Anonymous wanted a body count total, so he will get one

In the comments on my previous, brilliant post, an anonymous commentator politely observed that there is (supposedly) a rather wide disparity in the body count between atheists and theists in the 20th century. So, in his honor, I am going to tell you who wins and who loses the body count in history.

Spoiler alert: theism wins the body count game. And by "wins" I mean they've killed way, way, way, way, way more people than atheism. The differential is catastrophic.

Firstly, a note on methodology. Where deaths from theism are concerned, I have normally low-balled the estimates as a favor because the differential is so staggering and theism needs all the bones it can have tossed in its direction. For atheism, I go with the highest possible estimates.

Secondly, I am not going to split hairs over "things done in the name of atheism" and "things done in the name of theism" versus "things done by atheists or theists." I am going with theists versus atheists, because as soon as we parse up the theists ('but which theists were SINCERE' or 'but MY theism is more peaceful than THEIRS'), we will have to parse up the atheists ('but Pol Pot was a totalitarian scumbag, which most atheists aren't'), and then things will just get confusing. Brace yourself, anonymous, your shit is about to get rocked.

Theism
So, let us begin with the crimes of theists. They are extensive, so I have parsed them up according to eras of history.

Pre-Modern:

• The An Shi rebellion, lead by the son of a sorceress who shows every indication of subscribing to socially normal contemporary religion, cost 36 million lives.
• The Greco-Persian war, lead by the theocratic Persians against the more subtly theocratic Greeks, cost a conservative 500,000 lives.
• Pre-modern conquests by the theocratic, undeniably Muslim Arab empire can be conservatively estimated at 10 million.
• Total pre-modern human sacrifices, the vast majority of which were perpetrated by the theocratic Aztec empire, can be estimated as high as 6 million, but I will put the count at 1 million for now.
• The Mughal conquest of North India (which is categorically distinct from the expansion of the Arab Empire), which was explicitly religious in nature and which pitted a Muslim theocracy against a Hindu one, cost 100,000 lives, conservatively.

Middle Ages:

• Genghis Khan, an avowedly religious person (and, like many of his co-religionists, a homophobe of the highest Levitical quality), ground up about 40 million lives in the expansion of his empire throughout the 13th century.
• The emperor of Japan, a routinely avowed theist who has been throughout history considered himself somewhat divine, on ordering an invasion of Korea in the 16th century, end up causing about a million casualties. Further competition among the shoguns around that period for the favor of the divine theocrat cannot be calculated due to lack of records, so I will conservatively estimate 500,000.
• The Holy Roman Empire's various ideological squabbles, mostly from the Peasants' War, can be conservatively estimated to have caused about 100,000 deaths.
• Total violence between Protestants and Catholics over disputes of religious ideology in the Middle Ages have been conservatively estimated at 14 million.
• The Crusades, the old and boring example that gets trotted out routinely, have been estimated as causing around 9 million casualties total, between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

Early Modern:

• The unabashed holocaust perpetrated against the aboriginal inhabitants of the North America is far and away the most lethal item on this list. Between the militant Catholic fundamentalists known as Conquistadors, and the deaths caused by militant Protestant fundamentalists known as Puritans using biological warfare in the form of smallpox-infected blankets against natives, the total desolation across the continent exceeded 100 million even before the American nation swept most of the rest from the continent by force.
• The Spanish Inquisition is an oft-cited example, but its real death toll is insignificant. Perhaps 1,000 or less.
• The witch trials of North America (Salem and Connecticut being the only two famous, but far from the only, examples) are also oft-cited examples, but they too are utterly insignificant as measures of the depravity of the average theist. 100 or less.

Modern:

• The early 20th century's Armenian Genocide (and yes, it was a genocide), carried out by a vassal state of the theocratic Ottoman empire, cost 1.5 million lives.
  
• Hitler, an avowed Catholic, Mussolini, who had the good sense to be non-religious in his youth but who later converted to Catholicism in 1927, and Hirohito, an avowed participant of the state religion of Japan, launched the Second World War in 1939 (or was that 1941?). The total deaths from this war have been calculated at about 72 million, including the Holocaust. The largely atheistic citizens of the Soviet Union were the biggest victims of this war of theistic expansionism. This does not include
• the Nanking massacre, which modern historians estimate took about 500,000 lives, almost entirely Chinese.
  
• The 1948 Arab-Israeli War has been reliably tallied at almost exactly 20,000 casualties.
• The Six-Day War has been reliably tallied at almost exactly 22,000 casualties.
• The First Sudanese Civil War (which is not the Darfur crisis), which was explicitly religious in nature, cost about 500,000 lives. The Second Sudanese Civil War (which is also not the Darfur crisis) cost about 2 million.
  
• "Operation Searchlight," the pogroms carried out by the megalomaniacal theists in charge of Bangladesh in the early 1970s, cost 3 million lives.
• Conservative estimates of the Hindu extremist group known colloquially as the Tamil Tigers place the ongoing death toll at 215,000.
• Other forms of modern Hindu violence against other religions or lapsed Hindus (almost entirely in the form of Hindu-on-Muslim violence) can be veeeery conservatively estimated at 25,000.
• Late 20th century violence by the Islamic Ba'ath party of Iraq (a nation so religious that it had the phrase Allahu Akbar scrawled across its flag and which once hosted one of the largest mosques in the region built by Saddam Hussein) against ethnic Kurds cost about 150,000 lives.
  
• The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, also known in Iran as the Holy War, cost about 750,000 lives, conservatively.
  
• The 1994 Rwandan genocide, not religious in nature but certainly caused by theists, resulted in about 1 million deaths.
• The Ustasa regime's mass murders, which would have been impossible had not the regime been propped up by the Catholic Church (whose fingerprints can be found in nearly every example of 20th century fascism; see "God Is Not Great" by award-winning journalist Christopher Hitchens), tally up to "hundreds of thousands." Lets call it 200,000.
• The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center by Muslim fundamentalists who all came into extremist Islam in adult life after coming out of good educations and good backgrounds in countries that had never known any measure of oppression by the United States cost almost 3,000 lives.
  
• The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the avowed theocrat George W. Bush who said that the war was waged on instructions from God, launched against the (above-mentioned) theocratic Ba'ath Party of Iraq, has, between insurgents, Americans, Iraqi security, Iraqi civilians, foreign military officers, and foreign civilians, cost about 1 million lives, mostly caused by Muslim fundamentalist extremists.
  

Deaths from theism whose full tallies are impossible to calculate:

• Routine violence, starvation, economic attrition against, denial of medical services to, and criminal negligence of India's dalits over the millennia have probably cost hundreds of thousands or millions of lives.
• Religion's endless war on vaccines has caused and will cause the resurgence of old diseases and the ravaging of current populations, mainly in Africa, since it takes only a few unvaccinated people to allow a virus to mutate into a strain that resists vaccination. The death toll from this encouragement of disease-related deaths by religion will undoubtedly skyrocket in the coming century.
• The Vatican's and Muslim leaders' routine opposition to safe-sex practices, especially through the murderous criminals known as "missionaries" in Africa, has exasperated the HIV problem considerably and there is no way to know how many hundreds of thousands of people have died slow, agonizing deaths at the hands of HIV as a result, and how many will continue to suffer in the future.
• The death toll from those who refuse to seek medical attention because of religious beliefs, Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse blood transfusions, Christian scientists who refuse all treatment, those who subscribe to the undeniably religious pseudoscientific New Age beliefs that prefer bullshit to real medical therapies, etc., is impossible to calculate. I do not doubt that it is thousands every year.
• Honor killings in Muslim societies. Probably hundreds every year.
• The deaths that will be caused by the inevitable famine in the fundamentalist Confucian state of North Korea will be staggering but difficult to precisely calculate.
  

Disputed theist deaths:

• A 3rd-century compendium of ancient Semitic fairy tales and military procedures known as the Bible records a number of deaths, mainly at the hands of a genocidal maniac worshiped as a patriarch named Moses. I doubt most of these, so I will not include their tens of thousands in the final tally.

Negligible sources of theism-related deaths:

• Botched circumcision, Waco, various Mormon atrocities in the 19th century, UFO cult suicides, and genuinely bizarro psychos like Andrea Yeats, or other oddities like this have not been included. Theism doesn't need the help.
  

Final tally for theism: 2,229,074,100

And now for Atheism:

• The French Revolution, built on Enlightenment principles, probably cost somewhere from 1-2 million lives.
  
• Maoism in China, indisputably atheist, was indirectly responsible for the starvation of 20-40 million Chinese citizens during the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution" combined.
  
• Even though I could find no evidence that Pol Pot was an atheist, his regime was anti-most religion, so I will include the tally of his regime, whose very tip-top highest estimates place the death toll at 3 million.

Disputed atheist:

• Stalin: recently-unearthed secret documents indicate that Stalin may have been made a deist who “made his peace with God” and who brought priests back into favor and who encouraged religious icons to be paraded around Leningrad for good luck during the siege. He had “complex” relations with religious institutions in the Soviet Union, notes Hector Avalos, and so there is every indication that Stalin might have been a closet atheist turned closet diest, or even Orthodox Christian, who kept his faith very private. You're welcome I didn't include the 50 million victims of his pogroms under the theism casualties, because the new, very modern evidence against Stalin's post-1940 atheism is pretty damn good.

Highest possible atheism death toll without Stalin: 45,000,000.
Highest possible atheism death toll with Stalin: 95,000,000.

So, at its very highest, atheists have caused almost a whopping 100 million deaths throughout world history. This is about 1/20th the casualties caused by the morally depraved theists who have dominated history. Given that statistically about 16% of the world is non-religious but only about 5% of total world military/genocidal violence has been caused by atheism, we can safely add one more piece of evidence that theists have proven themselves to be far and away more morally depraved, violent, aggressive, brutally selfish, and downright nasty to each other than us infidels.

And to think that the theists say that we atheists can't know right from wrong.

Dear childish idiots,

Somehow some of you have managed to figure out that the end result total doesn't like up with (some) of the numbers listed. Some of you have gone so far as to indicate that children should be able to figure this out, therefore I'm less intelligent than a child. Permit some consistency then when I say that you are less intelligent than children because a child should be able to read the explanation I have provided over and over and over and over and over again in the comments thread.

Some of the numbers have imprecise figures, some of them I did not provide numbers for. This includes estimates of damage done by Catholic anti-condom lunacy, a certain fraction of deaths from vaccine-curable diseases in Africa in the last fifteen years, etc. For some of these numbers you have to actually go to something called a "book" for the end result. But, as I have already concluded that several of you are illiterate, I doubt that this word "book" will mean much to you.