It is very difficult to think of any organised human activity that could not be corrupted…The lesson is that anti-religious corruptions and religious corruptions are both possible. There is no magic system or belief, not even belief in liberal democracy, which can be guaranteed to prevent it.
To illustrate this let me use the outdated cliché of “religions are the cause war and conflict” and show how war and conflict are not unique to religions. In the relatively short history of secularism the following massacres have committed in the name of non-religious ideologies such a communism, nationalism and social-Darwinism:
• 70,000,000 under chairman Mao
• 20,000,000 under Stalin
• 2,000,000 no longer exist because of Pol Pot
• 700,000 innocent Iraqi’s in the current occupation
• 500,000 Iraqi children in the 10 year sanctions
So it can be clearly seen above that war and conflict are not religious monopolies, rather they are human phenomena and not unique to religion.
more people have died in the twentieth century’s secular wars than in the preceding fifty centuries of fighting combined…. No religious war in history, not all the religious wars of history added together, did as much damage as this century’s wars of nationalism and ideology.