God's body count in perspective

I recently finished reading Drunk with Blood: God's killings in the Bible, and I was curious how God would stack up with some of the more recent mass murderers. In particular, I chose some of the names that come up frequently including Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot. I also included two that are more contemporary and recently in the news: Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Satan's number was too small to make the cut.

Estimating the number of people killed by these individuals is difficult and it is impossible to get a precise number that is agreed on by all historians. Instead of trying I just looked around quickly and included a low and high estimate. This approach is similar to the book that includes a count where the Bible provides actual numbers and another count that estimates the number killed when actual numbers are not provided. One difference however, the estimate from the book of God's killings is probably on the low side where the high estimate I'm using is probably higher than most would fairly assign to these individuals. For more nuanced estimates try Who was the Bloodiest Tyrant of the 20th Century? and 1900-2000: A century of genocides. So lets get on with it, here are the numbers:

God

Lets start with God, Steve Wells helpfully has a post with an overview of all God's killings in the Bible. The count where the Bible provides the number is 2,476,636. The estimated count for other killings where the Bible is vague is 24,634,205. Read the blog or the book if you want more information. It should be pointed out, this only includes killings mentioned in the Bible. Some may think God deserves credit for later killings as well, but they are not included in this tally.

Adolf Hitler

For the low count I used the estimated number of people killed in the Holocaust. There are various numbers that get mentioned, but 14 million seems like a reasonable estimate. The high estimate blames Hitler for all of the deaths associated with World War II, and the extreme seems to be around 78 million.

Joseph Stalin

According to wikipedia, Stalin's death count falls somewhere between 3 million and 60 million. Other sources place the actual number between 20 and 25 million. I used the estimates from wikipedia.

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong killed somewhere between 10 million and 70 million people. The discrepancy is in part whether you include deaths due to famine from policies such as the Great Leap Forward. Basically are we counting democide or genocide.

Pol Pot

The high end estimate for Pol Pot was only around 2.5 million. Given his competition, I didn't bother with a low estimate.

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden was included because he was recently killed and has been in the news a lot lately. If you look at killings he planned or ordered the number is probably around 3,500 (from 1900-2000: A century of genocides). Looking at the wikipedia article it estimated the deaths from the global war on terror at 80,000 to 1.2 million. For my purposes, Osama represents the deaths from the war on terror with an estimate of 1.2 million.

Saddam Hussein

The estimate for Saddam Hussein seems to be around 600,000.

Global Deaths per Year

In addition to various tyrants, I wanted to have some kind of baseline for the comparison. I chose to use the estimated number of people that died in 2010. This number is calculated using the crude death rate of 8.37 deaths per 1000 people over a 1 year period. If the estimated population size is 6.92 billion, then the estimate for the number of people to die per year is 57.9 million.

Infographic

So with those estimates, here is a quick graphic to try and put the number of deaths attributed to God into context with the others:

Religious Knowledge Survey

The Pew Forum's U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey has been in the news lately. I was disappointed as the results aren't the least bit surprising. The shocking conclusions seem to be:

The survey results are clear: People with higher levels of education tend to be more knowledgeable about religion.

The survey shows that reading and talking about religion are related to higher levels of religious knowledge. People who say they read Scripture at least once a week, for instance, get significantly more questions right on average than those who read Scripture less often. The same pattern is seen in frequency of reading books (besides Scripture) about one’s own faith.

I did find one amusing bit:

And only about one-third of those polled know which famous court trial dealt with whether evolution could be taught in public schools; 31% know this was the Scopes trial, while 36% say it was Brown vs. Board of Education and 3% name the Salem witch trials.

I would really like to see a breakdown of the 3% that thought the Salem witch trials were related to evolution. Unfortunately the raw data doesn't seem to be available yet.

Miracle of the Herrings

Not being Catholic, I found it strange that the church would bother making such a ridiculous claim. Why not just celebrate Thomas Aquinas for what he did? What is the point of making up some pathetic story and labeling it a miracle? I was curious if this was just made up for television so I tried to find (i.e., searched for a few minutes online, not a serious scholarly effort) an official document from the church on why Thomas Aquinas was declared a saint. I didn't have much luck finding what I was looking for on the www.vatican.va website. Many results came up for Thomas Aquinas, but not what I was looking for.

The best reference I was able to find was The Sanctity and Miracles of St. Thomas Aquinas, but I have no idea about the veracity of the source. It does partially corroborate the story about the herrings:

Asked about miracles - whether he knew of any worked through the merits of Thomas either before or after death - the witness said that when Thomas died his body was buried at first before the high altar, but then the monks, fearing it might be taken from them, transferred it secretly to St. Stephen's Chapel in the same abbey-church. But about seven months later Thomas appeared in a dream to a brother James, who was prior at the time, and said:'Take me back where I was at first.' So they took him back, with due solemnity. (This dream was and still is commonly talked about in the monastery.) And when the tomb was opened a delicious fragrance came out, filling all the chapel and cloister: whereupon the community sang the Mass Os justi meditabitur sapientiam, etc., in honour of Thomas as of a saint; they thought the Mass Pro defunctis hardly suitable for such a man.

All this the witness knew because he was there and saw it for himself; it happened about seven months after Thomas's death; but he could not be sure of the month or the day. Asked who were present, he said 'the whole community'.... Asked who had called him to the place where the fragrance was smelt, he said he himself smelled it; it drew him to where the tomb was.

IX. Asked if he knew of other miracles attributed to brother Thomas, the witness said that he had heard of many; and in particular that when Thomas lay sick in the castle of Maenza and was urged to eat something, he answered, 'I would eat fresh herrings, if I had some.' Now it happened that a pedlar called just then with salted fish. He was asked to open his baskets, and one was found full of fresh herrings, though it had contained only salted fish. But when the herrings were brought to Thomas, he would not eat them.

The witness spoke too of a Master Reginald, a cripple, who was cured at the tomb of brother Thomas.

Asked how he knew of these two miracles, he replied that that about the fish he had from brother William of Tocco, prior of the Friar Preachers at Benevento, who himself had it from several people at Maenza, where the event occurred. The other story he had from brother Octavian (mentioned above) who averred that he had seen it happen. And in the monastery these miracles were common knowledge.

In this story it explicitly states that Thomas Aquinas did not eat the fish as Stephen Fry stated in the video. However, the book Saint Thomas Aquinas: the person and his work (by Jean-Pierre Torrell, the chapter "The Last Months and Death" on page 291 in the version scanned by Google) suggests he may have eaten some of it:

It was there that he fell ill and totally lost his appetite; the doctor called to take care of him—John of Guido, from Piperno—asked what he would like to eat and received a disconcerting response: some fresh herring, which he once enjoyed when he was in the Ile de France. Miraculously, some were found. But according to Tocco, it was the others who ate them, since the patient no longer wanted them. An eyewitness assures us, however, that he ate some of it: de quibus etiam arengis comedit dictus frater Thomas.

History is messy. But it doesn't really make a difference whether or not he ate some of the fish in terms of the miracle. A NY Times book review When the Lights Went Out in Europe gives a similar story about the herrings:

When St. Thomas Aquinas lay dying, in 1274, it was said that he asked for herrings, which were unknown thereabouts. Yet sure enough they soon obligingly turned up at the local fishmongers. Even in the early 14th century, when Thomas's candidacy for sainthood was under investigation, and at least two miracles were required for admission, this unlikely tale did not wash -- not least because it emerged that the witnesses had no way of telling whether what they had seen were herrings or not.

Though I would prefer an official document from the Catholic church, from what I can tell the miracle of the herrings is a real claim made to support the canonization of Thomas Aquinas. It would be nice if the Catholic church had an easily searchable database of all the saints and the records for how they qualified for sainthood. However, if all of the "miracles" are this pathetic, then it is probably better for public relations not to make the information more accessible.