Five Deadliest Atheists
Political leaders and those in power need to believe in God. They need to have some sense of accountability to someone higher than themselves, and even higher than the political state they are leading. If not, the people suffer (Proverbs 29:2).
The following 20th century political leaders did not believe in God. They had no sense of accountability to God because they were, in fact, atheists. They oversaw some of the deadliest regimes in history. The numbers killed are included in this list.
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945): 6 million Jews killed plus millions of others
Pol Pot (1925-1998): 3 million killed
Mao Zedong (1893-1976 ): 15-55 million killed
Josef Stalin (1878-1953): 10 million died
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924): 61 million killed
By contrast, the United States, though not a perfect country, was founded on the belief in God. The Declaration of Independence, for example, affirms that all men (i.e., all people) are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable (i.e., irrevocable) rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights to human dignity and life were not given by human beings, by custom, or by political power. They were given by God and can be ignored, but not taken away, by humans.
Our leaders in this country, from George Washington to John Adams to Abraham Lincoln to most of our presidents, have been Christians, with some sense of accountability to God for their actions. None of them have overseen the kind of mass murder of millions of people undertaken by the five twentieth century leaders above. We live in the most prosperous, free country in the history of humanity, a fact I link to the belief in God.
In the preface to Nina Shea’s book In the Lion’s Den¸ Chuck Colson (1931-2012) noted the extensive nature of brutal and inhuman cruelty in the current persecution of Christians worldwide. “More Christians have been martyred for their faith in this [twentieth] century than in the previous nineteen centuries combined” (1997, p. ix). The special hatred of atheistic regimes reserved for Christians reminds us that our “struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). Though the darkness sometimes seems to reign supreme, this is an illusion created by the evil one. Those of us who have declared our loyalty to Jesus are on the winning side.
Subscribe to receive an email notice when I post a new blog article.
Please leave a comment on the original post.
