"How can we account for the widespread violence (physical, emotional, and spiritual) over the past 2,000 years among the followers of Jesus—the greatest proponent of non-violence that the world has ever known?"

The atrocities of professing Christians over the years cannot be denied in my view. However, many instances, like the Crusades, could probably be viewed more accurately as political/economic atrocities than religous. I look forward to hearing other viewpoints on this…as I don’t claim to be a history expert.

It’s also likely that atrocities have more to do with the existence of evil in the world than our inability to acknowledge our unevolved condition. Oz Guiness speaks to this point in the first chapter of his new book Unspeakable.

"Fourth - and most controversially - the worst modern atrocities were perpetrated by secularist regimes, led by secularist intellectuals and in the name of secularist beliefs. This fact runs directly counter to today’s ruling orthodoxy in educated circles in the West. Many actually make the opposite claim. ‘The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism,’ Gore Vidal thundered in the Lowell Lecture at Harvard University. ‘Only the willfully blind,’ writes Richard Dawkins in A Devil’s Chaplain, ‘fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities of the world today.’ The ‘real axis of evil,’ one British journalist responed in counter to President Bush, is ‘Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.’

Not so fast. Vidal, Dawkins, and many like them overlook the fact that monotheism is the single most influential and constructive belief in human history and that the links between twentieth-century massacres, secularist intellectuals, and secularist beliefs are shocking but undeniable. In this case, September 11 was a break with the worst twentieth-century massacres because the atrocity was done in the name of Allah and by avowed, if extremist, followers of Islam. But the ensuing discussion has become grossly distorted in putting the blame for modern evil solely on religion.

We return to this point in the course of the exploration, but an analysis of modern massacres and genocides - from the Young Turks through Stalin and Mao Tse-tung to Pol Pot - reveals a fact that is stunning yet vital for public discussion in the West: more people in the twentieth centruy were killed by secularist regimes, led by secularist intellectuals and in the name of secularist ideologies, than in all the religious persecutions in Western history" (p. 9).

This isn’t said to minimize the atrocities carried out in the name of Christ. An atrocity is an atrocity. And mankind is in desperate need of humility, better choices, and inner and outer peace. But, as Guiness states clearly, the humanist platform (which includes neo-darwinism) has only exacerbated the problem. Evolution doesn’t provide an answer that leads us beyond the problem of evil…or worldly behavior for that matter.