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The notion of "God" and the Ideas around it has generated countless heated religion wars since the dawn of time. One may argue that the real reasons for war have been imperialistic but "God" has been used as a vehicle to motivate the masses and instrument the war, so the body count gets awarded to "God". Thankfully as science and the instruments of war advanced in efficiency, the religious passion waned. But if you normalize by total Human population I think it will be number 1.
Mormons are not a representative sample, they are generally a "new" dogma, so they don't provide anything to the discussion
Ignoring for a moment the fact that you must project forward as well as look back and thus the Mormons cannot be so easily dismissed you also fail to consider the number of lives saved inter-group due to the strictures of religion. Christianity’s influence, in the west, set into motion the belief that man is accountable to God and that the law is the same regardless of status.
http://crossandquill.com/journey/the-influence-of-christianity-on-western-civilization/
Ambrose readmitted the emperor only after several months of penance and when he promoted a law, which in the case of death sentences would allow a thirty-day lag before the execution would be enforced. One can only speculate how many other massacres were avoided throughout history by the mitigating influence of a religion who's commandments include "Thou shalt not kill"
Yes this is why I argued that "Lives Saved" is a better metric for Ideas than "Kills", "Kills" is easier measured but lacks insight. "Lives Saved" is impossible to quantify, and everyone assess it at will, which is why Ideas get debated and accepted anyway despite their murderous nature. Its a trolley problem.
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Simple Aggregate CO2 production per capita in China had been consistently lower than in US or Europe, only recently China took the lead. Had the Chinese followed the US paradigm and drive V8 cars instead of Bikes where would we now be?
Please tell me you are not arguing that the decimation of the Chinese people by Communism was all good because it lowered CO2 emissions. I don’t even know how to reply to that one so I will leave it to Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
Estimates vary, but scholars have estimated the number of famine victims to be between 20 and 43 million.[3] Historian Frank Dikötter, having been granted special access to Chinese archival materials, estimates that there were at least 45 million premature deaths from 1958 to 1962. Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng concluded there were 36 million deaths due to starvation, while another 40 million others failed to be born, so that "China's total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million."[6]The term "Three Bitter Years" is often used by Chinese peasants to refer to this period.
The great Chinese famine was caused by social pressure, economic mismanagement, and radical changes in agriculture... Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese communist party, introduced drastic changes in farming which prohibited farm ownership.
Mao was a fool, he hurriedly tried to restructure the Agricultural Industry to divert Productivity to Industry (out of envy) by "innovative" techniques, That's what happens when you skip beta testing and pilot rollout. It was to be expected as the political science of central planning was/is still young. Note however that this failure didn't recur so this failure cannot attributed to communism or central planning but to poor implementation, in short not a "systemic" failure so I don't award those "kills" to Communism but to Vanity.
Contrast this to "systemic" inequality in capitalism that allegedly kill our children
The argument though that central planning restrained liberal resource consumption in the overpopulated eastern hemisphere I think stands.
If it was a simulation game I would played it as it happened. One sector focused on innovation in a free market and inefficiency in resources allowed, while the larger one focused on sustainability in a central planning and cross transfer resources for tech breakthroughs. Choosing only one or the other I think will lead to either explosive burn-out or slow burn-in