50 Million? Really?

Some historians say the Roman Catholic Church has killed some 50 million people or more over the centuries. Adding all the religious wars such as the Thirty Years’ War, the Crusades, the various inquisitions and earlier mass slaughters, one can easily approach and far exceed this number. David A. Plaisted, a computer scientist who references various historic works, proved this in “Estimates of the Number Killed by the Papacy in the Middle Ages and Later.”

However, many have disparaged and discredited these numbers. Chief among them, unsurprisingly, is the Catholic Church. Plaisted wrote: “In general, in reconstructing the computation, it is helpful to remember that these death tolls tend to decrease with time due to the influence of the Catholic Church, so that death tolls that are considered high today were probably used in the computation. For example, Lockman … writes that during the Huguenot wars in France, even when many Protestants were being forcibly converted to Catholicism the Romish clergy were claiming that these conversions were entirely voluntary. Thus the Catholic version of history will tend to reduce the magnitude of past persecutions.” The Catholics have largely prevailed in blotting out this history.

But let’s judge by fruits. Today, almost the entire Christian world keeps Sunday rather than Saturday, as Christ and the apostles did. Almost all keep Easter, instead of the Passover that Christ kept. Almost all keep Christmas, although it is not commanded in the Bible and no such celebration is recorded by the disciples. Virtually all believe in the trinity—a doctrine that appeared over a century after most of the New Testament had been written—while the Bible talks about Father and Son. The list goes on and on. Why do billions of people believe in these doctrines? The answer is that the truth has been attacked—violently.