IIRC what little “statistics” and population estimates I’ve seen of native americans and aztecs in particular, a bunch of hotspots around the world today are doing much, much worse damage both per-capita and especially in terms of raw numbers.
Any number of them could reasonably be attributed to religion, but they could also be attributed to a bunch of other factors, which would be better described overall as “anti-epistemology” or just generalized stupidity.
Well, taking estimates from various of the top search engine hits and wikipedia, I arrive at an uppper 95%-confidence bound of 7% (rounded up) of the aztec population sacrificed systematically per year on average (during the peak of the empire, though, probably not sustained for more than a decade if even that), using the lower 300k total peak population and the (probably over-)estimated 20k number for annual human fatal sacrifices. The actual ratio was most likely much lower than this, but I wanted to challenge myself a bit.
By comparison, the ongoing war(s) in Afghanistan are estimated at a total three million deaths (upper bound also). This is over 34 years however, and the population estimates at the start were of 15 million, with current estimates around 30 million (this is all according to wikipedia data, though). This brings us to an average 0.5% deaths from war, rather than systematized sacrifice, which is arguably different and not quite the same as “religion causing people to do bad things”.
Similar data from similar sources on the Darfur case give a 1.1% figure, though I only used the pre-war 6-million population for this and the ratio would be higher if I had excluded the massive amount of people who fled or were displaced soon after that whole nightmare began.
So I’m running short on time here and won’t go analyzing other examples I had in mind, but in retrospect it seems I don’t quite have such clear-cut numbers here, and while I find the 20k/year estimate for aztec sacrifices ridiculously unlikely compared to the estimates for Afghanistan or Darfur, it would be reasonable to take my previous statement on per-capita with a large dose of salt. However, the “raw scale” point is certainly valid—even the impressive 20k/year figure pales in comparison to the 66k/year of Darfur or the 88k/year of Afghanistan, or some other figures that could be found with some more digging, and I’m quite sure that if we had better timeline data the total sum of the aztec sacrifices throughout their entire history wouldn’t even come close to the World Wars, for obvious reasons of scale.
And of course, for the concentrated killing-as-many-people-as-quickly-as-possible-by-doing-stupid thing, I now feel somehow obligated to point at them evil nuclear bombs. Because, y’know, they certainly win at the (deaths/second)*stupid formula.
IIRC what little “statistics” and population estimates I’ve seen of native americans and aztecs in particular, a bunch of hotspots around the world today are doing much, much worse damage both per-capita and especially in terms of raw numbers.
Any number of them could reasonably be attributed to religion, but they could also be attributed to a bunch of other factors, which would be better described overall as “anti-epistemology” or just generalized stupidity.
Any examples?
Well, taking estimates from various of the top search engine hits and wikipedia, I arrive at an uppper 95%-confidence bound of 7% (rounded up) of the aztec population sacrificed systematically per year on average (during the peak of the empire, though, probably not sustained for more than a decade if even that), using the lower 300k total peak population and the (probably over-)estimated 20k number for annual human fatal sacrifices. The actual ratio was most likely much lower than this, but I wanted to challenge myself a bit.
By comparison, the ongoing war(s) in Afghanistan are estimated at a total three million deaths (upper bound also). This is over 34 years however, and the population estimates at the start were of 15 million, with current estimates around 30 million (this is all according to wikipedia data, though). This brings us to an average 0.5% deaths from war, rather than systematized sacrifice, which is arguably different and not quite the same as “religion causing people to do bad things”.
Similar data from similar sources on the Darfur case give a 1.1% figure, though I only used the pre-war 6-million population for this and the ratio would be higher if I had excluded the massive amount of people who fled or were displaced soon after that whole nightmare began.
So I’m running short on time here and won’t go analyzing other examples I had in mind, but in retrospect it seems I don’t quite have such clear-cut numbers here, and while I find the 20k/year estimate for aztec sacrifices ridiculously unlikely compared to the estimates for Afghanistan or Darfur, it would be reasonable to take my previous statement on per-capita with a large dose of salt. However, the “raw scale” point is certainly valid—even the impressive 20k/year figure pales in comparison to the 66k/year of Darfur or the 88k/year of Afghanistan, or some other figures that could be found with some more digging, and I’m quite sure that if we had better timeline data the total sum of the aztec sacrifices throughout their entire history wouldn’t even come close to the World Wars, for obvious reasons of scale.
And of course, for the concentrated killing-as-many-people-as-quickly-as-possible-by-doing-stupid thing, I now feel somehow obligated to point at them evil nuclear bombs. Because, y’know, they certainly win at the (deaths/second)*stupid formula.