About the beginning of the 600's the Muslims started conquering and subjugating these Christian lands, forcing conversions. The Muslim empire continued conquering and expanding into Christian lands for 500 years, that is from the 600's through the 700's, the 800's, the 900's and the 1000's. Finally in 1096, after 500 years of losses to Muslim expansion, the Catholic nobility of Europe decided to fight back and try to liberate the Catholic and Orthodox lands now occupied by Islamic forces.
In general the Catholics lost and the Muslims won. (See map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_Mediterranean_1450_.svg)
While parts of the Balkans were regained along with Spain eventually, yet descendants of the Muslim invaders still occupy parts of the Balkans to this day, and the eastern part of Orthodox Greece and part of Cyprus is still occupied by Muslim invaders. The Chirstian majorities of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Arabia and Egypt and all North Africa were mostly forced to convert to Islam. Islamic traders, missionaries and armies were then free to expand from country to country further and further afield; West all across North Africa to Morocco and across to crush all of Christian Spain, ever East along the coasts of Asia as far as China and on into the Pacific, and South along Africa's East coast deep into the Southern hemisphere as far as Madagascar.
The mainly Catholic response to Muslim imperialism, now popularly called The Crusades, lasted around 200 years. This belated Catholic resistance to 500 years of Muslim expansion into and conquest of Christian lands, and the Muslim response that crushed the Crusades, resulted in between 200,000 and 1.5 million deaths on both sides over 200 years.
But squabbles between the world's great religions really has nothing over the record of modern athiest states. Just as Europe's Catholic nobility finally fought back after 400 years of Muslim invasions of Christian lands, so also when atheist Nazi Germany attacked and occupied Catholic Poland in 1939, the Poles and their allies fought back, immediately drawing Christian England, Canada and Australia into the 2nd WW.
For the record:
Soviet revolution: killed 9 million
Soviet forced starvation: killed 4 million 1921-23
Stalinist Russia: killed 20 million
Nazi Germany:
in death camps killed 12 million
outside camps killed 54 million
Communist China: killed 60 million
Total Deaths Attributable
to Athiest states: 156 million killed
John Lennon sang “Imagine no religion.” We don't need to. It is too clear where athiesm leads.
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