Religion and Violence

Wikipedia has a list of countries by murder rate. The top nineteen nations are all mainly peopled by practitioners of the same great world religion. Care to guess which religion that is?

If you guessed "Christian," you would be right. The twentieth nation on the list, Madagascar is mainly indigenous religions, but Christians are a strong second. The US is a bit lower than the average, and rather more than ten times less murderous than the worst country - El Salvador. It's also more than ten times as murderous as the safest nations.

The twenty least murderous nations include nine Muslim nations, eight European Christian nations, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Of course some countries' statistics may be more reliable than others.

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