Why millennials are ditching religion for witchcraft and astrology

[Pope George Ringo II]

33. You want to talk about Stalin or Mao, you might have something

Granted, I've never heard of either killing anyone over theological differences, but they were atheists and their hands were bloody enough. Mao's sparrow crusade was astonishingly costly, and Stalin thought roving gangs of cannibals in the Ukraine was an improvement. In those cases, we've made a start by at least talking about atheists who actually did murder people, even if religion doesn't appear to have been involved in their killings.

But you're talking about atrocities committed by an organization whose regulations explicitly required religious affiliation of some sort. What could that possibly have to do with your point about atheist regimes persecuting the religious? Hitler thanked "divine providence" for his survival on multiple occasions. I admit that Hitler certainly seems to have, ahem, defined christianity just for himself and I'd really hesitate to say he was orthodox enough to really fall under any particular church's doctrine even if he claimed to be catholic, but he was still almost certainly a christian and definitely a theist. We know Himmler and Heydrich were theists because the regulations Himmler drew up demanded it. Of all the genocidal regimes of the last century, this is the one which we are absolutely certain wasn't atheist and does your argument no good whatsoever. Bluntly, all the facts on this one are known, and they all say you picked the wrong horse.

Oh, and they did burn some atheists in the ovens. Some of the people with pink triangles were atheists, as were some of the people with yellow stars, just to name two groups. Dying was the extent of atheist involvement in the Holocaust. Again, this is the one example which definitely does not further your argument that atheists have committed atrocities against the religious.

Seriously, try Stalin or Mao if you want to at least make it as far as finding atheists who were bad guys. But Hitler made his theism nearly as clear as his antisemitism and it's a losing proposition even trying anything so far removed from reality.