These states didn’t kill people because of atheism.
Religious states kill people because of religion.
Fundamental difference here, see?

Besides, which states do you mean anyway?
Nazi Germany wasn’t atheist. Quite religious, in fact.
Soviet Union is the only atheist dictatorship I can think of.

I write one short sentence per row because the end parts
of rows in third tier replies tend to cut short abruptly.

Stalin killed people because of their religion, because they
were too wealthy, because they lived in the wrong place,
because they were in his way, because he didn’t like their
faces. Any reason was as good as another. And I’m yet to
hear about him killing Orthodox Christians because of
their religion. First, he was schooled as an Orthodox
priest and second, a large number of Russians adhered
to that religion and it wouldn’t have been prudent of him
to upset them. Of course they were repressed, but so was
everyone else, religious or not.

As for Mao, he was Buddhist/Confucian/Taoist/whatever,
as these terms can overlap. I haven’t heard about him
killing buddhists (who constitute at least a half of
Chinese people), not wholesale anyway.

Killing religious people DOES NOT mean killing in
the name of atheism. Period. I’m an atheist and I would
love to be a dictator, preferable in some Caribbean
banana republic, but I wouldn’t go about killing
Catholics.

See? This is where we disagree about Stalin.
I don’t think he was mad per se. Paranoid,
sure, but every ruler with a party full of
schemers behind him is. Other than that,
he was quite rational. If he killed openly
religious people, it was because he feared
their influence, not because he hated them.

And while yes, hatred for all religions could
turn into homicidal urge, so could hatred
towards any other thing. But killing
others because your religion says so is,
in my opinion, a completely unique form
of homicidal mindset. One doesn’t have
to be clinically insane to have such thoughts,
religion alone suffices. This is why I refuse
to let anyone bring out atheism as a
particular reason for hatred – it’s just one
of many possibilities – while religion is special.

I don’t really remember the title or author
of the Mao article, since it’s been a while
since I read it.

And you can’t blame Darwin for Hitler,
nor can you equate his works with
religious works. Darwin’s work was of
science and observation; religious books
are meant to guide and command people.
If someone takes a sentence from
“On the Origin of Species” and decides
to kill in its name, then, well, blame his madness
and not Darwin.

And a sidebar from myself: I am a racist;
I believe some people are genetically inferior
and I support eugenics to some extent.
I just don’t support murder to achieve these goals.