1. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. were atheists, and they were terrible! Answer that!

Comment #81559 by merkin on October 24, 2007 at 10:49 pm

Whether or not Hitler was an atheist is an irrelevant distraction. Let's pretend that he was and move on. Now what's immediately obvious is that this argument fails the first basic test of logic:

Premise 1: Communists are atheists.
Premise 2: Communism is bad.
Conclusion: Atheism is bad.

Can you spot the fallacy?

What's being said is that atheism can be, and has been, used as a foundation (!) for dangerous political ideology. Not a particularly damning observation. It seems to me that a limitless variety of structures can be built on such an accommodating foundation. This is tractable land. What political precepts are required by atheism? Well, let's see. Firstly, supernatural explanations don't hold water…and that about sums it up. Right! Where to go from here? How do the atrocities committed by Hitler, Stalin et al, necessarily follow from this single, rather unimposing precept? I would think you'd need a little more than this to rally a nation for genocide.

One more thing to note: This argument implies that atheists want to live under an explicitly atheistic government, rather than merely a secular one. Not so.