This is just a quick reply I made to a reddit post; if I were still actively updating this blog, I would try make a much more thorough reply to this common argument...
It's true that two of the dictators with the highest death counts in
modern history (Stalin and Mao) were atheists, but you know what else
they had in common? The biggest populations they were ruling over. If a
dictator is ruling a country with only half a million people, there's
really no way they can kill 20 million like Stalin did. So I'd love to
see someone calculate percentages of the population that
various dictators killed, instead of just raw numbers. Because, let's be
serious here, ISIS (the worst theocracy in Islam) would be more than
happy to kill 20 million people if they had that many people to kill and
still have anyone left to rule over.
