I wanted to comment further on a statement that someone made earlier in this thread about the viciousness of Stalin and Mao, etc., being a sociological and political problem, not an atheistic one.
Here's the thing: Atheism was one of the key elements of Marxism. Marx believed that religion was responsible for class division and that, if we were to have a classless society, religion had to go. He coined the phrase that religion was the opiate of the masses, echoed by Lenin and then Stalin. His economic theory was based on atheism. There is no way to extricate it from their political and economic beliefs.
And, given the persecution of Christians in both the Soviet Union and China, it seems pretty clear that atheism led men like Stalin and Mao to eradicate religion and the people who practised it.
I am also aware that many atheists try to say that Hitler was a Christian based on excerpts from Mein Kampf in which he talked about his Lord and Savior and the power of the church. Well, anybody can talk the talk, but fewer walk the walk. Given that Christians are instructed to love their enemies (Luke 6:27) and that, in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Gentile (Gal. 3:8), its hard to make a case for him being a follower of Jesus.
If you read what Hitler said about religion in general and Christianity in particular, you will see that, when he made a speech or was out in public, he supported them. In private, he vilified and condemned them. In other words, he wanted the German people to believe he had an affinity for God because so many of them did, but, in private, he didnt bother to pretend to be a Christian. His friend, Albert Speer, noted this fact in his memoir, Inside the Third Reich.
In fact, Hitler had the same hatred of Christianity that Marx did. His mother was a devout Catholic and he was officially a member of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), but it was a facade. He tried to sell himself and his ideals to the church early on. He signed a concordat in 1933 with the RCC which the church later came to regret. He couldnt get far with the Protestants at all. Many of them spoke out against him and helped Jews by hiding them or getting them out of the country. Many ended up in prison in result including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most outspoken anti-Nazi Lutheran pastors in Germany.
However, as I said, privately, he made it clear that he wanted to eradicate Christianity. For example,
"According to Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi leader of the German youth corps that would later be known as the Hitler Youth, 'the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement' from the beginning, though 'considerations of expedience made it impossible' for the movement to adopt this radical stance officially until it had consolidated power." See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/weeki ... tml?src=pm
In a book entitled Table Talk, Hitlers secretary, Martin Bormann, recorded statements the man made such as this one:
National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.
Hitlers main influences were Charles Darwin and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, not Jesus Christ. That should be pretty obvious by his actions.