"The Red Hand of Atheism" (edited for length)

While most literate individuals are aware of the atheism of mass murderers such as Josef Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Tse-Tung, they are not aware of how many other atheist leaders have been responsible for mass murder. In one of the [The Irrational Atheist's] appendices, I provided a list of 49 other atheist leaders who had overseen the slaughter of at least 20,000 individuals; these 52 leaders represent the majority of atheists who have ever held supreme political power.

This number is particularly striking when one considers the fact that the Christian king responsible for what was considered the worst crime in Christendom's Wars of Religion, the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, died regretting his role in the deaths of an estimated 10,000 French Huegenots

And yet, the scale of King Charles IX's crime is but a fraction of the great crimes of the 20th century anti-religious atheist zealots; it is also vastly overshadowed by history's very first atheist-influenced regime. Although it has largely been whitewashed by a France that still reveres its Revolution and is therefore little known in comparison with the Revolutionary regime's more notorious crimes, the story of the Committee for Public Safety's decision to slaughter the Vendéean people, who dared to resist the ordered closure of their churches, is finally beginning to be told thanks to a bold French aristocrat.

Atheists such as Richard Dawkins inevitably attempt to defend their non-faith, if not the actions of their historical predecessors, by claiming that historical actions such as the Vendée massacres were not committed in the name of atheism. But this is an absurd and inept attempt at a defense. Any thinking individual would laugh at a similarly illogical claim that Marlboro's can't cause cancer because no smoker lights up in the name of Marlboro.