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[Esquilax]

Perhaps you should remind your friend that atheism is just the lack of belief in god, and atheists derive their morals and worldviews from a variety of different influences and sources. There is no cohesive atheist worldview, and it is therefore illogical to use an example of three atheist leaders to criticize all political systems that atheists and their varied influences are capable of putting together.

This. Trying to compare atheism to theism of any stripe misses one very important point; the former addresses only a single issue, the latter evokes a worldview.

To be an atheist, you need only disbelieve god claims; anything else you believe is based on a number of other things, not necessarily atheism. To be a christian, one must necessarily adopt certain other things as true that do inform beliefs; there's an omnipotent god, he has a set of rules and sins, heaven and a hell, dislike for nonbelievers... these are all contingent propositions that one accepts when one becomes a christian.

Not so with atheism.

Now, as to your christian friend's claim that religion enforces moral rules to such a degree that removing them would be harmful... maybe ask him just how many of the biblical rules have actually been translated across to societal ones. Sure, we've got laws against murder, but our laws are much more strict than the bible's; there's no exemption for executing nonbelievers or gays, after all. We've got laws against rape that are much, much more strict than the bible's. And many things that are in the bible, we just don't care about anymore; we have no laws restricting worship, nor adultery, nor examples too numerous to list.

See, that's the thing; these people are all too quick to point out their particular religious texts as being the source of all moral laws, but we as a society have trimmed a lot of the fat and malignant vestigial bits from religion in order to arrive at the moral state that the religion is taking credit for. There's clearly something else at play here beyond just religion; to claim the bible is a useful source of moral law is to ignore all the parts of the bible that are simply too immoral for us to stomach in a practical sense.

And this idea that religion hasn't committed a large scale atrocity in a long time... actually think about that for a bit. What's changed between the inquisition and now? What's the variable? Whatever it is, it surely is not the religion, since it has the same holy book as it did back then. Their laws haven't changed and yet, somehow, their operating behavior has; what's changed?

Well, the societal pressure has. Religion doesn't sculpt society; society sculpts religion, which then proceeds to turn around and claim credit for those very changes.