everyone (else) seems to be hating on atheists

[Creed of Heresy]

I hope she gets better.

Thanks for the sentiment but that was never on the cards.

She died less than an hour ago.

My sympathies for you, Plumb. I truly hope her passing was painless and peaceful. :[ Failing or accompanying that, I hope she died surrounded by her loved ones.

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So the biggest concern people who use the most-used search engine on the internet have involving Christians is whether or not they should get tattoos, do yoga, drink, read, celebrate, and/or eat.

The biggest concern people who use the most-used search engine on the internet involving atheists is whether or not they should be killed, have the right to marry, have the right to vote, have the right to be considered citizens, and whether or not they should celebrate easter and christmas. The last two are fine.

Oh no. No, no, there's no bigotry towards atheists at all. Nope. No discrimination.

Well, truth be told, I cannot speak for any other than myself. But if I were an atheist, and I were made president [unlikely to happen in my lifetime it seems] and had the power to do away with the religious institutions in the US...I would not. I would tear down no church, mosque, or synagogue. I'll leave that to the religious. They do a good enough job tearing each others places of worship down. Something that the famous atheistic mass-murderers of history never seemed to get, which shows their ignorance and stupidity, and that their fame would never have come from any intelligent decision-making, and instead had to come from brutality, the weakest, most pathetic, most immoral and stupidest of means of obtaining fame and a legacy.

Perhaps more murder was done to the religious by atheists. But in no circumstance would you ever find any that any of them ever did it BECAUSE they were atheists. They did not kill in the name of atheism. They killed in the name of their own power. But meanwhile, the religious have a long, storied history of killing in the name of their god(s)(ess((es))).

People were killed in communist nations for a lot of different reasons. Some were communists who disagreed with those in power and were killed because of that. Some were anti-communists opposed the government and were killed for that. Some were simply in the way or inconvenient and were killed for that. These are political disagreements that people were being killed over, not murder in the name of atheism.

But weren't a lot of people killed because they were Christian? Certainly — but not simply because they were Christian. Communists typically regarded religious organizations as a hinderance towards the creation of a worker's paradise. Some religious groups also opposed the communists. Once again, we are generally looking at political issues, not a question of atheism.

Even if some people were killed simply because they followed a religion, it does not follow that they were killed in the name of atheism. Why? Because atheism is not inherently opposed to religion: it is possible to be both an atheist and religious and some religions are themselves atheistic. Atheism also isn't a belief system or ideology which can, by itself, inspire people to do things — good or bad.

Now, I compare this with this article that I found.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1121/p09s01-coop.html

It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures rail against the misdeeds of the Crusaders and Inquisitors more than 500 years ago. The number sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition appears to be about 10,000. Some historians contend that an additional 100,000 died in jail due to malnutrition or illness.

These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.

Whoever wrote the above article is ignorant as you can get, since there are no records of anyone in either of those nations being killed in the pursuit of an "atheist utopia." Such an ideal never existed. The "ideal" of Mao and Stalin was a "worker's paradise," and atheism never had anything to do with it.

To quote another article on Wikipedia:

Christian writer Dinesh D'Souza writes that "The crimes of atheism have generally been perpetrated through a hubristic ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values. Using the latest techniques of science and technology, man seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth."[64] He also contends:

And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic? Who can dispute that they did their bloody deeds by claiming to be establishing a 'new man' and a religion-free utopia? These were mass murders performed with atheism as a central part of their ideological inspiration, they were not mass murders done by people who simply happened to be atheist.[65]

In response to this line of criticism, Sam Harris wrote:

The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

Mr. Harris sums it up nicely, I think, whereas Mr. D'Souza comes off like a blithering, bleating neoconservative evangelical preaching to his own choir.