everyone (else) seems to be hating on atheists

[Aiza]

Aiza, you keep asserting that Christians were killed in the name of state atheism. I don't think you quite understand the paradox with what you speak. They were killed BY atheist states, yes, but not in the name of state atheism. They were killed in the name of the totalitarian dictator's power.

I think this is splitting hairs in a rather silly way. They were specifically killed because they would not become atheist. I generally avoid saying "killed in the name of atheism" because many atheists get hung up on the "in the name of" phraseology and try to dance around it somehow, even though the exact same argument can be made for any given religious killing.

Their brand of atheistic ideology explicitly called for the abolition of religion, since religion and theism itself were seen as detrimental to society and anti-scientific. They took it to its natural conclusion when they found out that just ridiculing religious people, shutting down religious institutions, etc. didn't work. Antitheism isn't about rejecting the "godly idea in all its forms" and proceeding to jam whatever you dislike into the definition of "god". It's specifically an active opposition to theism.

Information is bound to slip through the cracks, and those cracks can get pretty big if you think about all the factors that come into play in record keeping, such as passage time, clerical error, decay of the recording medium, destruction of property, revisionist leadership, and all that good stuff.

Sure, maybe. Either way I think its fair to say that they were extremely few and far between.

These men can still be religiously brainwashed, though; education does not make someone foolproof to brainwashing, just less susceptible.

I think "brainwashing"someone into a religion is what people told themselves in the 1960s to explain the newfound popularity of some NRMs. Its a pretty debateably issue to say the least:

James Richardson observes that if the NRMs had access to powerful brainwashing techniques, one would expect that NRMs would have high growth rates, yet in fact most have not had notable success in recruitment. Most adherents participate for only a short time, and the success in retaining members is limited.[42] For this and other reasons, sociologists of religion including David Bromley and Anson Shupe consider the idea that "cults" are brainwashing American youth to be "implausible."[43] In addition to Bromley, Thomas Robbins, Dick Anthony, Eileen Barker, Newton Maloney, Massimo Introvigne, John Hall, Lorne Dawson, Anson Shupe, Gordon Melton, Marc Galanter, Saul Levine (amongst other scholars researching NRMs) have argued and established to the satisfaction of courts, of relevant professional associations and of scientific communities that there exists no scientific theory, generally accepted and based upon methodologically sound research, that supports the brainwashing theories as advanced by the anti-cult movement.[44]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing

It's rather sketchy to say they were ever "brainwashed" into anything. I think its also sketchy to say that an educated person would be less susceptible to brainwashing because brainwashing itself can often take the form of education (and indeed, whether or not you consider a general cultural or historical curriculum to be brainwashing or not often depends on your own POV).

Since educated people are overrepresented in terrorism, I think actually that it is because they are educated about historical and sociopolitical issues that they can channel their anger at the West.

And I can promise you I wasn't brainwashed either, I converted on my own actually, with no Catholics hanging in the shadows trying to bully me into conversion or trying to 'convince' me of one thing or the other.

I suspect there hasn't really been a huge inquiry into how many atheists were killed by the church for the crime of it; atheists are not a majority anywhere in the world and never really have been, and the idea of the "aggressive atheist" is a relatively new concept. Consider also the secretive nature of a lot of things involving the church and just how many records they really do have and also consider how much of a bureaucracy the church really is [consider its size and scope; over a billion adherents and the entire hierarchy that entails "attending to the flock" as it were] and then consider how very little demand and pressure there is for the church to admit to persecuting atheists given how small our numbers and, worse, how disorganized we are [largely because of the fact that atheism itself is not much of a unifying force, if it is at all].

I don't buy this. The Church really isn't as 'secretive' as some popular media and they aren't sitting on secret trials of certain types of heresy but releasing others as they are demanded of. Protestants didn't need to demand that the records of the Inquisition be released. They've always been there, because the Church had no reason to hide them: and no, the Inquisition covered all manner of heresies, some of which weren't at all "organized". This feels like a borderline conspiracy of which there is no real evidence, if you will.

Also fascism is typically pretty anti-clerical and I don't know of the Catholic Church ever supporting fascism itself. It was popular among Catholics to support the authoritarian Francisco Franco since he was seen as the preferable alternative to state atheism. (With notable dissenters like Sg. Dorothy Day claiming that the lesser of two evils isn't actually good). Franco wasn't technically fascist though, since fascism seeks to transform society itself. Mussolini was an atheist but made a few attempts at reconciling with the Church (much to some controversy among other fascists), though the Church never really "supported" him.

But given how the current pope has stated that atheism is a clear and definite evil and bane of a good society...

He said that about atheist extremism.