While Hitler would often give lip service to Providence in his public speeches, biographer Alan Bullock wrote that, though raised Catholic, Hitler was a rationalist and materialist, who saw Christianity as a religion 'fit for slaves', and against the natural law of selection and survival of the fittest.
Hitler is quoted as saying,
'The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions.
Gradually the myths crumble.
All that's left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic.
When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.”
Adolf Hitler, via transcript of recorded conversation
In 1999, a discovery of 150 bound volumes were found, post-war volumes showing Nazi war crimes, documenting Nazi persecution of religious organizations, especially Christian Churches.
In a 108-page outline titled “The Nazi Master Plan”, the British Office of Strategic Services investigators argued that the Nazi regime planned to reduce the influence of Christian churches through a campaign of systematic persecutions.
“Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation [of church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion," said the report.
The most persuasive evidence came from the systematic nature of the persecution itself.”
Stalin, a staunch atheist and atheist re-educator, ruled Soviet Russia as dictator from 1925 until his death in 1953. He followed the position that religion was an opiate that needed to be removed in order to construct the ideal communist society. His government promoted atheism through special atheistic education in schools, anti-religious propaganda, the antireligious work of public institutions, including the popular militant atheist Society of the Godless, discriminatory laws, and a terror campaign against religious believers. By the late 1930s it had become dangerous to be publicly associated with religion.
Perhaps the most famous Chinese atheist, Mao Zedong ruled China from 1949-1976 and brought China into the modern age while forcing his political (left wing, Communist) and atheist views upon the massive population of China, turning it from a diverse feudal backwater into a unified Communist, atheist state.
During his regime, enemies of the state were labeled as 'black elements’, comprised primarily of religious leaders, land owners, rightists, philosophers, and the wealthy. These undesirable groups were oppressed through imprisonment, forced labor, re-education, organized food shortages, and executions carried out by the notorious Red Guard.
His tenure is labeled by historians as the top incident of democide in the history of humanity, with conservative figures listing 40 million deaths, while others suggesting 70 million Chinese deaths, plus an additional 1.2 million Tibetan deaths.
Dictator-for-life of the Cambodian Communist Revolutionary party from 1963 until his death in 1998, Pol Pot banned all religion and dispersed minority groups, forbidding them to speak their languages or to practice their customs. They especially targeted Buddhist monks, Muslims, Christians, Western-educated intellectuals, disabled people, and the ethnic Chinese, Laotians and Vietnamese. Some were put in camps for interrogation involving torture in cases where a confession was useful to the government. Many others were executed. In 1976, undesirables, especially the religious and the intellectuals, were marked for destruction through a reduced ration program which led to mass starvation and death.
"Religion is the opium of the people" -Karl Marx
"Communism begins where Atheism begins" -Karl Marx
"Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of Atheism" -Vladimir Lenin
"Let us drive out the Capitalists from the earth, and God from Heaven" -Soviet slogan
"Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism" -Vladimir Lenin
"You know, they are fooling us, there is no God...all this talk about God is sheer nonsense" -Joseph Stalin
"Atheism must take the place of belief in a God" -Mao Zedong
"Religion is poison." - Mao Zedong
"Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!" - Vladmir Lenin
“Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them” - Sam Harris
Dawkins was raised Catholic, do you still consider him a Catholic?