Atheists are prone to contend that the myth that is religious supernaturalism has been associated over the millennia with enormous amounts of harm to humanity. It is easy to say and show so. There are the religious wars – between Muslims and pagans, Christian and Muslims, Orthodox versus Catholics, Catholics versus Cathars, Catholics versus Protestants. Aztecs versus neighboring tribes. Anti-Semitism which was an invention of the Catholic church adopted by the Protestants. The Inquisition and its perverse offspring the War against the Women (aka witches). Christian’s common imperialistic colonialism which resulted in a series of world wars starting in the late 1600s, forced conversion, the slavery explicitly endorsed in Abrahamic scriptures. Then there is the patriarchal misogyny customary to many forms of theism. And the frequent favoring of repressive autocracy over liberal democracy and human rights. There is how the religious industry (https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/the-competing-global-industries-the) that is constantly going on about divine morality is commonly associated with political, financial and sexual scandals, often small-scale yet common, sometimes epic in scope.
Theists tend to downplay and wave away as much of the dark side of their supernaturalism as they can get away with. Their defense is that divine religion will always be the only way that intrinsically sinful humans can achieve virtue and thereby behave themselves by doing what a perfect moral entity tells them to. But the defense has severe limits. Many theists go on the offense in order to divert attention from the embarrassingly many flaws of the global theoindustry, by attacking the opposition. The claim is that it is god free atheists who have, since nontheism became a major demographic cohort in the 1900s, the leading source of evil and the ensuing worldly troubles that are inevitable when people foolishly fail to live in accord with the instructions of the morally perfect and wise creator of all that there is. How could it be otherwise? And they cite plenty of supporting evidence, as per the ravages of modern atheism in the forms of godless Bolshevism as practiced by the likes of Stalin, Mao, Lenin and Pol Pot, and the atheistic Nazis as led by Hitler and his cronies. The oppressive Chinese, North Korean and Cuban autocracies are being run by atheists. Surely the world would be a better place if all just did what The Perfection that is God instructs. Right?
To clear one very false theistic claim up. Fascism is far from being ungodly. Back in the day it was closely tied to the Catholic church, especially in Italy, Spain, Austria, and the Balkans where a vicious Christian right waged a ruthless Holocaust against non-Catholics. By no means an atheist, Hitler and his entourage were largely supernaturalistic to varying degrees (https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/was-hitler-a-dedicated-atheist-a). It was the Nazis who were doing the most to oppose the Godless Reds in a loose alliance with much of mainline EuroChristianity.
When it comes to the statistics of war and genocide, the theistic industrial complex has proven more deadly than have the irreverent nontheists (https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/the-total-toll-of-human-mass-violence). For millennia it has been those of religion, Christians included, who have been slaughtering fellow humans, either in combat or attacks often deliberate on civilians. There was a flurry of atheism associated – communism specifically – with mass death in the 1900s. But that failed to match the numbers achieved by God believers. The hardline atheist socialists liquidating lots of people in class warfare phase looks to be over, while the pious continue to execute the will of the gods to dispatch those who do not conform to their supernaturalistic opinions. In socioeconomic measures atheistic democracies are providing generally superior conditions for their populations than are the more pious countries (https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/2025/06/the-godly-financially-free-wheeling-american-way-is-not-the-envy-of-the-world-how-we-know-that-and-why-the-usa-is-so-bad-at-transforming-wealth-into-societal-and-actual-health).
As for the irreligious men and movements who have gone bad on a big scale, a common atheist line is that such it is because they formed sociopolitical religious type cults that parallel those of theists. Well OK, that is true, but it means that atheists can be as dumb-ass and nonmoral as theists. One that says that naturalistic atheism can be made into a dysfunctional religion as can supernaturalism theism. The problem with deity worshipping religion is not that it is a religion, it is that it is supernaturalistic paranormalism which is inherently false. If atheists can put together dysfunctional religions, the problem is that such is dysfunctional atheism. So it is a weak line of argument.
Atheism, merely being the absence of theism, is no more a moral than is say germ theory. Being an atheist does not demand being a good person. Neither does theism, since a given god people can follow may be good or evil or some combination. Atheism does have a major moral advantages over theism. Not believing there is an all-wise god or gods from which stem/s all probity -- as well are rewards for conformity and punishments for dissent - atheists are free to sort out what is good versus bad by thinking matters through, combining common decency with pragmatic societal needs. You know, personal responsibility. Because the planet we live on is so gravely defective that has killed off half of those born (https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/2022/06/how-the-suffering-and-death-of-billions-and-billions-of-kids-completely-disproves-the-existence-of-a-good-and-loving-god-including-wrecking-free-will-theodicy-in-the-process), and scriptures are packed chock full of immoral acts committed by or endorsed by the creator (https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/why-scriptural-morality-is-far-from), on the chance there is a God it must be the opposite of moral. Worshipping one for benefits locks a person into its dissolution.
Atheists are people too -- we being big brained primates evolved to be nomadic hunter-gatherers trying to run a global civilization here -- and we slip up. Aside from the dictatorial communism thing, there are individual atheists who do bad. The former head of American Atheists lost his position because of alleged sexual and financial missteps. I have been told of similar issues within atheoorganizations that have never gone public.
Consider that the USA is more atheistic than it has ever been, with somewhere in the area of a fifth or a quarter of the population lacking a belief in the gods and rising fast, as church-going is heading downslope like skiers at Aspen, and the theoright that just a little while ago was all about megachurches is experiencing demographic distress. And who is president of this fine land? MAGA has a major Christian right component to it, but a large portion of Trump supporters are nontheists. Particularly libertarians who are particularly prone to being atheists as per Ayn Rand.
Which brings us to how while atheism is on the one hand associated with the socialistic extremism that is communism, a significant minority cohort of atheists are into the other extremity of the Social Darwinistic libertarianism concocted by nontheist Herbert Spencer. With current or recent adherents including Michael Shermer and Penn Jillette (most American atheists are moderates to progressive). But rather than condemn the application of the naturally evolved law of the jungle to human affairs as an inhumane denial of divine creation, much of the American religious right has embraced the Social Darwinism devised largely by atheists as the Bible endorsed word of the Holy Trinity that is Jesus. Never mind that Biblical socioeconomics are actually feudalistic, including a heavy component of slavery. Even so, theists did not invent libertarianism, and the Catholic hierarchy has always opposed it.
A lack of supernaturalism does not assure moral competence. But it helps. Enjoying a superior ability to be moral because we are not ensnared in the automatic immorality of kissing up to a creator who has managed to wipe out half of the children born, and not believing in scriptures that are OK with intolerance, misogyny, racism, slavery, brutality, genocide and the like, it is the opportunity, and the responsibility and duty, of atheists to strive to be decent do-gooders.
The real test is not whether atheists can be free of religion, but whether they can build accountability without a sacred referee. Without that, disbelief can still become a permission slip for the same old human failures.