Now that I am a barred attorney, all of my arguments have the added heft of coming from a card-carrying-lawyer. The first argument that I'm going to tackle with my new-found super-power is the "fascism" argument.
One of the most popular arguments against atheism, if not the most popular, is the claim that Hitler, Mussolini and Pol Pot were all atheists... I guess the obvious implication is that since they were Atheists, Atheism is bad. This argument has been attacked by a number of people, probably most eloquently by Richard Dawkins. His argument centers around the fact that these men followed pseudo-religions. I'm going to try to avoid rehashing the same old chestnuts, and cut to what I think the best reasons are for considering this argument to be downright silly.
First, this is clearly guilt by association. Presumably all the modern fascists believed the world is round, that the world revolves around the sun, that the sky is blue, etc. Does that mean that all of these beliefs are bad too? We are talking about truth here, and when it comes to the truth all that matters is, well, the truth, not who believes it or not. But knowing the truth requires knowledge of facts, and religious people have no facts to rely on so, much like in the political arena, where one lacks facts they appeal to guilt by association (e.g. Obama is a terrorist because he once stood in a room with a domestic terrrorist, or e.g. McCain is a Vietnamese Militant because he once spent 4 years in a Vietnamese "retreat," ...that's a joke).
Second, and I think most importantly, non-belief in something cannot possibly be a guide to action. In other words, what they are saying is, "Their atheism caused them to be fascists." But atheism merely means, "the non-belief in a higher power." How can this cause anyone to do anything? "I want to kill you because of my non-belief in God." Does that sentence make sense? It is our beliefs that motivate us to act. "I believe that you are going to try to kill me, so I'm going to kill you first." "I believe that God will reward me for killing you, so I'm going to kill you." Let's try to think about this another way. I don't believe in unicorns, I'm aunicornist. Can you imagine a scenario where one might say, "You did that because you're aunicornist?" No, it makes no sense. The fascist dictators killed millions of people because they believed in fascism and they believed in themselves as fascist dictators who had the right to exterminate life. Fascism is wrong, and fascism caused the death of all those people. Of course, the religious person's response to this is, "Yes! You're right! But fascism is atheistic!" Brilliant. This really is just another guilt by association and emotional appeal without any substantive merit. Yes fascism is atheistic in the sense that it does not incorporate a belief in God, but that means absolutely nothing. Newton's theory of gravity is atheistic, my belief that milk tastes good is atheistic, they have nothing to do with god so they are atheistic. Again, non-belief in something is really a useless descriptor. Fascism is also aunicornistic, does that mean that there's something wrong with not believing in unicorns? I hope we can all agree that there is something seriously wrong with believing in unicorns. In short, atheistic-fascism is wrong, and theistic-fascism is wrong. The operative descriptors in those statements are not "atheism" or "theism," but "fascism."
That being said, I'd like to conclude with a somewhat conciliatory statement. If religious people are trying to say that Atheists have dirty laundry too, I wholeheartedly agree. We should not allow the past mistakes of Atheists or religious people to be repeated.
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