[quote=Alkeni Synair]
Mussolini was not an athiest. He brokered the deal between the Italian government and the Catholic Church that solved a rift that had been in place since Italian unification. And he was very Catholic.Stalin, Kim Jong-Il and Mao did not kill in the of atheism. Neither did Dahlmer. What makes a crime a crime of religious extremism as opposed to a crime of just stupid nutfuckery (Dalhmer) or political oppression (Mao, Stalin, KJ-I)
[/quote]

Mussolini was a stanch atheist and had strong opinions against Catholicism until he became leader and realized it would be a lot easier to work with the church than against it and had his kids baptized. When the Vatican is such a powerful political force, it doesn't make much sense to actively work against it when it resides in your borders and most of your population is Catholic.

My point wasn't that they killed because they were atheists, my point was they all did terrible things and in a lot of cases had very vocal positions against religion to actively targeting it. Chances are, the same atrocities would have been committed if the people who committed them were religious, but I'm illustrating that religious extremism hardly has the monopoly on colossal disregard for human life. Likewise, I'm sure that a lot of dictators or other leaders who allegedly killed in the name of religion would have done so regardless of their so-called faith. It's rather convenient to do something for political reasons and then claim you did it for theology, because it's pretty easy to justify doing something when you say "I did it because God wanted it this way and calls for the death of heretics" is a lot easier to justify than "I want to remove a large segment of my population because they are most likely to oppose my rule". 

I'm not saying that history isn't full of instances of governments or powerful individuals (or even just normal individuals, "honour killing" springs immediately to mind) acting on behalf of their faith to do terrible things, but it's rarely [I]just[/I] religion that caused them to commit atrocities. That would be grossly oversimplifying things, especially since for every person who commits atrocities in the name of their religion, there's millions who have a decidedly more positive slant with it. Ignoring political, cultural, and economic cues when looking at extremist groups and saying the sole entire reason that they committed an atrocity is just because of religion would be exactly the same as saying Stalin murdered 30 million people over his 5 Year Plans because he was an atheist who didn't have a religious compass. 

Point is, there's rarely ever one factor that leads up to people doing terrible things. It's not exactly fair to say the worst people humanity had to offer who were religious did what they did solely because of it and then say that the same kind of people who were atheist did what they did without their lack of faith not being a factor. Food for thought; Stalin and Mao's dictatorships both killed way more people under their rule than a religious dictatorship ever did. What if an entire lack of religious morals (like killing being a cardinal sin, belief in Hell) was a contributing factor to them being so callous about such vast disposal of human life to achieve their goals? Would things have turned out differently if Stalin had been, say, Russian Orthodox like the royal family, or Mao been a Buddhist?