Idiot. There is a difference between "atheism" as a general view and
"atheists" as individuals (just as there is difference between
"Christianity" and "Christian individual", or "liberalism" and
"liberal individual"). You can blame individual atheists for their
crimes, but if you're going to expand the blame to atheism-in-general,
then by symmetry Christianity-in-general gets to bear the blame for
crusades, pogroms, etc. And with more justification, as well: atheism
simply means absence of belief in God, but makes no other commitments.
OTOH Christianity, as I point out above, has elements within it that
can be (and were) exploited to produce the results we all mourn. Are
you sure you want to push this argument?

The trouble here is that there isn't any symmetry between atheism and
Christianity. Christianity claims to provide a moral base and rules

Of course not. The symmetry I'm invoking is solely in the form of the
argument: *if* we accept the principle that the category bears some
blame for the actions of individual exemplars, then this must apply
equally across all categories -- atheism, Christianity, liberalism,
conservatism, etc.

In fact, I reject this principle as an _a priori_ rule: it has to be
established by evidence for each case. As we both point out, it fails
in the case of atheism, as atheism _per se_ makes no prescriptions --
it's kind of content-free, that way. OTOH, the source documents of
Christianity (i.e. the canonical Bible, along with other early
writings) have a lot of content, which can and has been spun in a
number of different directions over the centuries. While I had (and
have) my personal preferences, I don't claim to know which is the
"correct" version; I don't think it's objectively decidable.

As an aside, I do sometimes see atheists talking as if all the world's
problems are the fault of religion; that if only every theist gave up
their silly notions we'd have peace on earth. The lesson of the
extreme forms of Communism is that that's not true either: humans are
quite capable of perpetrating unspeakable horrors without needing God
(in the conventional sense) to tell them to.

for living, it is at the core of Christians' very identity and
provides a major motivation and justification for their actions.

Atheism is none of these, and is incidental to the atheist's being.
Most of the time we're not even aware we're atheist unless somebody
else brings up their theism.

These modern despots did not murder because they thought there was no
God -- the murdered because their ideology told them that they were
serving the Greater Good -- just as the medieval Christians did.
Creating the proletarian paradise, giving the Christ-killers what's
coming to them, evicting the infidel from the Holy City, burning the
heretics who would spread misleading doctrine, the purification of the
Race -- with or without God, it's all the same. (And of course, there
were also those who murdered for personal gain, and cynically used the
Greater Good as the justification.)

Exactly.

Julian Huxley said in 1957,
Already some non-theistic belief systems have emerged to
dominate large sections of humanity. The two most
obvious are Nazism in Germany and Marxist Communism
in Russia. Nazism was inherently self-destructive because
of its claim to world domination by a small group. It was
also grotesquely incorrect and limited as an interpretation
of destiny, analogous to some of the primitive products of
the theistic type, such as deified beasts, bloodthirsty tribal
deities, or revengeful divine tyrants.

Actually, most Nazis were Christians, and their hatred for the Jews
was the culmination of a couple of milennia of insitutionalised
Christian anti-Semitism. It's not atheists who regard Jews as deicides
of a deity they don't believe in.

Do you agree with Huxley that [Huxley]"non-theistic belief systems...
emerged" with the rise of [Huxley]"Nazism in Germany and Marxist
Communism in Russia"? If "yes," we can discuss Adolf Hitler in
addition to the individuals referenced above.

Your quote even as given (and still less in the fuller version, below)
does not support your implied argument. Did you deliberately omit the
word "some" in the above paragraph? It rather changes the meaning
from Huxley giving examples, to implying that these were the first
examples. And BTW, it's a fallacy to go from Huxley's use of
"non-theistic" to implying that Hitler was an atheist.

He wasn't. He was a Catholic. Germany at that time was a mixture of
Catholic and Lutheran.

1957 Julian Huxley on _Religion without Revelation_
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=b1c67abe.0407270344.53d3af56%40posting.google.com

Yahya and Koster on the use of fear and force
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=b1c67abe.0407030811.4e8cd1bd%40posting.google.com
Koster: scientific atheism is an idea whose time is gone
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=b1c67abe.0406212033.90a39c1%40posting.google.com
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=b1c67abe.0406230445.7cff0545%40posting.google.com

due to the tendency for
Christian extremists to attempt to exterminate other groups with whom
they have religious or value differences.
Now try to argue your way out of that.

-- Kizhe