One can be an atheist while believing that most other people ought to believe in some religion that one considers false. Something like Plato's Royal Lie.

Very nice article. I'm often struck by how blind they (American Christians) are to the faith that was/is involved with Communism.

Yes. A lot of supposedly "thoughtful" or "liberal" religionists--and Pope Benedict, especially--claim that equal danger lies in pure faith or pure reason. They identify pure faith with Crusades, Inquisitions, and Jihads. So far so good, right? But then they identify pure reason with communism and fascism. It's an astonishingly blithe assertion to make, ignoring the massively "un-reasonable" nature of totalitarian systems. You wouldn't even need to read entire anti-communist books to know that; just 50-100 pages or so of Animal Farm, Gulag Archipelago or Dr. Zhivago would teach that to you: That totalitarian systems can be just as loopy--hilarious really, if they weren't so deadly--as any convential mythological system.

It's probably the laziest thing in the world to quote Sam Harris on a thread or blog like this but here goes anyway, "Communism or fascism are NOT what happens when people become too reasonable."

Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy has noted this correspondence between Marxist and Xian concepts:

Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect = The Proletariat
The Church = The Communist Party
The Second Coming = The Revolution
Hell = The Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth

Not surprisingly, Marxists have their own apologetics, like claiming that Marxist theory is a method and not a body of knowledge.

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After genetics, what other scientific disciplines might have been next to fall? Nuclear physicists successfully fought to keep their discipline from being Lysenkoized by certain Marxist ideologues who insisted that quantum mechanics is un-Marxist. It certainly departs from a billiard-ball conception of elementary particles, and it involves effects that go contrary to macroscopic-physics intuitions.

A telling point about Marxist theory was how Soviet scientists had worked and what their theorizing was like -- it was just like what Western scientists do with no Marxist dialectics in sight. I remember reading a book by some Soviet scientist on Quantum Electrodynamics (the quantum theory of electromagnetism). It looked almost exactly like what a non-Soviet scientist might write, except for a small section on Lenin and the "infinite extensibility of the electron", whatever that is.

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Andrei Sakharov also proposed something else very notable: an explanation for the Universe's matter content, described in more detail in: Baryogenesis.

Consider this Hymn to Stalin:

O great Stalin, O leader of the peoples,
Thou who broughtest man to birth.
Thou who fructifies the earth,
Thou who restorest to centuries,
Thou who makest bloom the spring,
Thou who makest vibrate the musical chords...
Thou, splendour of my spring, O thou,
Sun reflected by millions of hearts.

And the hero-worship of Mao Zedong and North Korea's two Kims. Complete with a miraculous birth (from Wikipedia):

Kim Jong-il's official biography also holds that his birth at Mount Paektu was foretold by a swallow, and that his birth was heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens.

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It's also possible to be an atheist and to believe in non-naturalist metaphysics. Philosophical Buddhism and Taoism seem like that to me, but I'm not familiar enough with them to be able to tell for sure.

Scary looking website KC. It looks as if my relative took their courses.

Atheists don't have an atheist doctrine that tells them to kill or subjugate religious believers; yet believers such as Christians and Muslims do have doctrines which tell them to kill non-believers for the sin-crime of disbelief. And while atheists have no problem denouncing the actions of atheists such as Stalin and Mao, most Christians and Muslims seem to be unable or unwilling to denounce those morally objectionable elements of their scriptures (e.g., instructions to kill apostates, blasphemers, homosexuals, etc.).