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Originally Posted by photon
Neither of those things say that religious believers are stupid and bigoted.
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Strongly insinuated though.
In regards to religion or atheism being responsible for "x" amount of deaths, I think we have to look at the problem from a different angle. That of politics and its relationship to religion.
The gods are the foundation of any political society. That is, there is always some higher power that directs a particular society's moral and political outlook. I'd go so far as to say that even though liberal societies are almost always atheistic in origin, we essentially substitute different things in place of traditional gods; things like an almost unshakable belief in progress, reason without virtue, and technology.
The Nazis and other totalitarian movements are a lot different and much more complicated than anything we have seen in human history. I'd posit from my limited knowledge on the subject that these regimes represent political religions of a sort, certainly atheist ones in the sense that they do remove gods, but they replace the gods with men and ideology. Each of these regimes had a personality cult around the leader, elevating him to divine status as well as political doctrine, mainly with a millennarian emphasis.
The standard ethical argument of scientific atheism vs. superstitious religion doesn't work out, in my opinion.