I didn’t know that Enver Hoxha openly stated that he committed his persecution of religion in the name of atheism, so thanks, too, for that piece of information. As for Vox Day’s discussion of the comparative statistics for genocides and other atrocities committed by atheist and theist regimes, I got the impression that his knowledge of military history is very thorough, and that he very effectively destroys the atheist claims about this very thorough in his book, The Irrational Atheist .

In fact I noticed a problem with Orlet’s claim about the numbers murdered by Stalin in the above article. Orlet mentions Stalin’s artificial famine in the Ukraine as an example of a Communist genocide. Now this isn’t really remarkable, as Stalin did indeed want to destroy Ukrainian nationalism. However, treating the famine in isolation could give the impression that it was only one such incident during Stalin’s period in power. In fact, the Ukrainian famine was one of a number of campaigns against various nationalities in the former Soviet Union by Stalin, intended to subordinate or destroy them. This included the mass deportation of entire nations, such as the Ingush, who were forcibly removed from their land in the Caucasus in 1944, and the Cossacks, amongst a number of other peoples to central asia. It’s been estimated that as many as 30 million people were killed during Stalin’s terror, though as proper records were not kept, the figure could be much higher, perhaps 45 million or above. In this instance, the number of people murdered by an atheist regime is far more than the nine million people killed during the Ukrainian famine, horrific though this number is by itself.

Here’s an account of the debate by a Christian.

http://douggeivett.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/william-lane-craig-vs-christopher-hitchens-first-report/

IMO the decisive issue is not how killings were justified, but the raw evidence that over 50% of known atheist leaders carry out atrocities against their own people, whereas for religious leaders the percentage is less than 1. Fro the benefit of your readers, Vox Day has the analyses for this in his book The Irrational Atheist, available as a free download.