Chris Cameron

Margaret Hoover says atheism has killed "way more than religion has".

• Margaret Hoover: You can call this guy a Christian extremist, but the difference between him and the Islamic supremisists … this Christian guy, he's a nut who calls hisselves [sic] a Christian, but he isn't connected to a global terror network that is trying to perpetrate terrorism on everyone else in the name of an organized and well funded terrorist network.
• Bill Maher: Neither was the Fort Hood guy. It is an idea.
• Hoover: No, that is not true. Major Hassan --
• Brian Cranston: Do you have to be a member of a club?
• Maher: Right, it's an idea, you don't have to be in the club.
• Hoover: There's a difference, as we know, between Islamic supremacy, and what you're calling Christian extremism, but the reality is you're blaming this all on religion.
• Maher: (Shakes head in agreement).
• Hoover: But the bloodiest murders in the last 20th century - atheism. What was communism? What was socialism? What was the Great Leap Forward? 30 million people died in China in the Great Leap Forward, 20 million people died in Stalin's purges, that was atheism.
• Maher: It wasn't *because* of atheism.
• Hoover: It was ideology that killed 50 million people in the 20th century. That's way more than religion has killed.
• Maher: Oh please. Religion has killed more people than --
• Hoover: Way more than religion has killed.
• Maher: That is bull shit.
• Eliot Spitzer: It's fanaticism. It is fanaticism that is the enemy, it is not religion. Fanaticism in any ideology, and lack of tolerence, is when you get danger.
• Maher: Far from restraining people, religion is what gives people license to commit crazy acts because --
• Hoover: So does ideology. What do you think Soviet communism and Great Leap Forward in China was? It's the same thing. It gave them license.
• Maher: First of all, it didn't give them license, it gave them an army. And also, in a lot of these places, it really was a state religion. North Korea, I know you would say that's an atheist country, it's not. The "Dear Leader" is the god! They think that he, like, ya know, when he was born winter turned into spring, they said the first time he played golf he had 11 holes-in-one. That *is* religion. I'm serious. You create a god.
• Matt Kibbe: I have another theory, by the way. Maybe this guy's just batshit crazy.
• Maher: Well he is, of course.
• Kibbe: Crazy's not an ideology.
• Maher: No, but religion gives crazy a platform and justifies it, that's the problem.
• Spitzer: It is the lack of tolerence, Bill, it is when you see a refusal to accept alternative views and you are so deeply ingrained in your own world view that you have to stomp out everybody else. That's when you get the craziness.
• Maher: Right, but what gives people license to think that way? Religion.
• Spitzer: Many different ideologies.
• Maher: But mostly religion.
• Spitzer: In many cases, yes.
• Maher: That's mostly what gives people the license to say, "My god has a bigger dick than your god, and maybe you should die for it."