A recent post on ThinkChristian.net generated some good comments, and I've already commented on the content of the post itself. Below are my replies to one commenter in that thread. (You can see his original comment at the ThinkChristian post above.)

"Atheists don't have any creeds or beliefs or principles other than their common assertion that there is no god. So to say that atheists are behind Nazi Germany or Socialist regimes is a misunderstanding of atheism."

I agree, although we should note that, like any worldview, certain other conclusions (not necessarily the ones you noted above) logically follow from atheism.

"If Christians would look at their own history … They destroyed documents that disagreed with the orthodox position and rewrote their own history …"

Which events are you referring to? There's no doubt that after Christianity became the official Roman religion under Constantine (and mixed with political power) that certain corruptions began to occur. But to insinuate that (prior to this?) a systematic process of corruption occurred is unsupported at best, and proven incorrect via extant manuscript evidence. If you're going to discount the New Testament texts out of hand historically, then you also must discount every other historical text from the same period, since the NT text is the best attested source from that time (in terms of number of extant manuscripts, time gap between events and when they were written, etc). See my ebook for more on this topic: www.whyfaith.com/nt/

"So, to claim that we have the words and ideas of Jesus today is very suspect because we can trace the sources of these ideas to non Christian belief systems."

This is a non-sequitur; just because we find similar beliefs elsewhere does not in any way prove that we don't have the original ideas of Jesus.

"… most destructive idea to come out of the Roman Christian war machine was that Jesus was the only way. This exclusive nature of Christian belief is the source of all the violence done in the name of Jesus"

This is a second non-sequitur; why does the fact that 'Jesus is the only way' necessarily lead to violenece? Certainly it has at times in the past, but if you're going to make that play, you should also be wary of "secular" regimes that have also lead to violence. Besides, claiming that the idea that 'Jesus is the only way' came out of the "Roman Christian war machine" is false; it comes out of the New Testament documents and the earliest Christian writers. (Pre-Constantine.)

"Just because there are ideas in the Bible that are good, doesn't mean that its the only source of those ideas"

That is true. The question is whether it is true or not. Whether Christianity has produced "good results" is a matter that is up for debate; a non-Christian historian like Rodney Stark would argue that it has. But it's not fair, IMHO, to discount an ideology because of the failure of many of its proponents.