In 1949 , China became a Communist state under the leadership of Mao Zedong 's Communist Party of China . China itself had been a cradle of religious thought since ancient times , being the birthplace of Confucianism and Daoism . Under Communism , China became officially atheist , and though some religious practices were permitted to continue under state supervision , religious groups deemed a threat to order have been suppressed — as with Tibetan Buddhism since 1959 and Falun Gong in recent years . During the Cultural Revolution , Mao instigated " struggles " against the Four Olds : " old ideas , customs , culture , and habits of mind " . In Buddhist Cambodia , influenced by Mao 's Cultural Revolution , Pol Pot 's Khmer Rouge also instigated a purge of religion during the Cambodian genocide , when all religious practices were forbidden and Buddhist monasteries were closed . Evangelical Christian writer Dinesh D'Souza writes : " The crimes of atheism have generally been perpetrated through a hubristic ideology that sees man , not God , as the creator of values . Using the latest techniques of science and technology , man seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth " . He also contends : And who can deny that Stalin and Mao , not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others , all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic ? Who can dispute that they did their bloody deeds by claiming to be establishing a ' new man ' and a religion-free utopia ? These were mass murders performed with atheism as a central part of their ideological inspiration , they were not mass murders done by people who simply happened to be atheist . In response to this line of criticism , Sam Harris wrote : The problem with fascism and communism , however , is not that they are too critical of religion ; the problem is that they are too much like religions . Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship . Auschwitz , the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma ; they are examples of political , racial and nationalistic dogma run amok . There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable . Richard Dawkins has stated that Stalin 's atrocities were influenced not by atheism , but by dogmatic Marxism and concludes that while Stalin and Mao happened to be atheists , they did not do their deeds " in the name of atheism " . On other occasions , Dawkins has replied to the argument that Hitler and Stalin were antireligious with the response that Hitler and Stalin also grew moustaches in an effort to show the argument as fallacious . Instead , Dawkins argues in '' The God Delusion '' : " What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists , but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things . There is not the smallest evidence that it does "
Cambodian genocide
Cambodian genocide
Criticism of atheism