Atheists on CBS News

CBS News repeats the same hoary chestnuts.

But Stephen Prothero, who chairs the religious studies department at Boston University, says that atheists miss the fact that religion, while being a source of some terrible evil, is also the greatest force for good.

"And so, if you're gonna criticize — you know, religious people for the Inquisition, then you need to praise them for the civil rights movement," he said. "You need to praise them for getting rid of slavery in the United States, which they did. You can't sort of have it both ways. And similarly, if you're going to praise atheists for these things, you need to criticize the Stalinists. I mean, some of the most murderous regimes that we've had in the 20th century were atheistic regimes."