Atheism Wins the Death Total

How many people has religion killed? Well, I say zero, since people kill people, not religion. Now the tenents of the different religions (and you can say that religion calls for the deaths of people, but again, do all religious people take up arms against each other? Do all people that take their families to church on Sunday or to Mosque on Friday kill for their religion?) have their strict rules to be sure, but does the average religious follower believe in death over life? There is a lot of evidence that certain religions' holy books say that followers must adhere to their "rules" with no question. That includes the killings of homosexuals, the stoning of children and adulteress adults, etc.

But to say that religion has killed more people than Atheism is ignorant at best and willfully misleading at worst. Just look at the results of Josef Stalin's implementation of Atheism alone. 12 million people dead. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, three million dead. Mao, 20 million dead; and so on. Even if you look at the death tolls of the Crusades (which in their totals, were military defeats for the Christians save for one) that were for all intents and purposes, religious wars; the death totals were approximately nine million. Given that the population totals of all of Europe (the "known world") was in the neighborhood of 22-25 million people. How then, during these "religious wars," did religion kill more people than the Atheism openly exhibited by Stalin an the rest? To date, the numbers just aren't there.