Sir - The basic fallacy that 'atheism murders people' and 'atheists are mass-murderers' has been proclaimed in the letters page on two consecutive weeks now. First we have Edward Sanderson (Letters, December 1) asserting that 'the most famous atheists who practised what they truly believed in were Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx. Both were rebelling against orthodox religious principles - millions of people died as a result of their anti-religious philosophy'.

Well, now: in the first place, Marx was a dry academic - of the ivory-tower kind common in Oxford - who never murdered anyone in his life. In the second place, it wasn't the atheism of Hitler and Lenin (a much more relevant name than Marx) that made them mass-murderers, but their being homicidal megalomaniacs.

One could just as rationally investigate their preferences in food, discover that they shared a liking for parsnips and thereupon decide that consuming parsnips turns you into a mass-murderer, as blame their atheism. And in the third place, the Nazi world-view was highly mystical and religious, however much Hitler and his acolytes in the cult of Medieval Teutonic supremacy may have denied it.

And now we have Ian Logan (Letters, December 8) claiming that 'atheism managed to murder more people in the 20th century than religious zealots in all of history'. That is factually doubtful.

First, because the Nazi persecution of the Jews bore all the classic hallmarks of religious zeal (and if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I tend to the thesis that it is a duck); second, because a philosophy doesn't murder people - homicidal people murder people; and third, no logical link whatsoever has been established between atheism and murderousness. Would Logan like it if others claimed that being a Christian makes one a murderer? Probably not.

John Kinory, Steeple Aston