Atheism in of itself cannot possibly authorize any action, good or bad. Theism, on the other hand, can. It doesn’t always, but it can. I am an atheist, and today I could kill my wife and my two dogs. But I don’t. Why not? Because I love my wife and dogs and would be incredibly heartbroken if they died. Not believing in God doesn’t make you an emotionless automaton. Even if I did, to say I did it because I was an atheist doesn’t make any sense. Like I said, just because literally nothing is preventing me from committing those acts doesn’t mean I’m going to commit them. In actuality, there is something preventing me from doing so other than my emotions toward them: the law. The social contract of a civilized society demands certain behaviors be curbed, including killing people and stealing their stuff. If you break those rules, there are dire consequences. But even if those rules didn’t exist, someone would eventually make them up because most of us don’t want to live in that kind of a world. If we did, then it wouldn’t be seen as immoral to begin with.

Now, let’s say I belonged to a religion and one day a religious leader told me that GOD SAID I should kill my wife and dogs. I didn’t want to, but let’s say my faith was so strong I did it anyway. Now you could say “God wouldn’t tell you to do that,” but how in the world could you possibly know that? What evidence do you have that points to a God who wouldn’t do such a thing that couldn’t also apply to a God who would?

And that’s that problem right there: derived authority. It’s not necessarily harmful to believe something that is not supported by evidence, but it becomes harmful when you use that belief to AUTHORIZE actions. And that belief doesn’t necessarily have to be religious, either. Stalinist Russians may not have believed in a God in the traditional sense, but they believed in an ideology and quasi-deified their leader. The regime persecuted skeptics and freethinkers just as religious regimes have done, and in fact Stalin’s Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea have far more in common with Theocratic governments than they do with secular ones.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/60-girl-students-thrashed-in-pak-139798?pfrom=home-otherstories