>Atheists, for the most part, don't start wars. They have no axe to grind.

Declared atheists, for the most part, haven't controlled enough governments for their warlike or pacifist tendencies to be evaluated in comparison with religiously observant rulers and leaders who did everything they could to follow the Golden Rule.

I hear laughter. Is it because that description covers almost no one we've ever heard of, no matter how religious they professed to be?

Nevertheless, your statement suggests that atheists in power would just naturally be less ambitious, less greedy, less paranoid, less violent, than their religious counterparts.

Why should that be? They might not launch wars for religion, but there are so many other reasons to choose from.

It's true that Hitler was raised a Catholic, but so what? He gave up on religion at an early age, and Blitzkrieg wasn't sold to the Germans as religiously inspired. (Nazism itself came closer, but it didn't involve gods or postmortem rewards.)

Whether Stalin and Pol Pot "thought they were gods" in the supernatural sense (the only kind that counts) seems dubious, to say the least.