RICHARD Dawkins is the world's most famous professional atheist, so it's strange he's so wrong about Hitler.

How could a great atheist not recognise another despiser of Christianity?

Dawkins, a British academic and author of The God Delusion, is here for the Global Atheist Convention and on ABC television tried to debate Cardinal George Pell, our highest-ranking Catholic.

Dawkins made a couple of howlers, but the worst came after Pell put what even I, as a non-Christian, know is one of the strongest cases for Christianity.

As Pell suggested, Christianity stands against totalitarians by defending the value of every human life. It insists that no human - whether weak, sick, in the womb or of another race - is so insignificant that he or she can be sacrificed to some creed, whether communism, fascism or Gaia.

Here's how Pell put it on Monday: "It's not Maggie Thatcher who was the epitome or the personification of social Darwinism. It's Hitler and Stalin. Because it is the struggle for survival, the strong take what they can and the weak give what they must and there is nothing to restrain them and we have seen that in the two great atheist movements of the last century."

Dawkins reacted with the anger of an autocrat.

"Oh, now that's ridiculous. First, atheism had nothing to do with Hitler and Stalin. Stalin was an atheist and Hitler was not.

"It doesn't matter what they were with respect to atheism, they did their horrible things for entirely different reasons."

First problem: Dawkins confuses restraint with motive.

Pell's point wasn't that Hitler and Stalin were motivated by atheism, but that their atheism - or anti-Christianity - helps to explain why they so disastrously lacked restraint. They did not mind sacrificing millions of lives to build their utopias.

But, second, Hitler was indeed violently anti-Christian, if not atheist. Check what he said in private conversations recorded at the time and later published in Hitler's Table Talk: 1941-1944.

"Socialism and religion cannot exist together ... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew."

October 1941: "Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure."

True, Hitler told his intimates it was not "opportune" to "hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the churches": "The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. So in public he paid lip-service to churches, although that didn't fool one famous atheist, who in 2006 grudgingly admitted: "It could be argued that, despite his own (public) words Hitler was not really religious but just cynically exploiting the religiosity of his audience." And which atheist said that? Why, Dawkins himself. How odd.

Originally published as Hitler escapes atheist's arguments