Passing beyond the fact that Christianity and Soviet Communism share the same ethics -- altruism -- I would ask ... What came first: Ethics or Religion?
There are those that believe in Creationism -- those that consider the Bible as the word of God -- that will say that ethics came first in that Biblical moral codes define an ethics upon which certain religions have been founded.
And then there are atheists who say that ethics is a science of human values, that ethics involves answering human questions about behavior, that ethics has purpose, that (quoting Ayn Rand) "Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man's survival," that ... a "moral commandment" is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced' the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
And so, upon realizing that ethics arrived with the dawn of rational man, the answer to the question -- "What came first: Ethics or Religion?" -- is (without doubt) ... Ethics.
It is true, as the source article for this thread writes, that ... "Atheists improve society."