Lumping towards futility

This argument between Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, and Dennis Prager, who is some warmongering radio talk show host, is of course unfruitful practically by definition, as it's on wether God exists.

Before you shout "next!", though, the back-and-forth seems to reveal one interesting thing, about categorizing. Somewhere about here, a familiar lumping-together rears its head:

Going back a generation or two, support for Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was almost entirely confined in the West to intellectuals. German Ph.D.s were also among Hitler’s greatest supporters."

The salient thing about this, and the reason I'm even mentioning this discussion, is that Harris also lumps together, but in a different way. Prager, responding to the strategy "we are all atheistic about Zeus":

But I will respond to one now—your argument that Prager’s or Collins’s God is in the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. Did anyone studying the human genome ever argue for Zeus? What are you talking about?

In the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. What on Earth does that even mean? It means that Prager is indignant at being lumped together with those false believers. Harris operates with a category 'religion' which contains, well, religion, and Prager has a big faceted category labeled 'true religion' ("Judeo-Christianity" and conformity) and a wastebasket of 'false religions and abominations' (everything else).

So Harris is in the same intellectual league as Stalin, because he's one of those, you know, those secularists. Regardless of the fact that Harris does not appear to be a Marxist-Leninist, nor a Stalinist.