Good Physicist Gone Bad

Steven Weinberg, a physicist who won the Nobel prize, wrote a mantra of New Atheism which is indicative of the brilliance Dawkins and Hitchens come up with:

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.

Now this statement is false and bigoted and one should condemn whoever says it. One can note the vagueness of certain words and that the statement is only true in an irrelevant sense. One can easily switch a few things:

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for bad people to do good—that takes religion.

or

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do bad—that takes atheism.

Surely, atheists would take these claims to court, and rightly so. But those same reasons would take Weinberg's claim to court as well. And the prosecution rests its case.

See this post for the standard objections I have to blaming evils on religion.