Some day there may be a story about an atheist hacking to death or blowing up someone because that person had offended against their adamant belief that there is no God.  (Spoiler alert: there actually is no God.) But that day isn’t here yet. Instead we have another story about someone hacked to death by a Muslim fanatic who was offended by someone questioning his childish beliefs. (Yes, childish, because the entire Abrahamic tradition is essentially a childish tradition in which “correct” behavior is driven entirely by the primitive fear of eternal damnation from a jealous and troubled God who acts entirely too much like an abusive parent/boyfriend.) So, yesterday the Guardian reported the story of a prominent American blogger of Bangladeshi origin — Avijit Roy, founder of the Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog site — had been hacked to death with machetes by unidentified assailants in Dhaka, while his wife was also critically wounded. The couple were on a bicycle rickshaw, returning from a book fair, when two assailants stopped and dragged them on to the pavement before striking them with machetes, according to local media reports. Roy, who was 42, is the second Bangladeshi blogger to have been murdered in two years and the fourth writer to have been attacked since 2004. According to the Guardian, hardline Islamist groups have “long demanded the public killing of atheist bloggers and sought new laws to deal with writing critical of Islam.”  Roy’s father said the writer, a US citizen, had received a number of “threatening” emails and messages on social media from hardliners unhappy with his writing.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The more I study the Abrahamic faiths, which include Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the question for me doesn’t become why I don’t believe in the God of Abraham, of Jesus and of Mohammad: the question for me becomes why anyone would believe in this appallingly harsh, reactive, small-minded and jealous God, clearly a creation of an ancient and much more primitive time, promoting values that we should have left behind centuries ago. For anyone to think that hacking to death someone who’s entire crime was the free expression of dissenting thought would be something of which a God (or any God) approves of has just indicted, as much as it is possible to indict, the so-called God in which he or she proclaims to believe. Say “Amen” to that, motherf**kers.