Garbage. I stumbled on this looking for what the priests name in Temple of Doom was, and found this tripe instead.

- "…perhaps he was strictly adhering to some lesser known passage found in his holy texts. Who knows?" How about looking or asking someone who is an expert, instead of assuming and denigrating an entire mostly peaceful religion?

- "What we do know is that without religion these kinds of unhinged individuals are far more readily identified." Quantify this. You can't, because you made it up.

- "Where does that leave the faithful? How can they denigrate this man’s beliefs while simultaneously hold similar unprovable notions (although they may not manifest in such ghastly ways)?" His beliefs could very well be completely irrelevant to the actual cause of his actions. He just as likely may have just been nuts, religion was his excuse. It's foolish to draw a conclusion either way without further questioning and medical examination.

-"Faith is a word used to hide the fact you have no good reasons to believe." This is the true garbage of your assertions here. This is a subjective argument, because what you define is a 'good reason' may differ from someone else's 'good reason'. Each person's path toward or away from faith is an individual one, and it is ENTIRELY egotistical and self-centered to judge another's path according to your standards. The moral ambiguity inherent in all atheist rants is also a glaring hypocrisy. What's good for you, the right choose to believe there is no God, isn't good for others, the freedom to choose to believe in God.

You save the most repulsive for last, as if the image of a man slaughtering his family and taking his own life is somehow representative of faith and the faithful as a whole.

Well, I say imagine the 60-100 million corpses* or so that have rotted under the sun, starved to death or murdered by various atheistic Socialist regimes.

The false sense of intellectual superiority in the most vehement atheists on the internet never ceases to amaze me. I should be used to it by now, but each time I run across statements like the ones you make I'm surprised that anyone could be so shallow, vapid, and cruel. I don't care if you believe in God or not, not like you think everyone cares anyway, trying to convert you and all. Your path to walk is your path, not mine. I do care when such gross over-generalizations and horrific acts are applied to everyone with faith. Your faith tells you there is no God, so be it. My faith, my life experiences tell me otherwise, as illogical as it may be. The beauty of being human is that there is more to life than logic, and dismissal of those things makes you less human, whether you know it or not.

Prove God does not exist. You cannot, no more than I can prove God does exist. The only purely logical conclusion is that we don't KNOW, hence faith. The belief that God does not exist is entirely based on faith, faith that you have a great enough understanding of reality and the universe to make a guess at the odds, and faith in that gamble.

I have not, and never will, intentionally harm an innocent life. I will love my fellow man as my brother (or sister), and treat them the way I would want to be treated if our roles were reversed. My God commands it of me. I know, I know. HOW HORRIBLE! HOW GRUESOME! HOW INHUMANE!

*The estimates vary for each individual atrocity or group of atrocities, so much so that when you compound them you end up with about 40M people that may or may not be accounted for, and that's just counting the big ones.

[...] this does attract the occasional, long winded, rantish comment or email.  This morning I woke to a comment on a post made way back in March 2010.  Then I commented on a Hindu priest who cut the heads off his three [...]

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