James Lee, Discovery Headquarters Terrorist and Atheist

It appears that a some nutball atheist has committed an act of terrorism.

It is easy to imagine what would have appeared on atheist blogs if James Lee, who took hostages in the Discovery Channel headquarters, had issued demands that the station change its programming to provide more "creationist" or other fundamentalist religious programming.

A substantial number of atheist blogs would have then written posts saying, "See how evil religion is that it is responsible for stuff like this."

However, it seems that James Lee was an atheist - somebody quite convinced that, on Darwinian and Malthusian terms, we are sewing the seeds of our own destruction and who wanted to put an end to it. So, without any promise of an afterlife or a heavenly reward, he took matters into his own hands and performed a terrorist act.

So, instead of atheist sites blaming "religion" for this crime, we have theist sites blaming "Darwinism".

And how are the atheists going to respond to this accusation?

They are probably going to accuse those who want to blame all of atheism for this crime that the theists are guilty of making bigoted, derogatory overgenearlizations - that many atheists would never endorse and certainly never commit this type of act. Many would, in fact, use these derogatory overgeneralizations as proof of the immoral nature of religious people in general, that they cannot think straight about these issues and cast blame only on those who are guilty.

None of them will think of taking their response and holding it up as a mirrir where it reflects on their own writings on similar issues where somebody performs some act while ranting about "God".

As atheism becomes more and more common, more and more acts such as this will be put in atheist terms and fewer will be put into religious terms, simply because these types of people with these types of problems must borrow from the ideas that permeate their society.

If that society is substantially religious, then these type of people will wrap their acts in religious terms. If their society is mostly atheist, they will wrap their acts in atheist terms. At least, this is a quite plausible interpretation unless and until somebody can come up with proof that there is an actual cause-and-effect to be had.

But people are not waiting around for scientific proof of an established causes and effects. They are rushing past that step and going straight to, "Person performed acts of violence mentioned God/Darwin. This just proves the moral bankruptcy of all of religion/atheism."

So, let's say we give up this practice of blaming all of religion for every crime committed by somebody who mentions "God", and save our criticism for those people who blame all of atheism or Darwin for every crime committed by somebody who does not mention God?