Awesome Religious Person of the Day: Phillip Craig Garrido

There's nothing religious people like to do more than count up the deaths caused by "Atheists." It has to be their single favorite argument; "Hitler, Stalin,Pol Pot were all Atheists, and look how many deaths they caused." I guess that means Atheists are wrong? Anyway, as silly as I think this kind of calculus is, I can't resist pointing out that if every crime caused by an Atheist is due to their Atheism (note that I do not necessarily agree that these men were Atheists, and I certainly don't agree that it was their Atheism that led them to kill people), then presumably every crime committed by a religious person is caused by their religion. The staggering thing to me is that considering the sheer volume of religious people, they should be the last people to want to count up murders, since of all the non-fascism related murders, they are far more likely to be the perpetrator, especially once you consider that Atheists are markedly underrepresented in prison (.21% as opposed to their ~10% representation in the general population, and no it's not because people convert in prison, the numbers are taken upon booking, go here for the data).

But since religious people love keeping track of the awful things Atheists do, I've decided to start a regular entry, which points out the obvious, that religious people do horrible things too, like kidnap, rape and impregnate eleven year-old girls, as did Phillip Garrido. It also appears that his wife was complicit in this disgusting affair. Garrido has a business called "God's Desire" which he refers to as a church. Garrido even claims that God speaks to him through a box. Who would have thought that people who hear voices could commit horrifying crimes?

Now I'd just like to make it clear in this first post (then I won't mention it again) that I'm not using this as an argument against religious people. The fact that millions of religious people rape and murder other people every year, is not an argument for whether or not God exists. If scientologists never committed any crimes would that prove that they're right? One thing it certainly does prove is that being religious certainly doesn't make someone a saint. Not by a long-shot.