Why did a shooter kill more than two dozen people in a Texas church yesterday? Reports now say he was targeting his mother-in-law specifically, and she happened to be in church. If she had been visiting a grocery store on Sunday, then we’d be talking about the grocery store massacre right now.

The point is: the attack wasn’t motivated by the church’s theology or the shooter’s faith (or potential lack of it).

But one-man Christian hate group Theodore Shoebat doesn’t care about the facts. In a video released on his website yesterday, he said that all atheists should be put to death because of what happened in Texas. (Gay people, too. Just because.)

“Sodomites and atheists need to be purged from society,” Shoebat said. “Sodomites automatically need to be put to death, that’s a no-brainer because they have already committed the crime of homosexuality. Atheists, on the other hand, they need to be inquisited, bottom line. They need to be inquisited and I think that when you have atheist enclaves in society, when you have atheist strongholds in society, atheist establishments that are very influential and when you see how fanatic they are, how much they hate Christianity, how much they hate God, how much they hate the church, you really can’t tolerate people like that and those people need the death penalty.”

I guess we should be happy he’s giving us the benefit of an inquisition first…?

I could go through the problems with what he’s saying — atheists don’t “hate” God; our frustrating with religious beliefs doesn’t mean we want to get rid of religious freedom, etc. — but there’s no need for a rebuttal when the entire argument is batshit crazy.

Here’s the truth: Atheists who have said anything about yesterday’s shootings have universally condemned what happened. I have yet to see a single individual take joy in what happened because it occurred at a church.

Atheists, like everyone else, think we’re right in our beliefs about God, but that means we don’t need weapons to settle our differences. Our arguments and logic and reason are more than enough. Shoebat wrongly thinks our godlessness makes us prone to violence.

Yet he’s the only one calling for the deaths of others.

(via Right Wing Watch)

