The following post and links contain incredibly disturbing content.

(Edit: The Daily Mail does not seem to have the video posted. The link to the Speisa site with the video has been added.)

This is not going to be an academic account; an argument shaped within a new journalistic context. This is not an article. This is me, gentle readers, with a sincerely broken heart, speaking to you in a kind of desperation.

In an absolutely horrific video posted by The Daily Mail and Speisa with a corresponding article, a nine-year-old boy is executed by Shia militia to the raucous cries of, obviously, Allahu Ahkbar.

In my history of writing on atheism, such as it is, I have watched countless execution videos–long before the IS emerged. I have been summarily disgusted by all of them; repelled by the contemptible actions to which faith gives men license. Roadside shootings, beheadings, immolations, hangings, none of which without the expected adulation to follow. All of them were ritualistic, fanatical, and an insult to the very idea of human solidarity.

But there was something about this that was disgusting on a level that was indescribable. I don’t want to appeal too much to the pathos of the situation–perhaps it was his age, the terror in his eyes, the entirely too jubilant shouts that came after the ringing blasts of gunfire.

They cried out “God is great” while a young boy bled, lifeless, into the disconsolate, unforgiving dirt.

It is impossible to be professional on this point–impossible to find a scrap of patience left for apologetics, for rationalization, for the kind of pseudo-politically correct Windsor knots that faitheists and others tie themselves into in order to make excuses on any level for this inhuman treachery. I can hear the straw-grasping now, but what does it matter?

Men scream “God is great” as they shoot children. No idea in the history of our inept and cruel species has such a distinction. Anyone who finds themselves searching in Plath’s empty sky for an answer, for comfort, is the most textbook kind of hypocrite.

As of yet, we don’t even know his name. I’m sure many of you are sure that god did.

Contemptible.