An islamic fascist group, a splinter of the Pakistan Taliban known as Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, decided that in order to progress their aims, it would be a great idea to send a suicide murderer to a funfair in Lahore to kill as many people as possible. Well, they achieved their aims all right, killing at least 70 people, as a group of Christians celebrated Easter, many of whom were young children. Or did they?
The majority of those who died – and the death toll is expected to climb further – were muslims. Yes, that’s right. Muslims killed muslims. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Of course it doesn’t.
Look deeper and the narrative is even more sinister. It just so happens that 27 March represented a deadline set by 30 or more religious groups who are demanding that a law giving some rights to women should be withdrawn. What better way to advance a case for opposing rights for women than to blow them up, taking their children with them? After all, it’s their fault for going to a funfair at which some psychopath has decided to terminate his life by turning into flying mince.
The Taliban must have been terrified at the power wielded by the Pakistani Christians who, after all, represent a towering 1.6% of the country’s population so they plainly decided that the only option was to murder them in the most cowardly and vicious way imaginable.
This is in relatively liberal Lahore, for goodness sake, so goodness knows how the less liberal folk in Pakistan behave. And it is a country where apostasy and atheism are addressed by execution. It can surely be no surprise when a barbaric act such as this occurs?
Any country bound together by enforced religion is bound to fail. It is completely absurd that every single person living in one country believes independently in exactly the same thing, unless they are brainwashed, proselytised and force-fed faith in a particular way virtually from birth. Allow people to make up their own minds about God when they are old enough, say to vote, and hardly anyone would make a reasoned choice to take up any religion at all, certainly not one where people commit mass murder by killing themselves.
I don’t compare David Cameron to islamic fascists or any other religious extremists but I would say his Easter message, pronouncing Britain to be a religious, in his definition a Christian, country was idiotic. Not as idiotic as murdering people at a funfair, obviously, but another step down the slippery slope to adherence to ancient and discredited religious superstitions of all kinds.
Words alone are not enough to describe what happened in Lahore yesterday. It is well beyond my level of understanding. The trouble, for me, is that the ancient tenets of religion are less relevant today than they have ever been. Nothing good comes from religion that wouldn’t have come about anyway. As the great physicist Steven Weinberg once said” “Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things – that takes religion.”
Some very bad people did some very bad things yesterday in Pakistan. And they weren’t atheists.
