Nine million children die every year before they reach the age of five. Picture an Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those tsunamis every 10 days, killing children only under five: that’s twenty-four thousand children a day, a thousand an hour, seventeen or so a minute. That means before you get to the end of this sentence, some few children very likely will have died in terror and agony.

Now I’m obviously not saying that Dr. Craig or all religious people are psychopaths and psychotics, but this, to me, this is the true horror of religion: it allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own.

And I’m not the first person to notice that it’s a very strange sort of loving God who would make salvation depend on believing in him on bad evidence.

Think about that: through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and they missed the revelation.

That it is not only tiresome when otherwise intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. This kind of faith really is the perfection of narcissism: God loves me, don’t you know?

To think in this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other Human beings.