let me hit you with some  atheism in the face of vatech (and let me remind you: something like four times as many people were killed by a bomb in baghdad today (only they don't count, or they count, say, 100,000/1). really, the monotheisms (=judaism+christianity+islam), according to whom god is all-powerful and perfectly good, are incompatible with this event. it's not that, once you write a book developing an amazing rationalization, it might not turn out that they are strictly logically inconsistent, but that you've just got a dishonest, and i want to say, more or less obviously false vision of the universe as you embark on this project. you don't look at the world and say: how might a world like this have come about? you look at some dogma that was enforced upon your person, and ask: how can i make this compatible with a breathtakingly anomalous situation? when your faith ceases to be directed at the world, you are subject to any delusion. blame it on sin or free will, but then you're going to have to make every single poor fucking asshole ridden with bullets deserve what she got.

the religious response is not an honest response: it is self-delusion. but it is poignant: surely none of us can squarely face this world - its horror. we must evade or escape by some means, and the religious means is no worse than the alcohol means, the emotional deadness means, the cho means of i'm just going to kill everyone; i commit myself to destroying this world. actually, the religious means is better than that, anyway.