When eight people, mostly Asian women, were murdered at massage parlors in Georgia, a huge argument ensued: were these race-based hate crimes, or the acts of a sex-crazed wacko?
The piece of trash that did this was turned in by his parents, who gave the cops his cellphone number so they could track him down. We'll call him "PoT" instead of his real name to avoid giving him the notoriety he likely craves.
PoT's Instagram account had the following tagline: “Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God. This pretty much sums up my life. It’s a pretty good life.”
If life was so good, what was PoT's problem? Why did he do this?
Authorities said Robert Aaron Long had confessed to the killings and had told investigators he had “a sexual addiction.” Long indicated he may have frequented the spas in the past, police said, and that they were “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”
In other words, PoT was a disgusting and weak animal, and "Guns and God" were the answer he chose to solve his own failings: kill the thing he desired and his temptation would go away.
We see this pattern over and over and over, in nearly all religions. In Saudi Arabia they make women cover themselves from head to toe to avoid inciting the passions of weak men. In Afghanistan the Taliban stopped girls going to school so they wouldn't tempt men. Ultraorthodox Jews in Brooklyn treat women like chattel, denying them a real education and turning them into baby machines that no man but their husbands can touch. Catholic priests worldwide crusade against birth control and abortion, denying women the most basic control over their own bodies. Southern Baptists disallow dancing and their pastors tell women that they have to look attractive because "God made men to be drawn to beautiful women," while sporting a gut that could dam the Mississippi River. And all religions have been covering up the rapes committed by their pastors, priests, rabbis and mullahs since time immemorial.
Religion gives animals like PoT license to murder. Here's how it goes. Lust is a sin. Temptation is how Satan takes us away from God. Satan is evil. You must conquer temptation. Throw in some guns and the answer is obvious. PoT was "proving" to God the strength of his faith, by destroying evil temptation at the source, killing these women.
How can I know that this was the motivation? There are literally millions of women out there to tempt him, and PoT knows that he can't kill them all. But he can pass God's "test" by killing the temptations he's met.
PoT had been in treatment for addiction, and clearly it failed. PoT's youth pastor said, “I don’t say this callously: I don’t know what’s happened in [PoT] to get to this point. What happened last night doesn’t seem in any way like the young man I knew.”
I can tell that pastor how PoT got to that point: religion screwed him up. By harping on sin and temptation and pretending that whatever force in the Universe that created the Andromeda galaxy actually cares how some bozo in rural Georgia gets his rocks off, his "faith" drove him to murder.
Religion does give legitimate comfort to some people. An old lady can die happy, thinking she'll be reunited with her long-dead husband. It can help some kids stay on the straight and narrow.But then we saw how nearly the entire evangelical hierarchy endorsed a completely depraved and immoral man for president, despite his own bragging about how he sexually assaults women. And then they had the gall to compare him to King David (who was also a total scumbag, but one who ultimately repented). And then they sued state governments that wouldn't let them crowd their congregations into disease-filled churches so they could fill their collection plates during a pandemic. All the while claiming that they are "pro-life."
Organized religion has lost whatever moral authority it ever had. It's just another gang of greedy men grubbing for money and power.
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