On Media and Motive - The Chapel Hill Murders

      About 2 a.m., Wednesday February 11, 2015, three bodies were identified as the victims of a shooting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  The victims were college students, 23, 21, and 19 years of age - all shot in the head by a Craig Stephen Hicks, also a resident of Chapel Hill.
      This event quickly whipped our "crack" media infrastructure into a frenzy, where they expeditiously sought to assign motive to this horrible crime.  Oddly, the standard media angle - a mass murder by gun - was almost completely passed over in this instance in favor of a more inflammatory one - the murderer was an atheist and the victims were Muslim.
While I'm sure the Fox newsroom broke into spontaneous orgasms over this revelation, curiously all the mainstream media latched-on to that angle as well.
      Keep in mind - no motive had been released or even found yet by the police department handling the crime, with the exception of a known argument over parking.  Yet the media, having investigated Hicks' Facebook page let pure speculation run rampant despite the complete absence of correlation between the event that occurred and the information on the page.
      Fox News, The Silver Fox on CNN, The Today Show, The NY Times, even local affiliates began reporting the story as a "hate crime," and even before a motive had been established.  But was this a hate crime?  Those who know Hicks said no.  Now - one might expect friends and family to cover for someone they care for, but when you look at the Facebook page - the one of the alleged Muslim-hating, godless atheist who was fueled by his Muslim hate to commit murder, you don't actually see the motivation.
      His Facebook page confirmed he considered himself an atheist.  He was in favor of gay marriage.  He was in favor of abortion rights.  He re-posted a number of typical atheism-related memes.  He did question religion - most specifically, Christianity in his posts.  But very little was present that would suggest he so viciously hated Muslims, he felt the need to randomly go murder three in an apartment complex.
      It would seem that not only were these innocent people deprived of their lives by a man who clearly snapped, WE have once again, all been deprived of a reasonable and factual media.  It's as though it were a deliberate attempt to whip the American - and world public - up into a frenzy, probably to bolster sagging ratings.
      So now the pot has been stirred and a table is being turned on atheism.  Atheists, myself included, tend to regularly point out the correlation between religion and psychopathic and/or homicidal behavior in individuals and groups.  Naturally, this event is forging a backlash that puts atheists and atheism in the spotlight for similar transgressions.  However, the reasoning behind it is clearly unsound.
      First point - atheism is NOT and organized community.  There is no charter.  There is no book of laws and regulations.  There are no churches - aside from perhaps the internet and occasional groups who meet maybe once a month to drink beer and talk.  More importantly, there is no code within atheism that provides for hate crimes to be committed.  There is no sanctioning of violence or exclusion or immoral behavior.  Atheism is NOT a religion.
      By contrast:
           The God of the Bible also allows slavery, including selling your own daughter as a sex slave (Exodus 21:1-11), child abuse (Judges 11:29-40 and Isaiah 13:16), and bashing babies against rocks (Hosea 13:16 & Psalms 137:9). 
          In 2 Kings 10:18-27, God orders the murder of all the worshipers of a different god in their very own church.
          All tallied, the God (Yahweh), of the Bible kills 371,186 people directly and orders another 1,862,265 people murdered.
          The Holy Qur'an - The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text.  They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Quran.

            Quran (3:56) - "As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help."

            Quran (8:12) - "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them." 
            Now these are but a few verses and examples.  The books are literally LOADED with words allegedly from GOD or ALLAH, spewing hatred, jealousy, immorality and death.  And that doesn't even take into consideration the heinous acts done over the centuries by the Catholic Church, reform churches who burned "witches", Holy wars of both religions and the horrific things coming out in the name of Islam today.
      So religion is predestined to create environments where horrific things become justified - "in the name of God."  Two-thousand years of acts of homicide are supposed to be excused, but one atheist goes nuts and it's ALL our fault?
      My second point is this - despite one's upbringing, despite one's belief system, some people just lose their shit.  Some people are caught in madness and that's the way it is.  Some people are religious, some aren't.  Most people don't murder three innocent people on a Wednesday, but occasionally some do. Religious or not.
      This Chapel Hill homicide appears to be far less about religious hate and far more about internal madness.  And even if it is found that he hated the victims for some reason, because they were Muslim, atheism holds no triggering factor that would've promoted the action.
      Despite what our illustrious media machine may have to say about it.