How many times after the arrest of someone for a terrible crime have you heard comments like these?
"He was a good christian man, I can't believe it."
"We were shocked. He went to church every week."

Well it isn't just christians who are so easily fooled. I found the following comments interesting concerning some of the terror-plot suspects in the U.K.

A friend from Henry Maynard Primary School said that Mr. Savant was a talented footballer, extremely well known and liked in the area. “I‘m completely shocked that this has happened and I think anyone who knows him would be shocked as well,” he said. Full article.

"All I know is they are peaceful, religious people. They were teaching Koran and all that to the young kids. I'm shocked, I'm sure they've got the wrong people." Full article

Hello people? First of all, why would you think a convert to Islam would be peaceful? What is the link between peacefulness and Islam? I certainly don't see it. Secondly, why are people shocked by the actions of religious people? Why should we be surprised that the vast majority of crimes are committed by religious people?

As we atheists know, religion is a delusion and delusional people act without regard for others. Wake up world!

EDINBURGH (Reuters) - Playwrights and comedians at the world's largest arts festival have boldly marched into the minefield of religious extremism this year to explode myths and destroy taboos.

Little is off limits for artists at the Edinburgh Fringe, with a record 50 shows about religion, covering Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Tackling faith has become a tempting challenge after the government introduced the Racial and Religious Hatred Act which sought to give all faiths equal protection, but was condemned by comedians such as Rowan Atkinson who feared it would turn satire into a criminal offence.

Despite its frivolous side, The Fringe has always reflected society's concerns.

"Petrol Jesus Nightmare," a dark play about two Israeli soldiers holed up under fire, is among the most prescient plays.

"The current situation certainly does make certain lines in the play shattering," said Philip Howard, artistic director of the Traverse Theater.

"The playwright Henry Adam doesn't spare any of the world's faiths in his onslaught. All religions ask you to kill in God's name."

"Mary and The Stripper" stretches across two millennia, contrasting the tales of Mary Magdalene and a 21st-century stripper hooked on heroin.

South African playwright Michelle van Rensburg said: "People have always been searching. It has just come to the fore. But I must say there are an awful lot of Jesuses at this year's Fringe.

"But there is so much done in the name of God that is blasphemous. It does get me down when these stand-up comedians blaspheme all the time."

Abie Philbin Bowman, whose one-man show "Jesus: The Guantanamo Years" is playing to sell-out houses, says comedy can be an effective weapon if used responsibly.

He plays Jesus, a bearded Middle Eastern man arrested by U.S. immigration officials and sent to the Guantanamo detention center in Cuba after confessing he was ready to die as a martyr.

"Being Irish and having grown up in the 1980s I have a sense of my own culture having been hijacked by terrorists and people assuming all Irish were terrorists," he said.

Portraying Jesus as a stand-up comedian returning to earth on a comeback tour, he said: "I am flying the flag for religious satire."

He said Jews had developed an incredible siege mentality after 2,000 years of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust "and now they are surrounded by people who want to destroy them."

He added: "You have got to try and understand where they are coming from sympathetically and try to show them they are sowing the seeds of their own future destruction."

On the other side of the religious coin, "We Don't Know Shi'ite" uses vox pops conducted by a troupe of young actors in the streets of Britain to highlight ignorance about Islam.

"Start talking -- that's our message," said the play's director Joshua Blackstone.

"Britain could work so much better as a multi-ethnic society if people were more open-minded. We could put to rest the stereotypes if there is more understanding," he added.

"The arts are absolutely necessary in bringing change into society."

PETERSBURG, Ky. - Like most natural history museums, this one has exhibits showing dinosaurs roaming the Earth. Except here, the giant reptiles share the forest with Adam and Eve.

That, of course, is contradicted by science, but that's the point of the $25 million Creation Museum rising fast in rural Kentucky.

Its inspiration is the Bible — the literal interpretation that contends God created the heavens and the Earth and everything in them just a few thousand years ago.

"If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is true, that's our presupposition or axiom, and we are starting there," museum founder Ken Ham said during recent tour of the sleek and modern facility, which is due to open next year.

Ham, an Australian native who started the Christian publishing company Answers in Genesis in the late 1970s, said the goal of his privately funded museum is to change minds and rebut the scientific point of view.

"We're going to show you that we can make sense of the different people groups, we can make sense of fossils, we can make sense of what you see in the world," he said.

Visitors to the museum, a few miles from Cincinnati, will be able to watch the story of creation unfold in a 180-seat special-effects theater, see a 40-foot-tall recreation of a section of Noah's Ark and stare into the jaws of robotic dinosaurs.

"It's education, but it's also doing it in an entertaining way," Ham said.

Scientists say fossils and sophisticated nuclear dating technology show that the Earth is more than 4 billion years old, the first dinosaurs appeared around 200 million years ago, and they died out well before the first human ancestors arose a few million years ago.

"Genesis is not science," said Mary Dawson, curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. "Genesis is a tale that was handed down for generations by people who really knew nothing about science, who knew nothing about natural history, and certainly knew nothing about what fossils were."

Ham said he believes most fossils are the result of the Great Flood described in Genesis.

Mark Looy, a vice president at Answers in Genesis, said the museum has received at least $21 million in private donations. He said two anonymous donors have given $1 million, and he expects the museum to be debt-free when it opens next May.

John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, an organization that promotes creationism, said the museum will affirm the doubts many people have about science, namely the notion that man evolved from lower forms of life.

"Americans just aren't gullible enough to believe that they came from a fish," he said.

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