We all owe a debt of gratitude to Brit Hume. Hume, you’ll remember recommended that Tiger Woods embrace Christianity. Gasp! Since then all…well…hell has broken loose.

Media types are crawling over each other to excoriate Hume. But they can’t just attack Hume because nothing he actually said was out of bounds. They must attack Christianity and religion in general.

Secular progressives won’t tolerate any mention of Christianity in public. In short, Jesus is the new smoking. And the fear of secondhand Jesus is even more intense than the pungency of nicotine in a restaurant. I’m pretty sure the outrage surrounding Hume would actually be less if he fired up a stogie in a nursery school.

U.S. News & World Report writer John Aloysius Farrell wrote the most ridiculous anti-religion piece I’ve read during this whole kerfuffle. Of course, Farrell can’t help but draw a comparison between Hume and Islamic terrorists.

The Cold War was fought against cruel Commie atheists who—we were warned by our leaders at the time—had no fear of God’s wrath because they simply didn’t believe in Him. But we survived because, it turned out, the faithless Russians and Red Chinese had no more of an appetite for nuclear incineration than we did.

In the end, the lack of a prospect for celestial paradise made the Communists, despite their weaponry, slightly less scary than our foes in the Long War, who are true believers.

It takes a religious zealot to strap explosives around his or her waist and, murmuring prayers, blow up a CIA facility in Afghanistan, or take down an airplane over Detroit, or steer a jet into the World Trade Center. Or, for that matter, to treat the world to Crusades and Inquisitions and the kind of faith-based savagery we’ve seen in places like Belfast, Bosnia, Beirut, and Jerusalem.

That is what made Brit’s comments so creepy: the self-certainty that “my god is better than yours.”

Hume has the right to yak…But, jeez, what a stupid thing to think.

It takes a religious zealot? Are you kidding me? While Farrell argues that the Soviet’s atheism prevented them from being as scary as Muslims, can we just go over the atrocities committed in the past century by atheists. In fact, let’s bring up Farrell’s beloved atheistic Soviet Union led by atheist Joe Stalin who killed anywhere from 25-60 million of his own people.

Atheist Mao killed even more. Throw in Pol Pot, Castro and Che for good measure. Hey, a million bodies here and a million bodies there and pretty soon we’re talking about a lot of bodies.

I know Farrell would likely be shocked that anyone would link these madmen’s actions with their atheism but the two are tied in. Atheism has no philosophical basis for the sanctity of individual life.

And on smaller levels right here in America, atheist/anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot and killed the President of the United States. Ted Kaczynski of Unabomber fame was an atheist. So the lie that it takes a religious zealot is just ignorant.

Here’s the thing. Why does violence done in the name of religion make religion “creepy” and “scary” but a body count in the hundreds of millions not impugn atheism in any way?

Ht Newsbusters