In before...

[Dystopia]

I wasn't talking about we (AF) but about anti-Islam people in general (including Christians and the far right)

[Mister Agenda]

I'm a little confused. There must be loads of murders by Atheists every year, just as there are loads of murders by Christians, Muslims etc. This is the first time I've seen it mentioned that a killer is an Atheist.

It's actually rare enough to be news in the USA. We're about 0.02% of the prison population and more like 2% of the total population. If you mulch all the theists together, they commit all crimes at a much higher rate than we do, but if you tease it out, we're about the same as liberal Quakers, Jews, and Unitarians.

The religious views of the shooter might seem more relevant because the victims are members of an often denigrated religious minority. Maybe it's a case of 'Thank goodness it wasn't a Christian murdering Muslims for a change'.

It is quite interesting to perhap feel what moderate peaceful Muslims go through when one of their radical brothers commits a similar act.

Maybe it will help some folks who are low on empathy in that regard.

There are however a few differences:

1. As an Atheist I don't claim to be any more moral than a Theist, nor would I say that of other Atheists. Religious people often claim that by following their religion they are better. It is this claim that we may counter with examples of religious people doing horrible things.

However, many of us claim, and I'm one of them, that being an atheist doesn't make a person any more immoral than a theist.

2. I'm not going to claim that this guy wasn't a "True Atheist".

Ditto.

3. There is nothing in the God Delusion, nor the Atheist Experience, that says anything about killing people. This isn't true of all religious texts.

There's nothing in this guy's Facebook posts that indicates that he thinks Muslims or other religious people should be killed, either, He's big on guns, supports gay marriage, and thinks religion is a bad idea.

Apparently he was having some kind of dispute over parking with the man, and possibly his wife as well. It's an incredibly stupid thing to kill anyone over, but sometimes in these cases I think it's a matter of whether they have a deadly weapon handy when the last straw lands on a person who is about to snap.

[Jackalope]

Dunno about you guys but I think Charlie Hebdo shouldn't excuse attacking a group of the population like this

It doesn't. That was wrong, this is wrong. One has jack shit to do with the other (except perhaps as a sick rationalization).

[Mister Agenda]

Apparently on his social media pages he posted a lot of anti-religion stuff and defined himself as a "militant atheist".

Sorry, what I meant was there must be hundreds of murders commited by Atheists every year, but the Atheist bit isn't normally mentioned.

Even if we committed murders at the same rate as theists, we'd only be about 2% of murderers. More likely we're 0.2% of murderers, which would make the number of murdering atheists in the USA pretty low. There were 412 murders in Chicago in 2013, on average, 0.824 of them would be committed by an atheist, not taking into account over-achievers who committed more than one murder in Chicago that year.

[Mudhammam]

As this scumbag was pulling the trigger, witnesses heard him shouting "Gott ist tot," which is German for "God is dead." = Something you probably won't hear any news outlets report because nobody is motivated to action by atheism.

[robvalue]

God obviously had no intention of stopping him either. Murderers must have their free will.