• At a convention discussing free speech, an apparent murderous opponent of said freedom opened fire on the cafe where the meeting was taking place. Even though the murderer fired 40 or so rounds, he or she could only claim one victim, an innocent human being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• A few weeks ago, three young people who claimed Islam as their professed faith-based belief system were murdered by a man who claimed no faith-based belief system.
• In the Sudan, a woman is being charged with leaving the faith-based belief system she was given by her parents; Islam, and choosing a different faith-based belief system; Christianity. Her own brother has called for her to be executed for this heinous act.

This is merely a tiny bit of news from just a handful of days. It’s not even a grain of sand’s worth of violence and madness that surrounds us because of faith-based belief. An all-loving, all-good Supreme Deity would be tired of shaking His massive head at all the horrors inflicted by His creations, except that He’s also all-knowing, so He knows all the crazy that goes on down here. While the likelihood of this Supreme Being actually existing is slim, if He did exist I think it’s highly probable He’s not the all-loving, all-good deity we’ve painted Him to be. Wouldn’t it be much more likely that this Supreme Being, who probably doesn’t exist, was all-evil? It would explain so much.

The violent and capricious nature of life on Earth would make more sense if an Evil Deity had created all of life. Parasites, microscopic germs, virulent, infectious diseases, mass extinctions, tsunamis that wipe out hundreds of thousands of lives in an instant, all make more sense if we accept that the puppet master running the show is a wicked, monstrous, sadistic fuck. Children dying of cancer, mosquitos carrying diseases from person to person, animal to animal, would no longer cause us to ask, “why?!” Think of the simple, yet brilliant plan to create massive amounts of chaos and war for centuries by whispering in a few people’s ears that He has given them the true Word. The Evil Deity would tell one person one story, let’s call him Abraham, then tell another person another story, let’s call him Saul, and then whisper in another person’s ear, let’s call him Mohammad, and tell each of them that they alone possess the secrets of the Universe. How the Evil Deity would grin as He considered the forces of darkness He had so simply unleashed.

Hell, He could even show up on Earth and pretend to be the Son of the Creator of the Universe. He could tell a few confusing and contradictory tales, give impossible rules to follow and then kill himself as a joke, coming back to life in a few days and then flying away, leaving the poor hapless semi-literate peasants to spend the rest of their days overwrought with guilt at their inability to measure up, and the fear of eternal damnation. The Evil Deity would roar with laughter at the thought that the pitiful humans thought they’d live forever, whether in His fictitious Paradise or His Fictitious Lake of Fire. My, what fun!

Anyone who applied a bit of mental elbow grease would easily see my point. All the arguments religious apologists make to support their deity just as easily support mine. A finely tuned Universe? Sure, the Evil Deity did it. The apparent design visible in the natural world? Of course the Evil Deity could do it. The implausibility and improbability of life at all? Why, the Evil Deity could just as easily have been the one who created something from nothing. But the Bible, you cry! Yes, inspired by the Evil Deity claiming to be a Good Deity. How would those poor Bronze Age saps know the difference? After all, it was just a “revelation” they received. The Evil Deity could reveal anything He wanted to, including telling Abraham to cut the skin off his penis. That sure sounds like something an Evil Deity would do. Telling Abraham to sacrifice his son? Evil. Telling Moses to have his armies slaughter the Amalekites, but not the virgin girls? No sir Moses, you keep those for your armies. Totally Evil!

Apply any test you like to my Evil Deity hypothesis and you will see the truth of what I say. Insert the Evil Deity and you’ll understand why your prayers go unanswered, why good people die horrible untimely deaths. You’ll understand why cataclysms wiped out almost all life on Earth 5 or 6 times already, and why we are hell bent on making the planet unlivable in the face of all the evidence that future generations will suffer for our actions. Replace the all-loving, all-good deity with my Evil Deity, and then you’ll understand jihad, witch burning, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and all the people who use the Word of the alleged all-loving deity to exploit the credulous. Who else but an Evil Deity would sit in watch over such madness and despair and do nothing to stop any of it? No deity would.