'Anti-theist' murders at Chapel Hill

On Jan. 10, three American college students were murdered at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Unmistakably, they were all Muslims: Deah Shaddy Barakat (23), Yusor Mohammad (21) and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha (19). And again unmistakably, their murderer, a 46-year-old man named Craig Stephen Hicks was a self-declared ?anti-theist? who wanted to see ?religion go away.?

The exact motivation of the murders is still unclear and some say everything began with a dispute over parking space. Yet, people normally don?t commit massacres for parking space, and enough signs point to a hate crime: The victims were targeted because of their very Muslim-ness.

This is not the first time that hatred of Muslims, also called ?Islamophobia,? causes blood spill. A worse incident had taken place in Norway in 2011, when a man named Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 innocent people. He saw himself as a modern day Crusader, with a mission to protect Europe from the perceived onslaught of Muslims and the collaborating liberals.

Back at Chapel Hill, the murderer is not a ?knight? who claims to defend Christendom against a rival faith. He is rather an anti-theist who hates all religions, perhaps with only more emphasis on Islam.

Here, let me focus a bit on what ?anti-theism? means. It does not equal atheism, which is simply a belief in the non-existence of the divine. (A totally belief-free position would be agnosticism, which modestly accepts the limits of our knowledge about existence.) But an atheist can well respect theism and its traditional manifestations, such as Christianity or Islam.

I know many atheists, for example, who appreciate the way such Abrahamic religions foster a sense of community, compassion and charity.

An anti...