Joe is right to allude to major concerns that sullied Benazir's two tints as prime ministet, not the least of which was the behaviour of her husband "Mr Ten Percent," subsequently jailed for his part in the corruption that ran unchecked under her leadership. None of this makes me any less shocked and appalled by her murder.

Where Joe is on less certain ground is in his defence of religion (seemingly ALL religions). No doubt a case can be argued by the deeply committed faith-merchants, but the point to which they have no answer is that once human-beings attach greater loyalty to their gods than to their fellow human-beings they are a threat to all of us. (Any justification for such loyalty is greatly undermined by the fact that they cannot even agree among themselves which gods are real.)

We don't know yet who killed Benazir, or why, but we do know that the perpetrator killed himself in the same calamity. That suggests he had been brainwashed (the most common way of acquiring faith) by promises of vestial virgins in some fantasy afterlife.

Perhaps he was remembering some lines by Rupert Brooke:

Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat'ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear....
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry....
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time.
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun....
And under that Almighty Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in....
Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook....
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.