I was just boarding a plane home when the breaking news of attacks in Paris was reported on the BBC News website with initial deaths being less than 20, although the reports stressed that this was an on-going situation.
9 hours later when I arrived in the UK and could get internet on my phone the news that the death toll had risen above 120 was difficult to comprehend. On the taxi ride home we all listened to BBC Radio 5 in complete silence, there was simply nothing to be said and no way of explaining this atrocity away. It just leaves you numb.
How do you rationalise such a senseless and pointless loss of life in attacks against seemingly random targets, what has it achieved? How has it furthered their goal?
When acts like this are religiously motivated, or at least done to further a religious ideology, it is time for the rational governments and institutions of the world to have the moral strength to say that religion has out lived its usefulness.
Technology and society, and indeed science, has relegated religion to a social and cultural position only - religion no longer explains anything and as has been shown this week lacks the universal moral code to allow it to have a seat at the top table.
It is time for rational governments and the UN to say that everyone can follow whatever superstitions they wish, but that there is no basis to believe that any supernatural beings exist, and can everyone please stop killing in the name of non-existent entities.
Until the world becomes rational these sorts of horrendous events are unlikely to stop.
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