I love the comparison to Prometheus. The forceful thrust against religious – read “Islamic” – bullying in the spheres of free expression and speech has been the last bastion that has thrust the god debate into the limelight. It seems that this more than people’s eternal souls and a notion of some putrescent heaven is what turns people’s eyes inward and gaze at what it is they worship and believe in. I saw this especially from my family, where Rushdie was barely noticed except in disgust. But no one had read him, except my uncle. I read it and to this day I love Rushdie (I had a degree in English because I love the man’s writings that much).

Most people blindly accept these fairy-stories and the fairy-dust involved without sneezing. It takes a novelist being threatened for a work of fiction, it takes a passionate beautiful woman like Ali (not her real surname I believe), and so on, to really nail home the point that things must change. Our strength lies within this world, not outside it. The petty Muslims are constantly shown for the whiny childish mountebanks they are. Thank goodness, as Dennett would say, for people like Ali. And now we just need more ex-Muslim women to speak out like her.