Although most professed atheists reject religion in general, they usually have a specific religion in mind. The sociologist Peter Berger argues that today’s atheism has roots in “Abrahamic” monotheism, and the term applies only to those who reject the theologies of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Usually they do so when confronted with the problem of theodicy: the idea of a just and benevolent God in a world manifestly filled with evil and suffering:

Suffering is endemic to the human condition, and so is the urge to overcome or at least to explain it. Different attempts to satisfy this urge are not neatly divided geographically. Theodicy in its full force is unlikely to appear in contexts shaped by the religious imagination of the Indian subcontinent, as manifested in Hinduism and Buddhism (the latter could only arise from the former). I have long argued that the most interesting religious dichotomy is between Jerusalem and Benares (now called Varanasi)—the city in which the Jewish Temple stood, where Jesus was crucified and resurrected, where Muhammad began his nocturnal journey to heaven—and that other city, where millions of pilgrims continue to immerse themselves in the holy waters of the river Ganges, and near which the Buddha preached his first sermon after attaining Enlightenment. . . . The fundamental assumption of the Indian view of the cosmos is reincarnation—the linked realities of samsara and karma, the endless cycle of rebirths and deaths, and the cosmic law that the consequences of human actions, good or bad, are carried from one life to the next. I would propose that in this view the “Jerusalem” problem of theodicy evaporates.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].