Evil deserves respect?

"I think we should respect the religion of the country we are in," pronounced my colleague.  I could tell she had said it before, and I could tell that she was expecting the customary nods and affirmations. 

She got neither from me. 

The country we are in is predominantly Muslim. Recently a nine year old student approached me after a science lesson I had just taught on the solar system. We had discussed the eventual fate of our Sun, to expand into a red giant as its mass falls below that required to maintain gravitational compression, engulfing the first three planets including Earth. Our treatment of the matter had been sober and unemotional, reassured as we were by the certainty that the cataclysm will occur some five billion years after our deaths. 

The boy wore an expression best described as a complacent smirk. "The Quran tells us that the Sun will move to within a mile of the Earth, and that only a few of us will be protected by God's shade. Everyone else will be BURNED." The last word was a yah-boo, so-there semi-shriek. He seemed heartily pleased to deliver such news. 

Religion encourages its adherents to anticipate, with salacious relish, the destruction of the world and of the infidel. Religion teaches that the end could come at any time, and that only their particular brand of faithful will be saved. 

I say that a belief system which encourages children to salivate in contemplation of a massacre is evil. Those who promulgate it are evil. Neither they nor their filthy religion deserve an ounce of respect. Rather, they merit the utter contempt of all civilisation.  

I will reserve my respect for that which earns it.