There are days I think religion is the best advertisement for atheism. This, unfortunately, is one of them.

If you’re wondering where the pessimism’s coming from, look to Nigeria, which has been recently rocked by street fighting between Muslims and Christians.

As you may be aware, the trouble grows out of a beauty pageant. Nigerian business and political leaders had hoped that hosting the Miss World competition would attract investment and tourism and help improve the image of a nation renown for official corruption and epidemic poverty.

Nigerian Muslims apparently did not share this hope. They were morally offended by the notion of scantily clad women on parade.

Then a newspaper columnist threw a lighted match into the gasoline. Isioma Daniel, who writes for a paper called ThisDay, wondered in print what the prophet Muhammad might think of the women in question. He wrote: “In all honesty, he would have probably chosen a wife from one of them.”

Next thing you know, the nation is burning. The newspaper, too. ThisDay’s office in the city of Kaduna was torched.

Then one of its editors was arrested by police. All this while the newspaper was issuing multiple apologies and the beauty queens whose presence was supposed to spotlight all that is good about Nigeria were fleeing to London.

Eyewitnesses reports of the carnage they escaped were horrific: bodies lying in the street, bands of Christians and Muslims stoning each other, people chopping other people with machetes, bystanders set afire and burned alive. The death toll: more than 200 people.

All because of a perceived affront to Muhammad.

Pardon me for saying, but that’s not exactly the most effective advertisement for the goodness of Islam. More to the point, it’s not the most effective advertisement for the goodness of God.

And that bothers me, because I believe in God. Although, about people, I am sometimes not so sure.

For the record, a Dr. Lateef Adegbite, Secretary-General of The Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in Nigeria, ultimately accepted the newspaper’s apologies. He was quoted as saying that this situation “should also be a lesson to all others. Islam is a very serious religion. You cannot come in to say just anything about Islam. … You would recall what happened to Salman Rushdie who wrote that stupid book, ‘Satanic Verses.’

“Some of the people in the Western world thought the Muslims went too far by pronouncing a death sentence on him, but you see, they did not appreciate the gravity of what he had done. And I am sorry that we almost had a kind of situation like this in Nigeria with this newspaper publication.”

If Adegbite had even a word of rebuke for his co-religionists who ignited murderous rioting, I am not aware of it.

I make no argument for the moral superiority of any faith. After all, Christianity, too, has authored acts of wanton cruelty.

From where I sit, though, the problem is not religion. It is extremism and intolerance, no matter what creed they purport to serve. It is people who use God as hammer, battering ram, WEAPON, against those who don’t believe as they do.

They can quote you chapter and verse those passages in the holy books that seem to justify their cruelty, their bigotry, their violence or their hatred. But they seem to be strangers to passages in the same books that require charity, compassion, humility, service, sacrifice, forbearance, mercy.

So there’s something sadly familiar about the carnage unfolding in Africa, something seen-before in the inability or the flat unwillingness of the avowedly pious to be as big as the faith they profess.

Instead, they storm the streets, chopping people to pieces, setting other human beings on fire, all in the name of God. And it strikes me that it’s a good thing the rioters are so religious.

Can you imagine the atrocities they’d commit if they were not?

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.