"Honor Thy Father...Thou Shalt Not Kill....Pick A Card, Any Card..."

Ironically, one of the most poignant and perceptive things I've ever heard said about religion in the world was said by a controversial comic.

I was reminded of that tonight as I saw this story.

(CNN) -- A 20-year-old woman from Iraq has died in an Arizona hospital, nearly two weeks after her father, police say, ran her over with a car because she had become "too Westernized."

Noor Faleh Almaleki died Monday of injuries suffered when she was run over October 20 in a parking lot in the Phoenix suburb of Peoria, Arizona, police there said. Authorities said they expect to change the aggravated assault charge against her father, Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, to more severe counts after meetings with prosecutors, Peoria police announced.

Peoria police said Faleh Hassan Almaleki believed his daughter had become "too Westernized" and had abandoned "traditional" Iraqi values. Peoria police spokesman Mike Tellef told CNN the family moved to the Phoenix area in the mid-1990s, and Almaleki was unhappy with his daughter's style of dress and her resistance to his rules.

After the incident, Almaleki's father drove to Mexico, abandoning his vehicle in Nogales, Peoria police said. He then made his way to Mexico City and boarded a plane to Britain, where authorities denied him entry into the country and put him on a plane back to the United States, police said.

A friend of the daughter, Amal Edan Khalaf, 43, also suffered serious injuries in the attack, police said. Almaleki faces a separate aggravated assault charge in connection with her injuries.

He is currently held in Phoenix, with bail has been set at $5 million, Tellef said.

Some years ago, the members of the seminal comedy troupe, Monty Python, were gathered together for a reunion, held in Aspen at their yearly comedy festival. As memory serves, it was a 20th or 25th anniversary thing, so it would have been in the late eighties or early nineties.

In the course of doing Q&A banter with the live studio audience and while discussing their film, "Life Of Brian", Terry Jones, in answer to some banal question about religion and man's perceptions of God, et al, shook his head softly and with some controlled, but clearly audible, disdain in his voice said...

"We all, every one of us, want to get to the same place. We've just been killing each other for thousands of years arguing over the best way to get there."

I admit to having little patience for most organized religion, if only because it has been my personal experience in life that strict adherance to the letter of any law without some kind of acknowledgement of the spirit of that same law is a sure path to some kind of failure, moral, spiritual, et al.

And zealots, no matter how disguised in everyday clothing they might be, are, by their nature incapable of anything but following the letter.

This man is obviously a zealot.

And he obviously disagreed with this young woman's interpretation of cultural and/or spiritual laws.

Naturally, that the disagreement ended in one killing another is tragic.

That a father could kill his own daughter transcends tragedy.

A lot of people will read this heartbreaking story and offer a flood of prayers.

Here's mine.

God, if this your idea of how to sell me on the idea of blind obedience to the law...

You're a pretty lousy salesman.