What if she really spoke to God?

Great Debates
1

*Attorney: Woman thought God told her to kill sons
Texas mother uses insanity defense at trial
Monday, March 29, 2004 Posted: 3:06 PM EST (2006 GMT)

Deanna Laney, 39, is on trial Monday in Tyler, Texas, on charges that she killed two of her sons and injured a third one.

(CNN) – In opening statements Monday, a Texas prosecutor described how a mother smashed the head of her infant son with a rock and then led her two older boys outside and did the same to them, killing the two oldest boys.

Deanna Laney, 39, has been charged with two counts of murder in the deaths of sons Joshua, 8, and Luke, 6, and a single count of injury to a child, Aaron, her 15-month-old who survived the attack. *
link to story

I apologize if it’s a repost. The person who showed it to me is a devout Christian. She feels the woman should recieve the death penalty and without a doubt says that woman did not speak to God.

Here are my thoughts. I’m not a follower of God or Jesus but from what this girl and other believers have told me, faith is a personal experience that cannot be explained to anyone else. If that is true, who is she or anyone else to say that God didn’t speak to this woman? What God speaks may be sunshine and flowers to some, but not to all.

It was argued that God doesn’t support such crimes. My arguement is that if faith is supposed to be blind and it often usurps understanding, (as in God works in mysterious ways) then slighting this woman because she’s done something in the name of God that is looked upon as immoral and vicious is wrong. Based on faith, who’s to say that she’s lying?

Personally, not being a believer in any religion, I feel this woman should pay for her crimes. It’s a double standard to judge the case based on faith or lack thereof. What if she really spoke to God?

Just curious what some of you might think about this from the standpoint of religion and how it affects the case.

2

One secular humanist’s reponse:

One person’s religious experience claim looks pretty much like another’s to me. Whether you claim to have talked to God about your job, or received a premonition from the Virgin Mary about famine in Africa, or been ridden by Elegba, or been told by God to kill your children, I can’t tell the difference. I have no way of figuring out whose experiences were imagined and whose actually happened. So I absolutely can’t take the reality of a supposed supernatural experience into account when deciding what justice requires for a person.

But let’s assume that an all-powerful being told her to kill her kids. Then we are left with another question: is “good” defined as “what that all-powerful being says”? Or is “good” defined independently from what that all-powerful being says?

If the former, then the word “good” is meaningless: surely APB might be malevolent, and a just society should not take his orders into account. We must simply come up with another word instead of “good” to use when talking about acting in a just, ethical, humane fashion.

If the latter–if “good” can be defined independently from that APB–then we can judge that being’s action as good or evil. In this case, the being gave what appears to be an evil order.

You might object that we, as humans, can never truly have enough information to judge God as good or evil. That’s certainly true, but it’s always true for every aspect of our lives. Yet we make decisions based on discrimination between good and evil every day, even though our decisions aren’t fully informed. We have to do the same with any supernatural beings we encounter.

Unless this woman was legally insane, couldn’t distinguish between good and evil, then the law puts the responsibility on her to choose the good action above the evil action. Even if a powerful supernatural being orders her to commit the evil action, she’s still responsible for making that decision.

Daniel

3

A Conservative Christian’s response:

Why would a god whose #6 Rule, out of 10, is “Don’t murder people”, tell one of his followers to murder someone? Looks majorly contradictory to me. Like Allah telling one of his followers to go cook a pig and eat it…Not very likely. So on that basis, I would not agree that this woman’s god told her to do it.

Also…

Dunno what denomination or “flavor” of Christianity we’re talking about here, but there isn’t ANY denomination or “flavor” of Christianity in which the warnings about the End of the World ALSO include an injunction to “kill your kids to spare them the horrors of the Apocalypse”. There’s absolutely nothing in the Bible about it, either. So if she believes that the Word of God is infallible, and she also believes there’s something in the Word of God that instructed her to kill her kids, then she’s quite simply dead wrong (or crazy). If she wanted to know the will of God regarding her kids, she should have looked it up in the Bible–which would have told her nowhere that she was supposed to kill her kids.

God could not have told her to do it, because it goes against the 2,000 years of instructions that he’s handed down to everybody else. And you can’t have a personal revelation that God has commanded you to do something, if that something is something that God himself has condemned.

4

Again, from the outside, your claim and hers look equally valid to me. I don’t see a reason to privilege the teachings of 2,000 years about a supernatural being over the claims of a woman who just killed her kids. Neither one has evidence to support it; both beliefs hinge on faith; both claims have alternate explanations that I find much more convincing.

If you could be right, then she could be right. God may indeed be a malevolent entity.

Of course, we cannot take claims without evidence into consideration in our courts; therefore, the veracity of her claims must be set aside during her trial as irrelevant.

Daniel

5

Well, if God really did speak to her, fine and well. But since God didn’t tell us that she’s following His instructions, we have to operate along the principles that He didn’t.

Zev Steinhardt

6

It would seem that there are examples of doing this sort of thing in the Bible. Didn’t God tell Abraham to take his son to Mount Moriah and offer him as a sacrifice? In that case God did step in and tell Abraham not to go through with it, but it would not seem out of the realm of possibility that God could want the child sacrificed for some reason which is not meant for his followers to understand.

Not that I agree with that reasoning. I’m an atheist and think the woman just snapped. But there are plenty of examples and teachings where followers are supposed to just take God’s word for things and go through with them even though they may seem contrary to what seems reasonable.

7

No pun intended, but playing the devil’s advocate: the Bible seems to give some clues for her actions:

AFAIR there is even some rules that allowed you to stone your kids to death if they were lazy or disrespectful. I do think her madness made a mix of all these rules (put your house in order) and she mixed them with an end of the world theme.

It is disturbing to find in the Bible several examples of how children were considered property, and there was little or no repercussions in Biblical times if a parent got rid of their own.

Of course, I do think she was mad, but I am getting tired of seeing almost every year, yet another example of madness hiding behind faith. Here I think it is pertinent to ask: after seeing cases like that, have churches made concerned efforts to seek and deal with members that are in similar situations? It seems that the pattern to look for is of very extreme literalism, together with 3 or more children in an already stressful household (including a mental condition never or barely taken care of) that tries to follow old bible rules to the max.
…

Just typed that, and now I wonder cynically if trying to do that will actually affect the most dedicated members of a sect, so churches instead of trying to be proactive instead choose not to try to take care of the problem. So, never mind?

8

There are some great points made in here. In fact my own thoughts on the issue seem primitive in comparison, but this particular passage I’ve is the idea my point of view is based on. I’m not an athiest, (I believe there is a greater power at work I just don’t think it needs a label) but for any Christian or believer in a God to say that this woman * couldn’t *have spoken to God is contradictory to the very basis of faith.

Based on what anyone has ever told me about faith, both generally and personally, you can’t presume that the intentions weren’t handed down from God simply because you don’t understand or agree with them. Many have learned to rule out things that are morally corrupt or nonsensical as being legitimate words of God and labeled those who claim them to be as heretics or insane.

This, of course, being entirely separate from the fact that her religion should not play a part in what law determines right and wrong.

How can anyone know for sure?

9

So suppose God did tell her to do it. Suppose there were 100 witnesses there to hear God telling her to do it. Suppose it was on the 5 o’clock news with a voice coming from the sky saying “Mary Smith, this is God, Go kill your children”.

It’s still not an excuse. I don’t think the law is written “murder is punishable by law, with the exception of when instructed by God.”

10

Firstly, you’ll note that nowhere in the text does God tell Jeptaph to sacrifice his daughter.

Secondly, it’s not so clear that he actually went ahead and sacrificed her. Rabbinic thought on the subject tends to fall into one of two camps:
(a) he did actually sacrifice her.
(b) she ended up living a cloistered life.

In any event, he need not have done what he did. If I vow to bring an ineligible sacrifice (a pig, for example), the pig doesn’t get slaughtered. I would simply owe to the Temple treasury the value of the pig. The same applies here with Jeptaph. In fact, he is roundly criticized in Rabbinic literature for both his rash vow and the follow-through.

You’re thinking of the law of the ben sorer umoreh (Dueteronomy 21:18). While I wouldn’t expect the defendant to have knowledge of the Talmudic rulings on this law, but, suffice it to say that the laws surrounding this are so complex that it was impossible to ever carry out the sentence. Indeed, the Talmud itself states (although not unanimously) that this law was never carried out and never could be due to the many restrictions on it).

Children were not considered property. One could not kill or injure their children. Sons could not be sold into servitude and daughters could be sold into temporary servitude under extreme circumstances. But again, I wouldn’t expect the defendant to know that from a literal reading of the Biblical text.

Zev Steinhardt

11

I agree with you 100%. The law does not state such an exemption and therefore should not be a factor at the trial. Sometimes, you have to be willing to pay a price for what you believe in.

Zev Steinhardt

12

zev, this may be splitting a fine hair indeed, but whereas the Talmud is very useful for understanding texts from the Torah, I’m not so sure it’s useful for interpreting texts from the Bible. That is to say, when we’re figuring out how a Christian woman should be held accountable for killing her kids, I don’t think the Talmudic commentary on relevant sections of the Old Testament are at all relevant.

But then, I don’t think that the Bible in general is relevant in assessing her moral culpability. So maybe I shouldn’t split that hair at all.

Daniel

13

I agree with you. I was merely providing additional background information. I certainly agree that Talmudic interpretations of the texts don’t really affect the case at hand. As I said earlier in the thread, I’m in favor of holding her fully accountable (provided, of course, that she’s sane).

Zev Steinhardt

14

However Zev, the deal breaker to me IMO is that God did not come back to punish Jephthah.

On the context of what a burnt offering was, I go for choice “a” of the Rabbinic thought.

15

Fair enough, and FWIW, the commentary is very interesting to me.

Daniel

16

Agreed. But God didn’t smite Joseph’s brothers for selling him as a slave. Are you going to argue that God therefore approves of kidnapping?

There’s no punishment recorded for Lot’s daughters for inebriating and seducing their father. Are you going to argue that God approves of incest?

There’s no punishment recorded against Aaron for his role in the Golden Calf. Likewise, there’s no punishment recorded to half of the idolatrous kings of Israel and Judah Are you going to argue that God approves of idolatry?

Simply put, the lack of recorded punishment does not necessarily constitute Divine approval.

Zev Steinhardt

17

Maybe God (or something she perceives as God) did tell her to murder her kids. What difference does that make to the situation at hand. God apparently didn’t tell the cops not arrest her, God didn’t tell the court not to indict her, and I doubt that God is telling the jury not convict her. If we are to believe in a god that would tell her to murder her kids then why would we believe that that same god wouldn’t want her to be in prison. I would assume that the god would have known the legal consequences of the crime he was urging her to committ.

18

Actually, yes, but see the context: it was more like a “I’ll allow an exception in this case” meaning that in some special situations, God looks the other way. (It looks like there are exceptions galore if family members of the chosen are involved)

However, in contrast to kidnapping, incest, etc, finding a prohibition to human sacrifice or someone condemned for that in the Bible is tough. Come to think of it, god appears to approve of it as part of the tale of the Christ.

19

Balak is not Jewish and he is never punished for his attempt to curse the Jews. Lot was not Jewish. Achashverosh (who allowed Haman to nearly exterminate the Jews) is not punished for his actions. I don’t think you can make the case that you are making. There are simply more examples that you will find WRT Jews not being punished for their wrongs simply because the Bible focuses, as a book, on the Jews.

Dueteronomy 12:31.

Well, no comment needed from me on that one…

Zev Steinhardt

20

In fact, if she could prove that God told her to do it, then that would prove she was sane and that she is responsible for her actions.