Apr 4, 2004
God Said to Abraham, Kill Me a Son
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Few Americans feel much sympathy for Deanna Laney, the woman who bludgeoned two of her children to death in response to alleged instructions from God.
Yet most Americans believe in the existence of God and in the possibility of receiving communications from him. Nor do they necessarily doubt that Laney had some experience which she interpreted as such a communication.
Why, then, do they not hail Laney’s actions as a sublime expression of faith?
I suspect they do not do so because they think Laney should have regarded the horrific content of the communication as evidence that it did not come from any authority worth obeying.
And surely they are right to think this; a command to slay one’s own children seems far more likely to be the product of delusion, or perhaps of some malicious spirit, than an injunction from a wise and loving deity.
Yet of those who condemn Laney, vast numbers are Jews and Christians who have nothing but praise and admiration for the biblical patriarch Abraham’s readiness to obey the divine command “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains ....”
So what’s the difference between Abraham and Laney? Why shouldn’t Jews and Christians praise Laney as Kierkegaard (in Fear and Trembling) praised Abraham, as a “knight of faith” who achieved a “teleological suspension of the ethical”? Or if Laney is to blame for not wondering whether it truly was God that was speaking to her, why isn’t Abraham likewise to blame for wondering the same thing? There seems to be some cognitive dissonance here.
As Sartre notes in Existentialism is A Humanism:
Few Americans feel much sympathy for Deanna Laney, the woman who bludgeoned two of her children to death in response to alleged instructions from God.
Yet most Americans believe in the existence of God and in the possibility of receiving communications from him. Nor do they necessarily doubt that Laney had some experience which she interpreted as such a communication.
Why, then, do they not hail Laney’s actions as a sublime expression of faith?
I suspect they do not do so because they think Laney should have regarded the horrific content of the communication as evidence that it did not come from any authority worth obeying.
And surely they are right to think this; a command to slay one’s own children seems far more likely to be the product of delusion, or perhaps of some malicious spirit, than an injunction from a wise and loving deity.
Yet of those who condemn Laney, vast numbers are Jews and Christians who have nothing but praise and admiration for the biblical patriarch Abraham’s readiness to obey the divine command “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains ....”
So what’s the difference between Abraham and Laney? Why shouldn’t Jews and Christians praise Laney as Kierkegaard (in Fear and Trembling) praised Abraham, as a “knight of faith” who achieved a “teleological suspension of the ethical”? Or if Laney is to blame for not wondering whether it truly was God that was speaking to her, why isn’t Abraham likewise to blame for wondering the same thing? There seems to be some cognitive dissonance here.
As Sartre notes in Existentialism is A Humanism:
If I hear voices, what proof is there that they come from heaven and not from hell, or from the subconscious, or a pathological condition? What proves that they are addressed to me? ... If a voice addresses me, it is always for me to decide that this is the angel’s voice; if I consider that such an act is a good one, it is I who will choose to say that it is good rather than bad.When people praise on the Sabbath what they condemn every other day of the week, we are entitled to suspect that some hard thinking has been shirked.