Interesting article in today's New York Times ("The Politics of the Binding of Isaac" by Omri Boehm) but written from the point of view of someone who takes seriously this
story, what is popularly but incorrectly believed to be the only
instance of god-mandated infanticide in the Bible, but sadly is one of
many. Isaac was spared after being traumatized by a false execution.
Others such as Jephthah's daughter (murdered after her father promised
god he would kill the first person who greeted him on his return if he
could just crush the dastardly Ammonites (Judges 11:3-39) and Jesus
(killed according to Christians willingly in accordance with the plan of
an all-knowing, all-powerful god who some early Christians and most
modern Christians believe is god himself, hence the infanticide) were
not as lucky.
At any rate, as Richard Dawkins points out, the
absurdity and gratuitous cruelty of the story should not distract us
from its profound immorality: what sort of a god would ask a man to
murder his own son just to see if he really would go through with it?
He is god; doesn't he know everything, including the obedience and
submissiveness of Abraham? And is this god good? Worthy of worship?
Of course, the biblical authors were writing these stories more along
the lines of Aesop's fables - we need not believe in talking
grasshoppers and ants to infer moral lessons about work and sloth
anymore than we need to believe literally in Abraham wanting to kill his
son to infer a moral lesson about absolute, blind obedience (a defense
summarized at Nuremburg as "Befehl is Befehl!" (an order's an order!).
But if there is a shred of truth to this god-whispering business, as a
psychiatrist I can attest that I have treated hundreds if not thousands
of Abrahams, absolutely convincing in their charismatic insistence that
the voice of god told them to do such-and-such (gouge out their eye,
kill their neighbor, move all their possessions to the basement where
they should eagerly await the return of Jesus), but it's amazing how
these hallucinations and delusions resolve with the right medication,
therapy, reality-testing, and tincture of time. In other words, there
is no reason to believe that Abraham was not psychotic or manic at the
time he reported his auditory hallucinations and luckily had corrective
visual and auditory hallucinations (something not all of those suffering
psychosis experience unfortunately). The burden of proof is on those
who claim otherwise, especially since messianic, grandiose,
religious-themed delusions and hallucinations are among the most common
(the part of our brain in charge of religious belief seems to become
especially active during psychosis or mania).
I don't envy those
who feel compelled to force this rambling collection of stories, some
overtly psychotic, others simply wrong, many plainly immoral, to make
sense or give us something meaningful to learn. My question is why one
would even try. A child (especially a child) could tell you that
murdering your child is wrong. Every culture has a taboo against such
behavior and we are hard-wired to fight like hell, sacrificing our own
lives if necessary, to protect our offspring, carriers of our selfish
genes into the next generation and beyond. We don't need an Aesop's
fable to tell us this, nor should we even consider murdering our own
children if a voice told us to (we should get help immediately).
