Abraham and Dee

By Crispin Sartwell

Dee Laney, according to newspaper accounts, like Andrea Yates before her, told police that God ordered her to kill her children. Meanwhile, neighbors and relatives in Tyler, Texas expressed shock that this could happen in a family of faith, and Laney was reported to be curled in the fetal position in her cell, singing hymns.

We often try to think of religions, especially our own, as simply wholesome and directed toward the good. But real religious faith always has an element of the extreme and irrational. Something similar to what happened to Laney, after all, happened to the father of monotheism, Abraham, whom God told to offer his son in sacrifice. And the difference between Abraham and Dee Laney cannot be that she actually killed her children and he did not, since Abraham's status as the model all people of faith should emulate depends on his willingness to kill Isaac, his absolutely serious purpose in obeying God's apparently monstrous will.

Perhaps, in the end, it is more difficult than we might like to believe to distinguish the voice of the true God from our own insanity.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.