With God, All Things Are Possible. The BBC
reports on the bizarre case of a Swedish priest who convinced his
ex-nanny to kill his wife by sending her SMS messages which purported
to be from "God".
Excerpt:
"Suddenly Helge said to me: 'If God were to tell you to kill a human
being, would you do it?'" Miss Svensson said.
"I thought it was a very strange question, but thought that if I
really knew it was God saying it, I would have to obey. There would be
no alternative," she said.
What I find interesting about this, and about the sorts of stories one
hears about in books like "Under
the Banner of Heaven" (disclaimer: I haven't read that book, I've
just heard the author speak), is that they confirm my ancient
hypothesis that once you allow yourself to be guided by "faith", to
accept "truths" conveyed to you without evidence and indeed to deny
evidence and rationality as a basis for understanding reality, you can
be convinced to do nearly anything.
This is not to say that I believe all religious people are readily
capable of murder. Rather, I claim that once you structure your life
around ideas that you are not permitted to test, but which you accept
as beyond testing (that is, on "faith"), you've abandoned your most
important survival tool, namely reason.
Introduce a bad axiom into a mathematical formal
system, you can prove anything. Similarly, if you abandon reason
for "faith", you lose your only tool with which to distinguish
the truth. This could leave you helpless to escape the idea that "God"
demands that you kill, and from there it is a short step to
shooting abortion doctors or flying planes into skyscrapers.
Some religious people will argue that "God" doesn't want you to shoot
doctors or fly planes into skyscrapers, but how are we to assess
whether that is true or not? We are told that we can't apply the
scientific method to the question of the existence "God", let alone to
the determination of the "divine" will. We are supposed to go by
"faith". If you have to go by "faith", why is the "faith" of the
person who kills because "God" has commanded it any less correct than
the "faith" of the person who claims "God" did not command it? The
answer "it just is" will get you sent to the back of the class. So
will references to the "self evident" truth of any holy book you care
to name. [Diminished Capacity]
1:08:25 PM 
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