Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk08 January 2008
Voice of god? Or just plain nuts?
A murderer, who may have eaten part of his victim, now says that god told him to do it. How do we know whether this is true? And if he’s lying, why does he think this is a good thing to say?
Christopher Lee McCuin, from Texas, called the cops himself. He told them that he had killed his girlfriend and was eating her. The police had already been alerted by others - McCuin had also stabbed his ex-wife’s partner, putting him into intensive care.
When the police arrived, they found an ear being boiled and some flesh impaled on a fork.
Now McCuin is claiming that he was compelled by god to commit these acts.
At a rational level, there is an easy explanation. If McCuin heard the voice of god, this might suggest paranoid schizophrenia (a likely explanation for many, possibly most, divine visitations). At the very least, we might reasonably conclude that McCuin is suffering some form of mental illness.
No doubt, this is what religious people will say too. For once we can all agree. But isn’t there a slight problem here? Because plenty of theists are quite willing to believe that god does actually talk to people. That he does actually command them to do things - you know, such as invading Iraq.
How do we tell the true recipient of a message from god from the out-and-out nutter? Perhaps we could look at what god is telling them to do. If it breaks the Commandments or the teachings of his prophets, maybe that’s a clue. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ would be a place to start. Oh dear. But that would kind of rule out Iraq, the Crusades and any number of other god-supported wars and executive actions.
No-one is in a position to say, “Well god clearly wouldn’t have wanted him to murder an innocent woman”. After all, we can’t know the mind of god (though some in positions of power seem to believe different). And besides, there’s the good old GMIMW clause - ‘god moves in mysterious ways’. Maybe he did want this man to commit murder. How could we possibly know?
Tricky, huh?
Oh well, I guess the religious among us will have to resort to their usual trick - cherry-picking the nice bits and ruling out the nasty stories on the basis of … well, nothing very much except wishful thinking. After all, religion is all about making stuff up as you go along.
There is another possibility, of course - that McCuin put the ear on to boil, stuck the flesh on the fork and made that call because he knew he would be caught and was already plotting an insanity defence. The business about the message from god would certainly help his case.
Which is rather funny when you think about it. One Texas resident uses a message from god as a justification for invading a sovereign nation without good cause, and a large section of the population applauds him for it. And another uses a claimed message from god as a way of convincing people he’s insane, and most of us are going to accept that too. I can’t help feeling that something has got switched here.
