Further problems: Did God order this man?
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The following story is of a man who says God ordered him to ram his truck into a woman’s vehicle.
While you might think the guy is crazy — is he really any more insane than the spokesman who claims that due to minor injuries "God must have been with them"?
A story like this causes some interesting problems to theists who maintain that whatever God does or commands is the highest morality that could even be hoped for. Such a theist can’t discount what God ordered in the following story:
Man says God ordered him to ram vehicle at 100 mph
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081202/ap_on_fe_st/odd100_mph_wreck
SAN ANTONIO – A man who rammed his truck into a woman’s vehicle on a highway early Friday told authorities he crashed into her while going more than 100 mph because God told him "she needed to be taken off the road."
The truck rear-ended the car on U.S. Highway 281, both vehicles spun across a median then came to a stop along a barrier in the opposite lanes. Both drivers suffered only minor injuries.
"He just said God said she wasn’t driving right, and she needed to be taken off the road," Bexar County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Kyle Coleman said in the online edition of the San Antonio Express-News. "God must have been with them, ’cause any other time, the severity of this crash, it would have been a fatal."
The pickup driver did not tell police how the woman was driving. Police could not find alcohol or drugs in either driver.
A psychiatric evaluation has been ordered for a man.
Unless, of course, there is some way of determining whether what a person says or writes about what God thinks about something is actually what God thinks about the matter.
It’d be nice to think that this driver was just insane in some way.
The theist who insists that God can talk to people, and that whatever He orders is moral means that unless the theist has talked with God about this particular incident, he doesn’t know whether or not God ordered the man to ram the woman’s car.
The theist would also have to say, if God did order it, then, hooray for the man for being such a good follower.
Now, imagine that the story was “Man says God ordered him to save women from vehicle wreck.” Nobody would think that he was insane or required a psychiatric evaluation. The man would be praised. The only difference being that we generally recognize, independently of God, the latter action to be morally good whereas the former is morally bad. Which goes to show that nobody really, inpractice, depends entirely on God for moral advice – because in practice it is impossible to know when God actually orders something.
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God wanted the woman to be “taken off the road” but then saved them both in a moment of compassion. Awww! That’s wonderful.
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I disagree with An Atheist. I would say that if you need to be ordered by God to save somebody from a vehicle wreck, you’ve got a whole different set of problems, don’t you? You’re not obligated to do it, but it’s just the thing to do, really. Just seems to me that anybody who says God spoke to them directly, with the exception of maybe the Pope, is crazy. Doesn’t seem like God’s style.
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Ill Diablo – Either way you have problems, so I think that we agree.
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This is a silly objection. If this schizophrenic individual hadn’t happened to believe in God, he might have later said that Jack the Ripper ordered him to do it, or whomever else he judged the voice in his head to be. Mental illness, not religion, is the cause of his actions.
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Nathan, answer my comment. If the man had said that God commanded him to save a woman from a wrecked car rather than wreck a woman’s car, would you still attribute his actions to mental illness?
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Ill Diablo – I don’t exactly see how the Pope is exempt from accusations of mental illness. -A Third Party
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“This is a silly objection. If this schizophrenic individual hadn’t happened to believe in God, he might have later said that Jack the Ripper ordered him to do it, or whomever else he judged the voice in his head to be. Mental illness, not religion, is the cause of his actions.” – nathanhj Are you willing to claim that Abraham was schizophrenic as well? If not, why the double standard?
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