Showing posts with label Mental disturbance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mental disturbance. Show all posts

Sunday, January 10, 2016

"God Told Me So": The Dangerous Delusions of the Religious Republican

by Nomad

It's strange that the typical conservative voter would reject in a courtroom the very thing they openly support in their presidential candidates.


Last week, as reported by local media,  the courts in Cobbs County, Georgia  heard defense of an 18-year-old woman Olivia Nicole Smith. She is accused of the horrific stabbing murder her step-cousin, 17-year-old high school Abbey Hebert. 

According to her testimony, Smith claimed to neighbors, right after the murder, that God had made her do it after she and her cousin smoked marijuana together. She explained that she had "an overwhelming feeling of God coming to her: and that God had disapproved of her behavior.
In response to this imagined judgment, the young woman had an argument with her relative. That argument somehow ended in a butcher knife of murder in the victim's front yard. Prior to this, both victim and accused murderer had been close friends.
The public was justifiably outraged by the sensational crime.   

Of course, it wouldn't be the first time that God (or Satan) has been the alleged accomplice/mastermind of some otherwise inexplicable crime. In fact, it's a pretty common thing.

Astoundingly, in the very same county in Georgia, back in 2008, then 36-year-old Donna Marie Redding told the police that her husband, Gary Dean Parnell, taken the Lord’s name in vain once too many times. 
(For those of you keeping score, that's Commandment Number 3 - taking God's name in vain- while the prohibition on murder is Commandment Number 6.)
Redding's religious sensibilities were utterly offended by all this loose talk, she claimed, and for this reason, Jesus commanded her to shoot her man with a 12-gauge shotgun in the stomach.