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.