When God Talks to People

I've always thought that people who believe in revealed religions, those that feature direct communications from deities, have to deal with stories like this one involving a woman who threw her three young children into San Francisco Bay and "claimed she was sacrificing her young sons for God." Granted, in this case, the woman asked the court to consider her insane. But what if she had asked for her story to excuse her actions? What if she claimed God had told her to murder her children? Would any otherwise sane modern-day believers stand by her? And how much different would her story be from that of Abraham and Isaac?

I'm increasingly open to the possibilities of religion's metaphorical power, and even in the possibility that the metaphor persists because it does correspond, however roughly, to some larger truth that we will, alas, never have the capacity to fully know. But I've always been disturbed by the disjunction between what the most literalist of religious people claim they believe about the deep past and what they would be willing to believe in the present day.