Why do you assume that someone is mentally ill when they say that God speaks to them? Are Quakers mentally ill? They just sit in the meeting waiting for God to speak to them and through them? And why assume that this systematic brutality is the product of mental illness?

Shizophrenics, as well as people suffering from many other sorts or mental illness, are capable of making good moral choices, and many, if not most of them do--

The problem here is neither religious nor psychiatric--the woman, and her community, have made bad moral choices, and, unlike many of us, including the mentally ill and the religiously inclined, rather than learning from their mistakes and moving on, they have simply sought ways to justify them.


In the end, saying that "God told me to do it" is just like saying "The Devil made me do it", it is an effort to avoid accepting responsibility for the choices that we make, of our own free will.