John Bice's article "Religion and mental instability an extremely dangerous combination" (SN 5/24) had many points begging for a response, but due to space limitations I will only comment on a few.

Bice relates the tragic stories of Deanna Laney, Andrea Yates, and Andrew Thomas: mentally unstable individuals who murdered eight people, most of them children. Bice claims that the fault lies in the fact that these people were religious, and that the Old Testament is "replete with such atrocities." Well, there is one example of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test, but then God stopped him from doing it.

There are a few other incidents of fathers killing their children, which God condemns: "… which I did not command or decree, nor did it come into my mind." (Jeremiah 19:5) That's not exactly "replete" with such examples. Bice then goes on to quote Jon Krakauer: "… when people rely on faith rather than rational thought for important decisions, the world becomes a much more frightening place." Really?

Let's look at some great 20th century atheists and note how much less frightening the world was then: Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Timothy McVeigh, to name a few. Between them they are responsible for millions of imprisonments, tortures and deaths. I'm afraid that Bice did not convince me that religious people have any corner on the insanity market; in fact it seems that atheism and mental instability are an even more dangerous combination.

Janice Munk
1975 graduate