[November 2000 journal entry]
The following quotation comes from an article in Nashville’s newspaper The Tennessean:
Sandy Phillips made an agreement with Brian Kelley when she first saw him just hours after his arrest in the killing of his 13-month-old daughter in August last year. Kelley told Phillips, a clinical psychologist at Cumberland Mental Health Service, that he had suffocated his daughter Erin on instructions from God as a way to bring about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, who would arrive by sundown. “I said we would certainly see each other tomorrow – in heaven if he was correct or in the Wilson County jail if he was wrong,” Phillips told a jury yesterday in Kelley’s first-degree murder trial. Phillips was one of a line of mental health experts who testified yesterday that Kelley was anything but sane when he suffocated his daughter shortly after midnight on August 15, one day from his own birthday. . . . Kelley may have known that killing was illegal, but he was compelled by his delusion that God had instructed him to kill his child as an Old Testament-style sacrifice -- Farooque (another expert witness, DB) and the other experts testified. “He didn’t think what he did was wrong,” Farooque testified. “He was not able to appreciate the wrongfulness of the act.” . . . Martell (another expert witness, DB) said he came to the same conclusion as his local colleagues – that Kelley had suffered a psychotic breakdown. “It is a disorder that will continue to plague him the rest of his life,” Martell testified.
How does the ‘religious’ T/O paradigm not lead to the end to which Kelley went? On what basis would teachers/preachers within the ‘religious’ sphere – especially those toward the fundamentalist end of the theological spectrum – who uncritically exalt the Abraham and Isaac story referenced in the article as an example of ‘faith’ oppose Kelley’s thought and action without undermining the T/O paradigm itself?
