Does hearing voices make you insane?

In Texas, that depends. I was pointed to this blog post via dispatches from the culture wars. It's pretty scary when you think about it.

This is a story about two women in Texas who murdered their children.Both women are the same age. Both were deeply religious, stay-at-home moms when they killed their children. Both women confessed.One mother was found insane, and hospitalized in a mental institution to receive treatment. The other was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

Actually, there was one way the women were different.Deanna Laney heard God tell her to kill her children. Andrea Yates heard Satan tell her to kill her children. Guess which one got the life sentence.

apparently hearing the voice of God alone is not enough to qualify a person as nuts. Under Texas law, to qualify as insane, you must not be able to determine right from wrong. So when God tells you to kill your kids and you do it, you're insane because God's will would never involve killing. But if Satan tells you to kill your kids, you should know it's wrong since it is Satan advocating it. This type of reasoning makes me pretty sick. It's as if these people believe that right and wrong is determined by some crusty old fiction book. If you ask me, Yates and Laney are both nuttier than squirrel turds. But you know what else is crazy? Using biblical ideas to determine right and wrong.