Achmed the Dead Terrorist is an incredibly funny routine by world-famous ventriloquist Jeff Dunham. Achmed’s catchline is ‘I Kiiiiiiiiill you!’

That sketch reminds me of another funny routine, which – out of kindness – we should abstain from pulling on religious people (unless they seriously annoy us).

Ask a devout believer ‘would you kill me if your god commands it?’

Then either enjoy the uncomfortable silence while the poor believer tries to find a suitably equivocal answer – or run like hell (ha, ha) if the answer is an unflinching ‘Yes’: you just met a sociopath, or a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, which is pretty much the same.

Asking this isn’t nice because it poses a dilemma for the believer – who is usually a good person: a morally sound person would answer straight: ‘No. Killing is evil.’ Morally good, but devout believers try to wiggle out of this because it opens them up for questions of morality: if you refuse a command from your god you place your own moral compass above that of your deity. Plus, it acknowledges that you have your own moral – a moral that now significantly diverges from your god. That ripping sound? That’s either the pages from the bible or the fabric of the faithful’s worldview.

The equivocal answer is usually ‘if god commands it, it must be good. Therefore you must be evil, and I would be justified in killing you’ or ‘God would not command what is evil, so he would not command me to kill you’.

But these answers are also not helpful: the Bible tells the story where Abraham is commanded to sacrifice his son. Isaac wasn’t evil, yet God told Abraham to kill him – God was testing Abraham’s faith. We therefore have a precent. So, would you kill me if He commanded it?

A ‘Yes’ opens the hapless believer up for the meanest question:
How do you know it is God who is commanding you to kill, not some voice in your head or, perhaps, Satan? How do you differentiate between a voice you want to hear (God’s) and one you hope not to hear (Insanity, Satan’s)? How do you tell the difference between Insanity and God?

And again, would you obey?