Recently my atheist news twitter service tweeted a story about a Texas mother who murdered her child and blamed the devil. In a nutshell:

Police said they found a 3 1/2-week-old infant stabbed and decapitated in a Texas home on Sunday and his mother screaming that she killed her son after the devil told her to do it.

Two people tweeted me the same message in reply shortly after the story was posted:

We need to remember that this is a product of mental illness and not something to blame on religion. Re: Devil makes mom kill

I don’t think that anyone can doubt that this woman is mentally disturbed. Certainly, nobody is suggesting that religion is directly to blame. The above message, however, would have us not focus any attention on religion.

I think that is unfortunate.

It seems to me that there is a fine line between believing that evil supernatural entities like the Devil actually exist and are somehow responsible for much evil and temptation to do evil in the world (which many millions do believe) and believing all of that plus said entity speaks to you. Given the former (which would probably classify someone as mentally ill were it not a part of mainstream religious beliefs) the latter is not a terribly far leap in logic.

It is impossible to say for sure whether or not this woman would have still killed her son anyway had she been an atheist or at least did not seriously believe in religious nonsense. Yet one still has to wonder to what extent we make such behavior more likely to occur by encouraging or otherwise not criticizing such unfounded beliefs in devils and demons in the first place?