Matt - what makes you think this story actually happened?

One important aspect to understanding the content of these ancient writings is all too frequently overlooked (and intentionally so by so-called biblical "scholars" ). A lot of it was written by men who were simultaneously reinforcing religious tenets and behaving as apologists for their political leaders, in a society where the distinction between political and religious leadership was anything but distinct. In fact it hardly existed at all.

If one treats the Jewish scriptures as an admittedly ham-fisted summary of the history of that group then it does not take a genius to see that they, at that time, were a particularly barbaric people even by the standards of the day. They pursued a military policy of genocidal proportions against their neighbours, who they were convinced held genocidal intentions against them. They used this belief (that others had it in for them) to justify their own behaviour, and topped the whole justification thing off with invented directives from their imaginary god to behave just so.

There is no way that such barbarism existed solely in what today would be called that society's "foreign affairs" policies. It must have permeated civil life too, and the bible is littered with incidents of casual callousness which support this view. The guys doing the writing were therefore no more or less psychotic than the rest of the society they were addressing, and played a huge political role in keeping the tribes "on the message" - that message being to treat life as dirt cheap, especially your enemy's and even your own kindred if push came to shove. God was used to reinforce this directive, just as the context was then used to "flesh out" the character of god and demonstrate that, despite his own psychotic tendencies, he was their psycho.

Events eventually conspired to disabuse Jews of the efficacy of such a simplistic and murderous deity. Periods of defeat in which they were not massacred but dispersed saw the evolution of scripture writing now designed to account for this apparent inability of their magic psycho to play his promised bit. The god character began to alternate between his old psychotic manifestation (but now simply promising to come back and kick ass later) and a more philosophical creature, his new improved philosophy no doubt being informed by the Jews' exposure to religions elsewhere.

The christian metamorphosis was really just another step in that evolution of a fantasy, this time drawing heavily from Mithridatic sources and other schools of philosophy permeating the Levant through Rome's dominion. By the time that particular sect had begun justifying its tenets the Isaac story had already become something of an embarrassment, illustrating as it did a god who played sillybuggers with mortals just to test them and a level of naivety on the part of mortals that was chillingly portrayed. Abraham - unlike in muslim theology - got left with his patriarchal role, but the "unfortunate incident" was reduced to a simple (if callous) "test of faith" story. Whereas the Jewish injunction was that everyone should do as Abraham did should the authorities demand it, the christian attitude was just that it was "a test", and let's all be grateful that god doesn't run those tests in quite that way any more.

Obama's observation that god induced Abraham to engage in questionable morality in order to prove himself faithful is correct, and it's good to hear a politician say it. But there are many people in the world who think still that the same test applies and from the same deity - and that morality doesn't come into it since if it is the will of Jehovah/God/Allah then it's moral, period.

What Obama should do (but won't, for fear of offending fundamentalists) is go one step further, and not just comment on how advanced we have come socially from the time this barbaric Iron Age society wrote their stories, but state emphatically WHY modern morality beats the godly one hands down.