I always look forward to Elaine Frei’s well-written, thought-provoking comments. Now she has graced us with her review and reflections of Under the Banner of Heaven, John Krakauer’s controversial expos?© of the murders of a mother and her infant daughter by Fundamentalist Mormons. What makes Krakauer’s coverage of these killings especially relevant for discussion here is that the murderers claimed that they followed divine revelation. This is the first part of two; the second half will go up tomorrow.
I’ve always been interested in the things people believe and why they believe them. I even studied the subject at university, when I focused my Intercultural Studies work on the anthropology of religion. Then, a few years ago, but after I finished school, I encountered a book that stirred my curiosity further, renewed my determination to look at belief more closely. It also opened up a new dimension of that interest that I had not really thought much about before. That was the question of what belief leads people – as individuals and as groups – to do. That book wasn’t the only thing that emphasized this practical aspect of belief in my mind. Certainly, the events of September 11, 2001, made me aware that beliefs have practical consequences in the real world in a way that I had not thought about that issue before. But 9/11 was such an overwhelming event that I had tried not to plunge too deeply into its implications, including the particular issue of belief and action.
When I read Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (Random House, 2003), by Jon Krakauer, however, I realized that I could not ignore that aspect of belief. The actions individuals and groups undertake in the name of what they believe are an integral part of the examination of belief, belief systems, and the people that hold to them. Belief isn’t only, or even mostly, internal. Not in its formation and certainly not in its practice. Everyone’s actions, every day, depend on what they believe, how strongly they believe, and how they think others feel about the beliefs they hold. And, like it or not, our actions affect the lives of others, and others’ actions affect our lives every single day.
In Under the Banner of Heaven, Krakauer looks at the story of how belief impacted the lives of Brenda and Erica Lafferty, a young mother and her infant daughter, when two of her brothers-in-law came to believe that God was sending them revelations, including the instructions to kill Brenda and Erica. Admittedly, this is an extreme example of the impact of belief on individuals, but it is an example that cannot and should not be ignored. That horrible 1984 case is, in turn, really just a jumping-off point for Krakauer‚Äôs examination of various offshoots of the Mormon faith which have not abandoned the early beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as introduced by the faith‚Äôs founder, Joseph Smith. These doctrines include plural marriage and blood atonement, doctrines that the official Mormon church, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, has long since officially abandoned and proscribed. Included in the offshoots which accept one or another or more of the doctrines in question are the so-called “Mormon fundamentalist” sects such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the United Effort Plan (UEP). There are also individual fundamentalist believers such as Brian David Mitchell, aka Immanuel David Isaiah, who was accused of the widely-reported kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart in Utah in 2002. Besides modern examples of the acceptance of these doctrines, Krakauer also looks at some of the events that such beliefs led to during the early years of what grew into the mainstream Mormon church, when those beliefs were still openly held and practiced. Krakauer‚Äôs main examples of this aspect of the story are the events surrounding the introduction of plural marriage by Joseph Smith and the issues and events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre and its aftermath.
Ron and Dan Lafferty, Brenda and Erica Lafferty’s murderers, were adherents of some of those earlier, now mostly abandoned doctrines of early Mormonism. Raised in orthodox Mormonism, the Lafferty brothers came to accept the idea that the mainstream church had been wrong in abandoning plural marriage, blood atonement, and other doctrines and practices that the orthodox church currently denies. Theirs is a story of what deeply held faith can lead people to do. Krakauer’s account of this story is a fascinating, meticulously researched, and well-written account that reads like a novel.
Ron and Dan Lafferty had both been excommunicated from the mainstream Mormon church for their fundamentalist beliefs. At the same time, a man named Bob Crossfield, a convert to mainstream Mormonism who ultimately styled himself as “The Prophet Onias” had begun a School of the Prophets modeled on an organization of the same name started by Joseph Smith in 1832. One of his aims as the leader of a fundamentalist Mormon sect was to “restore the gift of revelation” to modern Mormons by teaching them “how to hear the ‚Äòstill small voice‚Äô of God”, basically how to receive and interpret revelation. One of Onias‚Äô followers, Bernard Brady, met one of the Lafferty brothers and as a result first Dan and then the rest of the brothers were invited to join the school. The only brother who didn‚Äôt attend was Allen, whose wife Brenda would not allow him to do so. The school began to meet every week, and eventually Ron was called by Onias as bishop to the school‚Äôs Provo, Utah chapter.
Ron was the first of the brothers to receive a revelation under Onias‚Äô tutelage, and he received around 20 of them in February and March of 1984. In late March, he received what came to be known as the “removal revelation”, which said that Brenda Lafferty and her daughter Erica, along with Chloe Low, and Richard Stowe were to be killed. Stowe was the stake president who excommunicated Ron in 1983 and had extended financial aid to Ron‚Äôs wife Dianna while she was in the process of divorcing Ron. Low took Dianna, along with Ron‚Äôs children, into her home on more than one occasion while her marriage was breaking up. Brenda Lafferty, besides not allowing her husband to participate in the School of the Prophets, encouraged Dianna to divorce Ron after his excommunication.
At first, Ron only told Dan about the removal revelation, and then only because he had received another revelation that seemed to indicate that Dan was to do the actual killing. Ron was apparently disturbed by what the revelation said, and Dan didn’t disabuse him of that concern. He told Ron that it was important to make sure that the revelation was from God. If it wasn’t, it would be wrong to act on it, but if it was from God it would offend God if he didn’t act on it. Finally, Ron showed the revelation to Bernard Brady, who said flat out that he thought it was wrong and that he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Brady was concerned enough that he prepared an affidavit stating that he believed the lives of the individuals named in the revelation, as well as the lives of several others, were in danger. However, after he signed the affidavit and had it notarized he took it home and put it in a drawer. He didn’t call the police, and neither did any of the other members of the school when they found out about the revelation. In addition, when Dan told Allen about the revelation, Allen said that he did not accept it as from God and would defend his wife and baby with his life. But Allen never told Brenda that Ron and Dan intended to kill her and Erica.
And there the matter remained until July 24, when Ron and Dan Lafferty entered Brenda and Ron Lafferty’s apartment and killed Brenda and Erica. They set out to kill Chloe Low and Richard Stowe as well, but no one was home at the Low home and they couldn’t figure out how to get to Stowe’s home. By then accompanied by two other men, they set out for Reno, where they were eventually apprehended by the police.
In reality, some might argue, the Laffertys‚Äô story is really just one of religious belief used as a tool for rationalizing what they chose to do in pursuit of their goals. These critics might say the murders were simple revenge for the frustration of Ron Lafferty‚Äôs goals, with Dan as his executioner, and that they knew their actions would violate the most deeply-held mores of the culture in which they were living. Indeed, one way of interpreting this story is that when they were faced with someone who was standing in the way of their desires to practice polygamy, Ron and Dan simply used archaic religious doctrines from their own religious upbringing to justify the murder of their sister-in-law and others, whom they saw as frustrating their wishes. In this explanation Erica might just be seen as “collateral damage”. After all, it was Brenda Lafferty who urged Ron‚Äôs wife to leave him over his desire to practice polygamy. Further, she was the one wife, out of all the brothers‚Äô spouses, who would not submit to any extent to their excursions into polygamous practice.
In truth, however, that seems a bit too Byzantine an explanation to be the whole truth. Every single day, people get angry at others who stand in the way of their desires. And every single day, people commit violent acts to remove those obstacles. Most of these people do not feel the need to fall back on some sort of religious belief system to justify their actions, to themselves or to others. That sort of long way around seems to me to be just too much work. The Lafferty brothers, as pointed out in Krakauer‚Äôs book, had a history of serious study of the doctrines they claimed as the reason for their crimes. It isn‚Äôt as if they killed Brenda and Erica and then belatedly added: “Oh, by the way, God told us to do it.”
Another way to look at this story, one that Krakauer specifically brings up in the course of his book, is that Ron Lafferty, in claiming to receive revelations and, to a lesser extent Dan in helping him to carry those revelations out, were victims of a delusion. Ron’s defense tried to use that argument in an insanity defense. However, one of the witnesses in Ron’s trial, Dr. Noel Gardner, a psychiatrist, testified that holding unusual religious beliefs does not necessarily mean that the person holding those beliefs is delusional. Gardner also testified that while Ron Lafferty might well fit the profile for one suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, most self-proclaimed prophets – including the founders of most major world religions – could be classed this way, and that very few of them were murderers. Consequently, it seems to me that one must finally conclude, at least on the basis of the information presented in Krakauer’s book, that Ron and Dan Lafferty were not mentally ill in a clinical sense. They believed that they were receiving revelations from God and came to those beliefs through rational study. Those with whom they had made common cause, while not accepting the removal revelation, believed just as fervently as the Laffertys did that revelation could, indeed, come from God. The Lafferty brothers’ actions in killing Brenda and Erica stemmed directly from, and were justified in their minds by, the beliefs they held.
The Laffertys’ story is a fascinating one, even if only in the same sense that any disaster is fascinating. The wider story Krakauer tells, of the birth, growth, and schism of a new religious movement and its offshoots is equally interesting. I would be willing to wager that, at least before the Warren Jeffs saga hit the media, most Americans had no idea that there is an entire town in the Arizona desert, north of the Grand Canyon and near the Utah border, that lives a strictly religious, polygamous lifestyle, led by a prophet (Jeffs) who wields near-total control over the lives of the town‚Äôs citizens, to the extent of reassigning the wives of apostates to other men. Even though I pay attention to such things, I did not know about this particular group until I read Krakauer‚Äôs book. Likewise, I did not realize until reading Under the Banner of Heaven that experts estimate of the number of fundamentalist Mormon polygamists at between thirty and one hundred thousand. Krakauer‚Äôs inclusion of the information about such groups serve as an illustration of the sort of schisms that have split believers in Joseph Smith‚Äôs teachings into widely diverse groups. This information also shows one of the sources of encouragement the Lafferty brothers might have had in their own split from the orthodox Mormonism of their upbringing.
Besides the story of the Lafferty murders, Krakauer covers a number of other issues related to Mormonism past and present. I’ll share some reflections on those issues, and the mainstream Mormon church’s critique of them, next time.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Jonathan // Apr 10, 2007 at 9:11 am
Elaine,
An excellent post - thank you for taking the time to share this book with us!
There are many sects of Christianity that deal with the issue of divine revelation. People in the reformed theology movement say there is 0 personal divine revelation as opposed to the extreme Pentecostal and Charismatic movements which say that if you are not receiving divine personal guidance, prophecy, and revelation on a daily basis, you are probably sinning, or at least you aren’t a serious believer.
I’m attending a charismatic church right now to see if there is anything real there. One of the members of the church believes herself to be a prophet. She continually tells my wife that she has prophetic dreams. One dream she had was God telling her our new baby was going to be evil or demonic in some serious way, and then she told us that we were going to have twins. Well, we’ve had the baby and no twins, and nothing demonic. I was told later that she believes that every dream she has is a direct revelation from God. Another lady in our church prophesied that the 4 pregnant woman in the church would all give birth to a girl. So far, we’ve had 2 boys and 1 girl. Woops.
This whole personal divine revelation thing is really messy. I can see why most people who suffer the terrible bad effects of supposed divine revelation reject it. There are a lot of very angry anti-charismatic Christians or non-Christians that came from that background out there who are really fed up.
I am curious - did Krakauer describe the Prophet school’s process for determining the difference between supernatural revelation (demonic?) vs. specific divine revelation (God) vs. I ate something bad for dinner? Did they perceive any difference? Does anything that popped into their minds constitute divine revelation like the lady in our church?
From a Christian perspective, the Bible does have some verses that spell out pretty clearly that you should not believe everything that pops into your head or appears to you at night. You have to test the ’spirits.’ Otherwise, you will be walking down a very dangerous road - which could end up like the Laffertys at the worst, or just embarrassment at the very least.
From what you said and your observations, I think you are right - they were quite sane in what they did. Knowing the events only by your description, I would say that the really did hear something. The question of the hour is this: who told them to kill?
Look forward to your next post!
2 nee // Apr 10, 2007 at 4:09 pm
The bible and the book of mormon both contain murder sanctioned by god.
I find what happened in Waco and Jonestown the the Heaven’s Gate crew fascinating. But are they any different from mainstream Christianity? The only difference is the passage of time.
There are many things done now that people deride. Alleged prophecies. The same people who have no trouble with the notion that God would tell Abraham to kill Isaac have one hell of a problem with a woman in Texas who drowns her kids because she believes she’s been instructed to.
Would Abraham not have been thrown into the paddy wagon and hauled off today? You betcha. Okay, then what makes it okay that it happened back then? Nothing. The passage of time. How about someone obtaining plates in the BoM by any means necessary? Who is to say what the greater good is?
My point is, stuff like what Krakauer writes about, I’d love to see a book that has followers of scriptures defending why actions in the scriptures were okay then and not now.
This same thing is played out everyday when missionaries ask someone to pray about the Book of Mormon. Some get a yes. Some get a no. Who is to say who’s in the right?
I heard a podcast yesterday in which Gil Fronsdal said the Buddha was questioned by people saying all these different schools of thought are teaching this or teaching that. They asked Buddha which was correct, which was true. The Buddha said that truth was not the issue, the issue was whether or not they caused suffering. I’m paraphrasing (as was Fronsdal) but that was the gist of it.
When I look at my own journey of faith, many parts were wonderful and many parts caused suffering. Watching a bit of the last general conference, I heard some talks that reinforce and promote suffering. That is not skillful.
Point? I guess it’s that people need to examine the fundamental things taught as being “okay” and determine if those things promote suffering. If they do, maybe it’s time to rethink. And I think it is important to take what was okay at one time and ask ourselves, how would we feel if that were going on today. And if not, why not? If not okay now,why then?
This is why, just the tip of the iceberg, that religion is a convoluted thing and more and more appears to me that we created God (in the anthropomorphic sense) and not the other way around.
3 Elaine Frei // Apr 10, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Thanks for your comments, Jonathan and nee.
Jonathan…Krakauer doesn’t really get into much of the process that was used by Onias’ School fo the Prophets, although there is a passage where Ron Lafferty is quoted on the subject of how it felt for him to receive a revelation. It appears from the text that the main way in which any revelation was vetted as to its authenticity was in the custom of presentation of the revelation to the whole school by the one who received it “for evaluation”. When this was done with the so-called “removal revelation”, it was rejected by a vote of 6 to 3. Ron had begun by that time to challenge Onias’ leadership and authority anyway, and Ron and Dan Lafferty and another of their brothers (the three who voted to authenticate the revelation) left the meeting in anger.
Notably, Krakauer points out that any prophet who encourages the receipt of personal revelation by his or her followers, as Joseph Smith did at the beginning of the church, will likely have one or more of his or her followers challenge his or her authority at some point. This is probably why the mainstream Mormon church deemphasized that aspect of doctrine and now only allows that individuals might receive personal revelation for themselves only and not for anyone else. Not that that has stopped a legion of Mormon young men from trying to convince young women to marry them by claiming that God told him that she was “the one”. This is what was going on with Ron Lafferty, apparently, who was challenging Onias for leadership of the School around the time that the removal revelation was received.
nee…you make some very good points. I think a part of what you are talking about has to do with those who feel that scripture, in any religious tradition, is universal in application regardless of who you are or what period of history you live in, as opposed to seeing those texts as records of conditions at a particular time in a particular culture. Or, if you will, as to be followed literally as opposed to being considered symbolically.
My own personal bias is that it is best to look at scripture as the product of a particular time and place and often…usually, even…not applicable in detail outside that time and place. It would, indeed, be interesting to see an evaluation of Christian scripture, and specifically in this case Mormon scripture, evaluated in that way. That would be fairly simple…well not simple because there are still academic and religious differences in where and when some books were written, but comparatively so…in the case of the Old and New Testaments, since Biblical scholarship has identified in broad outline at least the origins of those books culturally and temporally.
Such an evalutation would also be fairly straightforward in the case of the Doctrine & Covenants as well…we know when and where they were written. It would be a little more complicated in the case of the Book of Mormon, with believers claiming that it is a record of ancient America and being inclined to evaluate it as a product of that time and place while many others would want to evaluate it as a product of the time and place where Joseph Smith wrote it. Even so, I think the sort of study you suggest would be a valuable exercise in looking at how we view some of the things that are accepted as valid behavior in the past versus how they would be evaluated if someone did those things today. Goodness knows, the whole Nephi/Laban thing bothered me when I was an active Mormon and it bothers me even more now that I am not.
I am quite interested in the comments you make, Jonathan, about the folks at the church you are attending who claim to be receiving prophecy or revelations and I think that ties right in with the question you ask, nee, about the differences in answers different individuals get when they pray about the Book of Mormon. I am one of those people who prayed about it and prayed about it and prayed about the Book of Mormon, and couldn’t ever figure out why I wasn’t getting an answer. It was something that went on for many years. You are right, Jonathan, that people kept telling me that either I was sinning or wasn’t doing it right or something…anyway, the problem was with me, not with God, according to them. Which really confused me for a long time, since I knew that I wasn’t “sinning” as they defined it, and that I was doing all the things the church told me that I should, at least as much as those around me were who seemed to be getting answers just fine.
Only when I finally figured out that it wasn’t me, and that I was getting an answer, just not the answer that I expected and that people told me I should be getting: that the Book of Mormon was true. In that case, the silence turned out to be a quite eloquent answer, and the only thing that was my fault was that I didn’t “get it” sooner because I was listening to the noise…others’ expectations of what the answer should be…rather than the signal.
Sorry for such a long reply, but you both have raised fascinating issues.
4 Jonathan // Apr 10, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Nee- you are very right about this. Even for folks who do believe in God, they spend their whole lives trying to remove their anthropomorphic encrustations from their concept of God. I have heard it often said that many people think God is like their earthly fathers, with all their shortcomings - and it is a tough thing for them to separate the two - to see God not like their fathers but like how he is revealed in the Bible. My father was awesome, but I am still trying to remove wrong concepts of God from my thinking, and will probably continue to do so my entire life.
You also raise a good point about things that were OK in ancient times vs. modern times. What’s the difference?
My best answer to that difficult question is that the way God acts is VERY sensitive to the type of person he interacts with and considers the culture and time period they are living in. The reason God did what he did with Abraham must be taken in context with previous interactions, the near-eastern culture at the time, and a million other variables that I don’t know about. It comes down to this: God acts uniquely and appropriately to the context. He never did what he did with Abraham with anyone else ever again that we know about. This would never work in the United States today in our culture.
Looking at this contextual interaction concept on a much larger scale - the entire Old Testament law was highly contextual - it was only for one nation of people during a limited time period. It has now been abandoned. Its context was life in Egypt and took into account their familiarity with deity priesthood rites, contractual agreements between lords and vassals, laws of surrounding cultures, etc. By the time the NT rolled around, this whole contract had become outdated because among other things, the near-eastern society had evolved, and so it needed to be replaced by a newer covenantal system.
To me, understanding God’s action by researching the context surrounding it is really fascinating - and I think essential for reading the OT, and most importantly, for understanding God.
5 nee // Apr 11, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Jonathan, your comment applies anthropomorphic qualities to god and I don’t subscribe to that brand of deity.
Some things are morally reprehensible, always have been, always will be, imo. And people - well they have not changed. Human nature being what it is, I’ve no doubt parents in Jesus’ day were doing the ancient equivalent of parents in the 1970s-1980s kidnapping their kids and sending them to de-programmers because they hooked up with “cults”.
The bible needs to be looked at as something about a very small subset of people. There were many people from that era who’s history is not preserved because they were secluded or didn’t win enough wars. There is a lot more history we’ll never know.
I’ve edited this comment before posting. I initially listed a litany of examples from today and from scriptures that basically say the same thing I’ve pared it down to here. No point in rehashing it ad nauseum.
My beliefs have changed and your comment, Johnathan, further underscores in my mind why I can’t believe in such a deity and why people created this sort of deity, not the other way around. Though I do appreciate your desire to show why this makes sense for you. I felt the same way once so I get the motivation.
6 Jonathan // Apr 12, 2007 at 5:14 am
Nee-
The reason I commented in response to your comment was to continue the discussion of why God would do things differently back then and not now. To me, this has actual meaning and your thoughts actually make me think hard about what I believe. My own comment reflects my thinking about the subject, but you are right - my thoughts don’t really benefit you since you no longer believe in God, and possibly this whole subject doesn’t interest you either. I’m never quite sure if hearing my perspective is of interest to you in just a curious observer of other people’s religious thinking fashion, but please believe me that your perspective is interesting to me! 
My method of finding truth means testing it constantly by throwing it past people who think differently.
Thank you for answering! Yeah - I was pretty sure you don’t believe in God anymore
I really appreciate what you have to say about these subjects because you seem to have thought them through and have good observations, both from your comments in this post and in others (and of course from you own website.) The one that comes to mind is your criticism of atonement - that one got me thinking a lot.
That being said, I gather from your last comment that I missed addressing your main point entirely. You weren’t interested in the pros of contextual bible study, you were talking about morally wrong things condoned or directed by God to do in the Bible. Your main example was God asking Abraham to do child sacrifice. Just so you know - I believe you are right. This is very weird because not only is it morally wrong in my perspective, but God himself is appalled by it and destroys nations who engage in this activity.
[Side Note:] Please don’t think I was justifying God’s amorality by saying context matters!! I just missed addressing your main point entirely - my previous comment was focused on something different which it should not have been, but the context subject fascinates me so I brought it up.
Abraham being told to sacrifice Issac is just one example of condoned amorality. Another example is when God brings a bear out of the woods and has them maul the young men who are making fun of Isaiah? (can’t remember which prophet). This is also weird because God later says that he does not desire the death of the wicked and criticizes Jonah and Israelite people like him for having that desire.
I think you are saying that because God justifies amoral activity and commands people to act amorally, that he is just acting like everyday people - which is not too different from the Greek gods. Since the God of the Bible and the Greek gods all do immoral things just like average people - it would be safe to say that people just made them up - gave them human-like attributes - and the dead giveaway is this amorality. You are qualifying an act to be immoral based on if it causes another suffering, which makes sense to me. I think Plato (via Socrates) was thinking in the same direction - criticizing Greek myths because of their bad example, as if there was an ideal of God, but the gods in these myths fell short of this.
You are also right that people never change. People back then are just like people today. My point is that people act in context with their culture. A culture my bring out the worst or best in people.
You are right about the Bible being about a small select group of people. This is why I study near-eastern culture in the setting of the Bible to understand how other people thought and lived during the same time.
I do have a tentative guess for God’s strange behavior, but it’s up to you if you’re interested - otherwise, I’ll probably write about it elsewhere - because it’s a good observation that requires some thinking, and writing helps me think.
Thanks nee! I really hope I’m not pissing you off with my comments
If I am, just give me a virtual punch in the face or something 
7 Miko // Apr 13, 2007 at 1:30 pm
dittos, many dittos. I definitely agree with Jonathan’s explanation of God (incl. the Greek gods) as being some kind of divine version of our dad. I don’t know who said it, but I once heard “How great and terrible is that moment when one realizes that one’s father is not a God afterall, but a man.”
I read a feminist critque of the relationship with God as Father: it allows us to be children, especially in the moral sense. A father figure as God allows us to simply “do what he says” because He says it. Remember when your parents’ word was law? Not growing out of this mind-set (argues this feminist author) opens the door for such amoral acts although (or because) they are allowed by God. She argues that, rather than trying to believe in God as Mother, another reinforcement of this parent-child relationship, we should come to God as Friend: a friend Who encourages you to be the best person you can be while allowing you to make your own mistakes. Just as in life, one must come to a point where your parents, while older & wiser still than you, are friends rather than parents in the sense of always doing what they say.
And does anyone else find the inherent child-abuse and cannibalism implicit in many Christian sects concerning? God may be the Heavenly Father, but he still “sent His only son” to die a horrible, torturous death. And “when we eat this flesh & drink this blood” we’re creepily close to symbolic cannibalism & vampirism.
re: the subject introduced by Elaine.
My first reaction was remembering an episode of House, MD (”House vs. God, 219) in which he has to diagnose a faith-healer (who ends up putting a woman’s cancer into remission). At one point, he says, “Isn’t it interesting that religious behavior is so close to being crazy that we can’t tell them apart.” I’ve always found “the Devil made me do it” just up there with “God told me to”. As I said above, a paternalistic notion of God allows one not to take responsibility for actions that are amoral but sanctioned. I also have this issue with “absolute morality” which generally is taken to mean “morality as dictated by an absolute entity” which is generally taken to mean “god” of some kind. Moral absolutists often do what that god tells them to, either in sacred texts or in revelation (sometimes those are the same). But having some supernatural entity dicating laws to the people around me really puts me on edge. I’ve heard plenty of Christians argue that some wars are justified (wars = killing) how far off is that, really, from arguing that killing your sister-in-law is justified?
My second reaction was that Crossfield’s instruction on how to listen to the still small voice of God & receive revelations is not too far from Indian and New-Age channelling/meditation practices. However, most of the credible sources for such programs stress that it should never be done without a proper teacher as some “voices” that you might hear are not the voices you should be listening to. I wonder if these kinds of practices put one in touch with one’s inner voice or subconcious. At that point, the unthought idea that a person is standing in one’s way could become the “revealed” dicate to dispose of that person. I find it interesting that the revelation in question revealed that someone other than the revealee was to do the actual killing.
Incidentally, dare I ask what, exactly, “blood atonement” entails? *shudder*
8 Elaine Frei // Apr 20, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Miko…sorry it took so long to answer this; I was away from my computer for a week.
Krakauer’s answer (on page 137 of “Under the Banner of Heaven”) is that Brigham Young taught that some acts against Mormons were so horrible that only the spilling of the perpetrator’s blood could right the wrong. As I understand it (and active Mormons might take issue with this, as it isn’t something that is talked about much with outsiders), blood atonement has also been taught in reference to the Mormon belief that some sins are so heinous - murder, for instance - that the atonement of Jesus on the cross cannot cover those sins and so the sinner’s blood must be shed in order for him or her to atone for their sinful act. I’ve heard it said that this belief was why Gary Gilmore chose to be executed by firing squad after he was convicted of murder - so that his blood would be literally spilled.
9 Leaving the Garden: Elaine’s Journey | Mind on Fire. // Jan 25, 2008 at 8:47 pm
[…] note: Elaine is a longtime MoF community member. She has contributed a guest post (a detailed examination of the Lafferty murders and a review of Krakauer’s Under the Banner […]
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