This is the thread for discussing this month's book.  Warning:  if you haven't finished the book yet, there may be spoilers here.

I am looking forward to the discussion about this book. I thought it was excellent.




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Thanks for the welcome! Yes, we are trying to get this into a few other papers. I think it can be written a little better. It was originally, but the editors chopped it and rearranged stuff. Which was a bummer! Anyone got any ideas about who to try and send it to? (the better version the author originally had?)

A couple of questions to kick off the discussion:

ZeeZrom:A couple of questions to kick off the discussion:

1.  One of the most interesting parts of the book to me was the legal wrangling over Ron's sanity.  Was Ron sane?  Where do we draw the line between belief in a supernatural being of any kind and insanity?  Where do we draw the line between a prophet and a madman?  

This is from Wikipedia:

Sanity considered as a legal term denotes that an individual is of sound mind and therefore can bear legal responsibility for his or her actions. It is generally defined in terms of the absence of insanity. It is not a medical term, although the opinions of medical experts are often important in making a legal decision as to whether someone is sane or insane. It is also not the same concept as mental illness. One can be acting under profound mental illness and yet be sane, and one can also be ruled insane without an underlying mental illness.

And

To be not guilty by reason of insanity it must be demonstrated that the defendant could not tell the difference between right and wrong.

So, the question is could he tell the difference between right and wrong? Typically, if someone tries to hide their behavior, then they knew that legally and socially their behavior is considered wrong. Now, they may believe they know god's will and it supercedes the law and thus is right, but if they hide their behavior I'd say that they are not insane.

To illustrate insanity, imagine that person A was absolutely convinced that person B was trying to kill them. To protect themselves, person A kills person B. It turns out person B was not trying to kill person A, it was only person A's paranoid delusions that led them to believe that person B was trying to kill them. At the moment person A kills person B, they are fully convinced they are doing the right thing. If there were other people around, person A would wonder why they are not helping to stop person B. Person A believes any reasonable person would do the same thing (kill in self-defense if that is the only way to stop them).

Ron, I think knows that other people would not do what he is doing or help him do it. He knew that other people would disapprove. Most people find a way to justify their behaviors, or make it right in their heads, and he is no different, except he believes god is commanding him. I think he is legally sane. Lots of people believe some strange, illogical stuff, but that does not mean that they don't know what behaviors society finds unacceptable.

Although I think the purely legal issue is interesting, I'm thinking more broadly.  Even the legal definition seems fairly slippery to me.  What does it mean to know the difference between right and wrong?  Suppose Ron was convinced that he had a vision from God, and that God instructed him to kill his niece and sister in law.  By what standard should we measure knowing right from wrong?  In that case, Ron knows right from wrong -- he just has it backwards.  To him, obeying God is right and disobeying is wrong.  What separates Ron from Abraham, when the latter is willing to kill his own son if God instructs him to?

Or, if Ron has a vision of god that leads him to reverse right and wrong, does that make him insane?  Does it matter that it is god and not space aliens?

Or, we can use the wiki's distinction between sanity and mental illness to get away from the legal definition.  Was Ron mentally ill?  When does a belief in an all-powerful god that can speak to individuals cross from faith into mental illness?

My knee-jerk reaction to Ron is that he's crazy.  Not like a fox.  Like a crazy person.  But I have trouble figuring out the boundary between that kind of crazy and belief in a personal god that can and does communicate with people.

Right vs. wrong in who's eyes? The laws? Then I think that Ron knew what the law deemed right or wrong. But God? And which one does Ron think is higher, gov't or God? Obviously, he felt that God's law was higher and that he was acting within the bounds of those laws. Therefore, he felt himself to be right. In the interview in the prison, whichever brother it was is not repentant. He knows, and admits, he went against the gov't law. But he thinks that law is corrupt and that he was told by God to bypass what the law said was right or wrong and do it anyway. Ron was brainwashed, he needed deprogramming, and I think he was crazy for thinking that God was telling him to do stuff, when I really think it was his own thinking. Yes, I think he was crazy. I but I also think he fully realized that what he was doing was against the law and wrong in that way, and therefore, fully competant to stand trial.

The lady who killed her kids in the bathtub called the cop and said she'd done something wrong, or evil, or whatever her exact words were. She was the same way. Felt that God had called her to do something. The difference is I do think that the lady was too crazy to stand trial. Even if she knew right from wrong, I think she needed mental help that went beyond the deprogramming she needed. And I don't think she should have stood trial. Crazy house for life is what she needed.

I can't answer the second question because I haven't quite finished yet.

Here’s my thought on “Under the Banner of Heaven.” Sorry, again, it’s long. The other day, we were discussing over Sunday dinner with my TBM family something about someone being sentenced to death, and one of my siblings mentioned that they deserved to die. I told them that in my belief, no one deserves to die, that it’s up to God to decide when someone dies, not humans or governments. Another sibling piped up that the person deserved to die for doing what they did. So I quoted, “Better for one man to perish then a whole nation dwindle in unbelief?” My sibling said, “Exactly” and my mother actually said, “I can’t believe we’re quoting the Book of Mormon in defense of someone dieing.”  Really? I though. But she was serious. Mormons today have never heard of blood atonement (at least none that I’ve talked with) and view Laban’s story as a truth, but a distant truth that they are sure will never affect their lives. But in fundamental Mormonism, I think it’s more of a truth, more of a teaching. And Ron and Dan truly don’t believe they’ve done anything wrong because they were merely fulfilling the truth of this principle. Reading the introduction, I wondered if perhaps their rational for the murder was just that, a rationalizing of their actions, an attempt to cope with the scope of their crime, but now that I’ve read the entire thing, I can see without a doubt that it was their rational going into the crime, that it was entirely premeditated based on the blood atonement principle that sneaks into fundamentalism. In the introduction, page xxiii, the author states, “Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion…..Common sense is no match for the voice of God….” *ahem* I obviously don’t agree with this. I think faith should only come after reason and common sense. That good judgment should be a basis of faith. The Bible itself speaks very clearly of using reason and logic in faith. Now whether every theist does this or not is an entirely different matter. But that’s what I strive for. The author does tend to tinge the story with his religion (agnostism), and he seems almost to group all religion with the same fanaticism related to the Lafferty brothers. He compares mainstream Mormonism to their fundamentalism quite often, and I believe he’s spot on about it. Mormons are in fact rejecting their roots by rejecting fundamentalism AND that the vast majority of extremes with fundamentalism have their very basis in mainstream Mormonism. It’s all an interpretation. As it is with every fundamentalist group. Which brings me to my next point. I found it a flat-out lie when GBH said in his interview with Larry King on Sept. 8, 1998 that “There are actually no Mormon fundamentalists.” But as I was reading this book, it suddenly occurred to me that he HAS to state this. “Religious fundamentalism, regardless of the religion, refers to the calling for a return to the foundational beliefs, fundamentals of the religion, or a literal interpretation of its scriptures.” (from an online dictionary, emphasis mine) If GBH had admitted to the existence of fundamentalist Mormonism, he would be admitting that mainstream Mormonism had stepped away from the fundamentals of Mormonism, away from the literal interpretation of not only scripture, but also of early prophets, since mormonism includes that in it’s scripture. And mainstream Mormonism (MM) claims that God changes all the time, that what they believe today is merely an evolution of their religion. To admit to fundamental Mormonism (FM), they would be admitting that what they teach today is wrong. On pg. 7, the author states, “It was this single change in ecclesiastical policy [the rejecting of polygamy and encouraging of gov’t agencies to prosecute polygamists], more than anything else, that transformed the LDS Church ito its astonishingly successful present-day iteration. Having jettisoned polygamy, Mormons gradually ceased to be regarded as a crackpot sect. The LDS Church acquired the trappings of a conventional faith so successfully that it is now widely considered to be the quintessential American religion.” I would argue that this was the beginning of the LDS church’s campaign to BE mainstream, to be considered the same as everyone else (even though there is still an “us vs. them” mentality as well as an elitist attitude). On pg. 11: “….life in Colorado City under Rulon Jeffs bears more than a passing resemblance to life in Kabul under the Taliban.” I find parallels between Mormonism and Islam very interesting (I specialized in Islam and the Middle East in college). FM and fundamental Islam have a large amount in common. The fact that both mainstream sects (at least in my opinion) try to make themselves common and literally mainstream and thereby reject many of their original founders teaching as well as early practices is one of the proofs, in my mind, of their fallibility and false teachings.  I didn’t realize quite a few things about FMs before reading this book. Such as their take on the Law of Chastity, their racism, that sort of stuff. (Though I’m well aware that it is also a sect by sect thing.) I’ve always wondered, and still wonder, whether polygamy can exist without the corruption, without the child abuse, the underage women, the brainwashing. There are plenty of cultures out there that are polygamist, some with fundamental religions, and some that are purely a tribal thing (which I suppose can still be considered a religion). Does corruption and abuse happen in those religions? Can there ever exist a true Big Love type of situation? I met a woman who was on Shawn McCraney’s show who escaped from the Kingston clan and she doesn’t believe it can. She also doesn’t believe that the legalizing of polygamy will change anything. (It’s my belief that legalizing polygamy will make it easier for children/women to come forward with abuse charges as well as make it easier for authorities to go in and monitor situations.)  In another Shawn McCraney show, he stated his belief that if a polygamist family were to convert to mainstream Christianity (since his show is Christian based) that they should stay together because they are a family, and God would not be pleased with the breaking up of a family, even if it’s not the family that God had in mind from the beginning. (He actually received more hate mail and death threats over this statement then anything else about his show.) IMO, I agree. But this would be saying that the problem with polygamy is not polygamy in essence, but the religious beliefs that surround it. What are your thoughts? 
(continued below....wordy)

Had to break it up again:

Somewhere in the book it discusses Abraham Lincoln’s law against polygamy, and if I remember right (I can’t find the passage, didn’t write it down) it was pretty clear that even living in the situation, state marriage or no, was illegal. Which means that it’s technically more prosecutable then I previously believed. Anyone know if this has been changed? Is it a state issue now? The Short Creek Raid journalist coverage really made it a lot harder for states to prosecute polygamy, and in a way, it’s right. Yes, they’re breaking the law, but by cracking down on one husband and his wives, you’re affecting (and entering into the foster care system) many times more children then you would for cracking down on a mainstream family. Isn’t there a better way? I’m just becoming involved with a ministry called “Shield and Refuge” that provides a shelter for women and children who desire to come out of polygamy. Isn’t there a way for families to become rehabilitated, learn how to be a good family, rather then breaking it up to rehabilitate individuals?  Another quote I can’t find the page for (what happens when I read late at night), about how the FLDS view apostates as misinformed and motivated by revenge. Apple doesn’t fall far from that tree, now does it? “The disagreement [over the correctness of Ron’s removal revelation] among the school’s members that evening underscores the conundrum that inevitably confronts any prophet who encourages his acolytes to engage in dialogue with God: sooner or later, God is apt to command an acolyte to disobey the prophet.” IMO, not only the reason why there are so many sects of Mormonism already, but also in Islam and Christianity. Once you open it up to someone receiving a “restoration” so to speak directly from God, you open the door to allow others the same opportunity, and it can very easily lead to a division in the religion. I found it interesting that this came up again during arguments as to whether Ron was insane or not. And I especially found very enlightening the arguments the LDS psychiatrist made. It was even brought up that in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, stated that “false beliefs,” by definition, are delusional. But who decides what are “false beliefs” and what aren’t? Obviously, Atheists would hold that a belief in Christ as a savior is a false belief, and obviously, Christians would say that the non-belief in God is a false belief, so who’s right and who’s wrong? Is “correct belief” merely a belief that is socially accepted? So then, religion would have nothing to do with it.  We had a discussion recently about Joseph Smith, Jim Jones, and, uh, I think David Koresh, and whether they were, as Dutch so eloquently put it, f#cking nuts. Were they? Does anyone claiming to commune with a higher power really crazy? If so, wouldn’t that count more then half the population as crazy? Were do they draw the line between being a religious zealot and being crazy? How are Biblical prophets, specifically Old Testament prophets who brought forth revelation to kill others or prophesized of doom to the Israelites themselves, any different? In my mind, it’s proof that “answers from God” aren’t always truth. But what do you measure it against? Are Mormons supposed to measure it against their scripture? Because you have the Laban story. And are Christians supposed to measure it against the Bible? Because you have a lot of stories in there of “Gentiles” being killed merely for getting in the way or their disbelief. Are Muslims supposed to measure it against their holy books? Because there’s specific parts in there that speak to violence against converts from Islam and to Gentiles in general. What are we supposed to measure it against? And if extreme beliefs, such as Lafferty’s, were considered insane, wouldn’t that mean that the Muslim extremists we’re holding on Guantanamo Bay should be classified as insane and their status as political prisoners (or POWs) should change?  Something else that REALLY bothered me is all the people who knew of the talk to kill Brenda and her baby, including Allen and Claudine, and yet no one did anything about it. IMO, they should be tried as accomplices.  I found the Lafferty brothers apparent “pick and choose” attitude about FM, especially the WoW, ironic. They would follow a commandment from God to kill their own SIL and niece, but they enjoyed smoking, drugs and alcohol.  I’d never heard the story of Samuel Smith being poisoned.  I hadn’t really thought of the blood oaths in the temple being started in vengeance of JS’ murder. When were the oaths changed to take the JS vengeance out? Is there a type of temple for FMs? Do they swear any oaths in the same way as MMs? I also hadn’t thought of the exodus to Utah “weeding out” the not-so-faithful. It’s just another, more physical way, persecution and hardship strengthened the members. It’s always been my opinion that if they hadn’t moved out here to Utah, where members were weeded out and then kept in exile from outside influence and under complete control, they wouldn’t have survived. I found it funny that one of BY’s apologist answers for polygamy was that plural marriage was an antidote to immorality, because men with a multitude of wives wouldn’t be tempted to engage in adulterous liaisons or visit prostitutes (because they could simply marry an temptation), but then turns around and says (along with almost every one else nowadays) that polygamy isn’t about sex. I found it rather pointed when the author says, on pg. 308, after Ron chooses to die by firing squad, the judge “….sentenced Ron to be shot to death for his crimes – underscoring the fact that Mormon Fundamentalists are by no means the only modern Americans who believe in blood atonement.” Bravo, Jon! As a Christian who is opposed to capital punishment, I am among the minority when I engage in conversation with my fellowship (and my family, both TBMs and fundamentalist Christians). Once again, the difference between what the Lafferty’s believe/did and what the government believes/did is merely one of social acceptance.  Last comment, I promise. One of my favorite quotes in the book (besides the capital punishment one) is on pg. 331, and the author is quoting DeLoy Bateman. 

It’s amazing how gullible people are. But you have to remember what a huge comfort the religion is. It provides all the answers. It makes life simple. Nothing makes you feel better than doing what the prophet commands you to do. If you have some controversial issue that you’re dealing with – let’s say you owe a lot of money to somebody, and you don’t have the means to pay them – you go in and talk to the prophet, and he might tell you, “you don’t have to pay the money back. The Lord says it’s Okay.” And if you just do what the prophet says, all the responsibility for your actions is now totally in his hands. You can refuse to pay the guy, or even kill somebody, or whatever, and feel completely good about it. And that’s a real big part of what holds this religion together: it’s not having to make those critical decisions that many of us have to make, and be responsible for your decisions.

 Exactly. It’s all about not thinking for yourselves, not being responsible for what you do wrong. One thing my MIL (fundamental Christian) always says when she sees/hears about someone doing something horrible, “Well, they’re not born again. They don’t have the spirit of Christ in them.” It’s the opposite of what was said above, but it’s the flip side of the same coin. It’s not allowing people to take their own responsibility. It’s not the murderers fault, he doesn’t have Christ. It comes from saying that things you do right aren’t your glory, but God’s glory, so therefore everything you do wrong isn’t God’s, it’s the sinful man. But Mormonism does the same thing. When you’re doing well, it’s the blessing of God, but when things go wrong, it’s either Satan tripping you up (if you’re TBM) or that Satan has a hold of you, you’re a Gentile, and you can’t help it. Nothing is of your own doing, nothing is your responsibility. Same with early Mormonism. Disobeying the law okay because it was sanctioned by God. (Although I agree with this in the fact of dictatorship and regimes like Hitler’s, but that’s a different thread.) Alright, thanks for reading all I had to say. Man, I talk a lot. I hope this is okay. I take notes while reading the books and want to share EVERYTHING I thought of with you all. If it’s not okay, and you’re rather me pose single issues or respond to the issues posted by the leaders, please let me know. Again, I’m fully aware that I talk too much. Just tell me to shut up.

So something else I've been thinking of:

Muslim terrorists are to Islam what the Lafferty brothers are to the LDS church. Thoughts, anyone?