Under the Banner of Heaven
May 21st, 2005 at 10:07 pm by Susie
Have you adopted your embryo yet? Via Echidne, we learn the federal government is actually inviting grant applications for this purpose.
I read this and thought, how about this? Before we start bombing Iran, what if we all start adopting Iranian infants and toddlers - you know, the ones we’re going to kill?
These people are plain fucking insane, and it’s all in the name of God’s will.
I recently read “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith,” which is a fascinating, thought-provoking book. (See, I read non-fiction, too.) While it starts out as a true-crime story of the “In Cold Blood” variety, it takes an interesting turn.
The murderers in this story were Mormon fundamentalists who brutally stabbed and killed their young sister-in-law and her 18-month-old baby because… well, God told them to. (Just as God told another Mormon fundamentalist to kidnap Elizabeth Smart and make her one of his wives.)
Author Jon Krakauer leads us through the history of the Mormon Church, explaining the individual quirks that led to controversial church dogma like polygamy. (It seems Joseph Smith decided God wouldn’t allow him to have the hots for so many young girls unless it was natural and good. When his angry wife responded that God must want her to have additional husbands as well, God immediately and rather conveniently gave Smith a specific directive telling Smith’s wife she was to remain faithful.)
Krakauer raises the very real hazards of breaking the wall of church-state separation, dissects the intent of our country’s founders and addresses the hazards of allowing fundamentalist, revelation-based faiths to act unchecked.
Because when individual revelation becomes the foundation of “righteous” action, we get into some very sticky territory, indeed. (Such as when three-day-old embryos are considered full-fledged human beings.) What happens when your personal revelation contradicts my personal revelation?
Truly fascinating book, with an important lesson for these times.
What happens when your personal revelation contradicts my personal revelation?
well, that’s when we go to war.
RE
Before we start bombing Iran, what if we all start adopting Iranian infants and toddlers – you know, the ones we’re going to kill?
Great idea. But let me me make a small add that’ll make it even more effctive to disrupt the cognates of Bush Junior and his army of Jar Jar Binks clones…Adopt IRANIAN FETUSes.
Protecting “unborn babies” good. Once they pass beyond that state and become “undead corpses”, they are merely missile-meat.
One other twist on the promotion. Few of the Bush Junior team or their alliews in the field know Iran = Persia. So if you started a campaign to protect unborn Persians, they might join against their own stated purposes out of sheer ignorance.
Will you promote this Save The Unborn Persians. I’ll make the buttons…
There is a standard for judging revelation, called guru-sadhu-shastra. For any question of religion, in the answer there must be agreement between one’s spiritual master, saintly persons, and scripture. No person other than the God has the ability to formulate a bona fide religious process.