Under the Banner of Heaven

On Amazon in around 2006 I left a nasty review of "Under the Banner of Heaven" (UBH) by John Krauker. What is strange is people who read my critique of UBH reached out to me trying to correct my Mormonism, ignoring my critiques of the book. (I am sure I will enjoy the TV series based on his book because I love me some true crime drama, and because I have enjoyed related media like the series "Big Love.") Here I will regale you with that tale and then illustrate how my views have matured since then.

UBH attacks LDS as a whipping boy for organized religion, using fringe cases of murder by extremists Mormons who aren't even LDS. Krauker blames LDS by way of association for these criminal actions, digging up Mountain Meadows Massacre drama, ignoring the historical context of how violent the Old West was in general. And he absolutely follows that up with anti-theist rants that struck me as somewhat Islamophobic when I read this book back in 2006-ish. 

After reading my review a sad man e-mailed me complaining about my review of UBH. LDS was bad because a friend of his had to sell space on her body for a tattoo artist to practice when a bishop wouldn't help her with rent money. (It was the Problem of Evil applied to LDS specifically: if God is Good, and God made Everything, how come Evil exists?) The sad man asked me how I dare defend such a violent religion, and complained that the LDS religion destroyed his family. The sad man's wife didn't leave him exclusively because of his abandoning of his faith, but apparently he wanted a lot of other things to change about their lifestyle and the wife and kids were not having that. 

So I replied to the sad man,"you say God could not have a church where in some cases it does not work as well as advertised for families, or a church where leaders make mistakes. But in school I have studied numerous global human services problems, and the one that haunts me is child soldiers in Africa. Those kids are forced to kill their own family members in front of the rest of their village so that they can never return, and then are used as sex slaves for that army until they are old enough to use an AK-47. If we can have a God that would allow something like that to happen, then I think that same God could have a Church with flawed leaders and flawed members." His reply expressed disgust for my my cynicism, and the conversation ended when I sent him the lyrics of this song:

LDS believe in the REAL divine, whatever that may be, and we do dare name that divine "Jesus." We live in the world we do, and it is a dark place. Jesus may have a very different value system from the rest of humanity. Or at least that's how I saw it then.

A few years ago I became interested in LDS apologetics because I had a younger friend who was interested in LDS and I thought he deserved betters answers than my dark rivethead views on life. Kwaku El on YouTube pointed out something I had always known about LDS but I didn't realize the philosophical significance of before: the LDS reject entirely the premise of Ex Nihilo.

Ex Nihilo is the belief that God makes things out of nothing. The problem is ancient peoples never experienced anything like that, and never believed anything like that: everything that was created in the ancient world was created from other raw materials. Ex Nihilo wasn't even formalized until the 2nd Century AD, so that none of the Christians, Jews, Samaritans, Romans, Philistines or anyone else you read about in the Bible ever actually believed that God "created the universe out of nothing."

The actual belief is that 1st century Christians and others at their time or before had was that God created the universe out of chaotic unorganized matter. LDS see all of humanity as "children of God," so that our mortal existence is part of an ongoing act of creation, as we become more God-like through trying to be better people and through our eventual Resurrection from death. Life is then an ongoing battle between God and chaos.

As someone with a lefty activist background, I never really identified with the "warrior codes" (Chivalry, Bushido, etc.) found in the martial arts, because I didn't see myself as a warrior, but as part of a resistance against oppression.  But seeing Kwaku El's point here helps me appreciate the role of the warrior, because we like God fight to establish the order we desire in a chaotic and unforgiving universe. The world is indeed a dark place, but that's not God's fault.

So again I reject Krauker's anti-thesim in UBH. In Tai Chi we realize that when things are good it is time to watch out for vulnerabilities, but when times are bad it's time to search for and exploit opportunities. A dark chaotic world is an opportunity for us to create the world WE want to have, and we do so primarily by choosing what rules we want to live by. You may not like the can-of-answers that is the LDS religion, but your contempt for my empowerment sounds like a you problem.