All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism.
No Man Knows My History, her magnificent, contentious biography of Joseph.
And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God – as the actions of Dan Lafferty vividly attest.
Laughter is always something that is a shared experience.
Mormon principles that had been forsaken by the modern LDS Church: plural marriage; the tenet that God and Adam, the first man, were one and the same; and the divinely ordained supremacy of the white race.
Like being free to think for yourself.
The impetus for most fundamentalist movements – whether Mormon, Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Muslim, or Jewish – is a yearning to return to the mythical order and perfection of the original church.
No Western nation is as religion-soaked as ours, where nine out of ten of us love God and are loved by him in return. That mutual passion centers our society and demands some understanding, if our doom-eager society is to be understood at all.
Uncle Rulon has married an estimated seventy-five women with whom he has fathered at least sixty-five children; several of his wives were given to him in marriage when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties.
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for ones neighbor – such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps – what more can the heart of a man desire?
As his sixth wife, Debbie became a stepmother to Blackmore’s thirty-one kids, most of whom were older than she was.
All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith.
Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur’an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.
They castrated him, cut his throat, sliced off one of his ears, and shot him two or three times.
It’s been estimated that approximately 85 percent of all rapes are in fact committed by assailants who are acquainted in some way with their victims, and that only a small percentage of these “non-stranger rapes” result in the successful prosecution of the rapist.
Salt Lake City, which became a crucial way station on the shortest route to the gold fields. The gold rush did have an upside; as the only game in town, Brigham was able to extort exorbitant prices from the Gentiles for provisions they needed to complete the long journey to California, giving the Saints desperately needed capital.
A large man, he cheerfully refers to the prison’s maximum-security unit as “my monastery.
As the dissimilar results from these two government surveys suggest, it is impossible to state with certainty how many women are raped each year. Quantifying the prevalence of sexual assault is a highly speculative exercise because at least 80 percent of those who are assaulted don’t report the crime to authorities.
President George W. Bush, who believes he is an instrument of God and characterizes international relations as a biblical clash between forces of good and evil.
There was too much of the Puritan in him, and he could not rest until he had redefined the nature of sin and erected a stupendous theological edifice to support his new theories on marriage.
Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community receives more than $6 million a year in public funds.