Blade_Runner wrote:
Craig Deleeuw Robertson? I'll lay odds he was a Mormon fundamentalist.
One woman who escaped a Mormon fundamentalist enclave wrote a book about her experiences.
She called the men "the American Taliban".
Jon Krakauer, author of such books as Into Thin Air: A personal account of the Mt Everest disaster
and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman also wrote a chilling book titled Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith.
Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to k**l their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this "divinely inspired" crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith.
Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty-thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the leaders of these outlaw sects are zealots who answer only to God. Marrying prodigiously and with virtual impunity (the leader of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five "plural wives," several of whom were wed to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties), fundamentalist prophets exercise absolute control over the lives of their followers, and preach that any day now the world will be swept clean in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.
Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism’s violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.
I've read most of Krakauer's books, including the three named. I've also read a half dozen other books on Mormon fundamentalists, mainly because I live among them. Those LDS Fundamentalists are some scary people.
Craig Deleeuw Robertson? I'll lay odds he was a Mo... (
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Yes, they are. Getting into our government should have been prevented.