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ladynutelladuck 's review for:
Under the Banner of Heaven
by Jon Krakauer
TL;DR: hours of my life wasted. Wish I'd known about Elder Turley's review first.
I bet this was the author's thought process: hey, I just heard this news story about some crazy Mormon murders, and apparently they left their religion to be fundamentalist wackos, so here's my perfect opportunity to find everything negative about all iterations of that religion and mash 'em all up together into a whole book of mixed up, at-times-deliberately-misleading, misinformation. If his thesis that Mormon-adjacent and original Latter-day Saint religions breed violence and indoctrination is true, you’d see way more evidence, but the fact that he has to do so much reaching back into history and looking at things through a clearly biased lens as he writes smear campaigns is pretty telling that he’s just angry, mean, confused, etc. and doesn’t care to learn or believe anything good about the religions for whatever reason. Of course there will be bad eggs; there are in any group, and even the best leaders make bad decisions and at times horrible mistakes, but it’s unfair to talk about whole groups as if they’re as evil and stupid as the worst thing someone has done. The point is how they react, change, and grow. This book took me so long to get through because it was just so annoying wading through the bias, wrong things stated as fact, cherry-picked quotes, and dramatic-sounding historical events often discussed without the context of their history or citations.
He got a bunch of not-insignificant details wrong, plus there are a few updates needed since the writing in 2003. There were WAY too many to fit here, so I put them on my blog. What a slog.
I bet this was the author's thought process: hey, I just heard this news story about some crazy Mormon murders, and apparently they left their religion to be fundamentalist wackos, so here's my perfect opportunity to find everything negative about all iterations of that religion and mash 'em all up together into a whole book of mixed up, at-times-deliberately-misleading, misinformation. If his thesis that Mormon-adjacent and original Latter-day Saint religions breed violence and indoctrination is true, you’d see way more evidence, but the fact that he has to do so much reaching back into history and looking at things through a clearly biased lens as he writes smear campaigns is pretty telling that he’s just angry, mean, confused, etc. and doesn’t care to learn or believe anything good about the religions for whatever reason. Of course there will be bad eggs; there are in any group, and even the best leaders make bad decisions and at times horrible mistakes, but it’s unfair to talk about whole groups as if they’re as evil and stupid as the worst thing someone has done. The point is how they react, change, and grow. This book took me so long to get through because it was just so annoying wading through the bias, wrong things stated as fact, cherry-picked quotes, and dramatic-sounding historical events often discussed without the context of their history or citations.
He got a bunch of not-insignificant details wrong, plus there are a few updates needed since the writing in 2003. There were WAY too many to fit here, so I put them on my blog. What a slog.