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The death of “blood atonement?”

February 8, 2011 by McKay Jones

My “blood atonement” article (“Dead Men Tell No Tales: The Blood Atonement Balance Sheet”) is up on the main web site:

/Misc/Dead_Men_Tell_No_Tales.html

It’s a long one (109 footnotes), but well worth the read, in my opinion. I think much of the material will be new for even those who are well-read in things Mormon. Much more so (in spades) for those who happily parade the standard “blood atonement” proof-texts from Journal of Discourses as devastating to Mormon claims that their prophets and apostles were divinely called and sanctioned.

This material is a very small part of some books I’m working on focusing on topics in Journal of Discourses. I have made my own detailed index on over a hundred topics (apologetic, Church-related, background, humor, etc.), which is much more detailed than the standard one published by BYU in 1959 (which listed only seven references for “blood atonement”).

Feedback is more than welcome . . .

Filed Under: Anti-Mormon critics, Doctrine, Temples

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Dave says

    February 9, 2011 at 6:10 am

    The link is incomplete. This gets you there:

    http://www.fairlds.org/Misc/Dead_Men_Tell_No_Tales.html

  2. McKay Jones says

    February 9, 2011 at 6:52 am

    Thank you, Dave. I’ve updated it in the original post as well (although I couldn’t figure out how to make it a live link).

  3. Trevor Holyoak says

    February 9, 2011 at 1:29 pm

    I made it into a live link for you.

  4. Jared says

    February 9, 2011 at 2:06 pm

    Excellent article. There were plenty of quotes that I had not seen before, many that got me thinking about modern social issues that we face, such as illegal immigration.

    FYI – There were a number of individual characters that didn’t render correctly in my browser, you might look and replace them with the proper html codes for those characters, or make sure that the http headers specify the proper encoding for the file. Using html codes is probably the easiest.

  5. McKay Jones says

    February 10, 2011 at 6:08 am

    Jared:

    I would be interested in your thoughts on modern social issues that reading this spurred. Would you mind elaborating?

    Thanks!

  6. Cassandra says

    February 11, 2011 at 10:34 am

    Hi McKay,

    Fantastic article. I’d love it someone (maybe I will) would follow up with a more generalized survey of American Protestant rhetoric at the time, to tie the Mormon statements into the broader cultural acceptance of strident and vivid religious threats. Jonathan Edwards alone would be a goldmine. Do you know if an article like this has already been published?

  7. McKay Jones says

    February 11, 2011 at 12:34 pm

    I think that would be a valuable follow-up. Consider yourself commissioned!

    I have found that this is a helpful secondary approach with many other favorite topics as well.

  8. Cecily Malkoski says

    April 6, 2011 at 5:54 am

    I truly desire spammers study these articles and check out how painless it will be human and value understanding.

Trackbacks

  1. Tweets that mention The death of “blood atonement?” | FAIR Blog -- Topsy.com says:
    February 9, 2011 at 2:16 pm

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by LDS Blogs, FAIRLDS. FAIRLDS said: http://www.fairblog.org/2011/02/08/the-death-of-blood-atonement/ […]

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