Thinking Outside of the Gene Pool

Thursday, December 29, 2005
5:49 PM

Part One
Happiness is knowing that you've turned out pretty normal even if the rest of your family tree is loaded with nuts. Beside the fact that they're all dead, I believe there is one crucial difference between me and many of my departed ancestors: I discovered the life-and-death importance of independent rational thought. Let me explain.

John D. Lee

The man you're looking at is John Doyle Lee. My parents always spoke of him with a weird sort of admiration and reverence. They informed people with pride that we were related. My grandpa, Doyle Woolsey Humphries was even named after him. Their pictures look uncannily alike, but thankfully that's where the similarities stop. My grandpa was an honorable man for whom I still have a great deal of respect, and that's a hell of a lot more than I can say for his namesake.

On September 11, 1857, my great-great-great-great grandfather Lee, a Mormon Bishop in Southern Utah, helped slaughter 120 unarmed men women and children in what is now known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Although he had many accomplices, he was the only one executed. His membership in the Mormon church was restored posthumously in May of 1961.

To an outsider, it might seem strange that a confessed and executed murderer could eventually find his way back into the church. I think there are two possible explanations for this.

The first is the doctrine of blood atonement. Early Mormonism held that some crimes were so heinous that the only way to redeem oneself was to “have one's own blood spilt upon the ground” as an atonement. While this answer makes some sense on the surface, I think that lets the Mormon church off the hook far too easily.

From what I've read, I am more inclined to believe that Lee was reinstated because he was following orders. In his confession Lee said, “I believe that most of those who were connected with the Massacre, and took part in the lamentable transaction that has blackened the character of all who were aiders or abettors in the same, were acting under the impression that they were performing a religious duty. I know all were acting under the orders and by the command of their Church leaders; and I firmly believe that the most of those who took part in the proceedings, considered it a religious duty to unquestioningly obey the orders which they had received. That they acted from a sense of duty to the Mormon Church, I never doubted.”

“I am now cut off from the Church for obeying the orders of my superiors, and doing so without asking questions—for doing as my religion and my religious teachers had taught me to do. I am now used by the Mormon Church as a scape-goat to carry the sins of that people. My life is to be taken, so that my death may stop further enquiry[sic] into the acts of the members who are still in good standing in the Church.”

Did you catch that? He was just doing his job. He was obeying orders without asking questions. The most dangerous aspect of religion (and most political parties for that matter), is that eventually they ask you to surrender your mind. Ellsworth Toohey, the villain in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead summed up it up beautifully:

“If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn't make sense-you're ready for him. You tell him there's something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you can play it deuces wild.”

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