I'm just thinking this morning about how what looks like heroism and sacrifice from one point of view looks like a terrible misdirection of human energies and a waste of the lives lost, from another.
Few incidents illustrate this bit of perspectivism better than the death of more than 200 of the so-called "handcart pioneers" in the spring and summer of 1856, an odd subplot within the story of Mormon westward migration.
If you don't know the story, here's one account.
Mormons see the handcart pioneers, more even than those who before them had made it out to the Great Salt Lake in covered wagons, as their church's answer to the Pilgrims and the hazardous crossing that ended at Plymouth.
David Roberts looked upon the handcart saga with a jaundiced eye -- jaundiced regarding Brigham Young's leadership in this connection especially -- in his recent book, Devil's Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy.
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Knowledge is warranted belief -- it is the body of belief that we build up because, while living in this world, we've developed good reasons for believing it. What we know, then, is what works -- and it is, necessarily, what has worked for us, each of us individually, as a first approximation. For my other blog, on the struggles for control in the corporate suites, see www.proxypartisans.blogspot.com.
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About Me
- Christopher
- Born in 1958, on the western side of the Tappan Zee, vocal at once, literate soon enough, and curious always. Mastodon
1 comment:
Thanks for your reply to my comments.
The piece I was recommending (on Quakers as 'a people') was by Chuck Fager: http://www.quaker.org/quest/peoplehood-1.htm
Fager points out that God might well choose more than one people for one job or another...
Rodger Kamenetz wrote of how the Dalai Lama invited a delegation of Jewish leaders to advise him & the Tibetan Buddhists on how to survive in exile as a people with a religious mission. (So there's an example Fager didn't think of.)
I would consider the Mormons to be another example... even though I have to share Mark Twain's impression of their writings.
This is REALLY weird, even from me! (I do, by the way, have Mormons in the family; although my mother had left the group, they had my great-grandfather's account of the walk.) When I was in Isla Vista in 1970, I met a prophet. (No, I did not examine his credentials, although this guy was impressive enough that I tended to take his word for it.) He said he had been sent to the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake, where he stood on the steps in his army blanket robe, and gave a message about what would happen if the Mormons failed to live up to their own doctrines. He was not asking anyone else to be Mormon; he was not saying the Mormons needed to follow anyone else's guidelines-- merely that they needed to live up to what they themselves had accepted.
They locked him up almost immediately. He said that another big bushy guy in an army blanket showed up right after him, and soon afterwards the authorities let him go.
Another odd thing about this... I have no doubt whatsoever that the Mormon scriptures are fictitious. So not only are human beings a little fuzzy about strict historical factuality; it may just not be one of God's priorities either. Plenty of time to correct that sort of error, if it matters.
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