The Tanners, of course, have had their collective output debunked for years now. Feel free to do some reading up on it.

@Christy:

I’m offering the link for pretty much everyone but PA Cat, who I know won’t touch the link even with a ten-foot pole that’s been blessed by the top ten best-selling evangelical authors of your local bookstore. I learned the following the hard way during Mitt’s last “official” run for President: Someone who’s gone out of their way to post the usual nonsense on-line is someone who’s already convinced that Mormons aren’t merely dupes of Satan but are instead actually conspirators with Satan. All we can do in our defense on-line is offer information to a curious lurking audience who, hopefully, understand that books with titles like “The TRUTH About Mormons!” or whatever don’t offer much in the way of actual truth. It’s true of like books about pretty much every sect so targeted, but, being Mormon and a reader of this particular blog, I feel I have a vested interest in offering at the very least a link or two when some hoary old chestnut like “blood atonement” comes up.

I’ll go back to silently following the blog now.

Freudian negligee?

Yours and Christy’s comments are a nice counterpoint.
Of course, there is unintended piquancy in Christy’s assertion that “blood atoning…was done vicariously through sacrificial animals”.

As if finding a substitute scapegoat in a person of one ancient Jew crucified 2010 years ago makes it somehow principally different. Speaking of scapegoats – Judaism, too, has quite a few remnants of the same antique tradition, if only symbolically now. Not so much requiring suspension of disbelief as Jesus’ blood and flesh transformed into wine and bread, though.

Granted, I may be an unusual Mormon, but the blood atonement teaching of the church matches the rest of Christiandom, i.e. – Jesus did all the blood atoning and before that it was done vicariously through sacrificial animals. Never in any of the teachings are members taught that their sins are paid for with their own blood. In fact, this goes against the basic teachings of the atonement and the gospel.

Don’t know where the other people are getting their information from, but it’s not church teaching. This is verifiable through research into older church publications straight from the top (i.e. – the First Presidency), not the misunderstandings of people who have an agenda against the church.

Here is a link to an article on the history underlying the Mormon teaching about blood atonement. The authors are a husband and wife (still living in Salt Lake City, I think) who grew up Mormon and left the church after they began to do historical research into early Mormonism. At the time this article was first published, the Tanners ran an outreach ministry to former Mormons and those considering leaving.

http://www.exmormon.org/bloodatn.htm

Hope it helps fill in the background of the doctrine for you.

The world is too much with me tonight, I’m afraid.