The Bibles were safe the night Christ Episcopal Church turned to tinder, allegedly at the hands of Caleb Uriah Lussier, police said Monday.
Lussier, 20, allegedly confessed to police that he used gasoline to torch the church in late May after he gathered the Bibles in a bag and placed them outside the reach of the flames.
Lussier, of Plymouth, Mass., is a student at the Word of Life Bible Institute in Schroon Lake, not far from Christ Episcopal. Investigators said he acted out of a religious zeal that also may have played a role in a fire at another church in his hometown and in threats against three other houses of worship.
Warren County Sheriff Larry Cleveland said Lussier thought the members of Christ Church were hypocrites who deviated from the teachings of the Bible and the word of God. He allegedly robbed the church twice in May. On one occasion he left behind a message written in a Bible: "You've been warned." On May 30, a fire at the 77-year-old church burned out of control before firefighters arrived.
[Lussier was only following Exodus 23:24, 34:11, Numbers 33:50-52, Deuteronomy 7:5, 13:12. Deuteronomy even specifies that arson is the approved method. 'Yeah, but that's the wicked Jewish part of the Bible, we follow Jesus!' Okay, then take a bite out of James 2:10. Maybe religion itself is a bad idea.]
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."