A felucca on the River Nile at sunset. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph by Ian Pudsley.). We took many such rides on the Nile — it was, for example, a Cairo Branch tradition to load every member onto one or two large boats for Easter sunrise gatherings — and we still love to include such an evening cruise for guests on our tours to Egypt.
Up today, on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:
Last weekend, my wife and I enjoyed an outdoor, physically-distanced, partially potluck dinner in the backyard of the widow of our good friend and former branch president in Cairo, my eventual colleague on the faculty at Brigham Young University (on whom, see “Arnold H. Green [1940-2019]” and “Bidding Farewell to Arnie Green”). Also there, with their wives and a daughter, were my former mentor, colleague, and department chair Dil Parkinson, now retired, and Joey Green, Arnie and Lani’s son, who was a very young boy when we first met him in Egypt and who has somehow managed to combine a passion for jazz guitar and the novels of Jane Austen with a highly successful and still unfolding career in the military. (See “Joseph Green: Fully Committed.”)
We had a very enjoyable time, not only eating and reminiscing but, well, discussing such subjects as film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels and Dil’s challenging work on a not yet complete new translation of the Book of Mormon into Arabic.
A couple of weeks ago, the anonymous perennial detractor whom I’ve dubbed my “Mini-Stalker” was shedding his usual crocodile tears about my sad hate- and anger-driven career, which has brought such shame on my church and my university. His specific theme, this time, was my ever-accelerating descent into obscurity. irrelevance, and loneliness. There can be no doubt that he’s right, of course, and that my depressing fate is richly merited and entirely just. Still, I take comfort and satisfaction in the fact that I’ll be accompanied to my solitary and disgraced exile by such good friends.
***
I hope that you enjoyed General Conference today as much as I did. I’m looking forward to the Sunday sessions.
Cape Foulweather, on the Oregon coast, received its name in 1778 from Captain James Cook. In this photograph, it doesn’t appear to merit the title, but things can change. Crowding and “social distancing” are not major problems in places such as this.
I’ve been encountering the claim, of late, that the Centers for Disease Control have finally been forced to admit that they’ve grossly inflated the death toll caused by the coronavirus “hoax” — the phony “scamdemic,” as one person put it. This is not only wrong, it’s dangerously wrong. If it’s taken as true, it will likely lead many Americans into risky behavior that will kill people — if not themselves, then others around them.
“Orac” is the blogging pseudonym of David Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. Here’s what he has to say on the topic:
My wife and I are fanatical theater-goers. (That’s scarcely surprising: She was a theater major.). But we’ve canceled all of our season theater tickets. Even where plays were being staged, we concluded that we just didn’t want to be among such crowds. Where we haven’t had major trips canceled on us, we’ve canceled them ourselves. We stay almost entirely at home. We wear masks when we go out. We haven’t seen our children and grandchildren who live in the eastern United States and in Latin America for months, except via computer. (This is extremely distressing to my wife.)
We’re particularly concerned, not only that we not contract COVID-19 ourselves but that we not in any way risk transmitting the coronavirus to my wife’s father, who is quite healthy for his age but who is well into his mid-nineties.
Still, we did, for quite specific reasons that I will not outline here, take two substantial trips this past summer, one to Colorado and one to the Oregon coast.
(My most implacable critics will demand to know those reasons, of course. They somehow seem to imagine that they’ve earned the right to audit my personal finances and to subject me to an invasive public moral colonoscopy and, absent such examinations, to pronounce me guilty. I don’t grant them that right. And the guilty verdict is a foregone conclusion in any event.)
We stayed in lodgings that had been — we inquired into this — meticulously cleaned. We ate almost entirely in our lodgings, but occasionally bought drive-through food from restaurants. Our visits, in our own automobile, were almost entirely to wild and unpopulated places in the Rockies and along the Pacific Ocean. We went to Rocky Mountain National Park and to Dinosaur National Monument, complying with all masking and distancing regulations, gaining access only subject to careful limits and control by the National Park Service. We wore masks. We washed our hands frequently. We carried hand sanitizer with us and in our car, and we used it often.
This angered my most obsessive online critics, nonetheless. (Big surprise!) They pronounced me selfish, arrogant, hypocritical, and indifferent to the suffering and possible death of those upon whom my baneful shadow might fall. On several occasions, one of them labeled me a “murderer.” My Malevolent Stalker, unusually candid about the judgment of me that has inspired him to devote daily time to condemning me for the past fifteen years, declared me “human garbage.”
From a late-16th-century manuscript of the Qur’an’s Surat al-Kahf (“Sura of the Cave”) Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph
This Muslim emphasis on the words and style of the Arabic Qur’an was vividly illustrated for me once on a trip, many years ago now, to Cyprus. That island, of course, is divided between Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks. I found myself, one day, driving with my wife and others in the Turkish part of the island. It occurred to me that I ought to buy a Turkish translation of the Qur’an while I was there and use it to try to improve my understanding of that language. So I went into a small village bookstore that seemed likely and, after a while, emerged with what I thought was a Turkish Qur’an. I climbed into the car and, as we drove away, removed the wrapper and began to leaf through my new book. I was amazed at how much I could understand. Although it was in Roman letters (the alphabet that modern Turkish uses), it contained an astonishing number of Arabic words. In fact, once I was used to seeing them in my own alphabet, I realized that every single word in the book was Arabic! “What on earth?” I thought. For a few seconds, I was a bit upset. I had asked for a Turkish Qur’an, but had ended up only with a bizarre version of the familiar Arabic original. Then I realized that this was actually something quite important. This was the Arabic Qur’an put into letters that a Turkish Muslim could read; it would enable him to recite the Qur’an in its original language with something like the accurate sounds. He probably wouldn’t understand much of it, because if he knew Arabic he would be able to read it in the Arabic alphabet. (We would never produce such a volume in Mormonism. Can you imagine a Chinese transliteration of the Book of Mormon? Not a translation, mind you, but simply a rendering of the English sounds into Chinese characters so that uncomprehending members of the Church in Taiwan and Hong Kong could sound out English phrases like “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents”? It’s inconceivable.)
Muslims are virtually unanimous in insisting that the Qur’an cannot be translated. One devout English convert to Islam, a man who ended up with the improbable name of Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, put it this way in the foreword to his translation of the Muslims’ holy book:
The Koran cannot be translated. That is the belief of old-fashioned Sheykhs and the view of the present writer. The Book is here rendered almost literally and every effort has been made to choose befitting language. But the result is not the Glorious Koran, that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy. It is only an attempt to present the meaning of the Koran—and peradventure something of the charm—in English. It can never take the place of the Koran in Arabic, nor was it meant to do so.[1]
It was on the basis of such reasoning that Pickthall chose to call his translation, not “The Koran,” but The Meaning of the Glorious Koran. Other translators, such as the illustrious A. J. Arberry, have shown similar modesty in denying that what they have produced in English is actually the Qur’an. (Arberry’s version is The Koran Interpreted.) Instead, what they have given us, they say, is merely the basic meaning of the text. The intoxicating magic of the book’s language, its “poetry,” its powerful emotional impact, cannot be conveyed across the language frontier. In the Muslim view, there is saving value in reciting the actual words of God, spoken to Muhammad. And those words were in Arabic, not in English or Turkish or any other language. That is why a Turkish Muslim might value the book I found as a way of entering into the language of God himself, where meaning is only a fraction of the divine power.
[1] Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, translator, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (New York: New American Library, n.d.), vii. Some of my own observations on the literary quality of the Qur’an appear in my “Editor’s Introduction: By What Measure Shall We Mete?” in Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 2 (1990): vii-xxvi.
***
The new academic year is about to begin, an odder one than any of us have ever experienced, and I’m scheduled to teach three courses, on (1) the religion of Islam, (2) the humanities of Islam, and (3) classical Arabic literature. I’ve been teaching such subjects, and writing and speaking on them, for decades.
In that light, it’s bizarre but true to form that my Malevolent Stalker is once again publicly claiming (and that at least some of his chorus of gullible groupies are singing harmony with him) that I characteristically denigrate and demean the religious faith of others, that I hold non-Latter-day Saint religious beliefs and religious believers in resentful disrespect, and that I even hope to inflict “pain” (his word) on those who don’t share my religious beliefs.
The sheer hateful dishonesty of his accusation is breathtaking. And it is dishonest. My Malevolent Stalker has been on a crusade against me for roughly fifteen years. Among other things, he follows this blog obsessively, every day, looking for material that he can weaponize against me — and mines IRS records looking for dirt on me, and pores over my little son’s Amazon wish lists from years back, and combs through obscure blogs looking for mentions of me, and probably examines the trash in my garbage cans during the middle of the night — so he’s definitely aware of such entries as this one, from 19 June 2020:
The Kinshasa Democratic Republic of the Congo Temple (LDS Media Library)
I’ve now managed to locate the conversation (so to speak) about Holocaust victims and the Latter-day Saint practice of vicarious baptisms for the dead to which I alluded in yesterday’s post. It occurred on Tracing the Tribe: The Jewish Genealogy Blog, and it commenced on 17 December 2006. My participation there will serve to illustrate the old adage “Fools rush in, where angels fear to tread.” I post this not to rekindle discussion of the question of vicarious baptism and Holocaust victims, but for the sake of a minor bit of history (including personal history):
My first entry is marked 3:08 PM, and it reads, in toto, as follows:
Some very quick observations from a believing member of the so-called Mormon Church:
(1)
To Rabbi Hier’s remark that “It is sacrilegious for the Mormon faith to desecrate [Simon Wiesenthal’s] memory by suggesting that Jews on their own are not worthy enough to receive G-ds’ eternal blessing,” I would respond that we Latter-day Saints do, quite unapologetically, insist that Jews “are not worthy enough to receive G-d’s eternal blessing” “on their own.”
It’s a fundamental Christian belief that nobody is.
(2)
I don’t believe that I should attempt to dictate Rabbi Hier’s theology. Likewise, I don’t believe that he should attempt to dictate mine.
(3)
For reasons perhaps best known to her, Helen Radkey hates my Church, and is always seeking to do it damage.
(4)
The Church cannot realistically be expected to control what individual members do in terms of submitting names for temple work. It can control what information it offers and encourage or discourage certain things, but it cannot systematically patrol all name-submissions to make sure that they’re not Jewish or that those who bore the names didn’t spend time in a concentration camp.
(5)
Systematically barring work for “Jewish names” would bar many seemingly Jewish names that are, in fact, not Jewish.
(6)
Systematically barring work for Jews that we Latter-day Saints regard as salvific would itself be an act of racist discrimination.
(7)
Systematically barring work for Jews would be an act of injustice towards Mormons with Jewish relatives (e.g., my wife).
(8)
It strikes me as odd that Rabbi Hier and many Jews seem to grant the efficacy of vicarious temple service. I would have expected them to simply brush it aside as, at best, well-intentioned mumbo jumbo.
(9)
I’m not sure why some Jews appear to be offended by Mormon temple service on behalf of Jews. Jews have precious few friends around the world. They should not be seeking to alienate Mormons, who are deeply philosemitic. Is it really not relevant that Mormons typically treat living Jews well, and are, by and large, enthusiastic supporters of Israel?
(10)
If somebody were praying for my conversion, or lighting candles on my behalf, or seeking to baptize me by proxy into some other faith, it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. I would most likely regard it as an act of intended kindness, however I felt about the faith being “offered” to me.
I’m reminded of a story that I was told many years ago, about Joseph Fielding Smith, a Mormon apostle who ultimately served in the early 1970s as the overall president of the Church, and who was anything but an ecumenist or a theological liberal.
It seems, if the story is true, that his daughter went to Holy Cross Hospital (a Roman Catholic institution) in Salt Lake City to have a baby. There were complications, and it was feared for a short time that the baby might die. So, as good Catholics are wont to do in such cases, the nurses baptized the baby.
Elder Smith’s daughter was very upset when she eventually learned of the baptism, and expressed her concern to her father.
“Don’t worry, dear,” he chuckled. “It’ll wash off.”
I’m sure he saw the baptism as a kindly, well-intended action performed by faithful people whose faith he didn’t share. That’s all.
I suppose that he could have huffed and puffed and screeched that it was an insult to make his grandbaby a Catholic. But he didn’t believe that it was an insult. And he didn’t believe that it had made his grandchild into a Roman Catholic.
(11)
My father participated, as a member of the 11th Armored Division, in the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Mauthausen, Austria — the camp in which Simon Wiesenthal was a prisoner. It was a life-transforming experience for my father. His specialty was aerial-reconnaissance photo-interpretation, which was in relatively little demand at the very conclusion of the war, and so one of his duties after the camp’s liberation was to photographically document Nazi crimes there. He organized a display of those photographs in the city square of nearby Linz, as an early effort at de-Nazification of the populace, under the title of “Nazi-Kultur.” (They are unspeakably horrific and gruesome.) My brother and I have been preparing a complete set of copies of those photographs for donation to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
I find it deeply ironic, in that light, that my father’s, my brother’s, and my faith is now being depicted by certain rabblerousers as an insult to the memory of Simon Wiesenthal.
(12)
I hope that Jews, of all people, will be very careful not to entertain the kind of religious hatred and bigotry that some will undoubtedly attempt to inflame over this issue (and that is already evident in some of the comments by other posters above).
The last paragraph was an acknowledgment of the fact that, already at that early point of the exchange, the “discussion” had been largely taken over by bitter enemies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who had no discernible connection with Jews or Judaism. That fact rapidly became even more obvious. And, as soon as I appeared, intense antipathy toward mepersonally became a recurrent theme, as well.
For some reason, most of the comments (though not all of them) now appear as written by “Anonymous.” Still, based on a quick skim through the thread, I appear to have posted again at 5:03 PM.
Then, on the next day, at
10:57 AM
11:20 AM
12:12 PM
12:45 PM
1:49 PM
2:13 PM
2:23 PM
2:49 PM
3:27 PM
6:48 PM
12:19 PM
12:26 PM
2:06 PM
3:42 PM
4:03 PM
11:06 AM
11:26 AM
12:32 PM
1:18 PM
5:34 PM
9:47 PM
Too much time, obviously. But it was Christmas vacation, and I was almost certainly taking breaks from reading student papers and grading final examinations. Having invested so much effort in the exchange, though, I’m not unhappy to have found it again and to make it available to any with a taste for the bizarre and the bitter. Although — I haven’t re-read it in detail yet — there might be places where I would change a formulation slightly, I stand by the position that I articulated there fourteen years ago.
Two observations:
Ever since this exchange, my Malevolent Stalker has suggested that I harbor anti-Semitism and disdain for Jews. He does so on the basis of my having written that “Latter-day Saints do, quite unapologetically, insist that Jews ‘are not worthy enough to receive G-d’s eternal blessing “on their own.”‘” I do not recall his ever including the sentence that follows immediately thereafter: “It’s a fundamental Christian belief that nobody is.”
The other sentence that he’s repeatedly used to brand me as an anti-Jewish bigot over the past fourteen years is my observation that “Jews have precious few friends around the world.” He claims to believe that it was an anti-Semitic taunt and a threat. I was aware of his abuse of the observation already back in December of 2016, and I addressed it in my final comment on the thread, at 9:47 PM on 19 December (?):
In my first post here, I commented, among other things, that “Jews have precious few friends around the world.”
I see on at least two zealously anti-Mormon message boards that that comment is being taken as clear evidence of my alleged anti-Semitism.
I suspect that Jewish readers here (if there are any) will have taken it in the spirit in which it was intended, which was precisely the opposite of the way in which my detractors here and elsewhere have wanted to see it.
As an Arabist, I’m painfully aware of the virulently anti-Jewish propaganda and attitudes that have been spreading for years throughout the rapidly-growing and rapidly-radicalizing Muslim world. As someone who has lived in Europe, travels there frequently, and tries to keep up on intellectual, cultural, and political trends in several of the European languages, I’m also acutely aware of the rise of (real) anti-Semitism there, and of the often somewhat irrational hostility to Israel that seems to be running rampant not only among skinheads but also among some of the elite political, cultural, and intellectual strata. I’ve also noticed a rise in anti-Semitism in certain portions of the African-American community. I find this all deeply distressing.
That was what I had in mind.
Anything but “anti-Semitic” . . . as I trust Jewish readers of my comments here to understand.
There is simply no good excuse for continuing to exploit that observation as evidence that I’m a religious bigot and an anti-Semite. Which, I know, will not dissuade my Malevolent Stalker from so exploiting it.
Please note, too, the comments by David Bokovoy at 12:26 PM and 3:43 PM (presumably posted on 18 December 2006, the next day), and at 8:36 AM (on 19 December?). David was, at the time, still an active and believing Latter-day Saint who had recently finished or was just completing his doctorate in Hebrew Bible at the noted greater-Boston Jewish institution Brandeis University. I also appreciated the “Anonymous” comment at 4:23 PM (18 December?).
The plenary hall of the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph by Nichollas Harrison)
I have an anonymous critic — I call him my Malevolent Stalker — who has been publicly faulting my character, my appearance, my literary tastes, my religious views, my travels, my scholarship, my friends, and indeed all my works almost every single day for the past fifteen years or so. Yesterday, he accused me of holding non-Latter-day Saints, non-Latter-day Saint religious faiths, and non-Latter-day Saint beliefs in disrespect and contempt, effectively of being a religious bigot.
Although much more could be offered, I believe that the following response should be adequate to counter the accusation:
For approximately thirty-five years, I have taught the humanities of the Islamic world at Brigham Young University.
For roughly the same period, I have taught introductory courses on the religion of Islam at BYU.
For roughly the same period, I have taught a course on Islamic philosophy, concentrating almost entirely (and entirely sympathetically) on religious issues.
Once or twice, I have included The Guide of the Perplexed (by Moses Maimonides, the Arabic-writing greatest of all medieval rabbis) in that Islamic philosophy course.
For nearly the same time, I have alternated teaching courses on the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, in Arabic and English.
I founded BYU’s Islamic Translation Series, and led it for many years.
I founded BYU’s Eastern Christian Texts series, and led it for many years.
I founded BYU’s series on the Medical Works of Moses Maimonides, and led it for many years.
In connection with those publishing ventures, I have lectured at, among other places, the British Library, the University of Jordan, Damascus University, the Jordanian embassy in Washington DC, the embassy of Saudi Arabia, the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, the Iran International Conference Center, and the United Nations in New York.
I have lectured in both Arabic and English at Islamic universities in Indonesia and at Cairo’s Al-Azhar, the premiere and oldest Islamic university in the Arab world
I have lectured repeatedly on Islam at BYU’s annual Education Week, in Provo and even, once, in Rexburg, to very large audiences in main lecture halls.
I have lectured on Islam around the world — on every inhabited continent except South America, in both German and English — to popular audiences of both Latter-day Saints and non-Latter-day Saints in an effort to increase mutual sympathy and understanding.
I have lectured on Islam in non-Latter-day Saint churches, as well as in synagogues and mosques, in several different countries.
I have participated twice (speaking three times) in the international Parliament of the World’s Religions.
During one of those international Parliaments, in Melbourne, Australia, I chaired a plenary session in the main hall of the city’s conference center that included (among others) Feisal Abdul Rauf and Tariq Ramadan.
I have participated in multiple interfaith dialogues and “trialogues” across the United States, as well as in Austria, Israel, Spain, and Malta.
I am currently involved in the planning of a major conference on Islam to be convened at Brigham Young University late next year.
As I say, I could add much more. But that’s enough for now.
I honestly don’t see the point of such transparent falsehoods as this one, leveled by my Malevolent Stalker. Granted, he posts his accusations in a small corner of the internet, to an audience pre-programmed to accept them. But the offense is particularly egregious in this specific area, where my record is so long, so public, so unambiguous, and so well-documented. It’s presumably not coincidental that my accuser takes his online pseudonym from that of a character on a popular television crime show — a highly intelligent but boundlessly malicious and unscrupulous stalker, psychological manipulator, and serial murderer. People find inspiration where it suits them.
This dome atop Mount Wilson houses the telescope used by Edwin Hubble when he discovered the general expansion of the universe. Along with Mount Palomar to the south, it was one of the principal places where Hubble’s great student and my longtime San Gabriel neighbor Allen Sandage did much of his work. Mount Wilson was perhaps the principal and most familiar feature of my natural environment. I saw it nearly every day of my childhood and youth. I visited it (and Mount Palomar) multiple times with my family, on school fieldtrips, and even on dates. (NASA public domain photograph)
I’m shocked and dismayed at the number of people who still don’t appear to be taking COVID-19 seriously. For those — and especially for the young and, therefore, the immortal among them — I offer some links. The first, especially, should be rather sobering:
And now I transition from the very small and invisible to the chronologically far distant and virtually unimaginable:
The following two quotations come from Richard Panek, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Mariner Books, 2011). They refer to the MIT theoretical physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth:
According to his calculations, the universe had gone through a monumental expansion in its first moment of existence. At the age of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one second – or 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000 th of a second – the universe had expanded ten septillion-fold – or to 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times its previous size. (126)
Guth found that if you apply that transformation mathematically to the conditions of the early universe, the phase transition would have produced a temporary vacuum. That vacuum, in turn, would have produced a negative pressure – a strong gravitational repulsion – that would have expanded space exponentially. The universe would have doubled in size, then doubled in size again, then doubled in size yet again. It would have done this at least a hundred times, and it would have done so over the course of 10-35 seconds (or 1/1035). After that, the vacuum would have decayed, the exponential expansion would have stopped, and the standard expansion of the universe – the one in the Big Bang theory that we can see for ourselves in the redshifting of the light from distant galaxies – would have begun. (127)
***
In other news:
For roughly thirty hours, thus far, the message board where my Malevolent Stalker, his mendacious wannabe the Mini-Stalker, and several others have anonymously published their work for approximately a decade and a half has been down. Now, I know that I should have more sympathy. But I frankly think it’s rather pleasant that, for part of two days now — to pick up just a few of the Peterson-related themes that were really, literally, trending on the board immediately before it went down — they’ve been unable to continue with their earnest discussions not only of such standard-issue topics as my 2012 purging from the Maxwell Institute, my mean-spiritedness, greed, dishonesty, physical ugliness, racism, and hatred of homosexuals; the viciousness of this blog; and the embarrassingly low quality of the Interpreter Foundation’s yet-unreleased Witnesses film; but of how, by distracting one of its central participants from his urgent professional work, this blog has interfered with Utah’s response to the coronavirus, and how my hatred and fear of science, if they were to spread to the general public, would make fighting COVID-19 almost impossible, and how I need to be more charitable to others.
So far as I’m aware, I haven’t yet been determined to be the cause of Utah’s recent earthquake or the locust plague in Africa and the Middle East.
“The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth,” by Jennie A. Brownscombe (1914) Wikimedia Commons public domain image
My anonymous but indefatigable Malevolent Stalker has just posted a condemnatory analysis of the way I spent my time on Thanksgiving Day 2019. Based on his careful study of my blog posts for that day, last Thursday, he concludes that I neglected and ignored my family on Thanksgiving.
This is important to him. He cares. He cares about me. He cares about my family. He’s been closely monitoring me for fifteen years now, and commenting continually about me during that time — always negatively — online. So I want to set his mind at rest, and, at the same time, to set him another task.
My family and I didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday at all.
Let me explain why.
Like several other members of the extended family, I was sick. Some family members also had scheduling problems (with other kinfolk, elsewhere) on Thursday. Furthermore, a monster snow storm was said to be coming for the day. (It turned out to be rather underwhelming, but we didn’t yet know that it wouldn’t really be, as some forecasts put it, “historic.”) So, on Wednesday afternoon, we decided to postpone our Thanksgiving observance until Sunday. We’ve never done that before, but we figured that doing so might allow some of us to feel better and to be less contagious, that it would get us past the threatened storm, and that it would permit some family members to be there who otherwise couldn’t be.
I hope that the Stalker will be relieved to know that we did, in fact, gather together as a family in Bountiful, Utah, after church on Sunday. My wife and I were there. Her father was there. So were two of her brothers and her sister. So were various spouses and children. We had a good time together. We spent quality time with each other. We ate turkey and dressing and cranberries and pumpkin pie and pecan pie and hot rolls and all of the other traditional foods of the standard American Thanksgiving.
The new task that I set for the Stalker is simply this: He needs to analyze the blog entries that I posted on Sunday, 1 December 2019, and to find fault with the way I spent that day. I know that he’s up to the task.
***
This is as good a context as any in which to mention something posted by my Mini-Stalker — a less talented Malevolent Stalker wannabe — that I noticed several weeks ago and quite enjoyed. He used just four words to sum me up, and I find the summation brilliant. I’ve reordered them a bit, as a way of remembering them, but I think that anybody who knows me well will instantly recognize how perfectly and how perfectly concisely he’s captured me:
Angry, bitter, cruel, and miserable.
I would say that these guys see right into my soul. If only I had one.
Thanks to my friend Mike Parker for kindly supplying these images. My own copy of “Expressions of Faith” is in a box somewhere in the basement of my house, in the aftermath of (not one but) two floods, from which I haven’t yet fully recovered.
The lidless, unsleeping, malignant eye of my Malevolent Stalker, always on the hunt for material that he might be able to abuse and twist in order to portray me as mean-spirited, corrupt, and depraved to the core, recently discovered a personal essay that I published in a 1996 anthology that was edited by Susan Easton Black under the title Expressions of Faith: Testimonies of Latter-day Saint Scholars.
My entry includes the following passage:
The building up of Zion is a cause that has interested the people of God in every age; it is a theme upon which prophets, priests and kings have dwelt with peculiar delight; they have looked forward with joyful anticipation to the day in which we live; and fired with heavenly and joyful anticipations they have sung and written and prophesied of this our day; but they died without the sight; we are the favored people that God has made choice of to bring about the Latter-day glory; it is left for us to see, participate in and help to roll forward the Latter-day glory. . . . And whilst we are thus united in the one common cause, to roll forth the kingdom of God, the heavenly Priesthood are not idle spectators, the Spirit of God will be showered down from above, and it will dwell in our midst. The blessings of the Most High will rest upon our tabernacles, and our name will be handed down to future ages; our children will rise up and call us blessed; and generations yet unborn will dwell with peculiar delight upon the scenes that we have passed through, the privations that we have endured; the untiring zeal that we have manifested; the all but insurmountable difficulties that we have overcome in laying the foundation of a work that brought about the glory and blessing which they will realize; a work that God and angels have contemplated with delight for generations past; that fired the souls of the ancient patriarchs and prophets; a work that is destined to bring about the destruction of the powers of darkness, the renovation of the earth, the glory of God, and the salvation of the human family.
My Malevolent Stalker made merry over the fiery biblical rhetoric of that passage, and over my apparent pretense to something like prophethood. “Wow!” chimed in his much less gifted wannabe, whom I call my Mini-Stalker. “Peterson really holds himself in high regard. Peterson’s name will be handed down to future generations? I can’t believe he really wrote that.” Poor Mini-Stalker practically had to grasp for his smelling salts in order not to swoon at my “smug sense of self importance and arrogance,” my “enormous ego” and “narcissistic personality.” “Unbelievable,” he wrote. “Just unbelievable.”
But then it was realized that the words aren’t mine at all. They’re quoted from Joseph Smith.
Oops.
And suddenly, at that point, the narrative turned on a dime: I had plagarized Joseph Smith, you see, “word for word.” Without credit.
Oh my.
Please see the photos above, taken from the book itself. Please notice the indenting that indicates a block quotation. Please notice the reference to HC 4:609-619.
This little episode offers a clear object lesson on how consuming malice can cloud one’s vision, making obvious things invisible and replacing them with phantasms, specters, and fictions.
I haven’t yet seen the film myself, but I may do so tomorrow. Both because I’m interested and because of my connection to the man behind it: Mitch Davis wrote the initial script for our Witnesses film project.
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Incidentally, there’s something else that I should probably say about that film project:
There’s a fellow who has devoted considerable effort to defaming and demonizing me over the past decade and a half. I call him my “Malevolent Stalker.” (He attacks me from a position of deep anonymity.) He’s a clever boy — well, of course, he’s no longer young anymore, since he’s been at this particular gig for approximately fifteen years — and sometimes even I am impressed by the cunning cleverness with which he cherry picks and twists and distorts and consistently misreads things that I’ve done and said. In order to find material that he can exploit against me, he’s located decades-old second-hand accounts about my days as an unmarried student in Israel, combed through IRS records, and burrowed into my then pre-teen son’s Christmas wish list on Amazon.com. To me, anyway, such obsessive behavior is unspeakably bizarre.
There’s another fellow, though, a relatively late and distinctly less talented arrival, whom I call my “Mini-Stalker.” He plainly wants to grow up to be a Malevolent Stalker in his own right. Accordingly, like the real Stalker, he posts anonymously. But he’s considerably lazier than his hero. He simply makes things up out of thin air — inventing fictional trips to Israel with me, for example, or creating fictional but lunatic quotations and attributing them to me. It’s the same malice, obviously, but it lacks the Malevolent Stalker’s craftiness and guile.
One of his more recent stunts has been to claim inside information about our Witnesses film project, alleging that it’s a fiasco and a failure and that our fundraising for it has had disastrously poor results. He claims to have informants within the Interpreter Foundation and offers at least one very specific figure about our finances.
Somebody is lying. If he really has one or more “informants,” he’s the victim of deception. He’s been lied to. I know every single person — there aren’t that many — who is involved in the Witnesses project. I know every single person who knows the financial specifics. There are, perhaps, four. They would never have told him that our fundraising has been poor, because it hasn’t been. It has, in fact, been extremely encouraging, for which I’m grateful.
If I had to place a bet about who is lying, though, my money would be on the Mini-Stalker himself. I doubt that any “informant”exists. Not even a bogus one. Lying is the Mini-Stalker’s métier, his modus operandi, his weapon of choice.
Members of our team have been scouting out potential filming locations in eastern North America and in Utah. We’ve been reviewing and tightening up our script. We’ll soon begin to consider casting decisions. I’m very excited about how things are going. I just wish that I had more time, personally, to devote to the project. However, I don’t want to be a bottleneck or an obstacle, so there will be times, for instance, when I’m simply not going to be able to be there for the filming.
The secret of my hypnotic power is, as you can plainly see, in my eyes. Bela Lugosi played me in the 1931 biographical film “Dracula.” Other than the inaccurate haircut, I thought it a fair portrayal. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
Stephen Smoot has concluded his series of essays in response to an important product from proponents of the so-called “Heartland model” of the Book of Mormon:
And it’s all at my fiendish direction. (See below.)
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Moreover, while we’re speaking of the Great Lakes, some of you may remember the time a while back when, by my sovereign command, poor Stephen Smoot was forced into the disreputable field dead-end field of Egyptology and exiled to the remote and perpetually frozen village of Toronto, which is located in the semi-mythical barbarian land known to anthropologists and Arctic explorers as “Canada.” You can refresh your memory, perhaps, by reading these two representative accounts:
It seems, though, that I’m up to my old tricks again. (Not that I’m ever not malicious, mean-spirited, and exploitative, of course! Please don’t get me wrong. I’m chronically both “nasty” and “delusional.”)
The basic motivation of my life is to destroy other people whenever and wherever I can, and so I’ve ordered poor naïve Stephen Smoot (and presumably “Peter” and “Captain Hook” and others whose real names and identities I don’t even know) to launch a critique of the Heartland model (aka a “smear” of those advocating it). Trashing fellow Latter-day Saints, and exploiting others, is my sole passion in life. The knife in the back is my favorite tool. I’ve never met an unethical act that I didn’t like.
I’m shamelessly using Steve Smoot and the others in a desperate attempt to save my failing “legacy,” and I don’t mind setting my exploited tools up for an eventual fall. When I’m done with people, I discard them.
Trust me. All of the above is absolutely true. I read it online, on a message board. There can be no doubt about any of it. If it weren’t true, my Malevolent Stalker and one of his lesser epigones would surely never have asserted it.
My eyes aren’t useful only for hypnosis. I can also destroy things directly by means of their laser function. (Image stolen — of course! — from the website of poor ever-exploited Steve Smoot)
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“Turning Gems Into Dirt”
Up today, on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:
Book of Moses Insights #23: Enoch, the Prophet and Seer: Enoch’s Prophecy of the Tribes (Moses 7:5–11, 22)
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Two recent items from Jeff Lindsay:
“Turning Gems into Dirt: The Case for Adam Clarke as a Source for the “Inspired Translation” of the Bible”
“No, B.H. Roberts Did Not Abandon Belief in the Book of Mormon”
***
Last weekend, my wife and I enjoyed an outdoor, physically-distanced, partially potluck dinner in the backyard of the widow of our good friend and former branch president in Cairo, my eventual colleague on the faculty at Brigham Young University (on whom, see “Arnold H. Green [1940-2019]” and “Bidding Farewell to Arnie Green”). Also there, with their wives and a daughter, were my former mentor, colleague, and department chair Dil Parkinson, now retired, and Joey Green, Arnie and Lani’s son, who was a very young boy when we first met him in Egypt and who has somehow managed to combine a passion for jazz guitar and the novels of Jane Austen with a highly successful and still unfolding career in the military. (See “Joseph Green: Fully Committed.”)
We had a very enjoyable time, not only eating and reminiscing but, well, discussing such subjects as film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels and Dil’s challenging work on a not yet complete new translation of the Book of Mormon into Arabic.
A couple of weeks ago, the anonymous perennial detractor whom I’ve dubbed my “Mini-Stalker” was shedding his usual crocodile tears about my sad hate- and anger-driven career, which has brought such shame on my church and my university. His specific theme, this time, was my ever-accelerating descent into obscurity. irrelevance, and loneliness. There can be no doubt that he’s right, of course, and that my depressing fate is richly merited and entirely just. Still, I take comfort and satisfaction in the fact that I’ll be accompanied to my solitary and disgraced exile by such good friends.
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I hope that you enjoyed General Conference today as much as I did. I’m looking forward to the Sunday sessions.