Philo-Semitism, Vicarious Baptisms, and Me: A Retrospective

Last updated on: August 20, 2020 at 1:07 pm By Dan Peterson

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):

http://tracingthetribe.blogspot.com/2006/12/anger-over-baptism-of-simon-wiesenthal.html

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 me personally 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?).

My sorry career as a religious bigot

Last updated on: June 19, 2020 at 7:58 pm By Dan Peterson

Where I chaired — 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:

https://www.deseret.com/authors/william-hamblin-and-daniel-peterson
https://www.deseret.com/authors/daniel-peterson/archives/2 (specifically, the columns published since Bill Hamblin’s untimely passing in December 2019)
https://www.amazon.com/Muhammad-Prophet-God-Daniel-Peterson-ebook/dp/B001F0RLLA/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=Daniel+Peterson&qid=1592578441&s=books&sr=1-4
https://www.amazon.com/Abraham-Divided-Perspective-Middle-East/dp/1562362461/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Daniel+Peterson+Abraham+Divided&qid=1592578589&s=books&sr=1-1
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2018/04/understanding-islam?lang=eng
http://religious-diplomacy.org/organization/
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.

“Coronavirus presents millennials with a generational moment”

Last updated on: March 20, 2020 at 5:59 pm By Dan Peterson

Atop Mt. Wilson — 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:

“Modeling study suggests 18 months of COVID-19 social distancing, much disruption”

“Coronavirus presents millennials with a generational moment”

“An open letter to my peers partying on the beach”

“CNN’s Tapper to people defying social distancing: ‘Who the hell are you?'”

“Some children can develop serious illnesses from the coronavirus: A new study suggests children are at risk, too”

But here’s a bit of inspiration, written not during our current troubles but for the BBC back in 2015:

“Did this sleepy village stop the Great Plague? Today, tourists amble through the pretty village of Eyam. But 350 years ago, during the plague, the town’s terrible sacrifice meant its streets were filled with the wails of the dying”

***

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^-35seconds (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.

A, B, C, and M(e)

Last updated on: December 6, 2019 at 12:01 am By Dan Peterson

An early twentieth century painting of Thanksgiving — “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.

The truth is not in them.

Last updated on: June 29, 2019 at 2:43 pm By Dan Peterson

My quotation from Joseph Smith — The relevant page in “Expressions of Faith”

Thanks to Mike Parker! — 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.

A new film and our forthcoming film

Last updated on: June 28, 2019 at 4:54 pm By Dan Peterson

Tonga scenery — A view in Tonga (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I was very pleased to read this positive review — it’s the only review that I’ve seen, thus far — of The Other Side of Heaven 2:

“Review: Gently powerful ‘Other Side of Heaven 2’ shows a onetime LDS missionary facing new challenges as mission president in Tonga”

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.

***

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.

Heartland Heartbreak and Unsleeping Malice

Last updated on: October 19, 2019 at 3:34 pm By Dan Peterson

Lugosi plays Peterson — 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:

“A Review of the Annotated Edition of the Book of Mormon (Part 8)”

And the writing of another prominent Heartland proponent has been subjected to withering criticisms of late. Here are three examples:

“A typical Jonathan Neville blog post”

“Jonathan Neville’s damnable lies”

“A hobby key vs. a full keyboard”

And it’s all at my fiendish direction. (See below.)

***

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:

“You can come home now, Steve Smoot!”

“A Tear for Stephen Smoot”

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.

Hypnotic dcp — 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)

Stepping away briefly from the gravy train?

Last updated on: May 17, 2019 at 9:24 am By Dan Peterson

Parliament, Thames, and Bridge — A view across the River Thames to Westminster Bridge and, behind it, the Houses of Parliament
(Wikimedia Commons public domain)

A status report for the convenience and delectation of the small cell of obsessive critics who anonymously comment virtually every day upon my vicious words and my appallingly amoral deeds:

Now that my wife and I are in England, we’re entirely on our own dime. You can disbelieve that as you choose — somehow, surely, innocent tithepayers are being abused and the widow’s mite cruelly extracted! — but we’re here (1) to spend some time with close members of our family, who will arrive in England on Saturday, and (2) because we need to be back in Israel next week or so and didn’t want to cross the Atlantic twice more in order to be there. But no, I won’t provide the names, birthdates, Social Security numbers, or bank account information for the family members with whom we’re meeting, and no, I won’t explain why we’re meeting them in England. To do so would be to leave you folks with no challenge beyond putting your customary negative but inventive spin on what I’m doing. And, anyway, your otherwise distinctly limited associate the Mini-Stalker is quite capable of inventing things out of whole cloth wherever needed or wanted.

Anyway, you’ll be happy to know that what you’ve chosen to interpret as the for-profit portion of this trip is temporarily over. My lavishly-compensated role of providing twelve to sixteen hours of daily commentary and lectures, on and off the bus or the boat, absolutely every day of the week, has come to an end. (I like these trips and so, they say, do those who come along on them, but they’re both exhausting and demanding.) In that capacity, almost all of my travel, food, and lodging expenses were covered, so, just like the airline pilot who is regularly given free trips (!) to Europe and/or Asia and/or Latin America on top of the salary he’s paid, I was plainly on the road to enormous — indeed, virtually unfathomable — wealth.

QEII -- the real one -- with gold. — When I showed her around my British holdings yesterday afternoon — obviously, after she had paid the required entry fee and agreed to compensate me for my services as a guide — Queen Elizabeth II was plainly jealous of the amount of gold bullion that I’ve accumulated from my apologetics work and my international tours. That was gratifying. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Now, though, I’ve taken a detour from that road. And I’m very happy to have done so. Those relaxing and luxurious trips to Israel, Jordan, and Egypt are quite demanding. We’re up early every morning and moving throughout the day, in areas that are often hilly, almost always unshaded, and without good paths. And, at this time of the year, the weather can be very hot. So some rest and relaxation are most welcome, and where better to get a bit of R&R than here, “in England’s green and pleasant land”?

Posted from London, England

Innocent Abroad

Last updated on: May 3, 2019 at 10:29 pm By Dan Peterson

Tiberias from above — A view over Tiberias (Wikimedia Commons public domain)

Roughly fifteen years into his remarkable, unsleeping, virtually daily, nearly fifteen-year-old anonymous campaign of defamation and character assassination against me, my Malevolent Stalker has declared that the only genuine way in which I can demonstrate that I don’t accompany these tours for the money that I earn from them — naïvely, I had imagined that the fact that I earn no money from them might suffice on that score — would be to prove that I accompany them entirely at my own expense.

That’s not likely to happen. Notwithstanding the many millions that I earn each year from apologetics, I’m simply not wealthy enough for such a demonstration of virtue.

I’m the same kind of pathetic loser who, when invited to grill burgers for a neighborhood gathering of roughly two hundred, might timidly agree to do it if the group inviting him will cover the cost of the ground beef.

I’m just not in the class who can say “Anytime you’d like to me to take you around Egypt or Israel or the Alps, or to accompany you on a Mediterranean cruise, just say the word and I’ll be there at my own expense!”

Greedy me.

Exploring another possible avenue of attack, one of the Malevolent Stalker’s anonymous online colleagues notes that I’m overseas and not teaching. Implicitly, he suggests, I must be defrauding Brigham Young University and ripping off the tithe payers.

Well. Most people who’ve attended school at whatever level (in the United States, at least) will have noticed that the academic calendar follows a certain rhythm — probably set, originally, by the seasons of seedtime and harvest and, therefore, a bit obsolete these days. But the tradition remains.

And, among other things, it yields what are known among specialists as “summer vacations.” At Brigham Young University, we have Fall and Winter terms, and the summer is divided into short Spring and Summer terms. No full-time faculty members at BYU, to the best of my knowledge, teach during every one of those terms. They’re not even permitted to teach during all of those terms.

So, alas, I’m not guilty of the kind of crime against BYU and the Latter-day Saints of which this particular critic would like me to be. And, for me, regular visits to the Middle East are something like a chemist’s regular visits to his laboratory. They recharge my batteries. After all, I teach about the Middle East. Seeing Israel, Egypt, and Jordan on a regular basis, talking to Middle Easterners, and so forth is helpful to me and, I think, indirectly to my students.

Posted from Tiberias, Israel

It’s all about $$$!

Last updated on: April 30, 2019 at 10:21 am By Dan Peterson

SLC mid-2011 — A view of Salt Lake City in July 2011 (Wikimedia Commons public domain)

I’m about to undertake another round of travel in (among other places) Israel and Egypt in order to (among other things) accompany tour groups there. So, as regularly as Swiss clockwork, one of the most dishonest of my anonymous critics is accusing me of “priestcraft,” profiteering enormously from such tours — as he has also accused me of scheming to make money from a fraudulent film project, just as he and his cleverer and more cunning role model, my Malevolent Stalker, have routinely (and falsely) accused me of generating considerable income from defending the claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and so forth.

There’s probably no hope, in this life, of repairing such accusers, who continually lie about me and who obviously feel no moral inhibitions about doing so.

But I suspect that others may be under an actual sincere misimpression regarding these trips, so I think that I’ll try to set things forth on the topic while I’m sitting here in the airport.

I’ve been doing tours with the Cruise Lady company every year for a decade or so. Maybe a bit more. Diane Larsen, the owner of Cruise Lady, approached me about doing so at the end of a large Education Week lecture in the ballroom of the Wilkinson Student Center at Brigham Young University. I still remember the occasion well. I have enjoyed working with the folks at Cruise Lady, and we’ve had many good experiences together — as, I believe, many of the people who have traveled with us have had.

But here’s the financial deal:

I’m not paid for these tours. I don’t profit from them.

My expenses — my airfare, lodging, food, and so forth — are covered by Cruise Lady, as are those of my wife, who always accompanies me and who is a wonderful help to me and (I’m sure that others could testify) to those on the tour. (If we were paying those expenses myself, my wife and I would go on our own, on our schedule, at our pace.) But those are expenses that we wouldn’t occur if we were not on the trip, and so the financial impact on us is a wash.

Actually, it’s less than a wash for us, because we always pay at least a few expenses ourselves, and we always give substantial tips to the local guides who accompany us (and whom, in places like Israel and Jordan and Egypt, Cruise Lady is obliged to employ).

Anyway, if I’m expecting to grow wealthy by accompanying these tours, somebody urgently needs to sit me down and help me to rethink my business model.

I’m reminded of the old joke that my father used to tell, about a farmer who bought a pig for $100 and then, about a year later, sold the pig for $100. “What was the point of that?” asked a neighbor. “Well,” responded the farmer, “I had full use of the pig for a year!”

And I remember the joke told in Conference once by President Dallin H. Oaks about the two enterprising agricultural salesmen who would buy watermelons for a dollar and then transport them by truck to a market in the nearby city, where they sold them for a dollar. After a season of extremely brisk sales, they looked over their books and discovered to their amazement that their financial position hadn’t improved a bit. “Obviously,” said one to the other, “we need a bigger truck.”

Posted from Salt Lake City, Utah