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 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.

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.

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

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

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