![\"sl;jlsjh;lsd\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2022\/02\/576px-55_Central_Park_West_Ghostbusters_Building_by_David_Shankbone.jpg\")
<\/a>(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A whole circle of freak-show demagogues once swirled around the professional anti-Mormon mountebank Ed Decker, who achieved somewhat more than merely his fifteen minutes of fame with the 1982 film The God Makers.\u00a0 <\/em>(Decker is still reputed to be alive in some sense, up in Washington State.). One of Decker\u2019s associates, Bill Schnoebelen, used to claim that the very architectural form of the Salt Lake Temple, particularly the \u201ctrapezoidal\u201d form of its spires, was consciously designed to attract demons, like flypaper.\u00a0 \u00a0(See Massimo Introvigne, \u201cThe Devil Makers: Contemporary Evangelical Fundamentalist Anti-Mormonism,\u201d Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought<\/em> 27\/1 [Spring 1994]: 153-169; for the flypaper claim, specifically, see page 164.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n My serious hunch is that Schnoebelen derived the idea of demon-attracting architecture from the use of the Manhattan apartment building at 55 Central Park West in the 1984 movie Ghostbusters.\u00a0 <\/em>In that immortal film \u2014 which should probably not be interpreted as an anthropological field documentary\u00a0 or an essay in Religionsph\u00e4nomenologie<\/em> \u2014 that apartment building is called the \u201cShandor Building\u201d and \u201cSpook Central,\u201d and the movie tells us that \u201cThe whole building is a huge, superconductive antenna that was designed and built expressly for the purpose of pulling in and concentrating spiritual turbulence.\u201d)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Anyway, in the wake of the Decker\/Schnoebelen circus, there were complaints from more orthodox, mainstream anti-Mormons \u2014 I can\u2019t recall offhand whether I heard them from James White or from Jerald and Sandra Tanner \u2014 that it was becoming harder and harder to recruit volunteers to picket Temple Square during the twice-annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a>.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because gullible evangelicals, terrified at the thought of being so close to the main Latter-day Saint satanic power-generating station, were unwilling to stand anywhere near<\/em> the Salt Lake Temple.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Some of you may be aware that I\u2019m the proud owner of a small but zany group of anonymous personal critics who tend to congregate at a place that I sometimes call the \u201cPeterson Obsession Board.\u201d\u00a0 As a whole, they\u2019ve been at it for about fifteen or twenty years now.\u00a0 (They\u2019ve been at it for however long the POB, for which I appear to be a principal raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/em>, has been operating.)\u00a0 There\u2019s my Malevolent Stalker, for example, and my Mini-Stalker, and several others.\u00a0 And there\u2019s the fellow at the POB who\u2019s been sending me obscene and studiously semi-literate personal insults since at least 4 August 2012; they now go directly into a special file, where \u2014 I checked just now \u2014 well over eight hundred specimens are available for study by interested mental health professionals.\u00a0 (I have no idea how many of his creations have been trashed over the past decade, or otherwise sadly lost to science.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t help but be reminded of the glorious days of Decker and Schoebelen when I recently read a comment from a poor unfortunate over at the Peterson Obsession Board who had long obsessively followed my blog, seeking (and finding) daily specimens of my stupidity and depravity to share among his fellows, presumably hoping for (and receiving) their approval.\u00a0 Of late, though, as they were discussing what they claim to perceive as my warm, friendly feelings toward the Nazi Third Reich and the Holocaust, he vowed to stay away from my blog.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t healthy, he observed, to expose oneself every single day to such evil as I represent.\u00a0 Expressing sympathy for him, another commenter observed that I embody, in microcosm, everything that is evil in the Church and, indeed, in the world more broadly.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n When tributes such as these pour in, it really does seem to me that I\u2019ve accomplished something with my life.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n On a separate but related front, since certain critics are once again laboring mightily to establish the falsehood that I have been, or will be, lining my pockets with the cash that Witnesses<\/em> has been bringing in and that that movie\u2019s docudrama sequel, Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon<\/em>, will also enrich me, I probably need to issue this little statement once again:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve pointed out many times before, the claim that I have profited or will profit from the Interpreter Foundation\u2019s film projects is flatly untrue.\u00a0 There is no expectation on my part or on anybody else\u2019s part that I will earn a penny of profit from Witnesses <\/em>or Undaunted<\/em>.\u00a0 There is no mechanism by which I might be able to do so.\u00a0 There is nothing in any of the contract documents related to the project that promises or permits me any financial interest in the success of the films.\u00a0 No money will accrue to me from the movies \u2014 neither directly nor indirectly.\u00a0 (Nor \u2014 I know how certain critics\u2019 minds work! \u2014 to my wife, my children, my grandchildren, my cousins, my present or future pets, my estate, my heirs and assigns, my legatees, my neighbors, or any shell company or secret bank account in the Cayman Islands.\u00a0 Neither in cash nor in kind nor in gold bullion nor in doubloons nor in Swiss francs nor in bitcoin nor in corv\u00e9e labor.)\u00a0 Whether, in the end, the film project fails miserably or breaks even or earns $800 million, my share of the earnings will remain unchanged, at precisely $0.00 \u2014 or the exact equivalent in any currency used within the United Federation of Planets or known to exist beyond<\/em> the Federation.\u00a0 And I make this statement freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I realize that that\u2019s almost certainly not clear enough or airtight enough for certain folks, and especially for those who really, really, really<\/em> want to expose me as a mercenary fraud.\u00a0 But it\u2019s the best that I can do at the moment.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n There will be deep disappointment in some circles over this news:<\/p>\n