John Gee's book review and thoughts:

[_Daniel Peterson]

I wonder how many of your posts directed to defenders of the faith include the words "smear tactics" or close variations thereof. I think lots and lots and lots. Run the word "smear" in "Search" above and see the fruits of your thought.

When writing about me, at least, Scratch uses the term smear at a remarkably high rate. It seems that, in his demonology, "smearing" is just about all I do. 24/7. Day after wearisome, grimly determined day.

Look, if you are going to defame Peterson and attempt to injure his reputation, at least you could show some courage and unmask yourself. You and your buds are cowards.

I strongly agree on this point.

Of course, I have personal reason to do so. For roughly two years now, Scratch has been almost unceasingly attempting, anonymously, in his rather ineffectual way, before his audience of . . . several, to destroy my reputation.

Can't we all just get along, and follow New Testament principles of brotherly love? Talk nice to each other and have reasoned discussion, instead of continual insults?

Guy Sajer has vowed to try to make that change, and I respect him for it. I will be happy to do likewise with him. Although I'll be leaving shortly, I would very much like to see the level of personal hostility here ratcheted down. A lot.

I would, however, be astonished beyond all measure if Scratch were to follow suit. Take calumny, slander, and perceived dirt away from him, and what, really, would he have to talk about? C'est son métier.

[_Daniel Peterson]

by the way Daniel, much of Europe has internet access. Good Luck!

True, and I'll be using it when I'm in appropriate areas. But participating here is very far down my list of priorities for my time there. It won't happen.

[_Rollo Tomasi]

Who is David Wright?

You can read Dr. Wright's own story of his excommunication here:

http://www.mormonalliance.org/caserepor ... p5ch23.htm

[_Trevor]

I appreciate the warm welcomes!

My job is pretty good. I have a 2/2 load. In order to get tenure I have to produce a minimum of a book and three articles. Not so bad, really. Of course, they prefer articles in certain journals that are tough to get published in and certain publishers who are also a little more picky, but I am working on some fun stuff, and I hope I can publish useful and interesting work about it. The faculty here is ambitious, so the demands and the atmosphere accord well with each other.

I interviewed at BYU a while back, and fortunately I was turned down. Long after I had lost a conventional testimony in Mormonism, I had not let go of the sense that working there was somehow what I was to do. I feel kinda bad that I did not work all of this out before I wasted their time and money. Still, being turned down was something of a surprise, because they had been 'cultivating' me for some years, in a sense, but it was an unexpected boon. It gave me the opportunity to align my actions with my beliefs and feelings. My wife and I therefore stopped attending the LDS Church.

Now I treat the LDS Church like any other social group. It has its pros and cons, and for some the pros outweigh the cons enough to make it an attractive spiritual home. I simply awoke to a fact that I think the BYU folks sensed on some level already--that I was not one of them. No hard feelings, and all that. Life is too short to try to force the square peg into a round hole every Sunday. Or maybe the opposite image is more appropriate.

My wife expresses her gratitude to Dan Peterson on a regular basis for sharing that definition of insanity: doing something over and over again, and expecting different results. This idea really helped her quit going too. Not that Dan was speaking of being in the Church. For him it is an organization that works on some level or every level, and so he sees fighting it as being insane, which may be the case for him and from his perspective. I certainly don't want to fight it, and tilt at life's windmills. I am just trying to make peace with its new place in my life as my former church.

Whoever is ultimately responsible for keeping me out of BYU, I would thank heartily. Unfortunately, their process is not open, like most other schools, so I won't be able to buy that person a pink lemonade. I would thank God, but I do not believe in a personal deity. How I love George Carlin's joke about the invisible man in the clouds with a list of ten things he doesn't want you to do! My sides split every time I see that routine.

I am still very interested in Mormonism and Mormon scholarship, however. I just don't have to spend time at Church to indulge that interest anymore. Fortunately, I have a wonderful, close friend in Don Bradley, who graces me with a phone call now and then so that we can brainstorm about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the Book of Abraham. It is just about the most fun I have. I owe scholars of Mormonism so much for bringing me this joy. I am still thankful that I took some classes from Hugh Nibley, who first showed me that Mormonism was a topic with wider intellectual reach.

Don assures me that Dan Peterson is a good sort of fellow in person, and I trust that is true. His aims and methods are somewhat different from mine when it comes to Mormonism. I understand that. I do not believe that the LDS Church is the kingdom of God on earth--an idea I find repugnant. My concept of how Joseph Smith was a prophet is more in line with Robert Graves' idea of the poet than the LDS Church's notion of THE PROPHET. He was a fascinating character, to be sure. And while I think that LDS scholars do good scholarly work on Mormonism, I also think that non-LDS scholars of Mormonism have much to contribute. It is their work I find most interesting, since their interests and methods are more likely to line up with my own. Still, LDS scholars are an important part of this field which I merely dabble in.

Thanks again for a warm reception!

[_Rollo Tomasi]

Look, if you are going to defame Peterson and attempt to injure his reputation, at least you could show some courage and unmask yourself. You and your buds are cowards.

One-note-wonder-Bob strikes again.

Can't we all just get along, and follow New Testament principles of brotherly love? Talk nice to each other and have reasoned discussion, instead of continual insults?

Practice what you preach, Bob, and your desire may be taken more seriously.

[_Rollo Tomasi]

I'm not the demonically vicious and unscrupulous monster that Scratch and Rollo Tomasi portray ....

I have never portrayed you as such. I may take issue with your words (in publications and this bb) and opinions, but not you. Based on your PBS performance, you seem a jovial enough fellow. Many folks have written about what a good guy you are in person, and I have no reason to disbelieve this. But this is a discussion board, so when I take issue with something you write I will respond accordingly. There's no free pass here, like you may have enjoyed at FAIR. That's what makes this place so intriguing.

[_guy sajer]

Dan, I deleted what I originally wrote here. Like Trevor, I am getting tired of this pissing contest. I'm willing to call a truce, and we both can assume our superiority if we so deisre. I will endeavor to limit my criticism of you in this regard and try to move on.

I'm perfectly happy with the idea.

I have never, ever, attempted to portray myself as superior to you. I know little of your academic career, and relatively little of your field -- although I flirted briefly with the idea of pursuing a Ph.D. in economics, particularly after a summer partially (and wonderfully) spent with Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, George Stigler, and various others of like mind and stature at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland -- and I have no problem acknowledging that you were likely a respectably, or even more than respectably, productive member of the BYU faculty.

I understand that your generation of faculty were hired under a different set of circumstances.

I was hired at BYU in 1985, under, I assume, much the same regime that you were. You do wrong to suppose that I have not been productive.

I came to BYU with my dissertation topic just approved. I had to invent a full-fledged program in Arabic and Islamic studies and to teach an exceptionally heavy load of classes -- including new courses on Arabic language and literature, Islamic philosophy, Islam as a religion, the humanities of the Islamic world, etc. -- while working on an extraordinarily abstruse dissertation (on an esoteric early-eleventh-century Isma‘ili Shiite Neoplatonist, none of whose voluminous works, only recently made public by the Isma‘ili sect, had ever been translated into any Western language and who had never been the subject of any study by any Western scholar) for which nobody between the University of California and the University of Chicago could offer me even the slightest help of any kind. Did this slow me down? Absolutely. Have I been sitting on my hands? Not nearly as much as you think.

I think that were we to meet in person, we'd get along famously. I here your a swell guy in person, and I'm certainly less of an arrogant jerk in person than in cyber space.

Let me leave it at that, and we can look forward to much jousting ahead in a reasonably civil manner. We will probably never agree on much, but that's what makes this fun.

I'm happy to have some sort of a rapprochement. I wouldn't be surprised, myself, if we got along reasonably well. I'm not the demonically vicious and unscrupulous monster that Scratch and Rollo Tomasi portray; people (even those who reject virtually every opinion I hold) seem to like me well enough, and I virtually always like them. I have to confess that I've found the situation here increasingly unpleasant, and I don't like what the exchanges almost invariably become. I leave tomorrow night for a month in Europe, and I'm not sure that I'll be coming back here when I return. (Except, of course, to announce publications, and the like.) But I will feel better if, as seems to be happening in at least your case, things wind down with considerably less vitriol.

It looks like we have some things in common. I had no help on my dissertation; I floundered and produced a piece of junk. But my advisor was good for one thing; he promised to get me through the process, and he did, in less than 5 years. I thereafter buried my disseration and hope nobody ever dredges it up. My advisor, though of no help writing, had a good view of the disseration, "It's the price you pay to join the guild. If it's the best piece of work you do, you're in trouble. Get it done, move on, and do better work in the future." I tried to keep his injunction in mind, and I like to think I succeeded.

My Ph.D. was actually in Poly Sci, but aside from my first publication, I never did any poly sci. As a defensive measure (seeing how I was in a pub admin dept) I started writing in pub admin topics, while also trying my hand at economic topics that interested me (i had lost interest in poly sci by then). If I had one fault in my academic career (and probably had more), I did not specialize enough, but rather I researched and wrote on topics that interested me, and I had a wide range of interests, so I ended up writing and publishing on economics, pub admin theory (mostly to ensure my dept felt I was dedicated to pub admin), health care. Later, I finally settled on int'l development, with a specialty in microfinance, though I did far more consulting than publishing in this area. This is the area where I'm now concentrating, though I've gone far beyond microfinance by now and am doing a lot of work in value chain development. My specialty is monitoring and evaluation. I conduct experimental and quasi-experimental field studies and design performance monitoring systems, while also working on developing tools to measure social performance of development organizations.

I probably would have prefered to stay in academics, but BYU was no longer tenable for me. I tried the NOM route, and it simply didn't work for me. I couldn't stand the lying it required; I hated pretending to be something I wasn't, and I really, really hated going to church (nor do I enjoy Mormon culture--I find it shallow and insipid, but that should be understood in the context that I find love Austin Powers, so I guess I'm not that sophisticated after all). (I have come to the conclusion that I am simply not wired for belief in God. I have no desire for anything spiritual and see no use for religious faith in my life. Believe me, I tried to make it work, to reconcile my growing skepticism with a belief, first in Mormonism, then in God, but I could not do it.) I understand that BYU has a mission, though I disagree with it, and I believe BYU actively stifles intellectual freedom, I came to conclude that it needed someone other than me who was committed to the mission. It made sense from all perspectives to leave. Once I had enough consulting contracts, I resigned, quite to the surprise of my dept chair and dean. I left on good terms, and when I left, only two people knew the real reason. I've never publicly come forward or made any kind of grand statement. I valued the friendships I made, and I preferred to leave them in tact. (Though anyone who follows these boards would have an easy time figuring out who I am.)

So that's the short version of my history. Happy travels, and if you make it to Vienna, be sure to sample the pastries; best in the world, far better than the Krispy Kreme you're brandishing in your avatar.

[_rcrocket]

I understand that BYU has a mission, though I disagree with it, and I believe BYU actively stifles intellectual freedom,

The thing that is odd about this is that I have you on record in the prior iteration of this board advocating the use of government power to suppress the free expression of Mormon and Islam religious thought. Whereas you complain about free expression at BYU, you don't have a problem with suppressing the faith of your family. Why is that?

rcrocket

[_Yoda]

Can't we all just get along, and follow New Testament principles of brotherly love? Talk nice to each other and have reasoned discussion, instead of continual insults?

I seriously can't believe this quote came from you. When I saw Rollo capture it, I had to go back and find it myself to make sure you were really the source.

I agree with Rollo. Practice what you preach.

[_guy sajer]

I understand that BYU has a mission, though I disagree with it, and I believe BYU actively stifles intellectual freedom,

The thing that is odd about this is that I have you on record in the prior iteration of this board advocating the use of government power to suppress the free expression of Mormon and Islam religious thought. Whereas you complain about free expression at BYU, you don't have a problem with suppressing the faith of your family. Why is that?

rcrocket

Robert, I don't wish to rehash this. You are now, as before, distorting what I said. Honestly, how many times do I need to clarify this for you? The context was the case in which religious belief infringed on the civil rights of others. I don't believe that religious belief is a blank check to do whatever one wants to whomever one wants. Rights conflict, in which case we must decide among them.

Let it lie.

I don't suppress the faith of my family. My wife continues to attend church and she takes our children with her. My oldest daugher attends seminary. When the children turn 17, they get to choose for themselves. My son, who is now in college, chose not to remain in Mormonism. I'm guessing my oldest daughter will choose to remain. I tell my children what I believe, but I also tell them the choice is theirs, and I'll love them regardless.

Is this sufficiently clear to you?