The Berry-Picker's "Laughter"

[_wondering]

Dr. Peterson wrote:

Whatever one may think about the strengths or weaknesses of David Wright's argument, or about the strengths or weaknesses of John Tvedtnes's response, it's incorrect to ascribe any of this to some monolith called FARMS. FARMS doesn't exist as a personality or hive-mind. John Tvedtnes's response is strong or weak because John Tvedtnes wrote it that way.

..............

As a matter of fact, John Tvedtnes has long promised me a more extensive response to David Wright. But, other than reminding him and encouraging him to write it or to finish it, I have no power to force him to get it done. And now he lives in Arkansas.

Dr. Wright concluded his in-depth analysis of the Isaiah sections in the Book of Mormon: "Isaiah in the Book of Mormon: or Joseph Smith in Isaiah" in American Apocrypha stating that "the Book of Mormon is not an ancient work further coincides with critical study which shows that other supposedly ancient works produced by Smith, such as the revision of the Bible, the Book of Abraham, and temple endowment, do not come from ancient sources but grow out of nineteenth-century influences and sources."

I agree with Analytics that Mr. Tvedtnes' review did not match the depth of Dr. Wright’s analyses and did not answer all of the objections to a historical Book of Mormon that Dr. Wright raised.

If Mr. Tvedtnes is not availble to provide an indepth rebutal, perhaps Dr. Peterson can assign another scholar to provide a substantial review of the significant claims of Dr. Wright.

I think that many people would be interested.

[_Yoda]

No, I don't find the prospect of being sued at all entertaining. It's a personal quirk of mine.

OK...This just made me laugh!

[_Daniel Peterson]

No, I don't find the prospect of being sued at all entertaining. It's a personal quirk of mine.

Perhaps you should get out of the business of Mopologetics, then?

No. I won't be intimidated by lawyers.

I don't want to live in a society where free speech is successfully terrorized by the hyper-litigious.

Perhaps people should back off a bit on attempts to enlist the coercive power of the state in order to punish the expression of opinions.

But I'm intrigued by your apparent willingness to class Robert Ritner with Walter Martin, Ed Decker, and Bill Schnoebelen as an "anti-Mormon."

I wouldn't have classified him that way, myself.

I wouldn't either (and I didn't).

Here's what you wrote:

I'm sure DCP was slapping his knees mirthfully as Robert Ritner announced that he was seriously considering a defamation lawsuit against The Good Professor: Ho ho ho! Hilllaaaaarious! Those wily anti-Mormons!

Now, I really don't know how to make sense of that sentence if it doesn't include Robert Ritner among those wily-anti-Mormons.

Consider a British statesman in a conversation about Napoleon. "Oh, the French!" he says. Which makes sense, because Napoleon is a member of the class of Frenchmen. But if, instead, he says "Oh, those Koreans!" that appears to make little if any sense at all. What on earth, his conversation partners would quite justly ask, do the Koreans have to do with our comments about Napoleon?

You're not deliberately trying to engage in misrepresentation, are you?

Nope. Are you?

And, presumably, you do consider Prof. Ritner to be "anti-Mormon," given his apparent opposition to J. Gee's Book of Abraham theories?

No, I don't.

Can anyone name the logical fallacy here?

No. There isn't one.

And let me remind you, Prof. P., that we have no real evidence--beyond your incredibly shaky "word"; given your history, I think it is fairly safe to assume that you have engaged in a fair amount of equivocation in this regard--that *you* get paid solely to be a BYU prof. For all we know, your salary is divided up evenly with your Mopologetics.

I've equivocated not at all. I've told you far more than you have any right or business knowing, while, ironically, you hide altogether behind a pseudonym, unwilling to tell anything at all about yourself.

The fact remains that Ed Decker, John L. Smith, John Ankerberg, and John Weldon work full time at what they do, and that nobody outside of Scratchworld -- undoubtedly including Decker, Smith, Ankerberg, and Weldon themselves -- would find this statement even remotely controversial.

Feel free to locate a few of my publications against Protestantism, or my exposés of Hinduism, or my filmed denunciations of the Catholic Church, or my tabloid articles attacking Islam.

The gist of what "they" do is attacking others. Plain and simple. And, unfortunately, that is precisely what you do.

That's simply false nonsense. Fourteen volumes in the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (Islamic, but also Jewish and eastern Christian), scores of comparative religion columns for Meridian Magazine (on everything from Calvinism to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, from Buddhist pilgrimages to Hindu rituals, from Brazilian Pentecostalism to medieval Scholasticism, from Moses Maimonides to Ibn Sina and Thomas Aquinas), my Muhammad biography, my Abraham Divided book, my lectures and classes and articles and encylopedia entries and CDs on Islam, my "trialogues" with Muslims and Jews and other Christians in Europe and the Near East, etc. -- these things are all on public record.

Ask the imam of Orlando whether I spent any time last Sunday evening attacking Islam.

Your perpetual attempt to portray me as a religious bigot is as transparently absurd as has been your recent campaign to portray me as a grimly humorless and insecure zealot.

Your malignant personal obsession with me is deeply bizarre and weird.

I bet you thought it was "hilarious" when Louis Midgley turned up at the Tanners' bookstore in order to very loudly express his disgust that they were carrying books written by "that queer" (i.e., D. Michael Quinn). That's the sort of thing that you and others on l-skinny find amusing, right? (Let me guess: you'll either not respond to this at all, or you'll dispense some extremely half-hearted, "Aw, well, *I* wouldn't have done that!" Even though you probably snickered when you learned of it.)

"Probably"? In other words, you're just making this up.

All I know about the Midgley incident at the Tanners', which isn't much, is third hand at best. I don't know that your depiction of it is accurate; in fact, I have some doubts.

But, in fact, I wouldn't do it, didn't do it, haven't laughed at it, and, actually, haven't heard much about it, on Skinny-L or anywhere else. Truth be told, I only hear about it (and that quite rarely) from critics like yourself.

Instead, I am arguing that this "sense of humor"--if you want to call it that--completely vanishes when it comes to certain "close-to-the-heart" Mopologetic topics. So let me ask you again: Do you find it funny that well-respected academics find many of your arguments laughable? Does knowledge of this fact sit well with you? For example, Michael Coe, in The Mormons, could hardly restrain his laughter as he discussed LDS archaeologists' failure to find any significant Book of Mormon evidence in Meso-America. The smirk on his face was unmistakable, in fact.

Your question is misconceived. (It's also, I think, a Trojan horse. As it were.)

Things that are funny are funny. The fact that X thinks Y is funny isn't, itself, funny.

A Seinfeld joke is a completely different thing than the statement "Many people find Seinfeld funny." The first draws a laugh. The second is merely an observation. It isn't, in itself, funny.

Do you like that, Prof. P.? Or does it bother you?

Why would I "like" it?

To the extent that it's true, I see it as a challenge.

Anybody who argues for a position is likely to regard convincing those not yet persuaded as a challenge. That's part of the fun of academia.

Further, how might you explain the endless (and needless) self-deprecating "humor" from yourself and Bill Hamlin on the subject of how you and he are "laughingstocks"? Why, I have to wonder, would you feel the need to do that?

Speaking for myself, I do it occasionally because a few people like you insist that we actually are laughingstocks. Why, just today, during my roughly weekly excursion into the so-called "Recovery" board, I ran across a post by someone there who wondered why I still allow myself to be called a "scholar," since I'm obviously such a moron and a joke. To which an obvious response is that at least I've been cunning enough to have fooled the editors at the University of Chicago Press, E. J. Brill, Oxford University Press, Macmillan, and several other such places, as well as the leadership of the Middle East Studies Association, etc.

[_Daniel Peterson]

If Mr. Tvedtnes is not availble to provide an indepth rebutal, perhaps Dr. Peterson can assign another scholar to provide a substantial review of the significant claims of Dr. Wright.

I lack any power or authority to "assign" somebody to write a response.

I can ask and invite, but that's it.

I think that many people would be interested.

Count me among them. I would enjoy seeing a good response.

[_Analytics]

There's no question that the FARMS Review represents a certain broad worldview, and that, like journals of annales historiography, Keynesian economics, Freudian psychoanalysis, Catholic theology, monetarist economics, evangelical biblical scholarship, continental philosophy, and Marxist sociology -- I apologize to Chap for these references -- we publish essays expressive of our general worldview and, by and large, don't publish essays that aren't expressive of that worldview. (FARMS was founded, to a large extent, to provide such a venue for scholarship expressive of that worldview; there already exist plenty of scholarly venues that aren't.)

I find a subtle bit of equivocation in these analogies. Monetary economics, for example, really isn’t a worldview per se, but rather a class of models for analyzing complex economic reality. Journals that cater to that worldview are free to criticize monetary models and delimitate when they are insightful. In contrast, the worldview that FARMS Review caters to is that the core tenets of the LDS Church are in fact the ultimate truth.

That fundamental difference in what is meant by "worldview" is why the following Emerson quote applies to apologists better than to monetary economists:

If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, — the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

In any case, rehashing this discussion with you has been a pleasure, as always.

[_harmony]

I don’t mean to blame FARMS or its editor for Robinson’s review, but honestly—you can’t tell me you would have published it if Robinson would have said, “You know what? This book convinced me that the liberals really have a lot of keen insights into the Mormon scriptures that are worthy of respect. For the sake of intellectual integrity, we ought to take some lessons from the RLDS approach…”

I've never received such a review.

Did you solicit one?

[_Daniel Peterson]

harmony, I solicit reviews from people that I think will have something interesting to say. I don't dictate what they will say in advance, and I don't believe that I've ever censored the substance of what they've said after they've said it.

I'm very much a laissez faire editor, as any of the hundreds who have written for me can easily attest.

I find a subtle bit of equivocation in these analogies.

I don't.

Incidentally, I'm not convinced that religionists and system-building philosophers have a monopoly on "worldviews."

Thomas Sowell wrote an interesting book some years ago (entitled A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles) in which he pointed to very much the same predictability that your Emerson quote attributes to preachers, but referring to political ideologies. He pointed out that, if you know somebody's position on abortion or progressive taxation, you can typically predict with a fairly high level of accuracy that person's position on such seemingly unrelated matters as the preservation of snail-darter habitats, anti-missile defenses, and racial quotas.

To explain this, he posited two fundamental competing worldviews: a constrained view of human nature and an unconstrained one.

With apologies to Chap, permit me to observe that it's an interesting book.

[_Chap]

Incidentally, I'm not convinced that religionists and system-building philosophers have a monopoly on "worldviews."

Thomas Sowell wrote an interesting book some years ago (entitled A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles) in which he pointed to very much the same predictability that your Emerson quote attributes to preachers, but referring to political ideologies. He pointed out that, if you know somebody's position on abortion or progressive taxation, you can typically predict with a fairly high level of accuracy that person's position on such seemingly unrelated matters as the preservation of snail-darter habitats, anti-missile defenses, and racial quotas.

To explain this, he posited two fundamental competing worldviews: a constrained view of human nature and an unconstrained one.

With apologies to Chap, permit me to observe that it's an interesting book.

Gracious me, no apology is required for making a post that is in English throughout and is accessible, just as it stands, to any person with normal reading ability. I would hate to see DCP being at all hesitant about sharing his views with us as he has here.

But I am not quite sure that this tendency for peoples's views to come in clusters is what Emerson was talking about. Wasn't he pointing to the fact that when (for instance) a GA stands up to give a talk called 'evaluating the historicity of the Book of Mormon', we know what he has to say if he wants to stay a GA? It is his job to say what we he does.

That is different from predicting my view on abortion from my views on taxation, isn't it?

[_Daniel Peterson]

But I am not quite sure that this tendency for peoples's views to come in clusters is what Emerson was talking about. Wasn't he pointing to the fact that when (for instance) a GA stands up to give a talk called 'evaluating the historicity of the Book of Mormon', we know what he has to say if he wants to stay a GA? It is his job to say what we he does.

That is different from predicting my view on abortion from my views on taxation, isn't it?

Perhaps. Formulated in the way you do, it may come closer to the logical fallacies of ad hominem and/or "poisoning the well."

[_Chap]

But I am not quite sure that this tendency for peoples's views to come in clusters is what Emerson was talking about. Wasn't he pointing to the fact that when (for instance) a GA stands up to give a talk called 'evaluating the historicity of the Book of Mormon', we know what he has to say if he wants to stay a GA? It is his job to say what we he does.

That is different from predicting my view on abortion from my views on taxation, isn't it?

Perhaps. Formulated in the way you do, it may come closer to the logical fallacies of ad hominem and/or "poisoning the well."

Naah. Just being cautious about accepting assurances about the purity of the water from someone who works for the bottling plant.