As I have said before, your writing style (obtuse and inflammatory) leaves a lot to be desired as well as your civility.
Most people disagree, but I am willing to test your claim, so let’s do it.
There is no way you can go toe to toe with a true academician, or be influential.
But I already have, on numerous occasions, so your statement is just meaningless assertion. Incidentally, when I was a TBM I used to frequent a Greek and Hebrew B-list and debate Evangelical academians on a regular basis. I had them up against the ropes as well, and I don’t remember any LDS feeling my method was not influential or uncivil.
Since turning a critical eye inwards, I have made Gee, Hauglid, Peterson and Hamblin look foolish on a number of occasions. I caused Hauglid to flee the internet even after I had been banned from the forum. He couldn’t help himself but to come over here and read my critique of his debate with Metcalfe, and he expressed that he was displeased with my criticisms so he fled the pundits forum for good. He never came here and addressed by criticisms because he knew he couldn’t win.
Recently, I have enjoyed my exchanges with Bokovoy. He had the integrity to come here and I commend him for that. How you can say I am not influential is a mystery since Bokovoy himself said he was impressed with the points I made, and that he had been convinced of some of the things I said. I am still waiting for his response in the celestial forum.
My last encounter with Hamblin… I caught him flat out lying. How did he respond? Well, Dan Peterson ran to his aide and insisted he leave the scene, which of course, he did. It was hilarious. Hamblin accused me of misrepresenting what he said when what he said was provided in mp3 format for anyone who wanted to listen. He was just too trigger happy with the usual apologetic responses, that he wasn’t even paying attention to what he actually said. I was left beside myself when he fled the scene expressing indignation as if I had done something wrong. The entire thing is still on Kerry’s blog I believe.
Dan Peterson has fled the scene on more occasions than I can count. I know you prefer to believe his reasons have everything to do with my unworthiness and my tone, but the history of our exchanges will prove otherwise. He frequently engages people who are less worthy and far more uncivil. The difference is that he picks battles he knows he can win. He cannot afford risking a loss in front of his home team. He is too important of a figure to do that. It isn’t tone or intelligence tat repels Dan, it is refutation. He is too big of a name to let someone like little ole me damage his ego. This point is also supported by the fact that he actually does choose to respond to my criticisms, only in a forum where he knows I cannot respond. He comes to this forum, and even to my own, but never to engage in debate. He has learned from experience that it is counter-productive, but not in the way you guys think.
Yesterday, I got a kick out of his claim that he would respond to my post after he got back from the ballot box. Seconds after he posted this I was banned and Dan then just moments later after he saw my criticisms had been removed, he returned safely to his refutation-free forum and began posting responses to other respondents.
There was nothing wrong with the civility of the post I provided at MAD. It was far more civil than the typical FARMS review, which immediately attributes deceptive motives to the anti-Mormon author. The fact is Dan Peterson made serious mistakes in his Ensign article; mistakes that would result in a thorough lambasting if done by a critic in an “Anti-Mormon” work.
If you wrote a little more concisely
Oh give me a break. Dan’s inability to respond to valid criticisms has nothing to do with the length of my posts. He frequently responds to longer posts, but only when they are written by people he thinks he can debate successfully.
with a little less cut-and-pasty one-upmanship
One-upmanship? The whole point of a critique is to point out errors. You guys do this all the flippin time. I can hardly do this without coming across in this manner, especially with people like you who feel you are above reproach.
and with fewer insults (let's see, just about everybody with whom you disagree is either an "idiot" or "moron"
This is not true at all, so why are you lying? I don’t believe I have ever used either of these terms in a discussion with Dan. I have always given him the respect he is due. Same with other LDS scholars. Dan Peterson used to call me a "jackass" in the ZLMB chat room. The difference between us is that if I have something like this to say about him, I will come out with it on the forum, and not hide behind a pseudonym in a chat room.
I hammer Gee, but it is well deserved. He is a coward. He used to email me all the time with hints of things to say in ZLMB debates with Metcalfe because he was too scared to come do it himself. And then when it turned out that Gee’s points fell through the holes, I was the one left looking stupid. My last email to Gee at that point was:
“Metcalfe is saying the color photos of the KEP undermine your argument about two different inks, and it looks like he is right from what he has presented. Have the photos he posted online been manipulated in some way?”
Gee never responded. I emailed him several time over the course of the week but he never responded.
This is your hero. A coward who refuses to defend his own lame apologetic nonsense.
you might per a little more persuasive.
But I have already been persuasive - far more persuasive than you and the other reviewers/apologists at FARMS/FAIR. You see the apologists at FAIR are not persuading anyone from their original position. How many critics have they persuaded, or dissuaded? Maybe every few years you hear about some far-flung critic who gets baptized. When I was ousted by FAIR it caused a ruckus because the posters there appreciated my participation – even many TBMs wanted me to stay. I was getting emails from more than a dozen struggling LDS who understood exactly the points I was making, and they were eventually persuaded.
What annoys you guys more than anything is that you know very well that if both sides were to be given a platform to elucidate their positions on a level playing field, the critical side would win out every time. This is why you never see Gee or Peterson debate these issues with Ashment or Metcalfe. You know it is a self-defeating cause. Instead Peterson picks his battles carefully and chooses to do radio debates with idiotic Evangelical bible-thumpers.
You cannot win the Book of Abraham issue. This is why people like Dan and the mods have to rig the game from the start wheneve it is raised online. They have to censor, ban, reprimand, anyone and everyone who ends up dissuading those they ended to retain. And yes, you guys are not about dissuading. You are all about retaining members and keeping them from finding out the facts about the Book of Abraham. It is all for the benefit of the believer, not the casual objective onlooker. It is taken for granted that none of these people could ever be convinced of the apologetic line. Even Will Schryver said as much. Without the premise of a testimony that Joseph Smith was a true prophet, there is no reasonable means to conclude the Book of Abraham is anything other than fraud.
And for crying out loud, every time I wander over there I am totally amazed just how ignorant some of these people are, like Obiwan and Coggins. Even still, they do not understand the basics of the fiasco. It has been watered down for quick consumption, and they way it is presented there leave the critics looking like non-professionals who can’t get real jobs, who rely strictly on speculation in virtually every single aspect of their critiques. They do not understand or acknowledge any of the evidence that suggests we have the source Joseph Smith used for the Book of Abraham, and people who do understand it (Schryver and Peterson) are doing nothing to educate them on this matter. They are effectively acting as disinformation machines, because the end justifies the means. They keep feeding them apologetic conjecture as a means to retain them; by giving them some way to say, “OK, I guess that’s possible.” It is an insult to our intelligences call any of this “reasonable” which is what Dan Peterson is dong right now.
But nobody over there gives them a step by step walk through on the evidences for both sides. When the critical evidence is presented it is usually in straw man format, so the result is that the ignorance level at FAIR continues to drop.
Is Ed Ashment still selling insurance?
Do you have any idea how you proved my point with this statement? You’re a hypocrite. You call my approach uncivil? You cannot refute anything Edward Ashment has said, so you go after his livelihood and use it against him. I suppose you think you are somehow mitigating his educational background in Egyptology. You fail to acknowledge that Ashment was one of the first people hired by the Church to analyze the KEP first hand. He was an active member in good standing at the time before he found the evidence you do not want people to know about. Maybe he originally proceeded with the doctoral program to add credibility to himself as an apologist, but when he realized it was a fraud, his interest in Egyptology drifted? After all, we know knowledge in Egyptology is hardly required to know the Book of Abraham does not come from the extant papyrus.
This is one of the things that made me sick with your kind at FARMS. I used to email people on an LDS apologetic e-list to ask them for help with arguments and they would usually respond with some pithy comment about the man’s profession. Lou Midgley emailed me once in response to a question I had about the papyri. The question had nothing to do with Charles Larsen, but he assumed it did. His response was this:
“So Chuck Larsen, former security guard and current high school teacher is going to refute Yale trained John Gee?”
That was all he said.
I then asked him about Stephen Thompson’s arguments. Instead of dealing with the arguments he told me that Thompson couldn’t make it in academia as a professor, so he has to teach High School. That was it. That was the extent of the apologetic ammunition I was given. Seven years later I see this method is alive and well. Your method is a disgrace to reason. You guys cannot handle arguments and I think you all realize this. You have to attack the messenger every time.
This means you are more cowardly than a hundred anonymous posters.
I knew him at the University of Chicago. In any event, Gee's writings seem more compelling to me. At least Gee had a dissertation to defend, successfully.
Gee cannot persuade anyone on the Book of Abraham. Al he can do is throw out theories that keep believing members at bay, and usually, this s only when an absence of critical information s available. If you think Gee’s arguments are compelling then you either haven’t understood them or you are also too deep on confirmation bias for your statement to mean anything. Nobody outside of LDS apologetics thinks Gee is compelling in anything he says about the Book of Abraham. The only people who find him compelling are those who need to believe a certain way. That should speak volumes. For your type, no amount of evidence will dissuade you, and this has been established recently with Bokovoy’s paradigm philosophy which resonated with most TBMs.
Now Gee is a dishonest person who cannot be trusted and I will prove it. He used deception in his “guide” to the papyri, and he did so successfully. There is no way his defenders can successfully defend him on this point. There is simply no excuse for his ridiculous goofs, which can be explained no other way except intentional deception. Are you willing to defend his errors as something else?
As long as you are the faith's most strident opponent on the issue of the Book of Abraham, the faith has little to fear.
The evidence speaks to the contrary. The apologetic front is scared to death of me. If anyone even hints of my presence they all freak out and go into lock-down mode. You know they cannot deal with my presentations in a coherent, point by point manner. All they can do is what you do best, and that is to make the issue personal and divert attention to Kevin Graham instead of his arguments.
So here I have a challenge for you Bob. If I present evidence that Gee is a joke who should never be trusted on all things Book of Abraham, will you defend him?