beastie wrote:I'd like to know more details about him calling you a liar, too. What film? What was the entire statement? What evidence and context can you provide?
The film is entitled The Bible vs. the Book of Mormon, and it is produced and aggressively marketed by an anti-Mormon enterprise located in Brigham City, Utah, that operates under the name Living Hope Ministries. Here is something that I published in response to it:
A personal note: One of the more graceless moments in the film comes when it presents a decontextualized clip from a videotaped lecture of mine after which Tom Murphy declares that "Dan Peterson is lying."*[see footnote] Murphy suggests to his audience that I was saying that scholars everywhere, in and out of the church, find the claims of the Book of Mormon largely unobjectionable—a proposition that, had I really advanced it, could, of course, be instantly demonstrated false and might even qualify me as certifiably insane. But I have never said anything of the sort (nor even thought it). My specific point, in the comment to which Murphy objects, has nothing whatever to do with demographics, geography, technology, ecology, metallurgy, archaeology, or anything of the sort, as Murphy should have realized and as he could easily have determined, if by no other means, by asking me. Whether deliberately or out of careless incompetence, Murphy and Living Hope Ministries have grossly misrepresented my position, a position that I have explained in scores of public lectures. (The very fact that I have published many thousands of words defending the Book of Mormon against criticisms demonstrates beyond reasonable dispute that I am both aware of such criticisms and willing to publicly acknowledge them.) My point in the passage from the lecture that Murphy or his handlers carefully extracted to serve as their straw man is a simple and very limited one, essentially stylistic, which I stand by and which I am quite willing to defend: The Book of Mormon does not strain to create an aura of pseudo-oriental exoticism or antiquity; apart, obviously, from its miracles and revelations, and apart from the visit of Jesus Christ to the Nephites (though, really, even in those cases), its narrative is sober, understated, conforming to ordinary quotidian experience of cause and effect, unmarred by the excesses that make much medieval hagiography so literally incredible. It reads like real history. It is reminiscent, rhetorically, of the better ancient and medieval chronicles, and, indeed, of the Bible. When Murphy brands me a liar for having asserted this, besides revealing either his failure to grasp my point or a cavalier unconcern about accurately representing the opinions of those whom he has been engaged to attack, he coarsens the discourse in a way that is both shamefully uncivil and wholly unjustifiable and that his avowedly Christian sponsors should not be seeking to promote with their film.
*[footnote] The filmed lecture (entitled "A Scholar Looks at Evidences for the Book of Mormon") is available via farms.BYU.edu/multimedia/index.php?cat=Book of Mormon (accessed 11 January 2006). I wrote to Murphy on 7 November 2005 to chide him for what I regard as, among other things, a gratuitous and unprofessional public insult and, frankly, to give him an opportunity to apologize. Responding that same day, he was unashamed. He repeated and underscored his accusation and, in fact, broadened it to include essentially everybody else affiliated with the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies.