Peterson Misleading Again

[_guy sajer]

On the one hand, I very much doubt that the 2nd letter was forged. I also doubt that DCP would lie about something like this.

That's the reasonable reaction, one that doesn't assume me and my supposed co-conspirators to be monumentally dishonest and wildly reckless.

Dan, is it possible that someone might occasionally be less than forthcoming (lie) and still not be 'monumentally dishonest and wildly reckless?"

I don't consider you monumentally dishonest or wildly reckless, but neither do I rule out the possibility that you might occasionally, well, lie when it suits your purpose or for some other reason. I'm less inclined to think you'd engage in the 'big' lie, but I see no reason to rule out the possibility that you might at times engage in the 'little lie.'

I don't think this makes you a bad person; I think it makes you 'normal.'

You have this tendency to engage in hyperbole in this regard, but surprisingly, you seem to believe it yourself.

As to the current topic, I have no opinion on whether you are lying.

[_Arnold Friend]

Hello everyone. I think I can lay at least a part of this issue to rest. some time ago, I had a close friend within LDS Church headquarters and I recall when Bro. Watson received Bill Hamblin's letter. I was intrigued enough by it to get a hold of a photocopy. I had misplaced it though which is a strange coincidence. But I recently found it as I was going through some old papers. After some debate I decided that it would be best to present a transcription of the letter to this board for Your perusal. if there are any errorrs in the transcription they are mine.

Dear Brother Watson:

We face a grave threat from the anti-Mormons. Although you surely did not intend it, your letter attempting to clarify the location of the Hill Cumorah has fallen into the hands of the Tanners. We cannot have this. Perhaps you are not aware, but the good Brothers and Sisters at FARMS have been very busy trying to locate the real Hill Cumorah in the Chiapas region of Mexico. By telling people that the Brethren officially believe Cumorah to be located in New York, we risk losing the faith of thousands of Latter-day Saints, since it appears that the best LDS scholars and the Brethren are not on the same page. While it is possible that the Hill is indeed in New York, at the present time the bulk of evidence points to a Latin American locale.

I urge you to issue a retraction letter as soon as possible, before it can appear that apologists and the Brethren are not united in their doctrinal understanding. I am sure you are sensitive to the gravity of this situation, and that you will act as promptly and hastily as possible.

Your Brother-in-arms,

William Hamblin, Ph.D.

So I think we can safely assume that the second watson letter is real.

[_Daniel Peterson]

If Professor Nibley accused Mrs. Brodie of actually forging or inventing primary source documents, I must have missed it.

Despite inserting the qualifier, "actually forging or inventing primary source documents" - I think you missed it. He accuses her of dishonesty, among other things, all throughout his essay :

"While a large book could (and probably should) be devoted to this remarkable monument of biographical mendacity,"

"Her manipulating and tangling of evidence, which we once compared to a nest of garter snakes, "

People can manipulate evidence and etc., or even dishonestly misrepresent the overall state of the evidence, without being crudely or deliberately dishonest. Ideology, bias, etc., can lead in that direction. (Isn't this -- at a minimum -- what apologists are routinely accused of?)

It's hard to imagine consciously forging a document, though, without deliberate dishonesty.

I don't regard either the Tanners or Fawn Brodie as a deliberate liar or forger.

Do you consider them accidental liars? Incidental liars?

I would be very hesitant to use that language. I probably wouldn't. I never have.

That said, after years of regarding the Tanners as fundamentally honest but misguided, I did, a while back, run across a passage where it was difficult to see how they could have genuinely missed the latter part of a quotation that transformed the meaning of the earlier part that they had cited. I confess that they took a hit in my mind that day. I think (and surely people here will agree, in principle, since many here imagine that it's essentially the way I and some of my colleagues live our daily lives) that zeal to reach a conclusion can lead one to misuse or trim evidence.

But that's quite a different matter from very consciously sitting down to create a counterfeit piece of primary textual evidence.

While I think the Tanners are demonstrably guilty of the former on at least some occasions, I would be enormously surprised (and shocked) if they ever did the latter. Yet it's the latter that some here have suggested in my case.

On the one hand, I very much doubt that the 2nd letter was forged. I also doubt that DCP would lie about something like this.

That's the reasonable reaction, one that doesn't assume me and my supposed co-conspirators to be monumentally dishonest and wildly reckless.

Dan, is it possible that someone might occasionally be less than forthcoming (lie) and still not be 'monumentally dishonest and wildly reckless?"

Yes. Of course.

But that's quite a different matter than sitting down very deliberately to craft a phony letter from the Office of the First Presidency for citation in a published article. For a member of the Church, and especially for an employee of BYU, that would be unbelievably reckless. It would be monumentally dishonest for anybody.

I don't consider you monumentally dishonest or wildly reckless, but neither do I rule out the possibility that you might occasionally, well, lie when it suits your purpose or for some other reason. I'm less inclined to think you'd engage in the 'big' lie, but I see no reason to rule out the possibility that you might at times engage in the 'little lie.'

I don't think this makes you a bad person; I think it makes you 'normal.'

But we're talking, here, about a very big and brazen lie: the deliberate, quite conscious, creation of a counterfeit letter from the Office of the First Presidency, to be quoted and deployed as evidence in a published article.

Or else we're talking about a case in which, despite efforts by myself (the overall FARMS Review editor), by Dr. Hamblin (the author of the article), by Dr. Ricks (the FARMS Review production editor), and by the FARMS Review source checker to accurately reproduce the two sentences [!] of the letter in the published version of the FARMS Review, we were unable to do so without fundamentally distorting the content of those two sentences.

As to the current topic, I have no opinion on whether you are lying.

That's not a very resounding vote of confidence.

If I were to say, off hand, that I have no opinon whatever about whether you've been lying on this board about your one-time teaching position at BYU and your publication record and your graduate studies and your present career, and if you were to regard what I said seriously, you wouldn't (and shouldn't) take it very kindly. The default setting for civil conversation is and should be that we typically take each other's comments as sincere and more or less at face value unless we have strong reason not to do so. I have utterly no reason to believe you to have been lying about your education and your career. Nor do Joey and Harmony and a very small handful of others here have any serious reason to presume that Drs. Hamblin and Ricks and I and the FARMS Review source checker lied about the existence and contents of Watson letter #2.

[_Daniel Peterson]

If "Arnold Friend," for example, were trying to pass his forgery off as real, there would be no question (unless we believed him to be literally delusional) that his forgery represented an act of conscious and deliberate fraud.

[_guy sajer]

If Professor Nibley accused Mrs. Brodie of actually forging or inventing primary source documents, I must have missed it.

Despite inserting the qualifier, "actually forging or inventing primary source documents" - I think you missed it. He accuses her of dishonesty, among other things, all throughout his essay :

"While a large book could (and probably should) be devoted to this remarkable monument of biographical mendacity,"

"Her manipulating and tangling of evidence, which we once compared to a nest of garter snakes, "

People can manipulate evidence and etc., or even dishonestly misrepresent the overall state of the evidence, without being crudely or deliberately dishonest. Ideology, bias, etc., can lead in that direction. (Isn't this -- at a minimum -- what apologists are routinely accused of?)

It's hard to imagine consciously forging a document, though, without deliberate dishonesty.

I don't regard either the Tanners or Fawn Brodie as a deliberate liar or forger.

Do you consider them accidental liars? Incidental liars?

I would be very hesitant to use that language. I probably wouldn't. I never have.

That said, after years of regarding the Tanners as fundamentally honest but misguided, I did, a while back, run across a passage where it was difficult to see how they could have genuinely missed the latter part of a quotation that transformed the meaning of the earlier part that they had cited. I confess that they took a hit in my mind that day. I think (and surely people here will agree, in principle, since many here imagine that it's essentially the way I and some of my colleagues live our daily lives) that zeal to reach a conclusion can lead one to misuse or trim evidence.

But that's quite a different matter from very consciously sitting down to create a counterfeit piece of primary textual evidence.

While I think the Tanners are demonstrably guilty of the former on at least some occasions, I would be enormously surprised (and shocked) if they ever did the latter. Yet it's the latter that some here have suggested in my case.

On the one hand, I very much doubt that the 2nd letter was forged. I also doubt that DCP would lie about something like this.

That's the reasonable reaction, one that doesn't assume me and my supposed co-conspirators to be monumentally dishonest and wildly reckless.

Dan, is it possible that someone might occasionally be less than forthcoming (lie) and still not be 'monumentally dishonest and wildly reckless?"

Yes. Of course.

But that's quite a different matter than sitting down very deliberately to craft a phony letter from the Office of the First Presidency for citation in a published article. For a member of the Church, and especially for an employee of BYU, that would be unbelievably reckless. It would be monumentally dishonest for anybody.

I don't consider you monumentally dishonest or wildly reckless, but neither do I rule out the possibility that you might occasionally, well, lie when it suits your purpose or for some other reason. I'm less inclined to think you'd engage in the 'big' lie, but I see no reason to rule out the possibility that you might at times engage in the 'little lie.'

I don't think this makes you a bad person; I think it makes you 'normal.'

But we're talking, here, about a very big and brazen lie: the deliberate, quite conscious, creation of a counterfeit letter from the Office of the First Presidency, to be quoted and deployed as evidence in a published article.

Or else we're talking about a case in which, despite efforts by myself (the overall FARMS Review editor), by Dr. Hamblin (the author of the article), by Dr. Ricks (the FARMS Review production editor), and by the FARMS Review source checker to accurately reproduce the two sentences [!] of the letter in the published version of the FARMS Review, we were unable to do so without fundamentally distorting the content of those two sentences.

As to the current topic, I have no opinion on whether you are lying.

That's not a very resounding vote of confidence.

If I were to say, off hand, that I have no opinon whatever about whether you've been lying on this board about your one-time teaching position at BYU and your publication record and your graduate studies and your present career, and if you were to regard what I said seriously, you wouldn't (and shouldn't) take it very kindly. The default setting for civil conversation is and should be that we typically take each other's comments as sincere and more or less at face value unless we have strong reason not to do so. I have utterly no reason to believe you to have been lying about your education and your career. Nor do Joey and Harmony and a very small handful of others here have any serious reason to presume that Drs. Hamblin and Ricks and I and the FARMS Review source checker lied about the existence and contents of Watson letter #2.

Ok, Dan, fair enough. I am satisfied. I do not believe you are lying in this case. Nor do I believe you to be a wanton or habitual liar. I believe that you are, for the most part, honest in your dealings. I have my issues with you, but suspicion about your integrity is not one of them. I also would assume that most of us on this board would agree with me. Don't lump us all in with your accusers in this regard.

My baseline assumption is that most people are honest most of the time. But also that most people do lie on occasion, for a variety of reasons. I don't make an exception of anyone, including you, me, Thomas Monson, and so forth.

[_Daniel Peterson]

Ok, Dan, fair enough. I am satisfied. I do not believe you are lying in this case. Nor do I believe you to be a wanton or habitual liar. I believe that you are, for the most part, honest in your dealings. I have my issues with you, but suspicion about your integrity is not one of them. I also would assume that most of us on this board would agree with me. Don't lump us all in with your accusers in this regard.

Not to worry. I don't.

I'm quite aware that there are unreasonable extremists here. I don't consider you one of them. I think they represent a vocal and quite unpleasant minority.

[_guy sajer]

Ok, Dan, fair enough. I am satisfied. I do not believe you are lying in this case. Nor do I believe you to be a wanton or habitual liar. I believe that you are, for the most part, honest in your dealings. I have my issues with you, but suspicion about your integrity is not one of them. I also would assume that most of us on this board would agree with me. Don't lump us all in with your accusers in this regard.

Not to worry. I don't.

I'm quite aware that there are unreasonable extremists here. I don't consider you one of them. I think they represent a vocal and quite unpleasant minority.

Geez, all this pleasantness is making me feel giddy.

But I could be lying :-)

[_beastie]

This is the most interesting thing on this thread:

Dear Brother Watson:

We face a grave threat from the anti-Mormons. Although you surely did not intend it, your letter attempting to clarify the location of the Hill Cumorah has fallen into the hands of the Tanners. We cannot have this. Perhaps you are not aware, but the good Brothers and Sisters at FARMS have been very busy trying to locate the real Hill Cumorah in the Chiapas region of Mexico. By telling people that the Brethren officially believe Cumorah to be located in New York, we risk losing the faith of thousands of Latter-day Saints, since it appears that the best LDS scholars and the Brethren are not on the same page. While it is possible that the Hill is indeed in New York, at the present time the bulk of evidence points to a Latin American locale.

I urge you to issue a retraction letter as soon as possible, before it can appear that apologists and the Brethren are not united in their doctrinal understanding. I am sure you are sensitive to the gravity of this situation, and that you will act as promptly and hastily as possible.

Your Brother-in-arms,

William Hamblin, Ph.D.

What is interesting about this is that high-profile apologists feel entitled to "correct" the brethren, so to speak. Members at large certainly don't feel that kind of privilege or right. The second interesting thing is that the brethren accepted the correction.

Kind of at odds with the idea of a leadership led by revelation.

[_Trevor]

Kind of at odds with the idea of a leadership led by revelation.

Maybe they had a revelation that Hamblin had a good point.

[_Mister Scratch]

This is the most interesting thing on this thread:

Dear Brother Watson:

We face a grave threat from the anti-Mormons. Although you surely did not intend it, your letter attempting to clarify the location of the Hill Cumorah has fallen into the hands of the Tanners. We cannot have this. Perhaps you are not aware, but the good Brothers and Sisters at FARMS have been very busy trying to locate the real Hill Cumorah in the Chiapas region of Mexico. By telling people that the Brethren officially believe Cumorah to be located in New York, we risk losing the faith of thousands of Latter-day Saints, since it appears that the best LDS scholars and the Brethren are not on the same page. While it is possible that the Hill is indeed in New York, at the present time the bulk of evidence points to a Latin American locale.

I urge you to issue a retraction letter as soon as possible, before it can appear that apologists and the Brethren are not united in their doctrinal understanding. I am sure you are sensitive to the gravity of this situation, and that you will act as promptly and hastily as possible.

Your Brother-in-arms,

William Hamblin, Ph.D.

What is interesting about this is that high-profile apologists feel entitled to "correct" the brethren, so to speak. Members at large certainly don't feel that kind of privilege or right. The second interesting thing is that the brethren accepted the correction.

Kind of at odds with the idea of a leadership led by revelation.

I agree, and I, for one, am extremely grateful to A. Friend for transcribing the text of Dr. Hamblin's letter. Further, in addition to the "corrective" element you note, Beastie, I think it is intriguing to observe a form of "correlation" taking place. Plus, one cannot help but notice a very real fear that critics such as the Tanners might gain the upper hand in the battle for members.