Response to DCP before it is removed
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_Kevin Graham
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 13037
- Joined: Fri Oct 27, 2006 6:44 pm
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_Yoda
Re: Response to DCP before it is removed
#1 Xander
Brings Forth Plants
Contributor
3,229 posts
Joined 22-June 11
Posted Today, 03:34 PM
Apparently, Dan started a thread attacking some things I had said on another forum. I see the thread has been shut down, but I hope the mods will allow me to respond since it stood for two days and I never had the chance to read it or respond to it until now.
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I've noted before that Xander/Kevin tends to brand those who disagree with him as unscrupulous, cowardly, incompetent, and/or lying, which is one of the reasons that I stopped interacting with him even back in the days when he was still a Latter-day Saint. Life is short, and I have no patience for such rhetoric or such treatment.
Yes, and you falsely note this for the purposes of poisoning the well, as I have noted every time you do this. It is one of the reasons why I have such a negative opinion of you. You absolutely refuse to address the plethora of evidences that run contrary to your assertions attacking others like me. Between the two of us, only I am able to maintain strong friendships with people on both sides of the aisle. How is this even possible, if, as you assert, I tend to label everyone with whom I disagree, a liar? Why don't you call up your friends David Bokovoy and Brian Hauglid and ask them what they think of your theory. You know, people who actually know me. Or does the truth matter so little to you that a quick phone call to credible sources is just beyond what you're willing to do?
As we both know, the primary reason why you stopped interacting with me is because you failed miserably in your initial attempt to prove me wrong on a point related to Islam. That reflects poorly on your ego, not my alleged intolerance. When I provided authoritative Islamic references, at your request, you then realized you could not respond effectively so you decided to leave the forum and head on over to this one where you could then attck me the same as you do everyone else who proves you wrong on any given matter. You informed your audience that I was too spiritually deficient for you to engage and thus the anti-Kevin rhetoric began. It is what you do, after all. And the fact that you are starting these hit threads, in the context of defending yourself against the charge that you engage in hit pieces, is nothing short of proving our point.
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That's not particularly interesting in itself, nor really worthy of much note.
But you thought you'd go ahead and intoxicate your audience with a healthy dose of well poisoning. After all, why mention this at all if, as you admit, it is not particularly interesting or worthy of note?
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But he's raised a couple of old accusations against me to which I feel I need to reply, if only cursorily, because of their seriousness. I take them in steeply ascending order:
1) He's again accusing me of cowardice for not agreeing, many years ago, to a formal public debate with somebody named Bob McCue, and he's attributing to me a whole host of more or less lame excuses for my failure to engage Mr. McCue.
This is not accurate. Someone brought up the McCue incident which I vaguely remembered, and it dove-tailed nicely with what we already knew of you. The McCue incident is hardly the first time you've teased people into thinking you were ever interested in a dialogue, and then bailed when it became clear you were not equiped to defend your arguments. If you want to seriously represent me correctly, then you'd share with your audience the example I provided on the thread, which dealt with your numerous challenges on the forum you hate so much. Challenges, to which you responded by claiming you were too busy with all your scholarly activities (conference speeches, flights to Europe, teaching assignments, "I think I'm more important than I really am" anonymous meetings, etc) to respond to questions that were presented to you in a very civil manner.
Then weeks later we discover that you wrote a editor's introduction attacking web-based "anti-Mormons" with a broad brush, ignoring every issue we raised but instead focused on easy straw man statements made by irrelevant, obscure internet posters who, for all we know, were sock puppets you created for your own straw man purposes. Your "introduction" to the FARMS review was roughly 14,000 words and 56 printed pages, which undermines your claim that you had no time on your hands to deal with online concerns made by folks on the forums. In fact, you were obsessed with them, but didn't have the integrity to approach them directly, let alone treat them like humans deserved to be treated.
But as I said, you do this to a number of people. Here is another example just before you left the forum, promising to respond to a question you said was substantive. You said, and I quote, "That's an actual substantive charge, which can be discussed. And which I will discuss, when I'm ready to do so." And yet the cricketts are still chirpping over on that thread. A number of your claims were challenged; claims which you published back in the 1994 Ensign. In another thread you went gunning for the lowest hanging fruits while ignoring questions posed to you by someone who you actually knew, MsJack. You gave no reason for ignoring her substantive questions except to whine about how you're free to ignore who you will and nobody can force you to respond if you don't want to. So please stop pretending I'm the guy you refuse to debate and that you do so because I'm uncivil. I have proved that I am perfectly capable of civil discourse. In reality, you refuse to debate a wide variety of folks who have substantive criticisms of your apologetics, and you refuse because you represent the losing side that is lacking truth. Civility has nothing to do with it because MSJack and others were perfectly civil and yet you still flee the scene after promising to respond. For you it is better to just ignore us all, so that you can claim you haven't lost because you never engaged. Which would be fine if you left it at that. Instead, you run over here to misrepresent what we've said and then you use the Church funded publication to launch your attacks, knowing perfectly well you're going to have the privilege to say pretty much whatever it is you want ; that is, until a General Authority catches wind of what it is you think accurately represents the mission of the Church, and is pulled. This in and of itself proves once and for all that you're living in fantasy land when you claim you do not do hit pieces. You want us to believe that some General Authority pulled your publication for no reason other than anti-Mormon intimidation. Again, we witness your inability to admit wrongdoing at every turn. Even when your own Church authorities get involved you're still making excuses and blaming those you have attacked.
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(a) I debated in high school, rather successfully, and, perhaps for that very reason, I have little faith in formal, timed debates as a way of getting at the truth.
Who said anything about formal debates? Just answer basic questions without running off. You always present yourself on these forums and you spend countless hours morning afternoon and night, posting thousands upon thousands of rhetorical quips. But when you're presented with basic questions, you flee the scene. What's worse, you run over to this forum complaining that no one wants to have a "civil dialogue" with you and for that reason you consider the other forum "toxic." This also counts as a "hit" against your credibility and character because those of us who have endured your waves of rhetoric, always going for the lowest hanging fruit while ignoring those of us who have something substantive to say, understand that Daniel C. Peterson was never someone who was interested in civil dialogue with anyone. It is a charade you put up when venting your complaints over here.
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I'm not scared of debates, and have engaged in them (against such genuinely able, high-stature, and experienced debaters as William Lane Craig and Robert Spencer and, albeit on a radio show, James White) with, to my mind, respectable results. I'm willing, on occasion, to engage in formal public debates. They're just not high on my list of priorities.
Again, we're not talking formal debates. We're talking about your inability to admit being wrong on any given matter. It proves you're not really interested in what's true or what can be called "civil dialogue." Standard etiquette in civil dialogue presupposes a willingness to reciprocate by answering just as many questions as you pose to your perceived opponents. But you usually answer none unless you feel it they are safe questions to answer.
.As a perfect example, you once stated that the Islam of Avicenna is not comparable to the militant Islam we see on the news. I pointed out to you a statement by Avicenna which runs contrary to your claim. Avicenna believed that non-Muslims should be fired upon using catapults, even if innocent women and children were on the other side of the wall. It doesn't require a "formal debate" to own up to the fact that you were clearly wrong on this point. But you can't even respond cordially with something along the lines of, "Good point Kevin, I didn't realize Avicenna had that view." This is what separates your bombastic approach from the scholarly humility that is exhibited by folks like Bokovoy and Hauglid, both of whom have absolutely no problem conceding that they actually learned something, however minor, from an evil apostate such as I.
You could have just admitted you were wrong and then we could have moved and there would have been no need to marginalize me as an eternal enemy of you and the Church. But divisive rhetoric is what you enjoy. The fact that I ever dared to disagree with you in public, especially on an issue for which you're supposed to be an authority, has been the foundation of your 10 year of resentment towards me.
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(b) I'm aware of no obligation on my part to debate X simply because X demands it or because Y and Z think that I should. That is to say that, from my perspective, the default answer, when I'm challenged to a debate, isn't "Yes!" unless and until I can scramble to come up with a reason not to do so that will satisfy X, Y, and Z. It's my life, and my time, and I'll choose to do what I think is most important for me to do.
Yes Dan, it is your life. You have every right to pretend to be interested in civil dialogue just as you have every right to claim you're too busy to engage your "enemies" when it is convenient, and then publish a 14,000 word "introduction" about how stupid online anti-Mormons really are. Because we both know that you never make distinctions when criticizing anti-Mormons in a general way.
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He's accusing me of callously endangering another man's life, roughly a decade or so back, via a book review that I published. (This is a depth of moral depravity to which even my implacably obsessive Malevolent Stalker rarely attempts to assign me; he's probably bitter with envy right now.)
Your propensity to perceive every little criticism in the worst possible way, just to score you points on the well poisoning meter, is again one of the things that counts as a hit against your character. You do this all the time and you only do it here or on your blog because, as we were saying, you prefer to misrepresent your critics to their backs where you'll get an obsequious round of applause from other apostate haters, rather than to their face where you'll have to deal with refutation.
The fact is you refused to remove the offending detail from the online publication, and you never really gave me a reason as to why. I suspect that you believed JP was lying about his use of a pseudonymn, in which case you never really believed you were putting his life in danger, which would also preclude you from doing so "callously." So you are essentially wrong here and have misrepresented what I said.
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Now, I'll readily concede that I only vaguely recall this episode. It doesn't loom anywhere near as large in my mind as it plainly does in Xander/Kevin's
And what does this say about your desire to build bridges with others, as you once claimed?
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I'm pretty confident in saying that the Dan Peterson of a decade ago would have been no more inclined than is the Dan Peterson of today to casually expose another man to the risk of violent death.
Which was never the argument, as you well know. The fact that JP's life was in danger is irrelevant to the fact that you clearly thought he was lying.
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I mean really
Good grief.
Precisely the kind of response your straw man deserves.
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As it happens, though, when Xander/Kevin raised this accusation two or three years ago elsewhere, it so surprised me that I actually wrote to the man involved, expressing my regret to him if anything I had done had inadvertently put him in danger.
Given the position you were in at the time, you really had no choice did you? When the initial incident took place, I was just an apologist who was willing to lay down and let the abuse go unnoticed. You felt no reason to issue an apology for something that wasn't known to anyone beyond that four-way email exchange. But years later, as an "apostate" I made the issue known to the forums, at which point you felt you had to diffuse the issue with a written apology. Of course this doesn't explain why no apology was written when Jp had originally written you years earlier, or why you refused to remove the name from FARM's domain.
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s response -- which I may perhaps still have somewhere, despite the passage of time, a couple of major computer failures, and etc., if anybody absolutely must see the actual exchange in order to dissect and parse it for lingering traces of my blood-guilt -- it was pretty plain that he's no longer upset about the matter, if indeed he ever was, and that (or so it seemed to me) he scarcely remembers or thinks about it anymore.
Yes, and that is to his credit. JP Is quite the forgiving soul. But this is irrelevant to the issue at hand. The reason this issue was brought up was because of the Dehlin controversy, and yours and Hamblin's ludicrous assertions that FARMS scholars do not engage in hit pieces. That is precisen what you gave JP holding when you assigned review duities to hatchet man, Russell McGregor. The guy whose "research" consisted of googling JP Holding's enemies, particularly atheist Farrell Till, which is where McGregor discovered JP's use of a pseudonym. Apparently, all FARMS needs if for some antagonistic atheist to make a claim somewhere on the web, and suddenly it is passed off in a FARMS review as established fact. For all McGregor really knew, Till was just making it all up, and JP Holding wasn't using a pseudonym at all. Of course he got lucky, and he was right in his review, but it certainly wasn' because of his rigorous researching skills. The point here is that you signed off on something to be published by FARMS that could have ver well been rumor. You did nothing beyond taking the word of someone who has been harrassing JP and his family for years.
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I just wanted to put my responses to these two matters on record. At least some of the people on Xander/Kevin's home board seem inclined to take what he says at face value, as simply one more redundant illustration of my apparently boundless moral evil.
Just to be clear, those are your words, not ours.
I really have no time to post online except on the weekends, but this was brought to my attention and I felt it necessary to correct your misrepresentations. I'll respond to Pahoran's ridiculous and false comments later if this thread is allowed to remain open through the weekend. I'll just say that the details of that incident will be coming to light, including email exchanges, soon enough. And at that point Russell won't be able to avoid accountability for his deceptions. And about his wife's email information, the way he made it sound is as if I just dug up her information like a dedicated stalker would, and posted it for no apparent reason...
The fact is when he claimed he had apologized to JP, I provided the email exchanges online to prove he was lying about that. JP said he never received an apology and Russell's emails at the time made it clear he was not apologetic in his tone. Instead, he was mocking JP's excuse for using a pseudonym. So I cut and pasted the original email exchanges between he, JP and I, and his email address happened to include the name of his wife, which I hadn't realized at the time. For example, mine would be "Kevin and Karina Graham" drtagnank@gmail.com.
When he PMed me about it I immediately removed it and expained it was an accident. And here he is pretending it was intentional all along, and that I might do it again. Sigh. Reality is stranger than fiction sometimes.
#1 Xander
Brings Forth Plants
Contributor
3,229 posts
Joined 22-June 11
Posted Today, 03:34 PM
Apparently, Dan started a thread attacking some things I had said on another forum. I see the thread has been shut down, but I hope the mods will allow me to respond since it stood for two days and I never had the chance to read it or respond to it until now.
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I've noted before that Xander/Kevin tends to brand those who disagree with him as unscrupulous, cowardly, incompetent, and/or lying, which is one of the reasons that I stopped interacting with him even back in the days when he was still a Latter-day Saint. Life is short, and I have no patience for such rhetoric or such treatment.
Yes, and you falsely note this for the purposes of poisoning the well, as I have noted every time you do this. It is one of the reasons why I have such a negative opinion of you. You absolutely refuse to address the plethora of evidences that run contrary to your assertions attacking others like me. Between the two of us, only I am able to maintain strong friendships with people on both sides of the aisle. How is this even possible, if, as you assert, I tend to label everyone with whom I disagree, a liar? Why don't you call up your friends David Bokovoy and Brian Hauglid and ask them what they think of your theory. You know, people who actually know me. Or does the truth matter so little to you that a quick phone call to credible sources is just beyond what you're willing to do?
As we both know, the primary reason why you stopped interacting with me is because you failed miserably in your initial attempt to prove me wrong on a point related to Islam. That reflects poorly on your ego, not my alleged intolerance. When I provided authoritative Islamic references, at your request, you then realized you could not respond effectively so you decided to leave the forum and head on over to this one where you could then attck me the same as you do everyone else who proves you wrong on any given matter. You informed your audience that I was too spiritually deficient for you to engage and thus the anti-Kevin rhetoric began. It is what you do, after all. And the fact that you are starting these hit threads, in the context of defending yourself against the charge that you engage in hit pieces, is nothing short of proving our point.
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That's not particularly interesting in itself, nor really worthy of much note.
But you thought you'd go ahead and intoxicate your audience with a healthy dose of well poisoning. After all, why mention this at all if, as you admit, it is not particularly interesting or worthy of note?
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But he's raised a couple of old accusations against me to which I feel I need to reply, if only cursorily, because of their seriousness. I take them in steeply ascending order:
1) He's again accusing me of cowardice for not agreeing, many years ago, to a formal public debate with somebody named Bob McCue, and he's attributing to me a whole host of more or less lame excuses for my failure to engage Mr. McCue.
This is not accurate. Someone brought up the McCue incident which I vaguely remembered, and it dove-tailed nicely with what we already knew of you. The McCue incident is hardly the first time you've teased people into thinking you were ever interested in a dialogue, and then bailed when it became clear you were not equiped to defend your arguments. If you want to seriously represent me correctly, then you'd share with your audience the example I provided on the thread, which dealt with your numerous challenges on the forum you hate so much. Challenges, to which you responded by claiming you were too busy with all your scholarly activities (conference speeches, flights to Europe, teaching assignments, "I think I'm more important than I really am" anonymous meetings, etc) to respond to questions that were presented to you in a very civil manner.
Then weeks later we discover that you wrote a editor's introduction attacking web-based "anti-Mormons" with a broad brush, ignoring every issue we raised but instead focused on easy straw man statements made by irrelevant, obscure internet posters who, for all we know, were sock puppets you created for your own straw man purposes. Your "introduction" to the FARMS review was roughly 14,000 words and 56 printed pages, which undermines your claim that you had no time on your hands to deal with online concerns made by folks on the forums. In fact, you were obsessed with them, but didn't have the integrity to approach them directly, let alone treat them like humans deserved to be treated.
But as I said, you do this to a number of people. Here is another example just before you left the forum, promising to respond to a question you said was substantive. You said, and I quote, "That's an actual substantive charge, which can be discussed. And which I will discuss, when I'm ready to do so." And yet the cricketts are still chirpping over on that thread. A number of your claims were challenged; claims which you published back in the 1994 Ensign. In another thread you went gunning for the lowest hanging fruits while ignoring questions posed to you by someone who you actually knew, MsJack. You gave no reason for ignoring her substantive questions except to whine about how you're free to ignore who you will and nobody can force you to respond if you don't want to. So please stop pretending I'm the guy you refuse to debate and that you do so because I'm uncivil. I have proved that I am perfectly capable of civil discourse. In reality, you refuse to debate a wide variety of folks who have substantive criticisms of your apologetics, and you refuse because you represent the losing side that is lacking truth. Civility has nothing to do with it because MSJack and others were perfectly civil and yet you still flee the scene after promising to respond. For you it is better to just ignore us all, so that you can claim you haven't lost because you never engaged. Which would be fine if you left it at that. Instead, you run over here to misrepresent what we've said and then you use the Church funded publication to launch your attacks, knowing perfectly well you're going to have the privilege to say pretty much whatever it is you want ; that is, until a General Authority catches wind of what it is you think accurately represents the mission of the Church, and is pulled. This in and of itself proves once and for all that you're living in fantasy land when you claim you do not do hit pieces. You want us to believe that some General Authority pulled your publication for no reason other than anti-Mormon intimidation. Again, we witness your inability to admit wrongdoing at every turn. Even when your own Church authorities get involved you're still making excuses and blaming those you have attacked.
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(a) I debated in high school, rather successfully, and, perhaps for that very reason, I have little faith in formal, timed debates as a way of getting at the truth.
Who said anything about formal debates? Just answer basic questions without running off. You always present yourself on these forums and you spend countless hours morning afternoon and night, posting thousands upon thousands of rhetorical quips. But when you're presented with basic questions, you flee the scene. What's worse, you run over to this forum complaining that no one wants to have a "civil dialogue" with you and for that reason you consider the other forum "toxic." This also counts as a "hit" against your credibility and character because those of us who have endured your waves of rhetoric, always going for the lowest hanging fruit while ignoring those of us who have something substantive to say, understand that Daniel C. Peterson was never someone who was interested in civil dialogue with anyone. It is a charade you put up when venting your complaints over here.
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I'm not scared of debates, and have engaged in them (against such genuinely able, high-stature, and experienced debaters as William Lane Craig and Robert Spencer and, albeit on a radio show, James White) with, to my mind, respectable results. I'm willing, on occasion, to engage in formal public debates. They're just not high on my list of priorities.
Again, we're not talking formal debates. We're talking about your inability to admit being wrong on any given matter. It proves you're not really interested in what's true or what can be called "civil dialogue." Standard etiquette in civil dialogue presupposes a willingness to reciprocate by answering just as many questions as you pose to your perceived opponents. But you usually answer none unless you feel it they are safe questions to answer.
.As a perfect example, you once stated that the Islam of Avicenna is not comparable to the militant Islam we see on the news. I pointed out to you a statement by Avicenna which runs contrary to your claim. Avicenna believed that non-Muslims should be fired upon using catapults, even if innocent women and children were on the other side of the wall. It doesn't require a "formal debate" to own up to the fact that you were clearly wrong on this point. But you can't even respond cordially with something along the lines of, "Good point Kevin, I didn't realize Avicenna had that view." This is what separates your bombastic approach from the scholarly humility that is exhibited by folks like Bokovoy and Hauglid, both of whom have absolutely no problem conceding that they actually learned something, however minor, from an evil apostate such as I.
You could have just admitted you were wrong and then we could have moved and there would have been no need to marginalize me as an eternal enemy of you and the Church. But divisive rhetoric is what you enjoy. The fact that I ever dared to disagree with you in public, especially on an issue for which you're supposed to be an authority, has been the foundation of your 10 year of resentment towards me.
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(b) I'm aware of no obligation on my part to debate X simply because X demands it or because Y and Z think that I should. That is to say that, from my perspective, the default answer, when I'm challenged to a debate, isn't "Yes!" unless and until I can scramble to come up with a reason not to do so that will satisfy X, Y, and Z. It's my life, and my time, and I'll choose to do what I think is most important for me to do.
Yes Dan, it is your life. You have every right to pretend to be interested in civil dialogue just as you have every right to claim you're too busy to engage your "enemies" when it is convenient, and then publish a 14,000 word "introduction" about how stupid online anti-Mormons really are. Because we both know that you never make distinctions when criticizing anti-Mormons in a general way.
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He's accusing me of callously endangering another man's life, roughly a decade or so back, via a book review that I published. (This is a depth of moral depravity to which even my implacably obsessive Malevolent Stalker rarely attempts to assign me; he's probably bitter with envy right now.)
Your propensity to perceive every little criticism in the worst possible way, just to score you points on the well poisoning meter, is again one of the things that counts as a hit against your character. You do this all the time and you only do it here or on your blog because, as we were saying, you prefer to misrepresent your critics to their backs where you'll get an obsequious round of applause from other apostate haters, rather than to their face where you'll have to deal with refutation.
The fact is you refused to remove the offending detail from the online publication, and you never really gave me a reason as to why. I suspect that you believed JP was lying about his use of a pseudonymn, in which case you never really believed you were putting his life in danger, which would also preclude you from doing so "callously." So you are essentially wrong here and have misrepresented what I said.
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Now, I'll readily concede that I only vaguely recall this episode. It doesn't loom anywhere near as large in my mind as it plainly does in Xander/Kevin's
And what does this say about your desire to build bridges with others, as you once claimed?
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I'm pretty confident in saying that the Dan Peterson of a decade ago would have been no more inclined than is the Dan Peterson of today to casually expose another man to the risk of violent death.
Which was never the argument, as you well know. The fact that JP's life was in danger is irrelevant to the fact that you clearly thought he was lying.
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I mean really
Good grief.
Precisely the kind of response your straw man deserves.
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As it happens, though, when Xander/Kevin raised this accusation two or three years ago elsewhere, it so surprised me that I actually wrote to the man involved, expressing my regret to him if anything I had done had inadvertently put him in danger.
Given the position you were in at the time, you really had no choice did you? When the initial incident took place, I was just an apologist who was willing to lay down and let the abuse go unnoticed. You felt no reason to issue an apology for something that wasn't known to anyone beyond that four-way email exchange. But years later, as an "apostate" I made the issue known to the forums, at which point you felt you had to diffuse the issue with a written apology. Of course this doesn't explain why no apology was written when Jp had originally written you years earlier, or why you refused to remove the name from FARM's domain.
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s response -- which I may perhaps still have somewhere, despite the passage of time, a couple of major computer failures, and etc., if anybody absolutely must see the actual exchange in order to dissect and parse it for lingering traces of my blood-guilt -- it was pretty plain that he's no longer upset about the matter, if indeed he ever was, and that (or so it seemed to me) he scarcely remembers or thinks about it anymore.
Yes, and that is to his credit. JP Is quite the forgiving soul. But this is irrelevant to the issue at hand. The reason this issue was brought up was because of the Dehlin controversy, and yours and Hamblin's ludicrous assertions that FARMS scholars do not engage in hit pieces. That is precisen what you gave JP holding when you assigned review duities to hatchet man, Russell McGregor. The guy whose "research" consisted of googling JP Holding's enemies, particularly atheist Farrell Till, which is where McGregor discovered JP's use of a pseudonym. Apparently, all FARMS needs if for some antagonistic atheist to make a claim somewhere on the web, and suddenly it is passed off in a FARMS review as established fact. For all McGregor really knew, Till was just making it all up, and JP Holding wasn't using a pseudonym at all. Of course he got lucky, and he was right in his review, but it certainly wasn' because of his rigorous researching skills. The point here is that you signed off on something to be published by FARMS that could have ver well been rumor. You did nothing beyond taking the word of someone who has been harrassing JP and his family for years.
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I just wanted to put my responses to these two matters on record. At least some of the people on Xander/Kevin's home board seem inclined to take what he says at face value, as simply one more redundant illustration of my apparently boundless moral evil.
Just to be clear, those are your words, not ours.
I really have no time to post online except on the weekends, but this was brought to my attention and I felt it necessary to correct your misrepresentations. I'll respond to Pahoran's ridiculous and false comments later if this thread is allowed to remain open through the weekend. I'll just say that the details of that incident will be coming to light, including email exchanges, soon enough. And at that point Russell won't be able to avoid accountability for his deceptions. And about his wife's email information, the way he made it sound is as if I just dug up her information like a dedicated stalker would, and posted it for no apparent reason...
The fact is when he claimed he had apologized to JP, I provided the email exchanges online to prove he was lying about that. JP said he never received an apology and Russell's emails at the time made it clear he was not apologetic in his tone. Instead, he was mocking JP's excuse for using a pseudonym. So I cut and pasted the original email exchanges between he, JP and I, and his email address happened to include the name of his wife, which I hadn't realized at the time. For example, mine would be "Kevin and Karina Graham" drtagnank@gmail.com.
When he PMed me about it I immediately removed it and expained it was an accident. And here he is pretending it was intentional all along, and that I might do it again. Sigh. Reality is stranger than fiction sometimes.
Brings Forth Plants
Contributor
3,229 posts
Joined 22-June 11
Posted Today, 03:34 PM
Apparently, Dan started a thread attacking some things I had said on another forum. I see the thread has been shut down, but I hope the mods will allow me to respond since it stood for two days and I never had the chance to read it or respond to it until now.
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I've noted before that Xander/Kevin tends to brand those who disagree with him as unscrupulous, cowardly, incompetent, and/or lying, which is one of the reasons that I stopped interacting with him even back in the days when he was still a Latter-day Saint. Life is short, and I have no patience for such rhetoric or such treatment.
Yes, and you falsely note this for the purposes of poisoning the well, as I have noted every time you do this. It is one of the reasons why I have such a negative opinion of you. You absolutely refuse to address the plethora of evidences that run contrary to your assertions attacking others like me. Between the two of us, only I am able to maintain strong friendships with people on both sides of the aisle. How is this even possible, if, as you assert, I tend to label everyone with whom I disagree, a liar? Why don't you call up your friends David Bokovoy and Brian Hauglid and ask them what they think of your theory. You know, people who actually know me. Or does the truth matter so little to you that a quick phone call to credible sources is just beyond what you're willing to do?
As we both know, the primary reason why you stopped interacting with me is because you failed miserably in your initial attempt to prove me wrong on a point related to Islam. That reflects poorly on your ego, not my alleged intolerance. When I provided authoritative Islamic references, at your request, you then realized you could not respond effectively so you decided to leave the forum and head on over to this one where you could then attck me the same as you do everyone else who proves you wrong on any given matter. You informed your audience that I was too spiritually deficient for you to engage and thus the anti-Kevin rhetoric began. It is what you do, after all. And the fact that you are starting these hit threads, in the context of defending yourself against the charge that you engage in hit pieces, is nothing short of proving our point.
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That's not particularly interesting in itself, nor really worthy of much note.
But you thought you'd go ahead and intoxicate your audience with a healthy dose of well poisoning. After all, why mention this at all if, as you admit, it is not particularly interesting or worthy of note?
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But he's raised a couple of old accusations against me to which I feel I need to reply, if only cursorily, because of their seriousness. I take them in steeply ascending order:
1) He's again accusing me of cowardice for not agreeing, many years ago, to a formal public debate with somebody named Bob McCue, and he's attributing to me a whole host of more or less lame excuses for my failure to engage Mr. McCue.
This is not accurate. Someone brought up the McCue incident which I vaguely remembered, and it dove-tailed nicely with what we already knew of you. The McCue incident is hardly the first time you've teased people into thinking you were ever interested in a dialogue, and then bailed when it became clear you were not equiped to defend your arguments. If you want to seriously represent me correctly, then you'd share with your audience the example I provided on the thread, which dealt with your numerous challenges on the forum you hate so much. Challenges, to which you responded by claiming you were too busy with all your scholarly activities (conference speeches, flights to Europe, teaching assignments, "I think I'm more important than I really am" anonymous meetings, etc) to respond to questions that were presented to you in a very civil manner.
Then weeks later we discover that you wrote a editor's introduction attacking web-based "anti-Mormons" with a broad brush, ignoring every issue we raised but instead focused on easy straw man statements made by irrelevant, obscure internet posters who, for all we know, were sock puppets you created for your own straw man purposes. Your "introduction" to the FARMS review was roughly 14,000 words and 56 printed pages, which undermines your claim that you had no time on your hands to deal with online concerns made by folks on the forums. In fact, you were obsessed with them, but didn't have the integrity to approach them directly, let alone treat them like humans deserved to be treated.
But as I said, you do this to a number of people. Here is another example just before you left the forum, promising to respond to a question you said was substantive. You said, and I quote, "That's an actual substantive charge, which can be discussed. And which I will discuss, when I'm ready to do so." And yet the cricketts are still chirpping over on that thread. A number of your claims were challenged; claims which you published back in the 1994 Ensign. In another thread you went gunning for the lowest hanging fruits while ignoring questions posed to you by someone who you actually knew, MsJack. You gave no reason for ignoring her substantive questions except to whine about how you're free to ignore who you will and nobody can force you to respond if you don't want to. So please stop pretending I'm the guy you refuse to debate and that you do so because I'm uncivil. I have proved that I am perfectly capable of civil discourse. In reality, you refuse to debate a wide variety of folks who have substantive criticisms of your apologetics, and you refuse because you represent the losing side that is lacking truth. Civility has nothing to do with it because MSJack and others were perfectly civil and yet you still flee the scene after promising to respond. For you it is better to just ignore us all, so that you can claim you haven't lost because you never engaged. Which would be fine if you left it at that. Instead, you run over here to misrepresent what we've said and then you use the Church funded publication to launch your attacks, knowing perfectly well you're going to have the privilege to say pretty much whatever it is you want ; that is, until a General Authority catches wind of what it is you think accurately represents the mission of the Church, and is pulled. This in and of itself proves once and for all that you're living in fantasy land when you claim you do not do hit pieces. You want us to believe that some General Authority pulled your publication for no reason other than anti-Mormon intimidation. Again, we witness your inability to admit wrongdoing at every turn. Even when your own Church authorities get involved you're still making excuses and blaming those you have attacked.
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(a) I debated in high school, rather successfully, and, perhaps for that very reason, I have little faith in formal, timed debates as a way of getting at the truth.
Who said anything about formal debates? Just answer basic questions without running off. You always present yourself on these forums and you spend countless hours morning afternoon and night, posting thousands upon thousands of rhetorical quips. But when you're presented with basic questions, you flee the scene. What's worse, you run over to this forum complaining that no one wants to have a "civil dialogue" with you and for that reason you consider the other forum "toxic." This also counts as a "hit" against your credibility and character because those of us who have endured your waves of rhetoric, always going for the lowest hanging fruit while ignoring those of us who have something substantive to say, understand that Daniel C. Peterson was never someone who was interested in civil dialogue with anyone. It is a charade you put up when venting your complaints over here.
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I'm not scared of debates, and have engaged in them (against such genuinely able, high-stature, and experienced debaters as William Lane Craig and Robert Spencer and, albeit on a radio show, James White) with, to my mind, respectable results. I'm willing, on occasion, to engage in formal public debates. They're just not high on my list of priorities.
Again, we're not talking formal debates. We're talking about your inability to admit being wrong on any given matter. It proves you're not really interested in what's true or what can be called "civil dialogue." Standard etiquette in civil dialogue presupposes a willingness to reciprocate by answering just as many questions as you pose to your perceived opponents. But you usually answer none unless you feel it they are safe questions to answer.
.As a perfect example, you once stated that the Islam of Avicenna is not comparable to the militant Islam we see on the news. I pointed out to you a statement by Avicenna which runs contrary to your claim. Avicenna believed that non-Muslims should be fired upon using catapults, even if innocent women and children were on the other side of the wall. It doesn't require a "formal debate" to own up to the fact that you were clearly wrong on this point. But you can't even respond cordially with something along the lines of, "Good point Kevin, I didn't realize Avicenna had that view." This is what separates your bombastic approach from the scholarly humility that is exhibited by folks like Bokovoy and Hauglid, both of whom have absolutely no problem conceding that they actually learned something, however minor, from an evil apostate such as I.
You could have just admitted you were wrong and then we could have moved and there would have been no need to marginalize me as an eternal enemy of you and the Church. But divisive rhetoric is what you enjoy. The fact that I ever dared to disagree with you in public, especially on an issue for which you're supposed to be an authority, has been the foundation of your 10 year of resentment towards me.
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(b) I'm aware of no obligation on my part to debate X simply because X demands it or because Y and Z think that I should. That is to say that, from my perspective, the default answer, when I'm challenged to a debate, isn't "Yes!" unless and until I can scramble to come up with a reason not to do so that will satisfy X, Y, and Z. It's my life, and my time, and I'll choose to do what I think is most important for me to do.
Yes Dan, it is your life. You have every right to pretend to be interested in civil dialogue just as you have every right to claim you're too busy to engage your "enemies" when it is convenient, and then publish a 14,000 word "introduction" about how stupid online anti-Mormons really are. Because we both know that you never make distinctions when criticizing anti-Mormons in a general way.
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He's accusing me of callously endangering another man's life, roughly a decade or so back, via a book review that I published. (This is a depth of moral depravity to which even my implacably obsessive Malevolent Stalker rarely attempts to assign me; he's probably bitter with envy right now.)
Your propensity to perceive every little criticism in the worst possible way, just to score you points on the well poisoning meter, is again one of the things that counts as a hit against your character. You do this all the time and you only do it here or on your blog because, as we were saying, you prefer to misrepresent your critics to their backs where you'll get an obsequious round of applause from other apostate haters, rather than to their face where you'll have to deal with refutation.
The fact is you refused to remove the offending detail from the online publication, and you never really gave me a reason as to why. I suspect that you believed JP was lying about his use of a pseudonymn, in which case you never really believed you were putting his life in danger, which would also preclude you from doing so "callously." So you are essentially wrong here and have misrepresented what I said.
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Now, I'll readily concede that I only vaguely recall this episode. It doesn't loom anywhere near as large in my mind as it plainly does in Xander/Kevin's
And what does this say about your desire to build bridges with others, as you once claimed?
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I'm pretty confident in saying that the Dan Peterson of a decade ago would have been no more inclined than is the Dan Peterson of today to casually expose another man to the risk of violent death.
Which was never the argument, as you well know. The fact that JP's life was in danger is irrelevant to the fact that you clearly thought he was lying.
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I mean really
Good grief.
Precisely the kind of response your straw man deserves.
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As it happens, though, when Xander/Kevin raised this accusation two or three years ago elsewhere, it so surprised me that I actually wrote to the man involved, expressing my regret to him if anything I had done had inadvertently put him in danger.
Given the position you were in at the time, you really had no choice did you? When the initial incident took place, I was just an apologist who was willing to lay down and let the abuse go unnoticed. You felt no reason to issue an apology for something that wasn't known to anyone beyond that four-way email exchange. But years later, as an "apostate" I made the issue known to the forums, at which point you felt you had to diffuse the issue with a written apology. Of course this doesn't explain why no apology was written when Jp had originally written you years earlier, or why you refused to remove the name from FARM's domain.
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s response -- which I may perhaps still have somewhere, despite the passage of time, a couple of major computer failures, and etc., if anybody absolutely must see the actual exchange in order to dissect and parse it for lingering traces of my blood-guilt -- it was pretty plain that he's no longer upset about the matter, if indeed he ever was, and that (or so it seemed to me) he scarcely remembers or thinks about it anymore.
Yes, and that is to his credit. JP Is quite the forgiving soul. But this is irrelevant to the issue at hand. The reason this issue was brought up was because of the Dehlin controversy, and yours and Hamblin's ludicrous assertions that FARMS scholars do not engage in hit pieces. That is precisen what you gave JP holding when you assigned review duities to hatchet man, Russell McGregor. The guy whose "research" consisted of googling JP Holding's enemies, particularly atheist Farrell Till, which is where McGregor discovered JP's use of a pseudonym. Apparently, all FARMS needs if for some antagonistic atheist to make a claim somewhere on the web, and suddenly it is passed off in a FARMS review as established fact. For all McGregor really knew, Till was just making it all up, and JP Holding wasn't using a pseudonym at all. Of course he got lucky, and he was right in his review, but it certainly wasn' because of his rigorous researching skills. The point here is that you signed off on something to be published by FARMS that could have ver well been rumor. You did nothing beyond taking the word of someone who has been harrassing JP and his family for years.
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I just wanted to put my responses to these two matters on record. At least some of the people on Xander/Kevin's home board seem inclined to take what he says at face value, as simply one more redundant illustration of my apparently boundless moral evil.
Just to be clear, those are your words, not ours.
I really have no time to post online except on the weekends, but this was brought to my attention and I felt it necessary to correct your misrepresentations. I'll respond to Pahoran's ridiculous and false comments later if this thread is allowed to remain open through the weekend. I'll just say that the details of that incident will be coming to light, including email exchanges, soon enough. And at that point Russell won't be able to avoid accountability for his deceptions. And about his wife's email information, the way he made it sound is as if I just dug up her information like a dedicated stalker would, and posted it for no apparent reason...
The fact is when he claimed he had apologized to JP, I provided the email exchanges online to prove he was lying about that. JP said he never received an apology and Russell's emails at the time made it clear he was not apologetic in his tone. Instead, he was mocking JP's excuse for using a pseudonym. So I cut and pasted the original email exchanges between he, JP and I, and his email address happened to include the name of his wife, which I hadn't realized at the time. For example, mine would be "Kevin and Karina Graham" drtagnank@gmail.com.
When he PMed me about it I immediately removed it and expained it was an accident. And here he is pretending it was intentional all along, and that I might do it again. Sigh. Reality is stranger than fiction sometimes.
#1 Xander
Brings Forth Plants
Contributor
3,229 posts
Joined 22-June 11
Posted Today, 03:34 PM
Apparently, Dan started a thread attacking some things I had said on another forum. I see the thread has been shut down, but I hope the mods will allow me to respond since it stood for two days and I never had the chance to read it or respond to it until now.
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I've noted before that Xander/Kevin tends to brand those who disagree with him as unscrupulous, cowardly, incompetent, and/or lying, which is one of the reasons that I stopped interacting with him even back in the days when he was still a Latter-day Saint. Life is short, and I have no patience for such rhetoric or such treatment.
Yes, and you falsely note this for the purposes of poisoning the well, as I have noted every time you do this. It is one of the reasons why I have such a negative opinion of you. You absolutely refuse to address the plethora of evidences that run contrary to your assertions attacking others like me. Between the two of us, only I am able to maintain strong friendships with people on both sides of the aisle. How is this even possible, if, as you assert, I tend to label everyone with whom I disagree, a liar? Why don't you call up your friends David Bokovoy and Brian Hauglid and ask them what they think of your theory. You know, people who actually know me. Or does the truth matter so little to you that a quick phone call to credible sources is just beyond what you're willing to do?
As we both know, the primary reason why you stopped interacting with me is because you failed miserably in your initial attempt to prove me wrong on a point related to Islam. That reflects poorly on your ego, not my alleged intolerance. When I provided authoritative Islamic references, at your request, you then realized you could not respond effectively so you decided to leave the forum and head on over to this one where you could then attck me the same as you do everyone else who proves you wrong on any given matter. You informed your audience that I was too spiritually deficient for you to engage and thus the anti-Kevin rhetoric began. It is what you do, after all. And the fact that you are starting these hit threads, in the context of defending yourself against the charge that you engage in hit pieces, is nothing short of proving our point.
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That's not particularly interesting in itself, nor really worthy of much note.
But you thought you'd go ahead and intoxicate your audience with a healthy dose of well poisoning. After all, why mention this at all if, as you admit, it is not particularly interesting or worthy of note?
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But he's raised a couple of old accusations against me to which I feel I need to reply, if only cursorily, because of their seriousness. I take them in steeply ascending order:
1) He's again accusing me of cowardice for not agreeing, many years ago, to a formal public debate with somebody named Bob McCue, and he's attributing to me a whole host of more or less lame excuses for my failure to engage Mr. McCue.
This is not accurate. Someone brought up the McCue incident which I vaguely remembered, and it dove-tailed nicely with what we already knew of you. The McCue incident is hardly the first time you've teased people into thinking you were ever interested in a dialogue, and then bailed when it became clear you were not equiped to defend your arguments. If you want to seriously represent me correctly, then you'd share with your audience the example I provided on the thread, which dealt with your numerous challenges on the forum you hate so much. Challenges, to which you responded by claiming you were too busy with all your scholarly activities (conference speeches, flights to Europe, teaching assignments, "I think I'm more important than I really am" anonymous meetings, etc) to respond to questions that were presented to you in a very civil manner.
Then weeks later we discover that you wrote a editor's introduction attacking web-based "anti-Mormons" with a broad brush, ignoring every issue we raised but instead focused on easy straw man statements made by irrelevant, obscure internet posters who, for all we know, were sock puppets you created for your own straw man purposes. Your "introduction" to the FARMS review was roughly 14,000 words and 56 printed pages, which undermines your claim that you had no time on your hands to deal with online concerns made by folks on the forums. In fact, you were obsessed with them, but didn't have the integrity to approach them directly, let alone treat them like humans deserved to be treated.
But as I said, you do this to a number of people. Here is another example just before you left the forum, promising to respond to a question you said was substantive. You said, and I quote, "That's an actual substantive charge, which can be discussed. And which I will discuss, when I'm ready to do so." And yet the cricketts are still chirpping over on that thread. A number of your claims were challenged; claims which you published back in the 1994 Ensign. In another thread you went gunning for the lowest hanging fruits while ignoring questions posed to you by someone who you actually knew, MsJack. You gave no reason for ignoring her substantive questions except to whine about how you're free to ignore who you will and nobody can force you to respond if you don't want to. So please stop pretending I'm the guy you refuse to debate and that you do so because I'm uncivil. I have proved that I am perfectly capable of civil discourse. In reality, you refuse to debate a wide variety of folks who have substantive criticisms of your apologetics, and you refuse because you represent the losing side that is lacking truth. Civility has nothing to do with it because MSJack and others were perfectly civil and yet you still flee the scene after promising to respond. For you it is better to just ignore us all, so that you can claim you haven't lost because you never engaged. Which would be fine if you left it at that. Instead, you run over here to misrepresent what we've said and then you use the Church funded publication to launch your attacks, knowing perfectly well you're going to have the privilege to say pretty much whatever it is you want ; that is, until a General Authority catches wind of what it is you think accurately represents the mission of the Church, and is pulled. This in and of itself proves once and for all that you're living in fantasy land when you claim you do not do hit pieces. You want us to believe that some General Authority pulled your publication for no reason other than anti-Mormon intimidation. Again, we witness your inability to admit wrongdoing at every turn. Even when your own Church authorities get involved you're still making excuses and blaming those you have attacked.
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(a) I debated in high school, rather successfully, and, perhaps for that very reason, I have little faith in formal, timed debates as a way of getting at the truth.
Who said anything about formal debates? Just answer basic questions without running off. You always present yourself on these forums and you spend countless hours morning afternoon and night, posting thousands upon thousands of rhetorical quips. But when you're presented with basic questions, you flee the scene. What's worse, you run over to this forum complaining that no one wants to have a "civil dialogue" with you and for that reason you consider the other forum "toxic." This also counts as a "hit" against your credibility and character because those of us who have endured your waves of rhetoric, always going for the lowest hanging fruit while ignoring those of us who have something substantive to say, understand that Daniel C. Peterson was never someone who was interested in civil dialogue with anyone. It is a charade you put up when venting your complaints over here.
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I'm not scared of debates, and have engaged in them (against such genuinely able, high-stature, and experienced debaters as William Lane Craig and Robert Spencer and, albeit on a radio show, James White) with, to my mind, respectable results. I'm willing, on occasion, to engage in formal public debates. They're just not high on my list of priorities.
Again, we're not talking formal debates. We're talking about your inability to admit being wrong on any given matter. It proves you're not really interested in what's true or what can be called "civil dialogue." Standard etiquette in civil dialogue presupposes a willingness to reciprocate by answering just as many questions as you pose to your perceived opponents. But you usually answer none unless you feel it they are safe questions to answer.
.As a perfect example, you once stated that the Islam of Avicenna is not comparable to the militant Islam we see on the news. I pointed out to you a statement by Avicenna which runs contrary to your claim. Avicenna believed that non-Muslims should be fired upon using catapults, even if innocent women and children were on the other side of the wall. It doesn't require a "formal debate" to own up to the fact that you were clearly wrong on this point. But you can't even respond cordially with something along the lines of, "Good point Kevin, I didn't realize Avicenna had that view." This is what separates your bombastic approach from the scholarly humility that is exhibited by folks like Bokovoy and Hauglid, both of whom have absolutely no problem conceding that they actually learned something, however minor, from an evil apostate such as I.
You could have just admitted you were wrong and then we could have moved and there would have been no need to marginalize me as an eternal enemy of you and the Church. But divisive rhetoric is what you enjoy. The fact that I ever dared to disagree with you in public, especially on an issue for which you're supposed to be an authority, has been the foundation of your 10 year of resentment towards me.
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(b) I'm aware of no obligation on my part to debate X simply because X demands it or because Y and Z think that I should. That is to say that, from my perspective, the default answer, when I'm challenged to a debate, isn't "Yes!" unless and until I can scramble to come up with a reason not to do so that will satisfy X, Y, and Z. It's my life, and my time, and I'll choose to do what I think is most important for me to do.
Yes Dan, it is your life. You have every right to pretend to be interested in civil dialogue just as you have every right to claim you're too busy to engage your "enemies" when it is convenient, and then publish a 14,000 word "introduction" about how stupid online anti-Mormons really are. Because we both know that you never make distinctions when criticizing anti-Mormons in a general way.
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He's accusing me of callously endangering another man's life, roughly a decade or so back, via a book review that I published. (This is a depth of moral depravity to which even my implacably obsessive Malevolent Stalker rarely attempts to assign me; he's probably bitter with envy right now.)
Your propensity to perceive every little criticism in the worst possible way, just to score you points on the well poisoning meter, is again one of the things that counts as a hit against your character. You do this all the time and you only do it here or on your blog because, as we were saying, you prefer to misrepresent your critics to their backs where you'll get an obsequious round of applause from other apostate haters, rather than to their face where you'll have to deal with refutation.
The fact is you refused to remove the offending detail from the online publication, and you never really gave me a reason as to why. I suspect that you believed JP was lying about his use of a pseudonymn, in which case you never really believed you were putting his life in danger, which would also preclude you from doing so "callously." So you are essentially wrong here and have misrepresented what I said.
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Now, I'll readily concede that I only vaguely recall this episode. It doesn't loom anywhere near as large in my mind as it plainly does in Xander/Kevin's
And what does this say about your desire to build bridges with others, as you once claimed?
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I'm pretty confident in saying that the Dan Peterson of a decade ago would have been no more inclined than is the Dan Peterson of today to casually expose another man to the risk of violent death.
Which was never the argument, as you well know. The fact that JP's life was in danger is irrelevant to the fact that you clearly thought he was lying.
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I mean really
Good grief.
Precisely the kind of response your straw man deserves.
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As it happens, though, when Xander/Kevin raised this accusation two or three years ago elsewhere, it so surprised me that I actually wrote to the man involved, expressing my regret to him if anything I had done had inadvertently put him in danger.
Given the position you were in at the time, you really had no choice did you? When the initial incident took place, I was just an apologist who was willing to lay down and let the abuse go unnoticed. You felt no reason to issue an apology for something that wasn't known to anyone beyond that four-way email exchange. But years later, as an "apostate" I made the issue known to the forums, at which point you felt you had to diffuse the issue with a written apology. Of course this doesn't explain why no apology was written when Jp had originally written you years earlier, or why you refused to remove the name from FARM's domain.
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s response -- which I may perhaps still have somewhere, despite the passage of time, a couple of major computer failures, and etc., if anybody absolutely must see the actual exchange in order to dissect and parse it for lingering traces of my blood-guilt -- it was pretty plain that he's no longer upset about the matter, if indeed he ever was, and that (or so it seemed to me) he scarcely remembers or thinks about it anymore.
Yes, and that is to his credit. JP Is quite the forgiving soul. But this is irrelevant to the issue at hand. The reason this issue was brought up was because of the Dehlin controversy, and yours and Hamblin's ludicrous assertions that FARMS scholars do not engage in hit pieces. That is precisen what you gave JP holding when you assigned review duities to hatchet man, Russell McGregor. The guy whose "research" consisted of googling JP Holding's enemies, particularly atheist Farrell Till, which is where McGregor discovered JP's use of a pseudonym. Apparently, all FARMS needs if for some antagonistic atheist to make a claim somewhere on the web, and suddenly it is passed off in a FARMS review as established fact. For all McGregor really knew, Till was just making it all up, and JP Holding wasn't using a pseudonym at all. Of course he got lucky, and he was right in his review, but it certainly wasn' because of his rigorous researching skills. The point here is that you signed off on something to be published by FARMS that could have ver well been rumor. You did nothing beyond taking the word of someone who has been harrassing JP and his family for years.
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I just wanted to put my responses to these two matters on record. At least some of the people on Xander/Kevin's home board seem inclined to take what he says at face value, as simply one more redundant illustration of my apparently boundless moral evil.
Just to be clear, those are your words, not ours.
I really have no time to post online except on the weekends, but this was brought to my attention and I felt it necessary to correct your misrepresentations. I'll respond to Pahoran's ridiculous and false comments later if this thread is allowed to remain open through the weekend. I'll just say that the details of that incident will be coming to light, including email exchanges, soon enough. And at that point Russell won't be able to avoid accountability for his deceptions. And about his wife's email information, the way he made it sound is as if I just dug up her information like a dedicated stalker would, and posted it for no apparent reason...
The fact is when he claimed he had apologized to JP, I provided the email exchanges online to prove he was lying about that. JP said he never received an apology and Russell's emails at the time made it clear he was not apologetic in his tone. Instead, he was mocking JP's excuse for using a pseudonym. So I cut and pasted the original email exchanges between he, JP and I, and his email address happened to include the name of his wife, which I hadn't realized at the time. For example, mine would be "Kevin and Karina Graham" drtagnank@gmail.com.
When he PMed me about it I immediately removed it and expained it was an accident. And here he is pretending it was intentional all along, and that I might do it again. Sigh. Reality is stranger than fiction sometimes.
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_Yoda
Re: Response to DCP before it is removed
#1 Xander
Brings Forth Plants
Contributor
3,229 posts
Joined 22-June 11
Posted Today, 03:34 PM
Apparently, Dan started a thread attacking some things I had said on another forum. I see the thread has been shut down, but I hope the mods will allow me to respond since it stood for two days and I never had the chance to read it or respond to it until now.
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I've noted before that Xander/Kevin tends to brand those who disagree with him as unscrupulous, cowardly, incompetent, and/or lying, which is one of the reasons that I stopped interacting with him even back in the days when he was still a Latter-day Saint. Life is short, and I have no patience for such rhetoric or such treatment.
Yes, and you falsely note this for the purposes of poisoning the well, as I have noted every time you do this. It is one of the reasons why I have such a negative opinion of you. You absolutely refuse to address the plethora of evidences that run contrary to your assertions attacking others like me. Between the two of us, only I am able to maintain strong friendships with people on both sides of the aisle. How is this even possible, if, as you assert, I tend to label everyone with whom I disagree, a liar? Why don't you call up your friends David Bokovoy and Brian Hauglid and ask them what they think of your theory. You know, people who actually know me. Or does the truth matter so little to you that a quick phone call to credible sources is just beyond what you're willing to do?
As we both know, the primary reason why you stopped interacting with me is because you failed miserably in your initial attempt to prove me wrong on a point related to Islam. That reflects poorly on your ego, not my alleged intolerance. When I provided authoritative Islamic references, at your request, you then realized you could not respond effectively so you decided to leave the forum and head on over to this one where you could then attck me the same as you do everyone else who proves you wrong on any given matter. You informed your audience that I was too spiritually deficient for you to engage and thus the anti-Kevin rhetoric began. It is what you do, after all. And the fact that you are starting these hit threads, in the context of defending yourself against the charge that you engage in hit pieces, is nothing short of proving our point.
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That's not particularly interesting in itself, nor really worthy of much note.
But you thought you'd go ahead and intoxicate your audience with a healthy dose of well poisoning. After all, why mention this at all if, as you admit, it is not particularly interesting or worthy of note?
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But he's raised a couple of old accusations against me to which I feel I need to reply, if only cursorily, because of their seriousness. I take them in steeply ascending order:
1) He's again accusing me of cowardice for not agreeing, many years ago, to a formal public debate with somebody named Bob McCue, and he's attributing to me a whole host of more or less lame excuses for my failure to engage Mr. McCue.
This is not accurate. Someone brought up the McCue incident which I vaguely remembered, and it dove-tailed nicely with what we already knew of you. The McCue incident is hardly the first time you've teased people into thinking you were ever interested in a dialogue, and then bailed when it became clear you were not equiped to defend your arguments. If you want to seriously represent me correctly, then you'd share with your audience the example I provided on the thread, which dealt with your numerous challenges on the forum you hate so much. Challenges, to which you responded by claiming you were too busy with all your scholarly activities (conference speeches, flights to Europe, teaching assignments, "I think I'm more important than I really am" anonymous meetings, etc) to respond to questions that were presented to you in a very civil manner.
Then weeks later we discover that you wrote a editor's introduction attacking web-based "anti-Mormons" with a broad brush, ignoring every issue we raised but instead focused on easy straw man statements made by irrelevant, obscure internet posters who, for all we know, were sock puppets you created for your own straw man purposes. Your "introduction" to the FARMS review was roughly 14,000 words and 56 printed pages, which undermines your claim that you had no time on your hands to deal with online concerns made by folks on the forums. In fact, you were obsessed with them, but didn't have the integrity to approach them directly, let alone treat them like humans deserved to be treated.
But as I said, you do this to a number of people. Here is another example just before you left the forum, promising to respond to a question you said was substantive. You said, and I quote, "That's an actual substantive charge, which can be discussed. And which I will discuss, when I'm ready to do so." And yet the cricketts are still chirpping over on that thread. A number of your claims were challenged; claims which you published back in the 1994 Ensign. In another thread you went gunning for the lowest hanging fruits while ignoring questions posed to you by someone who you actually knew, MsJack. You gave no reason for ignoring her substantive questions except to whine about how you're free to ignore who you will and nobody can force you to respond if you don't want to. So please stop pretending I'm the guy you refuse to debate and that you do so because I'm uncivil. I have proved that I am perfectly capable of civil discourse. In reality, you refuse to debate a wide variety of folks who have substantive criticisms of your apologetics, and you refuse because you represent the losing side that is lacking truth. Civility has nothing to do with it because MSJack and others were perfectly civil and yet you still flee the scene after promising to respond. For you it is better to just ignore us all, so that you can claim you haven't lost because you never engaged. Which would be fine if you left it at that. Instead, you run over here to misrepresent what we've said and then you use the Church funded publication to launch your attacks, knowing perfectly well you're going to have the privilege to say pretty much whatever it is you want ; that is, until a General Authority catches wind of what it is you think accurately represents the mission of the Church, and is pulled. This in and of itself proves once and for all that you're living in fantasy land when you claim you do not do hit pieces. You want us to believe that some General Authority pulled your publication for no reason other than anti-Mormon intimidation. Again, we witness your inability to admit wrongdoing at every turn. Even when your own Church authorities get involved you're still making excuses and blaming those you have attacked.
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(a) I debated in high school, rather successfully, and, perhaps for that very reason, I have little faith in formal, timed debates as a way of getting at the truth.
Who said anything about formal debates? Just answer basic questions without running off. You always present yourself on these forums and you spend countless hours morning afternoon and night, posting thousands upon thousands of rhetorical quips. But when you're presented with basic questions, you flee the scene. What's worse, you run over to this forum complaining that no one wants to have a "civil dialogue" with you and for that reason you consider the other forum "toxic." This also counts as a "hit" against your credibility and character because those of us who have endured your waves of rhetoric, always going for the lowest hanging fruit while ignoring those of us who have something substantive to say, understand that Daniel C. Peterson was never someone who was interested in civil dialogue with anyone. It is a charade you put up when venting your complaints over here.
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I'm not scared of debates, and have engaged in them (against such genuinely able, high-stature, and experienced debaters as William Lane Craig and Robert Spencer and, albeit on a radio show, James White) with, to my mind, respectable results. I'm willing, on occasion, to engage in formal public debates. They're just not high on my list of priorities.
Again, we're not talking formal debates. We're talking about your inability to admit being wrong on any given matter. It proves you're not really interested in what's true or what can be called "civil dialogue." Standard etiquette in civil dialogue presupposes a willingness to reciprocate by answering just as many questions as you pose to your perceived opponents. But you usually answer none unless you feel it they are safe questions to answer.
.As a perfect example, you once stated that the Islam of Avicenna is not comparable to the militant Islam we see on the news. I pointed out to you a statement by Avicenna which runs contrary to your claim. Avicenna believed that non-Muslims should be fired upon using catapults, even if innocent women and children were on the other side of the wall. It doesn't require a "formal debate" to own up to the fact that you were clearly wrong on this point. But you can't even respond cordially with something along the lines of, "Good point Kevin, I didn't realize Avicenna had that view." This is what separates your bombastic approach from the scholarly humility that is exhibited by folks like Bokovoy and Hauglid, both of whom have absolutely no problem conceding that they actually learned something, however minor, from an evil apostate such as I.
You could have just admitted you were wrong and then we could have moved and there would have been no need to marginalize me as an eternal enemy of you and the Church. But divisive rhetoric is what you enjoy. The fact that I ever dared to disagree with you in public, especially on an issue for which you're supposed to be an authority, has been the foundation of your 10 year of resentment towards me.
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(b) I'm aware of no obligation on my part to debate X simply because X demands it or because Y and Z think that I should. That is to say that, from my perspective, the default answer, when I'm challenged to a debate, isn't "Yes!" unless and until I can scramble to come up with a reason not to do so that will satisfy X, Y, and Z. It's my life, and my time, and I'll choose to do what I think is most important for me to do.
Yes Dan, it is your life. You have every right to pretend to be interested in civil dialogue just as you have every right to claim you're too busy to engage your "enemies" when it is convenient, and then publish a 14,000 word "introduction" about how stupid online anti-Mormons really are. Because we both know that you never make distinctions when criticizing anti-Mormons in a general way.
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He's accusing me of callously endangering another man's life, roughly a decade or so back, via a book review that I published. (This is a depth of moral depravity to which even my implacably obsessive Malevolent Stalker rarely attempts to assign me; he's probably bitter with envy right now.)
Your propensity to perceive every little criticism in the worst possible way, just to score you points on the well poisoning meter, is again one of the things that counts as a hit against your character. You do this all the time and you only do it here or on your blog because, as we were saying, you prefer to misrepresent your critics to their backs where you'll get an obsequious round of applause from other apostate haters, rather than to their face where you'll have to deal with refutation.
The fact is you refused to remove the offending detail from the online publication, and you never really gave me a reason as to why. I suspect that you believed JP was lying about his use of a pseudonymn, in which case you never really believed you were putting his life in danger, which would also preclude you from doing so "callously." So you are essentially wrong here and have misrepresented what I said.
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Now, I'll readily concede that I only vaguely recall this episode. It doesn't loom anywhere near as large in my mind as it plainly does in Xander/Kevin's
And what does this say about your desire to build bridges with others, as you once claimed?
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I'm pretty confident in saying that the Dan Peterson of a decade ago would have been no more inclined than is the Dan Peterson of today to casually expose another man to the risk of violent death.
Which was never the argument, as you well know. The fact that JP's life was in danger is irrelevant to the fact that you clearly thought he was lying.
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I mean really
Good grief.
Precisely the kind of response your straw man deserves.
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As it happens, though, when Xander/Kevin raised this accusation two or three years ago elsewhere, it so surprised me that I actually wrote to the man involved, expressing my regret to him if anything I had done had inadvertently put him in danger.
Given the position you were in at the time, you really had no choice did you? When the initial incident took place, I was just an apologist who was willing to lay down and let the abuse go unnoticed. You felt no reason to issue an apology for something that wasn't known to anyone beyond that four-way email exchange. But years later, as an "apostate" I made the issue known to the forums, at which point you felt you had to diffuse the issue with a written apology. Of course this doesn't explain why no apology was written when Jp had originally written you years earlier, or why you refused to remove the name from FARM's domain.
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s response -- which I may perhaps still have somewhere, despite the passage of time, a couple of major computer failures, and etc., if anybody absolutely must see the actual exchange in order to dissect and parse it for lingering traces of my blood-guilt -- it was pretty plain that he's no longer upset about the matter, if indeed he ever was, and that (or so it seemed to me) he scarcely remembers or thinks about it anymore.
Yes, and that is to his credit. JP Is quite the forgiving soul. But this is irrelevant to the issue at hand. The reason this issue was brought up was because of the Dehlin controversy, and yours and Hamblin's ludicrous assertions that FARMS scholars do not engage in hit pieces. That is precisen what you gave JP holding when you assigned review duities to hatchet man, Russell McGregor. The guy whose "research" consisted of googling JP Holding's enemies, particularly atheist Farrell Till, which is where McGregor discovered JP's use of a pseudonym. Apparently, all FARMS needs if for some antagonistic atheist to make a claim somewhere on the web, and suddenly it is passed off in a FARMS review as established fact. For all McGregor really knew, Till was just making it all up, and JP Holding wasn't using a pseudonym at all. Of course he got lucky, and he was right in his review, but it certainly wasn' because of his rigorous researching skills. The point here is that you signed off on something to be published by FARMS that could have ver well been rumor. You did nothing beyond taking the word of someone who has been harrassing JP and his family for years.
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I just wanted to put my responses to these two matters on record. At least some of the people on Xander/Kevin's home board seem inclined to take what he says at face value, as simply one more redundant illustration of my apparently boundless moral evil.
Just to be clear, those are your words, not ours.
I really have no time to post online except on the weekends, but this was brought to my attention and I felt it necessary to correct your misrepresentations. I'll respond to Pahoran's ridiculous and false comments later if this thread is allowed to remain open through the weekend. I'll just say that the details of that incident will be coming to light, including email exchanges, soon enough. And at that point Russell won't be able to avoid accountability for his deceptions. And about his wife's email information, the way he made it sound is as if I just dug up her information like a dedicated stalker would, and posted it for no apparent reason...
The fact is when he claimed he had apologized to JP, I provided the email exchanges online to prove he was lying about that. JP said he never received an apology and Russell's emails at the time made it clear he was not apologetic in his tone. Instead, he was mocking JP's excuse for using a pseudonym. So I cut and pasted the original email exchanges between he, JP and I, and his email address happened to include the name of his wife, which I hadn't realized at the time. For example, mine would be "Kevin and Karina Graham" drtagnank@gmail.com.
When he PMed me about it I immediately removed it and expained it was an accident. And here he is pretending it was intentional all along, and that I might do it again. Sigh. Reality is stranger than fiction sometimes.
#2 CASteinman
Grateful for the invention of the comma
Members
166 posts
Joined 6 days ago
Posted Today, 03:39 PM
TL: DNR
"There's no sense beating a dead horse- but if you've reached the point where you even seriously consider that abusing a dead animal might improve your lot in life, I say go ahead and give it a shot."
#3 Xander
Brings Forth Plants
Contributor
3,229 posts
Joined 22-June 11
Posted Today, 03:46 PM
Here is the post Dan read, but failed to provide context:
This is your problem: you refuse to distinguish between anything when it comes to "critics." You enter the debate with the premise that critics have to fit a certain mold, so when interaction with highly intelligent and more importantly, civil critics on this forum do not produce the results you were hoping for, you run back to the other forum with these blanket attacks on "critics" as a whole. When attempts are made to make a case, Dan always goes for the lowest hanging fruit and he always refuses to debate his targets man to man. His malicious attacks on Scratch is a perfect example of his inability to debate intelligent critics, and his cowardly maneuvering around his lecture blog to attack Kishkumen is another fine example. If he really thought he could make a good argument and win it, then why not come here and post his concerns to Kishkumen in the celestial forum where he knows for certain it would remain civil? Because Dan doesn't want civil dialogue. He never did. That is a myth and he is dishonest for trying to convince people that he were ever interested in such a thing. The evidence is simply too overwhelming.
There have been occasions when critics who have never even come close to becoming "vitriolic" or "uncivil" have tried to get Dan to answer basic questions. Dan never engages them for more than a post or two before informing us that he has to take off on some scholarly journey across the world, while informing us about how important he is to BYU. He always promises that when he returns he'll "consider" responding, but he never does. He will instead whine about how he has a busy schedule and can't be bothered with our questions, and then a few months later we find out the whole time he was pretending to be too busy for civil exchange, he was writing up some 14,000 word apologetic hit piece based on comments from some obscure critics over on an ex-Mormon forum that no one every really pays any attention to.
The whole purpose for his Mormonscholarstestify.org website is based on this kind of misrepresentation of critics. He told me that the reason he started it was because anti-Mormons kept making this argument that people cannot hold a testimony of the Church is they are scholars. He said it was a "regularly" asserted argument. Of course you'll find not a single person presenting himself as a critic online, make that argument. When I challenged Dan to produce just a single example of this argument, he finally gave into to pressure that I pressed day after day and he managed to come up with some ambiguous citation from some obscure "critic" no one had ever heard of.
So Dan's entire baby is based on a straw man that really has nothing to do with refuting or addressing anything anyone on these forums has said. Dan succeeds with his deception by broad brushing all critics as tough they were a bunch of idiots who actually think this.
Case in point, every time we point out how someone at FAIR or FARMS has engaged in unnecessary attack pieces, you try to justify this by pointing out that somewhere, someone on the web has been much more harsher than this "scholar."
Well the difference here should be obvious. Most of the things you could present to us as examples of "harsher" remarks come from people operating anonymously on a public internet forum, whereas your guys are publishing this stuff in an academic setting, all the while claiming to be scholarly. The fact that the critics have your best scholars wasting all their time attacking obscure names who you choose to consider threats, just because it presents an easy target, tells me none of you were ever serious about civil dialogue with anyone.
I know this is true first hand, because Dan Peterson was the guy who assigned a review to Russel McGregor 10 years ago, when my friend JP Holding provided me with a dozen free copies of his book to give to Dan so he could pass it around at FARMS. Dan and JP and Dan had some friendly conversations online and they both complimented each other's tome and approach. I was friends with both at the time and I was trying to foster dialogue between LDS scholars and Evangelical critics. This was during the "New Mormon Challenge" days, and Dan and other FARMS scholars admitted to me that JP Holding does present new challenges that have never been presented by Evangelical scholarship nor answered by LDS scholarship. They also told me that JP represents the kind of "anti-Mormon" they prefer to see because he doesn't come out accusing them of being non-Christian. Like JP told me, he doesn't care for that and he thinks any Evangelicals who focus on this line of "you're not a Christian" attack is engaging in "foolishness."
So after spending months trying to build bridges between LDS scholars and serious Evangelical scholars, Dan publishes McGregoor's review which is nothing short of a "hit piece." In it McGregor addresses not a single argument in his book but goes on and on about how this guy is just a typical anti-Mormon who keeps regurgitating the same arguments - contrary to what FARMS scholars had said to me prior. McGregor even accused JP of calling Mromons non-Christians when that is precisely what he didn't do. Even worse, McGregor decided to inform his audience that JP Holding was a pseudonym, and revealed his true name in print. This he did with full knowledge of the fact that he used a pseudonym because he used to work at a prison library and had issues with former inmates trying to come after him.
I immediately complained to both Dan Peterson and McGregor when this "review" hit the web, and I explained what kind of damage this "review" did for future hopes of civil dialogue between Evangelicals on this kind. I nearly begged Dan to remove JP's true in real life identity from the web version of the "review" and he said he would look into it, but then stopped responding to my requests altogether. As far as McGregor goes, well, he mocked JP in email claiming he didn't "buy" his reasoning for using a pseudonym.
Years later when I brought this up online, McGregor lied to the forum here and said he issued an apology to JP at the time, but when the email exchanges were posted here it became clear he issued no such thing. Instead he was mocking JP for complaining about it. But FARMS eventually got around to removing the offending information, but it was way too late. JP had already changed his legal name to JP Holding, partly because of FARMS publishing it in print.
So don't tell me these guys have ever been interested in civil dialogue with anyone. This is just a charade they play up until the time a civil, well informed critic actually takes them up on it. At which point they are ignored and FARMS publishes some hit piece on them.
Here is JP's online response to the FARMS hit piece where he takes McGregor to the woodshed:
http://www.tektonics.../funnyfarm.html
Edited by Xander, Today, 03:47 PM.
#4 Log
Destroyer of words
Contributor
3,910 posts
Joined 02-May 05
Posted Today, 04:00 PM
I think I speak for more than zero people when I say "O PLEASE NOT ANOTHER ONE OF THESE THREADS!"
Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme. - Karl Popper
If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. - J. B. S. Haldane
#5 Xander
Brings Forth Plants
Contributor
3,229 posts
Joined 22-June 11
Posted Today, 04:20 PM
Yes, it isn't likely to turn out well for Dan and his hatchet man McGregor. But I needed to correct their falsehoods in my own defense.
#6 volgadon
Crazy Israeli & Filthy Socialist
Contributor
7,406 posts
Joined 30-March 09
Posted Today, 04:25 PM
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As a perfect example, you once stated that the Islam of Avicenna is not comparable to the militant Islam we see on the news. I pointed out to you a statement by Avicenna which runs contrary to your claim. Avicenna believed that non-Muslims should be fired upon using catapults, even if innocent women and children were on the other side of the wall. It doesn't require a "formal debate" to own up to the fact that you were clearly wrong on this point. But you can't even respond cordially with something along the lines of, "Good point Kevin, I didn't realize Avicenna had that view."
I'm pretty sure that was Al-Ghazali, not Avicenna. Still, the online quote I found has way too much elipsis, so it would be nice to find the context.
Calba Savua's Orchard
I assure you that it is you that is ignorant of ancient Judaism. Read the Bible instead of listening to your teachers who appose [sic] the Bible. -Echo
i REALLY NEVER NEW YOU WAS A UNLEARNED PERSON. -Lucy Ann Harmon, a Facebook anti-Mormon
Brings Forth Plants
Contributor
3,229 posts
Joined 22-June 11
Posted Today, 03:34 PM
Apparently, Dan started a thread attacking some things I had said on another forum. I see the thread has been shut down, but I hope the mods will allow me to respond since it stood for two days and I never had the chance to read it or respond to it until now.
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I've noted before that Xander/Kevin tends to brand those who disagree with him as unscrupulous, cowardly, incompetent, and/or lying, which is one of the reasons that I stopped interacting with him even back in the days when he was still a Latter-day Saint. Life is short, and I have no patience for such rhetoric or such treatment.
Yes, and you falsely note this for the purposes of poisoning the well, as I have noted every time you do this. It is one of the reasons why I have such a negative opinion of you. You absolutely refuse to address the plethora of evidences that run contrary to your assertions attacking others like me. Between the two of us, only I am able to maintain strong friendships with people on both sides of the aisle. How is this even possible, if, as you assert, I tend to label everyone with whom I disagree, a liar? Why don't you call up your friends David Bokovoy and Brian Hauglid and ask them what they think of your theory. You know, people who actually know me. Or does the truth matter so little to you that a quick phone call to credible sources is just beyond what you're willing to do?
As we both know, the primary reason why you stopped interacting with me is because you failed miserably in your initial attempt to prove me wrong on a point related to Islam. That reflects poorly on your ego, not my alleged intolerance. When I provided authoritative Islamic references, at your request, you then realized you could not respond effectively so you decided to leave the forum and head on over to this one where you could then attck me the same as you do everyone else who proves you wrong on any given matter. You informed your audience that I was too spiritually deficient for you to engage and thus the anti-Kevin rhetoric began. It is what you do, after all. And the fact that you are starting these hit threads, in the context of defending yourself against the charge that you engage in hit pieces, is nothing short of proving our point.
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That's not particularly interesting in itself, nor really worthy of much note.
But you thought you'd go ahead and intoxicate your audience with a healthy dose of well poisoning. After all, why mention this at all if, as you admit, it is not particularly interesting or worthy of note?
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But he's raised a couple of old accusations against me to which I feel I need to reply, if only cursorily, because of their seriousness. I take them in steeply ascending order:
1) He's again accusing me of cowardice for not agreeing, many years ago, to a formal public debate with somebody named Bob McCue, and he's attributing to me a whole host of more or less lame excuses for my failure to engage Mr. McCue.
This is not accurate. Someone brought up the McCue incident which I vaguely remembered, and it dove-tailed nicely with what we already knew of you. The McCue incident is hardly the first time you've teased people into thinking you were ever interested in a dialogue, and then bailed when it became clear you were not equiped to defend your arguments. If you want to seriously represent me correctly, then you'd share with your audience the example I provided on the thread, which dealt with your numerous challenges on the forum you hate so much. Challenges, to which you responded by claiming you were too busy with all your scholarly activities (conference speeches, flights to Europe, teaching assignments, "I think I'm more important than I really am" anonymous meetings, etc) to respond to questions that were presented to you in a very civil manner.
Then weeks later we discover that you wrote a editor's introduction attacking web-based "anti-Mormons" with a broad brush, ignoring every issue we raised but instead focused on easy straw man statements made by irrelevant, obscure internet posters who, for all we know, were sock puppets you created for your own straw man purposes. Your "introduction" to the FARMS review was roughly 14,000 words and 56 printed pages, which undermines your claim that you had no time on your hands to deal with online concerns made by folks on the forums. In fact, you were obsessed with them, but didn't have the integrity to approach them directly, let alone treat them like humans deserved to be treated.
But as I said, you do this to a number of people. Here is another example just before you left the forum, promising to respond to a question you said was substantive. You said, and I quote, "That's an actual substantive charge, which can be discussed. And which I will discuss, when I'm ready to do so." And yet the cricketts are still chirpping over on that thread. A number of your claims were challenged; claims which you published back in the 1994 Ensign. In another thread you went gunning for the lowest hanging fruits while ignoring questions posed to you by someone who you actually knew, MsJack. You gave no reason for ignoring her substantive questions except to whine about how you're free to ignore who you will and nobody can force you to respond if you don't want to. So please stop pretending I'm the guy you refuse to debate and that you do so because I'm uncivil. I have proved that I am perfectly capable of civil discourse. In reality, you refuse to debate a wide variety of folks who have substantive criticisms of your apologetics, and you refuse because you represent the losing side that is lacking truth. Civility has nothing to do with it because MSJack and others were perfectly civil and yet you still flee the scene after promising to respond. For you it is better to just ignore us all, so that you can claim you haven't lost because you never engaged. Which would be fine if you left it at that. Instead, you run over here to misrepresent what we've said and then you use the Church funded publication to launch your attacks, knowing perfectly well you're going to have the privilege to say pretty much whatever it is you want ; that is, until a General Authority catches wind of what it is you think accurately represents the mission of the Church, and is pulled. This in and of itself proves once and for all that you're living in fantasy land when you claim you do not do hit pieces. You want us to believe that some General Authority pulled your publication for no reason other than anti-Mormon intimidation. Again, we witness your inability to admit wrongdoing at every turn. Even when your own Church authorities get involved you're still making excuses and blaming those you have attacked.
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(a) I debated in high school, rather successfully, and, perhaps for that very reason, I have little faith in formal, timed debates as a way of getting at the truth.
Who said anything about formal debates? Just answer basic questions without running off. You always present yourself on these forums and you spend countless hours morning afternoon and night, posting thousands upon thousands of rhetorical quips. But when you're presented with basic questions, you flee the scene. What's worse, you run over to this forum complaining that no one wants to have a "civil dialogue" with you and for that reason you consider the other forum "toxic." This also counts as a "hit" against your credibility and character because those of us who have endured your waves of rhetoric, always going for the lowest hanging fruit while ignoring those of us who have something substantive to say, understand that Daniel C. Peterson was never someone who was interested in civil dialogue with anyone. It is a charade you put up when venting your complaints over here.
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I'm not scared of debates, and have engaged in them (against such genuinely able, high-stature, and experienced debaters as William Lane Craig and Robert Spencer and, albeit on a radio show, James White) with, to my mind, respectable results. I'm willing, on occasion, to engage in formal public debates. They're just not high on my list of priorities.
Again, we're not talking formal debates. We're talking about your inability to admit being wrong on any given matter. It proves you're not really interested in what's true or what can be called "civil dialogue." Standard etiquette in civil dialogue presupposes a willingness to reciprocate by answering just as many questions as you pose to your perceived opponents. But you usually answer none unless you feel it they are safe questions to answer.
.As a perfect example, you once stated that the Islam of Avicenna is not comparable to the militant Islam we see on the news. I pointed out to you a statement by Avicenna which runs contrary to your claim. Avicenna believed that non-Muslims should be fired upon using catapults, even if innocent women and children were on the other side of the wall. It doesn't require a "formal debate" to own up to the fact that you were clearly wrong on this point. But you can't even respond cordially with something along the lines of, "Good point Kevin, I didn't realize Avicenna had that view." This is what separates your bombastic approach from the scholarly humility that is exhibited by folks like Bokovoy and Hauglid, both of whom have absolutely no problem conceding that they actually learned something, however minor, from an evil apostate such as I.
You could have just admitted you were wrong and then we could have moved and there would have been no need to marginalize me as an eternal enemy of you and the Church. But divisive rhetoric is what you enjoy. The fact that I ever dared to disagree with you in public, especially on an issue for which you're supposed to be an authority, has been the foundation of your 10 year of resentment towards me.
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(b) I'm aware of no obligation on my part to debate X simply because X demands it or because Y and Z think that I should. That is to say that, from my perspective, the default answer, when I'm challenged to a debate, isn't "Yes!" unless and until I can scramble to come up with a reason not to do so that will satisfy X, Y, and Z. It's my life, and my time, and I'll choose to do what I think is most important for me to do.
Yes Dan, it is your life. You have every right to pretend to be interested in civil dialogue just as you have every right to claim you're too busy to engage your "enemies" when it is convenient, and then publish a 14,000 word "introduction" about how stupid online anti-Mormons really are. Because we both know that you never make distinctions when criticizing anti-Mormons in a general way.
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He's accusing me of callously endangering another man's life, roughly a decade or so back, via a book review that I published. (This is a depth of moral depravity to which even my implacably obsessive Malevolent Stalker rarely attempts to assign me; he's probably bitter with envy right now.)
Your propensity to perceive every little criticism in the worst possible way, just to score you points on the well poisoning meter, is again one of the things that counts as a hit against your character. You do this all the time and you only do it here or on your blog because, as we were saying, you prefer to misrepresent your critics to their backs where you'll get an obsequious round of applause from other apostate haters, rather than to their face where you'll have to deal with refutation.
The fact is you refused to remove the offending detail from the online publication, and you never really gave me a reason as to why. I suspect that you believed JP was lying about his use of a pseudonymn, in which case you never really believed you were putting his life in danger, which would also preclude you from doing so "callously." So you are essentially wrong here and have misrepresented what I said.
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Now, I'll readily concede that I only vaguely recall this episode. It doesn't loom anywhere near as large in my mind as it plainly does in Xander/Kevin's
And what does this say about your desire to build bridges with others, as you once claimed?
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I'm pretty confident in saying that the Dan Peterson of a decade ago would have been no more inclined than is the Dan Peterson of today to casually expose another man to the risk of violent death.
Which was never the argument, as you well know. The fact that JP's life was in danger is irrelevant to the fact that you clearly thought he was lying.
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I mean really
Good grief.
Precisely the kind of response your straw man deserves.
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As it happens, though, when Xander/Kevin raised this accusation two or three years ago elsewhere, it so surprised me that I actually wrote to the man involved, expressing my regret to him if anything I had done had inadvertently put him in danger.
Given the position you were in at the time, you really had no choice did you? When the initial incident took place, I was just an apologist who was willing to lay down and let the abuse go unnoticed. You felt no reason to issue an apology for something that wasn't known to anyone beyond that four-way email exchange. But years later, as an "apostate" I made the issue known to the forums, at which point you felt you had to diffuse the issue with a written apology. Of course this doesn't explain why no apology was written when Jp had originally written you years earlier, or why you refused to remove the name from FARM's domain.
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s response -- which I may perhaps still have somewhere, despite the passage of time, a couple of major computer failures, and etc., if anybody absolutely must see the actual exchange in order to dissect and parse it for lingering traces of my blood-guilt -- it was pretty plain that he's no longer upset about the matter, if indeed he ever was, and that (or so it seemed to me) he scarcely remembers or thinks about it anymore.
Yes, and that is to his credit. JP Is quite the forgiving soul. But this is irrelevant to the issue at hand. The reason this issue was brought up was because of the Dehlin controversy, and yours and Hamblin's ludicrous assertions that FARMS scholars do not engage in hit pieces. That is precisen what you gave JP holding when you assigned review duities to hatchet man, Russell McGregor. The guy whose "research" consisted of googling JP Holding's enemies, particularly atheist Farrell Till, which is where McGregor discovered JP's use of a pseudonym. Apparently, all FARMS needs if for some antagonistic atheist to make a claim somewhere on the web, and suddenly it is passed off in a FARMS review as established fact. For all McGregor really knew, Till was just making it all up, and JP Holding wasn't using a pseudonym at all. Of course he got lucky, and he was right in his review, but it certainly wasn' because of his rigorous researching skills. The point here is that you signed off on something to be published by FARMS that could have ver well been rumor. You did nothing beyond taking the word of someone who has been harrassing JP and his family for years.
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I just wanted to put my responses to these two matters on record. At least some of the people on Xander/Kevin's home board seem inclined to take what he says at face value, as simply one more redundant illustration of my apparently boundless moral evil.
Just to be clear, those are your words, not ours.
I really have no time to post online except on the weekends, but this was brought to my attention and I felt it necessary to correct your misrepresentations. I'll respond to Pahoran's ridiculous and false comments later if this thread is allowed to remain open through the weekend. I'll just say that the details of that incident will be coming to light, including email exchanges, soon enough. And at that point Russell won't be able to avoid accountability for his deceptions. And about his wife's email information, the way he made it sound is as if I just dug up her information like a dedicated stalker would, and posted it for no apparent reason...
The fact is when he claimed he had apologized to JP, I provided the email exchanges online to prove he was lying about that. JP said he never received an apology and Russell's emails at the time made it clear he was not apologetic in his tone. Instead, he was mocking JP's excuse for using a pseudonym. So I cut and pasted the original email exchanges between he, JP and I, and his email address happened to include the name of his wife, which I hadn't realized at the time. For example, mine would be "Kevin and Karina Graham" drtagnank@gmail.com.
When he PMed me about it I immediately removed it and expained it was an accident. And here he is pretending it was intentional all along, and that I might do it again. Sigh. Reality is stranger than fiction sometimes.
#2 CASteinman
Grateful for the invention of the comma
Members
166 posts
Joined 6 days ago
Posted Today, 03:39 PM
TL: DNR
"There's no sense beating a dead horse- but if you've reached the point where you even seriously consider that abusing a dead animal might improve your lot in life, I say go ahead and give it a shot."
#3 Xander
Brings Forth Plants
Contributor
3,229 posts
Joined 22-June 11
Posted Today, 03:46 PM
Here is the post Dan read, but failed to provide context:
This is your problem: you refuse to distinguish between anything when it comes to "critics." You enter the debate with the premise that critics have to fit a certain mold, so when interaction with highly intelligent and more importantly, civil critics on this forum do not produce the results you were hoping for, you run back to the other forum with these blanket attacks on "critics" as a whole. When attempts are made to make a case, Dan always goes for the lowest hanging fruit and he always refuses to debate his targets man to man. His malicious attacks on Scratch is a perfect example of his inability to debate intelligent critics, and his cowardly maneuvering around his lecture blog to attack Kishkumen is another fine example. If he really thought he could make a good argument and win it, then why not come here and post his concerns to Kishkumen in the celestial forum where he knows for certain it would remain civil? Because Dan doesn't want civil dialogue. He never did. That is a myth and he is dishonest for trying to convince people that he were ever interested in such a thing. The evidence is simply too overwhelming.
There have been occasions when critics who have never even come close to becoming "vitriolic" or "uncivil" have tried to get Dan to answer basic questions. Dan never engages them for more than a post or two before informing us that he has to take off on some scholarly journey across the world, while informing us about how important he is to BYU. He always promises that when he returns he'll "consider" responding, but he never does. He will instead whine about how he has a busy schedule and can't be bothered with our questions, and then a few months later we find out the whole time he was pretending to be too busy for civil exchange, he was writing up some 14,000 word apologetic hit piece based on comments from some obscure critics over on an ex-Mormon forum that no one every really pays any attention to.
The whole purpose for his Mormonscholarstestify.org website is based on this kind of misrepresentation of critics. He told me that the reason he started it was because anti-Mormons kept making this argument that people cannot hold a testimony of the Church is they are scholars. He said it was a "regularly" asserted argument. Of course you'll find not a single person presenting himself as a critic online, make that argument. When I challenged Dan to produce just a single example of this argument, he finally gave into to pressure that I pressed day after day and he managed to come up with some ambiguous citation from some obscure "critic" no one had ever heard of.
So Dan's entire baby is based on a straw man that really has nothing to do with refuting or addressing anything anyone on these forums has said. Dan succeeds with his deception by broad brushing all critics as tough they were a bunch of idiots who actually think this.
Case in point, every time we point out how someone at FAIR or FARMS has engaged in unnecessary attack pieces, you try to justify this by pointing out that somewhere, someone on the web has been much more harsher than this "scholar."
Well the difference here should be obvious. Most of the things you could present to us as examples of "harsher" remarks come from people operating anonymously on a public internet forum, whereas your guys are publishing this stuff in an academic setting, all the while claiming to be scholarly. The fact that the critics have your best scholars wasting all their time attacking obscure names who you choose to consider threats, just because it presents an easy target, tells me none of you were ever serious about civil dialogue with anyone.
I know this is true first hand, because Dan Peterson was the guy who assigned a review to Russel McGregor 10 years ago, when my friend JP Holding provided me with a dozen free copies of his book to give to Dan so he could pass it around at FARMS. Dan and JP and Dan had some friendly conversations online and they both complimented each other's tome and approach. I was friends with both at the time and I was trying to foster dialogue between LDS scholars and Evangelical critics. This was during the "New Mormon Challenge" days, and Dan and other FARMS scholars admitted to me that JP Holding does present new challenges that have never been presented by Evangelical scholarship nor answered by LDS scholarship. They also told me that JP represents the kind of "anti-Mormon" they prefer to see because he doesn't come out accusing them of being non-Christian. Like JP told me, he doesn't care for that and he thinks any Evangelicals who focus on this line of "you're not a Christian" attack is engaging in "foolishness."
So after spending months trying to build bridges between LDS scholars and serious Evangelical scholars, Dan publishes McGregoor's review which is nothing short of a "hit piece." In it McGregor addresses not a single argument in his book but goes on and on about how this guy is just a typical anti-Mormon who keeps regurgitating the same arguments - contrary to what FARMS scholars had said to me prior. McGregor even accused JP of calling Mromons non-Christians when that is precisely what he didn't do. Even worse, McGregor decided to inform his audience that JP Holding was a pseudonym, and revealed his true name in print. This he did with full knowledge of the fact that he used a pseudonym because he used to work at a prison library and had issues with former inmates trying to come after him.
I immediately complained to both Dan Peterson and McGregor when this "review" hit the web, and I explained what kind of damage this "review" did for future hopes of civil dialogue between Evangelicals on this kind. I nearly begged Dan to remove JP's true in real life identity from the web version of the "review" and he said he would look into it, but then stopped responding to my requests altogether. As far as McGregor goes, well, he mocked JP in email claiming he didn't "buy" his reasoning for using a pseudonym.
Years later when I brought this up online, McGregor lied to the forum here and said he issued an apology to JP at the time, but when the email exchanges were posted here it became clear he issued no such thing. Instead he was mocking JP for complaining about it. But FARMS eventually got around to removing the offending information, but it was way too late. JP had already changed his legal name to JP Holding, partly because of FARMS publishing it in print.
So don't tell me these guys have ever been interested in civil dialogue with anyone. This is just a charade they play up until the time a civil, well informed critic actually takes them up on it. At which point they are ignored and FARMS publishes some hit piece on them.
Here is JP's online response to the FARMS hit piece where he takes McGregor to the woodshed:
http://www.tektonics.../funnyfarm.html
Edited by Xander, Today, 03:47 PM.
#4 Log
Destroyer of words
Contributor
3,910 posts
Joined 02-May 05
Posted Today, 04:00 PM
I think I speak for more than zero people when I say "O PLEASE NOT ANOTHER ONE OF THESE THREADS!"
Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme. - Karl Popper
If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. - J. B. S. Haldane
#5 Xander
Brings Forth Plants
Contributor
3,229 posts
Joined 22-June 11
Posted Today, 04:20 PM
Yes, it isn't likely to turn out well for Dan and his hatchet man McGregor. But I needed to correct their falsehoods in my own defense.
#6 volgadon
Crazy Israeli & Filthy Socialist
Contributor
7,406 posts
Joined 30-March 09
Posted Today, 04:25 PM
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As a perfect example, you once stated that the Islam of Avicenna is not comparable to the militant Islam we see on the news. I pointed out to you a statement by Avicenna which runs contrary to your claim. Avicenna believed that non-Muslims should be fired upon using catapults, even if innocent women and children were on the other side of the wall. It doesn't require a "formal debate" to own up to the fact that you were clearly wrong on this point. But you can't even respond cordially with something along the lines of, "Good point Kevin, I didn't realize Avicenna had that view."
I'm pretty sure that was Al-Ghazali, not Avicenna. Still, the online quote I found has way too much elipsis, so it would be nice to find the context.
Calba Savua's Orchard
I assure you that it is you that is ignorant of ancient Judaism. Read the Bible instead of listening to your teachers who appose [sic] the Bible. -Echo
i REALLY NEVER NEW YOU WAS A UNLEARNED PERSON. -Lucy Ann Harmon, a Facebook anti-Mormon
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_lostindc
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 2380
- Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2009 11:27 pm
Re: Response to DCP before it is removed
In your thread on the humorously named Mormon Dialogue and Discussion, DCP states:
Seems to be getting heated.
Trust me. I'm not pretending. You're uncivil, and I really, genuinely, don't like you.
Seems to be getting heated.
2019 = #100,000missionariesstrong
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_Doctor Scratch
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 8025
- Joined: Sat Apr 18, 2009 4:44 pm
Re: Response to DCP before it is removed
lostindc wrote:In your thread on the humorously named Mormon Dialogue and Discussion, DCP states:Trust me. I'm not pretending. You're uncivil, and I really, genuinely, don't like you.
Seems to be getting heated.
Yeah, he says repeatedly that he "doesn't like" Kevin. It seems he's harboring quite a grudge. It reminiscent of the grudge he's been carrying against Will Bagley, whom he called a "venomous gasbag."
And this seems like a fairly warped response to Kevin's observation:
Daniel Peterson wrote:Xander wrote:knowing perfectly well you're going to have the privilege to say pretty much whatever it is you want ; that is, until a General Authority catches wind of what it is you think accurately represents the mission of the Church, and is pulled. This in and of itself proves once and for all that you're living in fantasy land when you claim you do not do hit pieces. You want us to believe that some General Authority pulled your publication for no reason other than anti-Mormon intimidation. Again, we witness your inability to admit wrongdoing at every turn. Even when your own Church authorities get involved you're still making excuses and blaming those you have attacked.
You're believing the fictions invented by your own board. If some General Authority has communicated this sort of stuff to you about me, I hope you'll share the full text of what he said. I've received absolutely nothing of the sort from any General Authority, secretary of a General Authority, son of a General Authority, daughter of a General Authority, or pet of a General Authority.
No one "communicated" it to you, Dr. P. They went through Jerry Bradford. Remember? Don't try to pretend that there was no GA involvement in this.
And yet, I don't understand why they didn't contact DCP directly, apart from the fact that Bradford apparently out-ranks him. I suppose the larger question is this: are the General Authorities afraid of the Mopologists? Afraid that they'll totally go rogue and begin publishing hit-pieces on the apostles or the First Presidency? It wouldn't surprise me, and it would constitute quite a nuclear-grade meltdown. And there is precedent for this, since Dr. Peterson openly accused BY of teaching false doctrine.
"[I]f, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
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_Bond James Bond
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 2690
- Joined: Thu Aug 14, 2008 10:21 pm
Re: Response to DCP before it is removed
I was suspended for some reason. There's a strong likelihood that Pahoran/Russell McGregor is Chaos.
Whatever appears to be against the Book of Mormon is going to be overturned at some time in the future. So we can be pretty open minded.-charity 3/7/07
MASH quotes
I peeked in the back [of the Bible] Frank, the Devil did it.
I avoid church religiously.
This isn't one of my sermons, I expect you to listen.
MASH quotes
I peeked in the back [of the Bible] Frank, the Devil did it.
I avoid church religiously.
This isn't one of my sermons, I expect you to listen.
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_Louis_C_Ferr
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Wed May 16, 2012 5:53 pm
Re: Response to DCP before it is removed
I was suspended for some reason.
Me too. Though I can't figure out, for the life of me, why.
~Lou
**EDIT**
In reexaming the situation, I have not been suspended, just given a suggestion to change my screen name. Again, I don't know why.
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_Doctor Scratch
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 8025
- Joined: Sat Apr 18, 2009 4:44 pm
Re: Response to DCP before it is removed
It looks like they've done another mass banning. Which means, I assume, that they only banned critics. The only way I'll be surprised is if they kicked off Pahoran and/or DCP.
"[I]f, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
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_Yoda
Re: Response to DCP before it is removed
Nemesis wrote:I've had about enough of this. Looks like time to wholesale kick people off the board again. Sometimes I wish age would have tempered some spirits.
Nemesis
It looks like Dan G is back to pulling his trigger finger.
Bond...are you sure you are only suspended?
Kev, have you been banned yet?