Conference report - August 3

I attended the Fairly Mormon conference in Provo on August 3, 2018. It was worthwhile, for sure. I probably won't have time to post my notes here, but I took a lot of them. Generally, I thought the conference was well organized and managed, although the constant request for donations was a little off-putting for me. I'm not used to that at Church-related events, especially from General Authorities.

I will have more detailed comments about the book Saints, though.

This was the agenda:

 9:00 AM Wade Miller The Presence of Pre-Columbian Horses in America
10:00 AM John Lynch Strengthen Thy Brethren: Bolstering Those in Faith Crisis
11:00 AM Elder Kevin W. Pearson A Sacred and Imperative Duty

  1:00 PM Jeff Lindsay “Arise from the Dust”: Digging into a Vital Book of Mormon Theme
  2:00 PM Steve Harper Making Saints: A Look into the Writing of the New Church History
 
  3:15 PM Jeff Robinson Thinking Differently About Same-Sex Attraction
  4:15 PM Daniel Peterson Apologetics: What, Why and How?

I didn't stay for the last two sessions, but Brother Peterson made an interesting post the other day that I do want to discuss here.
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Many LDS people know Brother Peterson from the old FARMS days. He developed the Interpreter to replace FARMS. Plus, he has a blog at Patheos.

Two days ago he published a post titled:

Regarding the supposed creation of a whole new Mormon narrative

You can read it here:

The post comes across as somewhat of a straw man argument. Brother Peterson alludes to an unspecified (and unlinked) antagonist:

A vocal critic of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has revealed the existence of a formal plan, to be realized over the next ten to twenty years — his informants apparently differ as to the timetable — that will move the Church, among other things, from a literal understanding of the Book of Mormon as actual history to a metaphorical view.
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This is a perplexing post coming from Brother Peterson, who, as a charter member of the citation cartel, insists the founding prophets were all wrong about the New York Cumorah.

I made a comment that summarizes the situation from my perspective:*

Fantasy map used by BYU and CES to teach
students that the prophets are wrong. With this
map, who needs to worry about an unidentified
"vocal critic" of the Church?

If "vocal critics" of the Church want to see the Church adopt a metaphorical view, they can just sit back and watch LDS intellectuals such as Dr. Peterson make it happen.

The "formal plan" to transform the Book of Mormon into a metaphorical instead of a literal history is already well underway at BYU and CES (LDS Seminaries and Institutes). For example, they have been teaching LDS youth to understand the Book of Mormon by using a video-game like fantasy map. See the BYU map here: http://bom.byu.edu/

Dr. Peterson's Interpreter, along with BYU Studies and Book of Mormon Central, have long sought to persuade people that the LDS prophets are all wrong about the New York Cumorah, that Joseph and Oliver never visited the records depository in the New York Cumorah as Brigham Young and others related, that David Whitmer was not a reliable witness, etc.


Out of curiosity, I looked at the previous post Brother Peterson linked to, here:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2017/07/fundamental-story-restoration-church-taught-false.html

In it, he claims he and Brother Richard Bushman (who is awesome) share the following belief:

I have, moreover, long maintained that telling our full story, warts and all, is the best defense against such disillusionment and anguish.  I absolutely believe in honest and accurate historiography, and I absolutely believe that the claims of the Restoration can and will withstand the most serious scrutiny.  Indeed, Professor Bushman and I have had conversations on precisely that subject.

It is difficult to find a more deeply ironic statement than the one I bolded above.

As a major figure in the M2C citation cartel, Brother Peterson suppresses his "absolute belief in honest and accurate historiography" because he adamantly supports M2C in every venue possible. This means censoring statements from Church history that contradict M2C, as I've shown many times.

Apparently in solidarity with his M2C friends, in his book Rough Stone Rolling, Brother Bushman famously censored out Joseph's comments during Zion's Camp, as I mentioned in my presentation at the Mormon History Association last year in St. Louis:

Many supporters of Mormonism tend to downplay the links to the moundbuilders.

For example, in Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Bushman observes that “Indian relics turned up in newly plowed furrows, and remnants of old forts and burial mounds were accessible to the curious, but none was known in Palmyra or Manchester…Burial mounds, supposedly a stimulus for investigation of the Indians, receive only the slightest mention [in the Book of Mormon, Alma 16:11].”[10] He does briefly mention Zelph’s mound and the Kinderhook incident, but he deliberately avoids the debate about mounds and the Book of Mormon. 

For example, he quotes excerpts from the letter Joseph Smith wrote to Emma on June 4, 1834, from the banks of the Mississippi River during Zion’s Camp, but he omits a key phrase. Joseph wrote of “wandering over the plains of the Nephites, recounting occasionally the history of the Book of Mormon, roving over the mounds of that once beloved people of the Lord, picking up their skulls & their bones, as a proof of its divine authenticity,”[11] but Bushman quotes only “wandering over the plains,” omitting the rest of Joseph’s sentence.[12] [i.e., the part in red]

Some of the comments to Brother Peterson's post are delightful. For example, I especially appreciated this one:

Scholar-worship as a way to reject critical thinking, that is funny!

That's the topic of a post I'm publishing next week.

Unfortunately, and again ironically, the author of that comment went on to reveal her own cognitive dissonance, but that's a topic for another day.

For now, I just wanted to point out how Brother Peterson's "absolute belief in honest and accurate historiography" is purely content-driven. IOW, if Brother Peterson agrees with something, he wants it published and discussed. If something disagrees with his own ideas--say, Letter VII and the New York Cumorah--then he censors it and assists in suppressing it wherever he can.

Which makes him a very fitting keynote speaker at the Fairly Mormon conference, for sure!
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*I commented under my old B Winchester ID because I don't know how to change it easily.