Well,
just look what Dr. Midgley offered up earlier today:
Louis Midgley wrote:I should also have called attention to the useful service that Professor Peterson provides by occasionally calling attention to the useful and very amusing responses to Jonathan Neville's most recent antics. The one who does this must enjoy what some of us who once felt the need see that there are easily available responses to other similar and sometimes related rubbish--I have in mind the miserable mercenary Rodney Meldrum stuff.
Meaning, of course, that DCP has yet again provided a set of links to "Neville Neville Land," which is
entirely devoted to attacking Jonathan Neville. Now, I can see how they might object to me characterizing this as an "attack on others' religious beliefs," but at the end of the day, what else could it be? I imagine that Dr. Peterson will say that he's justified in linking to this blog because Neville "attacked" him. Do unto others, I guess? But at the end of the day, their dispute *is* religious in nature: they are fighting because they disagree over the location of the Book of Mormon. They wouldn't be calling each other names, setting up attack blogs, or trolling each other's blogs if it wasn't for that one, basic fact.
Honestly, I'm sort of amazed the DCP has gotten his nose so out of joint over this. The idea that he attacks others' religious beliefs is such a plain and obvious fact that it scarcely needs to be said. Does he never re-read his own writings? It's true that he doesn't do this all the time, and it's also true that he's generally respectful towards religion, and religious people. But that was not the point I was making. Everything I said can be true, and someone can *still* sometimes trash other people's beliefs. So, claiming that this is "flatly untrue" just isn't going to cut it. *Sometimes* it is really and totally true. Now, maybe somebody wants to make an arguing about "frequency" or "duration" or "severity" or whatever else--litigate this however you want. Maybe the idea is that, because this only happens, e.g., once per year on average, that it "doesn't count." If you want to explain it that way, go right ahead: I don't care.
Interestingly,
the move that was made was to *defend* the justifiability of denigrating, looking down upon, or judging others' beliefs:
Daniel Peterson wrote:You are also -- by definition -- a racist because you are a believing Latter-day Saint. Believing the Book of Mormon to be historically authentic, you strip Native Americans and the Maori and other Polynesians of their native origin stories and their own pre-Restoration understanding of themselves.
Curiously, I've never seen anybody who makes that argument denounce contemporary science and anthropology as racist.
But just ask a modern geneticist or anthropologist how much credence she gives to the Navajo account of First Man, First Woman, Coyote, their travels through the multi-colored worlds, their emergence into this one, their creation of the first Hogan, the birth of Changing Woman, and her twins, Monster Slayer and Born for Water. Does she endorse the claim that the Hopi used to live beneath the Earth prior to their emergence in the Grand Canyon? That Maasaw, this Fourth World's divine Caretaker and Creator, granted them permission to stay in it if they promised to be good stewards of it?
White supremacist science, you might say, is at war with indigenous self-understandings. But that's apparently okay, perhaps because it's mostly done by non-Latter-day Saints.
I guess the idea here is that if academics do this, it must be okay?
Wow. And to think that Dr. LOD wrote a post *praising* him for doing a blog entry on Native American perspectives on Juneteenth! So, basically, Dr. Peterson has conjured up this pretend social-sciences academic who studies Native Americans and secretly looks down "her" (notice the pronoun! That was deliberate, of course! He would love it if you were incensed over this!) nose at them, and who is privately dismissive of their religious ideas. Well, even assuming that such a person actually exists, I doubt this phantom anthropologist would post stuff on the Internet slamming them. Then again: weirder things have happened. I mean, maybe "she" would launch a racist blog under the pseudonym "Tinkerbell" in which she ridicules the Indians' belief systems. Maybe "she" would get into email arguments with Hopi or Navajo, and would take cheap shots re: "this Fourth World's divine Caretaker and Creator," and they would get posted on her buddy's crappy website: and they'd all high-five each other over this.
So it goes. Oh, and did you know that Dr. Shades--after all he did!--has now been temporarily banned from commenting? (I.e., censored?)
"[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
