On the surface, the blog entry would appear to be an extended attack on Gemli: "How stupid it is to ever assume that there is 'intelligent design' behind unexplained phenomena!" But in the process, he shows his true colors:
Quite dismissive, no? Should we be "puzzled" at the fact that all Mopologists, when considering the Book of Mormon, assume that it basically came from God? In all seriousness: why is belief in a historical Book of Mormon any more or less "puzzling" than assuming that this is "the grave marker for Jimmy Hoffa"? Why is one more worthy of ridicule than the other?Daniel Peterson wrote:What puzzles me about it is how everybody, seeing it, immediately leaps to the conclusion that the mysterious object was created and put in place by an intelligent agent, by either a prankster or an alien. (One person suggests that it’s the grave marker for Jimmy Hoffa. Others have proposed that hundreds of thousands of Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia ballots marked for Mr. Donald J. Trump have been concealed in it by Dominion, working together with Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp, the CIA, George Soros, and the specter of Hugo Chavez.)
But Dr. Peterson continues:
Well, how far away is the Colorado River, and how much of the "thousands of acres of wilderness" were altered by humans' interfering with the course of that river? And, isn't it possible that Joseph Smith cobbled the Book of Mormon together out of other sources that he'd read? I guess that's every bit as ridiculous as this "unobtanium" example, no?Some have contended that it can’t be very old, because metal objects in the desert Southwest of the United States very quickly grow bullet holes, while the surfaces of this monolith appear to bequite smooth. But I don’t find that argument conclusive. We don’t yet know of what metal the object is made. It could, for example, be composed of unobtainium, and we don’t know whether unobtainium develops bullet holes in the same way that conventional earthly metals do.
But why posit an intelligent agent as the force behind the monolith? How often has an intelligent agent proven to be the explanation for much of anything in the thousands of acres of wilderness that surround it?
Isn’t it more likely that it’s just an outcropping of metallic ore that has been left standing after the less resistant sand stone around it has eroded away? If you look at photographs of it, it’s plainly located in a little hollow that has been . . . well, hollowed out.
But the true Dr. Peterson--the true Mopologist: i.e., the public bootlick of Russell Nelson, doing exactly as the Prophet commands by adding the #GiveThanks hashtag to a post each day (not this post, though--rather tellingly: no mockery in the name of the Prophet, after all! Well, sort of... there is FARMS and 'Mormon Interpreter' to bear in mind, after all....), rears his head in this passage:
Yep: naturalistic explanations are just *so* silly! Or, rather, people believing in "dumb" things deserve to be ridiculed. Like I said at the outset, this was meant to be a jab at Gemli, but it backfires in spectacular fashion. Instead of the "lighthearted ribbing" that Peterson is intending, what this instead comes across as is gross hypocrisy, and very deep, condescending disdain for people who look to find supernatural explanations in anomalous phenomena. I mean, "Ha ha ha! Jimmy Hoffa's grave! What a bunch of dumb idiots!" Except that Dr. Peterson believes that there were real Nephites and Lamanites who lived in the Yucatan, without a lick of evidence--not even so much as a monolith! And shall we even bother to touch upon the matter of the witnesses? How many people have borne witness to the reality of aliens? How seriously should we take them?Imagining that intelligent beings did this — for what earthly purpose? — is just as silly as the widespread notion that somebody named Gutzon Borglum was responsible for creating the four seemingly anthropoid “faces” on South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore.
In any case, I'm glad to #GiveThanks for the endless entertainment value that the Mopologists continue to provide. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
