So I am thinking to myself, excellent, soon we should see a well written review that treats JP with the same respect that he has shown towards LDS scholarship.
Wishful thinking to say the least.
Eventually they got around to passing the job off to Russell McGregor, who offered a quick hatchet job that dealt with not a single argument in the book, but instead made a big deal of the fact that the book was called “The Mormon Defenders” (Oh! That must mean he admits he is "attacking" us!) and that JP Holding was a pseudonymn! He then insulted JP by publishing his real name which he only acquired from JP's notorious nemsis, Farrell Till, who is an online athiest antagonist who runs infidels.org.
You see, the LDS reviewer relies heavily on the persecution factor. One must come across as the victim of bigotry in order to add some sense of justification to their ensuing attacks on the author. Initially I was thinking there was no way a FARMS reviewer would be able to whine about victim hood with JP’s book, but leave it up to the spin-master, Pahoran, to figure out a way to do just that.
JP’s arguments were not the usual arguments. Virtually every one of his chapters offered tough, hard hitting arguments never before heard of, while maintaining a pleasant and refreshing tone. You see, unlike so many on the other side, JP doesn’t condemn Mormons to hell because they interpret the Bible differently, and he has even gone so far as to criticize those who do this, as “foolish.”
In Feb of 2006 Dan Vogel made this comment at MAD: “If there is a substantial problem with the review, that should be the focus of discussion. It should not be presumed a priori, on any dogmatic grounds, that a reviewer or author is corrupt and intellectually dishonest simply because of where he or she works.”
This was in a thread discussing the crappy review by the Hedges, of Vogel’s book. I noted that this part of the Hedges review blew me away:
the words “might, probably, may, perhaps, and seems” occur a total of7 times - better than two per page, on average. Rarely does one find a run of more than two pages where such words aren’t employed, and not infrequently one sees them in even greater abundance pages 78 and 79 for example contain nine such qualifiers apiece.
To which I responded:
Who cares??????????
So Vogel dares to use qualifiers that distances himself from the absolute statements they apparently wish he had made; it certainly would have made their job easier. All this quibble does is demonstrate how difficult it was for them to find something to complain about.
Dan writes 716 pages and the reviewers, despite being "armed" with two Ph.Ds, managed to produce a measly 18 page "review" that mostly attacks Vogel for being a pseudo-historian, while boring us with meaningless word counts.
Interestingly, Why me and Trevor were involved in that thread, so it might bring back memories.