2nd Watson Letter just found!'

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_Lemmie
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Re: 2nd Watson Letter just found!'

Post by _Lemmie »

Craig Paxton wrote:
Philo Sofee wrote:This is, without doubr, the singular most astonishing take down of Mormon apologetics in existence. Incredible sleuthing and detective work.

Cliffs Notes?

meadowchik wrote:Hey, I got to page 4 already! Get some coffee, who needs sleep anyway? ;)

hah! I've been dipping in and out all day, that's where I'm at too. Fascinating so far.
_Philo Sofee
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Re: 2nd Watson Letter just found!'

Post by _Philo Sofee »

It truly just grows and grows and GROWS! Everyone here did an amazing amount of leg work and detective sleuthing and comparing notes and using logic and reasoning to figure out just what was the truth in spite of the Holy Ghost testifyin apologists who, lying for the Lord, got out-classed, out-thought, out-maneuvered, and out-ed by truth. Utterly amazing! I mean it, this all by itself would have made me resign from apologetics had I been aware of it at the time. This 19 pages was not snark, innuendo, and name calling, it was demanding coherence and logic which was never given, so everyone banded together and pieced it all together. And they were exactly right, Greg Smith gave the Christmas gift of the year! :lol:
Last edited by Guest on Wed Oct 24, 2018 12:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
Dr CamNC4Me
"Dr. Peterson and his Callithumpian cabal of BYU idiots have been marginalized by their own inevitable irrelevancy defending a fraud."
_Philo Sofee
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Re: 2nd Watson Letter just found!'

Post by _Philo Sofee »

In light of the controversy concerning the Hill Cumorah, this collection of comments of early Mormon leaders is obviously pretty cotton pickin clear isn't it? I mean Harold B. Lee speaking in General Conference? That's sorta almost quite flippin official isn't it? And Joseph Fielding Smith? That's pretty official isn't it?

http://www.josephknew.com/who-said-that ... s-cumorah/
Dr CamNC4Me
"Dr. Peterson and his Callithumpian cabal of BYU idiots have been marginalized by their own inevitable irrelevancy defending a fraud."
_Gadianton
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Re: 2nd Watson Letter just found!'

Post by _Gadianton »

all I'll say about this is that, if you suspect this is 20 pages of the same thing over and over again as many of these conflicts go, then your suspicions are wrong. The rabbit hole gets deeper with every page. If you get to page 9 and think okay, you got the idea, the big revelation has come and that's that, no, the revelations keep coming. I wouldn't even know how to summarize this whole thing. It's so crazy that at the end of the day, the .5 watson letter was allegedly found, not the second.

On a related note, yes, Beastie did very well here, but Beastie's foremost contribution to the field of Mopologetics was to demolish the LGT, via eviscerating key footnotes of Sorenson live, in person, on the MDD board, with one of the staff writers at SeN pulling in the entire Near Eastern Studies department at BYU into the fray on the board. I made the same mistake as the 2nd Watson apologists did (depending on which version of their story you follow) by not getting a screenshot of that thread. (As we all know, MDD lets their discussions delete after a couple years, and they used to try to control visual access to their site, because they know what they produce actually hurts them more than it helps them). It was unreal. It was so bad, that Scott Gordon banned Beastie from MDDB, for no infraction whatsoever, (outside of schooling about 10 Phds; the best the Church had to offer, much like Jesus Christ schooled the Pharisees.) He called it "an Executive Decision".

Brandt G., who is one of the foremost LGTers and her main interlocutor, if I remember right was a little disappointed and didn't think she deserved to be banned. Either that, or he initially was good with the decision, but then regretted what happened). Either way, I came away from this thinking that Brandt was a cut above the others in terms of intellectual honesty. (I hope that doesn't get him excommunicated, although really, it would be for the best for anyone to get ex'd).

Beastie's discovery was electrifying, and I recall hooking up with some old friends who could give me some insights into what she was saying based on their backgrounds, to make sure I wasn't missing something, so that I could support her work to the extent that I could follow it.

Not simply screenshotting that thread at the pre-MDDB board may turn out to be one of the 10 greatest regrets in my life.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.

LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
_Holy Ghost
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Re: 2nd Watson Letter just found!'

Post by _Holy Ghost »

Joey wrote:
calmoriah, on 10 December 2009 - 03:32 PM, said:
He's a doctor and likely rather busy himself this time of year.

An email wouldn't really do anything more than provide the information that's already been given. The quality of a fax of a fax isn't that great from what I've seen. If he plans on doing a scan of material, best to have as close to the original letter as possible....which leaves you with snail mail.


To put everyone's mind at ease (ha!) I am still waiting for the docs. They have been mailed, by ground. (The Watson letter was only one in a large collection of documents being sent to me about an unrelated matter; my contact threw it in because he knew I'd be interested. There were too many to fax effectively.)

So, my enthusiasm has not waned, though it is taking longer than I thought because it was shipped by ground to Canada instead of air. I don't have a tracking number, but my days at the MTC tell me that the letter time from Utah to Alberta can be as long as 10 days even for a simple letter. Don't ask me why; I could get letters from Alberta to France faster.

Rest assured, I will still post it as soon as it is in my hot little hands here in the frozen north.

Greg


That is his latest update on the other board. Lots of posturing since his last promise. Looks a couple of poster there put pressure on him and Peterson to come current. Sounds a little fishy, must not have computers with PDF reads in Canada. "Too much to fax" really made me chuckle!

Big Dan seems to have gone silent on the thread! Surprise, surprise!

Perhaps the large collection was the "dirt" on John Dehlin that Greg Smith pieced together for the 100+ page hit piece on Dehlin that DCP was planning on publishing, and instead, led to DCP's ruin at the Maxwell Institute.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." Isaac Asimov
_moksha
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Re: 2nd Watson Letter just found!'

Post by _moksha »

SoHo wrote:Q: Who wrote the letter?
A: I think it was Watson.

versus

Q: Who wrote the letter?
A: Watson.

Versus

Q: You wants to get Doc Scratch off yo back, Massa Peterson?
A. Watson, get over here and write this damn letter!

FYI, Megyn Kelly helped inspire but did not actually author any text.
Last edited by Jersey Girl on Sat Oct 27, 2018 4:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cry Heaven and let loose the Penguins of Peace
_Lemmie
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Re: 2nd Watson Letter just found!'

Post by _Lemmie »

Gad wrote:...all I'll say about this is that, if you suspect this is 20 pages of the same thing over and over again as many of these conflicts go, then your suspicions are wrong. The rabbit hole gets deeper with every page. If you get to page 9 and think okay, you got the idea, the big revelation has come and that's that, no, the revelations keep coming. I wouldn't even know how to summarize this whole thing. It's so crazy that at the end of the day, the .5 watson letter was allegedly found, not the second.
WOW. you were not kidding. I vaguely knew the story, but reading through the live reveal, blow by blow, was just mind-boggling.

One final question, if anyone knows, was the Ogden fax verified as really coming from Carla Ogden, on the date in question?

I ask because Hamblin's final reveal that he quoted a pre-1985 "letter" makes me think that when he cited "correspondence" with Watson in his paper, he was playing a little fast and loose with the truth, morphing an encyclopedia entry "corespondence" on the grounds that they did sort of "correspond" with the Office of FP in writing that, if correspond means okayed it. He added the Watson source to cover the first letter fiasco, and a date.

I ask because it just seems too convenient that when people asked if there was a letter sent by Waton on that date, and the FP office told them no, why didn't they then ask if there was a fax that day? Or why didn't the office offer that, when they were checking for correspondence. To me, a fax is correspondence so maybe what the office said was there there was nothing on that day, no letter, no fax.

I know that's extreme, to assume the fax was totally fabricated, and maybe I missed a piece of the story where the fax date and source was verified, but it just seems too convenient that the transmission mark was missing,
_Lemmie
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Re: 2nd Watson Letter just found!'

Post by _Lemmie »

Found another thread, it looks like I'm not the only person to ask this:
In his list, he raises a number of red-flag-type reasons why a reasonable person might be led to the conclusion that the 2nd "[non-] Watson letter" is actually a forgery (i.e., it lacks date and time data; it was sent on a Saturday; etc.) I mean, it's not exactly entirely outside the realm of possibility that Hamblin, Hall, DCP, and the other Mopologists completely fabricated this--i.e., that they saw that bit of text from the Encyclopedia and then decided to doctor up a "fax" that looks more or less like it came from the FP's office, even though it didn't.
http://www.mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3 ... 4#p1032944
_Doctor Scratch
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Re: 2nd Watson Letter just found!'

Post by _Doctor Scratch »

The 2nd Watson Letter was truly a milestone is the endlessly corrupt history of Mopologetics. What is showed was (and it is still sort of stunning to think of it in this way) a conspiracy of prominent apologists to deliberately distort and misrepresent communications from the First Presidency. The fundamental arrogance of them thinking they can speak on behalf the FP, plus the brazen way that they lied about it.... Well, suffice it to say that I'm still kind of surprised that they didn't get into trouble over this. DCP used to challenge people on this board: "If you think Bill Hamblin and I forged a document from the FP, then go ahead and report us! We'd be fired for sure!" They didn't "forge" anything, but they certainly lied about the evidence that they *did* have.
"[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
_Philo Sofee
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Re: 2nd Watson Letter just found!'

Post by _Philo Sofee »

Doctor Scratch wrote:The 2nd Watson Letter was truly a milestone is the endlessly corrupt history of Mopologetics. What is showed was (and it is still sort of stunning to think of it in this way) a conspiracy of prominent apologists to deliberately distort and misrepresent communications from the First Presidency. The fundamental arrogance of them thinking they can speak on behalf the FP, plus the brazen way that they lied about it.... Well, suffice it to say that I'm still kind of surprised that they didn't get into trouble over this. DCP used to challenge people on this board: "If you think Bill Hamblin and I forged a document from the FP, then go ahead and report us! We'd be fired for sure!" They didn't "forge" anything, but they certainly lied about the evidence that they *did* have.


In their eyes, it is the noble and honorary thing to do. They are protecting the Jesus they have invented for their own understandings... but then again, everyone has done this with Jesus. Jesus has become everything to everyone, and therefor nothing for anyone.
Dr CamNC4Me
"Dr. Peterson and his Callithumpian cabal of BYU idiots have been marginalized by their own inevitable irrelevancy defending a fraud."
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