cinepro wrote: He wasn't saying "you're special so you don't have to do anything or accomplish anything in your life..." He was saying "Even if you aren't an Olympic Gold Medalist, Oxford Scholar or a billionaire, you have value and worth." This is very similar to what the LDS Church teaches in that everyone is a "child of God" and has value.
True. But this isn't a teaching that the Mopologists typically follow. I mean, what "value"--in their eyes--does Jeremy Runnells or John Dehlin have? How about Ed Decker? Sandra Tanner?
As others have pointed out, he just wasn't in the age group (2-5 year olds) for the show. The show nationally aired in 1968, when Peterson would have been 13. He wasn't supposed to like it.
Interestingly, Dr. P. himself has never explained why he "couldn't stand the show." (And there is a difference between saying, "This clearly isn't for me," vs. "I couldn't stand the show.") In his "Sic et Non" post, DCP points out that
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is "a program that has often been criticized as, precisely, bland, unadventurous, and very vanilla." Of course he doesn't elaborate on this or commit to it as a reason for his own dislike, because...well, I assume you know why. Because guess what else is "bland, unadventurous, and very vanilla"?
I have the same low opinion of the show "Barney", which was beloved by a generation of kids but aired when I was in my teens (and I would loudly complain when my younger siblings co-opted the TV to watch it). Hopefully that doesn't make me a bad person.
I don't think the comparison is an especially good one. Mr. Rogers was an actual, authentic human being with a multi-decade track record of unflagging kindness and decency--something that most of us can only aspire to. Barney, on the other hand, was a disingenuous purple dinosaur whose show was interesting mainly due to how surreal the whole thing was. Didn't you wonder on some level what the person inside the Barney costume was actually like? Imagine how "meta" this discussion becomes when you imagine that Barney was played by one of the Mopologists--say, for example, Matthew Roper.... Or, God forbid, Scott Lloyd....
the horror..... the horror....
"[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