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Today’s the Day. Tonight’s the Night.

Today’s the Day. Tonight’s the Night.

Last updated on: October 7, 2024 at 12:56 pm by Dan Peterson

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Today’s the Day. Tonight’s the Night. 2024-10-07T12:56:36-06:00 Dan Peterson

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While I was growing up in the greater Los Angeles area, this was “my” temple. And this is where, finally, my parents were sealed together for time and all eternity, and where my brother and I were sealed to them. I’m profoundly grateful for that. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)

Seventeen new temples! That’s more temples announced in one General Conference than existed in the entire Church when I was a teenager.

The remarkable explosion of temple-building that commenced under President Gordon B. Hinckley continues at an even more rapid pace under President Russell M. Nelson. Plainly, the effort is intended to make temples more accessible to Latter-day Saints in all areas of the world and, thus, to make temple worship more central to the lives of the Saints. We are accelerating the work of redeeming the dead. I had been looking forward to President Nelson’s address yesterday afternoon, and I was certainly not disappointed.

The liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, near Linz, Austria, on 6 May 1945, by elements of the Eleventh Armored Division of General George Patton’s Third Army. My father was there that day, although I can’t identify him in this photograph. He raised me with the express moral obligation that he himself felt, to try to ensure that the crimes committed at Mauthausen and at other such camps are never forgotten. And I HAVEN’T forgotten. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons public domain)

The other day, I happened across a meme created by my Mini-Stalker over on the Peterson Obsession Board in which he had incorporated an old still photograph of my smiling visage. He used the photograph to represent me as happy and gratified by Iran’s recent barrage of missiles and drones against Israel. I suppose the point of it is that I’m an anti-Semite.

I can’t quite understand why, over many years now, Mini-Stalker has apparently found continual public lying about me so very fulfilling.

Islamicist though I am, I have little to no sympathy for the Islamic Republic of Iran. I’ve spent time there, and my experience in the country, benign though it was for me personally and as much as I like Iranians and deeply admire Persian culture (about which I taught for decades), was, among other things, one of visceral dislike for fascism and totalitarianism.

Further, on this one-year anniversary of Hamas’s brutal attacks against Israel, I simply say that nothing — absolutely nothing — can justify the horrors of that day. Whatever grievances Palestinians may have against the Jewish state and against historical Zionism (and I think that they have some legitimate grievances), what happened on 7 October 2023 was utterly evil and repulsive. No cause, no grievance, can legitimate the atrocities that were committed by Hamas in southern Israel a year ago.

I have visited Israel more times than I can count. I’ve actually lived there in Jerusalem, altogether, for about a year. I’m very familiar with many of the places that are routinely in the news these days. I’ve been many times over the decades to the Druze town in the Golan Heights, Majdal Shams, where, on 27 July of this year, twelve children were killed on a football field by a Hezbollah rocket. I’ve been to Kiryat Shmona, the northernmost city in Israel, many times. It has largely been evacuated now under recurrent Hezbollah rocket bombardment. My father, as I’ve mentioned here on numerous occasions, participated in the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, in Austria, and of its adjacent satellite sub-camp, Gusen, and I was raised from childhood to be acutely aware of the Holocaust and of a moral duty to remember it. I am a believing adherent of the only faith of which I’m aware whose scriptural canon contains an explicit condemnation of anti-Semitism. When my Mini-Stalker insinuates that I’m an anti-Semite and a bigot who takes pleasure in violence against Jews, that is nothing other than an illustration of his characteristic perennially shameless mendacity.

Two of the supporting actors in “Six Days in August” pose for a still shot during a pause on the movie set. (Photo probably by Russ Richins)

Tonight (Monday night) is your final opportunity to catch a showing of Six Days in August prior to its official general release into theaters, which will take place on the evening of 10 October — this coming Thursday. Tonight’s screenings will take place in nine Cinemark theaters along the Wasatch Front in Utah: Salt Lake City, Ogden, American Fork, Draper, Farmington, Orem, Provo, Sandy/Midvale, and West Jordan. You can purchase tickets online, as well as at the theaters themselves: Six Days in August – Early Access

Last night, I received an email from the “empty nesters” group in my ward. With absolutely no prodding or input from me or my wife, they’re planning a movie night this coming Friday to attend Six Days in August. That pleases me very much, and I hope that other groups elsewhere will organize similar activities. The film will, I think, generate interesting conversations among Church members over post-theater ice cream, and etc.

And I simply can’t fail to mention, yet again, that the Interpreter Foundation’s prior film Witnesses (2021) is currently available at no charge for viewing online: https://vimeo.com/824199556/ecefc622ed. This is true internationally, as well as within the United States; thus far, I’m aware of people who have been able to access the film in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Qatar, and the United Kingdom. Witnesses will remain available for viewing at no charge until Thursday, 10 October, the day on which Six Days in August goes into general release. Priceless. If you can’t make it to Six Days in August this evening, Witnesses would be good viewing material for Family Night.

I had a fun time last night, by the way, on the radio with Martin Tanner (who was with me in the studio) and Brent Schmidt and Hales Swift (regular monthly participants who both joined us by telephone). We discussed Mormon 1-6 for the first hour of the Interpreter Radio Show; for the second hour, we talked about the just-concluded General Conference and . . . well, about Six Days in August. I deeply appreciate Martin’s work as the organizer and manager of the Interpreter Radio Show, as well as its rotating cast of hosts and discussants.

The J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

This article by a law professor at Brigham Young University, which appeared (of all places!) in the Salt Lake Tribune, could have come from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™, but its proximate motivation seems to have been the unfortunate Hulu television series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: “Voices: We must stop sensationalizing faith in the pursuit of eyeballs and ad dollars: We cannot afford to remain silently faithful while allowing mainstream bashing of a known societal good.”

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