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“Why are the Heavens Silent?”

“Why are the Heavens Silent?”

Last updated on: June 8, 2026 at 7:13 pm by Dan Peterson

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“Why are the Heavens Silent?” 2026-06-08T19:13:41-06:00 Dan Peterson

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“The Saints Driven from Jackson County, Missouri”
Carl Christian Anton Christensen (d. 1912) (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Episode 2o in the Interpreter Foundation’s series of mini-documentaries has now gone up online: Becoming Brigham, Episode 20 — Why are the Heavens Silent? Initially, Episode 21 had appeared on Meridian Magazine, out of sequence. But that has now been corrected, and Episode 21 will go up a week from today. (There is method in our madness.)

I hope that you’re watching, enjoying, and spreading the word about these short video lessons on the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Today’s installment is less than eleven minutes long.)

Bela Lugosi played me in the 1931 biographical film Dracula. Other than the inaccurate haircut and his complete failure to capture my dark side, I thought it a fair portrayal. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I launched this blog at 7:01 PM on 2 February 2012, with an entry entitled “Dan Enters the World of Blogging.” This is how it read:

For years now, people have asked me whether I had a blog. I’ve always answered No, but have felt that, really, I ought to.

So, finally, I’m taking the plunge. I probably won’t be posting long entries here — I have plenty of outlets as it is, and am already behind on more writing commitments and goals than I can count — but I think it will be useful to post news, announce public presentations (people often ask where or whether I’ll be speaking over the next weeks and months), call attention to new articles and books, shamelessly advertise tours I’ll be leading, and the like. I may even comment on politics — I’m really, really into political questions, and have been since I was an early teenager — though that may prove to be a bridge too far: I’m controversial with plenty of people without picking any more fights. (Which is, by the way, why I won’t be allowing comments here. I have no interest in spending several hours a day sparring with anonymous internet critics, and I can guarantee that they would show up here in droves to take a shot at me. But they have venues enough in which they can lament my wickedness and stupidity; I feel no obligation to supply them with yet another.)

How am I doing?

Obviously, some things have changed since then. For example, my blog entries are much longer than I had originally planned them to be. (Patheos encourages blog entries of at least a thousand words in length.) Has such extensive blogging interfered with my other, more serious and sustained, writing? Yes, it has, and I need to find better ways of avoiding such interference.

I do, still, use the blog “to post news, announce public presentations . . . , call attention to new articles and books, shamelessly advertise tours I’ll be leading, and the like.”

I’ve since sworn off politics more than I had intended to. But, under strong urging from the folks at Patheos, I opened the blog up to comments pretty early on. By and large, my obsessive critics haven’t come here very often. They have their own platform, from which they can deride and slander me without fear of contradiction or rebuttal. Oh, one of the them (or, anyway, one of their sympathizers) will occasionally show up here but, overwhelmingly, the commenters here have been civil and substantive. I’m grateful for that.

The Skyline Trail to Three Lakes, in Washington State’s Olympic National Park
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

A week ago Sunday, I announced a prize (the precise nature of which still remains to be determined) for the zaniest answers to the following urgently burning questions about my just-completed trip to Discovery Bay, Washington, out on the Olympic Peninsula:

For what disreputable purpose is Peterson now in the State of Washington?
What specific unhealthy foods is Peterson consuming in mass quantities during his stay?
Whom did Peterson defraud and/or browbeat into paying his expenses for this trip?
How does his being in the State of Washington once again demonstrate him to be both depraved and a buffoon?

As I explained, the competition was principally designed to gratify the interests of the folks at the Peterson Obsession Board, although participation wasn’t restricted to them. All, I said, were welcome to propose answers to the questions. Even sane people.

I’m now in a position to reveal the true and factual answers to the four questions that I posed and that are reproduced above without alteration:

For what disreputable purpose was Peterson up in the State of Washington?

With his wife, two second-generation units, and a tag-along third-generation unit, Peterson traveled to Port Townsend, Washington, in order to empty out the storage unit of one of the 2GUs and thereupon to drive its contents to a temporary location in Utah. (The names and genders and other identifying information of the others involved in this disreputable operation have been concealed so as to protect them, insofar as such protection is even possible, from exploitation and weaponization by the holy warriors of the Peterson Obsession Board.)

What specific unhealthy foods did Peterson consume in mass quantities during his stay?

Unbelievably, Peterson ate food during every single day of his trip to, from, and in Washington. For example, he consumed cereal in the morning and then, in the evening, some seafood (it being an area surrounded by seawater), and, one night, a couple of tacos. Weird and indefensible stuff like that. For those who are eager to invest the research time to acquire more detailed information on his food intake, the traveling group’s receipts from local eateries and grocery stores are probably still retrievable from area landfills, along with the relevant packaging materials (where relevant).

Whom did Peterson defraud and/or browbeat into paying his expenses for the trip?

This is a silly question. The fact that Peterson fraudulently financed this trip isn’t a matter of induction from particular empirical data. Rather, it’s a conclusion that inescapably follows by logical deduction from (a) his low character and (b) the sheer fact that he took the trip. As President Trump explained to Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday when she rudely suggested that no evidence exists to demonstrate that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that the California gubernatorial primary and the Los Angeles mayoral primary are currently being stolen, “All I have to do is look, and I listen.”

How does his having been in the State of Washington once again demonstrate Peterson to be both depraved and a buffoon?

Seriously? How does anything about his trip to Washington fail to prove him both a buffoon and depraved? Really. Come on. If you’re not willing to play the game, just get out of the building. Of course, you’ll first need to obtain Dr. Arkham’s signature on your discharge papers. And be sure to pick up your street clothes and your personal effects at the guard desk on the way out.

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