Jonathan Neville just likened Daniel Peterson to Satan

In a recent blog post, Jonathan Neville has stooped so low as to quote the language of the temple endowment to compare Daniel Peterson to Satan. (This is not the first time he has done this.)

In his post, Neville copied Peggy Fletcher Stack’s April 25, 2013, Salt Lake Tribune article about the 2012 change in leadership and staff at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, sprinkling his own comments throughout the article.

Stack’s article was, as usual, biased and lacking important information, but Neville has unquestioningly used it as his basis for criticizing the Interpreter Foundation, the organization Daniel Peterson helped found after he was unjustly outsted from the Maxwell Institute.

Neville quoted Stack:

Within a month of his ouster, Peterson and a group of scholars previously associated with the [Maxwell Institute’s Mormon Studies] Review established their own online publication, Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture. Since then, it has published at least one article a week, filling nearly four volumes of up to 250 pages each.

After which he added his own comment:

[Some say Dan took the spirits that followed him and created his own world…]

Any Latter-day Saint familiar with the temple endowment will immediately recognize specific wording used in the ceremony to describe Satan’s intentions after God cursed him for tempting Adam and Eve with fruit from the tree of knowledge.

Not only has Neville shown exceptionally poor taste in quoting from a ceremony sacred to Latter-day Saints, he has done so to (literally) demonize his intellectual opponents.

He should be ashamed of himself.

Peter Pan