My sophomore English class at Brighton High School in Salt Lake City was a disaster (sorry
fellow Bengals and generally great Brighton High teachers!).
The school was using a failed but trendy new system where hundreds of kids were in a big open
space and split up into rotating groups, moving every few weeks from one teacher to another for
different pathetic units that supposedly taught us English while we watched lame movies or
engaged in other dull "labs" or whatever.
Felt like chaos. Like block scheduling and other ill-informed experiments that sometimes
advance administrators more than students, whatever we were doing there couldn't possibly make
us better at reading, writing, or grammar (a dreaded g-word that is almost as despised in
American schools as that other G-word, "God").
The demographics of the school were pretty good with lots of suburban kids from generally
healthy families in the southern extremes of Salt Lake City. In theory they should have been a
pretty tame group of kids, though there were some rough elements (I have a scar as a reminder of
that from one of my most traumatic stories in 7th grade).
Demographics notwithstanding, big, unwieldy groups without much structure can be a recipe for
trouble. One day as the mass of classes in the open "pod" were dismissing, a student got into a
loud argument with a teacher. Kids gathered around to watch.
There were dozens of observers with quite a few nearby eyewitnesses who watched the shouting
escalate into physical violence as the student grabbed the teacher near the neck.
The teacher, possibly applying some improperly understood scene from a kung-fu movie,
attempted to break the student's hold by thrusting his hands upward, but with his thumbs sticking
out so he caught the student's arms with his thumbs. This broke the hold and both thumbs. Ouch.
The student was prosecuted for physical assault. Dozens saw it happen. I think it was just
grabbing and shaking the teacher, not actual choking, though I don't remember that clearly now
-- it's recorded somewhere in my journals if I want to review the story. But it was definitely a
physical attack of some kind and the student was clearly the perpetrator.
He was convicted. However, he came close to escaping legal punishment. I was apparently the
only witness during the trial that was able to withstand the questioning of the defense attorney.
My father sat in on the trial and told me what happened to the multiple other witnesses who came
in. One by one, a skillful lawyer was able to pick at little details in their story and find gaps,
uncertainties, and apparent contradictions and use them to create mountains of doubt.
Things like, "You said there were five people in front of you, and now you are saying you had an
unobstructed view? You first said the teacher was wearing plaid, and now you say it was a white
shirt. If you are so wrong about all these basics, are you sure you saw anything at all? Earlier you
said this lasted five minutes, but now you are saying it happened so quickly and was only a few
seconds. Were you even paying attention at all?"
In the end, according to my father, the room full of witnesses was essentially reduced to one. Had
it been a better lawyer or a more complex event, I'm sure he could have tripped me up as well.
Lawyers can be great at what they do, but in a court setting, their objective is not to discover the
truth, but to represent a client, sometimes at all costs. I see the mind and tactics of lawyers in
some of the recent anti-Mormon attempts to attack and dismiss the vast body of scholarship and
evidence from the many witnesses of the gold plates of the Book of Mormon.
Taking mistakes in quotations, uncertainties in documentation, easily resolved apparent
contradictions or errors, and turning them into mountain of doubt where there should be none --
it is amazing what skilled lawyers can do to a body of witnesses, but that doesn't remove the
reality of what they saw and in many cases handled.
Richard L. Anderson's vast body of scholarship on their lives and integrity is dismissed out of
hand as just a big book from a true-believer, without addressing the arguments and evidence.
Nitpicking at minor issues is the name of the game, but it's a lawyer's game, not that of a seeker
for truth.
The consistent witnesses of the Book of Mormon deserve a lot more study and respect. They
were far better and witnesses than what we had at Brighton High.
In my experience, many lawyers are men and women of integrity and some passionately seek for
truth. An intriguing example of this occurred wherein one nineteenth century lawyer grilled one
of the Three Witnesses to determine if their account might have been fabricated, delusional,
imaginary, or otherwise less than real.
It was a young lawyer's first cross-examination, sincere and intense.
The young James Henry Moyle, who had just received his law degree from the University
of Michigan and was returning home to Utah, took a detour to Richmond, Missouri, for
the sole purpose of interviewing David Whitmer. When he saw the Witness, he implored
him to tell the truth. He told Whitmer of the sacrifices that his family had made for the
gospel's sake, driven from state to state and finally pulling a handcart all the way to the
arid desert of the Great Basin.
I said to him: "I was born and reared in the Church and I do pray of you to let me
know if there is any possibility of your having been deceived. I am just
commencing life as you are preparing to lay it down, and I beg of you to tell me if
there is anything connected with the testimony which you have borne to the world
that could possibly have been deceptive or misunderstood."
I further said, in an earnest youthful appeal, that I didn't want to go through life
believing in a falsehood, that it was in his power to make known the truth to me.
His answer was unequivocal. There was no question about its truthfulness. The
angel had stood in a little clear place in the woods with nothing between them but
a fallen log -- the angel on one side and the witnesses on the other. It had all
occurred in broad, clear daylight. He saw the plates and heard the angel with
unmistakable clearness.
"He was the first witness I ever attempted to cross examine," Moyle wrote many years
later, "and I did so with all the intensity of my impelling desire to know the truth. The
interview lasted two and one-half hours." The young lawyer, who subsequently served as
assistant secretary of the treasury in two federal administrations, came away utterly
convinced of David Whitmer's sincerity.
The witnesses to the plates insisted that what they had seen, heard, and in many cases touched
and handled were real.
Some critics, often relying on highly questionable hostile sources and neglecting the weight of
scholarship on the topic, have attempted to suggest that the witnesses sort of imagined things and
didn't actually see with their physical eyes or touch anything tangible.
This revision of history utterly fails to explain the impressive historical record and the reality and
sincerity of multiple lives standing as witnesses of what was and is real. Peterson's article helps
summarize a few of the key points that have to be neglected by the critics in reaching that
unwarranted conclusion.
Jeff Lindsay has been defending the Church on the Internet since 1994, when he launched his
LDSFAQ website under JeffLindsay.com. He has also long been blogging about LDS matters on
the blog Mormanity (mormanity.blogspot.com). Jeff is a longtime resident of Appleton,
Wisconsin, who recently moved to Shanghai, China, with his wife, Kendra.
He works for an Asian corporation as head of intellectual property. Jeff and Kendra are the parents of 4 boys, 3 married and the the youngest on a mission.
He is a former innovation and IP consultant, a former professor, and former Corporate Patent
Strategist and Senior Research Fellow for a multinational corporation.
Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins and Mukund Karanjikar are authors of the book Conquering
Innovation Fatigue (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University and is a registered US
patent agent. He has more than 100 granted US patents and is author of numerous publications.
Jeff's hobbies include photography, amateur magic, writing, and Mandarin Chinese.
