Markk wrote:Maksutov wrote:No, Mark, sometimes life and people are just complicated. If your personal feelings or your limited understanding keeps you from grasping that, it is not the fault of a board full of people who are trying to protect some deceased Mormon's reputation. Good grief. You think this board is a Hugh Nibley fan club? You're back to your distortions and exaggerations again.
I believe all people are complicated, as is life...and it remains complicated if one throws the issues that make it complimented under the rug.
What are you trying to protect him from the truth? In one breath you are saying he was not successful, hardly a protection, and then in another you say you are protecting him?
What have I distorted? What have I exaggerated? At some point maybe you can address what I wrote instead of making it about me.
When Nibley spoke that Jesus walked GA through the 1st century temple...how did he come to that conclusion? Because he is complicated?
I deal with complicated issues every day of my life, especially at work...if I just brushed them off nothing would move forward...and in regards to HN...this is a discussion board of folks that think they know what we are talking about...it is what we do here...we are all hacks , except for maybe the "elite."
At any rate, as I wrote earlier, don't let the band width stop you from actually entering into the complicated issue of HN.
You misread Mak's sarcasm. He's
not saying people are trying to "protect" Nibley. The phrase "it is not the fault of a board full of people who are trying to protect some deceased Mormon's reputation" is meant as a parody of what you seem to think is going on. That's clear when he points out this place is hardly a Hugh Nibley fansite.
This is only one example of how you are not really making sense of what people are writing.
Another would be that no one has actually argued that Nibley was in every way possible to conceive "unsuccessful." Rather, people have been parsing his "success." No one has argued he wasn't any possible kind of "success."
And further, you brought the whole issue up after Kish and I had suggested that Nibley's apologetic career was made possible by the sacrifice of an actual scholarly one. Somehow the term "sacrifice" got lodged in your craw and you went from there trying to make a case that Nibley had some kind of obviously glorious career that would be the envy of all. When people tried to put your understanding of his career in perspective, by drawing on their own experience in academia, you simply came back with bigger and bigger exaggerations and over estimations.
I don't care about Nibley. I have no interest in him except that I found myself more sympathetic toward him after reading Martha Beck's crappy book. It made me think about the kind of position the church put him in.
The only reason I responded was that I thought I could clear up your misunderstanding of how to assess a person's academic career and scholarly achievements, as well as what I think is your exaggeration of Nibley's place in Mormon fanboi adulation (less worshipped than a GA, less popular speaker than Paul Dunn, less financially compensated than many who serve in LDS institutional roles). That second one is a matter of opinion, yes, but I think people on message boards exaggerate the overall importance of apologists and apologetics church-wide because the history of many of these forums as well as their purpose is rooted in apologetics.
Whatever. I honestly didn't expect that pointing out Nibley's irrelevance as a scholar of antiquity would be met with, "Oh yeah? What about this amateur review on GoodReads?" Clearly, you are having an argument with something other than the responses you're getting, because you aren't seeming to comprehend them at all.
From the Ernest L. Wilkinson Diaries: "ELW dreams he's spattered w/ grease. Hundreds steal his greasy pants."