Nibley -- Again

[_Daniel Peterson]

Oh how the winds of change can turn things of beauty to poop.

It wasn't "the winds of change," I'm afraid. On another thread, Scratch confessed that what he writes is "crap."

[_Gazelam]

I think I'll avoid googling a funny image for this particular thread.

[_Brackite]

Believe what you like.

FAIR divested itself of the message board quite a while ago and exercises precisely no control over it. Few of the leaders of FAIR ever post on MA&D. And I certainly don't speak for FAIR.

However, you have no less freedom to believe that the MA&D board is FAIR's official public voice than certain other people do to believe in the shapeshifting reptilian Mormon brotherhood:

http://www.reptilianagenda.com/exp/e062700a.shtml

Hello Daniel,
If ‘FAIR’ really divested itself of the message board quite a while ago, then how come at one of the MA&D Moderators ended up banning me there, when I just signed up there just a few weeks ago. That was the first time that I ever signed up on the MA&D Message Board. And at least one of the Moderators there ended up recognizing me, and then ended up banning me before I even got to Post even just one Message there. I was banned from Posting on the “FAIR” Message Board, but I don’t know why at least one of the Moderators on the MA&D Message Board would ended up banning me there, when I didn’t even get to Post just One Message On that “New" Message Board?

[_Daniel Peterson]

I don't know anything at all about your case, but what you seem to be suggesting is that, since there appears to be some continuity among the moderators from the old FAIR board to the current MA&D board, this somehow demonstrates that FAIR hasn't really divested itself of the MA&D board.

I don't see how that would follow, though. If, say, a corporation spins one of its divisions off as a separate company, I don't see why that would entail that all of the management of the new company would have to be entirely new.

Am I missing your point?

[_Brackite]

I don't know anything at all about your case, but what you seem to be suggesting is that, since there appears to be some continuity among the moderators from the old FAIR board to the current MA&D board, this somehow demonstrates that FAIR hasn't really divested itself of the MA&D board.

I don't see how that would follow, though. If, say, a corporation spins one of its divisions off as a separate company, I don't see why that would entail that all of the management of the new company would have to be entirely new.

Am I missing your point?

Hi,
I was banned on November 5th, 2006, when the MA&D Message Board was still named the 'FAIR' Message Board. I was banned with about four or five other Posters on that date as part of the Purge they did. The main reason why I think that they banned me was because they did Not like the Message that I was Posting here on Dr. Shades' Message Board. Then at the end of just this June, I signed up again, using the screenname 'Beckite' over there on the MA&D Message Board. At Least one of the Moderators over there on the MA&D Message Board ended up recognizing me, and ended up banning me over there before I even got to Post just one Message over there.

[_dartagnan]

Why would anyone want to brag about a board that admittedly reads private messages between posters, and then lies about their reasons?

Why would anyone brag about a board that openly shields favored posters from criticism, effectively creating an atmosphere of imbalance?

Why would anyone want to brag about a board that admittedly reads private messages between posters, and then lies about their reasons?

Why would anyone brag about a board that considers everything you might post there, to be their property, to do with it whatever they wish?

But more importantly, why would anyone want to brag about a forum started by Juliann Reynolds?

It boggles the mind...

[_Dr. Shades]

Why do you hurt so much, Danny boy? Still smarting from your inner child's wounds? Why are you so sad? Maybe it might help to talk about it. Let your little boy scream. Quit lying to yourself and everyone else. Are you gay? You like little kids? What's the issue?

[MODERATOR NOTE: Some Schmo, the second and third to the last sentences were quite over-the-top and don't belong in the Terrestrial Forum. Posts which use sexual innuendo as a means of attacking a fellow board participant, if they must be made, should go in the Telestial Forum, not here.

Please keep that in mind for next time.]

[_Blixa]

And to think this almost made it a full two pages as such a cordial thread taking a look at the belated Dr. Nibley. It came to an amiable (and according to the beautiful and intelligent Ms. Blixa – “diplomatic”) compromise regarding this man and his intellect and scholarship.

*Sigh*

Oh how the winds of change can turn things of beauty to poop.

Well speaking of poo, I was reading through Bergera and Priddis's Brigham Young University: A House of Faith, yesterday. A link was provided to the online text by dartagnan in another thread (http://www.signaturebookslibrary.org/byu/chapter9.htm#academic38). There is a brief discussion of Nibley under "Apologetics" and it only concerns the Book of Abraham, which I know is not one of your urgent interests, Dr. Steuss. Nonetheless, you may want to read through it for a few instances that come pretty, pretty close to prevarication in my book:

Meanwhile, Nibley allowed his former teacher, Klaus Baer, associate professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, to examine and translate the apparent source of the Book of Abraham for the independent Mormon journal, Dialogue. Baer identified the text as the ancient Egyptian "Breathing Permit of Hor." It read, "Here begins the Breathing Permit, which Isis made for her brother Osiris in order to . . . revive his corpse, and to make his body young again." Simultaneously, Nibley wrote in his series, "This writer [Nibley] is anything but an Egyptologist, yet he has stood on the sidelines long enough to know that there is no case to be made against the Book of Abraham on linguistic grounds."

So even though his own teacher, whom he knows is a competent Egyptologist, has translated the papyri, Nibley asserts that "linguistics" has failed to "make a case against."

Bergera and Priddis are quoting from Nibley's series on the papryi's discovery for the Improvement Era in the mid to late 60's:

Having had three classes in Egyptology, Nibley was assigned by church leaders to study the papyri when they were presented to the church by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Not yet confident in Egyptian," Nibley later explained, "I frankly skirmished and sparred for time, making the most of those sources which support the Book of Abraham from another side, the recent and growing writing, ancient and modern, about the forgotten legends and traditions of Abraham." Nibley began a series of articles for the church's Improvement Era magazine, ostensibly explaining the significance of the discovered papyri, but focusing on other apocryphal works. He did not address the text of the discovered fragments until his twenty-seventh installment, over two years later, and then only superficially.

I'm bothered by classic Nibley maneuvers like this:

In Nibley's final installment, he wrote, "You scholars have spoken; why don't you do the honest thing and admit that you don't know a blessed thing about the facsimiles, that you haven't made even a superficial study of them either to examine the categories to which they belong or the peculiarities of the individual documents?"

although by then the papyri had been studied by people like John A. Wilson, Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, and Richard A. Parker, chair of the Department of Egyptology at Brown University, who agreed with Klaus Baer's original commentary and identified the papyri as conventional funeral texts with emendations added by Joseph Smith. I can't for the life of me see how this is not, well, a lie. This is not the same as later catalyst theory or revelation or whatever. It's a statement that the scholars are ignorant, incompetent, lazy and wrong.

Of course none of this matters in terms of the local effect of Nibley's arguments. I wish I'd seen this earlier, when I first responded to your thread (or Gad's transfer of it here), because I'd read it before and it seems to sum up the Nibley-effect quite well:

As former BYU history professor Richard Poll observed in 1984, "[Nibley] has been a security blanket for Latter-day Saints to whom dissonance is intolerable. . . . His contribution to dissonance management is not so much what he has written, but that he has written." Poll candidly reported, "After knowing Hugh Nibley for forty years, I am of the opinion that he has been playing games with his readers all along. . . . Relatively few Latter-day Saints read the Nibley books that they give to one another, or the copiously annotated articles that he has contributed to church publications. It is enough for most of us that they are there."

[_Daniel Peterson]

Sure looks damning. Good thing there's only one side to the story!

[_Blixa]

Well, what's the other side, then? I can think of several ways to explain around it, but none of them completely erase the problem: that Nibley is more interested in keeping "belief" afloat than in accurately representing "the other side." And of course, one could say, what's wrong with that? That's what the Improvement Era series he was asked to do was intended for. Its the Improvement Era, afterall, not a scholarly essay in a peer-reviewed publication ; ).