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View Full Version : Hugh Nibley's "How to Write an Anti-Mormon Book"


lunaverse
18th October 2005, 07:30 PM
This is a talk by Hugh Nibley from 1962, summarizing the 10 things to do when writing an anti-Mormon history. Of course, they're all negative, and interestingly, Nibley uses the techniques himself within his own talk... But there's no accounting for hipocrisy.

http://speeches.byu.edu/index.php?act=viewitem&id=830&tid=

It was an interesting listen, having read Martha Beck's book and also being "anti-Mormon". I haven't read any of the books he attacks, nor really any books that critique Mormon history, but I have read enough internet sites to know Nibley's full of crap. :D

Nevertheless he gets plenty of belly laughs from his crowd.

Most especially interesting are a few comments I took as "sexism in disguise", some mild racism (something about how easy it is to sell whiskey to an Indian), and completely discrediting Ann Elza Young's (The 19th Wife) stories of abuse and subsequently running away and being afraid for her life. My gut wrenched as I recalled Martha Beck's stories of him (and many other Mormons) denying her claims. It seems (whether Beck's accounts are true or not) that he had a little experience with ignoring and blaming abused women prior to Beck's accusations.

Imagine the dissonance! He'd had so much practice of making monsters out of these people, and then one turns out to be his own daughter!

I'm reminded of a scripture my mom often quoted, and one I learned is very true: "Judge not that ye be not judged."

Luna

peter_mary
18th October 2005, 09:30 PM
The only thing of Nibley's I ever managed to read was his lovely little book, "No Ma'am, That's Not My History." It was truly THE single most patronizing, marginalizing book I have ever read, and it was plenty to cause me to appreciate the kind of guy we have in the First Appologist of Mormonism.

I once thought he was an itellectual...now I only see him as a very, very small man who sold his intellectual gifts for a birthright that, tragically, I believe was sold in vain...

He could have been so much more...

Peter_Mary

free thinker
18th October 2005, 10:54 PM
On page 212 of the book " The Ketstone of Mormonism" by Arza Evans we find the following:


In 1960, Hugh Nibley, a prominent L.D.S. author and intellectual, told Sterling M. McMurrin and a large assembly of students at the University of Utah that his extensive writings defending Mormonism were " nothing but a game". When McMurrin replied, " The people who read your articles do not regard your writings as a game", Nibley repeated himself and again said,"As far as I am concerned, it is nothing but a game".

free thinker