toreador said:
: how long did it take you to compose the above post. It was very interesting reading.
Probably about 15 hours, including reading for research. I was ill over the weekend and had some time on my hands.
Actually, I had always wanted to type up all of the relevant quotations of Josephus but I never got around to it. This gave me an excuse.
AuldSoul said:
:: I'll prove this easily: If the Society published a Watchtower article admitting that 607 was wrong and 587 was right, would you change your mind or not?
: I asked my mother this question. It clearly hurt her head.
Of course. I've asked a number of JWs about this over the years. Almost all did everything in their power to evade answering.
: THIS is the key, when the Society changes its viewpoint, suddenly what was wrong becomes right and what was right becomes wrong. What was good becomes bad and what was bad becomes good.
Your application of Isaiah 5:20-23 is dead nuts on.
These people would literally kill their children if the Watchtower Society instructed them to, in the right way.
Jeffro:
I know that we've all spent time dealing with scholar pretendus' nonsense, and obviously nothing sinks into his skull. Nevertheless, he serves a useful purpose on this board -- proving how braindead a committed cult member can be.
: The problem is that, like you say, 'scholar' will just continue to ignore the facts as he has always done, and he will just parrot the same meaningless 'blanket' responses that he always does.
Of course. I could write much of his response to my post merely by referring back to his various evasions in any number of posts and pasting them in. The most entertaining, and sad, thing he does is to paraphrase various scriptures and secular references, because he knows perfectly well that actually quoting them honestly immediately disproves his claims. It will be mildly entertaining to see this at work once again.
What I'm particularly curious about is how he's going to handle the huge conundrum I've presented with respect to Josephus. Obviously Josephus was confused about a lot of historical things, and in pointing this out I've only shown what many scholars have already said. The Watchtower has put much stock in Josephus' mention of 70 years of captivity and so forth, yet deliberately failed to point out Josephus' quotation of Berossus, which doesn't simply contradict his earlier statements, but shows why they were wrong. And of course, if scholar pretendus decides to try to contradict Josephus' clear statement that the temple was begun in the 2nd year of Cyrus, which in view of Ezra 3 directly disproves Watchtower chronology, then he must logically drop his arguments about Josephus' use of "70 years" in several statements. But this guy will surely be true to form and ignore everything he can't disprove, and continue using inconsistent data. JW defenders are extremely consistent in such dishonest scholarship.
AlanF