I had coffee with my rabidly devout witness friend the other night and it was sad listening to him talk. Everything and I do mean EVERYTHING in life has either Satan or Jehovah behind it, according to him.
Every minute detail. Scary.
Satan gets Credit for Everything...Even the Bible/New World Translation!!!
by oompa 19 Replies latest jw friends
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marmot
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Satanus
It's that goddam satan, again. He doesn't want people to see the truth that you are writing. You must pray harder and burn some incense (and maybe kill a sheep).
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nvrgnbk
Joking aside, excellent work, oompa.
Have you read Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus?
Bart Ehrman's 'Misquoting Jesus'
by Terry Gross
Listen Now [38 min 35 sec] add to playlist
Detail from the cover of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. HarperCollins
Fresh Air from WHYY, December 14, 2005 · Scholar Bart Ehrman's new book explores how scribes -- through both omission and intention -- changed the Bible. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is the result of years of reading the texts in their original languages.
Ehrman says the modern Bible was shaped by mistakes and intentional alterations that were made by early scribes who copied the texts. In the introduction to Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman writes that when he came to understand this process 30 years ago, it shifted his way of thinking about the Bible. He had been raised as an Evangelical Christian.
Ehrman is also the author of Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, which chronicles the period before Christianity as we know it, when conflicting ideas about the religion were fighting for prominence in the second and third centuries.
The chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Ehrman also edited a collection of the early non-canonical texts from the first centuries after Christ, called Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament.
Read an excerpt from Misquoting Jesus:
Chapter One
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture
To discuss the copies of the New Testament that we have, we need to start at the very beginning with one of the unusual features of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world: its bookish character. In fact, to make sense of this feature of Christianity, we need to start before the beginnings of Christianity with the religion from which Christianity sprang, Judaism. For the bookishness of Christianity was in some sense anticipated and foreshadowed by Judaism, which was the first "religion of the book" in Western civilization.
Judaism as a Religion of the Book
The Judaism from which Christianity sprang was an unusual religion in the Roman world, although by no means unique. Like adherents of any of the other (hundreds of ) religions in the Mediterranean area, Jews acknowledged the existence of a divine realm populated by superhuman beings (angels, archangels, principalities, powers); they subscribed to the worship of a deity through sacrifices of animals and other food products; they maintained that there was a special holy place where this divine being dwelt here on earth (the Temple in Jerusalem), and it was there that these sacrifices were to be made. They prayed to this God for communal and personal needs. They told stories about how this God had interacted with human beings in the past, and they anticipated his help for human beings in the present. In all these ways, Judaism was "familiar" to the worshipers of other gods in the empire.
In some ways, though, Judaism was distinctive. All other religions in the empire were polytheistic -- acknowledging and worshiping many gods of all sorts and functions: great gods of the state, lesser gods of various locales, gods who oversaw different aspects of human birth, life, and death. Judaism, on the other hand, was monotheistic; Jews insisted on worshiping only the one God of their ancestors, the God who, they maintained, had created this world, controlled this world, and alone provided what was needed for his people. According to Jewish tradition, this one all-powerful God had called Israel to be his special people and had promised to protect and defend them in exchange for their absolute devotion to him and him alone. The Jewish people, it was believed, had a "covenant" with this God, an agreement that they would be uniquely his as he was uniquely theirs. Only this one God was to be worshiped and obeyed; so, too, there was only one Temple, unlike in the polytheistic religions of the day in which, for example, there could be any number of temples to a god like Zeus. To be sure, Jews could worship God anywhere they lived, but they could perform their religious obligations of sacrifice to God only at the Temple in Jerusalem. In other places, though, they could gather together in "synagogues" for prayer and to discuss the ancestral traditions at the heart of their religion.
These traditions involved both stories about God's interaction with the ancestors of the people of Israel -- the patriarchs and matriarchs of the faith, as it were: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rachel, Jacob, Rebecca, Joseph, Moses, David, and so on -- and detailed instructions concerning how this people was to worship and live. One of the things that made Judaism unique among the religions of the Roman Empire was that these instructions, along with the other ancestral traditions, were written down in sacred books.
For modern people intimately familiar with any of the major contemporary Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it may be hard to imagine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost exclusively concerned with honoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice. There were no doctrines to be learned, as explained in books, and almost no ethical principles to be followed, as laid out in books. This is not to say that adherents of the various polytheistic religions had no beliefs about their gods or that they had no ethics, but beliefs and ethics -- strange as this sounds to modern ears -- played almost no role in religion per se. These were instead matters of personal philosophy, and philosophies, of course, could be bookish. Since ancient religions themselves did not require any particular sets of "right doctrines" or, for the most part, "ethical codes," books played almost no role in them.
Judaism was unique in that it stressed its ancestral traditions, customs, and laws, and maintained that these had been recorded in sacred books, which had the status, therefore, of "scripture" for the Jewish people. During the period of our concern -- the first century of the common era, when the books of the New Testament were being written -- Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire understood in particular that God had given direction to his people in the writings of Moses, referred to collectively as the Torah, which literally means something like "law" or "guidance." The Torah consists of five books, sometimes called the Pentateuch (the "five scrolls"), the beginning of the Jewish Bible (the Christian Old Testament): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Here one finds accounts of the creation of the world, the calling of Israel to be God's people, the stories of Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs and God's involvement with them, and most important (and most extensive), the laws that God gave Moses indicating how his people were to worship him and behave toward one another in community together. These were sacred laws, to be learned, discussed, and followed -- and they were written in a set of books.
Jews had other books that were important for their religious lives together as well, for example, books of prophets (such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos), and poems (Psalms), and history (such as Joshua and Samuel). Eventually, some time after Christianity began, a group of these Hebrew books -- twenty-two of them altogether -- came to be regarded as a sacred canon of scripture, the Jewish Bible of today, accepted by Christians as the first part of the Christian canon, the "Old Testament."
Excerpted fromMisquoting Jesusby Bart Ehrman. Copyright © 2005 by Bart Ehrman. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollinsSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5052156
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oompa
NVRGNBK: You are in rare form this morning!!! ROFLMAO!!!! What a catch!
I spent an hour plus trying to get my post on!!!!
An older gentleman I know said " When I was young, I could do it all day, now it takes me all day to do it".
An no I had not read that other info on your post, but will in a sec....oompa
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oompa
I know this post is long and has lots of source material, but I really would like to know if anyone know of other current JW teachings that seem totally contrary to each other. You can not teach two different things and both be the truth if they are in opposition to each other. The Bible can not be divinely preserved and accurate and corrupted by satan at the same time......oompa
it is so hard to nail dubs on anything cause of "imperfect men and light getting brighter"....finding contrary teachings is a solution!!
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oompa
I am not giving up on this post with the strange beginning! Are there other conflicted teachings? Come on now.....oompa
Should I re-post it with the highlighted areas restored or underlined...it is a much quicker read...
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freyd
http://www.chick.com/bc/1991/easternstar.asp
"Sadly, one of the key strategies a cult uses is to play upon the common interpretation of words. Dealing with any cult involves getting through a jungle of definitions. The cult will use words which have common meanings, like "Jesus" or "saved," or well known Bible verses, but will carefully not explain to potential members that they have applied a subtext to these terms, a second layer of meaning!
This is the problem with the OES. The people who put the order together back in the 19th century relied upon the familiarity with Matthew 2:2 as a common "Christmas verse." However, in light of the satanic symbolism involved in the OES, we need to look for another layer of meaning applied to that verse of scripture.
The A.V. 1611 text does not say "eastern star." It says "star in the east." The phrase "Eastern Star" has a specialized meaning in occultism. It refers to the star, Sirius, which is the most significant star in Satanism! It is sacred to the god, Set. Remember Set as the evil Egyptian god who killed Osiris? Set is probably the oldest form of Satan! The Eastern Star is the star of Set.
However, deadly word games are being played here. Though most women involved in the OES doubtlessly assume they are worshiping Jesus as they kneel around a huge satanic pentagram, it is obvious that the "his" actually refers to Set's star, not Jesus' star.
In Albert Pike's commentary on this degree, we find the usual duplicity found elsewhere in the Lodge. He explains:
"To find in the BLAZING STAR of five points an allusion to Divine Providence is fanciful; and to make it commemorative of the Star that is said to have guided the Magi, is to give it a meaning comparatively modern. Originally, it represented Sirius, or the Dog-star, the forerunner of the inundation of the Nile…"
Pike readily casts aside the bland lie of the degree and confirms that the blazing star is neither Divine Providence, nor is it Jesus' "star in the east." It is an Egyptian idol, the symbol of Sirius!
There is another critical problem in the Star—a reason why no Christian woman would wish to be a part of this organization. Set (Lucifer) is the acknowledged god of Masonry. Thus, what does it mean for a Christian woman to be adopted into the Star? She is submitting herself to the spiritual authority of Lucifer.
She may not know it, but in bowing before the altar of the Star, the inverted pentagram of Baphomet, she has surrendered herself (however innocently) to the gods of Masonry. That WILL give Satan an entry point into her life, no matter how devout a Christian she may be." -
Honesty
"A truth presented by Satan , is just as true as a truth stated by God. Accept truth no matter where you find it. No matter what it contradicts"
Charles T. Russell
July 1879 Watch Tower magazine -
freyd
WT July 1, 1879
"WHAT IS TRUTH?"
"This question is one which every sincere Christian should ask and seek to answer. We should learn to love and value truth for its own sake; to respect and honor it by owning and acknowledging it wherever we find it and by whomsoever presented. A truth presented by Satan himself is just as true as a truth stated by God.
Perhaps no class of people are more apt to overlook this fact than the Christian. How often do they in controversy overlook and ignore truth presented by their opponents. This is particularly the case when arguing with an infidel. They feel at perfect liberty to dispute everything he says on religious subjects. This is not the correct principle. Many infidels are honest--as anxious to speak and believe the truth as are Christians--and if in converse with them we ignore truths which they may advance, we not only fail to convince them of our truths, but put an end to all hope of reaching them; for our failure to admit the evident truth which they advance begets in them contempt for the one who is not honest enough to admit one truth because he does not see how it can be reconciled to another. Accept truth wherever you find it, no matter what it contradicts, and rely for ability to afterwards harmonize it with others upon "The Spirit of truth, which shall guide you into all truth," as Jesus promised." ::R9 : page 3::
http://www.ctrussell.us/ -
oompa
Sorry guys, i have never screwed up a thread so bad.
First there were no highlights which were needed due to the lengthy source material. I have re-started the thread as above, and hope to get some input on it.....thanks......oompa
