Thank you so much for this.
My mother had a copy of the Two Babylons and I remember the old Babylon has Fallen book. I'm glad Hisslop has been discredited.
How Alexander Hislop's crackpot pseudo-history influenced JW's
by Terry 22 Replies latest jw experiences
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jwfacts
great work
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VM44
Hislop's "reasoning" is perfectly acceptable to The Watchtower. Anything they can use is good!
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Gill
Terry - Great Thread!
Hislop hated Catholics so much that it seemed to hurt!
What I found funny was that so much that all religions do, including baptism, bread and wine passing had their roots and Babylon and so as much as they all claimed to be different and better, they were all much of a muchness!
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cathyk
Ralph Woodrow, the author of the article you linked to, is an honest man. He did not hesitate to say that he was mistaken. Even better, he has made good faith efforts to combat the errors in Hislop's work and his own.
He has taken heat for this. Some of his former readers accuse him of being forced to retract his earlier views, or worse, selling out. To face up to that sort of abuse takes character.
Cathy
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BurnTheShips
Wowsers.
Good one, Terry.
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Terry
Hislop was compulsively obsessive in his finding "clues" everywhere which supported his thesis that the Catholic Church was infested with pagan encroachments. Yet, Jehovah's Witnesses made his excess seem like forebearance by comparison.
Jehovah's Witnesses find the stench of Satan, paganism, demonism and evil influence in almost every human activity under the general heading of WORLDLINESS.
By painting the world black and discrediting those who oppose them they've painted themselves into a tight little corner kingdom in a matchstick castle above the clouds.
Crack open a Governing Body member and you'll find a tapeworm of conspiracy theory chomping away at sanity.
Proof isn't proof at the Watchtower. It is a reconstruction like Frankenstein's monster kept alive by flashes of "new light" made up as needed to revitalize their quivering monstrosity.
At first glimpse it looks like science. But, when the smoke clears it is madness and obsession riven with fierce contrarian nincompoopery.
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VM44
I do not believe that The Watchtower really cares if its doctrines and beliefs are correct.
The only important thing to them is to keep the Organization going!
The unique beliefs that the Jehovah's Witnesses hold serve to define them and keep them seperate from other religions, that is the main purpose of their doctrines, not that it really is 'Truth' according to the meanint of the word!
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VM44
That is why it is impossible to have correspondence with The Watchtower or a conversation with the elders concerning the accuracy of what The Watchtower teaches.
The only concern both of them have is if one is going to believe and follow what they teach.
If you do not hold to the WT teachings, then you are no longer a member of the "club" and so must leave and have no further association with the other "club" members, least they be tainted with doubt about what they must believe in order to be acceptable.
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steve2
At this time, (post Civil War) a pseudo-historian with extreme hatred for Catholicism named Alexander Hislop published a pamphlet (later enlarged into a book THE TWO BABYLONS) and promoted it by Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
This book would play a large and influential role in establishing a methodology for Jehovah's Witnesses in doing their own crackpot pseudo-historical analyses.
Terry, this is fantastic. My grandparents were converted to Russell's teachings in the 1920s and my grandfather proudly displayed a well-thumbed copy of Hislops "The Two Babylons" in their well-stocked book shelves (with a few exceptions such as Hislop's book, containing only Watchtower publications). He used Hislop's book as proof that the Society's publications were of a high standard and based on "sound" historical research by non-Witnesses. I think it was in the late 1970s that I first realised that Hislop's was a biased and far-from-objective "work".