by Vidqun 44 Replies latest watchtower bible
Let's start with prophecy. No human can predict the future. This is something only God can do. The Bible contains many prophecies. Quite a few of these have come true. And those that are still outstanding, I believe they will come true.
Please give one specific example of a prophecy that came true.
Conversely, [true] knowledge as absolute truth from God is indeed available in this day and age. I find these truths in the Bible. The Bible as a book has greatly influenced Western Civilization (see quote below). If you study the origins of Roman Law, where our modern system of Law comes from, the Bible has made its mark there. Then there is lots of principles in the Bible worth emulating, e.g., Love your neighbour as yourself, etc. I would concede that the Bible text has suffered under a multitude of editors, but enough has remained for us to use.
Yikes. What absolute truth is available? Where do you find these truths in the Bible? The Bible HAS greatly influenced Western Civilization, it's given us the Holy Wars, Crusades, genocides, killing of first born infants, deportation of all that don't believe in the Bible (practiced in Spain under Queen Isabella), the Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem Witch Trials, and many others. Roman Law has hardly, if at all influenced our modern system of Law. John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the GREEKS, greatly influenced the Governments of today, as well as Karl Marx (although his ideas were greatly misinterpreted) in the socialist countries. Roman Law was practiced on the Carthaginians though. This is a great example of Roman Law. When they were finished destroying Carthage, they gathered all females (infants, teens, and adults alike), made sure they raped them, then burned the entire city down, killing more than 90% of the citizens, and after that they salted the Earth, a practice by the Romans where they literally poured salt covering every square foot of land in and around the city so that no city could ever prosper on that ground again. That is Roman Law, as well as crucifixions for minor shoplifting and for claiming you are the son of God. Is that the Roman Law you were talking about? Do I go around worshipping Aesop's Fables? Because those stories have much better morals than the actual Bible. For instance Leviticus 20:13, if a man lays with another man as he would with a woman they both should be put to death. Great morals.
Everything is nonsense
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
It's that simple. Absolute truth is never possible. For absolute truth to be possible, EVERYONE in the world must accept it. It can't be YOUR absolute truth, it must be everyone's. Some might say gravity is an absolute truth. Many people in the world don't even know gravity exists, and gravity is invisible, so the truth of gravity can never be known.
You might want to argue about absolute truth and relativism, and that's a perfectly normal philosophical subject to discuss, but don't bring God into it. God will never be known as absolute truth, because truth has yet to be offered concerning God.
Relativism in the dictionary is much different than relativism discussed by the likes of Kant, Hume, Hobbes, and Wittgenstein.
Real relativism is the understanding that morality, ethics, and other subjective ideals are culture, and geographically based, thus our judging of something like female circumcision, an act that most find strange and wrong, is invalid and incorrect, because if we had grown up in the areas where they practice it, we would most likely support it as well.
This you cannot dispute, relativism is the only absolute truth, that everything is relevant.
However this can be applied to God, and belief in God. For instance, the only reason you believe in the Bible is because you were born in America, or Western/parts of Eastern Europe, (and you were indoctrinated as a child). However if you were born in the Middle East, you would be kneeling towards Mecca in about 2 hours.
Conversely, [true] knowledge as absolute truth from God is indeed available in this day and age. I find these truths in the Bible. The Bible as a book has greatly influenced Western Civilization (see quote below). If you study the origins of Roman Law, where our modern system of Law comes from, the Bible has made its mark there. Then there is lots of principles in the Bible worth emulating, e.g., Love your neighbour as yourself, etc. I would concede that the Bible text has suffered under a multitude of editors, but enough has remained for us to use.
I pasted that quote again because I couldn't even believe it, ahahaha
Well, at least you pasted it and didn't expend any effort trying to answer this drivel.
Good lord, these people keep re-hashing the same crap arguments, using the same sloppy, if not perhaps ignorant, language, when it has all been discussed on here until the apologists run off not answering a question that shows them to be in error.
They sometimes then rejoin the thread , ignoring the fact that they have been exposed as a fraud, or rejoin the board under a new name.
I had hopes that one day a decent honest Apologist for the JW's would join here, one who knew what words like "believe and theory (scientific)" mean, and we could have a lively and interesting discussion, but I see no sign of that on this thread, Ho Hum.
There may be such a thing as absolute knowledge...but it isn't available to humans.
The atheist thinkers I have read (Dawkins, Hitchens) do not claim absolute knowledge. What they say is that man has only incomplete knowledge of things, that scientists understand that so, and, therefore, their knowledge is taken to be true on the basis of available evidence. A true scientist wants truth, and, therefore, he or she will be happy to be corrected if there is evidence for that.
Hitchens in particular claims that religion belongs to those stages of human life when we didn't know better. I believe he has a point: the Aztecs believed that a god, Tláloc, made rain by breaking clay pots with a stick. The sound of thunder was the sound of those clay pots breaking. We know better, don't we? Their mind did not conceive of pots made of anything other than clay because that was what they knew. Their mind did not conceive of rain being the result of a natural process. So they believed in appeasing the Gods so they would bring rain.
Personally, I would agree with "relativism" as being the idea that we may not know enough and therefore we must keep an open mind and accept what evidence supports. I don't agree with "relativism" understood as ethics being entirely dependent on what people think is ethical. I think that, for example, if someone found a child walking by, and decided to kill the child, that would be unethical no matter what the laws or the customs of the land said about it.
"Revealed wisdom" first has to prove that there was a revealer, on a basis other than "we have the Revelations to prove it".
Please give one specific example of a prophecy that came true.
The "70 weeks" prophecy requires the messiah to appear 483 years (69 weeks) after the word goes forth to rebuild Jerusalem. Per the VAT4956, the original date for year 37 of Neb2 was 511 BCE. That means year 23, the year of the last deportation occurs in 525 BCE. 70 years later would be the 1st of Cyrus which falls in 455 BCE. This is when Jerusalem began to be rebuilt in the Fall around the time of the Festival of Booths. The messiah would be expected to arrive 483 years later, also in the Fall. Jesus was baptized in 19 CE, fulfilling that prophecy.
OR
Also using the VAT4956 to confirm year 37 of Neb2 in 511 BCE, the fall of Jerusalem occurs in year 19, 529 BCE. The "7 times" prophecy points to the second coming 2520 years later, thus in 1992. The second coming, indeed, occurred that year on December 25. I was an eyewitness to that event along with others of the elect, so it came true!
Also dated in the Bible was the HOLOCAUST, called the "great tribulation" scheduled between 1940-1947 which occurred.
The 70th jubilee which marks the restoration of the Jews to their homeland and the end of the gentile times must occur in 1947, which it did, another Bible prophecy fulfilled. The 1947 link is to calculate jubilee periods of 490 years from 36 CE which ends a jubilee period.
4 x 490 = 1960
1960 + 36 = 1996
So 1996 ends a 70 weeks period with the jubilee beginning 49 years earlier in 1947. So 1947 should mark the 70th jubilee and the return of the Jews to their homeland. The Partition Agreement by the UN restored the Jews to their homeland and ended the "gentile times" on November 30, 1947. This also ends the "1290 days" which means the messiah would return to fulfill the "1335 days" 45 years later and thus sometime between November 30, 1992 and November 30, 1993. The second coming occurred on December 25, 1992. FULFILLED
Obviously, the success of Bible prophecy fulfillment requires you to have the correct interpretation AND the correct dates. When you have both then many Bible prophecies are fulfilled.
It's wonderful!
LS
Of course.
Fulfilled, not made up, Lars.
