UFO's may be a way of understanding Jesus.....(what did he just say???)

by Terry 24 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Terry

  Sometimes people with ordinary understandings and expectations encounter things outside their experience.

  They deal with it and move on. They tell people and answer questions.

  Eventually, somebody explains it and the incident (and the story) goes underground.

  ......only to re-emerge.

  If it is an unusual incident or report eventually there will be others who come along. These are people who have heard the story in some form that has

  elements which exaggerate unusual, inexplicable or conspiratorial parts. The fun begins.

  I had time to kill this morning and I sat down in a Barnes & Noble thumbing through one of the two Skeptic magazines. Skeptical Inquirer, I think.

  There is an article about UFO stories and their history of reporting, mythologizing, rediscovery and conflations.

  Immediately I saw the same application applying to other strange stories as well.

  What UFO stories have in common with, say, the Jesus story (gospel) narratives in not to be overlooked.

  Even if you don't care to accept my premise you might find the hypothesis of interest.

  1.Ordinary people discover, see, encounter or imagine a STRANGE or UNUSUAL happening.

  2.They report what they think they saw and are questioned by skeptical people.

  3.Further elements may be added tying up lose ends. Others nearby may be questioned.

  4.Somebody offers some kind of "explanation" which accounts for the elements and the story dies.

  What comes next?

  Because human curiousity and imagination is what it is these sorts of stories survive with retellings. The more outrageous the claims of the story the more attention

  it gets as it is passed along.

  At some point a self-appointed INVESTIGATOR will take it upon themselves to re-interview whoever was connected to the original story.

  At this point, the amateur Investigator will start weaving elements of conspiracy and supernatural or exotic meta-explanations.

  The LEGEND is now born!

  I'll stop at this point to refer to particulars.

  The modern UFO legends began after a newspaper report of a crash landing in Roswell New Mexico that we are all familiar with.

  A local farmer found bits of stick, plastic, aluminum foil, etc. around the "crash" site and expressed puzzlement. The newspapers blew the story up

  into a crashed flying saucer. Additionally, the element of "bodies" of strange aliens was added.

  BEFORE GOING FURTHER, please read this article:

  http://www.csicop.org/si/show/what_really_happened_at_roswell

  Christianity began with a similar pattern and investigation. Papias of heirapolis took it upon himself to interview all those still alive who had related Jesus' story.

  The result of his compiled Q&A sessions filled 5 books all of which were later destroyed by the Church! Early Church fathers quote him here and there, but, Eusebius denounced him because of his reporting that the apostles taught a Millennium on Earth and not heaven. Traditions related by Papias

  Kennedy assassination legends likewise were woven into myths (since debunked by actual experts) because naive, inexperienced self-appointed lay-experts got involved. Each time the story was told there were more mysterious persons and incidents involved until darned near the entire government, CIA, FBI, Mafia, LBJ, and KGB had a hand in it!

  The more outlandish, extraordinary and unusual the retelling---the more are people drawn in to "investigate" for themselves.

  Naturally, not one person in a 1000 goes beyond swallowing whole whatever appeals to them most!

  So many liars, exaggerators, true believers and pseudo-skeptics all involved feed each other's frenzied imagination!

  Look at the Book of Mormon and the story told by Joseph Smith. It went from outrageous and impossible to being a tenet of faith for millions of sober, clear-thinking people of faith! All the interim steps are too vast and complicated for any of them to take the time to study and absorb.

  DNA tests of Native Americans has debunked the basic premise of the Book of Mormon already as has the proven false deciphering of Egyption heiroglyphs by genuine scholars. None of this matters to a True Believing Mormon!!

  I simply wanted to share with you just how much the Jesus story has in common with UFO myths, Bigfoot sightings, Loch Ness Monster legends and the Book of Mormon.

  The more time you devote to the parallels of transmission of "information" (i.e. the corruption of any actual facts in favor of conflated retellings) the better you can understand how easily things get out of hand!

  Extraordinary claims requie extraordinary proof.

  Evidence, however, is always simply "destroyed", "confiscated", "divulged under mysterious circumstances" or simply supernaturally bestowed!
• 

  Finkelstein

  The more time you devote to the parallels of transmission of "information" (i.e. the corruption of any actual facts in favor of conflated retellings) the better you can understand how easily things get out of hand!

  So true Terry and I might add how information can be invariably spread through generation to another generation, all in a frame work of real

  and honest " Truth " .

  Another example of how your own inherent emotions can over power are own inherent sense of logical reasoning within are inner psychology .
• 

  cheerios

  think of how information spreads through overlapping generations!!!
• 

  Leolaia

  I made a similar point in 2008:

  In his exhaustive study of Hellenistic bioi, Klaus Berger has shown that ancient biography (a genre he placed the gospels within) contained a good portion of creative "fiction" (Aufsteig und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, 1984); Richard Burridge also has written at length about the cultural context and the way biographers used what would today be considered "fiction" to give true portraits of their subjects (What Are the Gospels?, 2004). The "fictional" creativity in bioi was intermediate between that of historiography and that of the encomium or novel. What set the gospels apart from other bioi however is their intensive intertextual use of literature (e.g. the OT) that was only secondarily interpreted to describe the life of the biographical subject -- in ch. 11-16 of Mark alone there are more than 57 quotations and 160 allusions to scripture. This suggests that, quite unlike standard biographies, the gospels used non-biographical sources as primary source material about their subject. The gospel writers would have certainly regarded scripture as a true witness to Jesus, perhaps even superior to human witnesses (cf. John 5:31-39, 5:45-27, 12:41, 1 John 5:9). If that is the case, I see no reason why the authors should have viewed themselves as writing "fiction" or fabricating stories if they viewed the prophetic word as a witness to Jesus' life which may be consulted alongside other sources -- whether to augment, clarify, or even correct what the human witnesses say -- and if they regarded their reading of scripture as guided by the same Holy Spirit involved in its writing. It is worth remembering that midrash itself was not construed as a fictional activity but rather as a process to discern the true meaning of scripture; haggadaic readings were thought to lie beneath the surface of the text. Since fidelity to scripture was a measure of the truth of a matter, stories that brought out the scriptural truth of Jesus would not necessarily have been dismissed like pagan fables and myths (which were rejected precisely because they were contrary to scripture) if they were upbuilding and revealed aspects of his character and teaching that were apostolic, "orthodox", or considered true.
  
  Then there is the matter of the memory of eyewitnesses. Bauckham has convincingly illustrated the fundamental flaw of form criticism in omitting actual witnesses and presuming only anonymous tradents, but there is a big difference between (presumed) witness testimony and historical accuracy. It hardly needs to be said that memory is a reconstruction and not a record -- it tends to blur recollections, fill in gaps with pre-existing schemas and memories of other people, it is biased by social environment, and it changes over time and with retelling. Psychologists recognize that witnesses extract from their perceptions an interpretation that is meaningful to their own beliefs and needs and this transformation from raw perception to interpretation is automatic and regardless of conscious effort (so people trust their memories regardless of whether they are accurate). It has been observed from study that witness narratives transform each time they are retold, recollections of unrelated events may be conflated together, and memories commonly incorporate information learned after the event. A good article about this is "Illusions of Memory" by Elizabeth Loftus (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1998), which points particularly to group settings where people come together to share their memories about a common experience as an environment when imaginative transformations of memory unintentionally occur; Loftus points out that this should not be surprising since "perceiving a stimulus and imagining a stimulus appear to involve similar brain mechanisms. That imagination activities can alter autobiography reveals something important about the flimsy curtain that separates imagination from memory" (p. 68). In experimental studies, people were easily induced to remember events that never occurred, and false memory is a well-known phenomenon occurring in social contexts where visualization and focusing of memory are prominent (such as therapy sessions, witness interviewing, support group meetings, etc.), and especially if the memory has important social value and serves to advance a common narrative. Your mention of UFOs reminds me of the recent studies on the development of the Roswell UFO crash legend (such as B. Saler, C. A. Ziegler, and C. B. Moore's UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth, 1997), in which the content of witness testimony changed dramatically over the decades in response to the overarching narrative taking shape in popular culture. I can think of similar examples of witnesses to the JFK assassination or to the events of 9/11 changing their stories to better fit with certain popular narratives that arose after the event. On how false memories could historicize things that never occurred, I recommend Peter Lamont's The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History (2005). One analytic study of memory along these lines is Believed-in Imaginings: The Narrative Construction of Reality (APA, 1998). I am not saying necessarily that these factors definitely played a role in the growth of oral tradition about Jesus, but I believe that there is a very strong possiblity of this -- enough of one that dismisses the idle objection that there would have had to have been a "conspiracy" if witnesses told stories that did not accurately reflect history. What we have in the gospels is the endpoint (or rather, an endpoint) of a long process of people telling and retelling their stories in group settings in a context of a highly focused agenda and evangelical purpose, where one person's memory could influence another's, where some people's memories were more authoritative and important than those of others, where memories that better supported the common theme could be valued more than others out of harmony with it, and especially where the scriptures had such an crucial role in the telling of the story of Jesus. Acts portrays Peter even before Pentacost interpreting recent events in light of the scriptures. How can you be so sure that it had no influence over the telling of stories? It is reasonable to suspect that witnesses were subject to its influence as much -- if not more -- than the influence of other witnesses. In a manner rather similar to "recovered" memories today, a witness could have had his or his memories tripped by reading a passage in the Psalms and recall, "Oh yes, I remember that now," even if that particular detail was not part of their original recollection of the event. In other words, the process of exegetical interpretation probably did not start with the gospel writers. Although they gave the exegetical traditions their final form by directly importing the language and thought from OT texts, they probably in many cases were induced to do so because their own witnesses and tradents preceded them in applying these scriptures to their own memories and traditions. Then there was the problem of witnesses who were really not witnesses at all, but who had a good story to tell. If their story supported the overall community narrative and theology about Jesus, and had didactic value that advanced the gospel, I doubt that such stories would have been necessarily flagged as suspect. Again, I do not wish to be misread as suggesting that the whole shebang necessarily was invented, as that is just as unreasonable as insisting that the gospels must be 100% accurate. I am arguing that there is plenty room for non-historical content -- especially in areas where there was little opportunity for witness testimony, where it would have been hard to identify exaggerations or false memories of witnesses if they had the "ring of truth", and where the author's creativity may have filled in gaps or harmonizing the different traditions of different witnesses. It also should not be forgotten that there was an ideological aim in the gospels to present Jesus as the singular Son of God who stands apart from other miracle workers, so writers likely had a preference for stories of a more remarkable character that emphasized this. It is also worth comparing this situation with contemporary reporting of the news of the bizarre and unusual. There is a lot that is reported in the world, especially by the credulous writers, that relate incredible miracles and wonders every bit as remarkable and wonderful as what is described in the NT. There very well may be genuine unusual, paranormal, unexplained things in the world. But very often these sensational reports are not accurate and have normal, non-paranormal explanations when the facts are closely examined. So how people interpret what they experience in the first place may differ considerably from what actually is going on.

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/bible/167595/1/Are-the-gospels-just-midrash
• 

  Finkelstein

  And aren't the embellished stories told by the ancient Hebrews concerning their chosen deity and now being retold by religious organizations like the

  JWS/WTS. further spurred upon commercial aspirations, a deliberate invasive attack upon are very vulnerable and sensitive human imagination ?
• 

  Terry

  The stories we shape our lives by are more real to us than any facts, evidence or expert testimonies.

  The best example currently in vogue is the 9/11 Truther movement which has otherwise reasonably intelligent, fully functioning people accepting as

  highly credible the idea that WE had demolition charges ready to take down our own buildings and that it co-incided with Terrorist efforts to fly planes into them.

  AS THOUGH THE MERE ACT OF FLYING JETS FILLED WITH PASSENGERS into those buildings would not create enough ill-will in and of itself!!

  Imagine this conversation after the planes struck. "Well, at least the buildings didn't fall down."

  "Yeah, now that WOULD be awful."
• 

  Leolaia

  Terry, here is one example of a witness changing his story as he became a truther witness:

  http://sites.google.com/site/911stories/idonotsayitwasabomb.mystoryhasn%27tchanged

  http://sites.google.com/site/911stories/rodriguez%27stimelinewayoff%3F (part 2)
• 

  Finkelstein

  Human ignorance infused with human emotion has been a great detrimental cause for much damage toward humanity over are long strenuous history.

  What has proved better for humanity though is just how we express and obtain are stories, through stringent investigation upon factual evidence

  separating carefully apart what is truly fact and what is truly just fiction.
• 

  Finkelstein

  The WTS. is standing proof that you can take a story and further embellish it to make more appealing and attractive toward the public.

  The stories by the WTS. are not only embellished for today's modern era, they've also been embellished from the past and toward the future as well.

  Now are the stories identified by the WTS. fact or fiction ?

  Where do they belong if you were to place them in a public library ?
• 

  sizemik

  Now are the stories identified by the WTS. fact or fiction ?

  Where do they belong if you were to place them in a public library ?

  In the children's section . . . my acceptance of it as truth, was childlike to an extreme.