Quetzalcoatl.
"Snakes will eat dirt in the new order."
by Comatose 89 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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smiddy
I`m banking on the Gov. body eating dirt in the old system.
smiddy
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Julia Orwell
They will. We all die. If the grave is what you mean...
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Julia Orwell
Hey did JW ever tell you that before the snake made Eve eat the fruit, snakes had legs, and then Jehovah cursed the snake by taking its legs away? Some sister told me that years ago. So in the 'new system' when everything's made the way it should have been, we're gonna get all these snakes with legs running around.
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mP
Julia
Apparently snakes flew before they got punished and lost their magic flying powers and was forced to slide on its belly. The text tells you this. The problem is the text doesnt always reveal who the charcters are accurately. Some of the angels in the early genesis are actually flying fire breathing snakes.
In a way she is right but she hasnt told you the full nonsense they actually belivedbecase once you know that it looks like total stupidity.
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mP
Julia
I wonder why that is, mP? It's very interesting. The Aborigines had the Rainbow Serpent too, just as another example. However, you don't find a lot of cultures who believe in magical turtles or frogs or lions etc. Some cultures do, but not anywhere near as many who do snakes.
mP:
Yes the aboriginies of au is another perfect example of snakes being extremely important in their system. Sure other cultures have other magical craatures but snakes are nearly always near the top.
Lions represent the sun due to the mane(!!) of the male lion and the yellow. The story of samson and the power of his hair is another example of solar worship. Samson means sun in hebrew. ask any arab what samson in the original hebrew or arabic means. Its the same reason the leo the lion is the sign of the peak of summer.
Ive read that the ancients were very impressed by the snakes shedding their skin which they thought was some sort of resurrection or rebirth. The ancients had lots of strange thoughts i guess this was one of them. The problem is we are very much removed from their ancient way of life we see the world in a totally diferent light than they did. Our worries about money didnt exist back then. they were worried about the seasons, rains, crops and the cold of winter. diseease was a real worry for them, an unknown, something we dont worry about any more int he same way. perhaps if we lived in their world we would better understand how they thought these things.
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Julia Orwell
Yes. We are so spoiled with knowledge these days.
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Jeffro
mP:
Apparently snakes flew before they got punished
Winged snakes is indeed a theme in various ancient mythologies. But Genesis doesn't seem to say anything about snakes flying. Can you explain? Which verses? Or which Hebrew words? Strongs numbers?
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adamah
mP said-
Thats simply not true. Snakes were special in ancient tradition, the Hebrew religion was no different from everybody else. Most religions are pretty
similar in the end
You missed my point: it seems you're trying to place too fine a point on your certainty about claiming to KNOW something that is actually impossible to know: what a large population of people actually believed in the past. That would apply EVEN IF you got into a time machine and travelled to Ancient Near East, sampled the opinions of EVERY INHABITANT of the 'Land of Israel' on a single day (say 500BC), EVEN IF you were able to sample their opinions of their beliefs with ABSOLUTE certainty and the results were free of error. Why? You're dealing with people's BELIEFS, which are plastic and ever-changing, by definition; the results would be different 50 or 100 years later. Just think of your own experience: if we had sampled your beliefs when you were a JW (however long ago that was), the results would be different than now, right? People's beliefs change (as opinion on gay marriage changes, or even gun control opinions changed overnight after Sandy Hook, etc).
By only being able to rely on written evidence that survives (assuming 100% accurate translation, an impossibility, BTW), we're automatically introducing the bias of examining the 'minority report' of the literate class, something that is associated with the elite living in urban centers (e.g. Jerusalem). The archaeological evidence instead reveals the practice of 'folk religion' thoughout ancient Isreal over a lengthy period of time which differed from the official record of how Judaism SHOULD be practiced.
Besides, there's evidence that some many of scribes and redactors of the Tanakh felt empowered to "correct" (change) as they made copies: it's really no different than the errors introduced by deliberate mistranslation (even leaving out the accidents, simply due to ignorance of past linguistic practices). Leolaia has written about the story of Job, which OT scholars agree contains some of the oldest passages in the Bible (based on linguistic analysis), but later redactors decided to alter the poetic core, adding a narrative "frame" (epilogue and prologue) as well as poetic passages. So 99.999% of readers have NO IDEA they're reading the product of a committee that likely spanned centuries, and shows classic "too many cooks spoil the broth" as a result.
You're claiming that Hebrew religion was "no different", when even THAT is a questionable claim (I suspect that Hebrews adopted or 'hijacked' ancient Egyptian and Babylonian pre-existing beliefs, and modified many to fit into their beliefs over a long period of time, the process of blending beliefs is largely unavoidable, called 'syncretism'. Why the motivation to place the Torah in written form? The "Persian Emperial Authorization Hypothesis" is hotly-debated in scholarly circles, and it MAY provide a compelling explanation for the motivations of the leaders of Hebrews held in captivity to assemble the written Torah into a historiographical work of legal code, in order to gain their autonomy under the Persian Empire who liberated them from Babylonain captivity).
So claiming a level of ABSOLUTE certainty for anything as slippery as beliefs of ancient people is probably a vestige of fantastic ABSOLUTIST thinking, since knowing ANYTHING to that level of certainty is impossible; it would require performing a series of miracles that perhaps approaches the miracles of the Biblical Flood account to have occurred as recorded.
Instead, science only deals in a language of statistical analysis/probability, where certainty (if the study allows that it even CAN be quantified) is expressed in 'confidence intervals'. Unfortunately, lay-people often prefer a claim of certainty which is based on a lie over an honest assessment of doubt; that's part of the dynamic that drives religions, scammers, etc. and leads to the aphorism, "if it seems too good to be true, it likely IS".
All that stated, thanks for the seraphim info: knowing human nature, it's easy to imagine how a 'flaming sword' could be associated (morph) from or into the idea of fanged serpentine angels. Just realize that the medieval stuff (eg Kaballah mysticism) was likely written at least 2,000 yrs AFTER the original account of A&E was widely heard in a public reading (as recorded in the Bible as having occurred Hebrews were released from Babylonian captivity, circa 500 BC, that is, if the Bible is to be believed on that claim)
Adamah
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adamah
Jeffro asked:
Winged snakes is indeed a theme in various ancient mythologies. But Genesis doesn't seem to say anything about snakes flying. Can you explain? Which verses? Or which Hebrew words? Strongs numbers?
I'm not mP, but from reading his information he's likely referring to the cherubim being cursed to crawl on it's belly, in essence "losing it's wings": the account didn't actually state that it the serpent "lost it's legs", so that's more examples Christian 'eisegesis', engaging in speculative activity by ASSUMING that the serpent had legs before by reading details in the account that aren't explicitly stated.
Both the WTBTS (and Mormons, I think?) have produced artwork that shows a legged serpent (I Googled, but couldn't find an example).
BTW, I remembered Jesus' advice to his disciples in Matthew 10:16 to be "wise like serpents, and harmless as doves", and looked it up. The Greek word often translated as 'wise' was 'phronimoi' (Strongs: 5429), which also was translated as 'intelligent, prudent, sensible.'
So in Jesus' time, the serpent clearly still enjoyed a reputation for being wise, cautious, prudent (defined as "looking out for one's self-interests").
No WONDER the 'arum' (the Hebrew word which apparently was quite analogous to the Greek 'phtonimoi', ALSO used in a similiar manner to describe serpents) was hanging out at Tree that granted wisdom: Eve likely assumed it was eating there. Foolish Eve trusted the snakie's favorable Yelp! review, since it was associated with wisdom and near the tree that God said would wisdom to anyone who ate it (more incriminating evidence of Divine Intrapment: why LABEL it with a tempting name, and why make it good to eat, and pretty to look at? Heck, that's a bit like sticking razor blades into apples on Halloween, and handing them out to kids)!
As I said before, the serpent was ALSO associated with knowing the secrets of Eternal life (via it's reputation for shedding it's skin, seen as immortality via regeneration), and hence likely possessed insight into the Tree of Life.
So again: who exactly is to blame for creating foolish humans, and then acting offended and shocked when they act in accord with the way they were made (as fools) and make foolish choices? Is that the fault of Jehovah, or the humans?
That's why I say the story only gives creedence to YHWH as the cruel trickster God, which is what led the Early-Christian Gnostics to reasonably believe that YHWH was only a demi-God, and not the "real" God. They saw the serpent as analogous to Prometheus, the demi-God who was the friend of mankind, stealing fire (an ancient symbol of knowledge) from Zeus for the benefit of humanity (Zeus didn't want mankind to possess knowledge, just as YHWH didn't want man to have wisdom).
I find it hard to believe these stories are NOT related, likely originating from a common mythological source: there's just too much similarities in their storylines to believe they both sprung up independently. Ancient people (circa 3,000 BC) likely didn't believe in an all-loving, all-knowing God: they were comfortable with the idea of Gods who could gang up and kill each other, and apparently didn't see them coming!
Julia said-
No wonder they don't want you reading Hebrew.
Nor Greek, or conducting independent research, or using parallel Bible translations on the Internet (biblehub.com), etc.
Here's another little interesting tid-bit I ran across last night:
One of the OTHER occurrences of the Greek word 'phronimoi' (out of a total of 14 in the NT) is in Jesus' parable of 'the Faithful and WISE servant' found in Matthew 24:5 (and in Luke). How interesting that Jesus would use the same adjective for serpents as he'd use for the faithful and WISE slave?
I dare say the JWs don't want to use 'prudence' there, since that might be too much of a "tell" for the GB's power and control-grabbing scheme.
Adamah