I ask a question. Relevance is something you look for not me.
I do. I expect someone asking a question to have some kind of idea why it matters. I will not make that mistake with you again.
Is Prophecy important?
by EA916 74 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Viviane
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Hold Me-Thrill Me
Wise. -
cofty
How did this man (Jesus) born of a poor family "pull this off". Birth place, silver coins...Impossible.
He didn't. The gospel writers indulged in an allegorical style of writing that did violence to OT scripture in order to support their claims about Jesus.
Mark, the earliest gospel, doesn't even mention the virgin birth or the resurrection. Paul, who predates all the gospels knows absolutely nothing about the human Jesus.
The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke are impossibly contradictory.
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Ruby456
viv
Your PoV is wrong, then.
my pleasure. I'm not a fan of inerrancy and can only claim plausibility for my pov
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Viviane
my pleasure. I'm not a fan of inerrancy and can only claim plausibility for my pov
Your claim is incorrect and utterly implausible.
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kaik
Welcome to the board. When I was still associated with JW, I had debated the prophesies with one unbeliever. His question was very simple at that time which really shocked me, "Do you know what all biblical prophesies have common?" "None of them ever came true". Once I have analyzed various prophesies, they seems much of BS than proof of divine intervention.
Any Jew will tell you that Jesus did not fulfill role of Messiah, as he did not restore kingdom of Jews nor brought to peace to the world. Jerusalem was destroyed in 70AD, but Jews were not banned from Jerusalem until much later around 115-130AD.
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Ruby456
EA16, viv - I was reminded once again why prophecies are important when I attended a recent co's public talk. He was describing the time of the end and he asked something enlightening when he asked the question 'what marks out the time period we are living in when there have always been nations rising against nations, earthquakes etc etc?
My reply in to myself was 'obviously it is because we are living during this time period.'
I am taking cofty's excellent point that the prophecies are so vague they could fit any time period but add that when we make it fit our time period we make them specific. Put this together with what Alain Badiou describes as the void (characterised by existential anxiety regarding what the presence of being subtracts from view) in his book Being and Event that appears to haunt humans in Western Society we have a recipe for developing a need to alleviate anxiety by establishing something verifiably substantiating about our time period that we can call truth not just for our time but for all time.
S all this went through my mind while the CO continued his talk. I came back to the talk when instead of speaking of the time of the end he said the ZONE of the end. This clinched my ideas above because I had also just finished reading Scott Atran's book In God's we Trust wherein Atran describes religions as talking to the spectre of existential anxiety to demonstrate how one's own particular religion can alleviate it and both, the CO and Atran, utilize geography terms to convey their ideas.
Viv you and I are always going to find ourselves opposing each other for the simple fact that I am fairly convinced that the way religion tackles existential anxiety will always grip the imagination.
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Viviane
S all this went through my mind while the CO continued his talk. I came back to the talk when instead of speaking of the time of the end he said the ZONE of the end. This clinched my ideas above because I had also just finished reading Scott Atran's book In God's we Trust wherein Atran describes religions as talking to the spectre of existential anxiety to demonstrate how one's own particular religion can alleviate it and both, the CO and Atran, utilize geography terms to convey their ideas.
So far you've said nothing that would in any way indicate this time is different than any other. The word zone not only doesn't clinch anything, it doesn't do anything.
Viv you and I are always going to find ourselves opposing each other for the simple fact that I am fairly convinced that the way religion tackles existential anxiety will always grip the imagination.
No, it's because you are aren't providing evidence for anything you say.
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Ruby456
zone of the end would make the discussion of the end times less focused on temporality and make it more spatiotemporal. Zone as I said has a more geographical ring to it - making end times more to do with space and time than in the past. Indeed, if this phrase wasn't just a one off from a young and fresh CO but a new direction from the GB, it would certainly mean that the society is working on a new take of the end times.
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cofty
less focused on temporality and make it more spatiotemporal
In English?