Whatever Happened to the Remnant?

by snugglebunny 38 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Half banana

  Paradise beauty, I recognise we have a democratic right to differ. You say you think that being anointed with holy spirit is the true Christian hope. You have every right to have a stab at belief but it can hardly be called knowledge can it?

  Your opinions however are based on the Christian scriptures and the conventional spin taught from them... mine, on this subject, come from a literary reality. May I suggest that you quote the text of the Bible as if it is from a divine source whereas the NT is the work of cult leaders who wanted to use the old pre-Jesus saviour figures as the basis for their new vision of religious control. Partly it is due to the inclusions of the various older tales such as the different gospel versions of the nativity which make for the contradictions in the NT. And in part it was due to the need to harmonise irreconcilable dogma such as found in the different cults, including Judaism in the Catholic push to organise Christianity under the one united umbrella of the Roman Church. The Bible, for all its time honoured holiness is most certainly not from God. To believe that it is, leaves one vulnerable to perpetual misunderstanding.

  If you quote the Bible and God and Jesus you must first be sure from a rational knowledge that these things are what you believe them to be. It is however very easy to believe things because we like them...but that doesn’t make them true.

  As an example of what I am saying, might you suggest why it was that the saviour god-man Osiris had a mother called Isis Meri, was born of a virgin, had twelve disciples, healed the sick and raised from the dead his friend Lazarus. (The names and tales changed significantly over the course of Egyptian history) All this two thousand years before Jesus was attributed with the same magical properties? Can you imagine why this was?
• 

  Ding

  Someone can correct this if I'm wrong, but my recollection of WT history is that the Bible Students expected to grow to 144,000 one day and all go to heaven when they died.

  When the numbers began to grow and exceed 144,000 they had a problem.

  That's when "light flashed up" to Rutherford that there was an earthly class and that the heavenly class closed in 1935 (no Bible numbers to prove that).

  When Armageddon failed to arrive as predicted (several times), in order for the GB to be among the "anointed," the organization dropped the 1935 date.

  JWs aren't troubled by the changes.

  They just ignore all that "old light" and rejoice at the new, convinced as always that the new faithful and discreet slave class (yes, the light changed on that too) speaks for Jehovah.
• 

  paradisebeauty

  I'd say this myth you speak of was created after Jesus. Are there any documents to confirm this myth dates befor Jesus?
• 

  paradisebeauty

  I read bout Osiris on wikipaedia. It says nothing you speak of.

  I'd say some people, long after Jesus existed added details about Jesus to the myth of Osiris, and created a new myth. That's the deal with legends, can change them as you want, add what you want. Just keep a name or two and it looks old.

  You'd better check your sources.
• 

  paradisebeauty

  Ding,

  you are right, they created a second class of christians during Rutherford, when the members were over 144.000.

  I wish they would have ditched the number.

  I did not knew they ditched 1935 to allow gb members who were younger to be anointed, but I think you are right!

  Such hypocrites! They do not care about the Bible
• 

  Half banana

  Paradisebeauty, apologies, it was late when I wrote, I should have said the character Horus has a more than remarkable parallel with Jesus in the Osiris myth.

  Do note the barrage of Christian rejection of the parallels between Horus and Jesus. The argument of the modern Christians in the Wikipedia entry on comparative myth is very faulty and they preface that it is it has a questionable neutrality. The first Christian objection is that the agreement is only partially true, therefore they dismiss any link of the past myth with the Bible, secondly they claim it implausible because Christian monotheism in the first century rejected paganism. These two arguments ignore the nature of the transmission of fundamental myth and make the false assumption that the Bible cannot be in error. Christian doctrines were almost all borrowed from paganism especially from Mithraism, itself a fusion religion drawn from many older beliefs. Nobody promotes a new doctrine unless it had already some foothold in the human religious imagination (although Ron Hubbard bucked the trend).

  Without a shadow of doubt the first century Jesus religion came from pagan folk belief. As I posted elswhere, Saint Augustine in the early fifth century said,

  “The same thing which is now called the Christian religion existed amongst the ancients”.

  And how about this from Pope Leo 10th:

  It was Pope Leo X who made the most infamous and damaging statement about Christianity in the history of the Church. His declaration revealed to the world papal knowledge of the Vatican's false presentation of Jesus Christ and unashamedly exposed the puerile nature of the Christian religion. At a lavish Good Friday banquet in the Vatican in 1514, and in the company of "seven intimates" (Annales Ecclesiastici, Caesar Baronius, Folio Antwerp, 1597, tome 14), Leo made an amazing announcement that the Church has since tried hard to invalidate.

  Raising a chalice of wine into the air, Pope Leo toasted:
  "How well we know what a profitable superstition this fable of Christ has been for us and our predecessors."

  And that is from the horse's mouth!

  The great skill of the early Church was in suppressing the source information.
• 

  paradisebeauty

  @Half banana

  I just read about Horus on wiki, it says absolutely nothing about any kind similarities between horus and Jesus.

  And my faith is not build on what any pope or so called "saint" said against Jesus.
• 

  Finkelstein

  The GB doctrines they create as well any of the past Presidents of the WTS. do so to serve the needs of the Publishing house which they sit as head editorial writers. Sure they use the bible and the basic belief in the bible to support their doctrines but in reality they are done so to uphold the proliferation of the literature the WTS. publishes.

  Its not rocket science is it now.
  
• 

  Half banana

  @ Paradisebeauty. As I said the clever bit of Christianity was in obscuring the pagan sources of the ideas. Wikipedia is not a scholarly source but neither would you expect to find the Jesus/ Horus parallels under the Horus entry, it is another discussion and as I also warn that the vehemence with which Christian believers regard the subject of the parallels make up the vast majority of the comments. It is actually hard to find the core subject matter for analysis. It does exist in scholarly books such as "Who is this king of glory" by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Academy press 1944.

  I’m not attacking you or your faith but since the JW religion is based on the Bible, we do not want to be duped a second time. We need to be sure of what is truth and what is story. JW org shares the same errors as the other churches do and that is that the very foundations of Christianity are drawn fairly and squarely from the earlier Christ cults whatever Popes or Saints say. The Jesus story is just the re-labelling of older cult myth and mystery religions to appeal to the beliefs of cosmopolitan Jews, Romans and Greeks back in the first four centuries of the calendar.