wouldn't disagree with any of the theories, but God(jehovah) the Devil (satan) are just as real as the tooth fairy, Sasquatch,Leprechauns and any other mythical beings/creatures
Jehovah is Satan
by VW.org 25 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Crazyguy
Wait you just hold on a minute, the tooth fairy is real, I should know I got a quarter from her years ago.
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Old Navy
Ha! Remember, he who laughs last, laughs last!
They really don't mind that there are many who do not believe they exist. They understand that life can be difficult and brutal and as a consequence many have come to doubt.
No matter. The doubters be very pleasantly surprised and in several hundred years of very pleasant living will come to forget that they ever doubted. All will be made good. That is the promise.
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David_Jay
For the sake of argument, let us say all Jewish Scripture is mythology. (To be honest, most Jewish scholars and Jews tend to view it as folklore and allegory. It seems that only Christians and Westerners have the impression that it is supposedly held as fact by Jews, when in reality it is only held as fact by groups like Jehovah's Witnesses and other Christian Fundamentalists.)
But, let's just go with the pure mythology stand for argument sake here.
I found a very convincing YouTube video showing that Jehovah of the old testament is Satan.
The Hebrew term "Satan" appears only 13 times in the Jewish Bible or Old Testament. In all these instances it never refers to a devil.
The word HA'SATAN means someone who comes or stands against you, even at times in helping you work out a solution by helping one to see all sides to a problem.
The best example of this is the angel that God assigns to watch over earth's affairs in the folklore story of Job. In it, God decides to stop him from doing his regular work and has him work as this type of problem-solving troubleshooter in Job chapter 1 and 2.
Christians interpret and read this angelic being as evil, but Jews do not. Here this angel works much like what happens in the scientific method. Once a scientist discovers something, he finds another party to test or disprove his theory. This party must be purely disinterested, not invested, adversarial for the sake of truth. This is how Jews have written and read the story since its inception.
The other occurrences of HA'SATAN refer to either people or circumstances that stand in people's way, even angels that are at God's service to stop humanity from falling into sin. But there is no mention of a "Satan the Devil" in the Hebrew text. That particular phrase never even appears.
Even the serpent of Eden is never connected with Satan or referred to as such anywhere in the Jewish Bible or in Judaism.
And there you have it. Just 13 uses of the word without a reference to "Satan the Devil." In fact, there is no such being in Judaism as I pointed out before.
But in the New Testament, a collection of books that all together is about the size of the Psalms of the Jewish Bible, the character of Satan the Devil is spoken of, described, and referred to 36 times, 18 in the Gospels and the book of Acts alone.
Again, the entire Christian Scripture collection is tiny compared to the size of the Hebrew Bible, and Satan (not to mention Hell or Gehenna and the Lake of Fire and other torments in the afterlife) as well as evil spirits and demons get referred to constantly, in almost every book of the Christian Bible, on almost every page. Satan the Devil is a favorite subject of Jesus who is described as personally having discussions with this creature.
It would appear that the mythology of the New Testament is Satanic in competition with the mythology of Judaism, borrowing the terminology and twisting it to make new characters. It is Christianity mythos that is obsessed with Satan upon examination, not Jewish folklore.
The video presentations are quite lacking in the most basic of scholarship. There are no signs of critical methods, no group work supporting the theories to ensure they are sound (again the use of disinterested parties to ensure your work is solid), and a failure to point out the above material which any of you (who often claim to be learned in critical thinking) should be well practiced in by now.
The problem is that people who leave cults seem to be anxious for anything to fill the void of knowing something that feels as definitely sure as that promised by the cult. There is nothing is in reality that feels like that...except for another cult or stupid cult-like teaching.
Don't fall out of the frying pan just to get burned in the fire. If there was something truly academic about the Bible, do you think it would be in a cheaply produced video on YouTube? Really?
Come on, people. Either you are a critical thinker like so many of you claim to be or you are still cult bait. Don't be cult bait.
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Anony Mous
It's a smart marketing tactic by a Christian ministry to be able to justify the "god of the Old Testament".
The gods of the old testament (and by extension of some the major religions today) were evil because they were invented in the stone age and came from various origins. The god the Jews or Christians believed in is a combination of a pantheon of gods, so in the OT as well as the NT you can find references to all "sides of god" which are just stories mashed together with a simple name change to justify a 'single god'.
The Bible is like someone took the Harry Potter series and all it's fan-fiction but changed every instance of Voldemort and all other main wizard characters (Dumbledore, Snape etc) to "Harry Potter" because they only wanted a single wizard, then had it translated and rewritten about every 100 years for the next 4000 years and gave license for anyone to change it so the story made sense to them.
In the end, you would have a very similar storyline to the Bible, confusing as hell with an evil Harry Potter for the first set of books and then a Harry Potter that slowly grows up and becomes a 'wise' Harry Potter, dies, reappears and defeats himself.
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Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
Me going back and forth between @VW.org's videos and @David_Jay's comments:
@David_Jay I don't have a horse in the race when it comes to theism and the lesson's taught in the Bible. But seriously, I do enjoy the different takes on the scriptures that sometimes pop up in Youtube videos, and even your own comments have been really informative. I appreciate you taking the time out to explain some of Judaism for us on here. I'm fascinated by the insights you've shared in your comments. Thank you.
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David_Jay
Anony Mous,
You are closer to the way Jews explain their own theology than you might realize. It's actual somewhat of a complimentary point of view you are expressing. But there are also some serious misconceptions you cling to.
Jews don't actually "believe" in a "God." The God of Abraham isn't a deity at all. Since we are alive in a universe, this is an "effect" of a "Cause." The "Cause" came to be expressed in ancient terms borrowed from Mesopotamian society, like "god" and other such terms, but Abraham rejected the idea of gods in their entirety.
Monotheism in Judaism is not merely that there is but one God, but also that God is ineffable. In other words, God is not even a god. Deities don't exist.
The stories of the Hebrew Scriptures were not used as you describe. What you mention is a Christian take, roughly what is taught by the Watchtower. The Jewish Bible was written during the Babylonian exile.
During the exile small communities assimilated and lost their identities. Without our land, with king or shrine, we would have lost ours too. But our religious priests did something clever. Their gave our customs and folklore a religious meaning and turned it into Liturgy for the synagogue system.
The stories were for systematic readings to for a yearly calendar, to be repeated on Sabbaths in public worship, especially to give new religious meaning to festivals we had celebrated for millennia. The narratives had a basis in history but were more like modern American legends, like the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, George Washington chopping down a cheery tree as a boy, Betsy Ross creating the first American Flag, etc. These are not factual American tales, but they harbor important truths Americans hold dear.
The Jewish Bible was created to preserve Hebrew truths to preserve our cultural identity through the exile so we would not disappear, and it worked. It's not what you say it was. It had a very definite purpose. That's why we Jews treat much of it as folklore...because we know it was designed to be just that.
You are still holding on to some idea the Watchtower taught you, that the Bible is some history book. Knowing it can't be, you mix that fact up with the idea that it has been changed and rewritten over the centuries and so mixed up that nobody can be sure what it originally meant, or that it got all it's ideas from a "pantheon of gods."
Again, if you are going to ever be an authentic critical thinker, you are going to have to learn authentic world history. You might want to go to college and take a few courses. At least study the history of the Jews if you are going to criticize the Bible so you can at least get it right when you discuss why we Jews put the thing together in the first place.
I mean think about the conversation you are having with me right now. You are telling me, a Jew, what the origins of my culture and my peoples' scripture is, a text that I, as a 50 year-old Jewish man, have spent my life studying, that I can read in Biblical Hebrew, who has lost ancestors in the Spanish Inquisition, grandparents and aunts, uncles, and cousins in the Holocaust, studies the Mishnah, the Talmud, prays in Hebrew, keeps Jewish customs, knows Jewish history and philology, and you are saying that you with...what background and credentials in Hebrew and Jewish studies?...that what you've written in your post is not only correct but has the backing and acceptance of academia, Jewish, Christian, and secular?
Is It really the result of authentic critical thinking that you are going to tell learned Jews that they don't really know anything about their own Scriptures and history of its composition? Sure sounds like the Watchtower to me. Sure you are not still affiliated with them?
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David_Jay
You are welcome, Wake Me Up.
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MeanMrMustard
I am at work and have not watched all the videos. Browsing threads at lunch - but just a surface question:
Jesus at one point ( as a lost child ) said it should have been easy to find him because he would be in his “Father’s house” (Luke 2:49). In this context, it was the Jewish Temple... the house of the OT YHWH. How does this theory reconcile this statement? Is Jesus the son of God, or YHWH (since YHWH in this theory = Satan)
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David_Jay
MeanMrMustard,
That is even a better question to ask.
Even though the early Christians were not strictly Trinitarians in the modern sense, they did see Jesus as the Incarnation of YHWH.
In Hellenistic and first-century Roman thought, a "son of" something was "one and the same with" that thing in the Greek idiom, and even sometimes in the Hebrew.
For instance, calling someone "the son of David" meant "you are the Messiah," in Second Temple era theology. This explains why people are shushing the blind beggar at Luke 18:37-39. The JW explanation is that there was a social caste system in Judea and the poor and blind were not allowed to speak up. But that wouldn't be the case as the crowds that followed and listened to Jesus generally are said to have consisted of almost entirely poor and lowly people.
No, the reason the blind man was hushed is that he publicly made a declaration that, according to Jewish law, could only be made by public consensus and announced in Jerusalem after formal assemblage of the Sanhedrin. He called Jesus "son of David."
Jesus was "son of Joseph," not "son of David." Jesus was merely a descendant of David. The term "son of," however means you are the "son" or equivalent to that which you are being spoken of. The blind man was calling Jesus of Nazareth the promised Messiah.
Jesus called John and James "sons of the thunder" because of their thunderous disposition at Mark 3:17, refers to a peaceful person as a "son of peace" at Luke 10:6, and calls Judas Iscariot the "son of destruction" since he had destroyed both his own life and that of Jesus. Do you see the idiom? (Note how Pilate, a Roman, reacts when he hears that Jesus is called a "son of a god" at John 19:7, 8 due to its implications based on the idiomatic expression.)
Calling YHWH his Father and claiming that he, Jesus, is the "Son of God" does not mean he is a creation or descendant of God but the Incarnation of YHWH, the Father, one and the same.
Just as "son of David" meant Jesus was Messiah, "sons of thunder" meant the brothers Zebedee were boisterous, and that the "son of destruction" was a person who brought destruction upon himself and others, "Son of God" means Jesus was calling himself the Father, calling himself one and the same as YHWH, the Incarnation of the God of Abraham.
Therefore the creator of the videos has created a paradox. As John 1:1 states, John not only believed Jesus was with God in the beginning but was one and the same as that God. Therefore the video creator is essentially claiming himself a Satanist if he upholds his own teaching. The "son of" God is God, and, according to the video maker, Satan, the video author's god.