Mephis

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Posts by Mephis

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  4

  RIP Terry Wogan

  by LoveUniHateExams in

  1. social
  2. current

  i've just been reading the sad news that terry wogan has passed away after a short illness (cancer).

  he was 77.. i admit that i wasn't necessarily a fan of his but he came across as such a nice, decent, softly-spoken and gentle individual.

  he was also a successful broadcaster and presenter.. i hope his family realize how much he was loved and get the support that they need at this difficult time.

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  Mephis

  I loved listening to his commentary for Eurovisions. And his pirate radio show MC for radio 6 was just incredibly funny.

  Hold tight HTML. It's the renegade sound.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ4q80YVdks
  
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  11

  Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls-Do the Scrolls Help us Understand Early Christianity?

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i think most scholarship would agree with a positive answer to that question.

  but let's take a look for oursselves.

  geza vermes, in his excellent translation ( the complete dead sea scrolls in english-penguin.

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  Mephis

  Just a minor point really, but one thing which really stood out for me the first time I sat down to go through the work done on them was just how difficult the idea of 'a bible' is to pin down. I suppose that was a legacy of the JW belief of there being one fixed divine word which has remained unchanged down the ages. And their claim the Dead Sea Scrolls prove that because all the OT is there unchanged. Well that ain't so.

  Instead what we see in the Dead Sea Scrolls is a group of texts which are passed down with few changes, often none. So the Torah, Isaiah, the Psalms and the twelve minor prophets seem to be fairly unchanging. But then everything else seems up for debate. It's not fixed. It's altered and amended and revised. They add new texts and new stories and new prophetic visions. They even rewrite books to form new books. A new version of the old process we see in what we call the canon with Deuteronomy and Chronicles.

  And one does see the same process within christianity too. Oral traditions get converted into written ones, and not only does the perspective change with the writer but also what actually is said to have happened. It's hard to escape the majority accepted conclusion that the gospels are re-writes from the same source material (probably Mark). Newly discovered letters are merged with older ones (eg the known pseudographical letters which made the canon vs those accepted to have been written by Paul), and then selection from amongst the various visions to get Revelation into the canon. And before the canon process semi-finalised things, what a crazy mix of texts were being used on a regular basis. eg The Shepherd of Hermas.

  Similar processes take place in Christianity as those we see happening with the Dead Sea Scrolls. The OP mentions the shared 'pesher' interpretation of prophesy, and the general atmosphere, but I think one sees a really strong Judaic strand to 'scripture' in its entirety too. And it's very, very different to the idea of a fixed word of God which passes unchanged through the ages.

  (References: Florentino Garcia Martinez is an interesting read on the scrolls generally, but his contribution to Authoritative Scriptures in Ancient Judaism (2010) supports the bulk of the factual assertions I've made here. He kindly shares a large number of his essays and lectures on academia.edu if anyone has interest in learning at that level of detail).
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  16

  Do People Have Spirits? What Do the Early Texts Say?

  by Cold Steel in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  for years adventist sects, including the jws, have believed that the dead sleep at death and remain non-existent until the resurrection.

  its strongest argument seems to be text in the non-escchatological book of ecclesiastes in the old testament.

  although a part of the canon of scripture, the book is not written by a prophet, nor is there any prophecy or recognizable doctrine contained therein.

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  Mephis

  @Cold Steel.

  I'd obviously disagree with parts there, but the point is really that trying to rely on Old Testament Jewish writing to buttress Christian beliefs seems a little flawed whoever does it. Because we know that the Jews themselves did not have a belief system which required the issue to be set in black or white. One can force whichever interpretation one wishes upon the Torah is essentially the point. The Jews did that for a long time,. The adventist movement are just paying the price for going with one interpretation and then trying to harmonise everything in the bible to that interpretation. Sometimes they hit pay dirt (Ecclesiastes) other times it's just nonsensical and they have to try to explain away some of the points you've raised.

  Our earliest christian writings are the letters everyone agrees are Paul's. And we know for sure that Paul's interpretation of doctrine was not shared by every Christian even at the time he wrote them. Something he acknowledges himself. So how far can one push that onto christianity as a whole? I really don't know there is an answer which can't be criticised, so just raising the point. By the late first century, I think we are looking at a gradual consolidation towards what you say. Some people get upset even if I air quote 'orthodoxy', so I'll label it a proto-orthodoxy. The things which can safely said to be in common. I look to the Didache though and I see a group of millenarians waiting for Christ to arrive, with a resurrection of the just just before it. That's not really fitting the story of one idea in Christianity about this.
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  41

  Does Believing in God Make You Dumb?

  by Brokeback Watchtower in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzqaeusdmtk.

  http://jdc.jefferson.edu/jmbcimfp/5/.

  abstract.

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  Mephis

  Of course I assume everyone here is college-educated with a degree

  A lot of us are. And then some. We just don't make a big thing of it other than to encourage others to consider the options which work for them with education, or professional qualifications. Best time on some of the other ex-jw groups are when people post up their graduation pics. Always so cool because we all have some idea of how much it takes to get there. Oh, personally, I have BA (hons), MA, PGCE (ie MA equivalent), plus similarly weighted professional qualifications. Like my privacy, but the universities were Russell Group standard although cost was a bigger factor than anything else in my choices.

  Anyhows, well done on your bachelor degree. Genuinely. If you wish to use education as a very loose proxy for intelligence, I think that's fair enough as long as allowance is made within this particular community for the difficulties around that. It's also worth keeping in mind that in the wider world, an undergraduate degree isn't uncommon. The average secondary school teacher here in Britain will have at least that and, commonly, the MA equivalent teaching qualification.
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  2

  UK report 1in 5 charities misuse more than half of their income!

  by sherrie11 in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  i understand that there is charities commission happening in the uk.

  i have read its really hard to loose charity status.

  how is this affecting the org?.

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  Mephis

  Donations are included under income for WBTS. But the Charity Commission are investigating the polices and procedures related to abuse of children, vulnerable adults and survivors rather than financial affairs of WBTS. Until the Commission reports back on what has happened, it's hard to say what the impact will be. In the past there have been other investigations (eg Mill Hill congregation) and other promises to sort out a proper child protection policy which ultimately led to not a lot changing. They're very, very unlikely to lose charitable status unless they go full derp on implementing adequate policies. I can see a scenario where they'd willingly relinquish it in order to avoid having to have outside oversight on what they're doing but it would be expensive for them.
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  16

  Do People Have Spirits? What Do the Early Texts Say?

  by Cold Steel in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  for years adventist sects, including the jws, have believed that the dead sleep at death and remain non-existent until the resurrection.

  its strongest argument seems to be text in the non-escchatological book of ecclesiastes in the old testament.

  although a part of the canon of scripture, the book is not written by a prophet, nor is there any prophecy or recognizable doctrine contained therein.

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  Mephis

  Josephus tells us that the Sadducees had no belief in the immortality of the soul. And that tends to support a view that the Torah (which the Sadducees followed) is sufficiently ambiguous to allow both that belief and the beliefs of the Essenes and the Pharisees to all be permissible readings.

  Wouldn't a fundamental problem be, and apologies if this is overly secular as a reading, that there's no real set belief in Judaism which is then transmitted into Christianity? If you're trying to hammer together one narrative from texts written over a period of 700 years, with oral history traditions adding a few more centuries to that, then you're inevitably going to get texts at odds with each other as there was no single unchanging truth being transmitted. Just a series of texts reflecting the beliefs of individual writers from various points within that time frame.

  eg Saul went and spoke to Samuel's spirit. Samuel talked back. At one point Judaism may have had some concept of life after death which wasn't a result of Greek thought. Perhaps an Egyptian conception of soul/body? But that was clearly not something which the person who wrote that story down wanted to write about.

  You get to the time of the Hellenistic apocrypha and you really start seeing the Greek influences in it. You can push that further on to things like Philo's writings a bit later on too.

  Definitely agree that the early non-canonical christian writings I've read have some element which at least strongly implies an immortal soul of some type. Just not sure how far one can then push that onto some form of proto-orthodoxy in 1st century christianity. Broad church was broad.
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  41

  Does Believing in God Make You Dumb?

  by Brokeback Watchtower in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzqaeusdmtk.

  http://jdc.jefferson.edu/jmbcimfp/5/.

  abstract.

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  Mephis

  The Duke study doesn't show believers become more stupid? It shows that very religious and very non-religious people may, generally, have a smaller hippocampus. A smaller hippocampus is associated with hyporeligiosity in some conditions, but away from those it "has been linked to clinical outcomes, such as depression, dementia, and Alzheimer's Disease". The study, as the full length article in Scientific American points out, doesn't show causation. Stress factors related to religion are proposed, to help explain why this also seemed to be something which non-believers have. I found it interesting that people who meditate seem to have a larger hippocampus.

  Link to study itself: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017006
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  39

  Evolution is a Fact #12 - Lenski's E. coli Experiment

  by cofty in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  evolution works by the non-random selection of random mutation.

  natural selection accumulates favourable random chance events.. the experiment that was began on 24th february 1988 on e coli bacteria by dr richard e. lenski and his team is surely one of the clearest demonstrations of the power of this process.. e.coli is one of the commonest bacterium on earth, there is around 100 billion, billion of them in the world at any given time and around 1 billion of them in your gut right now.

  most of the time they cause no problem, until a new strain wreaks havoc on its host's digestive system.. if we assume the probability of a particular gene mutating to be 1 in a billion, the size of the population is so high that just about every gene in the e.coli genome will have mutated somewhere in the world every day.

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  Mephis

  His threads are spam and quite annoying.

  Then don't read them. :)

  I personally find them a nice 5 minute read, do some reading around based on what Cofty posts and then crack on with my life. Would have enjoyed these threads as a born-in being inside though, know that. Encouraging people to think for themselves, to go and chase down sources, even to get some education if they've been denied it (even if it's something like a free online course from a decent university on edX or coursera), that's a big thing for some of us leaving.
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  9

  What's in the secret rooms beneath Chelmsford:

  by bohm in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  the basement.

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  Mephis

  All the magazines that every JW in Britain said they'd placed but didn't really. No, that's my parents' attic. With the bodies.
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  133

  What are the biggest holes in evolution?

  by shadow in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  how honest are the proponents of evolution?

  idk but curious to see what type of response there is on a topic like this or does their study only seek to confirm their preconceptions and ignore uncomfortable facts?

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  Mephis

  Oh true enough, but evolution doesn't really set out to address ultimate origins of the universe and beyond where our science is no longer relevant. But in this universe, complex systems can arise from fairly simple interactions (cheesy example - the weather) so evolution itself holds up. Hawking's an interesting read, but there are other theories [edit: just clarifying for others here] and it's been a while since I did more than just browse headlines on what is the latest consensus on this. It's just one way to try and get beyond causality. I find it hard to do that, I think the human mind is wired to try and find cause for the effect. Agree with you that it's turtles all the way down at some point in a 4 dimensional universe otherwise.