They're meant to be christians, so I'm sure they'd forgive me for paying more attention to a doctor than supposed commands from a god I don't believe exists. The reversal of that is a bit more problematic as, if I'm dead, I'm hardly going to be in a position to do much of anything even if their beliefs prove correct.
Mephis
JoinedPosts by Mephis
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152
If YOU had to make the decision, would you respect a JW relatives wish to refuse a blood transfusion?
by nicolaou ina few years after i quit the meetings my mum needed her medical directive signed and witnessed and she asked if i'd do it.
i was surprised to say the least!.
i think she was just angling to include me and maybe find some lever to get me involved again.
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47
Did Jesus actually start a church to himself?
by TTWSYF inwith some 30,000 different christian denominations, how would one know which one was for real?
some folks think jesus did start a church, others think no.
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Mephis
Personal opinion on the Peter/church thing, I'd suggest that Matthew is a gospel written for a Greek speaking Jewish community. It seems like an appeal to a more Jewish form of Christianity, and, if it was written late in the first century, then one has the obvious resistance in some branches of Christianity towards moving away from that. So an appeal to Peter as the authority on church matters may have been more in line with a unifying (on this issue) branch of christianity which still retained essential elements of Judaism. eg. see The Diadache of a little later for how Christian beliefs were superimposed on Jewish rites in a way to allow for Gentiles.
On the Mithras ideas, I'll defer to Clauss (The Roman Cult of Mithras). So much isn't known and so much of what was once 'known' seems to merely be clumsy nineteenth and early twentieth century supposition based on not a lot. I do know that Praetextatus was clearly not a christian - Jerome makes that point inescapably obvious in letter XXIII by contrasting his hopes for an afterlife with those of a good christian woman who'd died.
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47
Did Jesus actually start a church to himself?
by TTWSYF inwith some 30,000 different christian denominations, how would one know which one was for real?
some folks think jesus did start a church, others think no.
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Mephis
The point is it's not built while he's alive. And there's no mention of him establishing one when he returns after death. His disciples had all vanished off to do what they'd been doing before following him.
There's certainly little in the way of formal doctrine established in the early Christian writings - it's all based on interpretation either of writings about Jesus, writings about what he said, or the teachings of those who knew him or who claimed to have had personal divine revelation from him. It's a cacophony of beliefs rather than a fixed catechism held in common. There are some beliefs which seem to have been beyond the pale, but 'orthodoxy', such as it was, wasn't really coming from one recognised authority. Were the Christians of Alexandria more correct than those in Antioch? Or Jerusalem? Or Rome? There's different branches, different slants, different influences at work even in the early days of Christianity. And you catch glimpses of that even in what eventually formed the canon of the New Testament.
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47
Did Jesus actually start a church to himself?
by TTWSYF inwith some 30,000 different christian denominations, how would one know which one was for real?
some folks think jesus did start a church, others think no.
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Mephis
I always thought that Jesus started HIS church on Peter and the apostles
Even accepting they are Jesus' own words, it's "will build" not "have built" or "am building", no? -
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bible author and dates
by Nihilistic Journey ini seem to recall in either the green bible or the black/red leather bible a list of bible books with the supposed writer and approximate date of writing.
could anyone share that with me if you have that available?
thank you.
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Mephis
1984 edition. p.1548/9 is the list. Not sure if that's changed from what's on website currently.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Yoi3LAtDtBcmVQclZvamd6bVE/view?usp=sharing
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138
How many of you actually KNOW the bible OR God???
by Mark Zyche insince jws are sooooooo terrible and full of lies.
what the heck do you think about fat santa, and and days later the celebration of janus?.
since you seem to be so good at looking at the "lies of the watchtower" what do you people think of your lives now, religiously speaking?
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Mephis
WHAT DO ANY OF YOU APES KNOW ABOUT THE BIBLE.
More than any JW who still believes what is peddled in the WT. Thanks for asking. As you're obviously speaking from a position of authority on the subject, a question to you if I may. As Jude liberally quotes from the Book of Enoch, why do you think it was so problematic for it to be accepted into the canon? If we all pretended it was written by one of the named 'prophets' and pretended it was older than its attested dates to fit in with that, would that problem go away as it did with Revelation?
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47
Did Jesus actually start a church to himself?
by TTWSYF inwith some 30,000 different christian denominations, how would one know which one was for real?
some folks think jesus did start a church, others think no.
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Mephis
I'm personally of the view that Jesus started what would otherwise be called a Jewish apocalyptic cult apart from the fact that he decided he was divine rather than just a run of the mill Jewish messiah. Initially less a church and more a mendicant personality cult. -
168
Where to draw the line: how Platonism haunts our discourse and the search for exorcism
by slimboyfat inin the discussion about race i adopted a position i am not entirely comfortable with.
i think there is a sense in which it is useful to distinguish categories of description that can be fruitfully defended (apples and bananas) and those that cannot (caucasian or other racial descriptions for example).
but there is a more fundamental sense in which i believe that everything is socially constructed, every single line you can think of.
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Mephis
Blame the Anglo-Saxons and the parts of the country which remembered the 'wey' post conquest. ;) -
168
Where to draw the line: how Platonism haunts our discourse and the search for exorcism
by slimboyfat inin the discussion about race i adopted a position i am not entirely comfortable with.
i think there is a sense in which it is useful to distinguish categories of description that can be fruitfully defended (apples and bananas) and those that cannot (caucasian or other racial descriptions for example).
but there is a more fundamental sense in which i believe that everything is socially constructed, every single line you can think of.
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Mephis
But to the basic question: how do we know mankind is equipped to ask and answer questions about the world in a way that relates to the world in itself rather than simply our perspective? Since all sorts of creatures have variously developed senses of their surroundings, to accept that the perspective of the rational human represents objective reality, is to prioritise its perspective as being above all those other creatures. The human brain is therefore said to be the only known mind device in the universe capable of understanding the universe. But how can we be sure we are not misunderstanding the nature of the world in itself at such a basic level we can never see it?
The human brain isn't equipped for some questions for some pretty basic reasons. Captain Caveman has a habit of stopping and pondering the meaning of black and orange stripes and their relationship to the greater cosmos, Captain is now an ex-Caveman and that genetic line is extinct.
But... that still doesn't quite justify going all solipsistic on this for me. Because we can formulate the difficult questions. We can ask whether a rock is pulled towards the earth or whether the earth is rushing up to meet it. The finite human brain seems very ill-equipped to deal with infinity, but we play around the edges and find out interesting things. We pose questions in maths and get back answers which lead to new questions and new frames of reference. Science is beginning to hit the point where we need to take stock again of what the meaning of 'truth' is because we are outrunning our capability to measure and verify theory, yet that's not a locked in condition. There may be ways round that, just as there were ways to prove the existence of wee bugs which caused disease rather than them being the result of a grumpy divine being having a morality strop.
And returning to my initial point, in a society/culture/environment shaped to encourage Captain Caveman's speculation those recessive genes and odd outputs of the grand genetic lottery which were once dead-ends stop being so. We're not immutably fixed as a species into how we are now, nor in how we perceive things as we do now. There's always room for progress :) -
168
Where to draw the line: how Platonism haunts our discourse and the search for exorcism
by slimboyfat inin the discussion about race i adopted a position i am not entirely comfortable with.
i think there is a sense in which it is useful to distinguish categories of description that can be fruitfully defended (apples and bananas) and those that cannot (caucasian or other racial descriptions for example).
but there is a more fundamental sense in which i believe that everything is socially constructed, every single line you can think of.
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Mephis
Reminds me of my Structuralism 101 course at university. Everything is relative, the act of reading changes meaning, etc etc. Fun stuff to play with, but real world application remains in that one is identifying inhibiting factors to information transmission rather than absolute limits.
So yes, one can find an arbitrary line for the first human, but there will be a point on the continuum where you can say "this is distinctive to the other" based on the differences. A t-rex is not a chicken after all. There's always room for further refinement and further knowledge, and there's always a good case not to overly stress differences which are little more than cosmetic or just extend the range in variation.