Narkissos

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Topics Started by Narkissos

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  86

  Death: Friend or Foe?

  by Narkissos in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  the jw and the (pseudo?

  )scientific "hopes" of individual "everlasting life" (which have been connected on a couple of recent threads) have at least something in common: they all seem to take for granted that death is a bad thing.. as amazing as it may be to you, this amazes me so much that i don't know even where to start.

  of course death hurts in reality when you lose people you love, or in imagination when you anticipate your own extinction.

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  44

  Is the NWT the best...

  by Narkissos in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  wt publication ever?.

  or the worst?.

  : in nwt i include the "study editions" with cross-references and footnotes, and the kit..

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  18

  WT typology and the NT

  by Narkissos in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  this is a question that came to my mind from a couple of recent threads.. we are all familiar with the traditional wt use of typology on ot material (you know, ot characters and events being "types" of modern-day wt features and history, the latter being "antitypes" of the former).

  i'm not sure whether this interpretive method has been strictly restricted to ot texts (in fact i don't think so, because i doubt there has been much methodological thinking about it), but it seems to me that it has been only rarely applied to the nt.

  and i am wondering why.

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  Isaiah 26:20-21 another misapplied scripture by WBTS

  by Narkissos in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  let's hope brownboy weighs in... ;).

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  22

  "Only theologians can be true atheists." (J. Lacan)

  by Narkissos in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  discuss.

  :).

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  48

  Redemption, Reductions

  by Narkissos in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  as i have told before, one turning point in my exit from the wt was a conversation with a close friend about the "ransom".. we were in the (french) bethel library, i don't remember what we were talking about until she said to me: "you know, i never understood why jesus had to die for us.

  " this surprised me so much that the only reply i could offer consisted in reciting the wt theology which she, of course, knew as well as i did.

  and as she kept smiling at that i began to understand what she meant by "i never understood".. this was the first in a series of conversations which led us very far from wt theology and started me reading the nt again from a completely different perspective.. this basic question ("why jesus had to die") is central to christianity and, when you actually read the texts, already produces dozens of (slightly to wildly) different "answers" in the nt itself, not to mention later theology.. however popular religion does not work with multiple or complex answers but with unique and simple ones -- the variety of which constitutes the complexity as they add to and combine with each other in "history," i.e.

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  29

  Trends in counter-culture?

  by Narkissos in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  after some time of silently watching the "conspiracy" threads thriving on jwn with a mix of amusement, consternation, boredom and irritation, i suddenly felt like stepping back and trying to think about the phenomenon in its historical development.. of course, any attempt to understanding requires a measure of simplification, and the pattern that is emerging in my mind is only intuitive and merely offered for the sake of discussion.. it seems to me that the "anti-conformist" flock of "open minds" who can "think outside the box" and "see through the agendas of the establishment" have been going places over the decades.

  in the 70s they were into (mostly left-wing) political activism.

  then the english-speaking "enlightened" crowd parted ways from their continental european counterpart (which tended to vanish into the general society) and moved on either to christian fundamentalism (especially of the eschatological, dispensationalist kind) or to "new age" spirituality (both being nebulas and networks rather than "organisations").

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  26

  : )

  by Narkissos in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  this may not be my last post on jwd but i feel the time has come for some kind of "goodbye thread" nonetheless.. i first ventured on (french-speaking) xjw forums in 2003, when my own jw past was already old history and practically meaningless to any of my acquaintances in so-called "real life".

  looking back, beyond mere curiosity i certainly felt the need to revisit this almost-forgotten chapter of my life story.

  what especially drew me to jwd and made me stick to it for the past five years was undoubtedly the extraordinary diversity of this board, and the wealth of experience, information and reflection it offered.

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  20

  Freedom from choice?

  by Narkissos in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  just a few reflections as i announced on blueblades' thread about 'the commands to love and free will'.. what is freedom?.

  i think it is practically impossible to give an absolute (= timeless, or contextless) answer to such a question.

  there is both continuity and difference in the use (hence meaning) of notions like "freedom" (or "liberty") from one language, culture, civilisation, period of history, to another.... we can, to an extent, provide contextually defined answers -- and those will be mostly negative: to the ancient world "freedom" would have been construed as the opposite of slavery, or captivity, or foreign rule (for instance).

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  19

  "Grace" and "post-modernity"

  by Narkissos in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i was thinking today (again, for i may well have already written something similar before) that if one word of christian theology has any chance to survive into (and, perhaps, past) the so-called "post-modern" era that would probably be "grace".. i wrote "word" rather than "concept" or "notion" because "grace" is not easily reduced to a single meaning.

  in the bible the hebrew and greek words usually translated as "grace" ("undeserved kindness" in the nw overtranslation) happen to fall both sides of an unlikely semantic "border," between aesthetics ("grace" = "beauty") and ethics ("grace" = exception to, or excess over, "justice").

  and in christian tradition too the idea of "grace" has been construed in a number of ways.

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