Posts by Terry

48

OF DOGS AND BITES AND BIKES AND THINGS

by Terry in

the thought suddenly struck me plain and obvious: "these dogs won't stop until i'm good and bloody.".

there were two of them; a mixed breed of boxer and pit bull; clean, white--collared, tagged and--for some inexplicable reason, ferociously intent on tearing me to shreds!.

ah, but i'm getting ahead of myself.

Terry

The thought suddenly struck me plain and obvious: "These dogs won't stop until I'm good and bloody."

There were two of them; a mixed breed of Boxer and Pit Bull; clean, white--collared, tagged and--for some inexplicable reason, ferociously intent on tearing me to shreds!

Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. . .

____________________.

____________________

I've been riding a bike to the exclusion of driving a car for well over a year now and I've never had any problems with dogs. Sure, I've had a bike stolen; I've had cars almost hit me; I've had broken glass, thorns, nails, badly tended roads to contend with--but, never any dogs.

All that ended on Saturday morning at 8:30 am.

I had just begun my ride and had not gone 50 feet when the first dog ran out of a yard up ahead of me. It was unusually aggressive right away. I immediately came to a full stop right in the middle of the street. I dropped my hands to my sides.
I calculated the chances of going faster than the dog could run and decided I'd hate to lose because of having my tires bitten.
I was going to allow the dog to sniff me and decide I was no threat or intruder.
That's when the companion dog--probably a sibling--suddenly shot out into the street and approached from my opposite side.

An abiding wariness filled me with dread. These animals weren't curious. They weren't warning me off. I was some kind of opportunity for aggressive demonstration of punishment on their part!

I stayed frozen, making no moves at all.

That's when the first dog lunged at my leg and punctured my bare flesh with its teeth.

Yeah, it hurt and scared me all in the same instant!

Plans changed!
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The other dog on my opposite side was half jumping up at me and caught the side of my arm with a bared fang. Now I was bleeding from the leg and the opposite arm.

This situation was spiraling out of control alarmingly fast!

Before I could do much of anything, I started yelling for somebody to come out and do something. That wasn't going to happen, it was too early on a weekend for heroes or owners.
The first dog bore in again and caught me good on the same leg and tore two stripes of blood and ramped up its snarling.

I had an important decision to make--and to make very fast!

I carry a pocket knife with a small but sharp blade. I decided emphatically, it would be the wrong thing to do to start dueling, stabbing, slashing with two dogs. No--I'd need to act defensively and it had to be exactly the right defense.

I jumped off my bike and lifted it in such a way I could swing it around from side to side, fending off the two beasts and providing a moving shield. This did NOT discourage the attacks. It intensified the instincts of these two animals. I could easily sense the oppositional nature of my situation fed into their breeding. Theirs was to overcome fight response and defense of any prey by sheer force of aggression.

I had to wield the bicycle very fast, side to side or the one and then the other could time their spirited incursion inside my arc of defense and tear at my bare legs, (I wore shorts) and go for my most tender areas of unprotected flesh!
I did this by going in a full circle every now and then, unpredictably, to throw off their timing of advance, parry and thrust.

At about the three-minute mark of this terrifying battle, the moment of clarity arrive without rebuttal: I was going to have to get away or I would surely lose--and losing wasn't an option I could risk.
Had I been out for a walk, I'd have had no defense possible! I can only guess the extent of the damage they'd have ravaged me with in the heat of hot blood and instinct and the smell of blood.

The adrenaline was pumping insanely inside my bloodstream in an electrifying LIFE OR DEATH scenario I fully remembered feeling, from an assault I'd suffered in prison, all those many years ago. What a rotten mess this was--and I had no time to bemoan my fate!

I began inching backward, as best I could manage while summoning whatever strength I had remaining. Side to side, circling-- backing up--thrusting the bike and blocking the teeth-- the coordinated pack stratagems of an inevitable, weird, evolutionary choreography, it continued.

Fairly exhausted and ready to faint from adrenal overwhelm, I blocked off the entrance inside the narrow passage which led to my new front door, inside a small courtyard. The yapping, snarling, surly, fang-baring duo were not amused. It was all I could do to hold that passage like some latter day Spartan, bleeding at Thermopylae in ancient millennia.

Then, just as quickly as it had begun--it was over!

A kind of uncontrollable trembling had seized my legs, arms and body with muscle spasms rendering me all but helpless. I was not unlike a very drunken man trying to steady myself as I staggered to the door. Now I couldn't guide the key in my wavering hand into the slit of a keyhole no matter how hard I concentrated.
I stopped and whispered, "It is all over--breathe! Breathe!" I sucked in deep lungfuls of air and held it before slowly exhaling.
A minute or so later, I was inside.
I tended my bites with hydrogen peroxide, then I applied a thick coating of antibiotic cream to the affected area. I didn't sit down. If I had--I'd not have been able to get up again.
In less than five minutes, I had full possession of my senses. I determined to go back out and ride the opposite way on the street. I had a plan. I'd simply ignore my terror and not wallow in the incident or become entrapped by the rushing emotions of it all. This was nothing but rotten luck and a bad dog owner. I got caught in the cross-hairs of bad timing. That is ALL it amounted to.

So, I rode to the closest Starbucks and connected up to the Wi-Fi and found the website for reporting animal bites and loose dogs. I filled out and submitted the form.

Within an hour, I was sitting with Officer Garner of Animal Control. I answered his questions, signed the legal form, and let him photograph my bites. He immediately set off across the street and confronted the dog owner where he lectured him on the seriousness of the incident. The dogs would be quarantined for ten days. He'd be fined $$. And so on . . .

Later, my daughter Lily, drove over from Dallas and spent a lovely afternoon with me. I hadn't seen her since Father's Day. It was a wonderful, calming surprise. The visit was a perfect counter-balance to the odious beginning of my day.

All in all, I count the day as a big Win. I set out, dealt with an obstacle, resolved the problem, set in motion the solution--and had a great visit with my daughter.

I'm glad homo sapiens have reached the top of the food chain. I'd hate to think what my ancestors faced clawing their way through predators to arrive at the summit.
I imagine I had a wee small taste of that grand adventure:)

8

THE BART EHRMAN debate is available now

by Terry in

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skip to 9:02 and the debate begins.. _______________.

Terry

Follow up post on Ehrman's blog:

How Can You Know A Scribe’s Intentions?

My next step in this thread about my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture will be to discuss the various Christological views known from the second century (Docetic Christologies, adoptionic Christologies, separationist Christologies; and Modalistic Christologies), and then I will try to show how textual changes made by scribes in the period reflect opposition to this, that or the other Christology, in support of the “Proto-orthodox” Christology that came to dominate the early Christian tradition.

Before doing that, I need to clear out one final piece of underbrush. The argument of my book was that Christological changes of the text were “intentional” not simply accidental. But that raises a very large question that I have not addressed on the blog, even though I have discussed intentional changes a number of times. It is this: how can we determine the “intention” of a scribe?

This is part of a much larger question that literary scholars have dealt with for many decades now, going back at least to the middle of the twentieth century, to what is called “New Criticism” in the field of literary theory. In the good ole days, before New Criticism came along, a scholar would interpret a text by showing what it must have meant based on what the author was intending to do. But the New Critics pointed out that we don’t have any access to an author’s intentions, only to his or her final product. So how can you use something you don’t have access to in order to explain that which you do have access to? (How can something you don’t know explain anything?)

The problem is even deeper. Suppose

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Suppose you interview someone to find out what her “intentions” were when she did something. Technically speaking, you have no way of knowing whether what she is telling you is right. She could be lying. She could be self-deceived. She may not remember. She possibly had a range of intentions, and only tells you the one that now seems most important. There are all sorts of possibilities. Intentions are, technically speaking, impossible to know.

And that’s with an author you are speaking to. What about an author you aren’t speaking to? An author who lived years ago who is no longer available for an interview? You may be able to surmise or reconstruct a plausible sense of her intentions from the various things she wrote. But it’s a very uncertain matter, and it doesn’t seem like a solid base on which to build an interpretation.

And what about an author who lived centuries ago for whom you do not have a large collection of writings, just a single text? You can’t very well use the author’s intentions to determine what he meant by what he wrote, if what he wrote is the only thing you have from his hand.

With scribes the matter is even worse. We not only don’t have access to them to interview, and don’t have a number of things they authored to ferret out their intentions, or even a single thing they composed themselves (except for their textual changes). We know almost nothing about these people. We don’t even know their names. Or just when or where they were living. Or much of anything about them. How can we decide what their “intentions” were?

If we can’t establish their intentions, then how can we show their intentions behind changing the texts they were copying? That’s a very big problem, and one I had to address head-on in my book.

This is how I did it. I adopted a kind of “functional” understanding of intentions. It works like this. Different scribal changes of the text function in different ways. Some changes harmonize one Gospel text with what you find in another Gospel; some rid the text of a contradiction or a historical error; some add additional detail to the text; some make the text more amenable to certain theological views.

A functional understanding of intention does not require us to say that this particular scribe “absolutely meant to accomplish” this that or the other thing in the change he made. The term “intention” in this case simply means that the change makes sense as a conscientious change by a scribe (it does not appear to have been made by a slip of the pen); and the function of the change is this, that, or the other thing. Moreover, just as a person can have a variety of intentions in any action they undertake, so too scribal changes can have a variety of intentions. It is not necessarily important to establish that *this* intention or *that* one was foremost in his mind. He may have had several things in mind. But some of these changes are of such moment that it appears he had *something* in mind. They were almost certainly not changes made by accident.

And so my book looked at changes of the text that functioned in order to make it more “orthodox” in its Christological views, to circumvent its use by Christians who had different Christological views, to make it more useful for Christians who advanced the “true” Christological view. Whether the scribes had that as their primary intention or not can never be known. But it can be known that this is the functional effect of the changes they made, in case after case.

Once there is an accumulation of evidence like this, of course it is possible then to argue that it *appears* that there was an actual theological motivation driving the scribes to make the changes they did. But we can never know for sure, since none of the scribes is around for us to interview, and even if he was, it would not guarantee that we would have absolute certainty about the matter.

To that extent studying scribal changes puts us in the same boat as those who study all historical phenomena. All we can ever do is establish what seems most probable to us about the past. When it comes to antiquity, we can almost never know beyond a shadow of a doubt. Ancient historians work principally with probabilities, rarely with certainties. So too those ancient historians that study scribes and the changes they made in their texts.

8

THE BART EHRMAN debate is available now

by Terry in

go to the live streaming site and sign up or sign in:.

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skip to 9:02 and the debate begins.. _______________.

Terry

There is no reason why Ehrman's statements should not correspond in many ways with the Watchtower theology.

The JW position allows for some Biblical errata and corruption which THE SOCIETY rushes in to fill with their brand of Light.

It is what copyists for three hundred years apparently did as well. Being 'helpful' by changing, inserting, amplifying and nursing along the written text with 'clarification.'

Bart Ehrman has written about this on his blog and in a book:

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From Ehrman's blog:

How Do You Research Orthodox Corruptions?

When I finished my dissertation on a technical area within textual criticism – it was an analysis of the quotations of the Gospels in the writings of the fourth-century church father Didymus the Blind, in an attempt to demonstrate what the manuscripts at his disposal in Alexandria Egypt must have been like – I very much wanted to continue to work in the field of textual criticism, but I wanted to do some research that had some broader applicability and wider interest to scholars who were not purely technicians in this one rather arcane subdiscipline within New Testament studies.

I had always been especially interested in the detective work involved in solving textual problems in the New Testament. Where there are important passages that have important variants among the various manuscripts, how do you decide which variants are “original”? I’ve always loved that kind of problem, maybe because I’ve always been such an inveterate debater, and arguing for a plausible solution to a textual conundrum involves, virtually every time, mounting a convincing argument in the face of other options taken by other scholars.

What I realized in thinking about the next project was that a number of the textual variations that I found to be really important involved issues connected to understandings of Christology – the Christian understandings of who Christ was. I’ve mentioned one such variant at length on the blog, the so-called “bloody sweat” in Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus is portrayed as very human indeed, in two verses that were (in my judgment) probably not originally in the Gospel, but were added by later scribes.

After some intensive thought, I realized there were other variants that were also concerned with showing who Christ really was. And I started wondering: how many such variants *are* there exactly? I had no idea. And neither had anyone else. So I decided to try to find out. This was the beginning of my work that eventuated in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.

How does one go about acquiring such information? You can’t…

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You can’t just start collating manuscripts, that is, reading through one manuscript at a time, line by line, word by word, looking for textual variants. That would take a hundred years, working full time. Luckily for scholars at this stage of things, earlier generations – going back now over 400 years – have gone through all of our most important manuscripts and done that kind of basic leg work for us (though lots and lots more is left to be done). Editions of the Greek New Testament that have been published since, well, since 1707, have cited most of the important textual variants known. And so a scholar can have access to the variants in the manuscripts without having to read through each manuscript, one at a time.

The first resource I turned to in order to satisfy my curiosity was the famous work by Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. This is a book that explains how the five-person committee who put together the standard Greek NT that is used by virtually everyone today made its decisions in the key passages. The value of it that book that all the really most monumental variants in the NT manuscript tradition are presented, with some recollections by Metzger himself about why the committee chose the variant reading that it did in each case, and why it judged the other variants to be alterations of the original text. The problem with the book is that only very few textual variants are discussed in.

It took only a couple of days to work carefully through the book with my questions in mind. It was a useful undertaking, because it gave me some ideas about some of the variant readings that I had not thought about in relationship to Christology. But it was only a start, a very rough start.

I realized that to do the project thoroughly would require an intimate familiarity with every relevant textual variant ever discovered to be of any significance (and many that were thought to be of no real significance). And so I had my work cut out for me. It took me several years. This is what I had to do.

The scholarly version of the Greek New Testament (called the Nestle-Aland version) contains thousands of variant readings that Metzger doesn’t mention. And it is nowhere near being “complete.” An older version of the Greek NT was produced by a German scholar named von Soden. His edition is very difficult to use, but it contains masses of variants and citations of evidence not found in the Nestle – Aland. And an edition from the 19th century by Constantin von Tischendorf (his 8th edition) also has masses of information not available in either of those other two.

I wanted as much information as I could get my paws on. And so I went through all three of these editions of the Greek New Testament, starting with Matthew 1:1 and going one verse at a time, slowly, ploddingly, looking at the apparatus of each of the three editions, looking at each and every textual variant cited for each and every verse. Of the entire New Testament. To the last verse of the book of Revelation. Any time one of the textual variants out of these many, many thousands had any relation at all that I could imagine to issues of Christology, I made a note of it.

Before long I started realizing that there were roughly speaking three kinds of variants: some were clearly related to Christological issues; some could be *argued* (sometimes at a bit of a stretch) to be related to Christological issues; and some – lots – were possibly, conceivably, maybe *remotely* related to Christological issues.

And so I made three lists. The first contained every textual variant I was pretty sure I would want to discuss in my book; the second contained ones I needed to think long and hard about before deciding; and the third contained ones that I had at least to *consider* including, but, well, probably not. At every point of textual variant that I noted, of course, I would have to argue which variant was the “original” and which was the later alteration. I’ll say more about that in the next note.

8

THE BART EHRMAN debate is available now

by Terry in

go to the live streaming site and sign up or sign in:.

http://livestream.com/accounts/12497542/events/4350731.

skip to 9:02 and the debate begins.. _______________.

Terry

Go to the Live Streaming site and sign up or sign in:

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_______________

SKIP to 9:02 and the debate begins.

_______________

The topic is about whether or not Jesus believed and taught that HE was divine / God.

43

Deconstructing Splanes 'Generation' explanation

by Splash in

at around 4 minutes into the september 2015 video splane said "for the man and the baby to be part of josephs generation they would have had to have lived at least some time during joseph's lifespan.".

this is the lynchpin of the wt argument, that two lives must overlap to be considered the same generation.. let's take an example of twins who are born just a few minutes apart.

obviously, these twins are the same generation as each other.

Terry

No word has 'meaning' without context.

Anybody who has been married knows this. When your wife says it is "cold" while you are sitting on the edge of the bed sweating, the sudden fickleness of subjectivity smacks you upside the head!

A word like 'generation' needs co-ordinates. It needs brackets.

The Watchtower's greatest (cough cough) THINKERS have been jiggering with this explanation a long, long time to no permanent avail.

Should any of us expect a prophecy about END TIMES to actually have a real meaning, we are already off to a bad start!

Why do I say that?

Let's ask some really basic questions.

1. Why would God set a date for the End of his patience ahead of time?

Having forbearance is a matter of self-control.

If you are on an airplane and a baby is crying, you exercise self-control and patience. When will your patience end? Can you predict accurately and set the moment with chronographic precision?

2. Is Jesus actually speaking to his thick-headed companions with a complicated scheme of ponderable data to be unravelled, understood, and carried forward for thousands of years? Or, is it more likely Jesus was simply speaking in the kind of fuzzy generalities politicians and fortune tellers use when they are impressing you with heavy portents of great and momentous gravitas?

3. With the outrageous number of WRONG GUESSES made for the last two millennia by some of the greatest theologians known to history, all of whom were working with the same scriptures the Watchtower uses, isn't it demonstrable to anyone with half a brain functioning: there is no secret understandable key to working out an actual event?

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The End Times fundamentalists, evangelicals, and biblical inerrantists, take themselves (and the Bible) waaaaaaay tooooo seriously.

If there was a real Jesus. . .

and if the oral tradition was fairly accurate . . .

and the hundreds of generations of copyists didn't corrupt or demolish his words . . .

and if we are to understand what this mystical messiah was intending us to harken to. . .

HOW ARE ANY OF US better off spending our time working it out rather than merely

living each day as if it was our last?

JW's, Mormons, 7th Day Adventists, and the hundreds of other knuckle-head religious groups who wallow in the gloom of doom have only poisoned the well when it comes to arousing the public at large to ANY CREDIBLE acceptance of a prediction from now on!

It is time to GIVE IT UP and move on!

What does "this generation" really mean?

It means you've been invited on a Snipe hunt. So, dress warm and bring a bag big enough to hold your critter when you find it!

So, hide and watch as the JW's lead new converts around in the dark again and again with newer and newer Light.
None of it means a damned thing!

14

THE SAD BALLAD OF HAYDEN C. COVINGTON (Attorney of record for the Watchtower Organization)

by Terry in

ali did not serve even five minutes of time in prison and that had zero to do with hayden c. covington..

june 19, 1967 in houston, tex..

there are a number of salient facts concerning this man who possessed a big reputation..

Terry

If I take three giant steps backwards and look at the many layers of bureaucracy which make up the Watchtower

Organization today and lay that side by side with the Org in the time of Rutherford, WHAT A STARK DIFFERENCE there is to behold!

Legally speaking, today's Org is lawyered up to the gills.

There are firewalls galore.

Indemnity is the flag which flies highest on the pole.

We have in contemporary Witnessdom a plausible deniability policy with a Cheshire grin.

Instead of a few stalwart super-lawyers of the magnitude of Hayden C. Covington, there are faceless hirelings by the busload, skittering about on their little rat claws doing the bidding of hooded figures weilding scythes.

14

THE SAD BALLAD OF HAYDEN C. COVINGTON (Attorney of record for the Watchtower Organization)

by Terry in

ali did not serve even five minutes of time in prison and that had zero to do with hayden c. covington..

june 19, 1967 in houston, tex..

there are a number of salient facts concerning this man who possessed a big reputation..

Terry

Using the inflation calculator, Moyle sued the Watchtower and J.F.Rutherford for $50,000.00 each which in today's money is $857,251.80. The total of his lawsuit would = 2 X $857,251.80 or $1,714,503.60

Olin Moyle was awarded: $30,000.00 in today's money = $514,351.08, but later reduced to half. or roughly a quarter of a million dollars. (plus interest!)

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I love this part, where Rutherford is hysterical with righteous indignation:

"Now, I say this to you, Moyle, you have allied yourself with the Devil; you have willingly, without any just cause or excuse even, withdrawn yourself from the Lord's organization, and you are going back to the Devil's organization to engage in the practice of law. I have never known any man to withdraw from the Lord's organization and go into the Devil's organization, that ended up right. When you say you want to continue to fight for the Lord, there is not a person in this presence that believes a word of that. Henceforth you shall never represent the Watchtower by my consent. This Resolution has been adopted. I shall follow it. You have served notice to leave September 1. You need not wait but move out of the house this day. If you wish to join the enemy and fight, do so. I have no use for a quitter. You are a quitter. You have furnished as an excuse that the president of this organization has not conducted the Society according to your ideas, and I don't think your ideas are Scriptural. In the 4 years that you have been here, I have never heard you ask or answer a single Bible question in the Bethel home. Any man that pretends to be of the Lord's organization, and who does not attend the studies and does not engage in the spiritual discussion in this home, but who devotes himself to his general work, and then goes about talking with others to cause discord and to find fault with the organization, cannot be in the truth. I shall read this letter to the family or have it read. You may be present; if you wish to defend yourself. Henceforth I shall expect you to ally yourself with those who oppose the Society as long as I am here."

14

THE SAD BALLAD OF HAYDEN C. COVINGTON (Attorney of record for the Watchtower Organization)

by Terry in

ali did not serve even five minutes of time in prison and that had zero to do with hayden c. covington..

june 19, 1967 in houston, tex..

there are a number of salient facts concerning this man who possessed a big reputation..

Terry

Covington was surprisingly naive about anything/ everything going on in Bethel BEFORE he came on board. If he was told Moyle had cut and run, you can count on Covington to believe that's exactly what happened. He knew almost nothing about what was previously taught (under Russell) and didn't care to know.

The key to understanding the Rutherford years is pretty much tied up in the personality of J.F. Rutherford and his relationships with others. He was a slash and burn leader with fulminations, expostulations, and no recriminations :)

Moyle is prima facie evidence of Sociopathy on the part of the Watchtower President.

28

Where did they understood the anointed ones would be before the "great crowd" "revelation"?

by paradisebeauty in

this is a question on old doctrine of jw's.

before they came up with the "great crowd" "revelation", where did they preached that the anointed ones will be?

because if they preached it will be in heaven, how did they understood that the prophecies about the earth will be fulfilled?

Terry

Here is a very simple way to look at Watchtower doctrine.

Look at MOTIVE.

How is a new doctrine motivated?

How is a change necessitated?

What event triggers the changeover?
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1. Pastor Russell died after having his prophetic certainties proved false. 1914 was supposed to be THE END and not the beginning of the end.

2. Rutherford seized power under the pretext of heavenly guidance FROM RUSSELL. This motivated a dog and pony show. Those among the Bible Students and so-called Russellites who were loyal would need to be teased into continuing their following under Rutherford.

3. The Finished Mystery was a new book perpetrating the fraud: Russell's 7th Volume in his extremely popular Studies in the Scripture. In truth, Clayton J. Woodworth and George H. Fisher AUTHORED this book.

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