Posts by Annanias

19

Isaiah 43:10 "You are my witnesses"

by Gordy in

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the jw's use isaiah 43:10 as the excuse for their name.. i'm trying to find information that refutes this.

i came across a good one on a website but now can't find it.. anyone one know of a good refutation of the jw's use of this scripture..

Annanias

I always thought that the Isaiah scripture was a point of inspiration for the name, rather than a source of some divine proof. I realize that within every cong you're going to get the gaggle of turkeys that thinks it is proof of something, but I don't recall it ever being thought of such "officially". I mean, they could have called themselves "The Rockin' Robins of Zooterville" if they'd wanted.

John Lennon - "It's just a name, y'know, like "The Shoes'."

Paul McCartney - "Yeah. Right now your children could be listening to music by 'The Shoes'."

It's kind of like why people are called "Christians" instead of "Michaelists", or "Jesusists", or "Melchizedecians".

16

Five Meetings and David's Five Stones (and other goofy things)...

by Confucious in

i don't think this was ever written in a wt, but i've heard it more than once as a comment.

that when david reached into his bag to sling a stone at goliath - that he had five stones to choose from.

and the comment was... .

Annanias

You guys never got the mama duck and her ducklings story? You guys will go absolutely ape dodo over this one. Got it from a CO. I thought about it from many different angles, but all I ever got was a bunch of question marks popping out of my head. The story is about the CO at this really idyllic place by a stream and he sees a mama duck paddling in the water and she had five little baby ducks swimming behind her. So he steps on this twig and it makes a noise and the mother duck lets out one loud "quack" and she and the baby ducks instantly turned away. See, we were explained to, the baby ducks did just what they were told "immediately and without questioning" because it meant their survival. The moral is, of course, the mama duck is the org, and we're the baby ducks and we should obey just like they did because it means our survival.

Now, I'm sorry, but things like that really stimulate my smart-ass gland, but I stayed cool. I didn't ask him if he was trying to kill the ducks. I couldn't help but think of that National Lampoon joke: I felt sorry that I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.

17

Trotting out the JW credentials...

by Odrade in

the people who care don't matter, and the people who matter don't care.. i'm asking because i notice that even though i've pretty much rejected everything connected with the religion, i still find myself setting out who i knew, who knew me, how involved i was, how many meeting/assembly/convention parts i had... on and on ad nauseum.

(it's nauseating.. remember when there were records and record players?

you'd get a skip in the record, then everytime you played it, the needle would fall in the skip.

Annanias

O, I think you answered your own question. You state that you define yourself via the environment, people, deeds that you did while you were "inside". This is a curious statement. You go on to say that you don't have to do the defining thing with other aspects of your life, that you are quite comfortable with who you are. You seem very comfortable being on this board (or forum, or whatever), is that because you are really anonymous? Or is it because you are secure in knowing what you know about yourself now that you are "out"?

60

God and the Concept of Time

by ezekiel3 in

put your waders on, we?re going in the deep end?.

jw premise: god created jesus, and then together they created everything else.. fact: time and space require at least two points to exist.

you cannot reference time or space with only one thing.. so before god created jesus, there was no way to measure time.

Annanias

zen, as I said, it is a personal slant. If nobody is there to care, then the mafia is right.

As for the fempto second, I agree, all you need to do is divide time up. You can divide a fempto second into a 1000 different parts (millifempto?). The things was, it took quite a lot of engineering to be able to do that practically. In other words, even though it existed, until these guys "made" a fempto second, it didn't exist, except in theory.

25

Bush Announces "Peace and Security" (non-political thread only please)

by Confucious in

ok, in bush's speech last night, his theme was "peace and security" or "peace and saftey" which i believe was his actual words.

well, we know the jw retoric about "peace and security.

does anyone here have insite on what the the bible is talking about with "...when they are announceing peace and security that sudden destruction will be instantly upon them..." .

Annanias

The "peace and security" quote has always seemed a bit non-sequitor, but only because of the word "they". To quote The Wild Bunch, "Who the hell are 'they'?" If the general population is meant, okay that puts a certain slant on the sentence, if it's the religious leaders, another, political leaders, still another yet, and so on. I suppose you could insert "disgruntled postal workers" in there if you wanted. Sometimes I think writers should pay 50 cents for every pronoun they use (oops, what am I up to, 2 bucks?).

But situations seem to be lining up, somewhat. I mean, as long as we're guessing here. Since the "instant destruction" seems to indicate armegeddon, the "they" would have to be something dealing with the onset of armegeddon, not necessicarily the execution of it. What supposedly brings on armegeddon is the sudden destruction of religion by the political/military folks. Which would indicate that the "they" are probably the religious leaders. But the problem with all of this to me is the word "instant". How instant is instant? I mean, to a guy to whom a day is as 1000 years and 1000 years is as a day, instant can have a pretty broad meaning. I'm just a person, and it still takes 24 hours to make one day for me. So, if the "instant" is more than, say, in the millisecond range, it's not quite "instant" to me, and the 1Thess scripture starts to become watered down as time goes by.

A question to the gen pop here though, did anyone notice that when the US military (aka UN) went into Afghanistan and dismantled the Taliban, they were destroying a religion? It seems like, although I can't get much out of mainstream media (go figure), that the political survival of Iraq is a bazillion times more important to the US than it's religious survival and that it wouldn't take a lot to piss off GWB enough to just eradicate the religions so democracy can flourish in the mid east. Does it seem like that to anybody else? Wouldn't it seem cosmically ironic for babylon the great to begin being destroyed in the land of babylon itself?

60

God and the Concept of Time

by ezekiel3 in

put your waders on, we?re going in the deep end?.

jw premise: god created jesus, and then together they created everything else.. fact: time and space require at least two points to exist.

you cannot reference time or space with only one thing.. so before god created jesus, there was no way to measure time.

Annanias

zen & pole - first of all I have to ask you a personal question: are you ex JW's? If you are, I can understand why, as one of my personal (yet hidden) peeves was the inability to have a meaningful conversation above the repetition of "Bible, Field Service, Study, Meetings!"

zen, you seem to be a Quantum Mechanic. I especially appreciated your statement on everything being illusory, primarily because I agree with you. But probably not to the depth that you go. After having read a rather poorly illustrated explanation of Schroedinger's Cat and the paradox of quantum uncertainty, the physicist who authored the book quoted The Beatles, "Nothing is real." (Strawberry Fields) After all, if the things that make up the things that make up the things that make up us aren't real, are we real? Obviously, as gravity vs. Calculus was to Newton, the uncertainty principle is waiting for a new invention in math before it can be properly described. However, and this is totally unscientific, on a personal note, I believe in God. Primarily, because it seems obvious. But also, because without the thought that he does exist and we actually are going somewhere, this all becomes really, really boring. I mean, so what if all of this is happeneing if nobody cares? ("I was once walking in a forest by myself when a tree fell right in front of me and I didn't hear it." Steven Wright) Which brings up free will, which can be dissected and divided down to the quantum level and it becomes as mysterious as everything else; but, if God has even the most tiniest modicum of any sort of intelligence at all, he will absolutely assure and insure that there is free will.

pole - your discussion on time as per the english language is cool. It was rather intersting to me a few years back when I red an article in an engineering mag about how (I think is was HP, but it might have been Bell Labs) had managed to make a fempto-second ( what is it, 10 to the minus 11 seconds). How do you make a division of time, seems to me it's already there. I don't know if you've ever studied much about the Navaho understanding of time, but it is interesting. I haven't studied it at all, but I understand that they do not see things as being in the past or in the future, they believe that everything is just in different parts of now. Curiously enough, this concept of time seems to be a lot more in line with Membrane theory than the traditional western sand grains thru the hourglass idea. The idea of that nether-world existing in the .3 seconds of time between an acutal occurrence and our brain interpreting it is interesting. I was starting therapy with a psychologist who was asking me all of these "preliminary" questions, one of which was: have you been halucinating. I repled, "How the hell would I know?" but he didn't think it was funny. Like my answer to zen, though, I gotta believe there's a God, and unless he personifies stupidity, he would have had to give somebody (us? the porpoises?) free will, which would necessitate the advent of time. Or, rephrased, necessitate the advent of some sort of environment where our free will could be continually exercised in a non self-interfering way. (Which negates time travel by definition ala "The Butterfly Effect")

21

Did Jesus and Peter miss something in the story of Flood?

by Pole in

yet another flood question.

jesus and peter used the story of flood to illustrate how god will destroy hundreds of millions of evil people again.

(let's assume they really said/wrote the things recorded in 2 peter 2:5 and mathew 24:38).. however, just after the flood god promised: .

Annanias

pete-

I agree with your assessment of Velikovski's book; however, I wasn't mentioning it necessarily as a science reference. My point was that from time to time catastrophic events have shaped our world. Although Velikovski may have not had definitive proof of his theories (but how could he in 1925), the fact that he tied much of Biblical history to natural events, i.e. God made the sun shine over Israel for a continuous 24 hours for Joshua, means that it must have been dark in the western hemisphere for a continuous 24 hours and Velikovski finds an Incan reference to such an event, hmmm. The flood discussion had brought a couple of references to the idea that the flood was "local" as opposed to global. I saw a program on TV (Discovery channel, I think) where Bob Ballard went looking for evidence of Noah's flood based upon the theory that it was a "local occuance" in the area of the Black Sea. It made me wonder why people would beg the issue of what the Bible reported about the flood? The fact that we had an asteroid do the dinosaurs world wide, kind of proves that externaly originated occurences do happen and do affect the earth globally. If the flood happened globally, there would have to be a lot of water comming from somewhere. If the water were locked in the atmosphere in the form of vapor (possible), that would mean a lot of clouds (also possible). If the earth existed like that for some time, obviously some sort of balance had to have been reached that kept that much water suspended (possible?), and then something "catastrophic"(?) had to occur to cause the water to condense. Well, a few possibilities jump to mind: volcanism, sun spot activity, even orbital shift of the earth. Well, if orbital shift is chosen as the culprit, then a mechanism is necessary, and Velikovski's is as good as any.

Velikovski was born 50 years too soon. Can you imagine what kind of following he would have today in our world of DaVinci Codes, and Bible Codes, and Fingerprints of the Gods? Anyway, you are right, his book has become a cult classic. I wonder if that's what the Bible will be reduced to soon?

21

Did Jesus and Peter miss something in the story of Flood?

by Pole in

yet another flood question.

jesus and peter used the story of flood to illustrate how god will destroy hundreds of millions of evil people again.

(let's assume they really said/wrote the things recorded in 2 peter 2:5 and mathew 24:38).. however, just after the flood god promised: .

Annanias

Your explanations are cool. But hey, what about this. Just suppose, just suppose, that God destroyed the earth with an actual global flood that condensed an actual cloud canopy. (Anybody read any Velikovsky? "When Worlds Collide") And, that because sunlight was now able to get thru the atmosphere unobstructed, a rainbow could now be seen, and that God's statement that he'd never bring another great big flood meant nothing more than just what he said. No connection to the future, the bugs, the animals, future people, nothing. Maybe he will decide to destroy the earth again, but this time he'll use fire, or ice, or polka music, but it has no conncetion with the flood. Just suppose.

60

God and the Concept of Time

by ezekiel3 in

put your waders on, we?re going in the deep end?.

jw premise: god created jesus, and then together they created everything else.. fact: time and space require at least two points to exist.

you cannot reference time or space with only one thing.. so before god created jesus, there was no way to measure time.

Annanias

Steven Hawking described time as the "enevitable march toward entropy" of the universe. Now, supposedly, with 11 dimensional "Brane" theory explaining the Big Bang, time is "shown" to have existed before this particular universe. However, Brane theory also allows for an infinite number of parallel universes, in which an infinite number of things is possible, i.e. a universe where I don't exist. (But maybe a universe where I'm the Messiah? Cool!) The point to this is that if Brane theory is correct and Jehovah has set it all up that way, time doesn't mean anything anyway because, hey, it's all happened somewhere. An interesting concept to time within this universe (especially for JW's) is the concept that with the reinstatement of "everlasting life", the first death will be time. So, according to Hawking, the reason we are concerned with/effected by time is because, for us right now, it is finite. Free will has to exist by definition. Don't believe that you have free will? Here's a test: what is the one thing that God cannot do? (Yes, he can lie, we'd just never know it.) He cannot make you worship him.

24

They Aren't Your Friends

by metatron in

when i announced, at the c.o's meeting with the elders, that i was quiting and giving up, the brother who gave the prayer.

nearly burst into tears.. a couple months later, him and his wife pass us in the hall and hall and sit down in front of us: not a single glance or hello.

or hint of recognition.

Annanias

Old Hippie - you sound like you could be my clone. I'm sorry about your animals, I think that we humans rarely realize that our pets are perfect creatures, and in a sense, somewhat better than we are. You obviously did more on your "long walks" than tally your FS score for the month. I have a question, however, and it may be too personal, which, if it is, please accept my apologies for my nosiness up front. (No pun intended) Getting "disappeared" (isn't that what the NKVD use to do to enemies of the state?) is traumatic, I speak from personal experience, but what was it that separated you from the org, and (please, allow me one more) what is your current feelings toward Jehovah? Not his minions, his org, his children, but him?