my brother ( who is an elder ) tries very hard to get me back to the meetings.
he calls me every time he and his son ( he's also an elder) give a public talk.
they send me the zoom i.d.
slimboyfat:
Is that a change or am I reading too much into it?
You’re reading too much into it. The ‘study’ book is very dumbed down, and the specifics of just how Jesus purportedly ‘helped’ with ‘creation’ are (necessarily) vague and arbitrary fiction, but there is no doctrinal change here. Insight was revised in 2021 and the paragraph in question has not been changed.
i'm sure this has been discussed, but 1914 has to go away.
instead of, the overlapping generation teaching, they should have just ditched 1914. .
they should have done that a long time ago with 1975. it's the last of the teachings in the charles taze russell era.. i'm thinking they just will stop talking about it, and it will be out of the mind of the rank and file loyal witnesses .
‘scholar’:
The outbreak of the Great War, a fact of modern history which marked the end of the 'Gentile Times' and inaugurated God's Kingdom along with the fulfilment of the Sign of the Parousia confirm the Bible as God's written Word and can properly be termed as 'cast in stone' as a venerable witness.
Except the ‘outbreak of the Great War’ was before October of 1914. But because something significant happened in that year, JWs quietly ignore that fact. 😂 (On top of the fact that the Adventist numerology is nonsense, on top of the fact that Jerusalem was definitely destroyed in 587 BCE, not 607.)
But even if the war had begun in October, it would not be evidence of anything beyond a coincidence, especially given the literally dozens of years suggested by various Adventist groups (including Russell’s group) in the 19th and early 20th centuries for ‘something’ to happen.
And of course JWs also ignore the fact that in the Bible, Jesus’ parousia explicitly follows the great tribulation. JWs don’t really care what the Bible actually says when it disagrees with their nutty doctrines.
the bible records miracles such as resurrections, angels, prophecy and destructive acts of god to mention a few.
are these all a pack of lies?
how do you explain them?
Fisherman:
How do you explain them?
People tell stories. Fiction is quite popular. Not remotely complicated.
i'm sure this has been discussed, but 1914 has to go away.
instead of, the overlapping generation teaching, they should have just ditched 1914. .
they should have done that a long time ago with 1975. it's the last of the teachings in the charles taze russell era.. i'm thinking they just will stop talking about it, and it will be out of the mind of the rank and file loyal witnesses .
TonusOH:
When they made the "generation" change in 1995, where they appeared to try to quietly drop it, that was when they had the opportunity to let it fade away.
That change only reduced the significance of the amount of time that has elapsed 1914. It did nothing to reduce their dependence on 1914 as the end of the supposed ‘gentle times’. At their core JWs are an Adventist denomination and 1914 won’t be going away any time soon.
shower thought entered my mind the other day... jesus christ.
as per doctrine.
is still alive in heaven right now correct?
See Breeze:
Using atheist scholars' own strict criteria, a person can be certain that the message of the death, burial, and resurrection was widely believed and preached upon prior to Paul leaving on his trip to Damascus (2-3 years after the cross)..... and probably just weeks or months afterward.
😂 A fallacious argument from authority and ad hominem in the same sentence. Christianity Today is hardly an objective source for claiming what ‘atheist scholars’ say. But in any case, it’s entirely possible that a Jewish preacher was executed, an eclipse happened around the time he died, and the superstitious people made a superstitious connection and started a bunch of superstitious stories. 1 Corinthians was about 20 years after Jesus’ death and there isn’t any reliable contemporaneous attestation to the actual events. The fact that they believed something is not evidence that Jesus was actually resurrected. Even the stories about his resurrection say he wasn’t recognised, so someone else could have just claimed to be the resurrected Jesus.
i've been out for 13 years.
just wondering who the society is identifying as the king of the north?.
They said in 1999 that they didn’t know who it was from 1991 onwards (and they said it was the Soviet Union from after WWII until 1991, rather than ‘always’ or ‘Russia’). It is only more recently that they retrofitted it back to Russia.
shower thought entered my mind the other day... jesus christ.
as per doctrine.
is still alive in heaven right now correct?
Rattigan350:
But then without the ransom, what hope does anyone have?
False dichotomy, magical thinking.
The ‘ransom’ offers the same amount of ‘hope’ as the false hope offered by any other superstitious belief system (including the ones that you reject).
shower thought entered my mind the other day... jesus christ.
as per doctrine.
is still alive in heaven right now correct?
Sea Breeze:
Skeptics aren't suggesting that that the apostles and others died for their beliefs.
Nice attempt at straw manning the position of skeptics there though 😂
shower thought entered my mind the other day... jesus christ.
as per doctrine.
is still alive in heaven right now correct?
Even according to the woefully inconsistent stories of Jesus’ resurrection in the ‘gospels’, the people who first saw him didn’t recognise that it was Jesus, and only later became convinced that it was him. None of them say Jesus appeared to only Peter first, contradicting the hearsay in 1 Corinthians.
shower thought entered my mind the other day... jesus christ.
as per doctrine.
is still alive in heaven right now correct?
See Breeze:
Skeptics aren't suggesting that that the apostles and others died for their beliefs. They are asking Christians to believe that the apostles and others died for their lies, for something they KNEW to not be true; because they said they were eye-witnesses.
Wrong. Most of the claims of being eyewitnesses of Jesus come from the ‘gospels’ (including Luke-Acts), all of which were anonymously written decades after the alleged events. The exception is 1 Corinthians 15 as outlined by peacefulpete above, though it actually presents hearsay from Paul.
