cynicus

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Posts by cynicus

• 
  11

  Going to Amsterdam!!

  by In_between_days in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  my husband and myself have decided to go to amsterdam for 10 days in december for the new year.

  is anyone on this board from amsterdam, or anywhere in the denmark area?

  i need some suggestions on some cool places to go.

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  cynicus

  Just give me a shout. However, you may want to lookup both "Amsterdam" and "Denmark" on a map of Europe before you actually go.

  (c)
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  264

  Furuli's New Books--Attempt to Refute COJonsson

  by ros in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i just heard that the norwegian watchtower apologist, rolf furuli, who esteems himself a biblical scholar of semetic languages, has completed the first of two volumes he plans to publish on the societys chronology, assyrian, babylonian, egyptian and persian chronology compared with the chronology of the bible.. title of this first volume is: persian chronology and the length of the babylonian exile of the jews.. i hear that although carl olof jonsson is not mentioned by name, or reference made to his book "gentile times reconsidered," it is nevertheless apparent that these volumes are an attempt to refute jonssons excellent study which has exposed the watchtowers 1914 date as total folly.. .

  the book can be ordered now from furulis new personal website:.

  http://folk.uio.no/rolffu/.

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  cynicus

  Hi Alleymom,

  The WBTS has backpeddled on their "dates" and most definetely on their absoluteness. Oooh, they still hold on to 539, that's for sure, but what used to be an "absolute date" in 1969 was changed into "pivotal date" in 1988, yet still "astronomically confirmed", but in the latest editions of their Chronology article (in the Dutch version of Aid to bible understanding [1992] which is similar to the article in Insight [1988]) that last qualification was dropped too. They have discredited and rejected most not to say all archeological and tablet evidence, including the Nabunaid-chronicle [see Awake! 8/15/68 for a different former view], VAT4956, various steles and inscriptions, etc. as not trustworthy, especially when it can be used as supporting 586/587. COJ has at least achieved that change within WBTS chronology, allthough it probably wasn't the one he hoped would happen. The only thing the WBTS still seem to rely on for 539 is SK400. But exactly how they use it is not disclosed, wheras methods to date archeological artefacts, such as astronomical confirmation, works of secular historians, other tablets, etc. are discredited and rejected, as if they didn't use these themselves in dating SK400. It's a dishonest bunch of pseudo-historians and their defenders are possibly worse.

  (c)
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  147

  586/587 the K.I.S.S. approach --- no VAT4956, Ptolemy, Josephus needed

  by Alleymom in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  nabonidus -- 17 years.

  nebuchadnezzar -- 43 years.

  nabonidus -- 17 years

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  cynicus

  It must be the sound of these damned crickets that inhibits us from hearing Scholar's reply...

  (c)
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  147

  586/587 the K.I.S.S. approach --- no VAT4956, Ptolemy, Josephus needed

  by Alleymom in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  nabonidus -- 17 years.

  nebuchadnezzar -- 43 years.

  nabonidus -- 17 years

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  cynicus

  You have two problems with your KISS chronology.

  I'd say that you, Neil, have two problems with Marjorie's approach. Most people don't have any problem with it at all, so please don't shift the burden of evidence.
  

  Firstly where does the 70 years configure in your data?

  It doesn't. Great huh? So we don't need to discuss which 70 years, when they started or whatever. Since she's counting backwards from a WBTS-approved 'pivotal datum' using WTBS-approved regnal lengths it doesn't really matter. Can't you understand that? Or do you indeed believe there was a neo-Babylonian king left out of her counting method, or that one of the regnal lengths isn't correct after all? Please enlighten us with details.

  Secondly, what date marked the Fall of Ferusalem, 586 OR 587?

  July 18th, 586 B.C. If you need further explanation I refer you to Jack Finegan's excellent Handbook of Biblical Chronology, revised edition, 1999, paragraph 443, page 259; in an earlier post you've acknowledged that you personally own all of Finegans work so you shouldn't even have to go to the library. If you nevertheless prefer a date in 587 B.C. that's fine too, and we can discuss Jer. 52 as much as you want. Yet 607 remains off the scale in all cases.

  (c)
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  7

  Anybody from the Netherlands know when the conventions are?

  by avengers in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  .

  if you know then please.

  otherwise i have to ask one of the jw's .

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  cynicus

  Planning a picket?

  (c)
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  26

  Kazaa and spyware!

  by DanTheMan in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  about a month ago i downloaded kazaa.

  i used it to snag a couple of songs, and haven't used it at all since.

  (i'm on 56k, so it's hardly worth the effort).. but ever since i installed it, i've been getting annoying pop-up ads.

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  cynicus

  You may want to use Kazaa Lite instead (www.k-lite.tk) which is basically Kazaa with all the spyware removed.

  (c)
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  20

  Pure Language

  by Tashawaa in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hmmm, they must not have appreciated "lurkers"... they've set it up now that you have to be a registered member to read the posts.

  too bad - it was worth a laugh (or too), and it served as a big reminder why a person would never want to go back!!!

  talk about control

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  cynicus

  You can however be 100% sure that no-one gets your IP if you use a service like Hotmail or Yahoo (my preference, obviously) to email people. That's what I do! About 2 years ago, a "friend" of my daughter's figured out her hotmail pasword and used it to get into her e-mail account and send a nasty letter to all of my daughter''s friends in her address book (pretending she was my daughter). I was able to see the IP address from where she sent the e-mail and compare it to all of her other friend's IP addresses and figured out which friend had used her e-mail account. All you have to do (in hotmail) is to go to Options, Mail Display Settings, and click that you want Advanced Message Header Displays. Then you have all info of where any received e-mail came from....including the IP address of the sender.

  I recommend that you send yourself an email using Hotmail and then take your own advice. Depending on your internet settings you may be in for a surprise: check for the "X-Originating-IP" header. In most cases your "100%" insurance isn't worth the 4 bytes of memory allocated for it.

  (c)
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  24

  A new book on the JW's by Hartman

  by Jerry Bergman in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  psychological terror

  question: who is accusing jehovah`s witnesses of psychological terror?.

  answer: those people are no friends of jehovah`s witnesses.

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  cynicus

  Good Lord! Yet another dumb German author snookered by the JWs (certain authors writing on the JWs and the Holocaust come to mind). It's telling, though, that Hartman does not seem to have been suckered all the way into becoming a JW. At least, nothing is said that he has. I wonder why?

  I wondered about that too: did he convert or not? Since his book is positioned as being written as kind of 'objective' and from the viewpoint from a 'reporter' it is to me essential information. But there are no straight answers on the site, and I had to fallback to deduction: from what is written in the guestbook he is addressed by various guests as a 'brother', and at least one person (Inge) knows him personally and describes him as 'brother in the faith'. So it seems reasonable that he is a dub now.

  (c)
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  62

  What's Your Favourite War Movie???

  by dottie in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  well since everyone's mind is on the obvious...thought i'd add a twist to it and hopefully no flame war will come of it .

  what is your fave war movie??

  i have 2: full metal jacket and apocalypse now.

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  cynicus

  Triumph des Willens
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  21

  Try to get your head around this paradox!

  by DanTheMan in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i've never heard of this motion paradox.

  i've been reading a book titled the whole shebang by timothy ferris.

  it must take a certain amount of time for the arrow to get halfway to the target.

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  cynicus

  But I still don't see how adding an infinite amount of numbers can give you a finite sum.

  Well that shouldn't be too difficult. Let us examine a simple fraction: 1 / 9. You will agree that this number is a number that truly exists: if you cut a pizza in nine equal pieces we call such a slice 1 / 9 th part. Oddly, if we try to represent this fraction as a decimal fraction something 'strange' happens: (I know this is done differently in the English-speaking countries, but this is how I was taught to do it)

   9 / 1.0 \ 0.111 
   9
   ---
   10
   9
   ---
   10
   9
   ---
   1

  And the division is still not finished.... We see that if we try to actually divide 1 by 9 by doing a "tail division" (as it is literally called in Dutch) a very special number develops: a zero with a repeating series of 1 digits behind the fractional point. You can try it out for your self, but you will see that the series never ends, and every extra division by 9 will give you another 1 in the series. The fractional part consists of an infinite series of 1's.

  Now lets rewrite part of the number we saw above in a different form: if I asked you to rewrite the number 0.11111 (five ones) as a sum of fractions where each fraction's numerator is required to be one, you might come up with the following:

   1 1 1 1 1
   ---- + ----- + ------ + ------- + -------- = 0.11111
   10 100 1000 10000 100000

  What happens here is that the numerator is constant, that is 1, and that the denominator is a power of 10, and for each digit in the fraction increases to the next power of 10.

  If we go back to the original example of the fraction 1 / 9 I already you that the same number in decimal form has an infinite number of 1-decimals. So the number 0.111 ... (where the 1's repeat ad inifinitum) is equal to 1 / 9. When we rewrote 0.11111 (five ones) as a sum of fractions, I showed you how the series of 5 digits behind the fractional point can be seen as a sum of a series of fractions that have 1 for numerator and and increasing power of 10 for denominator. Combining the two shows that:

   1 1 1 1 1 1 1 
   ---- + ----- + ------ + ------- + -------- + ... + -------- = -
   10 100 1000 10000 100000 10^n 9

  The expression 10^n should be read as 10 to the power of the largest number you can think of, namely n. And if you have thought of that number just multiply it a few times more by 10 so that it gets even larger, which is in effect the same as doing a couple of more divisions in the division example.

  I hope the above is understandable enough to show how adding an infinite amount of numbers can still produce a finite sum.

  (c)