The "rainbow" aspect of the story is pretty standard for mythology. But it's also another bit of idiocy. Are we to believe that light also behaved differently prior to the Flood?
RodentBoy
JoinedPosts by RodentBoy
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59
Christians - Do you believe the flood occurred?
by AlmostAtheist inwhen i was a bible believer, i accepted the flood.
the frozen mammoths and seashells on mountaintops were "evidence", but the only needed proof was simply that the bible said so.
as a christian, do you believe the flood story?.
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44
Jesus no longer really "a god"?
by M.J. ini saw the latest wt magazine released this week.
i don't have it on me but on the cover it asks the question, "is there only one true god?".
skimming the story inside i noticed they quoted the verse in isaiah where it mentions there is only one god and there never was or will be a god alongside him.. "hmm," i wondered, "how will they reconcile this with john 1:1?".
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RodentBoy
M.J. wrote:
In a way, the WTS argument here is similar to the trinitarian view...That Jesus is divine, yet he is distinguished from being "another deity" by the fact he is "closely associated with the Almighty God."...But they stop short of stating outright that the "only true God", apart from which there is no deity, is a term inclusive of Christ.
Debates and notions on the nature of Christ have always danced on the head of a pin. The JWs are hardly the only or the first people to reject the Trinity, and the arguments that raged in the early days of the Church were a lot of verbiage over a rather small set of Scriptures. As far as my reading of history goes, it really only became an issue as the need to centralize the Church made enforcing orthodoxy imperative. As to whether the first Christians had a Trinitarian view, I really doubt anyone can say. The beginnings are shrouded from us, but considering the inadequacy of JW "theology" in other areas, I wouldn't trust their scholarship on this issue as far as I could throw it.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if Jesus was thought of quite differently by the first generation of Christians. Perhaps he started out as a charismatic holy man (hardly uncommon, we even have such people in our times). Perhaps later, as legend outgrew the truth, it became important to give him aspects of the divine, to fulfill both the Messianic tradition and to make him more palatable, his words both real and alleged given some greater import because not only was he a spokesman of God, he was, in some formulation or another, actually God incarnate.
One thing is very certain, before the Christianization of Rome in the 4th century, the churches, to one extent or another, were largely self-governing. There was no proper orthodoxy, and it was ultimately only Imperial authority which gave early ecumenical councils like Nicea an important legal as well as spiritual force.
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44
Jesus no longer really "a god"?
by M.J. ini saw the latest wt magazine released this week.
i don't have it on me but on the cover it asks the question, "is there only one true god?".
skimming the story inside i noticed they quoted the verse in isaiah where it mentions there is only one god and there never was or will be a god alongside him.. "hmm," i wondered, "how will they reconcile this with john 1:1?".
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RodentBoy
I think that teaching has always been implied, that Jesus was, at the end of the day, just a very special angel, or really, The Most Specialist Angel, being the Son and the first thing created. It does make Jesus part of the angelic hieararchy, and does strip him of any notions of divinity.
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Flood/Bristlecone Pine: For bible believers: please answer
by skyman in.
using overlapping tree ring patterns from dead and still living bristlecone pines shows a 100% provable climate for california for over 10,000 years thus proving the the great flood did not happen as far back as 10,000 years ago.. www.americanforests.org/productsandpubs/ magazine/archives/2004winter/feature1_1.php - 19k.
www.unmuseum.org/radiocar.htm - 8k
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RodentBoy
M.J. wrote:
But you bring up an interesting question about no pre-flood rain. Is that necessarily stated in the Bible, or is it just a WTS interpretation? If water existed on the earth then it had to exist in the atmosphere...which had to circulate and move because of localized heating from the sun...which would lead to a cycle of evaporation and condensation--and rain.
The fact is that any quantity of water in the atmosphere sufficient to cover the highest mountains would produce atmospheric pressure at the surface so extraordinary that life as we know it on land could not have survived.
All the attempts by Flood advocates to get over the impossibilities of the story end up being most obviously nonsensical explanations. I've heard some claim the mountains were smaller, or didn't exist at all, but of course that flies in the face of geology. Some like to claim that the Flood was responsible for continental drift, but of course, that amount of energy released even within a few centuries or millennia would be so great that it would turn the surface of the planet molten. But nothing stops them, and no amount of cold water will have get it through their heads that the Global Deluge stories found in the Middle East simply could not have happened, save perhaps in the ultimate Omphalistic claim that God did it and hid the evidence. But of course, the last thing they want to do is to admit that the only way it could have happened was through magic.
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50
Flood/Bristlecone Pine: For bible believers: please answer
by skyman in.
using overlapping tree ring patterns from dead and still living bristlecone pines shows a 100% provable climate for california for over 10,000 years thus proving the the great flood did not happen as far back as 10,000 years ago.. www.americanforests.org/productsandpubs/ magazine/archives/2004winter/feature1_1.php - 19k.
www.unmuseum.org/radiocar.htm - 8k
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RodentBoy
For whatever reason, some folks take the time to debunk the garbage that guys like Woodmorappe pump out, and yet, in classic pseudo-scientific style, people still act as if he and his ilk have anything meaningful to say.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/woodmorappe-geochronology.html
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50
Flood/Bristlecone Pine: For bible believers: please answer
by skyman in.
using overlapping tree ring patterns from dead and still living bristlecone pines shows a 100% provable climate for california for over 10,000 years thus proving the the great flood did not happen as far back as 10,000 years ago.. www.americanforests.org/productsandpubs/ magazine/archives/2004winter/feature1_1.php - 19k.
www.unmuseum.org/radiocar.htm - 8k
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RodentBoy
Rig Boy, you didn't actually demonstrate that the tree ring data was false. You simply went off on some conspiracy theory tangent. You are aware, I hope, that scientific journals like Nature are not published by large media companies. If you don't trust science journalism (and I certainly don't, it tends to be utterly incompetent), then you are quite free to look at the journals, see the data that the researchers are using and decide for yourself whether they are telling the truth. That is, after all, the point of peer review.
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50
Flood/Bristlecone Pine: For bible believers: please answer
by skyman in.
using overlapping tree ring patterns from dead and still living bristlecone pines shows a 100% provable climate for california for over 10,000 years thus proving the the great flood did not happen as far back as 10,000 years ago.. www.americanforests.org/productsandpubs/ magazine/archives/2004winter/feature1_1.php - 19k.
www.unmuseum.org/radiocar.htm - 8k
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RodentBoy
Rig Boy wrote:
evidence can be manufactured and/or skewed. Can we really trust academia or the establishment when it is monopolized? Like the media is monopolized.
Look what happened to the last guy to fake data and results. Scientists who do this will get caught, and there is no greater disgrace. Besides, when faced with a scientific explanation or, on the other side, the WTS essentially handwaving away counter results, just where do you put your trust? Is the rational alternative really that there is some grand conspiracy to hide the Flood?
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John 1:1 in Coptic Translation
by slimboyfat inapparently there has been quite a stir in jw apologetic circles recently about the translation of john 1:1 in the early sahidic version of john.
i don't know if this has been discussed here before - if someone could give a link to a previous thread they know about on the subject that would be great.
here is what i gather: .
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RodentBoy
Seems like pretty small comfort to me, considering that, so far as I am aware, all other early translations very clearly point towards the Jesus is God interpretation. This is simply cherry picking, finding some translation that, ignoring everything else, supports their view. The Coptic Church is and always has been a Trinitarian church, so clearly the JWs are very wrong on what the passage represents. You can produce your own translation that cleverly alters the Bible to say what you're bizarre theology claims, but you can't rewrite theology of another church, which is what the JWs are really trying to do here.
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Why I'll never see 'Brokeback Mountain'
by yaddayadda in.
yep, i'm 'homophobic' and damn proud of it!
http://www.rense.com/general69/prop.htm
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RodentBoy
I probably won't watch it because I hate soppy romances, no matter what the genders of those involved. As to being a homophobe, I don't really find any reason to be proud of it.
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59
Christians - Do you believe the flood occurred?
by AlmostAtheist inwhen i was a bible believer, i accepted the flood.
the frozen mammoths and seashells on mountaintops were "evidence", but the only needed proof was simply that the bible said so.
as a christian, do you believe the flood story?.
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RodentBoy
Really, does it explain where the water came from, where it went to? Does it explain how fresh water fish survived? Does it explain how the insects all survived? Does it explain ice cores going back many times the age of the alleged flood that show no evidence of a flood at all? Does it explain how an impossible wooden boat was built and survived the deluge? Does it explain how all those animals that did get on were fed?