Posts by CalebInFloroda

63

How dishonest was the Apostle Paul?

by opusdei1972 in

may be some of you will be shocked by this question.

however, when i was studying the bible with critical eyes i detected that paul ( or saul of tarsus) misquoted the hebrew bible in order to get false support for his arguments.

of course, this tricky kind of use of the "scriptures" was not only used by him, but others, like the author of the gospel of matthew got unsupported doctrines misquoting verses.

CalebInFloroda

No one should blame themselves for not knowing more if they were once a JW.

The Watchtower is oppressive in its demand that members avoid educating themselves, using critical methods for Scripture study, and avoiding learning from other religions by actual participation. Telling members they can't even have thoughts that are contrary to Governing Body teachings or have to avoid contact with atheists, agnostics, or other religious people and their customs destroys what is so vital to the human mind and spirit.

And while the New Testament may not be as idiotic as it looked to us once rejected the Watchtower (because leaving the JWs behind often makes a person want to throw out both "baby and the bath water"), it doesn't have to be stupid or illogical to be untrue. I for one think there's a lot of intelligence clearly displayed by its writers, but I don't buy into its theology or its claims one bit.

Watchtowerism teaches people to live by polarized standards. So sometimes when we leave the JWs behind we think we can only be totally rejecting G-d and Scripture or make a stand for it in some way. If we reject it we may carry over the JW habit of saying that rejecting something requires it to be unreal or illogical. That's a Watchtower concept, and it is not true. I believe, for example, that Jesus of Nazareth was historical. That doesn't mean that I accept him as the Messiah or require that I give credence to the claims of Christians about Jesus.

You can reject what is real and logical, and still be real and logical yourself. The two are not exclusive opposites as the Watchtower teaches.

Not everything that is logical has to be accepted. You can have cancer. Cancer is fatal. You don't have to accept that you have to give in to the disease. You can put up a fight. Your fight can beat the odds, even when doctors read real data that says you won't make it. Sometimes science doesn't have the answers or the results don't matter. Sometimes when we say "no, I won't be beat" it means just that. And despite the best data and evidence you don't die and you do beat cancer, contrary to what science may say.

The world is not black and white. You don't have to make the Bible out to be a book of illogical stupidity to reject it. G-d can be real and you can still tell G-d: "No thanks, but I don't want to worship you." G-d doesn't have to not exist for you to reject G-d. In fact it's easier to reject something fake than something that isn't. And it isn't wrong to reject someone or something that is very real. Sometimes these things don't matter to you or aren't your thing. They don't stop existing once we reject them, so neither does their existence mean we have to accept them.

There are a lot of steps to take in removing oneself from the Watchtower. Leaving is sometimes the easiest part. Identifying where some of it sneaked into us and came along on our way out is often the hard part.

45

Rejecting something due to unscriptural or pagan origins.....?

by stuckinarut2 in

so witnesses reject many practices or holidays due to their "unscriptural or pagan" origins.. for example, birthday celebrations, mothers or father's day, christmas etc..... most people in the world will say "but the origin doesn't matter anymore, we follow this custom now because it's a joyful occasion that creates happy times and brings the family together".

it is still firmly rejected.. so, if the wrong origin is so important, and should result in rejecting something, why isn't the same principle applied to the actual jehovah's witness faith itself!?.

after all, the very foundation of the organisation was based on wrong understandings of the bible, far fetched teachings and doctrines, links to false religious backgrounds, pyramidology, false predictions, inaccurate beliefs etc...... using their reasoning, it doesn't matter how good something is now, if the origin was faulty to begin with?

CalebInFloroda

And remember, what is "pagan" means what is not from the Jewish culture--right?

I'm a Jew. Let me tell you what is VERY pagan about the Jehovah's Witnesses.

1. Accepting the New Testament is the written word of G-d. Guess what? Jews don't accept the Christian Greek Scriptures.

2. Not observing a weekly Sabbath. That's right folks. When JWs treat Friday sundown to Saturday evening as just another day they are acting exactly like pagans!

3. Uttering G-d's name. Only pagans believe that their gods won't answer or even listen to their prayers unless they use the names of their deities. The G-d of Abraham and Sarah never has to be summoned by name because G-d always watches over humanity.

4. Not learning at least a little bit of Hebrew. You don't have to speak the language entirely, but you should at least know how to pray the Shema and read a little bit of the Torah in Hebrew.

5. Considering this the year 2015. If you are not a pagan, it's 5775.

6. For men, shaving, being uncircumcised. How many JWs grow beards? How many have...well, you know!

7. Viewing faith in doctrines as more important to G-d than doing something that will benefit the world around you. In fact, being neutral is definitely pagan. Jews believe you have to be involved in making the world community a better place for all.

8. Eating pork and/or mixing dairy and meat. How many Witnesses eat bacon cheeseburgers, pizza?

9. Not observing holidays. Yep, if you don't observe Jewish holy days that means you are a pagan.

10. Believing in a hierarchy or central governing body for doctrinal truth. While all organizations and groups have some type of structure, religious truth is a communal thing in Judaism. The pagan Gnostics developed the current belief popular among Christians that "truth" is found only among an enlightened few and that the rest of us are destined to feed off the crumbs that come from their table. Sorry, but that's a pagan concept.

The list can go on and on. And while some things by themselves are neither pagan or Jewish (not all Jews follow the exact same kosher rules for example or use them at all), the fact that the Witnesses claim to be a "pagan-free" religion is definitely a lie.

There is a pagan free religion. But sorry Jehovah's Witnesses. You guys are definitely quite pagan in custom and teaching.

13

Where Are They Now???

by minimus in

jw
friends

i was raised as a witness and i remember many of the old timers.

many of the elders are no longer serving.

it seems like almost anyone that wad married and had kids.

CalebInFloroda

Many of those I knew as elders are dead. Their wives are dead too. Now their children are old and dying off.

Those who are my age are just becoming grandparents for the first time, dealing with gray hair, getting old. Some are also already dead.

I don't know how the Watchtower does it, but there was a third and even fourth generation of dead witnesses that existed before I ever walked into a Kingdom Hall myself. How they have managed to see this as "one generation" or just recently as "one generation overlapping another" just proves to me what lengths the human mind will go to in order to preserve the state of denial one enjoys.

3

Another JW holocaust fund post

by Saintbertholdt in

the expenditure accounted for 6% of the total funds available over the period of the program*..

total funds available for recipients: $856 485.

total recipients benefited: 1876.

CalebInFloroda

If this claim is true then something tells me that this is another proof that the financial writing is on the wall for the Jehovah's Witnesses and their organization. They must need the money, really need it, in order to have the guts to claim they deserve it...and I can't see how they can claim they are entitled to it as an organization.

The reason for these type of funds is to compensate survivors and/or their families because of the financial burden the Holocaust has had on these people. What people don't realize because most as far removed from actual survivors is that many of these people are still struggling, and quite old too. When the war was over many tried to return to their homes and property only to find that others had moved in and refused to give them their homes back. This has affected a couple of generations in these families.

But financial compensation just because you were affected by the Holocaust is meaningless to Jews if you don't need the money. Money is no real compensation for the injustices suffered. All Jews were affected by the Holocaust. We all lost family relations and such, even those born after the events. We are not all getting compensation or applying for it. It's not about money.

The entire organization of JWs was not affected by the Holocaust. It's daily operations were not stopped. Most of its members didn't even know about it, and many who did see the events actually did nothing due to their neutrality while watching my family members being driven from the homes and sent to death camps. Just a few weeks ago we received an official apology from the Roman Catholic Church in Austria not only for the part Catholics played in the Holocaust but also from those who stood by and did nothing. I don't ever recall any JW apologizing for standing by and not doing anything during the Holocaust. Being neutral during the Holocaust is considered just as bad, you Jehovah's Witnesses...even Catholics see that!

So while I see it totally proper for individual JW survivors and their families to apply and receive funds for compensation due to losses incurred from the Holocaust, the JW organization has no right since as a whole it, like the Catholic Church in Austria, stood by and did NOTHING!

You don't stand by and do nothing when your neighbors are being dragged away to death camps. When the "godless" Soviets learned what was happening, they DID something...and these people were atheists!

Christians and their organizations who stood by and did nothing don't deserve compensation for the Holocaust. On the contrary, they should be the ones paying out the money!

40

JW Broadcasting is dying.

by John Aquila in

once a month about 15 to 20 elderly jw publishers would meet at the kingdom hall and one elder was assigned to set up the system so they could view jw broadcasting.

these publishers were long time pioneers, former elders, and long time publishers who know nothing about computers or the internet.

they are the last batch of those expecting the generation that saw 1914 or understood it--- to not die off.

CalebInFloroda

Note to idiot elders who told those weeping that Abraham was 100 when he had to raise a child and didn't cry about it:

Abraham was rich and had servants! He didn't cry about it because he had people to do it for him.

(Not to mention that humans are instinctively designed to care for their own infants, so much so that no one requires buying technology and taking classes in order to do it.)

Oy gevalt! Goy!

63

How dishonest was the Apostle Paul?

by opusdei1972 in

may be some of you will be shocked by this question.

however, when i was studying the bible with critical eyes i detected that paul ( or saul of tarsus) misquoted the hebrew bible in order to get false support for his arguments.

of course, this tricky kind of use of the "scriptures" was not only used by him, but others, like the author of the gospel of matthew got unsupported doctrines misquoting verses.

CalebInFloroda

@OUTLAW & Sparrowdown

You two got it wrong.

It was Chanukah, and the Apostle Paul was known for going into sufganiyot (Jewish doughnut) shops, and when no one was looking he would lick them and tell Timothy: "I hate Israel and Israelites."

He later offered an apology on his JDate account claiming that he really meant to say that what he hated was how "Jewish food made people fat in Israel, that's what I really hate." Paul stopped eating sufganiyot after that.

But Peter wrote he saw Paul trying to lick bagels at Einstein Brothers a week later.

63

How dishonest was the Apostle Paul?

by opusdei1972 in

may be some of you will be shocked by this question.

however, when i was studying the bible with critical eyes i detected that paul ( or saul of tarsus) misquoted the hebrew bible in order to get false support for his arguments.

of course, this tricky kind of use of the "scriptures" was not only used by him, but others, like the author of the gospel of matthew got unsupported doctrines misquoting verses.

CalebInFloroda

Sparky1,

I was not offering my personal view. I'm a philologist who works in the field of Bible translation. I have worked on one ecumenical version so far. Though an exJW, I am also Jewish.

And as a Jew I don't have a personal opinion or conviction about what Paul was trying to say. I can only tell you the mechanics and what the general academic consensus is. If you wish to debate the points I made you will have to find you nearest university scholar and take it up with them. I am only repeating what is accepted in the field.

Lastly, while I appreciate your offering a link for me, that is only a lexicon entry. Lexicons give you "root meanings" to words, and some usage. They are not exhaustive representations however and they are quite limited in scope when it comes to how terms have been expressed by writers throughout various eras. We need to delve into etymology for that.

In my field you have lexicography (which is the work of defining root meanings), etymology (the origin of words and how there meanings changes over time), and philology (the critical analysis of language as used in history). A lexicon as you linked to is just a small part of what is needed to unravel and understand ancient texts and their words. You can't really understand a language just by looking up things in a lexicon. That's an old JW trick meant to "wow" people. It's really nothing more than looking up something in a dictionary.

63

How dishonest was the Apostle Paul?

by opusdei1972 in

may be some of you will be shocked by this question.

however, when i was studying the bible with critical eyes i detected that paul ( or saul of tarsus) misquoted the hebrew bible in order to get false support for his arguments.

of course, this tricky kind of use of the "scriptures" was not only used by him, but others, like the author of the gospel of matthew got unsupported doctrines misquoting verses.

CalebInFloroda

I see a problem developing in this thread, and the Watchtower is to blame.

I’ve noticed that many ex-JWs exit the JW religion with much of their Watchtower theology still intact, though they may not notice it. I know I left this way. If not it is expelled, the ex-JW will make mistakes in further judgment made outside the Watchtower on Scripture and religion.

One of these carryovers from Watchtower naiveté is that the New Testament authors are “quoting” from either the LXX or a Hebrew text. But the truth is they often are not. What you are reading when Paul and others “quote” from the Hebrew Scriptures is midrash, not a real quote.

Midrash is a Jewish technique in which exegesis is actually interpolated into Scripture as you say it, thus making up for any ambiguity in a text that might be viewed as problematic to the teacher. Normally this is an acceptable technique, but the New Testament writers used it to emphasize that there was a hidden, encoded message that only the light of Christ could decode.

Matthew’s use of Isaiah 7.14 is a prime example of how the NT writers used midrash. The text reads in Hebrew similar to the translation as found in the NJPS:

Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son. Let her name him Immanuel.

The word for “young woman” refers to a type of female. In older forms of English the term would have been “maid” or even “maiden,” but it has fallen out of popular use. While the LXX uses a term that on the surface reads “virgin,” the Greek word does refer to someone sexual status but again to a type of female, most notably a “maiden.”

Since midrash often is a play-on-words form of exegesis, the author of the gospel of Matthew played with the Greek word to give it both meanings, namely “virgin/maiden” and “virgin/sexually inexperienced” at Matthew 1.28. The author was neither quoting from the Hebrew text or even the LXX necessarily, but was merely using the same words to fit the prophecy into a fulfillment of the events mentioned. The author does this several times, never really quoting but reshaping texts, such as at Matthew 2.23.

The theology of the Watchtower is very primitive and two-dimensional. It views the Scriptures as a sort of book of proof-texts to be used as proof-texts. The actual documents are actually far more complex. But the Governing Body insists on NOT teaching JWs the actual process of transmission, that a very Semitic philology and set of Jewish hermeneutics governed their construction.

We who leave the JWs behind are not taught the necessary fundamentals of Bible study to begin with so we find ourselves arguing based on the only limitations we know. Our conclusions can therefore fail us. How many on this board can identify when a “quote” is really a quotation from Scripture and not midrash or perhaps when a verse merely being stated from memory? What is the difference between midrash and Midrash? Who even heard of the term before today?

I was so unprepared when I went into formal Scriptural study. I learned nothing from my exposure to the Watchtower brand of religion (though I thought I did). I swear it probably sucked up a few IQ points even! Thus I am not criticizing anyone for the mistakes that are being made. You are working from the limited point that some of you probably still have due to the same happening to you. It took me almost 20 years outside of the Watchtower devoted to in-depth collegiate study to get where I am today. The more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew.

Paul is not always quoting from any text in his writing. His quotes are often midrash in nature. They aren’t always to be found in the LXX or the Masoretic or even proto-Masoretic texts. It is not a sign of error on the author’s part either. While I don’t agree with a lot of Paul’s teachings or the New Testament in general, I can attest that the author we generally know as Paul was not an idiot. He may have twisted things beyond their original purpose, but he does demonstrate a logic that is definitely Pharisaic in nature. From a Jewish viewpoint I can attest that the writings do demonstrate a familiarity with rabbinical exegesis of the Second Temple era.

63

How dishonest was the Apostle Paul?

by opusdei1972 in

may be some of you will be shocked by this question.

however, when i was studying the bible with critical eyes i detected that paul ( or saul of tarsus) misquoted the hebrew bible in order to get false support for his arguments.

of course, this tricky kind of use of the "scriptures" was not only used by him, but others, like the author of the gospel of matthew got unsupported doctrines misquoting verses.

CalebInFloroda

@jws

I would have to agree with you, but only sometimes because (as you allude to) not all the Pauline epistles seem to be written by the same person. While that might be a reason for the very conflicting things in them, the explanation is by no means a panacea. Sometimes I am more prone to be confused by the real Paul than with the possible pseudonymous works attributed to the apostle.

Case in point: The quote that opusdei1972 makes is a striking example. Galatians was written prior to Romans, and in Galatians Paul seems very negative about the Torah, practically insisting that it was not of divine origin (Galatians 3.19-20) and that the Jewish people are not the true see of Abraham ( Galatians 3.16). Just a couple of years later in Romans, Paul's words soften considerably, even to the point of saying that "the gifts and the call of God [to the Jews] are irrevocable.'--Romans 11.29.

While I am not sure if you are describing the Jewish Scriptures or the New Testament, if you are talking about what Paul was quoting from in the NT, the quotes are from the Alexandrian Septuagint. He even makes reference to the Book of Wisdom as found in this version of the LXX, most vividly in Romans 1.

63

How dishonest was the Apostle Paul?

by opusdei1972 in

may be some of you will be shocked by this question.

however, when i was studying the bible with critical eyes i detected that paul ( or saul of tarsus) misquoted the hebrew bible in order to get false support for his arguments.

of course, this tricky kind of use of the "scriptures" was not only used by him, but others, like the author of the gospel of matthew got unsupported doctrines misquoting verses.

CalebInFloroda

Sparky,

One should not confuse the Watchtower definition of what Paul is saying with what one finds in the actual text. If you read it like the Witnesses do, of course it sounds idiotic. But it is not because Paul wrote it with the JW understanding. To illustrate...

"Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him…"--1 Corinthians 11.14, NRSV.

The word for “nature” here in the Koine Greek text is PHUSIS. It means in this instance “social order,” as in the Roman social order or way of doing things. It does not mean “nature” as in the sense of a National Geographic television documentary about flora and fauna.

In first century Hellenism and Roman culture, the “natural order” of things had no division between what one witnesses in nature (i.e., plant life, animal life, etc.) and the societal norms, social conventions, and culture of human society. The customs adopted and promoted by humans were believed to be as “natural” as what happened in nature itself. They are one in the same thing in the first century mind.

Therefore to act outside of societal norms was to act “unnaturally.” It is not a scientific term, but one that expresses the ancient Roman understanding of how the world worked.

Paul was not telling the Corinthians that it went against biological norms for men to wear long hair, but that it went against Roman convention. A clue that helps one come to this conclusion even without this knowledge of ancient understanding is that Paul comes from a society where men did let their hair grow long, namely in Jewry. Paul himself even pays for the haircuts of Nazarites at the Second Temple at Acts 21.23, 24, 26.

Obviously he wouldn’t be saying that it was biologically unnatural for men to grow their hair long as he has witnessed it himself as part of an offering of oneself to G-d as a Nazarite. Since Jews would never offer something biologically unnatural to G-d (and Nazarites grow out their hair during their vowed period), Paul would not have been condemning the biological growing of hair in men. No, here he is speaking about convention.