Hey, Anti Christ! Have you encountered http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/? It's an interesting place to glance at when you're first looking at a text. Of course, the scholarly commentaries are even better. The point is not that there are "contradictions" but all the cool stuff the subtle differences and discrepancies between the texts reveal.
veradico
JoinedPosts by veradico
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New testament contradictions.
by Anti-Christ ininspired by a certain person who is relatively new here i decided to start a new topic on the bible.
i will just mention a few nt contradictions.. 1-jesus birth.
in matthew 2:1 the bible says that jesus was born during the reign of herod the great but in luke 2:2 it says that jesus was born during the first census of israel when quirinius was governor of syria.
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real one --- please provide proof here
by kwintestal insorry to saratonin wrath for his thread being hijacked.
real one ... please provide the evidence that you said was out there on this thread here to avoid further hijacking of the other thread.. insults towards non-believers are also better suited to this thread then the other one as well.. kwin.
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veradico
If you really care about this subject, these links might also be of interest to you.
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/87694/1.ashx
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/77083/1.ashx
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/64513/1.ashx -
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real one --- please provide proof here
by kwintestal insorry to saratonin wrath for his thread being hijacked.
real one ... please provide the evidence that you said was out there on this thread here to avoid further hijacking of the other thread.. insults towards non-believers are also better suited to this thread then the other one as well.. kwin.
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veradico
I also don't think they are wrong about _everything_. Not even a room full of monkeys, if, as the saying goes, they typed at a group of computers long enough, could be wrong about everything. However, they are wrong in this instance.
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real one --- please provide proof here
by kwintestal insorry to saratonin wrath for his thread being hijacked.
real one ... please provide the evidence that you said was out there on this thread here to avoid further hijacking of the other thread.. insults towards non-believers are also better suited to this thread then the other one as well.. kwin.
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veradico
real one,
That is how the Watchtower explains the contradiction as well. Of course, in doing that they ignore the obvious sense of the texts.
This subject has been discussed many times before. For an example of one such thread, see the following:
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/84614/1.ashx -
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has anyone else seen this article about what's going on in Egypt? shocking!
by veradico inhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7247228.stm
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veradico
Well, it would have had to have been a strange sort of quarantine, but I suppose people didn't really understand how the disease is transmitted. In fact, I hear Huckabee was still confused about that fact not so long ago. What still surprises me is not when some uninformed people treat others like scum because of fear or hate but when people in official government positions behave this way. But I suppose you're all correct: I shouldn't be surprised at this point.
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has anyone else seen this article about what's going on in Egypt? shocking!
by veradico inhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7247228.stm
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Accessibility to guns to blame for violence?
by 5thGeneration inwith all the talk about the increased violence in schools and among society, it still surprises me that the accessibility to guns argument often tends to trump the cultural argument.. maybe i'm out of touch but showing saw iii uncut on hbo at 10pm and releasing the most violent video games in history and the marketing of violent and perverse music, these are the things to me that desensitises young people first and then may trigger some hurt and unstable kids long before they go and buy a gun.. okay, ready to be blasted (pardon the pun)!.
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veradico
Being entertained by some of the things you mention may be a symptom of a predatory or perverse desire, but I doubt it is a cause. The causes of violence are what they have always been. Hate and fear, ignorance and inflexibility of the mind, these are toxic forces in the mind, retarding growth and ossifying the soul. Of course, the availability of guns, particularly the sort that are clearly meant to kill people, not to hunt animals, does not help matters when someone does go off the deep end. When children commit these crimes, as in the case of the shooting of the gay youth earlier this week (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-oxnard15feb15,0,7663055.story), it is easier to blame the environment, i.e., entertainment, the hateful attitudes of friends and family, etc. When a graduate student in social work decides to murder, as in the incident at NIU (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-02-14-shooting_N.htm?csp=34&src=campaign=reprise_bnfeed_google_shooting), something more complex is going on. I don't think violence can be eliminated from our species, but perhaps we can become more efficient in our ability to detect dangerous people and cure them. Has anyone here ever read The Abolition of Man? What do you think of Lewis' argument that some cures give people less human dignity than the punishments they would have been given by past societies? Indeed, it is easy to see that the notion of "curing" a dysfunctional mind deprives that mind of the "dignity" of having chosen to do wrong.
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The enigmatic mystery of the Nephilim, the Rephaim, and the Titans
by Leolaia init has been said that historical memory in oral tradition goes back only a few hundred years before it alters considerably in later retellings, and when even greater time depth is involved the mythic past fills in what has been collectively forgotten.
but myths purporting to relate events hundreds or even thousands of years in the past often contain kernals of historical memory amid the layers of tradition and archetypal folk motifs.
an excellent example from my own reading is that of the inuit eskimo in greenland who have a rich oral tradition about the norsemen who died out over 500 years ago and who originally colonized the land a millenium ago.
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veradico
I just noticed this old thread. What you take with one hand, Leolaia, you return with two arms bearing a cornucopia! One might be dismayed to learn that the Flood, as far as can be discerned from the strands that remain after the J element involving the Nephilim has been removed, had as its cause nothing more interesting than the wicked and distressing ruckus of humanity, as in other related myths of the Near East. It's so much more interesting to see in the story a jealous God who disapproves of humanity's increasing divinity as the gods mingle with the mortals to produce the gigantic heroes of antiquity. But the beauty of your deconstruction of the text and subsequent reconstruction of facts that would otherwise be lost to us is that we now have the additional insights you gave us AND we can still marvel at the elegance of the new narrative produced by the redactor from his sources. A pleasure as always.
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RUSSELL USED SYMBOL LINKED WITTH BA'AL WORSHIP
by badboy inaccoring to good news magazne,winge sun disk is linked with ba'al worship.. this was concerning jezebel's ring they found..
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veradico
The winged sun disk is, of course, ubiquitous in Egyptian and Mesopotamian representation of royalty and divinity. But I wonder what the symbol meant in the unique context of Israel. If I remember correctly, Mark Smith cites an emendation of the word "shield" in Psalm 84 to read something like "sovereign". Both God and his anointed king are referred to in Ps. 84 as shields, and God is exhorted to "behold" the king, in effect, to shine upon him. In Is. 58:8, we find the healing sun imagery connected to the "glory" of God and the pillar of fire that play such prominent roles in the Exodus. YHWH as storm god and as sun god performs vital, life-giving functions. The storm imagery comes primarily from Ba'al, but there is a body of evidence suggesting that YHWH absorbed solar iconography as well from the surrounding cultures. Cloud and flame imagery mingle beautifully in Psalm 18, wherein YHWH rides on the cherubim and comes "on the wings of the wind." While the wings of the sun disk were, I suspect, originally intended to represent the diffusion of light surrounding the sun, especially at dawn (cf. "rosy-fingered Dawn" in Homer) and sunset, I further suspect that this is not what they meant to the Jews. After encountering the glory of God on his mountain, Moses, like the kings of Israel, is in some sense divine, and consequently radiates a fear-inspiring divine light which must be veiled, just as God's fire must be masked by cloud. Mark Smith's book mentions that some scholars interpret Moses' face emitting "rays" (lit. "horns") and his wearing the "veil" in Exodus 34 as a memory of animal masks (esp. of bulls) worn by priests when serving the god. (I think Jerome simply didn't understand the Hebrew idiom involved.) Throughout the Near East, bulls and horses are often linked with solar imagery, and Jehovah is the Bull of Jacob, the Calf of Samaria (called the "Calf of Samaria" because of the "golden calves" or cherubim placed in Dan and Bethel to represent God's presence over Israel). Whether Moses is being depicted as a type of Near Eastern sovereign, participating in the glory of the national God, or as a priest, the solar connection is clear. In any case, I'd like to suggest the hypothesis that the solar disk would be viewed by Hebrews as a representation of God's presence (the shekhinah) which was especially located above the cherubim (cf. the cover of the Ark of the covenant and various depictions in prophetic theophanies). The golden cherubim function sometimes as the guardians of the divine garden on the top of the cosmic mountain (cf. the depiction of Eden in Genesis and Ezekiel) and sometimes as the bearers of God, the bulls of Heaven. What do you think?
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Evolutions billion dollar question!
by Blackboo inhow did emotions evolved???
*grinning* are emotions, thinking, and morals biological?
please answer this sincere question..i am actually being nice this time.
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veradico
I found the following passage in that article on the evolution of emotion interesting:
"An emotion is not reducible to any one category of effects, such as effects on physiology, behavioral inclinations, cognitive appraisals, or feeling states, because it involves evolved instructions for all of them together, as well as other mechanisms distributed throughout the human mental and physical architecture.
"All cognitive programs - including superordinate programs of this kind - are sometimes mistaken for 'homunculi', that is, entities endowed with "free will". A homunculus scans the environment and freely chooses successful actions in a way that is not systematic enough to be implemented by a program. It is the task of cognitive psychologists to replace theories that implicitly posit such an impossible entity with theories that can be implemented as fixed programs with open parameters."
I tend to think of emotion as a certain category of judgments, i.e. judgments that a benefit or harm is being done to one's self or to a person or thing with which one identifies (family, friends, God, country, etc.). This category of judgments (emotion) produces certain physiological and psychological effects (feelings), but these are secondary and contingent. Specific emotions will arise spontaneously when one encounters specific situations, and specific feelings will result from the emotions. Thus, as the author states, one cannot locate "free will" in the situation. However, though I think our behavior at a given moment is determined, I think we can modify ourselves in the present so that our reactions in the future will be different from what they would be now. What do you all think?