What I thought was most amusing about that magazine when I first saw it was that whoever put it together chose to put a QFR article about a verse that is clearly misogynistic in magazine whose theme was "Why Jehovah Likes Women" or something. It seemed like a bad move to me. Why point out one of the verses like this in such an article? If anyone has it, I think it might make a good magazine cover to parody. I always wondered about the Society's attempt to insist the Bible books have a consistently enlightened view about women. They are clearly viewed as objects in the Law. Particularly during war, men can take them and use them like property, but if a woman gets taken and happens to be in the catagory of women with whom a man is not supposed to have sex (i.e. his daughter, his daughter-in-law, etc.), she, though I would say she would be innocent, has to be killed because she has somehow been tainted by his sin. They are supposed to feel unclean every time they menstruate. They are killed for not being virgins. They are killed for being betrothed virgins who did not scream when being raped. If they happen to be barren, they are made to feel cursed. They are clearly more valued as tools to bring forth sons than as humans. Female animals are not even worthy of being sacrificed to YHWH. A good son brings honor to his father; a bad son brings shame to his mother. Etc.
veradico
JoinedPosts by veradico
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QFR: "Never has a woman given Jehovah perfect obedience"
by Inquisitor inquestions from readers w07 jan 15 p.30.
in what sense did the congregator find only "one man out of a thousand" but not "a woman among all these"?
- ecclesiastes 7:28. the answer is written out in 3 paragraphs.. paragraph 1: placatory remarks to show that jehovah god is not chief misogynist.. paragraph 2 & 3:.
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Newbie!!!
by KCM ini'm a newbie on here.
been away from the truth for nearly a year now and have just got my divorce from my violent ex who is stil serving in the congregation.
found things hard and still am, as the 'truth' is all i've ever known....so am on here for some well needed support, if thats ok?
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veradico
Welcome. I wish you all the best, and I hope you find the support you need.
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Asherah, the wife of YHWH
by veradico inas we all know, the bible tends to overlook and often look down on women.
the priests and scribes who were in charge of it did everything they could to emphasize the maleness of god, thus supporting the social organization in place.
however, we can also detect in their writings the obvious fact that most of the people and many of the nobles of israel liked to turn to goddesses like asherah, who they could expect to be more sympathetic and compassionate than yhwh, and that the jewish people, in their legendary past, had other gods and goddesses (think of rachel's teraphim, get a bible commentary that talks about how the ot interacts with near eastern myths in attempting to have yhwh absorb the characteristics and titles of other gods and goddesses, note the lateness of even the prophetic condemnation of asherah compared to the early condemnation of ba'al worship).
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veradico
Sorry I never responed everyone! I gave this thread up for dead. Narkissos, I agree. To my mind, female villans are far more scary than male ones. Lady Macbeth, Kali, etc... I would much rather have a guy be angry with me. Still, I think their popularity comes from the intuition expressed by Clam, and I would maintain that the attempt by the Jewish priesthood to exclude the feminine from the divine was unhealthy and has had a negative cultural influence on Western civilization. Doug Mason, thanks for the reference. I'll check the book out. I'd actually like to take this opportunity to change my whole subject heading. I recently read a article that argued that "asherah," like the name of Jehovah's father "el" (which got softened to simply mean something like "god"), came to mean "divine consort, image of the divine consort." Asherah was originally the wife of El, but Ashtoreth remained the personal name of the YHWH's consort.
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What is your favorite Pagan Gods !
by 5go inskadi .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ska%c3%b0i.
isis.
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veradico
Dionysos and Apollo for opposite reasons; Ganymede, Zeus' gay lover; as a collective, the Norse gods are my favorite
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Latest Gospel scholarship supports the reliability of the oral tradition!
by yaddayadda inanother eminent new testament scholar has come out and declared that traditional form criticism is now obsolete.
richard bauckhams 2006 book jesus and the eyewitnesses the gospels as eyewitness testimony is the latest in the recent trend of contemporary british gospel scholarship to re-examine many long-held assumptions about the oral tradition behind the gospels which is coming up with some rather startling conclusions.
jesus remembered, grand rapids; eerdmans.
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veradico
I followed the link you provided. Thanks for giving some excerpts from the books. They really helped me get a feel for this Dunn fellow. I noticed, for example, that he says that the "historical Jesus" was "a Jesus who regularly used the phrase 'the son of man,' probably as a way of speaking of his own mission." I think this is a good example of where Dunn is going wrong. The gospels do represent expressions of oral traditions. Oral traditions are what they are. Those who live in them have, as Dunn helps people appreciate, astounding memories. But oral traditions are also rather fluid. The gospels are also examples of ancient biography. Ancient biographers did not have the same "scientific" attitude towards their art as do modern historians. Ancient biography was consciously subjective. The goal was not to strive after an objective account of a person's life. The goal was to select those aspects of a person's life that best revealed (in the author's opinion) the character of the person. Thus, the gospels should be understood in that light. They are working within the fluid medium of oral tradition, interacting at times with a variety of sources, and are attempts to help readers arrive at the "feel" of Jesus' character, as understood in the social and historical context of that time period. Think of how the titles "Son of God" and "Son of Man" would be understood in the different communities (Jewish and pagan) who preserved and translated the oral traditions. Jesus’ pagan biographers wanted to make him sound like a son of a god. Like the “son of a god” Apollonius of Tyana, his mother knew from before his birth that he would be divine; his religious authority and knowledge was evident even in his youth; he traveled around gathering disciples and urging people to stop being obsessed with physical things; he was an exorcist, a healer, a prophet, and he could even raise the dead; after the Romans killed him, his followers believed that he came back from the dead. (Of course, in a Roman context, the title sounds dangerously like sedition, for the Emperor too has a God as his father. And the king of Israel was God’s son. The pagans would hear "Son of God" and think of a divine man; the Jews would think of a kingly man.) The identity of the "Son of Man" is a good example of the way those who viewed themselves as followers of Jesus reinterpreted his words. It is understandable that Jesus' followers would want to think of him as the Son of Man from the apocalyptic book of Daniel. (For those pagan Christians not aware of Daniel's prophecy, I suppose the expression would have refered to Jesus' humanity.) Thus, when the oral tradition preserves for us a passage like Mark 8:38, in which there is no indication that Jesus is talking about himself, we have reason to trust it. It's not the kind of verse Jesus' followers would have made up. Jesus expected the world to end in his generation and before his followers tasted death. The Son of Man would come, the dead would be raised, and all the injustice being inflicted on the Jewish people would be put to right. The fluidity of the oral tradition can be made clear in the numerous ways each of the gospels subtly alter their material in order to fit the needs and beliefs of their communities. The apocalyptic nature of Jesus’ message is gradually watered down. He starts claiming to be the heavenly character from Jewish Apocalyptic, “The Son of Man.” Finally, he claims equality with God. Instead of people being judged when the Son of Man arrives based on how they treated the lowly (Matthew 25:31-46), people are judged based on whether or not they accept Jesus.
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What's your favortie drink?
by IronClaw inso here i sit on a saturday night nursing my favorite bottle of wine.
a pinot grigio.
so what drink does it for you?.
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veradico
Frannie, thanks for the suggestion. I think you are the second person in my life to suggest I try that, so now I have to.
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What's your favortie drink?
by IronClaw inso here i sit on a saturday night nursing my favorite bottle of wine.
a pinot grigio.
so what drink does it for you?.
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veradico
I'm going to have to look into this Bushmill's 10 stuff. Sounds good. I adore the fact that if anything can be fermented humans probably have fermented it. I just discovered fruit lambics. I prefer cherry. Speaking of cherries, has anyone ever had Kijafa cherry wine? It's a wonderful dessert wine. Or, going back to the world of beer, a Blue Moon with an orange. Or, following the fruit idea, a bottle of Hornsby's hard apple cider. I can appriciate the virtues of a virgin hot chocolate, but the only reason why it has been saving itself is because it knows that somewhere out there is a bottle of ButterShots that wants to mingle with it in a wonderfully wet and, to use the word again, orgasmic way. In the warmer months, I agree about mojitos, but they'll have to fight it out with Gin and Tonics. But it's cold right now. The other week I made some hot spiced buttered rum batter. A friend of mine was in Mexico and brought back some real vanilla. To the vanilla one adds brown sugar, butter, cloves, cardamon (sometimes called cardamom), cinnamon, and nutmeg. Once one has made this flavorful batter, simply add a table spoon or so of the batter to a mug of hot water and rum.
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Talk on Apostates
by IslandBrother inhave you ever walked on the beach and tried following another persons footprints; matching your own steps with them as exactly as possible?
by calling ourselves christians, we have indicated our desire to do just that, to follow closely in the footsteps of christ.
have you ever noticed though that on a crowded beach, , there were several sets of footprints, many of them may look alike.
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veradico
I don't really like the image at all. I don't think of "following" the teachings or examples of spiritual people as a matter of forcing myself to fit into a precise pattern. A robot could mimic the precise behavior of Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tse, Mencius, Confuscius, Zarathustra, Apollonius or anyone else, but what would it matter? "Following" is a metaphor. If one tries to force one's self to fit a pattern that is contrary to human nature, as I would argue the Watchtower model is, he has apostatized from everything that is worthy of the word "divine." As soon as we turn ourselves over to others, abdicating our freedom and consequent responsibility to make our own decisions, we deprive our very lives and actions of meaning. Our feet fill the footprints of those who have gone before, and that is all. Our eyes cannot attend to the sight of the dunes and the surf and the sky; our ears cannot hear the crashing of the waves and the calls of the seabirds; we cannot smell the salty moisture in the air. For we are following the footsteps of the Faithful and Discreet Slave.
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What is Gnosticism and why do Christians dislike it ?
by 5go inaside from the fact that gnosis is greek for knowledge.
two things christians seem to dislike greeks(think animal house) and knowledge (other than knowledge of the christ of course).
seeing as they practice a form of it anyway.. gnostics believe that they have secret knowledge about god, humanity and the rest of the universe of which the general population was unaware.
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veradico
I forgot to mention Harold Bloom's fun book on American religions (which contains, by the way, a delightfully amusing chapter on Jehovah's Witnesses) in which he argues that the American faith is characterized by a Gnostic spirit.
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What is Gnosticism and why do Christians dislike it ?
by 5go inaside from the fact that gnosis is greek for knowledge.
two things christians seem to dislike greeks(think animal house) and knowledge (other than knowledge of the christ of course).
seeing as they practice a form of it anyway.. gnostics believe that they have secret knowledge about god, humanity and the rest of the universe of which the general population was unaware.
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veradico
It certainly would be easy to argue that the Johannine epistles (in which term I include the "essay" or whatever you want to call it of 1st John) are arguing against a kind of Gnostic Christianity which some Christians--perhaps after coming into contact with the Gnostic trend of thought that emerged in the Hellenistic world around and probably slightly before the development of the various Christian sects--viewed as the proper understanding of the faith confessed in the 4th Gospel. (Even though such features of the Gospel as the (in general) realized escatology, the mixture of high and low Christologies, the sense of alienation from the world, and the belief in the power of knowledge or truth to set one free can be explained by the historical development of the community in relation to Judaism, they are consistent with the "Gnostic" trend of thought that might have been coming into existence around that time.) However, I think the Johannine community (or, to be more P.C., the community of the Beloved Disciple) and its offshoot that is addressed in the epistles had as much to do with the development of Christian Gnosticism as did Jewish apocalypticism, Platonism, the mystery cults or Zoroastrianism. The "orthodox" anti-Gnostic rhetoric about the group's immorality has to be suspect. Furthermore, the myths generated by the Gnostics should be treated as poetic attempts to express non-physical concepts; the "orthodox" far to often attempt to force upon Gnostic texts absurdly literal interpretations. The genuine Gnostic texts that have been discovered indicate that Gnostics were characterized, as someone on the forum already mentioned, by asceticism, not by wild sexuality and canabalism. Unfortunately, due to their secrecy, the Gnostics were viewed by their fellow Christians with the same suspicion as were Christians by Greco-Roman society as a whole. Certainly, their views were not what we would call orthodox, but, at the time that they articulated their views, "orthodoxy" did not exactly exist. There are points of doctrinal comparison between Gnosticism and Jehovah's Witnesses (some of these have been mentioned: the need for "accurate knowledge" for salvation, the three classes of humanity (those who have the divine spark, Christians in general, and the rest of the doomed world), the dualistic perspective on the world (i.e., the world is evil and is ruled by the Evil One, but we are separate and chosen), etc.); however, it's hard to be as offended by these doctrines in Gnosticism since they do not seem to have been linked to the spirit of exclusivity, pride, and organizational devotion that characterizes Jehovah's Witnesses. Gnostics were notoriously hard to distinguish from their fellow Christians. I think the comparison someone made to groups like the Free Masons was apt. I suppose those who are committed to the doctrines that became relatively catholic among Christians particularly from the 4th cent. on would look upon the Gnostics with more disapproval than I do. Gnostic beliefs such as that the creator God is not the true God and had nothing to do with the Son (who, by the way, did not really live and die as a man) would be offensive. I personally find the links to Eastern thought in Gnosticism most provocative and interesting. Michael Williams' _Rethinking "Gnosticism"_, of course, cannot be ignored. He argues that the whole catagory or term "Gnosticsim" is artifical.