Some people in Australia, especially those holidaying in the mountains at the time, celebrate Christmas on July 25. Does that make it a religious holiday? Or is it beacuse there is snow around at the time?
Doug
Doug Mason
JoinedPosts by Doug Mason
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Why do Atheists Celebrate Christmas
by givemejustalittlemoretime inscientist and atheist richard dawkins has admitted he does celebrate christmas - and enjoys singing traditional christmas carols each festive season.. the writer and evolutionary biologist told singer jarvis cocker that he happily wishes everyone a merry christmas - and used to have a tree when his daughter was younger.. dawkins, one of the most famous atheists in the world, was interviewed by sheffield born cocker when he stepped in as a christmas guest editor on radio four's today programme.. 'i am perfectly happy on christmas day to say merry christmas to everybody,' dawkins said.
'i might sing christmas carols - once i was privileged to be invited to kings college, cambridge, for their christmas carols and loved it.. read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1100842/why-i-celebrate-christmas-worlds-famous-atheist.html#ixzz39dwxid00 ?.
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Leviticus 20:27 ....Why does it say to stone a medium or spiritist?
by opusdei1972 ina man or woman who is a medium or spiritist among you must be put to death.
you are to stone them; their blood will be on their own heads.
(leviticus 20:27).
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Doug Mason
Crazyguy,
I agree with you: much of the Hebrew Bible is shaped by the religious elites who were taken into captivity, and they produced material that would support their intentions. They said that the calamities which had befallen the nation resulted from people failing to obey their prophets.
And so they wrote all of their opponents out of history or demonised them, including the priests who were not based at Jerusalem. The reshaped history that they produced is now known as the Deuteronomic History, and it includes Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings.
Unfortunately, today we see the consequences of people believing that the propaganda represented actual history. (Not that Jerusalem was ever the capital of Israel.)
Doug
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Is there Such a Thing as TIme
by givemejustalittlemoretime inthe present moment is real.
however much you may remember the past or anticipate the future, you live in the present.
the next second of your life is the future.
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Doug Mason
Time is distorted by forces such as gravity. This results in time changing speed as one moves further from the earth's surface. For this reason, the times on the satellites used for GPS have to be kept updated to compensate.
Space is likewise not linear, but is distorted along with time by forces, such as is exerted by bodies such as the sun and by "dark matter".
Although the late iron age people who penned the Hebrew myths said that the earth hangs on nothing, it is indeed held in place by the interplay of these forces.
Doug
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If the bible is "a letter from God", why is it that only the GB can interpret it?
by stuckinarut2 inwe know that witnesses often use the illustration "the bible is like a letter from god.
a letter from a loving father to all his children etc".
so in this letter he says "he desires none to be destroyed, but all to survive etc".
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Doug Mason
The Bible was created by the Church that the GB says had slid into apostasy.
Doug
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Doug Mason
No one knows who wrote the Gospels, although we can be certain that the Matthew Gospel was written by people with a Jewish background.
Likewise, the authors of several letters attributed to Paul were written by unknown authors. Paul, of course was of the diaspora and he had no affiliation with the community at Jerusalem. He shows this at Galatians, despite the religious fiction written by "Luke".
No one knows who wrote 1 Peter and 2 Peter, the latter most likely written about 100 years after Peter's death. The latter is an exposition of Jude, which in turn is based on 1 Enoch (a book commonly used throughout the NT). The author of Revelation is not known but he was definitely had a strong Jewish background.
The people who decided which writings would be accepted as Christian Scriptures and hence form the NT were not Jewish.
Each writing had to reflect the culture of the community that produced it. None of these original texts exists, and those texts we are left with have been modified to include the views and opinions of successive copiers and their communities. Thus we need to identify the idioms, understandings, religious and secular politics, geography, interplay with neighbouring communities at each time, and so on.
Further, when we come to the NT writings, the feature known as Pesher comes into play. This term, which finds its genesis in the Dead Sea community, says "this is that", applying Scripture to their own times while totally disregarding the original context of the text. We see this practice in Jesus' "explanations", as well as in Paul's and Luke's. Today, we see the WTS employ this method, when they say that the Scriptures which were written thousands of years ago, are speaking of them. This, I believe, is the reason they reject Higher Criticism while at the same time as accepting Lower Criticism.
Doug
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The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad
by God_Delusion inhi guys and gals!.
i've just put the finishing touches to my latest article, which talks about the tree of the knowledge of good and bad.. you see, i've always been fascinated with the tree of knowledge and the tree of life.
both are incredibly weird stories.
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Doug Mason
[continues from previous post]
The renaming of the woman as Eve, chavvah ("progenitress"), "because she was the mother of all the living" (Gen. 3:20), happens only after eating from the tree. This too bolsters the "sexual" reading of this story—eating of the tree of ultimate "knowledge" turns the wife of Adam from ha-ishah ("the woman") into a (potential) mother.
God's response to the woman after she eats from the tree is not a curse. The words "And to the woman He said, / 'I will make most severe / Your pangs in childbearing; / In pain shall you bear children. / Yet your urge shall be for your husband, / And he shall rule over you” (Gen. 3:16) are a description of women's new state: procreative, with all the "pains" connected to procreation in the premodern world, including the natural pain of childbirth. This verse is not stating (as a harmonistic reading of Genesis 1-3 might imply) that before eating the fruit women gave birth painlessly, but now they would have labor pains. Furthermore, it notes that women will not do what most people do—try to avoid pain at all cost—because "your urge shall be for your husband, / And he shall rule over you." The meaning of this last section is ambiguous. The root m-sh-l ("to rule") has a general sense, so that its use might suggest an overall hierarchy of male over female. However, the context of this verse suggests that it means merely that men will determine when couples engage in sexual intercourse.
It is difficult to determine the attitude of this mythmaker toward the new state that he is describing. Is he happy that a boring life as asexual immortals in Eden has been traded for a challenging, sexual life outside of Eden? Or does he miss immortality? Or is he being merely descriptive, noting how humankind moved from an earlier stage to its current one? The Bible (in contrast to much of Victorian and post-Victorian society) has a generally positive attitude toward human sexuality, as may be seen most clearly from the Song of Songs. In various places, it sees women in particular (in contrast to men) as very sexual beings (see especially Proverbs 1-9). Thus, it is quite reasonable within a biblical context to see Eve as a type of Pandora figure, who is to be commended for bringing sex into this world.
Implications and Conclusions
Genesis 1:1-2:4a and 2:4b-3:24 are two separate stories, written by different authors using different styles. They are both myths—neither aims primarily at offering a scientific description of "the earth and everything upon it" (Neh. 9:6). They are metaphors on the story level, traditional tales dealing with issues of collective importance. As such, they are "creating" worlds.
The first story describes a very good world, which is highly structured and controlled by a most powerful God who in some ways is so dissimilar from humans that he even has his own word, bara, to express his creative activity.
The world of the second story is much more ambiguous. Its God, a master potter (Gen. 2:7), is much more humanlike, walking and talking, even sewing (3:21). Also this world is unlike that in the previous story: it lacks the gender equality of the previous story, and it is not "very good."
Modern "critical" biblical scholarship fosters these observations by allowing the stories to be disengaged from each other, allowing each to be seen as an independent story, reflecting its author's perspectives. It understands them as constructive myths, which helped to frame the very essence of Israelite self-understanding, as well as their understanding of their relationship to their God, and to the world that they believed He had created. (“How to Read the Jewish Bible”, Marc Zvi Brettler, pages 45-47)
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The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad
by God_Delusion inhi guys and gals!.
i've just put the finishing touches to my latest article, which talks about the tree of the knowledge of good and bad.. you see, i've always been fascinated with the tree of knowledge and the tree of life.
both are incredibly weird stories.
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Doug Mason
[Part 1 of 2] - from Jewish Scholar Marc Zvi Brettler:
The Meaning of Genesis 2:4b – 3:24
The story as widely known has been filled out through various (Christian) interpretations. For example, nowhere does the text itself tell us what the forbidden fruit was. In early Christian tradition it was generally understood as an apple, whereas early Jewish tradition offered several opinions as to the fruit's identity, with the fig being the most popular—and contextually the most appropriate (see especially Gen. 3:7).
Other dearly held views of this text are also not borne out by a close reading. Thus, we might believe that its main theme is the curse received by the woman (and all women), yet the word "curse" is absent in God's comments to her (Gen. 3:16), while it is present in God's statements both to the serpent (3:14) and to the man (3:17). Moreover, the doctrines of the Fall of Man or original sin are nowhere to be found in this passage, though they appear in early Christian interpretation of the text.
The Garden Story is about immortality lost and sexuality gained. It begins from a simple premise: originally, people were immortal. In fact, the huge life spans recorded in the early chapters of Genesis are part of an effort to make a bridge between that original immortality and "normal" life spans. As immortal beings, they were asexual; in the Garden story God does not tell them to "be fertile and increase" as they were told in the first creation story (Gen. 1:28). Sexuality is discovered only after eating from the tree, when "they perceived that they were naked" (3:7). In fact, the divine command of 2:17 should not be understood as often translated—"for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die" (so the JPS translation)—but rather "for as soon as you eat of it, you shall become mortal." The connection between (procreative) sexuality and mortality is compelling and was well understood even in antiquity—if people were to be both sexually procreative and immortal, disastrous overpopulation would result.
Many details within chapters 2-3 support this interpretation. The tree that is first forbidden is (literally) "the tree of knowledge of good and bad." Here da-at ("knowledge") is being used in a sense that it often has in the Bible: intimate or sexual knowledge. "Good and bad" is being used here as a figure of speech called a "merism": two opposite terms are joined by the word "and"; the resulting figure means "everything" or "the ultimate." (Amerism is likewise used in Genesis 1:1, "heaven and earth," which there means the entire world.) The words "good and bad" have no moral connotation here.
[continues in following post]
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The end was near
by Doug Mason innearly wiped out.. https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/24549348/earth-survived-near-miss-from-2012-solar-storm-says-nasa/.
doug.
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Attack is the best form of distraction
by Doug Mason inwhile the wts attacks evolution, it needs to prove its hypothesis that each "day" of genesis 1 is actually 7000 years.. at least evolution has the evidence that enables it to reach the status of a scientific theory, whereas there is no tangible evidence for the wts to lift its idea above that of a mere hypothesis.. as an aside, it is interesting to note that lamarck published his evolutionary theory in the year that charles darwin was born.. doug.
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Doug Mason
Even today, not all evolutionists are Darwinian. The WTS is superficial in laying the foundation and execution of Evolution at Darwin's feet.
I simply put it as an aside to show that many others, such as Lamarck, proposed models of Evolution. Charles Darwin had to rush his book into publication in order to beat others to the punch.
Doug
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“In recent times, some fundamentalist religions have put forward creationism as the answer to evolution. But in doing so, they make a claim that is both unscriptural and unbelievable. It is that the heavens, the earth, and everything on the earth were created by God in 6 days of 24 hours each—yes, in just 144 literal hours! This teaching has caused many to ridicule the Bible. But is a “day” in the Bible always 24 hours in length?” (“The Watchtower”, April 1, 1986)
“The Genesis account of creation allows for the earth to be billions of years old and does not limit each creative day to 24 hours.” (“The Watchtower”, Dec. 1, 2000, page 31)
“A study of the fulfillment of Bible prophecy and of our location in the stream of time strongly indicate that each of the creative days (Genesis, chapter 1) is 7,000 years long. It is understood that Christ’s reign of a thousand years will bring to a close God’s 7,000-year ‘rest day,’ the last ‘day’ of the creative week. (Revelation 20:6; Genesis 2:2, 3) Based on this reasoning, the entire creative week would be 49,000 years long.” (“The Watchtower”, Jan. 1, 1987, page 30)
“Since the seventh day has been continuing for thousands of years, it may reasonably be concluded that each of the six creative periods, or days, was at least thousands of years in length.” (“Insight on the Scriptures”, Vol. 1, page 545)
“The Bible shows us that God proceeded to rest from his creative works some 6,000 years ago” (“Insight, Vol. 1, page 1129)
“The Bible does not reveal exactly when [God’s rest day] started. It was some time after the creation of Adam’s wife, Eve, about 6,000 years ago.” (“The Watchtower”, Oct 15, 2012, page 22)
“World events as well as Bible chronology indicate that we are now [in 1980] rapidly nearing the time for the thousand-year-long reign of Jesus Christ to start. His reign of a thousand years … will occupy the last thousand years of Jehovah’s rest day or Sabbath day of seven thousand years” (“The Watchtower”, Nov, 15, 1980, page 19)
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Attack is the best form of distraction
by Doug Mason inwhile the wts attacks evolution, it needs to prove its hypothesis that each "day" of genesis 1 is actually 7000 years.. at least evolution has the evidence that enables it to reach the status of a scientific theory, whereas there is no tangible evidence for the wts to lift its idea above that of a mere hypothesis.. as an aside, it is interesting to note that lamarck published his evolutionary theory in the year that charles darwin was born.. doug.
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Doug Mason
While the WTS attacks Evolution, it needs to prove its hypothesis that each "Day" of Genesis 1 is actually 7000 years.
At least Evolution has the evidence that enables it to reach the status of a scientific theory, whereas there is no tangible evidence for the WTS to lift its idea above that of a mere hypothesis.
As an aside, it is interesting to note that Lamarck published his Evolutionary Theory in the year that Charles Darwin was born.
Doug