out of all religions, catholicism, to me, is wrong and clearly could never be the truth.
Tom
You make a fair point, I'm sorry if I came across too harshly I actually respect you a lot for your williness to come forward and stand by your faith.
You do better than a lot on this forum that get so involved and wrapped up in their hatred of WTs they become anti-witnesses of a sort unable to move on and while in many cases it's because family members are still JWs, I can't help feeling that its a lot healthier to do as you have done and find a belief that they are happier in
reniaa
ok i'll stay on topic lets use a bible example were the figure has to be guessed, pharaoh killing the babies around moses birth!
we know the egyptians were getting fearful of how large a group the slaves were getting this seems surprising untill later calculations reveal 3 million israelites slaves joined moses on the Exodus so my question is....
In light of 3 million slaves traveling with moses only 60/80 years later how many newborn baby boys must the egyptians have slaughtered if they killed them all in one specific year, culling the herd of slaves so to speak?
The bible doesn't reveal it, but I'm sure a rough calculation could be made?
i would like to know how jw's reconcile their world view with the fact that there exists creatures that live solely on blood.
bed bugs are in the news at the moment so they serve as a good example.
bed bugs live solely on the blood of animals.. ok, please explain to me how you reconcile the belief of creation by jehovah with the existence of bed bugs?.
I think this is a case of Jw's possibly going beyond what the bible says, falling into their own trap of backward speculation, but I could be wrong the bible says vegetarian animals in beginning but is that outside of eden?, all we know is man didn't eat meat right upto flood. Speculation often comes back to bite you in the butt, The lion lying down with the lamb scripture is a bible promise but it's in the future. just found a website on creation with a eww youtube on it.
out of all religions, catholicism, to me, is wrong and clearly could never be the truth.
attack me rather than the point I made nomoreguilt? good tactic!
I recognise the problems with JWs and how that is reflected in changes and mistakes, but if the blinkers are off for JWs they are also off for any other religion and or political organisations.
So I'm not going to do what most ex-Jw's do who turn from JW because of doctrine issues and just put a new set of blinkers on for another religion or organisation in this case catholism.
The example I used which you ignored is exactly the sort of doctrine change you hold against the Jw's, in fact it's worse because it's a major doctrinal change from a set belief for 1800 years. I can probably dig up thousands of books fully illustrated of hellfire and damnation with full description of suffering sinners will have that all contradict this new statement from the pope, who because he is seen as God's mouthpiece and divine in himself has set a new doctrinal policy.
out of all religions, catholicism, to me, is wrong and clearly could never be the truth.
Roman Catholic Beliefs
The teaching of the Roman Catholic church prior to 1999-JUL has been consistent:
Hell is a location where its inmates will be severely punished without any hope of relief, for eternity. Among those punished will be Satan, the angels that supported him, and persons who have died "with grave and unrepentant sins" which have not been wiped clean by church rituals. 1 The level of torture in Hell will be meted out in accordance with the seriousness of the individual's sin. It will last forever. There is no prospect of relief or mercy. The Roman Catholic church teaches that punishment will be in the form of isolation from God, and some supernatural form of fire which causes endless, unbearable pain, but does not consume the body. Eastern Orthodox churches teach that the precise form of punishment is not known to us. The Church teaches that most individuals who are not destined to Hell first suffer punishment in Purgatory. This is a type of time-limited Hell during which they become fully cleansed and acceptable for admission to heaven. In the special case of newborns who die before being baptized, the church is ambivalent. It has no official stance. However, many Roman Catholics believe that newborns go to a place or state called "Limbo" which is separate from heaven, but where the infants are happy. On 1999-JUL-28, at his Wednesday general audience, Pope John Paul II made some statement that made the front pages of some North American newspapers. He said that:
"Hell is not a punishment imposed externally by God, but the condition resulting from attitudes and actions which people adopt in this life...So eternal damnation is not God's work but is actually our own doing." "More than a physical place, hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy." Hell is "the pain, frustration and emptiness of life without God."2,3
I recognise when the witnesses changed generation to make it more paletable and allow more time so I'm surprised that former witnesses that condemn this in JW's accept the same softening of the Hell stance in Catholics to make it more main stream?
The softening of hell was a massive change in 1999 Tom and quite the equal of anything people accuse JW's of hmmm.
How about an alternative question erm who killed more people in the last World war? hmmm that would be America after dropping 2 nuclear bombs on japan. Or Germany trying to genocide a whole race
this is prompted by reniaa who claims that one of the things that jws have right is the name jehovah.. you know how if you're trying to convert someone to be a jw, you put your best foot forward and try to keep the controversial stuff that might "stumble" them on the back burner?
(like say, mother's day or when i was a kid, pinatas?
) well, that's how i categorize the whole topic of the divine name.
Hi open mind
sorry about that last sentence I was getting sleepy and lol I'm not sure I can make sense of it myself this morning hehe :)
How important is pronounciation?
consider the following...
The Nazarene Way of Essenic Studies
Yeshua or Jesus?
The Mis-Transliteration of a Greek Mis-Transliteration
http://www.thenazareneway.com/yeshua_jesus_real_name.htm
What we pronounce now is the latinised form of jesus certainly not the original, so bonezz your arguement of if we can't pronouce it correctly we shouldn't at all is not a valid one or we would have to apply it to jesus too and change all our bibles etc to the original pronouciation.
How important are vowels? we have 21 consonants in english language and 5 vowels to pad out the words the hebrews written language shows you don't need vowels to know the word, THS S TH WY TH HBRW PPL WRT BCK THN, means "this is the way Hebrew people wrote back then," so they could easily pronounce words without vowels.
So YHWH is God's name there is no getting away from that and just because someone used the same vowels which are in Adonai doesn't make it Adonai, it just made it Jehovah because vowels are there for the pronounciation than the actual word as you can see from my example above.
So that is all the facts pertaining to JHWH, jehovah, Yahweh I guess in the end we all have to decide if using the english version of God's name Jehovah is better than a totally different word Lord, that can in the end change the whole meaning of a scripture?
4 Trust the LORD always, because the LORD, the LORD alone, is an everlasting rock.
and some cases make the scripture sound like the author had a stutter.
but in other cases just make me sad by it's loss
18 That they may ( A ) know that ( B ) You alone, whose name is the LORD,
Are the ( C ) Most High over all the earth.
the whole richness of this scripture is lost by the removal of God's name and the truth as well because in the end how important is a name?
this is prompted by reniaa who claims that one of the things that jws have right is the name jehovah.. you know how if you're trying to convert someone to be a jw, you put your best foot forward and try to keep the controversial stuff that might "stumble" them on the back burner?
(like say, mother's day or when i was a kid, pinatas?
) well, that's how i categorize the whole topic of the divine name.
Not only did the "superstitious jews" allow the correct pronunciation to lapse, GOD HIMSELF allowed it. You haven't really addressed one of the key parts of my initial thread.
I did in my recent post but you missed it,
The point I made... is this is faulty reasoning because it doesn't allow for certain similar reasonings if we can go down that road.
1/ if God wasn't bothered by his name being used why use it at all? 7000 times in Ot is a lot to not be bothered about.
2/ So maybe he put it in and changed his mind and so allowed it to lapse be replaced thereby letting it slide into historical oblivion, again this doesn't work since it's been found and restored.
3/ Why allow the witnesses to use it as an identifying mark? if you have made sure it wasn't used by jews in the past? Does not correctly pronouncing it cancel it out so they can use it? if so wouldn't that also cancel nearly all the other names in the bible because there no way any are correctly pronounced because we are talking with English language and verbal expressions when trying to pronounce them.
These are all the roads I can go down using your reasoning that somehow jehovah is responsible for it's not being used deliberately because it automatically begs the question of him now allowing it and why?
this is prompted by reniaa who claims that one of the things that jws have right is the name jehovah.. you know how if you're trying to convert someone to be a jw, you put your best foot forward and try to keep the controversial stuff that might "stumble" them on the back burner?
(like say, mother's day or when i was a kid, pinatas?
) well, that's how i categorize the whole topic of the divine name.
and the number of insertions of Jehovah into the NT by the WT is 237.
thx i didn't know the exact number I was relying on memory oops never agood idea for me lol
Erm blondie I'm not sure what point your trying to make are you implying Jw's should only use Jehovah not God? which is weird be like saying they could only use jesus not christ.
My main point is for those that say "If God wanted us to use his name he wouldn't have allowed it to be replaced by Lord" is faulty reasoning because by the same token I can say "If God didn't want us to use his name he would have stopped it's discovery and then the Jehovah's witnesses using it"
For all yahweh supporters as nice as it is, it's still is not proven to be how to pronounce God's name in the same way Jehovah isn't, so both are equal in that sense, the best we can say is yahweh is more likely maybe but Jehovah has the senority of having origins from 12th century so was chosen instead, If yahweh had been chosen it would equally have not mattered the importance is we are using the 4 consonants and pronouncing Gods name the English version of it, which was established well before the Jw's came along as jehovah.
this is prompted by reniaa who claims that one of the things that jws have right is the name jehovah.. you know how if you're trying to convert someone to be a jw, you put your best foot forward and try to keep the controversial stuff that might "stumble" them on the back burner?
(like say, mother's day or when i was a kid, pinatas?
) well, that's how i categorize the whole topic of the divine name.
Reniaa
The NWT does o just fine in restoring the Divine name to the OT...as do other versions such as the ASV. We have the backup to show the Tetragrammeton was present. However, the NWT is alone and unsubstiated in 'restoring' the Divine name to the NT- they have 'restored' something that was never there
I appreciate your point isaac and the 130 something times Jws have put jehovah into the Nt they have to be accountable for but I would uphold them if they putting it in a scripture which is a direct quote from an OT one using the tetragrammeton. how can it be more correct not to use it if your quoting from a scripture that does use it?
36 For David himself said by the holy spirit, ' Jehovah saith unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make 37 thine enemies thy footstool. ...
and jws weren't the first to put it into the nt
- "Newcome" New Testament
Translated by William Newcome, but revised by Unitarians. Published 1808. One of the first to use "Jehovah" in the NT, and the first in English to translate John 1:1 "the Word was a god".
- Griesbach Novum Testamentum Graece, Vol 2 (1810)
Facsimile of the second volume of Griesbach's last edition of his Greek Testament.- Heinfetter New Testament
A literal translation of the New Testament, by Herman Heinfetter. Translated by Frederick Parker. 1863. Digital facsimile in PDF. Uses "Jehovah" many places.
