Posts by Half banana

13

Has science replaced the bible? WT June 1 2015

by stuckinarut2 in

i picked up a printed copy of the june 1 2015 public edition wt..... before the end of page 1, the stupidity is already evident.. they quote a dictionary, but don't list which one.. they quote a "world- famous physicist", but don't give his name.

the quote looks like it is edited to fit their reasoning.. they quote "others", but no reference to who they are is provided.. the next page quotes "a popular science writer" who??.

then the classic line "jehovah's witnesses respect each person's right to make a decision on this matter".

Half banana

The practice of not giving citations for the source of academic information is both impolite and ignorant.

The consequence, as Stuck has implied; only the fellow ignoramuses will continue with it. This is a selection process (think of evolution) whereby WT literature will be exclusively for the ignorant and by the ignorant.

If the Org still exists, what will it look like in a few years time if this trend continues? What sort of members do they want; just those with learning difficulties? Will they condemn all learning which does not originate with them? Will they start to say that God hates education? Will they start saying that God only loves the most stupid and ignorant people... like the leaders of the cult?

86

What are you gonna do when the existence of god is disproved?

by Doltologist in

in 1897, j.j. thomson discovered the electron.

this was the first constituent part of the atom which, for 2,000 years, was thought to be indivisible.

today, we know of 18 elemental particles following the recent discovery of the higgs boson, the so-called god particle.. back in 1897, most people believed in god because there weren't even any theories as to how the universe came into being.

Half banana

God is an irrelevance. Thank God I realised God is no more a reality than Satan is back when I was still a JW.

69

Breaking News: Anthony Morris III comments on Ireland legalization of gay marriage.

by cappytan in

jw
friends

#notsatire.

thanks to wifibandit and pixel for collaborating on this.

more to come.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxce4duetw8.

Half banana

Where is that quiet mystique of reverence which the GB held before the star spangled JW-org TV exposure?

In tatters I think!

69

Breaking News: Anthony Morris III comments on Ireland legalization of gay marriage.

by cappytan in

jw
friends

#notsatire.

thanks to wifibandit and pixel for collaborating on this.

more to come.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxce4duetw8.

Half banana

dble pst

52

Help with understanding

by Doltologist in

please take pity on me someone and help.. i was going to say that i suffer from aspergers syndrome but actually, i've come to rather enjoy it.. no, seriously, i really do have aspergers which is why my posts may seem a little odd to some of you.

ok, they may seem bloody odd to most of you.. my world exists in a binary frame.

things are or they are not.. i know that in the "real world" things might be or might not be as well as are and are not.

Half banana

@ adjusted,I haven’t got much time to spare at the moment but copious discussions of Josephus’ three references to a Christ are found under the scholarly heading of Testimonium Flavianum. This subject is so important that over the centuries it has accumulated more interest and research than you can throw a stick at; it is vast! Note how The English writer Thackeray analysed his writing style and recorded how many times J used each repeated expression. Amongst the problems incurred are the viewpoint of the reviewer, like the shaman’s divination device; the results often confirm the psychological bias. It is also to be remembered there were many christs before Jesus and in the first century it seems from my reading of events his name is not mentioned anywhere and only appears perhaps as late as the end of the second.

35

June JW Broadcast - Jehovah's & Jesus' names Are Interchangeable!

by The Searcher in

mr. geoffrey jackson hosts this month's propaganda-fest, and uses a favourite catchphrase of the org - "by extension" - to get out of the dead-end which the scriptwriters had put him in.

he quotes matthew 10:22 - "and you will be objects of hatred by all people on account of my [jesus'] name; but he that has endured to the end is the one that will be saved.".

mr. jackson knows only too well that probably no j.w.

Half banana

My take on the long term outworking of this predicament is that indeed there is always ambiguity in the NT about the identity of Jesus and his relationship with his father. The Org is always having to watch its back to be doctrinally consistent but never manages it... and since they realise JC is textually a dodgy character, they downplay him and stress Big J instead, Jehovah after all is their trade-mark .

Trouble is that Yahweh alias Jehovah, who started life as a cow headed wooden idol in the Canaanite pantheon, also has a dismal track record for credibility. The reason is that the Bible is fiction in the first place.

26

What on earth have the JW org got to offer?

by Half banana in

what on earth have jw org got to offer?.

one hundred and thirty six years this july of the worlds most published and least read magazine: the inglorious watchtower.

nothing in it which is original has been of any use to mankind.

Half banana

@Fading Albatross, too true!

@Mille, you are absolutely right. The JW org trades in feelings and most certainly not in logic or evidential fact.

Nevertheless as you say the JW org does have something to offer: the company of like minded sheep-brained hopeless cases who cannot deal with the world as it actually is, who bond by sharing the distant lure of perfection and who equate obedience to the publishing company with getting brownie points from God.

At the cost of stifling common sense and natural human ties, they entice with the hope of perfect life in paradise. They proffer the dream, but no organization or any God can supply the goods.

For JWs, this flimsy hope eclipses and even destroys the pleasures of getting on with enjoying our lot of a short and bittersweet life on a beautiful planet.

36

Gods name

by Mr.logic in

jw
friends

what is the correct spelling of gods proper name"yahweh or jehovah"?

if the jw's maintain that yahweh is more proper, why do they misspell it "jehovah"?

if the name of god is so important, then you should not only pronounce it correctly, but spell it correctly too.

Half banana

Does it really matter how you spell the name of an invisible friend?

52

Help with understanding

by Doltologist in

please take pity on me someone and help.. i was going to say that i suffer from aspergers syndrome but actually, i've come to rather enjoy it.. no, seriously, i really do have aspergers which is why my posts may seem a little odd to some of you.

ok, they may seem bloody odd to most of you.. my world exists in a binary frame.

things are or they are not.. i know that in the "real world" things might be or might not be as well as are and are not.

Half banana

@ Cappytan, I have to disagree with your basis for believing in Jesus as a person. I don’t believed he ever lived because there is no concrete evidence for his existence but there is evidence for political propaganda in the Roman state to promote a fictional god-man saviour hero with a Jewish name. That he existed is the propagandistic assumption which has powered the Roman Church for nearly seventeen hundred years. A superb book to read which helps get a handle on the events of the first century is A Short History of Christianity by JM Robertson...old... but astonishingly good. (Lots of others have written books of the same title).

Secondly Wikipedia is popular consensus information and not necessarily scholarly, i.e. peer reviewed. Wikipedia is not considered a scholarly source at universities.

@Adjusted, although no handwriting of his remains, we have first hand, primary sources in the case of Socrates, the key elements which make history historical. We have no such record of Jesus. All we have is second hand stories about him written years after the purported events. Even more telling is that we have almost exactly the same stories about the life of the NT god-man attributed to other god-men two thousand years before Jesus was supposed to have existed... Crucially in the argument against a real Jesus is that the “Jesus” story did by no means originate with him. The gospels for example tell their own variants on the older set of myths about the saviour of mankind, close in accord but not quite the same. Myths have to have the right ingredients to replicate but the ‘accent’ often changes.

Josephus’ mention of Jesus had long ago been dismissed by textual scholars in the past as a forged insert into his text... but Christians now, in their desperate need to find Jesus as a real person, have resurrected the matter again in an attempt to make Jesus real.

There are very strong arguments against Josephus having known or heard of a wonder working god-man called Jesus. Josephus wrote for educated Romans, had Jesus existed his readership would have wanted to know about him. If there was such a man as the Biblical Jesus; then Josephus would have recorded reams of information not just a passing mention which would have only whetted the reader’s curiosity. Alas there is no secular documentation of Jesus; I would maintain that he is a fiction in just the same way that his town of Nazareth did not exist in Josephus’ day. Jesus was supposed to have lived in Galilee about half an hour’s walk from where Josephus lived. He was too astute a historian to miss out salient facts. The mention of Jesus simply ‘in passing’, is out of character for Josephus’ writings and for him to record he was “the Messiah” is neither the language of a serious historian nor that of a Jew. The handwritten text which does say this is surely a later Christian forgery.

@Doltologist, thank you for telling us about your condition, I do not have it myself but sympathise. One of the joys of being human is our differences.

52

Help with understanding

by Doltologist in

please take pity on me someone and help.. i was going to say that i suffer from aspergers syndrome but actually, i've come to rather enjoy it.. no, seriously, i really do have aspergers which is why my posts may seem a little odd to some of you.

ok, they may seem bloody odd to most of you.. my world exists in a binary frame.

things are or they are not.. i know that in the "real world" things might be or might not be as well as are and are not.

Half banana

@ Cappytan, I have to disagree with your basis for believing in Jesus as a person. I don’t believed he ever lived because there is no concrete evidence for his existence but there is evidence for political propaganda in the Roman state to promote a fictional god-man saviour hero with a Jewish name. That he existed is the propagandistic assumption which has powered the Roman Church for nearly seventeen hundred years. A superb book to read which helps get a handle on the events of the first century is A Short History of Christianity by JM Robertson...old... but astonishingly good. (Lots of others have written books of the same title).

Secondly Wikipedia is popular consensus information and not necessarily scholarly, i.e. peer reviewed. Wikipedia is not considered a scholarly source at universities.

@Adjusted, although no handwriting of his remains, we have first hand, primary sources in the case of Socrates life, the elements which make history historical. We have no such record of Jesus. All we have is second hand stories about him written years after the purported events. Even more telling is that we have almost exactly the same stories about the life of the NT god-man attributed to other god-men two thousand years before Jesus was supposed to have existed... Crucially in the argument against a real Jesus is that the “Jesus” story did by no means originate with him. The gospels for example tell their own variants on the older set of myths about the saviour of mankind, close in accord but not quite the same. Myths have to have the right ingredients to replicate but the ‘accent’ often changes.

Josephus’ mention of Jesus had long ago been dismissed by textual scholars in the past as a forged insert into his text... but Christians now, in their desperate need to find Jesus as a real person, have resurrected the matter again in an attempt to make Jesus real.

There are very strong arguments against Josephus having known or heard of a wonder working god-man called Jesus. Josephus wrote for educated Romans, had Jesus existed his readership would have wanted to know about him. If there was such a man as the Biblical Jesus; then Josephus would have recorded reams of information not just a passing mention which would have only whetted the reader’s curiosity. Alas there is no secular documentation of Jesus; I would maintain that he is a fiction in just the same way that his town of Nazareth did not exist in Josephus’ day. Jesus was supposed to have lived in Galilee about half an hour’s walk from where Josephus lived. He was too astute a historian to miss out salient facts. The mention of Jesus simply ‘in passing’, is out of character for Josephus’ writings and for him to record he was “the Messiah” is neither the language of a serious historian nor that of a Jew. The handwritten text which does say this is surely a later Christian forgery.

@Doltologist, thank you for telling us about your condition, I do not have it myself but sympathise. One of the joys of being human is our differences.