@Village Idiot, I haven’t investigated enough to know the answer or even to know whether it’s possible to arrive at a conclusion as to a reality of Islam’s founding figure. I think the strongest parallel is in the sacralising of the text which appeared in the Roman Church also took place with the Koran with similar results.
Half banana
JoinedPosts by Half banana
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25
Bible Christianity is Holy baloney
by Half banana inunderpinning all the claims of the jw org is a belief in the sanctity of the bible as gods word.
this holy assumption is certainly never challenged by the watchtower and neither does the believer dare to use critical thinking to evaluate the source of his or her beliefs.
the watchtower org, for obvious reasons would not do this as they would need to sell up and hand back the money were they to admit that the bible is just a piece of literature and not divine in origin.
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25
Bible Christianity is Holy baloney
by Half banana inunderpinning all the claims of the jw org is a belief in the sanctity of the bible as gods word.
this holy assumption is certainly never challenged by the watchtower and neither does the believer dare to use critical thinking to evaluate the source of his or her beliefs.
the watchtower org, for obvious reasons would not do this as they would need to sell up and hand back the money were they to admit that the bible is just a piece of literature and not divine in origin.
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Half banana
@Village Idiot “cults like Christianity do not invent leaders; their members won’t have the imagination to do so.”
I quite agree with the second half of your sentence, they had no need for imagination when there was a ready-made and universal myth of a holy superman which could be elaborated upon.
Was it necessary to have a charismatic leader to jump start Christianity?
There are two strong arguments against this. Firstly as already stressed the virtually complete story of christ the superman, demi-god born of a virgin in a cave in midwinter with oxen, visited by three Persian astrologers, healed the sick raised Lazarus ,walked on water, turned water into wine and died at Easter on a cross etc . This tale was told from antiquity. Again, Christianity with a capital C began in the fourth century with the Roman Church. It became ‘Catholic’ or universal by the deliberate absorption of all significant religious beliefs syncretising them into the Christianity we recognise today.
The idea of Christ already existed in people’s minds so a man of flesh was not necessary and it was the Roman Church and Emperor Constantine, not any charismatic Jew which jump started the religion. In fact there is no extant written evidence that ”Jesus” was used in the first century. The most widely distributed Christian literature of the first two centuries, The Shepherd of Hermas, called the saviour hero ”Lord”.
As regards myth it is worth appreciating that the obvious does not apply here. The obvious assumption is that a historical person or event, a kernel of truth is elaborated and ‘mythologized’ over time. Whereas this is completely possible; this is not mythology, it is not the pattern of transmitting myth. For what it is worth; the opposite is true.
I would maintain that much of the Bible texts are built around myth and not history. It is critical in understanding that what has occurred is that writers have historicised the myths and not mythologized history. In other words they have clothed the myth to give it a recognisable personality or plausible historical setting. As with the question of who is the real James Bond; the character (the myth) is fiction but comes to life by elaboration of his exploits and by the actors who play him. Once this perception has been fully grasped it makes for real progress in understanding what the Bible is all about. (IMHO)
@ finklestein
"And wasn't the reason why the Romans eventually adopted Christianity was because it was deemed better than their old previous pagan practices ?"
I would say that they adopted Christianity because IT WAS ALREADY their pagan practice!
Consider...
1) Hundreds of years before Jesus, according to the Mithraic religion, three Wise Men of Persia came to visit the baby savior-god Mithra, bring him gifts of gold, myrrh and frankincense.2) Mithra was born on December 25 as told in the “Great Religions of the World”, page 330; “…it was the winter solstice celebrated by ancients as the birthday of Mithraism’s sun god”.
3) According to Mithraism, before Mithra died on a cross, he celebrated a “Last Supper with his twelve disciples, who represented the twelve signs of the zodiac.
4) After the death of Mithra, his body was laid to rest in a rock tomb.
5) Mithra had a celibate priesthood.
6) Mithra ascended into heaven during the spring (Passover) equinox (the time when the sun crosses the equator making night and day of equal length).
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Bible Christianity is Holy baloney
by Half banana inunderpinning all the claims of the jw org is a belief in the sanctity of the bible as gods word.
this holy assumption is certainly never challenged by the watchtower and neither does the believer dare to use critical thinking to evaluate the source of his or her beliefs.
the watchtower org, for obvious reasons would not do this as they would need to sell up and hand back the money were they to admit that the bible is just a piece of literature and not divine in origin.
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Half banana
Charlie Smith thank you for replying but your return fire is from a blunderbuss. I would have to make a list too long to answer the matters you raise. In defence of modern archaeologists, at least those I know and have worked with and who are scientists: they do not lie, at least not professionally. It has to be said that the Kenyons, sixty years ago, worked within a different investigative frame at odds with today’s approach. Their digs took the Bible at face value and they attempted to find evidence for its veracity, similar to the way that the WTBTS only raises secular evidence if it appears to support its cause.
You quote the Bible in a similar way, you make assumptions that we work from these propagandistic stories. (Ten plagues, exodus etc.) This was the very point I was trying to make. As Vivian’s cat knows: it’s poop ‘cos it smells like poop. Archaeology is a science and so it textual criticism and these two disciplines supporting the historian's narrative, now show that the Bible has little factual foundation in the modern post-enlightenment sense of history. Because of the Catholic Church’s ownership of the Bible they had by total political control infused or rather infected all western learning with its teachings as if sacred, above criticism and duty bound to be held true. We have moved on from here.
You must be aware of the books by Israeli archaeologists Finklestein and Silberman The Bible Unearthed and David and Solomon. The lack of archeological evidence for the Exodus; that the Jews were never in Egypt en masse in the first place, there is no Egyptian record of them being there which there would have existed had it been true.
Alas! You have removed your nuttery!
But I do agree with you crazy guy; the impotent goat herders of the Canaan highlands had to borrow their myths from their awesome Egyptian neighbours...and that is the more important story which illuminates and explains the contents of the Bible. It is the pagan myths which are the important details of the Bible texts not the enslaving religious propaganda derived from it.
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Bible Christianity is Holy baloney
by Half banana inunderpinning all the claims of the jw org is a belief in the sanctity of the bible as gods word.
this holy assumption is certainly never challenged by the watchtower and neither does the believer dare to use critical thinking to evaluate the source of his or her beliefs.
the watchtower org, for obvious reasons would not do this as they would need to sell up and hand back the money were they to admit that the bible is just a piece of literature and not divine in origin.
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Half banana
Opus dei, you said “I don't believe that Jesus was 100% an invention”. Where is your evidence that he existed?
I said that Jesus was highly unlikely to be an individual because his character, as in a play, as in literature, was already there for millenia before he is supposed to have existed.
Let me ask you, who is the real James Bond?
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Bible Christianity is Holy baloney
by Half banana inunderpinning all the claims of the jw org is a belief in the sanctity of the bible as gods word.
this holy assumption is certainly never challenged by the watchtower and neither does the believer dare to use critical thinking to evaluate the source of his or her beliefs.
the watchtower org, for obvious reasons would not do this as they would need to sell up and hand back the money were they to admit that the bible is just a piece of literature and not divine in origin.
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Half banana
Underpinning all the claims of the JW org is a belief in the sanctity of the Bible as God’s word. This “holy” assumption is certainly never challenged by the Watchtower and neither does the believer dare to use critical thinking to evaluate the source of his or her beliefs.
The Watchtower org, for obvious reasons would not do this as they would need to sell up and hand back the money were they to admit that the Bible is just a piece of literature and not divine in origin. For the true believer, to discover fault would be most unsettling. To investigate further, could reshape their whole world-view, it could actually change the identity of the person. What an incentive not to go down this avenue?
For countless generations of Homo sapiens possessing a faith in an invisible spirit world has been their emotional anchor. This idea is promoted in the Bible texts and in turn the Bible is revered as holy to the point that it is the word of God. So to come to realise that the Bible is mainly pagan and that Jesus is just a literary fiction would be to invite insecurity and probably depression as well.
Yet all things considered, the Bible is simply a collection of texts selected by the imperial Roman religious authorities as the corpus of writings made divinely sacred by the state Church for the purpose of political control. This is the story of Bible Christianity, it is fourth century Roman and not the imaginings of the Bible writers who are credited with the Christ story.
When Paul wrote “All scripture is inspired of God...” he referred to any writing of an uplifting nature as opposed to legal works, dramas, histories and inventories. He was not referring to the Bible since it did not exist. The received view is of some miraculous descent from heaven of Jesus and Christianity in the first century. This is a myth imagined by Christians and JWs.
The only reference to Jesus of Nazareth outside of the Bible is the mention in Josephus (called in scholarly circles the Testimonium Flavianum) which has been satisfactorily dismissed as a forgery. It was probably performed by an early church father inserting his wishful thinking into the historian’s hand-written text. Do not confuse the word christ with Jesus-Christianity for christs have existed from the early Bronze Age. In fact “Krst” was a name of the Egyptian saviour figure Osiris and his mother for that matter was “Meri”. These facts alone hint at the enormous field of textual scholarship regarding the entirely pagan and uninspired Biblical source documents from antiquity.
To imagine that Jesus said all the things he said in the Bible is preposterous in terms of literal historical truth. Hand written documents are most susceptible to alteration when being copied and political and cultic imperatives are easily slipped into the text. But more than that, since the character and deeds and life story of Jesus were already those same character, deeds and life stories of earlier ’God-men’ known from antiquity, it is highly improbable that Jesus ever existed as an individual since his character is a composite, a mosaic built from these older stories. The Bible writers were simply re-telling the same ”holy” tales in their local cultural dialect to promote their own religious power-base.
In short (since this is a long subject) I have little doubt now that Jesus is a fabrication and that the Bible is not in the slightest bit sacred apart from what human sentiment attributes to it.
The failing of the religious mind is to become enslaved to what other people have already called "holy".
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Managing a doomsday cult
by Half banana inthe wtbts have only one objective: to keep their religious engine on the tracks.
the pastoral care of their followers (although they would publicly deny it) is right at the bottom of their priorities.they demand abject loyalty.
as a matter of sociological fact the subscribers to the watchtower belief are on average placed at the lowest rung of the income ladder and in the bottom category of the least educated of religious groups.
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Half banana
The WTBTS have only one objective: to keep their religious engine on the tracks.
The pastoral care of their followers (although they would publicly deny it) is right at the bottom of their priorities.They demand abject loyalty. As a matter of sociological fact the subscribers to the Watchtower belief are on average placed at the lowest rung of the income ladder and in the bottom category of the least educated of religious groups. An educated following could not cope with the contradictions and absurdities.
The key facilitator of the Watchtower objective is to have the money keep on rolling in... Forget the needs of the flock!
A doomsday cult is all about the marketing of hope...the ever imminent arrival of reward for your loyalty to the cult. The cult never has to prove its abilities to furnish satisfaction because it relies on the mind and lifestyle control of its customers through its propaganda machine in relation to the spurious hope. It works only on the basis of “hope” and strictly not on the realisation of what that hope is for. This is the religious scam. This is what keeps the money coming in.
But here is my point, in the last century from around 1927 onward the WTBTS promoted a plausible untruth that those who saw 1914 would also see Armageddon. Like every other fatuous edict from the Watchtower, delivered with threat and promise; it failed. In the last century they convinced people that they alone had exclusive divine attention and pointed to the events of 1914 as if they had predicted WW1 by divine providence. This belief is a travesty of what was actually prophesied. Instead of religious glory it was a disaster and Russell knew it. With JC ruling in the heavens since 1878, it was taught that by 1914 he would bring the destruction of all of “God’s enemies” along with the rapture of the consecrated (anointed) and the earth returned to paradise by then. Not surprisingly more than half the membership (or was it two thirds?) decided not to follow Joe Frankly Ratherflawed who had dishonourably grabbed control of the magazine but could not control the proprietorship of the Russellite beliefs, for they splintered into various sects.
The 1914 untruth is no longer evidence for their claim for exclusive divine attention. The “overlapping generations” fools nobody; it only exposes the GB desperation. The consistent prophetic failures of the Watchtower are evidence that Big J is not interested in them, if he were interested or if he existed at all, he would have got it right the first time! So without the theological fixture of 1914, to what other myths about themselves can this doomsday cult resort, to demonstrate that God is exclusively using them?
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All things considered, when will THE JW religion end?
by sowhatnow inid give a guess of maybe another 15 to 20 years ,.
nothing will be the same , if there even is a headquarters.. opinion?.
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Half banana
The JW delusion will exist as long as there are emotionally needy and intellectually limited people who will happily hand over their conscience and money to religious leaders.
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"Whilst the bible is important, the Watchtower is God's main way of communicating with people today"
by stuckinarut2 inyes, i'm not kidding!.
this gem was stated today in the talk!
(shortly before i walked out).
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Half banana
For the speaker to quote the outline, it is as if he couldn’t believe such a statement himself and didn’t think his audience would either...so he thought it needed to be read verbatim.
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Attention all Bethelite Lurkers!
by The Searcher inyou have your bethel watchtower study on a monday evening, as i understand it.therefore, prepare your hearts and your bible trained consciences to "test the inspired expressions" being presented as bible truth in the next study article - especially this one;w14 11/15 p. 26 par.
"acts 1:8 - "you will be witnesses of me...." [jesus]john 1:15 - "john bore witness about him..." [jesus]john 5:37 - "the father who sent me has himself borne witness about me.
"revelation 12:17 - ".......and have the work of bearing witness to jesus.
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Half banana
@ Mille, the answer is ”from books” often in the British Museum Library but the conclusions here are of my making. I always ask the questions “How and why did any idea get started. Even as a JW I puzzled at the obstinate lack of clarity in the Father- Son relationship of the Greek texts.
It is a grave mistake to think that the Bible is holy!
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I was shy on my first JW.ORG Video, I am so happy sharing God's Organization with you!
by JWCart1975 injw.org is the fastest growing media outlet in the world, our local cobe said we are going to take the media from satan's wicked world!
repent before it's too late and come back to the kingdom hall with all your loving brothers and sisters!
you won't find happiness without jehovah's organization and you know it!
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Half banana
Proper JWs do not even know about 1975!