@ 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.
Half banana
JoinedPosts by Half banana
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52
Help with understanding
by Doltologist inplease 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.
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June JW Broadcast - Jehovah's & Jesus' names Are Interchangeable!
by The Searcher inmr. 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.
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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.
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What on earth have the JW org got to offer?
by Half banana inwhat 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.
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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.
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Gods name
by Mr.logic inwhat 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.
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Half banana
Does it really matter how you spell the name of an invisible friend? -
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Help with understanding
by Doltologist inplease 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.
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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.
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Help with understanding
by Doltologist inplease 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.
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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.
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The perpetual End of the World
by Half banana inone thing common to human culture is a belief that god will punish a dissolute world.
the earliest reference i have encountered is from a cuneiform tablet 4800 years old:.
an assyrian clay tablet dating to approximately 2800 bc was unearthed bearing the words "our earth is degenerate in these latter days.
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Half banana
One thing common to human culture is a belief that god will punish a dissolute world. The earliest reference I have encountered is from a cuneiform tablet 4800 years old:
An Assyrian clay tablet dating to approximately 2800 BC was unearthed bearing the words "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common."
Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts 1979
But to make money out of this belief is an art. It is the very thing the WTBTS has honed its propaganda skills on from day one back in 1879.
It would be ok to agree to call it the "final push" or the "very last days" if they were to acknowledge that if Big A didn’t come; they would dissolve the Watchtower organisation forever and share out its wealth (or give it to the UN!)... and everyone go home knowing it was all a horrible mistake. Watchtower; if you really mean it; put your money where your mouth is and shut up shop if the end doesn’t come in say five years... JWs; don’t pay a penny to the organisation... if it is the work of God; money is not an issue. You cannot forever say it is the last days, this is conning people and people with simple sheepy minds at that...it is abuse, it is cruelty.
Any cult operation is based on myth. In the case of the JW org its dogma are myths based on myths but presented as precious divine truths. In a doomsday cult there comes a day of reckoning when it no longer remains credible. The Watchtower has sounded a false alarm for 136 years and all that they can offer its members is for them to become humble sheep. The narcissistic leaders on the other hand live like proverbial lions and excruciatingly, have declared themselves to be immortal heavenly princes. You need the brain of a sheep to become a JW only to be rewarded with the life of a dumb submissive sheep. What sort of reward is this for giving up your right to a normal life!
They will not of course hold to their part of the bargain, they control the words and the words can mean anything they want them to. They say that this is the last push (all the other pushes were ”last pushes” as well, remember “Stay alive till seventy five,” Millions now living will never die” etc.) and the reason is because doomsday cults depend on the perpetual imminence of the end to keep the money rolling in from their superstitious followers. It is how doomsday cults function. When it looks like delaying, which it will again in a few years time there will be yet more dire measures, “new light” and more inward looking and heavier restrictions to give its members the illusion of something numinous happening, they will crank up the paranoia and claim "persecution!" when observers spot what they are up to and they rightly receive exposure in the media.
I suggest to all JWs that you should put the JW org to the test. If they say this is the last push... you might want to believe them ... don’t financially contribute but then when “the end” does not come in five years time: everyone packs their bags and leave.
Wakey wakey Watchtower!
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June 2015 Watchtower equating Apostates with The Antichrist!
by nicolaou inshit!
it finally happened.. years ago i speculated on this happening but can't find the posts.
anyway, this is a tactically aggressive move by wt.
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Half banana
Two points; in the absence of a hell fire doctrine, they have to rage about something to condemn the apostates and “antichrist” sounds like strong put-down.
Note how the writer John used it, to exclude those who did not believe in his particular Christ cult ...the one which said the Christ had come in the flesh. In other words there were those back in his day who knew the variants of the Christ story including the one which said it was just that; a story. By labelling them antichrists it would clarify the partisan divide and bolster the pride of John’s party of believers.
So, to the Watchtower: we don’t want to join your silly social club anyway!
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What on earth have the JW org got to offer?
by Half banana inwhat 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.
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Half banana
I see it this way; they have nothing to offer which can be realised neither do they have a unique evidence of divine attention as positives to attract the punter. To make matters worse they carry the negative baggage of 136 years of total Watchtower failure!
It is absurd,they have no authority to lead or teach and no basis for authority. How do they get away with it?
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What on earth have the JW org got to offer?
by Half banana inwhat 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.
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Half banana
It was me too Deltawave, cheated of a proper education, a pioneer and window cleaner like you. I have also made up for it by adult university education which has been a most enjoyable experience. There is so much pleasure in learning realities as opposed to languishing in a mind-numbing cult...