Posts by Half banana

23

Jesus Christ dead for three days and three nights really?

by Crazyguy in

has anyone done a detail research on this subject?

the gospels seem to contradict one another and christians apologists have a bunch of different ways to try to explain away the problems.

has anyone have a concrete explanation for or against him truly being dead three days and three nights as the story goes?.

Half banana

Actually Crazyguy, I was saying that the recurring motif in ancient literature of three and a half days for heros being dead or going down into the underworld, comes from the winter solstice when the Sun 'dies' and not from solar events the vernal equinox.

The Easter time events are do with the sacrificial death of the son of the Sun God and his resurrection to heavenly glory but the trope of "three days dead" is carried over from the death and rebirth of the Sun in December.

Myth does not follow logic and that is why Bible texts struggle to make sense of irrational folk tales by forcing some semblance of reality on them and worse still, claim them to be read as historical truth.

23

Jesus Christ dead for three days and three nights really?

by Crazyguy in

has anyone done a detail research on this subject?

the gospels seem to contradict one another and christians apologists have a bunch of different ways to try to explain away the problems.

has anyone have a concrete explanation for or against him truly being dead three days and three nights as the story goes?.

Half banana

Crazyguy, I asked the same question myself five years ago and did some investigation. What else dies for three days? It is the sun which 'dies' for three days from the 21st December to the 24th. It stops at the same point of the horizon, setting and rising there for three days and three nights but when It rises again on the 25th December it has begun to move northwards again; otherwise described anciently as being "reborn". This was a cause for celebration; the re-birth of the sun.

Just to get the astronomy right-- the setting point of the sun was a calendrical marker for the seasons for pre-literate agriculturalists possibly starting in the New Stone Age, (may be earlier) and going forward for some thousand years through the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age. Where else would you look to find what the date is without books or calendars? How else would you know when to sow particular crops? The position of the sunset on the horizon tells you. Furthest North is midsummer and midway are the equinoxes.

In Autumn the position of sunset progressively moves southwards on the Western horizon until it slows down in its southern travel and stops altogether for three days. On the 25th December it begins to moves North once again. If you live on the equator this will not help you and neither will it be of use if you live in the Arctic. In between these geographical extremes you would have depended on this information for your farming and therefore your food. It would not be surprising to celebrate the turning of the seasons and clearly the feast and fast days of the ancient pagans were absorbed into the Bible and sanitised by early Christian Church. It's one reason why Jdubs have the memorial. . .

Many of the Stone circle alignments (but not Stonehenge) even in the north of Europe eg Maeshowe in Orkney Scotland, are orientated for a solar alignment at sunrise on the 25th December. It was the moment to celebrate the return of the Sun, the rebirth of the Sun God who would bless the community again with light and growth and fertility in the fields and hence the continuation of life itself.

In the Neolithic folk calendar Christmas day was central to the annual cycle of life to be followed three months later by the sacrificial death of the son of the Sun God at Easter.

In Homer, Ulysses goes down to the underworld for three days, in fact all saviour and celestial heros die for three days as a mark or badge of the God-man. Jesus was described as doing the same so the listeners would know what character he was meant to be.

Jesus is none other than a historicization of the folk tale of the journey of the Sun God as were all of his literary forebears, Dionysus, Attis, Horus, Adonis et al.

It was the fact that early Christianity preached that this god-man Jesus had become a real breathing person, who had lived -- and died for three days and three nights and was resurrected according to the folk tales of old, which shocked the sensibilities of the educated Greeks and Romans to learn that they gullibly believed these outrageous impossibilities.

31

22,000 years of arctic ice cores melt, and wash the YHWH/JESUS concept down the sewer

by fulltimestudent in

the full story, as told in the uk guardian can be found at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/16/arctic-ice-cores-melt-university-alberta-canada.

and briefly it tells of an equipment failure at a storage facility for ice cores that had been extracted from the polar ice cap in various locations.. but note, that the layers of ice evident in the cores covered a period of 22,000 years.

and from the christian/jw perspective, that's impossible, for the bible story of the flood (verified by jesus and sundry other biblical writers) maintains that 4000+ years ago, the ice caps would have melted during the period when the earth was covered by the divinely caused deluge.

Half banana

If anyone believes in Adam and Eve and the Biblical flood happening in Biblical times; they should ask them selves "Why is it that am I a such a gullible person?"

31

22,000 years of arctic ice cores melt, and wash the YHWH/JESUS concept down the sewer

by fulltimestudent in

the full story, as told in the uk guardian can be found at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/16/arctic-ice-cores-melt-university-alberta-canada.

and briefly it tells of an equipment failure at a storage facility for ice cores that had been extracted from the polar ice cap in various locations.. but note, that the layers of ice evident in the cores covered a period of 22,000 years.

and from the christian/jw perspective, that's impossible, for the bible story of the flood (verified by jesus and sundry other biblical writers) maintains that 4000+ years ago, the ice caps would have melted during the period when the earth was covered by the divinely caused deluge.

Half banana

Apolgies.... ambiguity!......I'll reorder the sentence:

It was back in the middle of the 19th century that the Swiss researcher Louis Agassiz first determined that there had been an ice age (in recent geological history). People then had been looking for evidence of the Biblical flood but did not suspect an ice age event, so Agassiz' observations were not popular. There is no evidence for a global flood but there is coherent and tangible evidence for a succession of ice age glacial events over the last 2.6 million years.

No earth scientist could survive at his or her job believing the folk tale of Noah's flood to be a true happening.

Why is it so hard for some to distinguish between fact and fiction?

31

22,000 years of arctic ice cores melt, and wash the YHWH/JESUS concept down the sewer

by fulltimestudent in

the full story, as told in the uk guardian can be found at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/16/arctic-ice-cores-melt-university-alberta-canada.

and briefly it tells of an equipment failure at a storage facility for ice cores that had been extracted from the polar ice cap in various locations.. but note, that the layers of ice evident in the cores covered a period of 22,000 years.

and from the christian/jw perspective, that's impossible, for the bible story of the flood (verified by jesus and sundry other biblical writers) maintains that 4000+ years ago, the ice caps would have melted during the period when the earth was covered by the divinely caused deluge.

Half banana

We have, or rather scientists have a very good record of past climate data going back a couple of million years.

Our best clues are from the pattern of climate change which has occurred during the present Holocene as a continuation of the Pleistoscene geological periods. Snow buried WW2 aircraft are no help whatsoever in determining the overall scientifically determined pattern of climate oscillations.

It was the Swiss researcher Louis Agassiz who first determined that there had been an ice age back in the middle of the 19th century. This despite the popular certainty that there had been a global flood. He showed evidence for his hypothesis which eventually was accepted. Later researchers showed that there was not just one ice age but four ice ages, this early 20th century idea also had evidence but it was the deep sea sediment cores from the Pacific mainly, which told the whole story. Arctic ice core information amongst others corroborated the sediment cores.

By the end of the 1980s, earth science had all the data to show the slow 'tide' of ice advance and retreat over the polar regions was due to the relative positions of the Earth and sun in their periodic changes of position. They 'wobble' with a periodicity having maximum effect relative to the amount of incoming solar radiation from max. to min. during an epoch of just over 100,000 years.

This last climate minimum (full on ice age) was between 20,000 to 18,000 years ago followed by global warming and pluvial period up to the present interglacial maximum which has been around for ten thousand years and might last another ten to fifteen thousand years.

The evidence for climate history is built up from dozens of types of sources in hundreds of thousands of locations. The faunal assemblages, the floral, the insects, the pollen, river life, river and lake deposits (varves), yes ice cores and dozens of types of other more esoteric data all add up to a real knowledge of what climate existed in the past.

There is not the slightest evidence that the Biblical flood could have ever happened but there is evidence to the contrary that it did not happen.

38

Cirencester Congregation UK: My story

by erbie in

dear all,.

i have been a member here for some years although mostly in the background.

many of you have bravely shared your own experiences and i am very grateful for that but i have never been open about my own experience.. nevertheless, i would be very grateful to those of you who would now take the time to read about my own personal journey from the jw religion and the circumstances that caused me to abandon that way of life and how i landed up where i am.

Half banana

Well done erbie, my experience with family, me leaving the org and staying in the marriage for the sake of the children parallels yours. I did not however have to deal with crazy in-law elders and in my case my two of my three children are still in thrall to the seven dwarfs of Brooklyn (or wherever they now hang out). I also live near you and frequently go to Ciren.

43

How long has it been since you have seen your family?

by Christian Gutierrez in

jw
friends

howdy guys!

so how long has it been since you have seen your jw family or friends?

or do you even care to have them in your life anymore?

Half banana

Yes Finky baby and jp1692, the splitting apart of families is deplorable. It is simply built into the genes of the JW cult.

You cannot talk to ex JWs because they will contaminate you. . . actually they will inform you of the realities of the JW scam. If you talk with ex JWs; you must lose the 'privileges' of club membership, it's a basic cult thing.

It is absolutely true that if you join Jehovah's Witnesses that you are likely, over time, to split your family in two. All it takes is for a new generation to arise and either the parents or the children to leave the cult and bingo! you are trapped in an ideological standoff being shunned.

Now since most JWs leave their religion eventually, this becomes an inevitable state of affairs and therefore it is completely true to say "Jehovah's Witnesses splits families". Yes there are millions of split families!

To anyone new here who has not made up their mind about the value of this religion, I want to reinforce what jp 1692 has said: get out of the JW cult before your family is torn apart!

Jws offer paradise but give you hell.............

38

If we are further away from perfection, why are we more moral?

by stuckinarut2 in

as we know, witnesses teach that adam and eve were perfect and then committed the first act of sin and rebellion.. they in turn were cursed,and we all declined as their offspring.

humans supposedly lived shorter and shorter lives, and became more imperfect and sinful.. the further away in time humans go then, they should be getting worse.

so why is it then that as a society, humans have actually improved in so many ways?.

Half banana

Agreed Steve2.

(Erratum: the Enlightenment was essentially an 18th century affair) What it demonstrated was that the fixtures of monarchy and religious power were working against the interests of the French population in particular, and were outmoded generally. In principle these two evils were highly undemocratic since they favoured the rich and perpetuated their entitlement to undue privilege. The philosophes offered reason as a substitute for religious superstition.

It might be said that early Christianity attempted to create a God centered society and by the fifth century it was being enforced as a political instrument in the ailing Late Roman Empire. In reality Christianity's weaknesses were apparent right from the start. There are very few contemporary secular texts on the subject but one from the early second century by the Stoic and rationalist Epictetus (pron; epic teetus) called the Jesus Christians "Galileans" to distinguish them from other christian sects. He felt a philosophical sympathy with their calmness in facing death but noted their passivity and gullibility in believing holy things.

Christianity like all irrational belief has a lot to answer for. The response has got to be the the Enlightenment ideal of reason before faith.

38

If we are further away from perfection, why are we more moral?

by stuckinarut2 in

as we know, witnesses teach that adam and eve were perfect and then committed the first act of sin and rebellion.. they in turn were cursed,and we all declined as their offspring.

humans supposedly lived shorter and shorter lives, and became more imperfect and sinful.. the further away in time humans go then, they should be getting worse.

so why is it then that as a society, humans have actually improved in so many ways?.

Half banana

RT, I can't reconcile an increase in disease today with my perception of the past?

Homo sapiens is a young species and while having begun to turn towards organising ourselves for the betterment of all, we remain for the time being at the level of raw recruits working out how to do it. This difficulty is not surprising since no other species has attempted a conscious democratic governance. Brute force was the only rule available.

Religion worked as a political unifier in the past especially when all societies were rigidly class layered but the time for blind faith in the numinous world is rapidly declining. Our species is only just setting out on a real star treck although we've hardly got off our own planet, yet surely, the technology does seem to be pointing in Roddenberry's direction?

If we take the typical life of a human in his or her development as a pattern; It seems to me that humans in the 21st century are collectively at the stage of teenagers still trying out the world, with some more grown up than others. Human society/societies have made progress and religion with faith in holy magic is no longer a beacon for the future.

The next stage toward maturity: will it be built on the foundations set up by the "philosophes" of the 19th century Enlightenment?

38

If we are further away from perfection, why are we more moral?

by stuckinarut2 in

as we know, witnesses teach that adam and eve were perfect and then committed the first act of sin and rebellion.. they in turn were cursed,and we all declined as their offspring.

humans supposedly lived shorter and shorter lives, and became more imperfect and sinful.. the further away in time humans go then, they should be getting worse.

so why is it then that as a society, humans have actually improved in so many ways?.

Half banana

We are more educated, more likely to base actions on reason rather than cultural obligations and much less religious.

Morality is not something which can be quantified.

From the utilitarian viewpoint of nineteenth century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, we are doing better. Today in the Western World more people have more pleasure and less pain and live longer with a greater sense of wellbeing than ever before.