Posts by Anony Mous

20

The only man in the room - Kennedy 1962

by slimboyfat in

in the current situation, it’s worth listening to this podcast about nuclear near misses.

the cuban missile crisis was only one example, but is worth considering.

in 1962 the united states and russia went eyeball to eyeball over russia’s military base in cuba.

Anony Mous

I think JFK royally screwed that one up though. In the end JFK practically chose for Cuba to be a terrorist dictatorship with terrible suffering for millions over the years and gave Turkey over to Islamic and particularly Iranian interests which led to the modern era of Turkey being a hellhole, Afghanistan, Iraq etc. Not only that, it lead to a massive nuclear scare, nuclear missiles off the coast of Florida means the US was permanently weakened.

There would've been no nuclear war, this is all just grandstanding, the Soviets knew they had no chance of winning any war, but they knew JFK was a weak president, they didn't do the same with Nixon or Reagan, because they knew that actions have consequences with those presidents.

Just like Russia knows they cannot win a nuclear war, China knows that would be the end of both their empires, it's all just grandstanding in the hopes that a weak US President will just give them what they want. They're basically North Korea, only bigger.

Sometimes leaders just got to tell their constituents that they have to sacrifice, that is true leadership, not cowering and letting others take both the blame and bear the results of your actions.

24

Did you ever have an “Olaf” moment.

by Slidin Fast in

did your class mates queue up to have sex with you?

it happened to olaf according to today’s wt.

.

Anony Mous

Not queue up. But I had a couple that wanted to. My dumb JW self rejected them. Not sure why the WTBTS would make such big deal out of it, requests for sex happen all the time amongst single teens and adults.

47

JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them

by Anony Mous in

so a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.

if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.

now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.

Anony Mous

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Bible

47

JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them

by Anony Mous in

so a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.

if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.

now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.

Anony Mous

@pistol: hence why I started this thread. I noticed the same several years before I even let JW and I’ve always been interested in the apocrypha. They are basically books written by contemporaries of Paul that were left out because the Catholic faith needed a single direction. But you still have Ethiopian and other Orthodox churches that do not accept the Catholic (council of Nicea) version of the Bible and include or exclude certain books from their canon. There had been an attempt in some Protestant circles to basically rewrite parts of the canon (hence why older NWTs have a few sections that are excluded from the KJV), but nobody never went as far as creating a full Bible with commentaries and “apocryphal” stories the way the Jews have the Talmud for example. Until ~1950 there also never was any real attempt by modern scholars to unite the views either theologically or archaeologically and come up with a more accurate story of the potential historical events and even the ones that are don’t see much mainstream attention.

47

JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them

by Anony Mous in

so a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.

if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.

now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.

Anony Mous

Using only these sources, the 12 facts of Jesus Resurrection are agreed upon as literal history by the majority of skeptic scholars who publish in this area. And, as such cannot be dismissed by thinking people.

That is a very strong claim. I think you mean theologians, not archeologist. Big difference between the philosophy of Christianity, which include the requirement to accept those 'facts' but they aren't facts in the sense that they are true things that happened.

You're talking and quoting theologians, not scientists.

Even so, you cannot dismiss that the stories of the Passion and Resurrection are completely different and occasionally conflict in the 4 canonized books and even more different in the apocrypha, Muslim and contemporary Jewish theology, including the link you pointed at showed that according to the Jews, Jesus was hanged.

47

JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them

by Anony Mous in

so a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.

if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.

now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.

Anony Mous

No, those “facts” take the resurrection as a fact and then come up with those articles to support it. However, no scientific evidence of either Jesus and especially not of anyone ever having been resurrected has been brought.

What you define as a fact and scholarship is faith, and complete different than what the scientific method requires for proof, facts and evidence. It is not faith, I have it on good authority that resurrection is not a regular thing, however during the time the resurrection is written about, it had become so banal not even the Romans wrote about it?

You’d think a city full of zombies, the story of Lazarus, the story of the girl Paul resurrected, the story of Jesus; you’d think someone else would’ve noticed all these people kept coming back, and if it were that common that nobody noticed at least tax and death records would indicate this was a common occurrence.

But it seems only Christians noticed a few decades after Jesus had already died and even they can’t agree on the specifics. You said it’s a different part of a story, which is possible if they all had different sections of the story but that doesn’t explain the blatant contradictions in all the stories or even the completely different order of events depending on the target audience.

Simply said, if you take away the Christian sources on the subject, what is the story on Jesus you are left with? There is no Jesus in any contemporary record, Christians are mentioned as a sect from the Jews, Pontius Pilate is a footnote at best. Resurrection doesn’t even come up, there are no graves we can visit, you’d think, given the importance of the event to their faith, that is the first thing early Christians would remember to properly identify, geographically pinpoint and later on secure as evidence. This is what the Muslims did, they have an important stone, they have to make a pilgrimage at least once in their life, they always seem to know where it is anywhere on earth they are. Same for the Jews, they only have one wall left, but they know where it is, they try to make pilgrimages to it.

47

JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them

by Anony Mous in

so a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.

if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.

now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.

Anony Mous

@Sea Breeze: there is no scientific evidence for any of those “facts”. They are simply articles of faith. That list is simply paraphrasing portions of the gospels and the Pauline epistles that Christians have to accept without questioning.

But as you know many of the gospels, as well as the apocrypha have large variations of the events surrounding Jesus’ supposed death, it is very much devoid of a historically accurate and verifiable story and every single story, even in the canon, has differences that are hard to ignore both during the passion (see here: https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/research_sites/cjl/sites/partners/cbaa_seminar/Passion_Narratives.htm) and the ressurection (how many angels, men or Jesus himself were in the tomb, which belies at least one of the “facts” you mentioned, the tomb was not empty in any account, how many did he appear to and who first etc etc)

As far as the lack of historicity, Pontius Pilate for example in the Biblical story is written as a kind but weak willed person, allowing the Jews to carry out their own judicial proceedings, however historical records like that of Philon and Josephus describe him as a cruel, stubborn and merciless person that oppressed the Jews and would never allow any sort of self-governance.

47

JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them

by Anony Mous in

so a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.

if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.

now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.

Anony Mous

@Disillusioned:

There is a difference between theology (Bart Ehrman and co) and archeology (a good primer would be The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology).

The archeological evidence for a Jesus or a Paul is very scant, no graves, no contemporary accounts at the time, no records. This indicates their existence was already a myth by the time it was written down.

According to the The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Paul's own conversion was dated to be ~31CE based on the writings, that would put it 3 years before Jesus died if you accept 1CE as the year of his birth. Now most scholars and even the Church now date Jesus' birth to ~3 BCE just to keep everything in line, but there is a lot of compression going on.

Basically the entire story of Christ and the expansion of the religion to all of Rome has to fit between ~1CE and 70CE with mass-conversion for the stories to make sense. However archeologically speaking, there is simply no evidence of a widespread mass-conversion.

Most scholars therefore now believe that Christianity was an offspring of Judaism that after the loss of autonomy to the Romans concocted the messiah stories to fill in the gaps of basically where God went and eventually included stories why he allowed the temple to be destroyed. It is believed that the first Jewish rebellions Roman fought (4BCE, when they massacred 2000 messianic Jews) was basically the same group that eventually called themselves Christians.

47

JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them

by Anony Mous in

so a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.

if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.

now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.

Anony Mous

@disillusioned:

Yes, Christianity has existed in some form archeologically speaking at least since ~100BC, there are several books that explore the archeological evidence of the Judaic traditions that eventually become Christianity, some trace back elements like a messianic 'carpenter' to 1000BCE.

By ~50CE the religion was already well established that it threatened political stability in Rome, hence why Nero persecuted them. The oldest known Pauline letters (which are likely to be copies and edits) date back to ~30CE, according to Paul, he had not heard about Jesus before that and Paul supposedly wrote his letters towards the end of his life when he was already an established Christian "elder", this would effectively put Paul's writings and potentially Paul's own life and death and the spread of Christianity, before the death of Jesus if you accept 1CE = Jesus birth.

47

JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them

by Anony Mous in

so a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.

if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.

now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.

Anony Mous

So a quick little note about a few things that I recently learned. If you ever had the yellow book of Bible stories, there was the story of Enoch, also repeated in other Watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth. Now if you look at the Nicean Bible, which is the WTBTS selection of the Bible, it mentions Enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about Nephilim and Ben Elohim. But it doesn’t speak of giants and the like or Enoch and what he did, it seems to be conjured up by the WTBTS. However, the book of Enoch does go into details on Enoch’s life, the giants etc, how he preached about the apocalypse.

Likewise the story told to JW children about Cain and Abel, read the Genesis chapter, then read or remember the story in the WT literature, especially the pictures, now there are a lot of details that aren’t in the Nicean Bible, that match the Book of Jasher, the Bible says he simply killed him without details, the Book of Jasher details an iron ploughing instrument, the fact he didn’t bury him but left him bleeding in the field etc, the WTBTS depicts Cain having killed Abel with an instrument matching that description, Abel bleeding and Cain walking away from an unburied body.

There are a lot of other things, minor details perhaps that if you read for example Book of Jubilees, Book of Enoch etc and put them in context with what’s in the JW interpretation of the Bible and additional background to the stories which suddenly start making sense. Where does the WTBTS get its explanation of year-weeks and numerology surrounding the numbers 6 and 7 - read the books surrounding Kabbalah, Jubilees and others and it starts making more and more sense, patterns you see there are reused by WTBTS although some of these practices the WTBTS itself has condemned as demonic influences.

It’s an interesting avenue of investigation I haven’t heard much about in contemporary JW investigation. I think the mid-60s-through-90s Governing Body were very much aware of the apocryphal books and must have done significant investigation into it for it to come through in what we consider the JW canon. Question is why they rejected them, especially since the Dead Sea Scrolls indicates those books were very much in circulation amongst Christians ca 100BC and have to date existed amongst Ethiopian Churches (one of the earliest churches still in existence)