Posts by David

16

How much time and money did we waste traveling to meetings alone?

by longgone in

quick answer: way too much!.

this is something that really gets to me, all the way back to my childhood.

twenty minutes each way, three times a week.

David_Jay

Every penny and every second that didn't end up in me getting laid.

37

Which Watchtower publications did you keep?

by Schnufti in

i'm currently cleaning up our bookcase and need to decide what goes into the trash.

i'll keep the watchtower books that are not available online anymore (e.g.

the brown "reasoning" book).

David_Jay

Nothing.

Of course it's been so long since I was in that my publications would have become apostate material now that the information in them is so outdated.

For example, one book said that God has to bring Armageddon before the year 2000 otherwise the human race won't survive.

Another says that the dwindling number of Memorial partakers is a clear time indicator of how deep we are in the Last Days.

And one of them has this crazy claim that the anointed make up a composite "prophet," the " Ezekiel class, " and that God spirit-guides this modern-day prophet to foretell future events before they happen so accurately that with the last thought of the dying wicked (having been slaughtered at Armageddon--which again has to come before the 20th century ends) will acknowledge about Jehovah's Witnesses what is written at Ezekiel 33:33: "Then they will know that a prophet has been among them."

Apparently the Watchtower Bible & Tracy Society writes, publishes, and distributes its own apostate material. Just hold on to for a while, and like milk you've kept way too long, it too will go bad.

25

How did we get from singular ha-Elohim (God) to plural ha-Elohim (judges)?

by I_love_Jeff in

read exodus 22:6-8

jps tanakh : 6 when a man gives money or goods to another for safekeeping, and they are stolen from the man’s house if the thief is caught, he shall pay double; 7 if the thief is not caught, the owner of the house shall come near (נקרב) to god (האלהים) that he has not laid hands on the other’s property.

8 in all charges of misappropriation pertaining to an ox, an ***, a sheep, a garment, or any other loss, whereof one party alleges, “this is it” the case of both parties shall come before god (האלהים): he whom god (אלהים ) declares guilty (ַיְר ִשי ֻףן) shall pay double to the other.

David_Jay

Footnote:

As an example of how "sloppy" merging of languages can be, I had friends visit from Spain recently where in Spanish people were speaking of "el Internet," " el disco de Blu-ray, " and "la Scotch tape."

Since time forever people have been breaking the rules and mushing up languages. It means little really, except that people are trying to communicate about things using words that don't originate with their culture. The same happened in Bible days.

25

How did we get from singular ha-Elohim (God) to plural ha-Elohim (judges)?

by I_love_Jeff in

read exodus 22:6-8

jps tanakh : 6 when a man gives money or goods to another for safekeeping, and they are stolen from the man’s house if the thief is caught, he shall pay double; 7 if the thief is not caught, the owner of the house shall come near (נקרב) to god (האלהים) that he has not laid hands on the other’s property.

8 in all charges of misappropriation pertaining to an ox, an ***, a sheep, a garment, or any other loss, whereof one party alleges, “this is it” the case of both parties shall come before god (האלהים): he whom god (אלהים ) declares guilty (ַיְר ִשי ֻףן) shall pay double to the other.

David_Jay

There is a very simple explanation. But first you have to realize a few things:

Christians often emphasize what the words of Scripture mean. The use of these words has more to do with why they were chosen.
You have to take the concept of Jewish monotheism into consideration and leave the Christian and Muslim (and heathen/pagan) one behind for a moment.

The rest, the technical part, will be easy (and short).

Let's start with that last point, the Jewish concept of "God." Unlike that in other religions, YHVH isn't actually a deity in the mind of Jews. Deities actually don't exist. None of them are real. In Jewish tradition, Abraham is said to have come to realize this early in life. His father, a seller of idol gods, lost money when his son acted upon this understanding and smashed all his dad's inventory to bits.

This story comes from B'reshith Rabba, a religious text from Judaism's classical period. It is probably the most famous rabbinical commentary on monotheism in Judaism. What it means is that Judaism views "God" as the Cause of the everything in the universe (which is the "effect" of this "Cause"). To Jews it makes no sense that the concept of deities made all we see and experience. The universe is too great to be the product of the human concept of gods.

Keeping that in mind, one then wonders why we call YHVH by words like "God" then. Well, the reason for this is that if anything does deserve to be called by words used to describe the gods, then it is this great Cause.

While Christians are sometimes a bit obsessed with the meanings behind the words used in Scripture (and it's not wrong, mind you, to study and get at the root of things), this obsession is sometimes done at the expense of learning the philology behind the words. Learn that word and remember it: philology.

Philology is the branch of study that deals with the historical development of words, often with view to their relationship with other languages and the cultures that used them. Philologically speaking, the Jews didn't learn all about this "God" in one swoop, as if the Bible just came down from heaven and that was that. The Jewish culture and Jewish religion did not have the luxury of the Scriptures like Christianity did. There was no Bible around when Judaism began. We did without one until after the Babylonian exile. Our concept of God has not remained static either, as it has in Christian and Islam. "God" evolves in our theology, so our understanding of God does too...and so have the names we have used as this evolution has played out.

Our words for God came from the languages and cultures of the peoples around us, the folks that melded into the people of Israel, and the language and speech of the peoples we Hebrews melded into ourselves. We Jews are not as "pure" of a product as you read in Scripture. We are likely not the army nation that marched 40 years across a desert to destroy the people living in Canaan as dramatized in the Bible. No, we are more likely the people that just merged with them.

Keeping all that in mind, here's where the language part comes in:

In the Bible, God has many names.

Yeah, I know, Jehovah's Witnesses say these are "titles," but in Hebrew these "titles" are actually "names" we have applied to God across the generations. The word Elohim, which simply means "God" in Scripture, is one of these borrowed words from another culture. It is in the plural, and it actually means "great ones." It's the term used by the heathen for their gods. We simply adopted it and used it to describe what we meant in referring to our own particular "God" concept. The word is in the plural likely because the heathens didn't have just "one god" like we did, so there wasn't a word for our particular monotheistic concept. What was "the gods" to the heathens meant "God," singular, to us.

As time went on, the Hebrews went through a period when they began identifying as "Israel," as a single (no longer a merged) people with a single, unique God, separate from the nations. The form Ha‑Elohim came from that period. Our Jewish "God" was not to be confused with "the gods" of the nations any longer. Now God was "the God." This made a plural word into a singular, but in an ad-hoc kind of way.

It's just patch work, really, as far as etymology is concerned. If you notice, it breaks the rules, because the "Ha" in Ha-Elohim does mean as the Jehovah's Witnesses claim, namely "the [one true]." So the merging here is sloppy, the same that happens in other languages when new words come up. People were already calling God "Elohim," a plural that in the mind of the Jews meant a singular. Now with the "Ha" added, this singularity was being emphasized (though the grammar was bad). It is philological evidence of the polytheistic beliefs the Jews came from and once held.

While it is often argued by some Christians that the plural is just a "royal" way of speaking, such as a king or queen might say of themselves: "We are not amused," the evidence is that is was more likely simply adapted from the indigenous people of the land of Israel. Another philological sign of this etymological evolution is the Canaanite word for god, El. As time progressed, this word got transferred also to YHVH. For instance, God is sometimes called El Elyon (God Most High), El Olam (the Everlasting God) and El Shaddai (the Almighty God). The word is not specifically Hebrew (like "patio" is not really English), but got transferred over as the God concept evolved.

The time came when Jewish theology then made using any term for God a reason for silence. With the emergence of the Temple, the theological concept of "holiness" arose. Things that are "holy" are "separated" from the way mundane things are used. Since mundane names are applied by humans to other people, animals and things, God was now seen as self-designating. God was now YHVH, a name that had circular reasoning behind its meaning: "I am defined by what I am." This is when God became more unknowable or too ineffable for the mundane world. Thus God's names became treated the opposite way mundane names were used. Mundane names were spoken all the time, but God's names, since they were holy, were used less often (or not at all), separated from the common world.

After that came euphemisms for God's name, such as "Heaven," and even spelling the word like G_d to show respect. Today the concept of God is such that Jews emphasize no gender in reference to God. No more "Lord" but just "Adonai" or "HaShem." No more, God "himself," just God. No more "King of the Universe" but "Sovereign of the Universe," etc.

Over millennia, the names for the Jewish God concept have evolved along with the Jewish theology behind God. Those words you are looking at in Exodus are borrowed from our heathen roots of long ago. They are very ancient, somewhat archaic, and a bit out of the realm of common use in the speech we use in speaking of God in Judaism today. But they apply nevertheless, even though the mixture of plural and singular forms got sloppy over the ages.

9

DEMONISM👿

by minimus in

jw
friends

when i was a kid and even in my adult life i believed in demons.

the demons were always around.

we had to be careful that we didn't do anything to upset jehovah or else the demons would make their way to us.

David_Jay

My cousin, Rachel __, grew up in a house that was for a time believed by many to be the site of a poltergeist attack. I grew up in this house in my teens years when my parents (as some of you know) were proved unfit to raise me due to engaging in child abuse. My aunt is a Jehovah's Witness, and this how a Jewish kid got mixed up with the Witnesses for a few years until I was an adult and left on my own.

Now, before I arrived I remember hearing reports from my family on how poor Aunt Grace lived in that haunted house. I didn't know at the time, but apparently something in the house was determined by the Witnesses to be the object at the root of the "evil" in the home: a Ouija board my cousin Rachel had found in a storage shed behind the garage, left by the previous owners.

When I moved in all this had ended, or course. I would later learn that something almost like a ceremony or ritual occurred in which elders from the congregation along with each member of the family burned all the items in the shed, including the Ouija board, said prayers, and then used the newly-cleaned shed as storage for Watchtower publications which my aunt, a pioneer at the time, could use to store the various books, tracts, and magazines from the Society (and keep the demons at bay from ever returning since, according to her, they had the name "Jehovah" written in them which worked like a repellent--kinda like deet for mosquitoes).

It obviously "worked like a charm," to intentionally use the pun, because the demons never seemingly returned, although Rachel and Aunt Grace would tell me stories from "those days" on how all present witnessed that the Ouija board resisted burning, whereas all the other items from the shed quickly went up in flames. "Not until the last item from the shed burned and we said prayers, using the name of Jehovah very loudly and repeatedly, did the Ouija board finally give into the flames!" I was told. (Kinda brings chills down your back listening to the story, huh?)

Now I don't believe in demons or evil spirits. We don't have any of that or the Devil in Judaism. So I decided that it I ever got to talk to my Aunt and cousin again now that I'm out of the Watchtower, I would ask. They, or course, shunned me after I returned to Judaism, but that recently changed--briefly. Though still Witnesses, recently they had restored ties all of a sudden and actually reached out to me, inviting me to dinner one night "back home."

So I asked about the "poltergeist" as they call it, and they still firmly believe it was all real. It would cause hanging light fixtures to swing, open cabinet and closet doors, and toss selected items out of closets and cabinets like record albums and glasswear. It would often toss water out of the cat's drinking dish and even, reportedly, out of the toilets. Odd shapes would appear on the window blinds when closed for the night (so horrifying that they had to switch to curtains), but then the curtains would get torn down. Occasionally an odd, deep humming sound could be heard. They were many who witnessed the events, including non-JW family members of mine and folks from the congregation, including elders and one circuit overseer.

A month later after I had visited for dinner the events suddenly began again. Unable to find the cause, my Aunt Grace admitted to the elders that she and Rachel had let me in the house again instead of shunning me. Certainly I had cursed the home somehow by my returned presence, the elders concluded after being unable to locate anything on the premises that was likely demonized. Perhaps Jehovah had removed his protection from the house due to my aunt's failure to be loyal to the Organization. Aunt Grace left her home of 50 years and moved into an apartment community for retired people, sending me an email informing me of what my Jewish/apostate presence had caused her to suffer.

But my cousin Rachel was not so quick to agree with my aunt or the elders. Her son (a physics major in college--and never baptized as a JW) was there for the new "ghost attack" and noticed something in the events that reminded him of something he had once learned. And thus he set out to have things tested out.

There is a natural phenomenon known as "the hum" that can affect certain buildings. While the cause or origins of the hum can be different in each case, the effect is similar: a low frequency or infrasound hum that produces soundwaves that are more felt than heard (some people can hear it while others cannot). Sam (Rachel's son) did some checking, and sure enough there had been an earthquake hundreds of miles away that went unnoticed by the community at large. It was too far away to be felt, but some swimming pool owners in the area complained about water sloshing out suddenly or making odd waves for a minute or two.

Aunt Grace's house became the scene of a little science experiment by Sam and his friends as a result of this information. Employing speakers capable of generating frequencies as low as 16hz, Sam aimed bursts of this inaudible soundwave out into the neighborhood. A few dogs barked, but no one who lived on the street noticed...except for the college physics club inside Aunt Grace's now-on-the-market home.

In the home when the infrasound was sent out an audible rumble was actually heard, but when you stepped outside you could not hear a thing. Hanging light fixtures still in the house swung back and forth. Curtains left behind in one room fell. Window blinds in another room actually created odd wave patterns as a result whenever the infrasound was sent out. Closet and cabinet doors opened in a few rooms, and test items like glassware came tumbling out but items like towels and canned goods (too heavy to vibrate) did not.

Ta-da! There was finally an answer. The house was on a sturdy cinder block foundation. But this left a gap between the actual ground and the floor of the home (almost four feet), and the house though large, was itself was essentially a large wooden box. It acted as a perfect subwoofer amplifier for infrasound.

An earthquake zone hundreds of miles away appears to have been causing the hum phenomenon in the house which uniquely seemed designed (by accident) to amplify the infrasound of strong far away quakes. When these quakes occurred, the infrasound traveled, got amplified in the house and caused the "paranormal" activity. Sam was even able to get water to slosh around a bit in the toilets (though not come out as in some reports) in his testing, and admittedly it played out like something out of a horror movie even from the perspective of those conducting the tests who knew what was going on.

Sam also checked old news reports from years past, and sure enough there was a series of horrific earthquakes and aftershocks in that zone (far away in Mexico, to be exact) that timed perfectly with the series of "poltergeist" attacks my Aunt and Rachel had witnessed so long ago. What made the activity seem "demonic" was something Sam called "the Philip Experiment" effect.

While not fully conducted under today's fought science experiment standards, in 1972 two scientists and several academics set out to see if people could cause so-called "paranormal" activity, and in the ensuing panic actually "conjur" up a "ghost" out of the shared experience. Apparently yes, and the imagined "ghost" was named "Phillip" who eventually got blamed for all the phenomena witnessed in the experiment. The was never a real ghost conjured by these acadmics, but they demonstrated that one's beliefs can be projected on such events to make things seem "paranormal."

Apparently the infrasound hum caused a series of events in the home that mixed with JW belief and fear of demons to become the "Philip" or poltergeist demon my Aunt experienced. The story that the Ouija board would not burn was actually imagination at work. Rachel admits it was the last thing to be tossed into the fire and that for a simple board it took much longer to burn that expected. The reason? It was an antique, one of the first produced by Parker Brothers once they took over the trademark in 1966 and was far larger in size than you find today (about twice the size of today's Ouija boards to be exact) and composed of far more durable materials than the board games of the present.

Rachel and Aunt Grace still returned to the world of ignoring me, but Sam remains in contact.

5

This is a great video! Must watch..... "Intelligent people beleive in God"

by stuckinarut2 in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y201qzddzbg&app=desktop.

David_Jay

While this video does cover very useful and important points, it needs to be pointed out that "belief" and "faith" in God are concepts based on Christianity and the religion of Islam. That is how God is reacted to in those groups, but it is not true about all, especially the religion that started the concept of the God of Abraham that many non-Jewish people claim to "believe" in.

Religions like Judaism (upon which Christianity and Islam claim their religions are based), Jainism, Buddhism, Taosim and some other religions are "practice" based. They do not require a "belief" or "faith" in any particular deity. Jews, as a matter of fact, don't actually "believe" in God (which is the specific reason for us being named after Israel--"one who wrestles with God"--and not Abraham).

With the claim of Christians and Muslims that their particular brand of monotheism was merely transferred intact from Judaism, I find too many people apply arguments against "belief in God" as presented here toward Jews as well. This in effect is just like what is warned about in the video, believing in another incredible but false story.

Judaism is a religion that is practiced, like Buddhism. It doesn't require a belief in religious concepts as a requisite to membership or for "salvation," especially since there is no salvation concept in Judaism. While of course there is a "God" at the center of Jewish religion, the response to this concept is definitely not one of "belief" or "faith." In fact when the rare occasion of a Christian converting to Judaism occurs, it is this type of mental assent in credulity that must be rooted out of them. One can totally accept the reality of the Jewish God-concept while being agnostic or atheist and still practice Judaism. The idea that the Jewish concept of and response to God is the same as Christian and Islamic views is actually the same type of ridiculous claim spoken of in the video that people learn from birth, family, community, etc. and that is almost impossible to convince others otherwise because of this lifetime of indoctrination.

Don't get me wrong. I AGREE with this video. The argument that "intelligent people believe in God" to me is a contradiction in terms. If something is supposed to be real, what is intelligent about merely offering it mental assent? If the God of Abraham exists, it is actually demonstrating a lack of intelligence to merely "believe." A true intellectual response to this concept would be just that, an intellectual "response" or physical reaction, not merely a mental one.

People measure how serious another is about reality based on their actions, not on their claim to mental agreement in a concept. An intelligent person for instance, doesn't merely believe in a healthy diet because just "believing" in a diet will not help you. It is the person who follows the practice of daily eating a healthy diet that we can call intelligent.

Just having faith that a certain healthy diet will do something beneficial for you but never eating it is not intelligence. Singing, praising, and preaching about the diet to others, testifying to its beneficence and passing out tracts to passersby telling others to also believe in the diet but themselves never daily living and eating the healthy diet is never, ever intelligence. Yet, this is how too many so-called "intelligent" people "believe" in God.

Otherwise, good video.

19

Jehovah has Evil Spirit ?

by EverApostate in

last weekend i was watching darkmatter2525 on youtube and came across this new thing in the bible.

jehovah has evil spirit!!

was just wondering how i didn’t come across this absurdity when i was a jw for 11 years.

David_Jay

The Exodus narrative was composed during the Babylonian exile and likely finalized shortly after the exile ended. Jews view the narrative as reflective of the diaspora Jews who were attempting to preserve their culture now that they had no land nor Temple in Babylon. Thus the Jewish practices and history were combined with folklore that was heavily slanted to give the customs of the Jews a religious connection.

With that in mind, the answer is no. The 40-year trek of millions of people crossing the Sinai peninsula as found in Exodus is not viewed as literal in Judaism. If it were literal, a crowd that size would still be crossing the Sea of Reeds while the first Hebrews were approaching the traditional site of Mt. Sinai.

While historically there is evidence that some of our ancestors likely lived in Egypt under the Hyskos dynasty, the following dynasty did endure a series of slave escapes, perhaps three or more, in which those welcomed under Hyskos rule left for the Fertile Crescent area and beyond.

While there are some Jews who might give this a literal reading, the idea that his took 40 years is taught to teach a religious lesson more than report on history. It teaches the lesson that a new nation arose from the slaves that left their previous life behind, like one generation bringing forth a new, totally free one. 40 gets used a lot like this in Scripture, with one situation being renewed into something totally different.

As for the snake used by Moses to cure in the wilderness, it appears to be a recurring symbol of rebellion. When Adam and Eve rebel, the narrative has a snake in it. When Pharaoh rebels against God, Moses' staff becomes a snake that devours the snakes of Pharoah's magicians. When the people rebel during the Exodus, they are punished by snakes and healed by seeing a symbol of a snake on a rod, as if reminding them of the rebellion of Adam and Eve.

Recall that the Torah is one book, and that it originally ended with Numbers. Deuteronomy is one of the final redactions to the Torah, added sometime after Numbers was completed. While definite certainty doesn't exist about this, it is not unlikely that the snake is a purposefully employed narrative device. Torah begins with a rebellion (symbolized with a snake) and originally ended in Numbers with a snake image reminiscent of the Genesis story.

It may be that this was a commentary on the destruction of a snake idol by King Hezekiah, an idol that was worshipped by some Israelites as mentioned in 2 Kings. These Israelites may have tried to legitimize their cult by claiming this was the very image forged by Moses, but it is quite likely that this was a popular myth about the idol's origin. The use of the symbol in Genesis through Numbers may be based on that image, given the fact that the snake does seemed to be used as a device in Torah each time disobedience or rebellion arises.

19

Jehovah has Evil Spirit ?

by EverApostate in

last weekend i was watching darkmatter2525 on youtube and came across this new thing in the bible.

jehovah has evil spirit!!

was just wondering how i didn’t come across this absurdity when i was a jw for 11 years.

David_Jay

James Mixon,

If it helps, Jews don't believe in evil spirits, otherwise known as "demons." While there is mention of them in Jewish religious thought, it is mostly in folklore and a facet of comical implications.

The texts in the OP do not imply a "spirit" or demon in the Christian sense, but that God gave a "spirit of evil" to Saul. That expression is an ancient idiom for what we now know is clinical depression or some similar mental state in which one's "spirit" became aggravated.

In reality, it is only Christians and other Gentile religions in which people are said to be "possessed by evil spirits," wherein the word "spirit" refers to an entity. The word spirit in the texts of the OP refers to a "frame of mind" or disposition.

19

Jehovah has Evil Spirit ?

by EverApostate in

last weekend i was watching darkmatter2525 on youtube and came across this new thing in the bible.

jehovah has evil spirit!!

was just wondering how i didn’t come across this absurdity when i was a jw for 11 years.

David_Jay

Correction, I WASN'T trying to defend the Bible or God.

19

Jehovah has Evil Spirit ?

by EverApostate in

last weekend i was watching darkmatter2525 on youtube and came across this new thing in the bible.

jehovah has evil spirit!!

was just wondering how i didn’t come across this absurdity when i was a jw for 11 years.

David_Jay

EverApostate,

Actually, being Jewish I don't have a need or desire to "paint" the Bible in a favorable light or "defend" how God is portrayed in Scripture.

Jews don't use the Bible as the basis for our religion. It is a product of our religion and culture, but it holds a very different place and use in Judaism than it does in Christianity.

My post was to point out that you wouldn't have this view to begin with if you weren't exposed to Watchtower teachings. Jews don't have it because we have different ideas about "evil" and the entire God concept by comparison.

The Scriptures are a very dated, ancient view of how Jews of the past understood the world around them. While it still plays a significant part in Judaism, we aren't locked to view it's static concepts as Fundamentalist Christians do.

And as for "defending" God, that demonstrates that the Marie Antoinette Effect might be playing a part here. Many practicing Jews are agnostic or even atheist. Even theist Jews will often claim that God acts unjust, unlovingly, unfair, and imperfectly in Scripture. We don't defend God. We wrestle with the concept, which is why were are called the children of "Israel." We don't accept God blindly as other religious people do.

Even the idea that the Scriptures are the "Word of God," as you put it, I am sure is based on your limited exposure to Christianity. The critical Jewish view, for instance, views Scripture as coming from humanity.

The "Marie Antoinette Effect" merely refers to dealing with things based on a limited scope. This is why even atheists who were never religious often refer to ex-JWs and ex-Mormons who become atheist as "narrow atheists." The term "narrow" means having a limited or narrow view upon which to come to their conclusion.

I actually support the atheist choice of many ex-JWs, and was merely referring to how exposure to the Watchtower religion can cause this effect. I was trying to defend the Bible.

David_Jay

Posts by David_Jay