Melchisedek,
This ( the forum ) is interesting. I am looking forward to reading the posts. Though my skills with typing on the Russian keyboard are lacking.
kepler
JoinedPosts by kepler
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16
October 1914
by Quendi inwe have had a great discussion about world war i and its impact on the twentieth century.
i hope we can have an equally interesting exchange about october 1914. we all know how important that date was in the history of jehovah's witnesses but what may be murkier is the wts's later thinking on what happened that month and when.
charles taze russell and his followers expected the gentile times to conclude in that month with the battle of armageddon.
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kepler
Qendi,
In that July 1914 topic of a few days earlier, I appreciated the discussion as well and had some ideas related to this one...
Sorry I've been remiss on this. A lot of business related things have come up which actually have been great fun but time consuming. Also, an earlier draft vanished into cyber space.
But what I wanted to say on that one is that there is an odd ring to the notion of "cause and effect" about 1914, Satan falling out of heaven and all that.
Doesn't it sound familiar to anyone's ears? Doesn't it seem like something one might have read ( or was supposed to have read) in English class?
We all have our tastes in literature, I am sure, especially those of us who like to do writing of our own. 17th century English literature is not my forte, however, but I am aware that it exists. And even went so far several decades ago to attempt to read John Milton's "Paradise Lost".
Paradise Lost - what is that all about?
Why, bless my soul, it is about Satan getting kicked out of heaven - A LONG TIME AGO!
So, what was he doing there on the even of World War I?
Why was his eviction anticipated?
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For some reason, Puritan poet John Milton decided to write a free verse 12-book poem addressing his theology and mirroring the conventions of Virgil's Aeneid or Dante's trilogy about the afterlife, a mixture of both. And it can be argued that Lucifer might have even been the hero of this story. Anti hero as some of the commentary or criticism suggests.
But is this in the Bible either? I leave that open to responses, but here is how I put together the picture.
The documentation for Satan as an adversary of God in the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures is very sparse. Even the name Lucifer is taken out of context in Isaiah. For readers and Jewish commentators of the TaNaKh, the serpent in the Garden is a serpent. In Job, ha satan is a courtier in the court of god who is a betting man and a vehicle for introducing the concept of suffering and evil befalling the decent in this life... Only in the later later books is there even suggestion that the gods and idols that are earlier dismissed as unreal or fake could actually be exiles from God's domain. And then in several Gospel accounts, there are not only devils behind nearly every tree, but Satan confronts Jesus in the desert claiming he owns the world. Now how is that for dualism!
I won't attempt to explain all this, save to say that times have changed for Judea. It is Paul, however, that speaks the most about events in the Garden. And as I review Romans, I believe that he speaks of Christ dying to reconcile us with God due to sin. Redemption - and especially the JW term of "Ransom" suggest a dualism and giving the devil his due. "It was through one man that sin came into the world" Rom 5:12. And although Paul frequently speaks of devils or satan tempting him or others in their day to day work, he makes very little of the role of the devil in the garden.
Question for readers: Does Paul ever mention Job?
Hebrews is an outlier for Paul - and many doubt that he was the actual author. The other epistles make it quite clear who is talking. Anyway, shifting back and forth from concerns about priesthood and the state of mind of the angels confronted with the notion that God was going to send to human kind a savior... There is a suggestion in Hebrews 1 that this occurred early on. "To which of the angels, then, has God ever said You are my Son, today I have fathered you."
So if nothing else, from this I would surmise ( are you listening JWs?) that Jesus is distinct from the archangel Michael. But perhaps someone else can locate or infer that angels were jealous of an announcement that Jesus would offer redemption to mankind. Maybe Milton did.
Next on my list is Jude. Now check this out (5-7): I should like to remind you that the Lord resuced the nation from Egypt, but afterwards he still destroyed the people who refused to believe him; and the angels who did not keep to the authority they had, but left their appointed sphere, he has kept in darkness in eternal bonds until the Judgment Day..."
And then:
"Not even the archangel Michael when he was engaged in argument with the devil about the corpse of Moses dared to denounce him in the language of abuse..." (9)
Now how is it that the angels who have fallen are bound up but also trying to carry off the corpse of Moses? Hard to follow,but I think stages are being set from documents which are not considered canonical.
"It was with them in mind that Enoch, the 7th patriarch from Adam, made his prophecy when he said, 'I tell you, the Lord will come with his holy ones ( angels) in their tens of thousands to pronounce judgment on all humanity and to sentence the godless...
And that's where we get an account of the war amongst the angels in times distant.
But it's not in the Bible.
And it probably was very difficult, if not impossible, for John Milton to obtain in 17th century England, considering that late in life he was blind.
... And now we are expected to believe that WWI was caused by the same mechanism which would fare terribly in a patent office review.
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Is there Such a Thing as TIme
by givemejustalittlemoretime inthe present moment is real.
however much you may remember the past or anticipate the future, you live in the present.
the next second of your life is the future.
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kepler
Bart B.,
Not that I am an expert on these matters, but I believe there is an error in your argument, but it is key to the discovery of relativity.
E = m c^2 implies time, because velocity is the derivative of distance with respect to time. And prior to relativity, save perhaps for Einstein's contemporary Lorentz, time passage was considered a constant and invariant with respect to space. Since the hypothesis to contrary has been applied, it has been proven repeatedly to be not so.
Once estimates of the speed of light were made by systems of instrument starting a couple of centuries ago, physicists were puzzled that the speed of light did not vary with respect to its arrival from moving sources of varying speeds (e.g., Michelson & Morley). Doppler effects were there for sure. Sources moving toward us caused shifts to blue and objects moving away shifted to red. But why did the "clock speed" c of light remain the same?
Further investigation revealed changes of spatial and "temporal" geometry. In effect, relative motion caused changes of clock speed.
The equations of special relativity were the ones that addressed some of the basic geometric relations, and ten years later Einstein came up with the General Relativity relations which are much more comprehensive.
For the moving body time t is distorted by the ratio of the relative speed to light velocity c in the following form. The
t' = t0 [1 - (v/c)^2)^0.5
Or the time in a moving body t' is reduced with respect to a body at rest t0 by a factor with the exponential terms.
Time is also distorted by the presence of mass and its gravitational distortion. And correspondingly, energy distributed over space will have the same effect as the mass.
For a photon, I guess you could say that time has stopped, since its relative velocity is c. But when you divide by zero, this poses problems. And in the case of a body like a black hole, a mass with no finite dimensions, but one where escape velocities can be defined in the spaces surrounding them at levels higher than c, then there is another instance of time stopping - and at lower radii from the center of this mass, doing something drastically different under the "event horizon".
If time can be dilated or stretched by spatial position to mass or energy or else by relative velocity, then I would argue that it exists. Its part of a cosmos for which there was an initial event or cause. It suggests, however, that the Creator resides outside of it - as much as in...
When it came to formulating all of this, Einstein managed to get a lot of mileage out of the notion of passengers in a railroad car or elevator who experience accelerations or force of gravity, but would not be able to distinguish between the tw, the so-called equivalence principle. We can use this as a segue to another idea - and that of the elevator being stuck. This introduces subjective time which seems to be in the background of this discussion: our own perception of time's passage whether exciting ( brief) or monotonous ( extended).
Ah, never mind
So having gone this far, we'll probably have to address free will, quantum mechanics and uncertainties another day...
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100 Years Ago Today: World War I Began - July, 28, 1914
by Oubliette in100 years since world war i07/28/14 07:44 am by timothy noah and johnny simon.
"one hundred years ago today, emperor franz josef of austria-hungary declared war on serbia in retaliation for the assassination one month earlier of his heir apparent, archduke franz ferdinand, by a serbian pan-slavic nationalist.
what might otherwise have remained a regional conflict between the dying hapsburg empire and one of its former holdings instead became, through a tangle of alliances and a global power imbalance, two world wars that began in 1914 and ended in 1945, with a 21-year intermission for the jazz age and the great depression.".
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kepler
Interesting discussion so far.
As for myself I've studied WWI with great fascination and with an increasing appreciation of its monstrous nature and consequences; yet for the various links of my family, there are plenty of connections to WWII, but hardly any at all related to WWI. And in many ways it's a remarkable skip of the needle.
On my father's side he and his brothers either enlisted or drafted into the WWII - as were my mother's older brothers. Some served in battles of the Pacific and were wounded. One of my father's brothers, off the farm in Illinois, was a ham radio operator and then became an instructor, an aviator, an officer and then a flight surgeon before he retired from the air force in the 1960s. On my mother's side I can often remember the discussions between my mothe and grandmother about waiting word throught the Red Cross about my uncle Johnny who was a marine and who participated in the island landings of the Pacific campaign.
The overall effect was that I saw my relatives being in the service and then returning home to start a career or attend school on the GI bill. They were first my foster parents and then my adoptive parents. I followed their example.
But their parents who married in the 20s, raised them through the Depression Years, they spoke little of WWI. On my father's side the stories were of events of the American Civil War and several of his ancestors served at those battles, particularly at Shiloh early in the career of Ulysses Grant.
Now, skidding off in a very different direction, I noticed a couple of people remarking on events in heaven. And those are related to what brought us to this forum. And about these events, I often get confused, particularly as to when they were supposed to have happened, how they were detected or even surmised.
Charles Taze Russell gets tons and tons of credit, but should he not share some with the English poet Milton, author of Paradise Lost?
Or what about the Book of Enoch?
How can this "Event" be repeated again and again? And how much of the description is borrowed?
If there is really any traction on this, maybe we should break to that as another topic?
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Just got off the elevator with Anthony Morris
by kneehighmiah inat the international convention here i just got off the elevator with anthony morris.
he was heading to the basement and i was heading up to administration.
i rode one floor down with him before i went up to my destination.
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kepler
At the international convention here I just got off the elevator with Anthony Morris. He was heading to the basement and I was heading up to administration. I rode one floor down with him before I went up to my destination. Hilarious how unimpressed I am after awakening. I'm sure the "worldly" elevator operator was equally unimpressed. Typing this in thebathroom as I await his concluding discourse.
Could have been worse.
The elevator could have got stuck.
For hours.
And he could have lectured you on the nature of eternity....
Just so you could get the idea of how unbearable it could be with some people.
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Been over this one before? By the voice behind him, John of Patmos directed to write...
by kepler insomeone in my family many years back was pursued very intensely by jws in her neighborhood to become one of the pack.
two or three jws would meet with her each week and they would discuss the bible, with which she was well versed, and also some of their supplementary commentary material of a high ratio of drag to lift.
she became more and more enthusiastic about the bible, but did notice significant discrepancies between the text and the study material.
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kepler
Someone in my family many years back was pursued very intensely by JWs in her neighborhood to become one of the pack. Two or three JWs would meet with her each week and they would discuss the Bible, with which she was well versed, and also some of their supplementary commentary material of a high ratio of drag to lift. She became more and more enthusiastic about the Bible, but did notice significant discrepancies between the text and the study material. She didn't take the invitation to join.
When the delegation warned her that she would be lost unless she joined the group, she retorted that they had no such authority to condemn, but this was a matter which God decided. ... And so it went, but the meetings broke off forever on this question which she posed about Revelations.
In chapter 1, verse 11, when John heard the voice behind like a trumpet, saying, "Write down in a book all that you see, and send it to the seven churches of [ Asia Minor] Ephesus, Smyrna, Peregamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea..."
Her question was, "Which of those churches do you represent?"
Comments? Or. perhaps as so many other topics do, has this one come up before?
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Have scientists found "a new earth"???
by Nathan Natas inhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1293976,00.html
earth-like planet could harbour life .
tim radford, science editor.
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kepler
Terry,
You must be heavier than I was led to believe. Or at any rate, I think there is hope for your mobility on planet X if there is ever a cultural exchange.
If the planet is 14 times as massive as Earth and the same density then its radius increases with the cube root. That makes it 2.4 times the diameter or radius. Surface gravity is inversely proportional to radius squared. So I get 2.4 times as heavy there. If an individual weighs 150 lbs here, then they ought to weigh 361 pounds there. Not too comfortable, but in the age of obesity, there are people here on Earth who might have weighed 150 lbs a century ago, but are carrying something like that now. Call it a variation on the generation theme. But to illustrate: Saturn is 95 times more massive than Earth, but owing to relations like that and lower density, the surface gravity is about the same. Jupiter is about ten times as wide, denser than water and about 330 times as massive as Earth. Surface acceleration, if I remember right, is about 2.6 gravities.
I do see a report that one of the so-called candidate habitable exoplanets has vanished from the list. Apparently an artifact of observations. More details should appear in the journal Science in a week or so.
Oh, yeah. The issue with the period of nine days? The exo planet is not going around our sun, but another one out there. It's different in that it is less massive and less luminous. Luminosity drops off faster than mass. Mass luminosity relations are about third or fourth power. But the consequence of that is that stars with low luminosity last much longer too. It's one of those places that you don't have to worry about the lights going out before an eternity with the GB will end.
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What significance did "Scriptures" have for Church historians 2nd-5th centuries?
by kepler ini started looking at this when i came across a reference to clement of alexandria in another thread.. my first scans seem to indicate that early christian historians spoke of scriptures much more than they quoted it, save for issues related to aryanism or not.. anyone done any digging in this area?.
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kepler
I started looking at this when I came across a reference to Clement of Alexandria in another thread.
My first scans seem to indicate that early Christian historians spoke of Scriptures much more than they quoted it, save for issues related to Aryanism or not.
Anyone done any digging in this area?
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kepler
Defender of Truth,
Note the quote:
" Professor Fred Hoyle likened the efforts of the Ptolemaic cosmologists at patching up their failing theory in the face of new discoveries to the endeavors ofbigbangbelievers today to keep their theory afloat. He wrote in his book The Intelligent Universe: “The main efforts of investigators have been in papering over contradictions in thebigbangtheory, to build up an idea which has become ever more complex and cumbersome.” After referring to Ptolemy’s futile use of epicycles to rescue his theory, Hoyle continued: “I have little hesitation in saying that as a result a sickly pall now hangs over thebigbangtheory. As I have mentioned earlier, when a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that it rarely recovers.”—Page 186.
This pruning of sources suggests an argument concocted from the Watch Tower. It's fraudulent. With your moniker you should be ashamed of yourself.
I always liked Fred Hoyle. He wrote some great science fiction which had a lot of 1960s and 1950s era astronomy and science within it. But to quote Fred Hoyle on the imminent demise of Big Bang theory is akin to quoting the ghost of Ptolemy on the imminent demise of Copernican theory. Like Ptolemy Hoyle was on the losing side. What wiped out Hoyle's Steady State proposition was the discovery of the cosmic background radiation in the microwave band back in the early 1960s. It was cosmic and omni-directional. And it was consistent with another principle of astronomy: as an energy source irradiates into space, its characteristic black body temperature decreases. This was consistent with observations and theory of others, physicist, mathematician and cleric Lemaitre for one. General relativists applying Einstein's theory among others.As far as I can tell, astronomer Wendy Freedman has been a participant in the measurement of the Hubble constant for the expansion of the universe. And as far as I know, she has subscribed to the theory (not an article of faith!) that it is an expansion from an event billions of years earlier. During the Hubble Space Telescope era, there was a controversy about whether the universe was younger or older based on two different measures: calculated ages of ancient stars in star clusters - or the Hubble expansion rate. It would not be surprising that Freedman in an individual report cited an inferred age of 8 billion years - perhaps 20 years ago - and the stellar age people were figuring perhaps 20 billion based on some of their measures. But it got resolved to the figures you hear quoted today - and astronomy moved on to other issues.
Looking around on the web, you might see some reports or articles where Freedman and others are commenting on the evidence for an increasing expansion rate rather than a deceleration. Why? Well you can join the rest of us and study the question or wait for an explanation in the WT.
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99.9% Of a People Who Believe In Evolution Don't Understand It.
by Space Madness ini never believed in evolution as i thought it didn't make sense and that what was proposed was simply impossible.
how could an environment alter an organism's dna?
as we can see however, bacteria cannot become resistance to antibiotics.
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kepler
Actually your assumptions about me don't really hold any water. I am not in the medical field.
But you started this discussion with a claim that even you have trouble tying down. If people believe that evolution is a mechanism to explain much of what they see in the physical world, then they are applying a theory to explain things. If, however, they observe discrepancies, then even people that understand the theory rather well, would be inclined to say they don't understand what's going on. What exactly is a species, but a construct to distinguish a cat from a dog? When does a wolf become a dog and how does it make a difference? How much genetic variation is allowed before one sample is a distinct species from another? Can a genomic specialist distinguish two closely related animals without looking at them, but only examining DNA?
Then, of course, there are people who reject the concept of looking at the physical world entirely. But does their lack of understanding reflect a higher understanding?
Actually, Newton had no explanation for gravity other than its behavior: its force of attraction between masses and its ability to act over distance. He had no idea what might cause it. By comparison electro-magnetism is better understood.
But you still haven't even said which textbook you are holding up to criticism.