Posts by kepler

18

THE TRUTH is an estimate

by Terry in

jw
friends

as i was growing up in a household with my grandparents, i heard a certain phrase hundreds of times, "well, you know what they say .

and i wondered: "who are "they"?.

it was my first encounter with shapeless, formless, invisible, abstract, non-descript, and anonymous authority.. the premise seemed to say:.

Your account of truth, estimates and the indefinite 3rd person plural - laugh out loud amusing. Reminds me of some property I owned for a number of years and finally got rid of. I could just see the trench in the front yard and the incoming new repair estimates lobbed in like hostile mortar shells.

Regarding things like, "You know what they always say..." It was other activities of decades back that used to stick to the back of my mind:

"You know what they are doing now?..." "Do you know what they are working on now?..."

This was the stuff of monorails and trips to Mars. Devices that I should have noticed in Popular Science or Popular Mechanics. As one social commentator remarked, it was akin to invoking a great conspiracy to make life better for "us". Even after two world wars that sort of optimism still remained in many areas of the country.

It might be that the estimates on things like spaceships and fusion power seemed to extend out like that plumbing job. Or maybe increased deficit spending made it harder and harder to follow up on all those research initiatives assumed by the Great Society, etc. In any case a whole lot of "advancements" did sneak in the back door. I say "advancement", because I am not that keen on app loaded pocket telephones that you can stare at all day, but I do appreciate what can be done in a day's work based on data.

Then sometimes one gets involved in a new project and you begin to wonder that maybe you might be working along with some of the group that people might be talking about - "You know what they are doing now..." Well, actually...

... The notion of "what they were doing" did invoke a notion that life was getting better, just like Victorians or Edwardians might have thought - until that frame of mind came to a screeching halt 100 years ago. But this was not the first time that had happened - or that society recovered from it.

It just might be that life on this plane, whether it gets better or not, will keep on going. It will change to a form that fits the aspirations of our children and grandchildren more than ours, descendants that like apps more than I do. And just because we do not like the prospects, does not mean that iall has to end.

Another "estimator" of a different persuasion, I think it was Malcolm Gladwell, suggested that we live in a most likely state. And when it comes to the age of mankind, tautological argument, so to speak, leads us to think we are near the middle of its life - since that would be the most likely result of such inquiry. We seem to be located in space and time at a rather arbitrary point after 13.7 billion years of goings in a spiral arm of a typical galaxy... The same might be true about the age of human kind. So if we see skeletal traces of ourselves back 40,000 years, odds are...

But wait, where's my slide rule? 607 BC Jerusalem's Temple was knocked down to crank up a 2520 year cycle mechanism... so that oh so consequently we are privileged to live at exactly 100 years after the clock ran out on that epoch, drawing to the tottering of another massive, momentous, cryptic domino...

"In the world of prophecy do you know what is going on now?..."

What a trade in mindset!

100

Can anyone disprove 607 BCE date using only the NWT and WT literature?

by Bart Belteshassur in

i haven't come across any arguement that does not involve secular history and external references.

in fact the wt can not get to 607 bce without using external sources as in knowing that they need to get back from 1914 ce to 607 bce, and botching an argument using an external date as reference to create their start point at 537 bce.. i realize that to get the final date we must provide a fixed figure from somewhere which can only be a historical source, but the objective would be to disprove the wt flim flam.

once that is achieve we can use which ever fixed historical point they wish to chose.

kepler

Jeffro,

Reflecting on your reply, I think I will keep Ezra 6:16-18 in mind if this topic should come up again, especially if anyone should knock on my door.

So if we are to assume that 607 BCE is the date of the Temple's destruction, then the temple was literally out of commission until the ceremony the verses in Ezra describe.

That's more like 90 YEARS than 70 YEARS.

Rationales for so-called "70 years of desolation" based on an end date in the 530s are all over the calendar with presumed points of initiation: Accession of Nebuchadnezzar? Treaties of alliance or hegemony with this or that Middle Eastern power?

You have to be in a cult to take any of them seriously.

The whole Northern Kingdom was obliterated and removed by Assyrians a century earlier and the chroniclers of these mishaps or their latter day interpreters hardly give a rat's ass about what happened to the tribes there or whether they appear on the historical stage ever again.

What bothers the chroniclers who compiled this story was the fate of the Temple. And it was out of commission for 70 years if presume it was demolished by Nebuchadnezzar according to the conventional historical chronology.

As to our aside about 70 AD being another 70 year milestone, I am aware of chronological uncertainties for Christ's birth. But then again, there is that obvious interval in the calendar. That you should dismiss that one as "what we call a coincidence" , then what should be done with the fabricated interval of 2520 years which is the topic of all this discussion?

100

Can anyone disprove 607 BCE date using only the NWT and WT literature?

by Bart Belteshassur in

i haven't come across any arguement that does not involve secular history and external references.

in fact the wt can not get to 607 bce without using external sources as in knowing that they need to get back from 1914 ce to 607 bce, and botching an argument using an external date as reference to create their start point at 537 bce.. i realize that to get the final date we must provide a fixed figure from somewhere which can only be a historical source, but the objective would be to disprove the wt flim flam.

once that is achieve we can use which ever fixed historical point they wish to chose.

kepler

Despite a number of references to Ezra, I don't think there was any mention of this Ez 6:15-18:

The Temple was completed on the 23rd day of the month of Adar in the sixth year of the reigh of King Darius. The Israelites - the priests, the Levites and the remainder of the exiles - joyfully celebrated the dedication of the Temple of God - for the dedication of this Temple of God they offered one hundred bulls, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs... They installed the priests in their orders and the Livites in their positions for the ministry of the Temple of God in Jerusalem, as prescribed in the Book of Moses.

In other words, the Temple was not complete until it was dedicated on a specific date.

What was the date? That was about 1 April 515 BC according to a footnote in my Bible. Elsewhere I have seen it described as 516. E.g., Wikipedia.

Now what was going on 70 years earlier?

Elsewhere Jews have interpreted this 70 year desolation accordingly.

Strangely enough, if we take the present era dating and the second temple's destruction, we get another 70 year interval.

Of course, we also have Herod the Great remodeling the daylights out of it and Antiochus IV desecrating it in manners that are recorded by history rather than what is inferred about Nebuchadnezzar's destruction, but when one deals with numerological predictions and prophecies, all is fair.

44

Disfellowed on 7/16/14 for sending a letter to my former congregation

by spbondgirl007 in

jw
friends

it's been quite a while since i lasted posted anything on jwn.

i was in hiding previously, but only because i wanted to avoid the shun gun until i had the opportunity to tell my former congregation what i think about the org./gb.

i last attended a meeting over 2.5 years ago but it wasn't until june--when i earned my bachelor's degree--that i finally had the time to collect my thoughts and get them down on paper...i decided to write my letter in a style i felt would be most appealing to my target audience--jw's still under gb mind control --in the hope that at least a few would read it and actually "think".

kepler

Don't know what I was expecting, but I found this to be a truly remarkable, memorable letter.

And I say this not feeling exempt from your critique. What you prescribe is a difficult path to follow, but it's a better course than what the alternative is.

Congratulations. I wish the best for you in your new life.

...You should have BEEN the graduation speaker!

5

Pastor Russell demoted to Brother Russell

by berrygerry in

in the reading room, and noticed in the god's kingdoms' rules, rules, and more rules book.. brother charles taze russell and brother russell.. never noticed him being called brother russell before..

kepler

Well, since he was the founder, maybe he deserves the appellation "Big Brother".

53

Is there Such a Thing as TIme

by givemejustalittlemoretime in

the 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.

kepler

Post Script.

I see that I have wandered off topic. But then again, there is an element of the time issue in the above digression.

If you spill a glass of milk or crack an egg, in our view of the direction of time you introduce an irreversible, new level of disorder into the world.

And that, in a way, is how we view the direction of time or time's arrow. As time passes "entropy" increases - with some notable exceptions.

But let us say, as some have, e.g. novelist Phillip Amis, that time's arrow is reversed and everything we see is running backwards: eggs are re-assembling; Humpty-Dumpty thanks to all the king's men and milk is flying back into the bottle. Then murderers are now more like doctors or humanitarians because they are saving lives, etc. In so many ways there are symmetries with time's direction reversed.

It does bring us back to the issue of whether the universe itself experiences time anymore than a river does. Time as part of space-time could be a dimension of that larger medium

And that brings us back to whether we are making choices and altering events - or events such as rocks in the stream are influencing our behavior.

Time looks like it is real in either case since it marks things off. So maybe we have to wonder if our own consciousness is real.

It was the last time I checked.

But then over that interval of time called my life that I have been wrong about a number of things...

53

Is there Such a Thing as TIme

by givemejustalittlemoretime in

the 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.

kepler

Bart B.,

Regarding the speed of light and excess velocities required to escape from the bounds of a black hole:

Of course, there are still the regions surrounding the black hole where photon velocities are sufficient to fly about in orbits... What do we do with this case? At far approach from the black hole, the photon's velocity is sufficient to be bent below the border where the velocity exceeds c at closest approach... Will it come back out? I doubt it. But energy is conserved somehow, right?

From time to time someone will note that speed of sound and speed of light as physical phenomena have similarities. The equations of fluid mechanics use the speed of sound and the mach number M in a similar way to predict drag and lift, for example. Drag approaches infinity at M=1 and then levels off in the supersonic and hypersonic regimes. Simularly in channel or nozzle flow: two sets of solutions but a singularity around the speed of sound.

And then, as you noted, imaginary numbers have "currency" in other physical phenomena such as electric circuits or sinusoidal motions.

But unlike fluid mechanics, particles in the light medium are transformed in more ways than supersonic objects. And the main hints the outside world has about the internal world of a black hole paint a very strange yet incomplete picture. There is the effect of mass on space and there is angular momentum ( or the effects of spin). Is there evidence of internal magnetic fields? I forget. And then, as Hawkings has pointed out, there are indications of temperature, entropy and means for a black hole to evaporate.... We will both have to read more somewhere else.

On another local controversy: about whether "c" is the speed of light. Perhaps this might help. The physical constant for light speed in a vacuum is nearly 300,000 km/sec. But in media in which it exhibits refractive properties ( bent), the velocity of light is reduced, if I remember correctly, factpred by the cosine of the angle of refraction. Maybe this has something to do with Viviane's argument?

20

New forum russian exJW

by Melchisedek in

jw
friends

http://jwforum.name/forum.

kepler

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.

16

October 1914

by Quendi in

we 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.

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?

------

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.

53

Is there Such a Thing as TIme

by givemejustalittlemoretime in

the 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.

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...