Posts by kepler

579

Won't get fooled again ...Moon Landing.

by The Rebel in

jw
friends

so i was fooled by the witnesses.

what can i learn from that?

not to accept things at face value but to seek out opinion and different view points.. hence my question " do you believe man landed on the moon?.

kepler

Just thought I'd stop by to see how this discussion is progressing.

Reflecting on "confirmation bias", I suppose one way to avoid it is to argue for a while from the opposite side. And that often does happen in any prolonged investigation. But in this case we already have a good share of such advocates for whatever reason. So I won't bother.

On the matter of evidence. I find rather awkward the silence of the competitors of the United States on this matter. Perhaps in the late 1960s they were oddly silent about Moon Landings in China or the Soviet Union, but I have met scientists and engineers from both countries, especially the former, who were engaged in the same activities, including the cosmonaut ( Aleksei Leonov) who was charged with performing the same task - and also one of the lead officials of the Soviet Space agency who gave his account of their own effort. Among these individuals, and especially during tours, they pointed out the hardware they were going to use, recounted their successes and failures. And they clearly acknowledged that the US lunar landing was real.

A few moments ago I was looking at surface pictures at the lunar landing sites

http://www.universetoday.com/113359/what-does-the-apollo-11-landing-site-look-like-today

I don't believe all the sources for the images are the same, because there are now several international missions taking photos of the moon. Sometimes at recent lunar and planetary sciences conferences you could watch the images in real time.

One of the most dramatic such images I have ever seen from space a spacecraft was a Mars Orbiter image of a Mars lander (Curiosity?) in mid flight descent toward landing at Gale Crater. Subsequently other Mars lander images were identified as well. You would think that the same thing could be done with the moon; and like surface explorations on Mars, beside the images of the lander stages, science packages and even flags, there are tracks on the lunar surface showing the paths of the lunar rovers in which the astronauts traversed subsequent landing sites.

Detailed accounts of the missions can be found in NASA special reports which have been collected by Apogee Books...

Though I suspect there are probably still some nation states that do not acknowledge that these events had ever occurred. Some just might not have much stake in the outcome either way. But maybe one might have some of their own know how, mythology and vested interest against - e.g., North Korea.

82

Quality Thinking - Warning: Long Post Ahead

by Viviane in

recently, several threads have had some debate about logic, evidence, critical thinking and skepticism.

i wanted to write a post discussing those things, hopefully to clarify what those things are, why they are important and how to use those tools.

first, logic, at its core, is simply a method for how to reason validly, how to draw conclusions based on a premise.

kepler

This is a fairly rational thread and I appreciate the logician's perspective. But I can't help thinking back to some musing of some decades back inspired by reading Goethe's Faust and Faust struggling to translate to German the Greek of the Gospel of John - It struck me that "in the beginning there was Logos", could just as easily have been "in the beginning there was Code..."

Small wonder that the darkness grasped it not.

But the notion that the Bible/Biblia which is books or the Book is inerrant - It is a mainstay of both Protestant and JW thought ( assuming they are separable). Truly it says what it says in some fashion, but you need only go two chapters into Genesis before it starts contradicting itself. If not errors, then these contradictions would at least stop execution if it is treated as an entirety of an executable program.

Moreover, the conclusions drawn are base can even be based on the sequencing of the books, post event "predictions" and adherence to Reformation era chapter and verse conventions. Issues that come up again in the first two chapters of Genesis. Generally, it is acknowledged that the system was off by about four verses ( Daniel shifts from chapter 5 to 6 perhaps in mid sentence).

Should it be thrown out? Not exactly. It serves as one of the templates for whatever comes next in western society. Not all the information in the text has been extracted or fully understood. The inerrancy arguments over the centuries have usually distilled down into the text means exactly what this institution or spokesperson for the divine says it means.

...Confirmation bias of my own, I guess.

579

Won't get fooled again ...Moon Landing.

by The Rebel in

jw
friends

so i was fooled by the witnesses.

what can i learn from that?

not to accept things at face value but to seek out opinion and different view points.. hence my question " do you believe man landed on the moon?.

kepler

What a topic.

No, I did not participate directly in Apollo 11, but I participated in spaceflight.

As to proof of Apollo landings, what can I offer?

I watched the last flight (Apollo 17) from the closest point to the launch pad as a guest. My instructor in college had received tickets for our class for teaching the same course In celestial mechanics to the astronaut corps, including those on board and who preceded them (the next time I would get nearly that close was the second launch of Shuttle Endeavour). It was a dark and (admittedly) moonless night where you could clearly see the Pleiades and the launch had a false start. After a hold it went up so thunderously I held my ears and struggled not to close my eyes. I watched the Saturn first stage yellow flame fade in brilliance to a yellow star and then watched the two subsequent LOX hydrogen stages burn a steamy white. Practically, the whole insertion into orbit was visible. I have seen and talked to two of the crewmembers subsequently. One of them I was introduced to during a conference on planetary science. A number of us were looking at an exhibit depicting the Lunar Rover used on his flight when he happened to walk up behind us. Beside being an Apollo astronaut, Harrison Schmitt was a geologist.

As time went by I met and worked with other astronauts in day to day work. A few times I had a microphone passed on to me as the next speaker, including from one of the Apollo 11 crew. Aldrin and Collins were not as reclusive as Armstrong.

Following Apollo 17 ( within a year or so), I worked with people who participated in the moon missions while we were working to design and develop Space Shuttle engineering models. Some of this work for was derivative: adapting Apollo guidance, navigation and control algorithms to model the Space Shuttle's flight. Legacy operations for the big coverup, I guess.

I watched the continuous live coverage of the moonwalks. Apollo 11 was obviously grainy, but Apollo 15 definitely was not. The initial flight and landing as cinema did not compare very well with the contemporary 2001 A Space Odyssey, but later Apollos such as 15 gave the film a run for its money. And if they were films, the features went on for days - not hours. Does anyone remember press conferences in flight where the astronauts floated around the cabin as they fielded questions? A few weeks after the Apollo 15 crew was done they ended up as guests at the engineering school I attended for the football homecoming. A number of the Apollo astronauts lived in my neighborhood when I lived in Houston. They also wrote memoirs about their training and flight...

As was pointed out, the sites of the moon landings can be seen from lunar orbiters. Upper stages of the Saturn V that supported the flights, some of them have escaped earth's gravity but return in periodic orbits to be observed by astronomers, not long mistaken for near earth asteroids since they have a reflectance typical of titanium oxide ( white paint).

Yes, I suppose there are significant gaps in my personal proof of lunar landings. I wasn't walking behind the Apollo 11 astronauts, though a number of my neighbors and colleagues did so from mission control stations that were long in use for other space flights.

As to whether there is any equivalence in believing this to accepting the JW belief system, I cannot say. I never believed the JW system. It just intruded into my life within the last decade. It forced me to examine things I never bothered with before - and I have shared my observations on this forum.

As to whether I have ever been fooled by belief systems that were not true, the answer is "yes", of course. But most of them have been easier to shuck off. Probably there are some more that I am as yet unaware of. Fortunately, most of these things start out as mysteriously not well explained and that there is so much more to be understood.

On the other hand, when I consider the science fiction that I read as a child or adolescent: about space travel, about planets around other stars, about the nature of the moon's other side, the surface of Mars, the moons of the outer planets and the asteroids ( especially Ceres), I have lived in an age of exploration that has not done so badly about giving shape to those dreamscapes. ... I am thankful to God for that.

30

Speculation ( not theory ) on child abuse inquiries.

by DATA-DOG in

most of you, like me, keep yourself informed as to what's happening in jw-land.

like me, you make it your business to know what's going on.

so i'm wondering why the wtbts is allowing eldubs to appear in these inquiries in australia??

kepler

This is a very remarkable development. And as said above, it reflects the local Australian circumstances rather than the judicial procedures e,g., in the United States. But still, it gets me wondering: If the Brooklyn offices were made aware of what they were headed for in Australia, it must have built a fire under them to get a settlement in continuing appeal cases such as the one in California with the Conti family. A great deal of argument depends here in the States depends on what can be documented about WT organizational policy. Now there's going to be a "before" and "after" the Australian inquiry.

As to how well the suit (sic) fits, I will defer to the legal observers.

62

Basic Bible and Religious Vocabulary the Watchtower Never Teaches

by CalebInFloroda in

when i began formal study of religion and biblical analysis it was like peeling off layer after layer of dark matter, sticky and putrid that had stuck over my eyes and ears and mouth.

i learned that under the watchtower one only builds a widening gap between yourself and the world of biblical academia and scholars.

i used to think i knew a lot because i learned to quote a few scholars or lexicons as a witness.

kepler

Interesting discussion on the 20 notions, to which I can not really add that much.

But along the same lines, I would like to suggest a 21st and 22nd. And I don't mean to close the topic at that number if anyone would want to add a 23rd, 24th or n. But here goes:

A hypothesis is either the origin of a theory or pursuit of the consequences of exploring it results in one, maybe more. Considering that so much of JW and Evangelistic application of the Bible is prophetic in an emphatic sense ( e.g., chunking the VHF/UHF digital channels and listening for a moment to TV evangelists or reading a WT), then it might be worth while to reflect on the fact that prophesies or predictions are based on hypotheses either of reading a text or observing nature. In nature, if we were to watch the sun and moon change position for a number of years against the background of fixed stars, we could either come up with hypotheses or theories and predict an eclipse, We could have a hypothesis that the they would collide ( sun and moon equal size at equal distance) or one will pass in front of the other ( sun behind moon or moon behind sun). When one or the other occurs, certain hypotheses are eliminated and we are also no longer dealing with predictions ( prophecies) because the event has come to pass.

So, where am I leading with all this:

21, The Documentary Hypothesis.

22. Post dated or ex eventu descriptions

On this last one a hint and citation: Isaiah 14:22:23 which figured prominently in the "What the Bible Really Teaches" pamphlet that I was asked to study. I did. So far as I could tell, the event happened all right, but it was during Isaiah's lifetime, undertaken by Sennacherib, a hundred and fifty years before the era in which I was supposed to believe it had happed ( via Cyrus) and had not.

35

Where did Jesus get the Idea of an After-life in Heaven?

by John Aquila in

the ancient jews did not believe in an after-life as far as i can tell, correct me if i'm wrong.

the watchtower says yes.

they say all the prophets believed in a paradise earth..

kepler

Village Idiot,

Thanks for bringing up Luke chapter 23. That verse ended a former relationship when the wheels of the organization and its conditioning started to kick in. It brings back memories and I recounted them at length on this forum over the past five years. I lost a lot on that one, but yet Thank God for Luke and his testimony.

------

Also, there is mention of Christ referring to the Book of Moses in Matthew. Well, he did it in Mark as well, chapter 10. Prior to that, when discussing the proposition of a widow who had once married sequentially seven husbands and who would she be married to at the Resurrection, Christ's answer practically sets the stage for Aquila's topic:

"Surely the reason why you are wrong is that you understand neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For when they rise from the dead, men and women do not marry, no. They are like the angels in heaven. Now about the dead rising again, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him and said, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.' He is God not of the dead but of the living. You are very much mistaken."

Like most people reading the Bible, I am left with impressions that are probably contradictory when examined. Judgment at death and at the end of time would be an example. But there is also the resurrection of the body and what Jesus just said above. The latter, however, seems to make more sense to me in as much as our limited and inconclusive contacts with the beyond would suggest. Example, if you have a dream, a coma like experience in the hospital or communications you cannot explain.

Whether that sounds convincing or not, the alternative provided by JW literature ( and some others) is something like the Earth as a rental property in which the inhabitants are evicted and a second party comes back to own it much in the same manner as before without the problems - because they are somehow physically perfect - and eternal. And I guess they are given a deed. Meanwhile, an earth and universe that would appear eternal continues to exist as the creation it was. But these elements are not eternal even though they obey creation's laws. There are no provisions in the story to address such issues. The interchange in Mark stands as an illustration.

Another small note. From one Gospel account to the next there are also slight changes in the name of heaven and each of the writer's adhere to one or another: the kingdom of heaven, my father's kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, etc. Each of those convey a different impression In the aforementioned Luke passages, the thief speaks of "your kingdom" and Christ replies that "In truth I say to you that this day you will be with me in paradise". Strong 3857 - used only that one time in the Gospel. Only twice elsewhere in the NT: in 2 Corinthians (12:4) and Revelations ( 2:7).

35

Where did Jesus get the Idea of an After-life in Heaven?

by John Aquila in

the ancient jews did not believe in an after-life as far as i can tell, correct me if i'm wrong.

the watchtower says yes.

they say all the prophets believed in a paradise earth..

kepler

The Deutero-Canonical book of Wisdom addresses immortality in 2:23

"For God created human being to be immortal , he made them as an image of his own nature.

...

"To the unenlightened ( 3:2) they appeared to die, their departure was regarded as a disaster,

their leaving us like an annihilation; but they are at peace..."

This is a book of late origin and in Greek, but long part of the Septuagint - and until the 19th century, part of the KJB.

63

How the Watchtower Screws Up Your View of Scripture

by CalebInFloroda in

while i do not argue the stand of atheism (because as a jew i find it totally logical and acceptable), i have noticed that there are odd carryover preconceptions about scripture that some hold as axiomatic about the bible (at least the hebrew texts), misconceptions that have nothing to do with the jewish scriptures themselves.. so regardless of what you may think of scripture, whether you believe it is of g-d or not, i thought some of you might enjoy a reference to see how much the watchtower teaching on scripture might still be influencing the conclusions you are making today...at least about the tanakh.

jews read their texts acknowledging the following:.

1. no scriptural concept of original sin.

kepler

Caleb,

Your reference to the Latin roots for the word Gentile (above) inspired me to take at look at Jerome's Vulgate Latin translation of the same chapter some time in the 5th century present era. Jerome does not use any form o f "gens, gentes, gentilis... but the original Greek word. See below:

6:7 And when you are praying, speak not much, as the HEATHENS. For they think that in their much speaking they may be heard.

Orantes autem nolite multum loqui sicut ETHNICI putant enim quia in multiloquio suo exaudiantur

6:8 Be not you therefore like to them for your Father knoweth what is needful for you, before you ask him.

Nolite ergo adsimilari eis scit enim Pater vester quibus opus sit vobis antequam petatis eum

Elsewhere, Jerome uses gentilis in John (once), frequently in the Acts and Maccabees.

Beside what you noted above, the Wikipedia discussion of Gentiles describes the term as follows:

The term is used by English translators for the Hebrew גוי (goy) and נכרי (nokhri) in the Hebrew Bible and the Greek word ἔθνη (éthnē) in the New Testament. The term "gentiles" is derived from Latin, used for contextual translation, and not an original Hebrew or Greek word from the Bible. The original words goy and ethnos refer to "peoples" or "nations". Latin and later English translators selectively used the term "gentiles" when the context for the base term "peoples" or "nations" referred to non-Israelite peoples or nations in English translations of the Bible.

Consequently, it seems that context was shaky here. And overall, the term was invented for English translation. for a conjecture.

This will probably one of the few times I will fall on the side of the New World Translation, which happened to observe the same thing.

63

How the Watchtower Screws Up Your View of Scripture

by CalebInFloroda in

while i do not argue the stand of atheism (because as a jew i find it totally logical and acceptable), i have noticed that there are odd carryover preconceptions about scripture that some hold as axiomatic about the bible (at least the hebrew texts), misconceptions that have nothing to do with the jewish scriptures themselves.. so regardless of what you may think of scripture, whether you believe it is of g-d or not, i thought some of you might enjoy a reference to see how much the watchtower teaching on scripture might still be influencing the conclusions you are making today...at least about the tanakh.

jews read their texts acknowledging the following:.

1. no scriptural concept of original sin.

kepler

Just another note on Matt chapter 6. This is not so much a matter of distinctions between Jews and the Christian community but among Christians themselves. In the reform movements of the 16th and 17th centuries, great emphasis was placed on the value of "faith" over acts, especially by followers of Luther and Calvin. When I look at these passages in Matthew, I see holes in their arguments. And I have to wonder how they missed them as well.

Their arguments were based on the humans after Original Sin being all of a kind, a very low form of low life. Nothing that they could in acts could be seen as favorable in the eyes of the Lord. And granted that these passages show the ways in which alms and prayers would not be seen as worthy - and how they can result in rewards here on Earth rather than heaven. But there are also recommendations on how to make these ACTS of value.

As I have been reading this summer in a historical account of those times, it would be possible to lose your life circa 1560 or so for making the same argument in various parts of Europe (just as there was for upholding its counter in other parts).

63

How the Watchtower Screws Up Your View of Scripture

by CalebInFloroda in

while i do not argue the stand of atheism (because as a jew i find it totally logical and acceptable), i have noticed that there are odd carryover preconceptions about scripture that some hold as axiomatic about the bible (at least the hebrew texts), misconceptions that have nothing to do with the jewish scriptures themselves.. so regardless of what you may think of scripture, whether you believe it is of g-d or not, i thought some of you might enjoy a reference to see how much the watchtower teaching on scripture might still be influencing the conclusions you are making today...at least about the tanakh.

jews read their texts acknowledging the following:.

1. no scriptural concept of original sin.

kepler

Thanks, Caleb. What I see here in your replies are homilies about scriptural texts that we of other persuasions would not likely ever hear, but would find that there is much to contemplate.

Which is a matter that leads back to something you mentioned earlier: the term Gentiles in Matthew 6:7-9 where Jesus gives disciples guidelines on how to pray, followed by introduction of the Lord's Prayer.

I went back to look at the text - and it is as you said. Chapter 6 begins with a discussion of alms giving and objections to public displays which refer to local practices (e.g., in synagogues - verse 5), but in English, "Gentiles" are called out as the ones who think they will be heard because of their many words. Like many people who retain the scriptures as a composite, I had assumed that Christ was again attacking Pharisees - and perhaps I had even heard as much from the pulpit at one time or another. At the very least this verse is directed elsewhere. Yet it still seems odd, perhaps even anachronistic. Who were these audibly praying Gentiles of which Jesus spoke?

I referred to a Greek English New Testament with the Concordance - and the Greek word used in this case was ETHNIKOS. In the text by Paul Reynolds the Concordance ( Strong number 1482) defines the word as NATION, but in all its applications and in the majority of its variant ( ETHNOS - Nation), the translation is assumed to be Gentiles. Since there are 162 uses of the latter, the context probably decides which is more appropriate, I suspect the rules are not iron-clad. But there are patterns: In Matthew, the early chapters speak of Gentiles up to chapter 20:19 (" the rulers of the Gentiles"), and thereafter we start seeing phrases like 29:19 "make disciples of all nations." And Paul in Romans is translated in speaking of Abraham as "the father of many nations", significantly not "Gentiles". ...Yet it is still the interpretation of the same Greek word.

If I were a raccoon treating translation as a lump of sugar being washed in a stream, I think I could eliminate the use of "Gentiles" altogether. For unless I was there listening to the intonation of the speaker, I could hardly tell which version of the word its evocation is supposed to convey.