Posts by kepler

9

Sumerian history

by StarTrekAngel in

can anyone recommend a good, updated book or documentary on the sumerian civilization?.

thanks in advance.

kepler

CrazyGuy, StarTrekAngel,

Responding to the question about destruction of Babylon:

Back about 5 or 6 years ago, I was asked to take instruction by my then fiancée. This consisted of having two representatives come to my house on Saturdays and take me through the pamphlet "What the Bible Really Teaches". About page 23 there was a section titled, "A Book of Prophecy". The text made claims about the book of Isaiah, about how Isaiah prophesied the destruction of Babylon by Cyrus and quotes on page 25:"She will never be inhabited, nor will she reside for generation after generation. And there the Arab will not pitch his tent, and no shepherds will let their flocks lie down there (13:20)". "I will sweep her with the broom of annihilation (14:22)."

The idea here was that Jehovah had devastated Babylon for desecrating the Temple. And wouldn't you like to have a deity like Jehovah backing you up when you're in trouble, et cetera?

Interesting. But I found this odd. I looked at my under-used copy of Herodotus. It seemed like Babylon was a bustling metropolis according to his account of his world a century or so after its presumed destruction. No reports of recent destruction or recovery from thereof. Later Alexander seemed to want to establish his capital there and the Persians were loose with the notion of where a capital was, save for where they liked to have court. And Ezra with a large party appears to have left Babylon with well wishes from Cyrus. Not even all the Jews left when he did. Something fishy.

I look at other accounts of history and I start reading Isaiah carefully for myself.

Chapter 14 is whole host of denunciations, that lead up to a fist shaking at Assyria which in Isaiah's time under Sennacherib had laid siege to Jerusalem and fumbled the ball. A plague broke out in its camp and the siege was lifted. Isaiah credits Jehovah's intervention ( or the Lord's or Yahweh's... depending on text). Prior to that, about Babylon, he says, quoting the Lord: "I will rise against them, ... and deprive Babylon of name, remnant, offspring and posterity, declares Yahweh. I shall turn it into the haunt of hedgehogs, a swamp. I shall sweep it with the broom of destruction... ( 14:22-23)."

As I said, the next few lines are about how the Lord would "break Assyria in my country: (14:25).

So what about the Ancient Iraq section and other similar texts? The destruction of Babylon did NOT occur 150 years later (539 BC), but around 689 BC. Cyrus was greeted as a hero. A peaceful takeover and favorable reception by local religious authorities is chronicled in stone. As is the earlier destruction by Sennacherib the Assyrian by FLOODING. "I will turn it into a haunt of hedgehogs, a swamp." Sennacherib diverted the river to flood the city and carted off the nobility and wealthy to slavery much as would happen later to the same classes in Jerusalem under order of Nebuchadnezzar. Cyrus did nothing of the kind, however.

And it means that the whole proposition of the segment on "What the Bible Really Teaches" was wrong. Jehovah did not punish Babylon for destruction or desecration of the Temple by desolation because it was Sennacherib that had done the deed 150 years before. And it was his son Esarhaddon who rescinded the 70 year sentence after 681 in an act of mercy or remorse that the Biblical account, which seems to borrow from Assyrian "jurisprudence" seems unable to consider or imagine. I would add that the scribes appear to have deliberately conflated the two events. And their work in that regard seems to have succeeded immeasurably better than they could have imagined.

Several times I confronted elders from the particular Kingdom Hall with these matters. They continued to insist that Babylon was irrevocably destroyed. It's amazing the tenacity of their beliefs. I also pointed out that the NWT claims that Peter was writing his epistles from Babylon...

Case closed.

13

Photodrama of creation: Solar system has 12 planets?

by Saintbertholdt in

in the photodrama of creation there's a picture of the solar system.. there are 12 solar orbiting objects.

(also a 13th orbit which seems to be a comet, probably halley).

does anyone know where russell got this from?.

kepler

Like today, the 19th century had evidence for astronomical bodies that had not yet been observed.

One of them that I thought might show up on the diagram was "Vulcan", an object that supposedly perturbed Mercury's orbit just like a 9th might have been responsible for effects on Neptune's. Number 8.

Pluto is first detected circa 1929. Too late for Russell's diagrams.

As it turned out, there was no Vulcan to be found inside the orbit of Mercury and Pluto is too insubstantial to have had any effect on Neptune. A part of the "advance" of Mercury's perihelion ( near approach to the sun) in the celestial sphere is attributed to General Relativity. Reasons for discrepancies in Neptune's orbit...Don't know if anyone has found a reason. So representation on the Russell chart seems to be major asteroids.

Aside from that, interesting, but I don't think the sketch was too rigorous on scale.

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

This might be a repeat. I stepped away from my desk and the text was gone.

Some time last night I remembered a 1970s film about faking a NASA crew landing on Mars shortly after the Viking landers in 76. The film was called Capricorn One and the director was Peter Hyams. Looking a Wikipedia articles about it and the growth of the lunar landing conspiracy theory, it seemed like they had an interesting cross fertilization, including Carpicorn One's access to NASA and contractor simulation facilities for either type of mission (Viking or Apollo).

Suffice to say, that since that time our abilities to simulate other things could make the historical record and simulations more blurry. Perhaps all our recorded history was really concocted in studios - including old newsreels.

But for the time being, given that we are talking about the implications of not having evidence in our hands, I would like to point out some another potential problem. After all, if a spacecraft is in orbit around the moon - and especially in the era of 1968 to 1972, there is no communication with the spacecraft when it is on the other side.

What could be going on with the spacecraft and its crew when every other hour it is lost from contact behind the moon?

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

Apollo had its roots in a Kennedy speech in September of1962, to land a man on the moon in a decade.

Recalling that there was a film about faking a landing on Mars called Capricorn One, I refreshed my memory looking at the Wikipedia articles on the film and the issue of the fake lunar landing. Oddly enough, it looks like the writers and directors of the fake Mars landing had a complicated relationship with NASA and lunar program. To produce the fake Mars landing film many NASA and contractor simulation facilities were used. So consequently when the film hit the screen, a number of people thought: Could the lunar landing have been faked as well?

It could. But once you admit that you don't have verification of everything, you could just as well argue that the astronauts went somewhere else when they orbited behind the moon.

After all, their signals were repeatedly lost for nearly an hour!

9

Sumerian history

by StarTrekAngel in

can anyone recommend a good, updated book or documentary on the sumerian civilization?.

thanks in advance.

kepler

StarTreKAngel,

In my own inquiries, I found Georges Roux's "Ancient Iraq" very informative. It's available from Penguin in paperback and has been updated from time to time by the author. Other books of some help have been guides to hieroglyphics, who wrote what, how and when.

This might not be a bull's eye on your basic question, since you said Sumeria. Sumeria is ancient Iraq though, but there is not necessarily continuity with the Semitic language peoples that followed it. And what's more, I find myself compelled to mention Roux's account (pp. 319-396) of Sennacherib's destruction of BABYLON (circa 689 BC) and his son Esarhaddon order ( in stone ) to have it rebuilt prior to the 70 years ( after a eleven years of ordered desolation issued after 681 BC, he inverted the numerals on a tablet in a formal ceremony).

This implications of this should be unsettling to any reader of Biblical archeology.

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.