Posts by kepler

44

How Christian thinking was corrupted by Paul's clever explanations

by Terry in

when modern writers, thinkers, believers in christianity talk about their religion they are almost always depending on saul of tarsus (paul) rather than.

jesus.. there is a good reason for this.

paul wrote letters.

kepler

Terry,

Hope this topic runs a while. As a proposition, there's a lot to think about and not be quickly dismissed.

For many, I am sure, there has been introduction to the idea of Paul as an interpreter of Christianity - whatever one might think Jesus specifically had in mind - or whether Jesus was always nodding his head in assent from on high to what Paul might have preached or wrote. But additionally, when I was confronted by assertions from people who were instructing me on JW beliefs ( another story) based on Biblical text, I had to ask myself what the compilers of both the Old Testament and New were thinking - or, to be brief, what did the OT mean to Jews when it was published or compiled.

"Published or compiled" might sound like splitting hairs - save for the fact that in reading what you are saying, there seems a straw man of Jewish belief. It is a shame that Old Generation Dude has thrown in the towel on such panel discussions. For whatever I have to say is as a quick study and not from present-day Jewish perspective - I'm not Jewish and never was. But the sense I got from "70 CE" is that Jewish faith did not face the two alternatives that you describe. Synagogue groups came into ascendency and a whole lot of theological reasoning became more like an accident panel review of the whole basis for belief. What do you do when the Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed twice? What do you take away from a covenant agreement when the your people do not occupy and control all the territory between the Nile and Tigris Euphrates? Yet you still believe in monotheism, right? What do you do in this situation? . You review everything you've been doing and come up with new procedures and perspectives. Since Paul does not know the outcome on this, we need not elaborate. But it is even remarked by observant Jews that had Moses turned up in some of those sessions in the centuries subsequent to 70 CE, he would have either been confused or would have been asked to sit down and listen.

This did not happen simply after 70 CE when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed. It obviously happened before because the OT repeatedly integrates several sources into new narratives. And that's the way the book is built from Genesis chapter one. To the modern eye, there are loose threads showing in chapter two, etc. And as you describe above. Even in as much as Paul quotes from it, what after all is Deuteronomy? King Josiah and court say, "Look what we just found in the (first) Temple... I didn't know that was there!" Uh-huh....

In fact, beside looking at Jewish thought over centuries and in response to historical events, there also exists evidence in Jewish writing that there were many different sects co-existing within its community prior and in Paul's time. Josephus describing the difference between Pharisees and Sadducees for an outside audience is illustrative. These two groups could not agree on the nature or existence of afterlife, for one thing. Early writers of the Bible evidently thought that longevity was God's reward. Some Jewish scholars have come to think that the illustration of long reigning King Manesseh and then the inclusion of Job in the Bible were cases in point confounding early chroniclers' beliefs. How come bad things happened to good people or the good people died early? Chronicles claimed that Manesseh repented of evil deeds in Assyrian captivity. Kings had forgot to mention this temporary absence. Did it happen or did it resolve a religious issue?

As to Paul's reasoning or motives, there are other jury panels that I would feel more at ease on. The premise that he was on a mission to disarm the Christian movement - sounds interesting - but considering all the other social divisions and the fact that Christians were not even on Josephus's horizon...? That's going pretty deep undercover for a relatively small faction.

A little farther afield. I had noticed in the JW literature some interesting extrapolations from Paul. Like Jesus and Paul, Adam and the serpent never exchanged a word. It's Paul that identifies a fall in the Garden. But when Paul speaks of it, he describes it as a failure of Adam in the sight of God - and therefore a redemption is required. I interpret this as a result as an issue between man and God. The JW re-telling of this sounds more like a hostage issue between God and Satan: the ransom. This is very dualistic. Instead of a question of man's unworthiness, Christ's passion becomes a drop off of "ransom" at Satan's door. Another earlier topic, but related to this one.

For what it's worth...?

K.

101

Help with Mathematical Concepts, Not Arithmetic

by Band on the Run in

jw
friends

my math background is embarassing.

my public education was very sad.

although i received good grades in college track math courses, i never understood the underlying ideas or motivations.

kepler

BOTR,

Hi. This is a fascinating and upbeat topic. Like you, hope it doesn't end soon.

For one thing, mathematics has so many different perspectives. An analogy: consider buying a laptop computer and loading it up with software. The software is mathematical, but it could have so many different applications. Same with people.

About the time I came on line with this board, I was looking at the operation of the Kepler extra-solar planet transit observatory and the history of transits. So the name was much on my mind. A second candidate might have been (Pierre) Gassendi. But when I stop to reflect, for much of my career I had been occupied with the outgrowths of the 17th and 18th century mathematics which had been nudged along by needs of describing Newtonian physics.

That historical perspective wasn't exactly what attracted me to the subject when I was a kid. It was: How do you get a satellite into orbit or how do you get a spacecraft to Mars? And the latter pre-occupation was the result of reading science fiction stories by people like Robert Heinlein or his 1940s and 50s contemporaries. Heinlein, an Annapolis graduate and engineer who pioneered aircraft carrier design and operation in the early 1930s, was probably a better children's writer than he was when he was writing to supposed adults. There was an insistence that someday sailors would sign on to ships that would sail oceans wider than the ones of centuries ago - that the ships' building blocks were all there and the sailors would learn to navigate by studying books "like this one here". I worked after school to pay high school tuition at a school run by teaching brothers for one reason among several: they promised to teach calculus, something that Robert Heinlein had highly recommended from his writer's retreat somewhere off in Colorado.

Have had only brief experiences on the teaching side of the classroom - and, just by chance, in the midst of another one with a local STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) program in the school district which involves a summer camp for rocketry and robotics. So far I have only completed the preparatory workshop of assembling and programming toy robots, but it is an opportunity to reflect on what Quendi and others are talking about: What are good teaching practices? What are valuable aspects of mathematics? What is it all about?

Not to recount all my career, but I did not immediately attend college after high school. In four years of military service I did some correspondence and overseas campus courses and then enrolled in a midwest university where I had intended to go to in the first place to study engineering (insufficient funds for sure). And later another school for graduate study that including being a teaching assistant in astronomy - my longest previous teaching experience. As observed, there was a distinct difference between the mathematics department approach to mathematics and that of the physics and engineering departments. At Michigan, the applied mathematicians remained in the math department, but at Washington, the applied mathematicoians were in my home department: aeronautics and astronautics. In either case, my hands were full dealing with their assignments; and I survived rather than excelled. But along the way I did learn some of the things I had wanted to find out about when I was a teenager. And, of course, encountered new problems.

In the meantime main frame computer dinosaurs evolved into the notebooks such as the one on which I am writing this post- and this notebook will host many of the analysis programs developed on mainframes and more.

In the STEM program now underway, there was some introductory remarks about rocketry which included the description of a sounding rocket's path. Much like an arrow or an artillery shell, idealized without atmospheric drag into a parabola that arced up from the ground. It was observed in passing that the angle of elevation for maximum range over a flat earth was 45 degrees. I had seen the solution somewhere, I had thought, and then I got pre-occupied as the lecturer explained about assemblying LEGO robots with trying to figure it out.

It was vexing, because the angle I was looking for kept getting canceled out of the equations. Then there were two parabolas that we were dealing with: the y and x of vertical and horizontal distances - and then the y and t of vertical distance and time. The horizontal distance relation vs. time was the necessary link to setting up a calculus solution. The distance between launch and "impact" on the x axis could be found when the quadratic equation solution for time of flight was substituted into the horizontal distance relation based on an initial and constant horizontal velocity. Seeing a derivative ( =0) of this distance with respect to an angle of launch would provide a maximum or minimum. This turned out to be a an expression in cosines squared minus sines squared multiplied by a constant. cosine A x cosine A - sine A x sine A = cos 2A, I believe. If cosine 2A =0, then A=45 degrees would work.

This took longer to figure out than I had expected and there could have been several false alarms about solution. I make typos in math just like in posts - and that had always been a problem. The main difference is is that with math you believe your own mis-statements. As a grader once, I encountered a similar interesting problem about light sources from stars and three students figured it out ("Use the vector triple product", one of them said later)- I didn't. And so when I got done with that homework set, I wondered if it would be a good excuse to drop a bottle of booze on my head - or just accept it - that there would be days...

In the recent exercise, I think only one or two people appreciated having an answer to the problem: a math teacher and the lead of the workshop. But even in saying that, I could see and appreciate that the other people in the program had competencies and skills that were much different than mine. Some people simply aced the workshop material. Did that mean that in 2012 certain skills have been identified that make 18th century mathematics skills obsolete? Probably not as simple as that. Number series, set theory, encoding, statistics, ... numbers are handled quite differently in these fields than in the exercise just performed - but not necessarily in entire isolation. In the above trajectory example, I think it was an illustration of several tools in trigonometry, algebra and calculus having to be used together in a puzzle. In other areas of study in support of a science, technology or social studies, puzzle solving proceeds in a similar manner. It always helps to be lucky, not error prone and patient as well as enthusiastic.

30

Checking the shelf life on Jehovah's Witness "Truth"

by Terry in

question of the day (every day!

) for jehovah's witnesses: "if it's the truth, then, why does it keep changing?".

second question is, for the truth that hasn't changed, what is the shelf life?.

kepler

GNNM,

Greetings. Not that I am in favor of dropping an amusing line of reasoning, your post merits reflection as well. And if I am summarizing correctly I believe you said, "Get used to the idea: JWs, like other Christian sects is going to be around for a long time. Look at the record."

At first I was going to say, "Odds are you are right." But I'm not sure that's true either. There is though, a natural selection process at work. Some movements around in the first century have vanished with hardly a trace. Others ,we read about courtesy of their church historian critics - unfavorable reviews. Still others we don't acknowledge because their beliefs have been assimilated into our (?) own. Example? Zoroastrians. And should we have had an opportunity to do some backward time travel to talk with the writers of classical antiquity, BC or AD, would there not be some surprised look on faces - theirs and ours?

What are the examples that you cited but mutations of belief systems prevalent earlier? Mutations out of Judea swept prevailing Mesopotamian belief systems aside. But did they owe nothing to the Mesopotamians?

Biblical study is something that I had off most of my life and was only galvanized into doing so by the outrageous claims I encountered, leading to participation in this forum. Since I found much that is troubling, I neither want to sweep it under the rug or simply be dismissive. There's got to be some other course. 100 or 1000 years ago, that appears to have been a pre-occupation of many people. Should this not be true as well in the future based on our children's children's perspective? (Well, wait a minute - I've got to remember the background of my audience. Maybe consensus will be a resounding NO!!!)

In the meantime, what do I tell younger members of my familiy? Or anyone that looks to me for guidance because I am old and read a book or two once? To me telling them to give up on understanding or following the example of Christ is like sitting high in a tree sawing away at the limb between you and the trunk. There has got to be a better answer.

And that brings me back around to the original topic: shelf life. If Christianity is built on a convergence on an end in the 19th or 20th century, that version has been shown repeatedly, demonstrably false. Scratchiong at a blackboard years ago, contemplating whether humanity will remain a proposition that would last as long as the stars we were discussing - or whether it was already on its way to termination due to conversations on red telephones, my thoughts then were that Chistianity had to have an underlying philosophy

Good whether the end was ten minutes from now or a billion years hence.

I'd like to think: If the end comes in a few minutes and you are standing around in an elevator with people of different faiths, Christian and otherwise, just like on a sinking ship, you should be able to say: "Hang on. It's going to be all right. We are in this together..."

30

Checking the shelf life on Jehovah's Witness "Truth"

by Terry in

question of the day (every day!

) for jehovah's witnesses: "if it's the truth, then, why does it keep changing?".

second question is, for the truth that hasn't changed, what is the shelf life?.

kepler

Another analogous situation - if not a perfect match.

Over the years, would write small scale computer programs in competition with bigger packages produced by long-established departments. Sometimes there were situations when an alternative source would provide a different numerical answer, but it was a horrifying thought that a third source might actually produce a tie breaker.

Often got set down for a talking to. It went something like this:

"Don't interfere if you want to work around here. Our product is PERFECT. Get it?..

"Now if I were you, I'd spend more time reading our User's Guide, learning to run and adapt our successfully proven test cases..."

"There will be a new release in a few weeks.... Now what was that you were talking about?..."

30

Checking the shelf life on Jehovah's Witness "Truth"

by Terry in

question of the day (every day!

) for jehovah's witnesses: "if it's the truth, then, why does it keep changing?".

second question is, for the truth that hasn't changed, what is the shelf life?.

kepler

The Kickoff post is absolutely great. Right into the end zone.

Reminds me of back in the 70s sitting around with friends looking at food packaging labels.

Versus the assurances of natural ingredients where none could be expected or found,

one of the guys picked up a package and add libbed:

"Our product has never seen the light of day."

171

Watchtower's Billion Dollars of Property Cannot Be Sold until Outcome of Conti Appeal

by Dogpatch in

30 minutes ago i just got off the phone with some important players in this case, and some things were relayed to me concerning a lot of details of the outcome of the last two days of court.

i am passing this on.

cynthia hampton, one of the main players in the candace conti case (and a close friend of 28 years), just informed me of a further, far more powerful move by the state of california against the watch tower bible and tract society of new york, inc.. by order of the superior court of the state of california - county of alameda (see documents below), until the watch tower's appeal, which won't begin until august 13th and will take up to two years to settle due to due process of law, has forbidden the watch tower to sell any more of its $1 billion in assets in the borough of brooklyn until the appeals case is finished, to assure they won't shelter their monies in the light of this most huge and devastating sexual abuse scandal ever to hit the watch tower society, and perhaps any other single-victim lawsuit.

kepler

Message on way.

171

Watchtower's Billion Dollars of Property Cannot Be Sold until Outcome of Conti Appeal

by Dogpatch in

30 minutes ago i just got off the phone with some important players in this case, and some things were relayed to me concerning a lot of details of the outcome of the last two days of court.

i am passing this on.

cynthia hampton, one of the main players in the candace conti case (and a close friend of 28 years), just informed me of a further, far more powerful move by the state of california against the watch tower bible and tract society of new york, inc.. by order of the superior court of the state of california - county of alameda (see documents below), until the watch tower's appeal, which won't begin until august 13th and will take up to two years to settle due to due process of law, has forbidden the watch tower to sell any more of its $1 billion in assets in the borough of brooklyn until the appeals case is finished, to assure they won't shelter their monies in the light of this most huge and devastating sexual abuse scandal ever to hit the watch tower society, and perhaps any other single-victim lawsuit.

kepler

Band on the Run,

Got your message and printed the instructions. Crossing my fingers that I will have something of interest for you shortly.

Thank you.

Kepler

171

Watchtower's Billion Dollars of Property Cannot Be Sold until Outcome of Conti Appeal

by Dogpatch in

30 minutes ago i just got off the phone with some important players in this case, and some things were relayed to me concerning a lot of details of the outcome of the last two days of court.

i am passing this on.

cynthia hampton, one of the main players in the candace conti case (and a close friend of 28 years), just informed me of a further, far more powerful move by the state of california against the watch tower bible and tract society of new york, inc.. by order of the superior court of the state of california - county of alameda (see documents below), until the watch tower's appeal, which won't begin until august 13th and will take up to two years to settle due to due process of law, has forbidden the watch tower to sell any more of its $1 billion in assets in the borough of brooklyn until the appeals case is finished, to assure they won't shelter their monies in the light of this most huge and devastating sexual abuse scandal ever to hit the watch tower society, and perhaps any other single-victim lawsuit.

kepler

Double submission. That's what happens when you stop to order a sandwich.

171

Watchtower's Billion Dollars of Property Cannot Be Sold until Outcome of Conti Appeal

by Dogpatch in

30 minutes ago i just got off the phone with some important players in this case, and some things were relayed to me concerning a lot of details of the outcome of the last two days of court.

i am passing this on.

cynthia hampton, one of the main players in the candace conti case (and a close friend of 28 years), just informed me of a further, far more powerful move by the state of california against the watch tower bible and tract society of new york, inc.. by order of the superior court of the state of california - county of alameda (see documents below), until the watch tower's appeal, which won't begin until august 13th and will take up to two years to settle due to due process of law, has forbidden the watch tower to sell any more of its $1 billion in assets in the borough of brooklyn until the appeals case is finished, to assure they won't shelter their monies in the light of this most huge and devastating sexual abuse scandal ever to hit the watch tower society, and perhaps any other single-victim lawsuit.

kepler

Band on the Run,

I would like to send you a PM about something I dug up researching the WTBTS role as an NGO. It's not a legal question per se, but probably would warrant a lawyer's perspective, similar to what you have provided already - which I am much appreciative of, by the way. Otherwise, I wouldn't be bringing this matter up.

Unfortunately, for the life of me, I see no controls on my logged-on account. Nothing seems to initiate a PM vs. a post when I go to the letter mode. Maybe I can get something out on a test letter as a reply? Or - if anyone has any suggestions. Obviously people get past this point.

Kepler

171

Watchtower's Billion Dollars of Property Cannot Be Sold until Outcome of Conti Appeal

by Dogpatch in

30 minutes ago i just got off the phone with some important players in this case, and some things were relayed to me concerning a lot of details of the outcome of the last two days of court.

i am passing this on.

cynthia hampton, one of the main players in the candace conti case (and a close friend of 28 years), just informed me of a further, far more powerful move by the state of california against the watch tower bible and tract society of new york, inc.. by order of the superior court of the state of california - county of alameda (see documents below), until the watch tower's appeal, which won't begin until august 13th and will take up to two years to settle due to due process of law, has forbidden the watch tower to sell any more of its $1 billion in assets in the borough of brooklyn until the appeals case is finished, to assure they won't shelter their monies in the light of this most huge and devastating sexual abuse scandal ever to hit the watch tower society, and perhaps any other single-victim lawsuit.

kepler

Band on the Run,

I would like to send you a PM about something I dug up researching the WTBTS role as an NGO. It's not a legal question per se, but probably would warrant a lawyer's perspective, similar to what you have provided already - which I am much appreciative of, by the way. Otherwise, I wouldn't be bringing this matter up.

Unfortunately, for the life of me, I see no controls on my logged-on account. Nothing seems to initiate a PM vs. a post when I go to the letter mode. Maybe I can get something out on a test letter as a reply? Or - if anyone has any suggestions. Obviously people get past this point.

Kepler