kepler

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  25

  Update - Talk # 6 THE FLOOD OF NOAH’S DAY AND YOU

  by ttdtt in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  instead of scraping this talk they updated it.. so they still try and make this look like it happened, and that there is plenty of evidence.to do that they refer to the (w08 6/1 8) found at http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2008411the main evidence is that floods have happened in the past, including.... geologists studying the landscape of the northwestern united states believe that as many as 100 ancient catastrophic floods once washed over the area.

  one such flood is said to have roared through the region with a wall of water 2,000 feet [600 m] high, traveling at 65 miles an hour [105 km/hr]—a flood of 500 cubic miles [2,000 cu km] of water, weighing more than two trillion tons.

  similar findings have led other scientists to believe that a global flood is a distinct possibility.. i could not find such an event, except for remembering one of those "disaster" shows on discover about that.

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  kepler

  "They exhibit a unique drainage pattern that appears to have an entrance in the northeast and an exit in the southwest. The Cordilleran Ice Sheet dammed up Glacial Lake Missoula at the Purcell Trench Lobe. A series of floods occurring over the period of 18,000 and 13,000 years ago swept over the landscape when the ice dam broke. The eroded channels also show an anastomosing, or braided, appearance....

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  I was living in Washington state going to graduate school mixing engineering and astronomy together back in the late '70s - and coincidentally, that was when the eastern Washington scablands were offered up as an analog to the flow features seen on Mars. One of my courses was taught by a geologist active in the space exploration program and - he was probably aware of the history of the scabland controversy dating back to the 1920s. I was not.

  But in this context, I can now see some other ramifications. Especially when about a year ago, I ended up digging up an article about J. Harlen Bretz and his theories about the scablands, written in the journal Science (22 December 1978).

  One of the reasons I had pulled it up was on account of someone's argument about a universal flood occurring some time around 4000 years. My counter to that was that there were a lot of independent flood features around the world that appeared to older than that, independent of each others age - and they hadn't been wiped away. Since this one was attributed to a particular glacier lake and dam structure which burst around 10,000 years ago, I argued that a universal flood should have eroded this one away as well. Ditto for the Grand Canyon. But there they are.

  Just for the record, that argument didn't cut much ice (sic) that time with the Noachian viewpoint. But then when I look at the original 1978 Science article, Noachian theories appeared to be in the background in the 1920s as well. The controversy then was whether the gradualist theory in geology was as gradual and non-catastrophic as many 19th century proponents had come to accept. Bretz was met with a good deal of skepticism even though he had tons of field data from Eastern Washington for a flood of enormous magnitude.

  Here's the article conclusion:

  The Spokane flood controversy is both a story of ironies and a marvelous exposition of the scientific method. One cannot but be amazed at the efforts to give a uniformitarian explanation for the Channeled Scabland and to uphold the [then prevalent] framework of geology as it had been established in the writings of Hutton, Lyell and Agassiz. The final irony may be that Bretz's critics did not appreciate the scientific implications of Agassiz's famous dictum, "Read nature, not books." Perhaps no geologist has lived and understood the spirit of those words than J. Harlen Bretz."

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  How much of the controversy in the 1920s and successive decades was based on a reaction in the geology community to anything that smacked of field work supportive of Biblical notions, is hard to determine from the article. But over the years catastrophism has been assimilated into both geology and evolutionary biology without the "framework" of the sciences collapsing. Impacting asteroids, volcanic explosions producing more devastation that nuclear bombs and melting glacial lakes have all had a role in both geology and biology over periods of tens of thousands of years, not to mention millions. But oddly enough, when you consider the connection with the martian surface, the flood model of Biblical literalists seems to apply more neatly out there, what with submerged hydrospheres and impacts causing gushers that sweep over frozen wastes...

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  8

  Length of a Generation? Ask a governing agency or member of governing board

  by kepler in

  1. social
  2. humour

  in the saturday/sunday wall street journal for the weekend of april 9-10, 2016, in the us news section there was an article titled, "housing bust lingers for generation x.".

  something clicked in my mind when i read.

  "the data show an enormous swing in the fortunes of people born between 1965 and 1984, the group defined by the harvard joint center for housing studies as 'generation x'".. hmmm....generation did you say?

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  kepler

  In the Saturday/Sunday Wall Street Journal for the weekend of April 9-10, 2016, in the US News section there was an article titled, "Housing Bust Lingers for Generation X."

  Something clicked in my mind when I read

  "The data show an enormous swing in the fortunes of people born between 1965 and 1984, the group defined by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies as 'Generation X'".

  Hmmm....Generation did you say? And it is delineated as a period of 20 years?

  According to some folks I know, they are supposed to extend from those that were alive in 1914 to the year 2016 of this system. Or else -can pass the torch. But evidently, for government or census study purposes Generation X would shift to Generation "Y" or some such after year 1984 with a span from 1985 to 2004.

  If I use similar conventions for the 1914 situation, we would have an "overlapping generation" extending to 1934, about the time that Rutherford was writing love letters to Herr Schicklgruber and a new generation extending from thence (1935 to about 1954.), with a 1955 culminating in 1974, on the eve of a PAST END of the system of things, followed by another generation starting in '75 and reaching 1994.

  Generation X is completely out of phase with things, but we should have experienced another end ( 100 years) around 2014.

  Somehow the fates of the great-great grandfathers of today youth are tied up with present generation by a governing board of not so ancient pronouncement geeks.

  Did all the current day governing board members know anyone like Rutherford or Franz personally?
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  12

  True or False .... The JW Religion was Started by Amateur Self Avowed Bible Theologians ?

  by Finkelstein in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  .....who were able to propagate their self devised bible theology by utilizing a printing plant which they themselves were the head editorial writers .

  c t russell and the man to follow him j rutherford, were both not academically trained bible theologians but they certainly were inspired businessmen to the fact, charlatans of their own era and time.. the return of jesus christ and a new world order to replace an old wicked world order, was just too much of a marketable and tangible concept for those men to just leave alone.

  they exploited the already existing belief in the bible already structured within the population to where they preached their created version of the gospel, the rest is now history as well their many self devised albeit commercially appealing failed doctrines .

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  kepler

  What's a professional avowed Bible theologian?

  The accounts in the Bible itself do not emphasize the experts on texts. Rather ambivalent about them at best considering the NT perspective on Pharisees. But on the other hand, Paul tries to get everything to jive with what he read in Deuteronomy.

  In the same period in the US that Rutherford and Russell were prominent, overseas the Documentary Hypothesis took a different approach to text. Whether that was professional or not, I hesitate to say, but it did arise out of efforts to interpret other documents from antiquity. What it did receive, however, in this country was a hostile reception from fundamentalist as well as a reaction of retrenchment.

  The stunner for me was that Darwinism or cosmological discoveries do not have to be invoked to find serious holes in fundamentalist or literalist arguments. One day, just happening to notice a literary quirk in Greek historians ( Persians = Medes) pulled down several sand castles I had wondered about. And they were based on both fundamentalist assumptions of inerrancy and self-fulfilling hypotheses associated with the beliefs:

  "It's the text, I understand it and it has to mean..."

  Professional or amateur can exploit that in a pamphlet, a radio station, pulpit or consultation meeting. Adventists see a Second Coming that has to mean a world collapse. Behold a comet. It must mean we are in the last days. No? Well, let's try again.
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  3

  Lourdes, Bigorre, Pyrenees, France.

  by Joe Grundy in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  (i never was a jw).. this topic occurred to me randomly.

  i don't know whether any/many posters heer have visited.

  the region is beautiful but marred, imho, by the scar that is lourdes.

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  kepler

  JG,

  Perhaps because I have never been a JW either, I can write this in reply.

  There was a recent article in the National Geographic on the apparition of Mary phenomenon. Lourdes was mentioned among many other places and temporal settings across the globe. The nearest one to the US, of any consequence, was Guadalupe in Mexico. I imagine that if I were set down in the midst of Guadalupe - or most anywhere else in Mexico where the canvas image of "Our Lady" is sold, the picture would be similar to what you describe.

  But still: I had been informed in several history classes or accounts that the Guadalupe legend originated in the 17th century. But yet when I read the account of conquistador Bernal Diaz of the "The Conquest of New Spain", put to ink in the 1570s or 80s by a witness and participant of the campaign of Cortez only a decade or two before

  In the siege and capture of Mexico:

  "Cortez ordered [Sandoval] to abandon his camp at Iztapalapa and go by land to blockade the other causeway, which runs from Mexico to a town once called Tepeaquilla, but now Our Lady of Guadalupe, the place of many miracles"

  There are a few more brief references to Guadalupe in the Diaz account. I pulled that from my Penguin paperback, but I think there are more extensive versions available on line. Unfortunately, Diaz never spells out exactly what transpired, because he assumes that all the readers just knew. And elsewhere his account, though often righteous in perspective, invokes little or nothing of the supernatural, save what would be expected from a Catholic monarchist of the time. Natural selection at work when you are surrounded by a cult that sacrifices its victims.

  So my point is that despite the tawdriness of the tourist towns, I would not dismiss the mystery entirely.

  I think there is one.

  Best regards, and have a good ( or better) continental stay.
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  11

  On the Fundamentalist Notion of Babylon Destroyed - Forgot to Tell Ancient World

  by kepler in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  among puzzlements of sitting down with jw reps with "what the bible really teaches", was the assertion that babylon was destroyed - forever - just like it says in these here chapters and verses.

  then the nwt claims that peter i & ii were written from babylon.

  but beside that, ancient greek, hebrew and roman writings are full of reference to babylon as an important center.

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  kepler

  Crazyguy,

  I think we have both gone over some of this before. But to clarify for others, there was in fact a curse placed on Babylon by Sennacherib: desolation for 70 years. Sennacherib ended his days via assassination, a presumed conspiracy of his sons, of whom Esarhaddon was chosen to succeed him. In the "community" there was a lot of concern about the severity of measures against Babylon - so Esarhaddon had it reversed. A stone stela records how the curse of desolation was re-invoked, but read upside down - inverting the cuneiform to 11 years from the previous 70.

  Seventy years elsewhere in the Bible is counted as a human lifetime. And one can imagine that the notion was borrowed or shared with Assyrians. So given all that, it would not surprise me that there would be a widespread acceptance among middle easterners of Assyrian notions of retribution or law. It might have even been a Babylonian notion as well. I've heard I remarked elsewhere that a lot of the notions about Covenants ( e.g., in Deuteronomy) seem to resemble Assyrian treaties with states intimidated into alliances.

  StephaneLalIberte,

  Thank you both for your recall and your source material. Because we all now can see the enforced disconnect among elements of recruiting, daily belief and "apologetics". I suspect that the last is a mental Potemkin village, a display of rationality and scholarship while concocting the new New World Testaments to back theological positions already made.

  Reflecting on the times I felt that I was confronted with saying "two plus two equals five" or else, I understand the how, but I do not fully understand the why. Then there were simply the consequences of whatever I chose. And it affected my life irrevocably. As it has others.

  Shortly after I had to made choices for "four" when signals all around me were for "five", I encountered another people in my neighborhood connected with Lyndon Larouche's political movement. Larouche provided his young adherents with quick set elements of a classical education. They sang patriotic and operatic choruses together; they studied the physical sciences, economics ( of course), the history of the Enlightenment - and then somehow molded it into political thought of their Leader. Oddly enough there was a pantheon of Enlightenment scientists, but Isaac Newton was the Judas among Copernicus, Kepler ( actually no relation), Galileo and Leibnitz. Larouche had a fondness for Germany - much like Rutherford initially. Anyway, of the five or six of Larouche's followers that seemed to settle at one of the local coffee houses, all of them were ready to explain at length Newton's infidelity.

  ... Otherwise they would have been thrown out of the movement.

  So somehow in the case of Babylon being utterly destroyed ( with the assist of Darius the Mede), I see a force at work.
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  11

  On the Fundamentalist Notion of Babylon Destroyed - Forgot to Tell Ancient World

  by kepler in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  among puzzlements of sitting down with jw reps with "what the bible really teaches", was the assertion that babylon was destroyed - forever - just like it says in these here chapters and verses.

  then the nwt claims that peter i & ii were written from babylon.

  but beside that, ancient greek, hebrew and roman writings are full of reference to babylon as an important center.

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  kepler

  Regarding burst bubbles:

  Check out the pamphlet "What the Bible Really Teaches", pp. 22 to 25, a section called "A Book of Prophecy".

  Whether the right hand knows what the left is doing and which is which in this case, this book claims that Isaiah prophesied the complete destruction of Babylon (chapter 13 and 14) and that Cyrus performed the deed ( 44 & 45).

  As I said, I had looked at Herodotus prior to that. Babylon looked like it was still in good shape. Then there was Ezra chapters 7 and 8... Somewhere I made the connection that what Isaiah was talking about was the work of his contemporary, the Assyrian Sennacherib who deported Babylon's population, sacked the temples and diverted the river to flood and wash away its remains, circa 690. Cyrus, on the other hand, occupied the city with hardly a fight and swore he was going to fix the shortcomings of Nabonidus when it came to observing religious festivals.
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  48

  God said be fruitful and multiply,fill the earth and govern it.

  by atomant in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  l have a problem with this.lf adam and eve didnt sin the earth would eventually have been full to the brim with perfect human beings.then what every man gets the chop or no more sex?then on the other hand we have the jw's sayingresurrected ones will not be allowed to marry in the earthly new system.. married survivors of armageddon will remain married.

  single survivors of armageddon may or may not be allowed to marry.so it seems that people reborn into new system wont be able to procreate.

  and married survivors will stay married so l assume that means they can still hanky panky and have babys thats a bit unfair..the earth can only accommodate a maximum number of humans then what for the married couples.

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  kepler

  Fundamental particles have a way of hanging around. Protons for example. Neutrinos cycle back and forth...

  But the universe is by no means static. If we were to hang around in it eternally on a paradise Earth, we would sure have to watch a deterioration in the neighborhood. Plus commit ourselves to a lot of dull reading and meetings.
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  11

  On the Fundamentalist Notion of Babylon Destroyed - Forgot to Tell Ancient World

  by kepler in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  among puzzlements of sitting down with jw reps with "what the bible really teaches", was the assertion that babylon was destroyed - forever - just like it says in these here chapters and verses.

  then the nwt claims that peter i & ii were written from babylon.

  but beside that, ancient greek, hebrew and roman writings are full of reference to babylon as an important center.

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  kepler

  Among puzzlements of sitting down with JW reps with "What the Bible Really Teaches", was the assertion that Babylon was destroyed - forever - just like it says in these here chapters and verses. Then the NWT claims that Peter I & II were written from Babylon. But beside that, ancient Greek, Hebrew and Roman writings are full of reference to Babylon as an important center. Alexander the Great entered it in 331 BC - and eventually died there from fever caught on campaigns. He meant to make it his Capital.

  Still with me on this? The first couple of books of Herodotus' Histories describes Babylon life in detail. These were written about a century after the unopposed entry of Cyrus into Babylon after defeating Babylonian armies farther afield. Xenophon and the 10,000 were headed there to serve as mercenaries in the late 5th century. And Alexander - well, when he wasn't chasing Darius III, apparently made a stopover there too.

  How do we know? Well, for a start, did our ancestors seriously doubt the matter? A few days ago, I saw a notice in the papers about the work of a 17th century master: "Woven Gold: Tapestries of Louis IV at the Getty Center through May 1st". The illustration was the work of Charles Le Brun, a 16' x 26 foot tapestry titled, :Entry of Alexander into Babylon."

  A search on line provided several more images. Additionally there were at least one film depiction (Oliver Stone's Alexander) and accounts of the event from classical writers, principally Roman writer Quintius Curtius Rufus (History of Alexander) and Greek writer Arrianis ( the Anabasis). Both evidently drew from earlier sources.

  While the film Alexander sold well overseas, in the US, hardly anyone took note. Perhaps if I had seen the film, five years later I would had more to say to the JWs who would visit my house Saturdays trying to convince me that everything they had read or were required to quote from was incontrovertible and entirely true.
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  166

  2nd amendment right ... where should it end?

  by Simon in

  1. social
  2. current

  one thing i like to do to test a theory is to take things to extremes or to their logical conclusion to see if the premises still hold.

  very often, a claim that seems to make sense at a superficial level falls apart when you start to stretch it a little.. so let's play a game.. suppose the 2nd amendment is valid, that some "well regulated militia" really is necessary to hold the government to account.. obviously when this was drafted the government had access to the weapons of it's day which would be muskets!

  so muskets all round.

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  kepler

  Amendment Text: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

  A couple of years ago I stumbled on a discussion of the English Bill of Rights of 1689. And I was struck by what it implied about the origins of the American 2nd Amendment and the right of militias to bear arms.

  In many current debates about the amendment's nature, a public figure such as President Obama might argue that regulation of arms would in no way result in the loss of firearms suitable for small game hunting. Whether this is simply disingenuous or the result of widespread unawareness of 1689's Bill of Rights, I have to wonder. After all, the President once taught Constitutional law. But consider this summary:

  -------------------------------------------------

  Laws should not be dispensed with or suspended without the consent of Parliament;

  No taxes should be levied without the authority of Parliament;

  The right to petition the monarch should be without fear of retribution;

  No standing army may be maintained during peacetime without the consent of Parliament;[nb 2]

  Subjects who are Protestants may bear arms for their defence as permitted by law;

  the election of members of Parliament should be free;

  the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament should not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;

  excessive bail should not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted;

  jurors should be duly impannelled and returned and jurors in high treason trials should be freeholders;

  promises of fines or forfeitures before conviction are void;

  Parliaments should be held frequently.

  --------------------------------------------------------------

  Did you notice that provision above about Protestants in particular having the right to bear arms? This was in reaction to the monarchial century and a half tug of war between Catholic and Protestant affiliations. Other features of the American Bill of Rights are there in embryonic form, but the right to bear arms is a check and balance measure against the possible religious backsliding of royal family members - and their standing armies.

  In other words, although Federalists Papers and other background sources have little to say on this matter, those that drafted the American Constitution would surely have been aware of the English BOR context.

  But the document does not take away with one hand what it gives with another: no established churches and religious liberty.

  I argue that the founders intended to arm the individual citizens as much as the situation might require: muskets., cannons, pikes or whatever technology allowed - and that they were not thinking about provisioning them with passenger pigeon or buffalo carcasses. They were thinking about defense against central governments. And I can imagine that Justice Antonin Scalia would pick up on this, even though you might say that the gun was originally pointed at people of his own religious persuasion. Others, of a different philosophical bend would be quite the contrary: "The amendment has to be taken into a 21st century context rather than 17th."

  In practice, I see evidence that mass murder and mayhem is as much a result of mental state. Our assassins seem to have no rational agendas. The shooting from the U of Texas clock tower back in 1966 could serve as an illustration. A military veteran with a severe brain tumor shot people at random in the quadrangle below.

  On the other hand ( an economist's argument?) were it not for gun shows in the United States, where would Mexican drug cartels get their weaponry? Or are these examples of well armed militias in another country?
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  8

  How the Churches got the ‘End of the World’ wrong in 1492.

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  in 1453 constantinople (also known as byzantium), the last remnant of the once mighty roman empire was a christian island in an islamic sea.

  the city had been seriously weakened during the holy fourth crusade (1202-04), when fellow christians of the catholic brand had besieged the city, captured it, and savagely sacked it.. ( who needs enemies when you have christian friends?).

  a miniature of the siege, artist unknown.

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  kepler

  Reading accounts of the 16th century Reformation, it appears that on both sides of the fence there was much the same feeling. They were living ( of course) in the End Times.

  Matter of fact, when you consider such influences such as plagues, i must have been every other decade that end time apprehensions were widespread.