The charts in the first post here may help: http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/bible/250378/1/2013-Watchtower-July-15-CHARTS-for-discussion
Then again, they may not. But yes, 1914 is still in place, as you'll see in the second chart.
Apognophos
JoinedPosts by Apognophos
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62
Are your Ready for Sunday's WT...1914...
by Legacy into all who are still active...& those who are not...... is everyone ready for wt for sunday....1914....is everyone ready to see the friends faces, that will pretend all is well.
but their minds will be racing.
i started the article...talk about confusing...but maybe on purpose only a few in the hall will be able to break it down.
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210
Question regarding Faith...(adamah)
by tec inpeace!.
you have stated (and others have agreed and stated the same) that faith is not based on evidence, or it is not faith to begin with.
may i ask you, then, if you think the apostles and early disciples, who walked with christ, had faith?
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Apognophos
I'm sorry to have gotten this far off-topic, but I wonder if you can see how you're contradicting your own argument. If the Egyptians knew all about dead bodies from handling them, why were they still wrong about the brain? If I recall correctly, they removed it from the head as if it was of little use to the person in the afterlife; just getting something out of the way to make embalming easier. So obviously religion, absence of it, or differences in it, did not have much to do with this misconception. (Incidentally, the Egyptians' ignorance was why I mentioned earlier that experiments with living things were needed to get to the bottom of the matter.)
That's why the Hebrews put words into God's mouth that make him appear to be ignorant of the TRUTH (or at least like he went to mummification school in Egypt). Even Jesus spoke of thoughts of the heart, some 400 yrs AFTER Hippocrates and others proved the claim as false
I know you won't want to hear this because it sounds like fundamentalist apologetics, but it's entirely possible that the writers were being poetic. Think about it this way: we still today say things like, "I feel it in my gut", "from the bottom of my heart", and myriad other expressions that imply that thoughts and emotions come from those organs. There's no passage in the Bible that I'm aware of that says that if someone's, say, kidney is removed, they will lose the ability to feel kindness or fear. All of the language works perfectly well if read with the same poetic license we use today in English and other languages.
Part of me didn't even want to bring this up. We're more or less on the same side of the argument, but I do feel that you look a little too hard sometimes for mistakes in the Bible, and I just wanted to speak up about this subject because it's something I happened to have on my mind recently, and because I don't think religion deserves that bad of a rap.
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Question regarding Faith...(adamah)
by tec inpeace!.
you have stated (and others have agreed and stated the same) that faith is not based on evidence, or it is not faith to begin with.
may i ask you, then, if you think the apostles and early disciples, who walked with christ, had faith?
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Apognophos
You're relying then on the same reasoning that Aristotle relied on in the 4th cent BCE, which led him to come to the WRONG conclusion that it was the center of cognition. In fact, he explained WHY he thought the heart was the center of cognition; in that sense, he made some valid observations, and relied on what we now know are false premises which allowed him to come to the wrong conclusion.
I know that the brain does the thinking, thanks :-p You simply supported my point in that Aristotle was not a Jew, and yet he also believed the heart was the seat of the mind. Was it because he was intellectually held back by his faith in the Old Testament? Obviously not. This was a conclusion that any number of thoughtful people must have wrongly reached in ancient times. Hence my objection to blaming this on religion.
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210
Question regarding Faith...(adamah)
by tec inpeace!.
you have stated (and others have agreed and stated the same) that faith is not based on evidence, or it is not faith to begin with.
may i ask you, then, if you think the apostles and early disciples, who walked with christ, had faith?
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Apognophos
What does this even mean? Harden our hearts?
It's an archaic phrase which actually demonstrates the retarding effect of religious beliefs on the advancement of human knowledge, since ancient men LITERALLY believed it as a FACT that the organs of cognition (thinking and feeling) were located in the heart in the TORSO, and not the head, where even a modern 4 yr old knows the BRAIN is located.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that religion held back science here. It's not so obvious, without performing experiments on a living person, where the seat of cognition is. When you see something gross, your stomach heaves. When your girlfriend leaves you, your heart hurts. Emotions are felt physically in the internal organs of the torso, not in the head. Seeing the effects on someone with head trauma might have led some people to have suspected that the brain was involved with cognition, but then again maybe they would write it off as damage to the eyes and other senses. It only seems obvious to us today, like many other basic facts such as the roundness of Earth, because we've been told so, not because we've done any experiments to prove it to ourselves.
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Comments you hear at the July 15th WT Study
by LostGeneration inif you still go to the meetings, i'd love to hear how tomorrow's wts goes down.. i'm sure there will be plenty of comments read straight from the paragraph, a few pauses where nobody wants to comment for fear of not getting it right, and a few completely wrong comments from publishers talking out of their a$$e$ trying to look smart.
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Apognophos
I will do my best to report back after the study tomorrow, I'll sure be paying close attention.
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WT 2013, July 15: Random thoughts and background info FWIW
by AnnOMaly inwill occur when the united nations (the.
tribulation.. chart, p. 4 - united nations (disgusting thing) will attack.
well, they believe in some kind of rapture now.. par.
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Apognophos
I'm not a Bible believer, but I have to admit, sometimes I'm almost convinced to believe on account of the number of Bible prophecies that the Society fulfills... I mean the kind that ablebodiedman is referring to, about false shepherds, the evil slave, false prophets, etc.
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Question regarding Faith...(adamah)
by tec inpeace!.
you have stated (and others have agreed and stated the same) that faith is not based on evidence, or it is not faith to begin with.
may i ask you, then, if you think the apostles and early disciples, who walked with christ, had faith?
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Apognophos
To me, the classic definition of faith is not the semantically confusing Hebrews 11, but the poetic account of Peter trying to walk across the water to Jesus, and only succeeding for a short time. The gospels are consistent in showing that Jesus' apostles had some faith, but were lacking total faith. This is why they were unable to cast out that demon, and why they abandoned Jesus when he was arrested, etc. etc. This definition of faith is in line with jgnat's phrasing -- a leap into the void with belief in your heart.
That being said, and although I really like the gospels, I'm not a faithful person. So while this is an interesting discussion, I don't believe that faith is an ideal state of mind that a person should seek to attain. Better to rely on facts and common sense than faith, which I can't distinguish from wishful thinking or fanaticism. That's not to say that faith is inherently bad, not at all; just that it can be dangerous.
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Are your Ready for Sunday's WT...1914...
by Legacy into all who are still active...& those who are not...... is everyone ready for wt for sunday....1914....is everyone ready to see the friends faces, that will pretend all is well.
but their minds will be racing.
i started the article...talk about confusing...but maybe on purpose only a few in the hall will be able to break it down.
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Apognophos
ADCMS, Of course, but I'm curious what they believe this week because I have to deal almost daily with my dubbie MIL.
3rdgen, the teaching is now that Jesus' presence (still) began in 1914, then he began inspecting his household, then he appointed the GB (who didn't exist yet) over his domestics (who are now the great crowd and the anointed remnant) in 1919, (then he somehow went away on business as the parable relates,) then at the time of the great tribulation he will return, appoint the GB (so they assure us) over all his belongings, take all the anointed remnant to heaven ("Thank you for flying Rapture Airlines"), then the end will come.
Phew, did I get that right, everyone?
They should have dropped 1914 in the late 1940s when Rutherford passed.
They sure should have. I still suspect that the real BIG ONE (AnnOMaly) is going to be the dropping of 1914, but it's hard to see how this adjustment can be made without losing a lot of membership.
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WT 2013, July 15: Random thoughts and background info FWIW
by AnnOMaly inwill occur when the united nations (the.
tribulation.. chart, p. 4 - united nations (disgusting thing) will attack.
well, they believe in some kind of rapture now.. par.
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Apognophos
Yep, excellent summary. This should be serious food for thought for any believing JW, but as I think back to when I was a believer, I honestly think I would have written this off as a tedious scholarly matter of minor details rather than seeing how deep the underlying implications are in this adjustment.
That being said, I'm interested in attending the next few Sunday meetings to see how the congregation seems to feel about these adjustments. It might very well be a waste of my time as everyone repeats the paragraph material robotically... but I'm not so sure. We have a couple old-timers in the congregation who are usually up for reminding people about what we used to believe and how much things have changed in their lifetime. Already there's been one joke from an elder on the platform to the effect that that the next study article is going to be confusing.
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The Day The US Drops To #2
by metatron inhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1380486/the-age-america-ends-2016-imf-predicts-year-chinas-economy-surpass-us.html.
it may happen in 3 years.
the us will no longer be #1 in the world.
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Apognophos
They aren't playing....They are dead serious and not distracted by foolish military adventures in the Middle East.
Indeed! China has the hunger. America had it once, when we were a young nation struggling to tame a wild land and live free. Then we ate and were satisfied. Now it's China's turn, and presumably India's turn. A prediction that's been made for years now is that we'll end up with a three-bloc world -- the Americas, Europe, and Asia (with various 3rd world countries falling into each bloc). But even if the U.S. retains some of its power, its days in the sun as "the world power" are clearly numbered. Mene mene tekel parsin.
The 2012 District Convention special talk made it clear that WT no longer teaches that another world power will rise up. What exists now is the end of it.
I do remember that talk quite clearly because I was surprised that they seemed to double-down on this "USA is the last power" notion right as the U.S. is losing its power -- BUT, notice my WT quotation above from the same time period. The WBTS is still saying that there will be an eighth king, even though it's not a kingdom. My suggestion is that the GB is going to change their interpretation of the eighth king if the U.S. suffers a clear fall to China as world power, to buy themselves a little more time. At least, that's what I would do if I were in charge.