secret recording 14th april:ralph walls: more changes are coming!.
( broadcasted to all british congregations today).
https://youtu.be/owg4bqj7pd0?si=yvfpkkos_qoy9u10.
Ty slimboyfat and disgruntled
If these were the verses the speaker used to support his claim then it's once again unfortunate misinterpretation. In neither of these verses do we get human beings becoming like God, able to independently generate their own life source.
I suppose JW can interpret scriptures any way they want, but sometimes they really stretch it and go out on a limb.
secret recording 14th april:ralph walls: more changes are coming!.
( broadcasted to all british congregations today).
https://youtu.be/owg4bqj7pd0?si=yvfpkkos_qoy9u10.
Listener- He says that the anointed will have incorruptible bodies and be given what even the angels don’t have, only jehovah and Jesus - their own source of life and energy.
What a claim. What scriptures did he use to support this?
How willing are we, normally, to lend credence to claims that have little to no corroboration? Do we approach similar claims differently based only on which ones we favor? We should be able to establish a pretty comprehensive sets of norms that most people can easily agree on.
Most people of faith have moved beyond what can be corroborated or not. Matters of faith have little to do with logic and appealing to the senses. Jesus himself said to Thomas, "because you see you now believe... blessed are those that believe without seeing".
Faith is tied to the heart and spirit, just as Jesus said. If one can believe that the heart and spirit exists (as opposed to nothing existing outside of hard solid tangible matter) then it's not a stretch to believe in the effect the gospels can have on that heart and spirit.
Tonus-In a situation where the only accounts are of undetermined origin, where the original accounts have not been found, where the only copies are literally that- hand-copied accounts that come with the caveats of such a process... it is natural to express doubts, even if those accounts reported normal or mundane happenings.
This is precisely why we are left with having to make our own call.
If these accounts also report on supernatural events, possibly involving actual deities, our skepticism must be ratcheted up. Otherwise, we are left with many, many such claims from people throughout the past that are suddenly possible.
Yes, and this is where we reach that additional layer of consideration that we call faith.
It is a unique layer because it now involves our personal life experience. As you indicated above, when the accounts seem scant you either believe or not. What will determine which? Your personal life experience. You'll look at your life and see none of the gospels in it, or you'll see enough of them to compel you to believe.
So julius caesar made up events and told lies, I see a pattern forming here.
Imagine that, the most powerful and advanced nation in the world.... making stuff up. What hope was there for little ole Judea?
If written history and 'witness' accounts can't be trusted (you can argue that this is more true today than ever) then you're left with having to make your own call.
Touchofgrey-You can't report on something (miracles)that never happened. So no historical accounts will exist.
Are you sure about this?
Not long before Christ, Julius Caesar had written his own Commentaries on the Gallic wars. His own first hand account of his victories on behalf of the Republic, with plenty of witnesses and historians that were right there in his camp writing on the events.
In his Commentaries, he claimed that at one battle his legions faced 430,000 Gauls...and defeated them... without losing ONE SINGLE Roman soldier. After their defeat, Julius claims the remaining Gauls were so emotionally defeated that most proceeded to commit suicide thereafter.
These amazing feats were written down and delivered in chapters and posted on the Forum for all of Rome to read in awe of Julius prowess. Not only that, these Commentaries were considered infallible by historians all the way up until the 20th century, when these claims were finally refuted.
Written history, it seems, is not quite so black and white.
Tonus-So... people saw these amazing things, reported it, were brushed off, and everyone just shut up about it for the next 30-40 years before someone thought to write about it?
According to the gospels, Jesus' very own people were skeptical. He WAS the son of a carpenter after all, was he not? If those people actually walking next to him had serious doubts, what makes anyone believe that Senators, philosophers and historians in Rome had more faith than they?
These 'amazing' things that Jesus did are always interpreted by us in the present thru the very swayed and elaborate presentation of them in art and modern movies for example. We speak of them considerably after the fact. But how consequential were these events to distant people in distant lands in the very moment they were actually happening?
Possibly these things might get someone's attention.
They did. The people that were actually there to see it. But these people, fishermen and goatherders , are very simply waived away.
On the subject of the resurrection, as is described by the gospels. How many historians were sent to his tomb to wait and see Christ risen? None. Nobody cared.
Lest we forget, Augustus had by now exiled even poets for alluding thru pretty cantos that the Caesar was anything less than a god. What reputable historian, IF he was sufficiently compelled, would undermine the god of the Roman empire, and get himself nailed to a cross?
Touchofgrey-You have yet to provide independent and verified eyewitnes and historical evidence of the resurrection of jesus at the time it was supposedly happen.
For a person, Jesus, who only operated as the Messiah for a scant 3 years at most...and did it trying (desperately at times) to remain anonymous up until his death...sure did have a lasting and critical effect since then.
There's absolutely nothing in the gospels, or the entire Bible for that matter, that points to anything Christ did including the resurrection, that should be recorded and verified by historians.
The world wasn't much interested in the arrival of the Messiah. The Romans themselves, the real movers and shakers of the world at the time, were utterly indifferent to just about anything happening in Judea.
Who really believes that what a bunch of uneducated fishermen and the little towns around them did mattered enough to send historians to Judea and make note of what was happening?
Seabreeze-Most Christians simply believe that the Resurrection really happened and that is the simple foundation for their faith. Churches are there so that like-minded people can hear the word of God, be encouraged and fellowship with one-another.
This is more or less what the episcopal church I watch online is. It's mostly ritual, some reading of the Old testament, a gospel and letters of the apostles. People are there mostly, from what I perceive, to listen to the readings, sing the songs, take the Eucharist and listen to the 30 min priest's sermon.
There's no real promising of anything in regards to the future except for the hope of heaven after death. But the focus is really never on the future, rather it's on living with faith now and simply hope for the best.
I also attended the meeting this weekend at the KH, and as usual, a very big deal is made of living for the future aka paradise after Armageddon. The public talk speaker tried his best to extract some kind of emotion from the audience when he emphasized the hope for paradise when "all our problems will be solved". But when I looked around people were either yawning or staring into space.
It seems that more than ever, the live only for the future schtick is really wearing thin these days.
