Posts by TerryWalstrom

6

IDENTITY and Fairies; The Salem Witch Trials and JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES

by TerryWalstrom in

two ball bearings manufactured at the same time, in the same factory, by rigorous engineering standards, and produced to serve the same function inside a particular machine.. question: are they identical?.

answer: no.

there is one on your left and there is one on your right.. these do not occupy the same space.. you can remove one and the other will not follow.. _________________.

TerryWalstrom

I guess we could say, "JW's lose their bearing and become bearings" :)

66

BART EHRMAN answers my question

by TerryWalstrom in

as a member on bart ehrman's blog, i am able to ask him direct questions.is jehovah in the bible?.

question:.

how firmly grounded in reality is the claim of jehovahs witnesses that the divine name (jehovah) belongs in the new testament?.

TerryWalstrom

If Jesus or his apostles had uttered the Tetra., don't you think it would have caused a tremendous accusation by the Pharisees who were looking for any pretense whatsoever with which to accuse them?

Beautiful reasoning; simple and elegant!

66

BART EHRMAN answers my question

by TerryWalstrom in

as a member on bart ehrman's blog, i am able to ask him direct questions.is jehovah in the bible?.

question:.

how firmly grounded in reality is the claim of jehovahs witnesses that the divine name (jehovah) belongs in the new testament?.

TerryWalstrom

Treating God's Divine personal Name as though it were Holy would mean treating it the same way the Holy of Holy's in the Temple was treated. You wouldn't "go there."

Off limits!

Look how JW's bandy the name about like it is their Uncle Chucky. Jehovah this and Jehovah that--especially attaching it to fake Armageddon predictions that plop embarrassingly flat.

The Watchtower pretends it was silly superstition on the part of Jews to NOT say the name aloud.

The contrast between respect and over-familiarity is quite distinct, don't you think?

66

BART EHRMAN answers my question

by TerryWalstrom in

as a member on bart ehrman's blog, i am able to ask him direct questions.is jehovah in the bible?.

question:.

how firmly grounded in reality is the claim of jehovahs witnesses that the divine name (jehovah) belongs in the new testament?.

TerryWalstrom

TODAY'S REPLY on Ehrman's blog:

Bart March 11, 2015

Short responses:
1. “The name” is another way to say the name of God without saying the name of God. You just say, “the name” and you mean “God” or “Yahweh”
2. Yes, there are Septuagint manuscripts that preserve the tetragrammaton. But most don’t.
3. I don’t know of any evidence that NT authors actually used the Hebrew letters for the tetragrammaton in their quotations of the OT. Do these authors actually say what the evidence *is*? I’ve looked at probably all the earliest manuscripts of the NT Gospels and I can’t think of a single stitch of evidence for that claim. But maybe I’m wrong!

6

IDENTITY and Fairies; The Salem Witch Trials and JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES

by TerryWalstrom in

two ball bearings manufactured at the same time, in the same factory, by rigorous engineering standards, and produced to serve the same function inside a particular machine.. question: are they identical?.

answer: no.

there is one on your left and there is one on your right.. these do not occupy the same space.. you can remove one and the other will not follow.. _________________.

TerryWalstrom

Objectively, JW's are without concrete purpose. Oh, they act like messengers delivering important warnings, but the reality behind the warning is illusory.

So, what exactly are JW's about, or as the English say, 'what are they IN AID OF'?

Nothing at all but agreeing with the latest phase of the moon.

They are do-nothings.

They are easily defined by what they DO NOT do.

They do NOT celebrate holidays.

They do NOT believe in hell.

They do NOT believe in immortality of the soul.

They do NOT believe in the Trinity.

They do NOT teach the way of the cross.

They do NOT salute the flag, sing the anthem, vote or do community service.

The list of "Do Not's' is endless.

In this, there is a unity of negative energy.

JW'S are passengers on a crazy bus where the driver (GB) calls out the destination now and then, but keeps changing the route sign and the terminus.

These JW passengers try to convince outsiders along the route to ride with them. But, nobody arrives at the place promised. It keeps changing.

Some of the JW passengers have been on this journey for most of their life. Some begin to suspect there IS NO DESTINATION, only death in the seat.

Some JW passengers ring the bell and get off, to the jeers and acrimony of the rest.

What sort of trip is a trip to nowhere if not a Cuckoo's nest crazy bus ride with patients from a sanitarium?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ_kAbbHQJI

66

BART EHRMAN answers my question

by TerryWalstrom in

as a member on bart ehrman's blog, i am able to ask him direct questions.is jehovah in the bible?.

question:.

how firmly grounded in reality is the claim of jehovahs witnesses that the divine name (jehovah) belongs in the new testament?.

TerryWalstrom

Stop and think about it.

Christian means identifying oneself with the MESSIANIC identity of Jesus.

Jehovah's Witness is to attest to something else entirely.

The name JESUS encompasses Christianity while the name Jehovah is to harken toward a different ethos.

6

IDENTITY and Fairies; The Salem Witch Trials and JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES

by TerryWalstrom in

two ball bearings manufactured at the same time, in the same factory, by rigorous engineering standards, and produced to serve the same function inside a particular machine.. question: are they identical?.

answer: no.

there is one on your left and there is one on your right.. these do not occupy the same space.. you can remove one and the other will not follow.. _________________.

TerryWalstrom

________________________What do we have here?___________________________

Two ball bearings manufactured at the same time, in the same factory, by rigorous engineering standards, and produced to serve the same function inside a particular machine.

QUESTION: Are they IDENTICAL?

ANSWER: No

________________

There is one on your left and there is one on your right.

These do not occupy the same space.

You can remove one and the other will not follow.

_________________

These ball bearings match identical specifications, true--but the practical test of identity is indeed separateness. The very fact I must refer to them and you must think of them as quantities identify the rational distinction our minds demand!

_______________

RATIONAL MIND and the problem of IDENTITY

To exist is to be something somewhere rather than nothing nowhere.

The way the human mind addresses the nature of IDENTITY is to break it up into separate characteristics.

Who, What, When, Where, How, and Why are the usual conceptual categories.

_____________IMAGINATIVE MIND and the problem of IDENTITY_______________

To "exist" is different from exist (without quotation marks).

To "exist" comes about by your mind assigning characteristics--not to an actual thing--but to your own created mental mock-up.

Example: Playwright James M. Barrie, imagined the character of Peter Pan. He wrote the play which was performed (made real or realized) on stage by real actors.

As a result, other people all over the world can think of Peter Pan too. Children can assign the mental value of "existence" to that imagined character.

________________Are there two kinds of EXISTENCE?_______________

The slippery slope of BELIEF is the result of our mind being able to perform a task NOT UNLIKE that of those 2 ball bearings. These 2 tasks are practically identical without, in fact, being identical.

We can use our 5 senses to identify (we smell it, we see it, we hear it, we taste it, we touch it.)

OR. . .

We can use our imagination to assign a mental mock-up (internal creation of our thought) and then BELIEVE it into "existence."

An amazing thing is our mind / brain.

__________________WHAT IS PHANTOM LIMB SYNDROME?_______________

A phantom limb is a complex phenomenon involving a sensation that an amputated or a missing limb is still attached to the body.
_______________

The real limb was removed, but your mind acts upon your body to report its PRESENCE.

The limb that isn't there can 'itch" or ache. Is this evidence of a ghost limb?

No, it is a false report by your own mind giving you false evidence which you then BELIEVE.

________________

Do we have 2 sets of SENSES? No. When our mind hallucinates, although it is our only source of information about our self and surroundings, we are fooled.

Garbage in = garbage out

False reporting equals false conclusions.

____________________SUBJECTIVE vs. OBJECTIVE___________________

"The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months."

a study published in Science magazine in 1976 cited the fungus ergot (found in rye, wheat and other cereals), which toxicologists say can cause symptoms such as delusions, vomiting and muscle spasms.

________________

Above are 2 examples of what happens when we rely on our mind to reliably report reality and the information is corrupt.

Subjective thoughts, feelings and beliefs are acted upon as though reliable evidence had been experienced matching reality.

What does OBJECTIVE mean if SUBJECTIVE is simply what goes on inside our head?

OBJECTS can be seen by everybody, measured by the same standards, and no special set of beliefs are necessary to induce their report of the existence and nature of the objects.

_____________________The Cottingly Fairies_______________

Is seeing believing?

______________PROOF of existence?

The famous Cottingley fairies were “photographed” by two girls Elsie Wright, 15, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, 10, in the last days of the First World War. The case got its international acclaim through Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, who was fascinated by the account and published an article in the Strand Magazine in December 1920. Doyle was completely convinced the photographs were actual evidence of the existence of fairies!

With the world’s attention focused on them, the girls had little option but to stick to their story. A juvenile prank had grown into a mass media circus.

____________________________________

JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES have minds and brains and beliefs which are no more or less intelligent

than any other group of believers on planet Earth.

They come from all walks of life with varied educational backgrounds. .

Each JW is not unlike one of 7 or 8 million ball bearings.

These millions are all alike and their unity of purpose is determined by the Watchtower Corporation which--like the manufacturer of ball bearings--exactly specifies the purpose which these teeming millions will serve.

QUESTION: Are all JW's identical or "identical"?

______________

Religiously speaking, by self-identifying with JEHOVAH (Jehovah's Witnesses) rather than JESUS, JW'S cannot be said to use personal, individual and separate consciousness manifesting Christianity in the historical sense.

By renouncing "personal" conversion experience; by not espousing a "born again" confession, and by not engaging in acts of conscience other than REQUIRED manifestations of loyalty to creed, JW's are "identical."

The CULT mind feeds corrupt information to cult members and they all react AS THOUGH theirs is actual reality, rather than imaginative mock-ups of non-verifiable fact.

Do Jehovah's Witnesses actual exist as human individuals?

The jury is out on that one!

Where is the separateness? How--without debate, or internal dialogue--can those 7or 8 million people be disambiguated?

QUESTION: If the Watchtower suddenly declared Blood Transfusions were a matter of conscience, wouldn't every member immediately believe the exact opposite of what was "True" the moment before without further research, speculation or investigation of a personal nature?

ANWER: Yes! To act otherwise would indicate separateness which is disloyalty which creates disunity which cause that person to suddenly EXIST as an individual. This would end his "existence" by being disfellowship.

________________________

WHAT DOES THIS ALL PURPORT TO MEAN?

All the above is an exercise to distinguish what it means to be a real human being from being an identical cult member without separateness of thought, tastes, personal opinions.

Historically (from the examples of the Salem Witch Trials and the Cottingly Fairies) we discovered how mass belief in defiance of reality leads to disastrous NON-RATIONAL behavior and even murder.

JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES may well be nothing more and nothing less than mere 'things' just like utilitarian ball bearings inasmuch as they are denied distinction as thinking, rational creatures.

66

BART EHRMAN answers my question

by TerryWalstrom in

as a member on bart ehrman's blog, i am able to ask him direct questions.is jehovah in the bible?.

question:.

how firmly grounded in reality is the claim of jehovahs witnesses that the divine name (jehovah) belongs in the new testament?.

TerryWalstrom

Today, I followed up with this response:

walstrom March 10, 2015
Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Thank you for covering this topic.
I was a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses for twenty years and am conversant with all the arguments presented by the Watchtower organization bolstering their use of Jehovah in the New Testament.
I’ll simply post three of these proffered arguments for your delectation in order to gauge your scholarly response.

1. About the middle of the first century C.E., the disciple James said to the elders in Jerusalem: “Symeon has related thoroughly how God for the first time turned his attention to the nations to take out of them a people for his name.” (Acts 15:14) Does it sound logical to you that James would make such a statement if nobody in the first century knew or used God’s name?
2. When copies of the Septuagint were discovered that used the divine name rather than Ky′ri·os (Lord), it became evident to the (NWT) translators that in Jesus’ day copies of the earlier Scriptures in Greek—and of course those in Hebrew—did contain the divine name.
Apparently, the God-dishonoring tradition of removing the divine name from Greek manuscripts developed only later. What do you think? Would Jesus and his apostles have promoted such a tradition?—Matthew 15:6-9.
3.The AnchorBible Dictionary makes this comment: “There is some evidence that the Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name, Yahweh, appeared in some or all of the O[ld] T[estament] quotations in the N[ew] T[estament] when the NT documents were first penned.” And scholar George Howard says: “Since the Tetragram was still written in the copies of the Greek Bible [the Septuagint] which made up the Scriptures of the early church, it is reasonable to believe that the N[ew] T[estament] writers, when quoting from Scripture, preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text.”
________________________
Below are some examples of English translations that have used God’s name in the New Testament:
A Literal Translation of the New Testament . . . From the Text of the VaticanManuscript, by Herman Heinfetter (1863)
The Emphatic Diaglott, by Benjamin Wilson (1864)
The Epistles of Paul in Modern English, by George Barker Stevens (1898)
St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, by W. G. Rutherford (1900)
The Christian’s Bible—New Testament, by George N. LeFevre (1928)
The New Testament Letters, by J.W.C. Wand, Bishop of London (1946)
_________________

Is this merely a fetish on the part of Jehovah’s Witnesses to protect their ‘branding’?
How arbitrary and out of step with the scholarly community is the Watchtower organization?

Thank you very much!

66

BART EHRMAN answers my question

by TerryWalstrom in

as a member on bart ehrman's blog, i am able to ask him direct questions.is jehovah in the bible?.

question:.

how firmly grounded in reality is the claim of jehovahs witnesses that the divine name (jehovah) belongs in the new testament?.

TerryWalstrom

As a member on Bart Ehrman's Blog, I am able to ask him direct questions.

Is “Jehovah” in the Bible?

QUESTION:

How firmly grounded in reality is the claim of Jehovah’s Witnesses that the ‘divine name’ (Jehovah) belongs in the New Testament?

RESPONSE

So this is an interesting question, with several possible ramifications. At first I should explain that the divine name “Jehovah” doesn’t belong in *either* Testament, old or new, in the opinion of most critical scholars, outside the ranks of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s because Jehovah was not the divine name.

So here’s the deal. In the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) God is given a number of different designations. Sometimes he is called God (the Hebrew word is El, or more commonly – by far – the plural form of that word, ELOHIM); or The Almighty (SHADDAI), or God Almighty (EL SHADDAI), or Lord (ADONAI), or – well, or lots of other things. But sometimes the God of Israel is actually given his personal name. Like everyone else, he has a name. And his name was יהוה (in English letters, that looks like YHWH).

Written Hebrew, as you probably know…

THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you don’t belong yet, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!?

Written Hebrew, as you probably know, does not use vowels, only consonants. When you speak, of course, you provide the vowels. But ancient Hebrew speakers did not need to see the vowels on the page to know what the vowels were supposed to be. And so only the consonants were written.

Later scribes realized that this made reading the texts very difficult for people who were not absolutely fluent in the language, and so they added vowels to the already written text. They could not very well insert new letters representing the vowels between the consonants, since the consonants were already written on the page and there was no room for letters between them. And so they developed a system of “points” that could be added above and below the consonantal letters to indicate which vowels were to be supplied with each consonant. And so there might be a small dot beneath a letter, or a dot next to a letter, or over a letter, or a small line under a letter, or three dots arranged like an upside down pyramid under a letter, or a small T shape under a letter, and so on – all representing different vowel sounds. You can see a list of Hebrew vowels in a number of places on the Internet, including here: http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Grammar/Unit_Two/Vowel_List/vowel_list.html

These “pointed” Hebrew texts are the texts that most of us trained in Hebrew in college or seminary or graduate school learned. I find it hard to read Hebrew in any event, but really really hard without the vowel points. I have colleagues, on the other hand, who read unpointed Hebrew like the newspaper. In fact, they read the newspaper in unpointed Hebrew!

So, back to the question. The original name of God, יהוה (YHWH – remember, Hebrew is written from right to left, so that in English transliteration the first letter Y refers to the Hebrew letter י that is furthest to the right, and so on), consists of four letters. It was consider exceptionally, extraordinarily holy. It was the name of God himself. It was so sacred, so distinct from every other word and name in the Hebrew language, that there came a time when Jews thought that it should never, ever even be pronounced.

The sacred name is sometimes called the Tetragrammaton – literally meaning, “the four letters.” Since it came not to be pronounced, scholars are not absolutely certain how it *was* pronounced back in the days when it was. It is usually thought, though, that when pronounced it was “Yahweh.” And so non-Jewish scholars typically refer to the personal name of God in the Old Testament as Yahweh. He was called “God” or “the Almighty” or the “Lord” – but his name was Yahweh.

What were Jewish readers supposed to do when they were reading a text that had the unpronounceable name YHWH in it? What were they supposed to say at that point? They couldn’t say the name. So were they just supposed to be silent? But how then would anyone know that the tetragrammaton was in the text at that point? Jewish scribes solved that problem when they started adding points to the unpointed Hebrew text. When the divine name occurred, instead of giving it its pronounceable vowel points, they gave it the points that belonged to the word for Lord, ADONAI.

When you add the vowels of ADONAI to the consonants of YHWH, it makes it very hard indeed to say. And this was a sign to a reader not to say the name Yahweh, but to say, instead, ADONAI. So they were reading the tretragrammaton, but they were speaking the word “Lord.”

When modern Bible translators were putting the Bible into modern European languages, they were confronted with this situation. There were various solutions devised to express the Tetragrammaton in English. In a lot of Bibles – you may have noticed this (or you may not have) – there is a difference in the Old Testament between the word “Lord” (first letter capitalized) and the word “LORD” (all four letters capitalized). The first word translates ADONAI and the second word translates the tetragrammaton YHWH. That’s how, when you’re reading a translation, you can tell if the tetragrammaton is being used.

But some translators took the tetragrammaton with the vowels of Adonai and created an English word for it. In some European languages the letters Y and J are equivalents (sound the same), as are W and V (think: German). If you spell the name YHWH as JHVH and add the vowels of ADONAI, you get JEHOVAH. That’s a made-up English word, not a Hebrew word (and not, before this, an English word).

People who claim that JEHOVAH is the divine name are kind of right but not really. The divine name was probably Yahweh. Technically speaking the name Jehovah doesn’t occur in the Old Testament.

And it certainly does not occur in the New Testament, which was not written in Hebrew, so that it never uses the tetragrammaton.

When the Old Testament came to be translated into Greek both Yahweh and Adonai were translated by the Greek word κυριος, which in English letters is KURIOS. It is the Geek word for “Lord.” It is a word that can be used to refer to your employer, your master, your superior, or to God, or … to the personal name of God. And so when the New Testament refers to God as “Lord,” it is not clear if it is calling him by his personal name or if it is designating him as the Lord. But in neither case, in my judgment, does it make sense to translate the term using the made up English word Jehovah."

9

Jehovah's Witnesses are "not even wrong" and here is why.

by TerryWalstrom in

a magician can demonstrate an empty hat from which, seconds later, he pulls a rabbit.

a rabbit in that empty hat?

in pre-enlightenment times, the easy answer was: magic was real--but--it was accomplished.

TerryWalstrom

Well, thanks for kind words.

The 'style' of writing back when I was inside a Kingdom Hall, was mostly the mad caw-cawing of Fred Franz from his perch in the tower of little Christs.

Difficult plodding, indeed.
If you can read a Watchtower, you can read anything!

Disordered minds tend to obsess on details at the expense of the gestalt. Fred Franz is a case study of that malady. His greatest 'talent' consisted of throwing everything into a broth of speculation, making it seem 'important.' A lazy person reading it might sigh and ask in wonderment, "How lucky am I to have stumbled into such an amazing meal!"

Food at the proper time was, of course, neither. But, we all went along for the merry ride, did we not?

It was only many years later, as I repeated certain doctrines aloud to sane people and watched the transformation of their facial expression, that I experienced an epiphany. IT WAS ALL CRAZY!

This jarred me. Surely I had gone mad. That must be the explanation for staying so long.

No, not insanity. It was intellectual vacuity. There is no there there. But, failing to employ skepticism, it seeped into my pores and crossed the brain-blood barrier. A deadly narcotic, I succumbed to idiocy and self-aggrandizement. THE TRUTH is an absolute.

I and my brethren were absolutely wrong and utterly confident in our stupor.

Why? Why? Why?

None of it was Falsifiable. Only the arguments of those who were of other (false) religions tested the soundness of our doctrine. That well had been poisoned.

It remained for the vicissitudes of life to disabuse me.