Leolaia

Joined

• started 148 topics
• posted 16,160 times   see topics posted on
• send a message

Posts by Leolaia

• 
  39

  Epimenides paradox: "Epimenides The Cretan Says, "All Cretans are Liars"

  by frankiespeakin in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  thomas fowler (1869) states the paradox as follows: "epimenides the cretan says, 'that all the cretans are liars,' but epimenides is himself a cretan; therefore he is himself a liar.

  but if he be a liar, what he says is untrue, and consequently the cretans are veracious; but epimenides is a cretan, and therefore what he says is true; saying the cretans are liars, epimenides is himself a liar, and what he says is untrue.

  thus we may go on alternately proving that epimenides and the cretans are truthful and untruthful."[1].

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Leolaia

  It can even destroy androids.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzVxsYzXI_Y
• 
  80

  RE: What did God accomplish with the flood?

  by bioflex in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  was just going through a few topics and this caught my attention, and since that thread looks pretty much dead i thought i would create a new one to add my thoughts .. so i would start by replying to as much criticisms as i can okay.

  @jam: .

  the purpose of the flood, because man grieved him to.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Leolaia

  well probaly because the was no americas. I came about this scripture when i was studing some time ago.
  Gen 10:25 And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother's name was Joktan.
  well isnt it interesting that something like this is accounted in the bible?, i mean the earth being divided and all, at least now there is your american for you and it happened after the flood

  The continents all separated from each other ONLY after the Flood? Within only the past 4,300 years? Several hundred million years of tectonic movement squeezed into what, centuries? Decades?

  Currently the Pacific plate moves at a rate of 8-9 centimeters a year. The March 2011 Tohoku earthquake, which was a magnitude 9.0, moved the plate about 24 meters relieving about 300-900 years worth of stress. The energy released shifted the earth's axis by several centimeters and changed the length of day slightly. Now think about that. That was only 24 meters! Continental drift would have to move continents over thousands of miles! Do you realize how many constant 10.0+ earthquakes and devastating tsunamis there would have to be in order to move the continents that fast??

  i find it ridicolous how people argue about the flood and totally ignore the fact that the bible it based on the power of God and the things he is capable of.
  
  We tend to rate God by our own limitations and think because its impossible for us then God could not have done it. You are missing the whole point.

  Because there is actual evidence that things didn't happen that way.

  You can imagine any fantasy of things happening contrary to history and then devise an all-powerful being that made it happen that way. Did you know that 9/11 didn't happen? None of it. The whole thing was a fraud. There never was any Twin Towers. We were all brainwashed to believe that by the Matrix. In fact, all of recent history never happened....Not even Obama exists as a real person....it was all implanted in our brain by the all-powerful Matrix that has us all under control. Any evidence to the contrary doesn't matter. I find it ridiculous that people argue about how these events happened and totally ignore that fact that the power of the Matrix is total and can be capable of manipulating everything. Do you doubt the power of the Matrix?

  I see that as no different than saying God created the universe in 6 days and any evidence to the contrary is to be dismissed on the grounds that God could do anything.
• 
  13

  Help With Bible Chronology Please

  by Yan Bibiyan in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  my question revolves around prophecies.. believers will claim that one of the sure signs of the divinity of the bible is that it predicts events hundreds/thousands of years before the events actually occuring.. from a more pragmatic viewpoint, a prophecy is a prophecy if it was predicted and documented ahead of the events in question.. the oldest known copies of biblical texts aare the death sea scrolls, dated from what i understand somewhere between 200bc-100 bc.. is there anything in the scrolls (not other books of the bible, but in the few biblical texts in the actual scrolls) that points to historically confirmed events postdating the scrolls?.

  in other words, are there biblical prophecies written on paper (or whatever medium) that:.

  a. can be confirmed to have been written prior to the predicted event - by means of radiological dating or other scientific metod, and.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Leolaia

  There may be a few that prophets got right; I don't know if these would meet the criteria in the OP. The prophet Isaiah was pretty accurate about Tyre's prolonged trade inactivity from Esarhaddon onward, although the period of "70 years" wasn't entirely accurate and was drawn from traditional prophetic motifs. Jeremiah used the same motif in reference to Babylonian supremacy and he also was right in general terms, though one might quibble over the details. It should also be recalled that Jeremiah correctly read the then-current political situation and was on the right side of history in opposing Judea's rebellious stance towards Babylon. There were other prophets who took the opposite position, so history kind of selected which prophet was remembered as "true". None of these prophecies can be "scientifically" proven to date prior to the events in question, but are generally accepted as such in scholarship (although it is clear that the Jeremianic oracle contains much redaction, as the contrast between the MT and LXX shows). In both cases, these prophecies were pretty safe bets. The "hits" however are far outweighed by the "misses", if the prophecies are not reinterpreted in a way that eases their disconfirmation.

  The Hebrew writer of Daniel gives a series of visions and oracles concerning the Maccabean crisis of 168-164 BC. The date of writing is securely set by the disjuncture between accurate prophecy (written about events in the recent past) and inaccurate genuine prediction (written about imagined events in the author's future). The author wrote that the sanctuary would be defiled for 3 1/2 years after which it would be cleansed, and then the desolator (Antiochus IV Epiphanes) would be destroyed, after which there would be the resurrection of the dead. The cleansing occurred exactly 3 years after the abomination of desolation was placed on the altar (and 3 1/2 years is accurate if time is counted in year-quarters from the time the pogrom began to the death of Antiochus), but interestingly Antiochus Epiphanes did die the following spring at the time expected by the author. So I would consider that in some way a "hit". The manner of his death was wholly unlike what was predicted (Antiochus did not die in Judea in the midst of a third campaign against Egypt), so this looks like a genuine prediction that did partially come to pass. Of course, God's kingdom did not then replace the Seleucid and Lagid dynasties, and war continued between Judea and the Syrians for several more years to come until Jewish independence was achieved.

  The important point to recognize is that prophetic disconfirmation is never really recognized in texts that the community accords the status of scripture. Fulfillment is instead simply deferred perpetually into the future and the prophecy itself is reinterpreted, often quite ingeniously, to apply to a new situation from a later time. A prophecy can then either be made "fulfilled" in retrospect, or it can again just be deferred. It is thus important to distinguish this hermeneutical process from what the prophet originally intended; usually such reinterpretations are inconsistent with the literary form or presuppositions of the original prophecy. Much of the work of the exilic and post-exilic prophets was to envision a full restoration of Israel to conditions better than what existed prior to exile, including a gloriously rebuilt Temple and a Davidic kingship in perpetuity, with eternal peace and sovereignty. The reality of the post-exilic period was a disappointment and thus there was much creative theological reinterpretation of the prophecies, giving rise to messianic apocalyptic scenarios which would one day fulfill all these expectations. The Seventy Weeks oracle in ch. 9 of Daniel, for instance, is a quite conscious reworking of Jeremiah's expectations of the restoration of Israel occasioned by the Maccabean crisis; why have the blessings not yet been realized hundreds of years later? The Hebrew author then devised a prophetic scenario of the end-times (which, among other things, saw the Suffering Servant of Deutero-Isaiah as fulfilled in the Maccabean martyrs), which would culiminate in the fulfillment of the old restoration prophecies, but which itself failed. And so it was itself deferred into the future, and then became source material for a new generation of prophets, including the authors of the Olivet discourse, 4 Ezra, and Revelation who applied the expectations of Daniel to their own time (the author of 4 Ezra was even explicit that his interpretation of Daniel, applying the expectations to the circumstances of the Roman empire, was very different than the one given to the original prophet). And then Revelation itself presented a scenario for its own time that did not come to pass as expected, and so it was deferred as well perpetually into the future, and thus remains a primary resource for end-time speculation by modern-day would-be prophets.
• 
  19

  If Jesus was created then why is the word protoktisis not used the Bible?

  by I_love_Jeff in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  is the word protoktisis from koine greek language?

  i do know that clement used it a centuries later.

  any greek scholars out there?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Leolaia

  The distinction between begetting and creating was not clearly observed before it became an issue in Christian apologetics, first in the gnostic controversy (where the gnostics made a sharp distinction between demiurgical creation involving matter and the divine generation of the aeons and archons from divine substance) and then in the later Arian controversy (whence the Nicene credal stipulation that the Son was begotten and not made).

  There is a much looser overlap between begetting and creation in earlier Jewish and Christian sources. Consider how the LXX translates the following OT passages using qanah "produce, create, acquire":

  Genesis 4:1: " Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth (MT: wattêlad; LXX: eteken) to Cain, and she said, ' I have created (MT: qanitî, LXX: ektèsamèn) a man with the help of the Lord' ".

  Genesis 14:19: " Blessed be Abram of God Most High, creator (MT: qoneh; LXX: ektisen) of heaven and earth".

  Psalm 139:13: "For you created (MT: qanîta; LXX: ektèsò) my kidneys, Lord, you made me in my mother's womb".

  Proverbs 8:22, 25: "The Lord created (MT: qananî; LXX; ektisen) me [i.e. God's wisdom] at the beginning of his way into his work.... Before the mountains were settled, before the hills I was brought forth (MT: c hôlal e tî; LXX: genna) ".

  Philo of Alexandria also used language of begetting to refer to God's acts of creation; for instance, "when he begot (gennèsas) plants and animals, he summoned them before man as their governor, that he might give each of them their appropriate names (De Mutatione Nominum, 63). I think also Philo used language of both begetting and creation in reference to the Logos. And even in the second century, we see language that mixes the two metaphors together, such as Tatian: "The Logos, begotten (gennètheis) in the beginning, in turn begets (gennèse) as his own work (poièsan), by imposing order on matter (hulèn), the things which we see" (Oratio, 5). The overwhelming metaphor applied to the Son in the second century is that of being begotten or produced, as opposed to created, often conceived as an extension or generation of God like a ray of light from the sun or fire kindled from fire.
• 
  55

  Argument against a GLOBAL Flood

  by enigma1863 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  how many people existed before the biblical flood?

  in the bible from adam to noah they have around 1600-1700 years.

  adam had at least three children (one dies and not counting the daughters) in a 930 year life span.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Leolaia

  P's genealogy in ch. 5 has " and he had other sons and daughters" as a refrain at each link in the genealogy. With life spans running into nine centuries, that can potentially result in an enormous number of children.

  I think better arguments are ones that recognize that a global flood is flatly contradicted by almost every branch of science.
• 
  19

  If Jesus was created then why is the word protoktisis not used the Bible?

  by I_love_Jeff in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  is the word protoktisis from koine greek language?

  i do know that clement used it a centuries later.

  any greek scholars out there?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Leolaia

  slim....You need a subscription to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. You said you are taking Coptic lessons? See if your institution gives you access.
• 
  19

  If Jesus was created then why is the word protoktisis not used the Bible?

  by I_love_Jeff in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  is the word protoktisis from koine greek language?

  i do know that clement used it a centuries later.

  any greek scholars out there?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Leolaia

  http://www.tlg.uci.edu/
• 
  19

  If Jesus was created then why is the word protoktisis not used the Bible?

  by I_love_Jeff in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  is the word protoktisis from koine greek language?

  i do know that clement used it a centuries later.

  any greek scholars out there?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Leolaia

  There are about a hundred instances of this word, all from Late Antiquity onward. Nothing earlier than Clement of Alexandria, who used it about twenty times. It was also used by Gregorius Nyssenus, Epiphanius, Eusebius, Basilius, Didymus Caecus, Joannes Chrysostomus, Julius Africanus, Gregorius Syncellus, and Gelasius Cyzicenus, usually in the context of the Son being described as "firstborn" as opposed to "first-created" in Scripture. It thus appears in a few NT catenae. Outside of this context there are a few occurences in profane (?) sources, but all very late. There is a scolion on line 1113 of Euripedes' Phoenissae regarding the Ogygian gates in Thebes that uses it in the plural. It also occurs a few times in magical papyri.

  So no hard evidence that the word pre-dates Clement (early third century AD). It possibly could have existed in earlier times, but there is no evidence that it did, and it looks somewhat like a back-formation from pròtogonos/pròtotokos, derived for apologetic purposes.
• 
  19

  If Jesus was created then why is the word protoktisis not used the Bible?

  by I_love_Jeff in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  is the word protoktisis from koine greek language?

  i do know that clement used it a centuries later.

  any greek scholars out there?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Leolaia

  Hold on, I'll do a search in the TLG.
• 
  17

  Dawkins' new documentary is now on Youtube

  by oldlightnewshite in

  1. social
  2. entertainment

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhhsyyvi-5k.

  i can't embed this but just copy and paste into the browser..

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Leolaia

  Since the first word is "sex", does this mean we are going to get "traditional sex roles are innate" BS?