Just want to quickly point out that Heb. `Ashtoreth Ug. `Athtart should not be confused with Heb. 'Asherah Ug. 'Athirat. It was the latter who was the consort of El and (as many scholars believe) Yahweh. Asherah had a cult in the Jerusalem Temple during the reign of Manasseh.
Leolaia
JoinedPosts by Leolaia
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79
Yahweh was a Cannanite god Ashtoreth his wife...before the Jews!! Unreal!
by Witness 007 inthis i did not know till recently.
buts a whole new meaning to "let us make man in our image.." no wonder all the kings of israel turned to other gods..
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are there JW FBI or CIA files?
by Honeybucket inwe all know that the government keeps files on everyone.. marilyn monroe, steve jobs, micheal jackson.
so do you think there are files on the dubs?.
im sure there is, so if it is obvious to those not a witness, why hasnt the government stepped in to help people like the russian government.
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Leolaia
Yes. J. Edgar Hoover's order to detain JFR in case of national emergency was among the FOIA files on Rutherford.
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Your earliest doubt?
by Apognophos inthis might be an unfair question for those who have been out of the organization for decades, but i'm wondering if any of you remember your earliest doubt -- maybe something odd that occurred to you as a kid (if you were a jw then).
please try to limit to two doubts at the most :-).
i think my first "doubt" was simply realizing that at the time of the flood, every animal that wasn't in the ark died (well, besides the fish, supposedly).
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Leolaia
World wide flood in 2370. Then some time later, after Tower of Babylon incident, history as we know it began. All of Egyptian and Sumerian history compressed into about 180 years. Really?
Yeah, that was precisely the problem that my young mind was busily engaged with when I was 14 and 15 years old. I wanted to find a way to make it all work out, shortening reign lengths, dismissing certain kings as "mythical", trying to squeeze everything within several hundred years. I knew the whole while it wasn't really working, but I wanted it to work. It bothered me how after the Tower of Babel the Egyptians would zoom super fast to Egypt and then instantly begin the first dynasty (I didn't even give room to Predynastic Egypt). But the whole scheme collapsed when I read about Woolley's excavations of Ur and found the mass graves of all the attendants to the Sumerian lord who were killed and buried with him. I forgot how many but it was something like 30-40 people. And that made no sense to me. I had that early king live just some 20 or 30 years after the Flood. At a time when people were trying to repopulate the earth and have enough people to work on the Tower of Babel a hundred years later, they were really cavalierly slaughtering a king's attendants when world population was only at a few hundred? It was then I realized that it was hopeless and I abandoned the project.
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Does the Bible contradict itself?
by exwhyzee inour old jw friend who is about to shun us says,there's nothing in the bible that contradicts itself?.
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can anyone think of certain scriptures that could prove otherwise?.
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Leolaia
The Bible doesn't present one single belief system or theological perspective; its an anthology of different books written at different times under different historical and social circumstances. Much like the Norton Anthology of American Literature. What is that book's teaching on the issue of individualism when you scan through the book's essays and short stories that touch on that issue?
4 - Individualism
a) The Norton Anthology of American Literature teaches that individualism is a fundamental American right above all others.
b) The Norton Anthology of American Literature teaches that individualism must be kept in balance with the needs of society as a whole.
c) The Norton Anthology of American Literature teaches that individualism is egotistical and without moral grounding.
d) The Norton Anthology of American Literature is confused.
One could choose (d) but it isn't that the anthology is confused; its that it is heterogeneous. Same goes for the Bible on any "contradiction".
This was posted recently in a Huffington Post blog. This is how Bible scholars actually approach the Bible:
The Hebrew Bible is not a book. It was not produced by a single author in one time and place. It is a small library of books composed and edited over nearly a millennium by people responding to a wide range of issues and historical circumstances. Because it is not a book (the name "Bible" derives from the plural Greek form ta biblia, meaning "the books") it does not have a uniform style or message.
From narrative texts to legal texts, from cultic instruction to erotic love poetry, this library contains works of diverse genres each of which sounds its own distinctive note in the symphony of reflection that we call the Bible. As is true of any collection of books by different authors in different centuries, the books in this collection contradict one another. Indeed, they sometimes contradict themselves because multiple strands of tradition were woven together in the creation of some of the books. The compiler of Genesis placed, side by side, two creation stories that differ dramatically in vocabulary, literary style and detail (who is created first -- humans or animals?). A few chapters later, two flood stories are interwoven into a single story despite their many contradictions and tensions (does Noah really take the animals on board two by two?). Proverbs extols wisdom, but Ecclesiastes scoffs at its folly and urges existential pleasure. Deuteronomy harps on God's retributive justice, but Job arrives at the bittersweet conclusion that despite the lack of divine justice (in this world or any other), we are not excused from the thankless and perhaps ultimately meaningless task of moral living. That such dissonant voices were preserved in the canon of the Bible, their tensions and contradictions unresolved, says something important about the conception of canon in antiquity. Ancient readers viewed this anthology as a collection of culturally significant writings worthy of preservation without the expectation or requirement that they agree with one another. Just as an attempt to impose harmony and consistency on the short stories collected in the Norton Anthology of English Literature would do great violence to those stories, any attempt to impose harmony and consistency on the diverse books collected in the Bible -- to extract a single message or truth -- does great violence to those books.I believe Narkissos in this forum has distilled this matter to its essence in this comment:
Does your library contradict itself?
It certainly does and is expected to.
However this is a rather odd question to ask about a library.
Does the Bible contradict itself? It only seems a valid question to ask about the Bible (ta biblia, plural) because of the usual religious presuppositions about this collection of texts. Once those suppositions are dropped there is nothing surprising or wrong in the "contradictions".There's nothing wrong with the Bible being an anthology of different works expressing different points of view. "Contradiction" is too judgmental a word and is borne out of a misplaced concept of unity of scripture. I feel that the Bible's diversity should be embraced and celebrated. It makes it a certainly richer book. The presupposition of inerrancy privileges harmonistic interpretations (aimed at resolving problematic "contradictions") over readings that deal with what a given text says in context and imho this results in an artificiality that is not present in the text itself. Such an approach would miss out on inner-biblical criticism and exegesis (that is, reinterpretation and disagreement within the Bible itself) and thus sets aside that "richness".
Here is what Narkissos also notes about that harmonistic interpretation:
One effect of this harmonising perspective on Biblical intertextuality is the creation of a paratext which then screens out the texts themselves. You cannot harmonise text A with text B without generating a (strictly unscriptural) paratext C which then remains in your mind as "what 'the Bible' actually says". Then you cannot read either A or B without superimposing C on them. (An easy example of that is the scenario gathered from Matthew's and Luke's alternative and complete Nativity stories, neither of which is read anymore for its own sake: what stays in mind is Luke's Nazareth + census + journey + manger + shepherds + Matthew's Magi + Egypt). As a result, you find that most unscholarly "Bible apologists" vs. "Bible critics" debates focus on a commonly admitted paratext (what "the Bible" supposedly "says") rather than on any particular text.
I know you were looking for just examples exwhyzee, but I hope this gets more to the issues involved in how one looks at the Bible.
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Why don't established religions care about Ron Wyatt's archaelogical findings confirming the Bible?
by Kosonen inwhy don't established religions care about ron wyatt's archaelogical findings confirming the bible?
what does that reveal about them?
have you any idea?.
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Leolaia
LOL!!!
Human cells normally have 46 chromosomes. These are actually 23 pairs of homologous chromosomes. In each pair of chromosomes, one of the pair is from the mother and the other member is from the father. Therefore, 23 chromosomes come from the mother and 23 from the father. In each set of 23, 22 chromosomes are autosomal and one is sex-determining. The sex-determining ones are the X chromosome and the Y chromosome. Females are XX, so they can only contribute an X chromosome to their offspring, whereas males are XY, which allows them to contribute either an X or a Y. If they contribute an X, the child is female, whereas if they contribute a Y, the child is male. The fascinating finding in this blood was that instead of 46 chromosomes, there were only 24. There were 22 autosomal chromosomes, one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. This evidences that the person to whom this blood belonged to had a mother but no human father, because the normal contribution of paternal chromosomes is missing.
So....Jesus apparently was a mutant and his Y chromosome came from, um, God?
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Why don't established religions care about Ron Wyatt's archaelogical findings confirming the Bible?
by Kosonen inwhy don't established religions care about ron wyatt's archaelogical findings confirming the bible?
what does that reveal about them?
have you any idea?.
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Why don't established religions care about Ron Wyatt's archaelogical findings confirming the Bible?
by Kosonen inwhy don't established religions care about ron wyatt's archaelogical findings confirming the bible?
what does that reveal about them?
have you any idea?.
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Leolaia
I could care less what "established religions" think. I have no idea why pointing out obvious BS is somehow a "defense" of established religion.
Wyatt (who died in 1999) claimed to have discovered bones of Nephilim, Noah's ark, ballast from the ark, the tombs of Noah and his wife, Sodom and Gormorrah, the actual storage containers that Joseph used to store grain, chariot wheels at the Red Sea crossing, twelve altars built by Moses, the actual rock Moses struck to produce water, the ark of the covenant, the ten commandments, a chamber in Jerusalem containing artifacts from the Temple, even blood from Jesus Christ! As in the case of frauds and hoaxes in general, suspicions are aroused when claims are just TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE™ . What actual empirical evidence has he provided that demonstrates the validity of these claims? Do they support the weight of the extraordinary nature of the claims? Do they justify the identifications he makes (which often seem to rely on a kind of circular reasoning)? Does Wyatt follow proper scientific methodology in making his case? I've seen precious little of any of that. Just sensational claims with little evidence to back them up. I personally believe he was a serial hoaxer. Bible enthusiasts bring big bucks. And there's celebrity in finding biblical relics.
And you discrediting Ron Wyatt, come with valid facts showing he is wrong in these matters. Otherwise your words are in no way scientific!
Did you just say "valid facts" and "scientific"? What "valid facts" has Wyatt produced that constitutes legitimate "scientific" research? Let's take the claim about discovering Jesus' blood as an example. Where is the scientific report by the laboratory that supposedly tested the blood? And what laboratory was it? Does anyone know? What are the details about the methods used in the tests? How many tests were done? How do we know the results are replicable? How was the identification with Jesus scientifically made? Where have the results been peer reviewed?
BTW, I'm not discrediting Wyatt at all. I have no desire to do so. The burden of proof is on Wyatt and his followers to substantiate the claims in the first place. If they can't be, then they rightly deserve little attention.
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I did NOT survive 12-21-2012. If you did NOT survive. Please check in here.
by FlyingHighNow inplease tell me i am not the only person who did not survive yesterday..
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Leolaia
BUT THAT WAS SPOSTA HAPPEN YESTERDAY! I WAS PROMISED!! I still can't even see Nibiru in the sky. Like, at all. I want my second sun! I wanna be like Luke Skywalker, dammit!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy1xlRcoY6E
Oh and is the Yellowstone eruption still days away?
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When is the (next) end of the world due?
by Aussie Oz inwell this lastest mayan fad just passed with nothing happening so i figure somebody has already got another date lined up...(obviously not related to the mayan calensar and its follwers...who are now end time has beens).
any new dates?
we cant let endtimes predictions dissapear into a vaccum you know!.
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Leolaia
I think 2029 and 2036 will be significant apocalyptic dates this century.
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Your earliest doubt?
by Apognophos inthis might be an unfair question for those who have been out of the organization for decades, but i'm wondering if any of you remember your earliest doubt -- maybe something odd that occurred to you as a kid (if you were a jw then).
please try to limit to two doubts at the most :-).
i think my first "doubt" was simply realizing that at the time of the flood, every animal that wasn't in the ark died (well, besides the fish, supposedly).
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Leolaia
What's hard to believe about a talking ass?