Nobody else on earth ever even noticed JOSHUA'S long day!!

by Terry 33 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Terry

  Joshua 10:12-14 (New International Version)

  12 On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel:
  "O sun, stand still over Gibeon,
  O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon."

  13 So the sun stood still,
  and the moon stopped,
  till the nation avenged itself on [a] its enemies,
  as it is written in the Book of Jashar.
  The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. 14 There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the LORD listened to a man. Surely the LORD was fighting for Israel!

  The sun and moon stood still for a whole day. "There was no day like that before it or after it."

  This is recorded in the inspired word of God as an actual historical event.

  Surely, if such an event as this (apparently "motionless" sun hanging in the sky; the moon not moving) it was true for the entire planet Earth.

  Yet, nobody else writing at this time or immediately thereafter ever wrote a single word mentioning such an astonishing event!

  Nations in the same hemisphere as the land of Canaan would not be so indifferent to extraordinary phenomenological happenings as this!

  A night of extraordinary length? Who would shrug this off? Somebody somewhere would surely have commented. Legends, myths, speculations should have sprung up in all nations and lands. But--nothing but silence! How passing strange this is upon reflection.

  Let's compare such an event to the SUPERNOVA in 386 A.D. NASA NEWS of January 11, 2001 carries an artilce concerning China and its records of this astronomical event (and others like it.)

  New evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory suggests that a known pulsar is the present-day counterpart to a supernova that exploded in 386 AD, a stellar explosion witnessed by ancient Chinese astronomers. If confirmed, this will be only the second known pulsar to be clearly associated with an historic event.

  In roughly the past 2,000 years, less than 10 reports of probable supernovae have been archived, mostly by Asian astronomers. Until now, the Crab Nebula has been the only pulsar whose birth is associated with an [sic] historic event, the supernova of 1054 AD, making it the only neutron star with a firm age.

  In "The 1987 A Supernova," Margarita Dimova and Emanuil Kolarov noted that a supernova of AD 1054 in the constellation Taurus formed the Crab Nebula and was reported by both Chinese and Korean astronomers. Rock paintings in Arizona and New Mexico indicate that this same supernova was also observed by American Indians. These reports show that when extraordinary events are visible worldwide, records of them are made. American Indians, for example, had no written languages, but they still left records of their observations through rock paintings.

  Now, some bright person might pipe up and say, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

  Okay.

  How much absence of evidence does it take for you to at least become a bit suspicious that the account of Joshua's LONG DAY may be a fable?
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  JWoods

  I thought the NASA computers had a record of this and they proved it from the star positions - a fundamentalist here at work told me so.
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  Terry

  I thought the NASA computers had a record of this and they proved it from the star positions - a fundamentalist here at work told me so.

  Lovely! I'm ready and eager to believe. Can you get me any links or articles, please?

  Thanks!
• 

  elder-schmelder

  JWoods - Very funny !!

  http://www.progressivetheology.org/principles/Missing-Day.html
• 

  Terry

  NASA Has Found a "Missing Day" on the Calendar, Explained Only by the Bible- Fiction!
  Summary of eRumor: An email says that NASA (The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has stumbled across some computer generated evidence that the Bible is true. A man named Harold Hill, a NASA consultant and president of the Curtis engine company, describes how NASA computers were looking back in time when they issued an alert that something was wrong. There seemed to be a day missing from the calculations. The scientists puzzled over this a long time until someone in their midst reflected that in the Bible, there's a story about the day the sun stood still for the Hebrew leader Joshua. This solves the puzzle, almost. According to the computer, not an entire day was lost, but 23 hours and 20 minutes. Now there's a new problem. What about the other 40 minutes? That's when the same employee remembers that there is another story in the Bible about a day when the sun moved backwards 10 degrees which, according to the employee, is an arc of 40 minutes...so the entire question of the missing day is solved!
  The Truth: Except for the reference to the astronauts, this version of 'the Missing Day' story has been around for nearly 30 years. Harold Hill was a real person and he was the president of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore, Maryland. He had converted to Christianity as an adult and became a popular speaker among Christian groups, because he was a successful businessman, claimed to be a consultant to NASA, and did presentations on science and the Bible. One of his most popular presentations was the story of the Missing Day. Harold Hill apparently told the story without much notice until October 1969, when a columnist for a small American newspaper was told about one of his speeches and was given some notes about the Missing Day. She was so intrigued, that she wrote it up and it was published. The columnist's name was Mary Kathryn Bryan and her column appeared in the Spencer Evening World in Spencer, Indiana. According to the newspaper, the results of that particular column were 'simply unbelievable'. They started receiving requests from all over the world for reprints of the article, and finally stopped counting when the number of inquiries passed 1,500. The total number of cards, letters and telephone calls is now in the thousands. From that article, the Missing Day story found its way into untold numbers of magazines, newspapers, gospel tracts, books and now emails. Harold Hill himself included it in a Christian book which he wrote. The story has several problems, however. One problem is that apart from Harold Hill, there is no known source for the NASA story. For many years, whenever anyone wrote to him about it, he sent a form letter which said he had misplaced the source of the information, but would send everybody a copy when he found it. The source never materialized. In his subsequent book, Hill dismissed all skepticism about the story and said that no substantiation was needed. His attitude was that if people believed it and it drew them to spiritual things, it was justified. Another problem is that NASA has denied that Harold Hill was ever one of its consultants. James S. Lacy, from the Office of Public Relations for NASA, wrote in a letter to a journalist that the only trace they could find of a Harold Hill having any connection with NASA was a person who was involved in contracting for the operations and maintenance of some diesel engine operations. Further, according to a letter I have from the NASA Public Affairs office in Washington, 'There is no truth to the recurring story that NASA uncovered a lost day in the movement of the Earth.' It is interesting to note that an attempt to explain Joshua's long day from a scientific standpoint was published many years before Harold Hill's NASA story. In the 1930s, Dr Harry Rimmer wrote a book called 'The Harmony of Science and Scripture', in which he drew from an 1890 book by Yale professor C.A. Totten. Using popular biblical chronologies of the time, Totten concluded that the world was created 4,000 years before the birth of Christ, on Sunday, September 22, 4000BC. However, he said that the calendar calculations showed that September 22 was actually a Monday, and not a Sunday, and that the error was probably because of Joshua's missing day. Totten also makes reference to the Hezekiah story in 2 Kings and argues that this accounts for another missing 20 minutes or so. Totten's calculations sound suspiciously familiar to the NASA story. The bottom line seems to be that there is a lot still missing about 'the Missing Day'.
• 

  White Dove

  If we look at it as a fable, something to teach us a moral lesson of sorts, what can this story teach us?

  That is how I see it, too, as a fable. I've wondered the same thing about how that long day would have affected the rest of the planet.

  The oceans would have been affected by the moon. People would wonder about why there's no light when they woke up.

  How about everyone floating or flying off the earth since gravity would be messed up?

  Too many questions for real "thinking people."
• 

  Terry

  Too many questions for real "thinking people."

  But, what about people of, um, Faith!? Surely they can think......can't they? A little?

  Or, does that spoil it?
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  cyberjesus

  what about all of the other effects that are involved? in order for the "Day" to have lasted double the earth had to be stopped and also the moon. What about the whole Solar System.

  IF the earth was moving and suddenly God were to stop it .. can you imagine what could have happened? what happens when you stop a car that goes 100mph? everybody would fly out at 100 mph. Well the earth is rotating at the equator at 1000 mph..

  What about the weather? storms and electric storms would have happened?

  God must have had to modified all the laws on the universe only so can Joshua could continue killing more Pagans!
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  ProdigalSon

  The ancient Jews believed the sun revolved around the earth, which was shaped like a pizza. The Bible is entirely geocentric, with hundreds of scriptures that either directly say or indirectly suggest that the earth is flat and motionless, and that the universe goes around it every day. There are actually some Bible-believing nut jobs online who have a whole movement going to overthrow Copernicanism.

  As usual, the literal (what they call "vulgar", and vulgar it is) reading is ridiculous, while through allegory it esoterically reveals kabbalist cosmology, which is very cool. The former is Paul's "milk", the latter is the "meat".

  ~PS
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  Terry

  You are spoiling it for me!