Bro. Lett (Governing Body) borrowed illustration from an outspoken WT critic

by fugue 77 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Andrew Sh

  "The question for me is whether Ankerberg invented this illustration, or picked it up from others." page 2 of posts (by Leolaia)

  Leolaia,

  The idea of getting an idea of the length of eternity by an illustration of a bird picking up and moving a grain of sand every thousand years is at least 300 years old. From the puritan minister Thomas Watson (lived 1620=1686):-

  The torments of hell abide forever....If all the earth and sea were sand, and every thousandth year a little bird should come, and take away one grain of this sand, it would be a long time ere that vast heap of sand were emptied: yet, if after all that time the damned may come outof hell, there were some hope: but this word EVER breaks the heart.

  He wrote a number of books which are still in print, and is perhaps the easiest Puritan to read. Perhaps his most useful book has been "A Body of Divinity". covering the whole of essential Bible doctrine.
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  Andrew Sh

  Quoted in:-

  http://www.eternallifeministries.org/quotes.htm under the heading "Hell".
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  Room 215

  The GB trade in eccentricities; they apparently believe it humanizes them; it's all affectation, style in lieu of substance.
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  fugue

  Interesting. So it originated much earlier.

  But I still believe Lett borrowed Ankerberg's version. This version just says "bird." Ankerberg's version is a parakeet. What are the chances that Lett would choose a parakeet without having heard Ankerberg's version? (Or whoever first said parakeet.)
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  Andrew Sh

  Fugue, I'm sure you are right.
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  Leolaia

  "The question for me is whether Ankerberg invented this illustration, or picked it up from others." page 2 of posts (by Leolaia)

  Leolaia,

  The idea of getting an idea of the length of eternity by an illustration of a bird picking up and moving a grain of sand every thousand years is at least 300 years old. From the puritan minister Thomas Watson (lived 1620=1686):-

  The torments of hell abide forever....If all the earth and sea were sand, and every thousandth year a little bird should come, and take away one grain of this sand, it would be a long time ere that vast heap of sand were emptied: yet, if after all that time the damned may come outof hell, there were some hope: but this word EVER breaks the heart.

  He wrote a number of books which are still in print, and is perhaps the easiest Puritan to read. Perhaps his most useful book has been "A Body of Divinity". covering the whole of essential Bible doctrine.

  Yeah....this is kind of reminiscent of the kinds of issues faced in trying to determine oral and literary dependence, such as the synoptic problem.

  As fugue points out, Ankerberg and Lett both share the more specific reference to a "parakeet". That points to a much closer connection between the two. The source of the sand in both is also Florida. I bet if one does a synoptic comparison of the two illustrations, one can find other similarities. But there are also differences. So the destination of the sand for Ankerberg is the moon, while it is the Grand Canyon in Lett's version. So....the question remains whether there is another non-Ankerberg source that Lett could have used that was closer to Lett's version, having the Grand Canyon as the destination of the sand instead of the moon. Otherwise the change in destination could have been Lett's own innovation. But I agree that Ankerberg is the closest parallel that we have thus far. And in fact, Ankerberg's illustration appears to be widely reproduced throughout the web, republished in other books, and Ankerberg's status as a commentator on JWs makes the possibility of direct dependence on Ankerberg all the more probable.
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  Jeffro

  Hmmm... him...

  Three years ago I commented on this forum about Stephen Lett:

  I had the displeasure of hearing that guy at an international convention a few years back reading a particularly nauseating scripted talk - "Beware the voice of strangers" - the one where he tells the little kiddies that their school friends are all liars who don't really love them and have a goal of ruining their spirituality. And he sounds like a demented Teddy Ruxpin.
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  Leolaia

  Here are some other versions of the illustration.

  "Now how long is eternity? Take a solid granite block one hundred miles long, one hundred miles wide, and one hundred miles high. Now encase it in a huge dome, so it isn't affected by weather. Take a parakeet to that dome, open the door, and let the parakeet in to sharpen its beak on the granite block for ten seconds. After ten seconds, take the bird and leave. Wait one thousand years, then let the little bird sharpen its beak for ten seconds, and then depart. Keep doing that at one-thousand-year intervals. When that parakeet has finally worn that block down to nothing, one moment will have passed in eternity" (Greg Speck, Living For Jesus Beyond the Spiritual High, 2008, pp. 141-142).

  This version has a parakeet but an overall different scenario (eroding down a granite block). Speck's version has been around at least since 1997.

  Another version is similar to Lett's illustration, specifying the Grand Canyon as the destination of the sand, but it doesn't have a parakeet or any bird as the agent of the sand deposition:

  "Try to wrap your mind around living for eternity. Actually that's physically impossible to do. So try to wrap your mind around living for a trillion years (which is still not even an expressible fraction of eternity). In an eternity, for example, you could fill the grand canyon with sand, piece by piece, traveling back and forth on foot to Florida or Maine for that matter. And you could do this a billion times. Granted, in paradise, you wouldn't have to do such a thing but the point is it would be an excruciatingly long period of time that simply never ends. It might be cool for a thousand years or so but I think it would turn into an absolute hell!"
  
  http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110328233654AA7lkEy (Mar 27, 2011)

  In some respects, this is closer to Lett's version than the Ankerberg illustration.
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  Jeffro

  "When that parakeet has finally worn that block down to nothing, one moment will have passed in eternity" (Greg Speck, Living For Jesus Beyond the Spiritual High, 2008, pp. 141-142).

  This is a sorites paradox. A parakeet would no longer attempt to use the block at some point before it approached 'nothing' when it becomes impractical to do so.
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  Bubblegum Apotheosis

  Does Brother Lett subscribe to the Chinese philosophy of intellectual property and plagarism?