Londo111,
It was a little difficult to decide on how to reply to your post. Re-reading it, I am glad I hesitated because I probably got stalled on several of your remarks.
"Captive of a concept", which I believe is the title of one of Hassan's books, sounds like the concept you want to convey - and then we are doing something of a sidebar about how to address the matter.
You don't mind if I start this thread back up, do you?
While I had something of a short essay planned about other types of oppressive systems which I had either experienced or studied, running into four elders at a local coffee shop changed my mind. When my party dispersed I went over to ask them if they were familiar with Jeremiah 25:8-11 and its pronouncement of a 70-year period of desolation. It had been cited in a 03-03-11 ministry school handout as a "proof". I believe they knew that much about what I was talking about. Then I asked them if they were familiar with the next verse pronounced by Jeremiah about Babylon's subsequent destruction. They said no. I said that it was historically inaccurate. If the king of Babylon was not a Chaldean and Babylon was not destroyed, taking Cyrus's own archeological testimonies, why should I simply believe that Jeremiah 25:8-11 was any more accurate?
The rejoinder from the senior elder of the group was that "Well we believe in the Bible over all secular sources." My counter: The Bible did not say when Cyrus arrived in terms of year BC or when the Judeans left. No matter. Several chimed in to say that Babylon was destroyed.
I won't go into the whole discussion. But most of their arguments were of a similar nature. And when they were sure that others surrounding us could hear that they were entirely ignorant of every matter we were discussing, they beat a retreat. I guess they don't feel quite as confident as they do on their home court.
I didn't mention it at the time, but let me mention it now. Eza 8:1.
"These, with their genealogies, were the heads of families who set out from the Babylon with me in the reign of King Artaxerxes."
That would be about 458 BCE.
Recently a friend of mine passed on to me this commemorative (50th anniversary) article from the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions The discussion is about the nature of scientific work and changes in scientific theories or paradigms, to use Kuhn's larger term. In the case of the elders and the ministry school, we have a situation where a proof is offered, but it is NOT ALLOWED TO BE TESTED. This is an extreme position of orthodoxy. Probably the definition of reactionary. In the above article, where Kuhn discusses scientific revolutions, he is describing a situation where the scientific community is no longer content to remain of a Whig frame of mind: ---
Kuhn’s central claim is that a careful study of the history of science reveals that development in any scientific field happens via a series of phases. The first he christened “normal science” – business as usual, if you like. In this phase, a community of researchers who share a common intellectual framework – called a paradigm or a “disciplinary matrix” – engage in solving puzzles thrown up by discrepancies (anomalies) between what the paradigm predicts and what is revealed by observation or experiment. Most of the time, the anomalies are resolved either by incremental changes to the paradigm or by uncovering observational or experimental error. As philosopher Ian Hacking puts it in his terrific preface to the new edition of Structure: “Normal science does not aim at novelty but at clearing up the status quo. It tends to discover what it expects to discover.”
The trouble is that over longer periods unresolved anomalies accumulate and eventually get to the point where some scientists begin to question the paradigm itself. At this point, the discipline enters a period of crisis characterised by, in Kuhn’s words, “a proliferation of compelling articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals”. In the end, the crisis is resolved by a revolutionary change in world-view in which the now-deficient paradigm is replaced by a newer one. This is the paradigm shift of modern parlance and after it has happened the scientific field returns to normal science, based on the new framework. And so it goes on...
...The most intriguing idea, however, is to use Kuhn’s thinking to interpret his own achievement. In his quiet way, he brought about a conceptual revolution by triggering a shift in our understanding of science from a Whiggish paradigm to a Kuhnian one, and much of what is now done in the history and philosophy of science might be regarded as “normal” science within the new paradigm.
--- And that's where I want to let up here. It might be my imagination, but many of the proponents of "gradualism" in doctrinal debates seem to hail from England. I would hesitate to say that the approach matches all JW temperments - or the puzzles their world view confronts them with.
