Not me. This is a fascinating look inside some of the Mormon rituals. My quick take-away? Pastor Russell wishes he'd thought of this stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6udew9axmdM#!
Who knew "Jehovah" got so much play with Mormons?
by SixofNine 3 Replies latest jw friends
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sabastious
Fascinating!
-Sab
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SixofNine
Crackpots and Evolved Traditions
Though all religions with supernatural doctrines believe some things that science finds to be false, not all religions are "crackpot."
The crackpot is first and foremost an individual and a crackpot religion will bears the personal idiosyncrasies of its author.
The Book of Genesis has no author at all. (Despite tradition, Moses did not write it.) It has been edited thousands of times before reaching the now-standard version. It is some of the earliest things human beings thought about that we have any sort of written record of.
The four gospels were written in the context of a developing tradition. Nothing in the gospels was written by anyone who had ever met Jesus. (That is not controversial. Jerry Falwell would have concurred.) Many people were involved in the process leading to them.
So they do not have the marks of crackpotism... of individual, insular, paranoid creation. That doesn't advance their likelihood of being true, but it does offer the smoothing a communal work gets.
Now, Joseph Smith, in the 19th century, decided that in the bible, Jehovah (Yahweh) means Jesus and God the Father is the biblical god Elohim. This was not a divine revelation, it was an error.
There is no biblical god Elohim. It is a nuanced Hebrew word meaning God or Gods. In the King James Bible the word is translated as God and is often used to refer to Jehovah (Yahweh), who there is considerable delicacy about overtly naming too much.
To say that the Earth was created by the joint efforts of Jehovah and Elohim is like saying that Ares, the Greek god of war, had two sisters—Aphrodite and Venus.
In a tradition somebody along the way says, "Venus is the Roman word for Aphrodite... it's only one sister." But an individual crackpot writing in isolation is limited to the precise specifics of his experiences and learning, and his points of simple personal ignorance become doctrine.
Most crackpots are crackpot scientists, and have the same problem. Some guys toil alone in the attic for years writing an earth0shaking new grand unified theory of Organic Chemistry, and it turns out they had the wrong atomic weight for Carbon, repeated endlessly throughout their work and making every calculation hopelessly wrong.
It happens. -
shamus100
Wacko's. But then so are JW's and their bizarre 'traditions'.