kaik - "Russell did not speculate, he believed his own shit."
As I've said before, that's a very easy habit to fall into when you surround yourself with people who are never allowed to disagree with you.
What were the calculations used to arrive at the 1874 date of Christ's return?
by Zoos 50 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Vidiot
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Zoos
Thanks again. A lot of great information here.
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kaik
Vidiot, you are correct on this one. Russell was probably never seriously challenged intellectually with his beliefs, because he continued to spew a lot of nonsense for his time which could be verified by theology, history, archology, and scholary research. He alone admitted at the court that he did not know Greek, so he was self studied preacher who was inventing stuff as he continued to write. His writting has many logical gaps, but this did not hinder him to be the most successful preacher/charlatan of his times. He believed that Portugal and Austria-Hungary were one of the horns of the beast and the abbyss was a period of imprisonment of Pope Pious VI by Napoleon. Russell borrowed some shit from 7DA, who held these views. He was hardly original.
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Apognophos
I think it would have been almost impossible to challenge Russell's ideas because who could keep up with everything he was writing? I imagine that any loyal readers were just hanging on for dear life trying to keep up with all the claims he was verbosely making in his Studies volumes, the magazines, etc. I haven't read a lot of his writing, but it seems like Russell's ideas were constantly mutating. So before you could challenge his writing in any large-scale way, you would first need to assemble it into a coherent worldview (as of a certain point in time), and at that point you'd still need to find a way to test it against reality.
And after all, who could really say if Portugal was one of the horns or not? There was no basis for saying it was incorrect except to say that your own common sense found it absurd, or that you didn't personally believe that Revelation had anything to do with the 16th-20th centuries. The only way you could disprove him is if he made a prediction, or his work made an implicit prediction, which did not come true. The last that Russell knew, his 1914 prediction may have at least partly failed, but he still expected to see the end of the world before the Great War was over -- and then he died in 1916.
The same issue is probably the case with Rutherford's "colorful book" period. There were so many claims being made, with multiple books published per year, that I wonder if anyone ever bothered to assemble them together and try to debunk them (not that I think it's worth the time). All you can do is kind of back away from the details and try to look for something to test, or question the overall dispensationalist approach to scripture, but it's not really possible to challenge a myriad of little subjective interpretations. Likewise, it seems that he may have expected the end of the world to come before World War II ended, but he died first in 1942.
I think it's easier now to debunk the teachings because, despite some claims on the forum that the religion is changing rapidly, the teachings have been fairly locked down for a while now and most of the literature is devoted to repeating the same doctrine over and over. Also, we have the advantage of over a century having passed since Russell started writing, which allows us to see a collection of wrong predictions that the Society has made. If I had lived back in Russell's time, I don't know if I would have been frightened by his craziness or impressed by his Bible interpretations, but things are much clearer now.
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AndDontCallMeShirley
The only way you could disprove him is if he made a prediction, or his work made an implicit prediction, which did not come true.
And this is the precise point that destroys any self-proclaimed prophet everytime.
Only in retrospect do alleged Bible "prophecies" get fulfilled. This is the way WT and similar non-prophet religions work: they look at world events, then make them fit (no matter how tortured the method) this-or-that prophecy, then declare themselves so insightful because they saw it coming the whole time.
The ones who do predict specific dates (Harold Camping, et al) end up with egg on their face, but at least they had the courage to be specific (though foolish). WT tried it with 1914, 1925 and 1975 and failed miserably, although they worked within a year timeframe rather than a day, date and year.
If WT was a true spokeman for god (a prophet) as they claim, they'd put specific dates and events out there and they'd come true everytime.
If I had lived back in Russell's time, I don't know if I would have been frightened by his craziness or impressed by his Bible interpretations, but things are much clearer now.
Mt. 24:36 should settle that issue ahead of time.
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Apognophos
Yes, true, Matt. 24:36 should have been sufficient to show that anyone claiming the end was near would have to be wrong. Plus the scripture about not going after those who say 'the time is at hand'.
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AndDontCallMeShirley
not going after those who say 'the time is at hand'.
Which should have spelled the demise of CT Russell and WT after 1914 came and went. But, there's one born every minute...
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kaik
Russell put Portugal for reason because it was a part of Roman empire. But since the 1755 earthquake, Portugal cased to be any significant European power and remained a such until this day. In the time of Russell writting, there were other European nations much powerfull and wealthier than Portugal that did not make the to the horns. Somewhere I read explanation on Austria-Hungary that both were part of Roman empire in the past (Noricum & Pannonia) and Vienna was a last capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Two years after Russell's death, Austria-Hungary, which was until 1918 second largest empire in Europe in land and third most populous after Russia and Germany, disintegrated and disappeared in history...
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Violia
well it was hard in chrome too to post video. my chrome does not allow copy and paste and after a search i see I am not the only one with this issue. So it tells you to use key board short cuts. ctrlc for copy and ctrlv for paste. I was not sure I was highlighting it but just ran my cursor over it and found the grayed out link and clicked it and a box opened and pasted the url into the top box. The video showed up as a link when I first did it but after i hit submit, it shows as a video. Hope it works. wow. that was hard.
I am so sorry, in my excitment to post my christmas video i posted it in the wrong thread. Maybe a mod could move it. I am sorry.