To Amazing:
Glad you got partly cured. Reading that nonsense really made me laugh, too.
Yeah, you ought to dig out that old Creation book. There's page after page of extremely funny quackery. The 1985 Creation book is actually patterned after this one, and isn't much better. If you're stuck at home, please do post some gems from the mine. You'll get a lot more cleared out.
How any modern JW with half a brain in his head can read that junk and not immediately understand that a supposed "slave" who teaches it cannot possibly be termed "discreet" is, well, a good illustration of how cults work. Anyone savvy enough to understand the problem won't be in the cult; anyone stupid enough to swallow such quackery will be too stupid to notice the other quackery.
To Booby:
Point is: both you and today's JW leaders, just like Rutherford, are completely ignorant of science, and are just as good at expounding upon the Bible as you are at expounding upon science.
I have no doubt that you saw nothing funny in Rutherford's "explanation" of why airplanes and airships stay in the air, or his "explanation" of Noah's Flood. That's why you and JW leaders can produce completely nonsensical posts and articles and books about "Bible prophecy".
Another illustration of your complete ignorance is your total misinterpretation of what I've said about "preserved mammoths". Here we find both faulty interpretative mechanisms and faulty memory at work in your brain. The same faulty mechanisms result in your truly amusing and ongoing predictions of "the end" coming every year, and in your not being able to understand that false predictions make you into an amusing street-corner lunatic shouting "THE END IS COMING!"
As for what I've said about "preserved mammoths", let me try to explain in simple terms. The only mammoth remains in tar pits that I know of are some bones and nearly complete skeletons dug out of the La Brea Tar Pits near Hollywood in Los Angeles. These remains were just bones, since the flesh had long since decayed. Along with these were found tens of thousands of skeletal remains of other animals, which had accumulated over tens of thousands of years. They'd still be accumulating if the place hadn't been made into a museum and park. On display today in the museum are thousands of partial and complete skeletons of all sorts of animals, including some now extinct, such as the Dire Wolf, Sabertooth Cat, Cave Lion (which is substantially larger than the African lion), Mammoth, Mastodon, and Ground Sloth.
The remains of mammoths and other animals that still have flesh on them have been found frozen in Siberia and Alaska. These have been found in various states of preservation, from nearly completely preserved to having bare bits of flesh left. In no case can their preservation be explained by the Watchtower Society's older or newer ideas on Noah's Flood.
For example, going back to Rutherford's day and continuing until now, the Society claims that these frozen carcasses were "quick frozen" during the first stages of the Flood by extremely cold winds that accompanied the Flood. One problem is that if the Flood were deep enough to cover "all the high mountains", then cold winds couldn't get to the carcasses to freeze them in the few minutes that "quick freezing" would require. Another problem is that, even if extremely cold winds accompanied the Flood, if they could freeze the carcasses then they would also have to freeze all of the Flood waters around the carcasses, immediately turning the Flood into a giant glacier. But even the Society is smart enough to avoid talking about that problem.
This notion of "quick freezing" is completely debunked by the state of preservation of the animals themselves. Since the 1960s the Society has trotted out the example of the 1903 report of the Berezovka mammoth from Siberia. Based on the comments of the quack writer Ivan Sanderson writing in a 1961(?) Saturday Evening Post article, they claimed that the mammoth was "quick frozen" so fast that every cell in its body was perfectly preserved. But the original report given in the Smithsonian Institute journal debunks that claim. The Russian scientists who took the better part of a year to recover the mammoth reported that the internal organs were all decayed. Indeed, the stench of rotting flesh had saturated the soil around the mammoth so strongly that the men could barely stand it. The only well-preserved flesh on the beast were the muscles around the head, neck and shoulders -- consistent with the creature's having fallen into a crevice and freezing over a period of days. Another impossibility for the mammoth's being killed in a huge flood was that its front leg and shoulder bones were broken, and it was found in a position as if it tried to climb out of the hole it had fallen into. Clearly it had broken the bones upon falling into the hole, and then died while trying to get out. You can see this for yourself on or near page 202 of the 1985 Creation book.
Another good example showing the impossibility of these frozen animals all being killed by Noah's Flood are the remains of a horse that were found by some Alaskan gold miners. They were digging a tunnel through frozen muck with hot water hoses, and someone noticed a horse's foot sticking down out of the ceiling of the tunnel. Eventually they extracted all of the remains. It turned out that the horse had fallen into a mud hole in the barely-thawed ground, and its head and neck had been eaten away by predators. The rest of the body froze in the ground and eventually was buried. There is no way that predators would be wandering around eating stuck animals during such a violent cataclysm as Noah's Flood.
Another wonderful example showing the stupidity of the Society's claims are the remains of an extinct species of bison that came to be called "Blue Babe", found in Alaska around 1978. The bison had been killed by lions and largely eaten, except for the head and shoulders. That it had been killed by predators was shown by the bite marks on the head, especially on the nose, which fit the jaw spread of lions perfectly. Lions often kill large prey like the Cape Buffalo by clamping down on the muzzle and holding until the animal suffocates. That it had been killed by lions was shown by a piece of lion's molar that had broken off in the frozen flesh of the shoulder. That it was largely eaten was shown by the state of the carcass. The skin of much of the body was peeled back and laid out on the ground around the carcass. Apparently the beast had sunk to its belly and died in that position. Much of the outer body muscles were eaten, and whatever internal organs the lions could get at were gone. The head and shoulders were the less desirable parts, and they froze solid before the lions could eat them. Eventually the carcass was buried in a creeping mud flow, where it remained for some 35,000 years. Again, nothing in this scenario is consistent with or explainable by a "Noah's Flood" scenario.
Complete source references for the above material can be found on Osarsif's web page.
So, Booby, here we find you again straying into an intellectual place where you ought not. Your take on matters of science and theology are thoroughly ignorant, infantile and laughable. But please do keep expounding your ideas. They're so helpful to the cause of JW critics.
To JWD:
You're quite right. The JWs and various other Adventist-derived religions all tend to teach the same pseudo-scientific nonsense, and are heavily involved in ridiculous end-times predictions. Fundamentalists are the same, often going after such charlatans as Hal Lindsey.
Yeah, the WTS often shoots itself in the foot by describing "false prophets". Unfortunately, the numbing cult mindset prevents JWs from seeing how perfectly their leaders are described by their own writings.
AlanF
