Dr Alton Williams is at Watchtower.org

by VM44 21 Replies latest jw friends

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  VM44

  Dr Alton William's story as told in the Awake! earlier this year (January 2004) is now up on the Watchtower's website.

  http://www.watchtower.org/library/g/2004/1/22a/article_01.htm

  It looks pretty good. The Watchtower is really making use of his story as they link to it right from their main page.

  It is strange that Dr William's will not answer any email sent to him concerning his published Awake! story.

  I know that his story was published in some discussion groups, all the posters in the group who tried to contact Dr. Williams reported that he did not respond to any of their emails.

  --VM44
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  Bubbamar

  Wow! Mind Control is amazing!!

  You can see in his story that he was in the last year of a doctoral program = extreme stress = vulnerability = prime candidate for cult indoctrination.

  It's hard to believe he couldn't figure out the 1914 flaw. Glad he's not a nuclear physicist!!
• 

  VM44

  Do you think the Watchtower is using Alton's Ph.D degree to promote the religion?

  This despite the disdain they have often shown towards "higher education"?
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  JT

  of course they are - using his education - problem is he got his degree BEFORE BECOMING A JW- LIKE MOST degreed jw - they attain them prior or right at the graduation time

  it is like he grew up a jw kid and family and friends encouraged him to pursue his passion in this field-

  i have rarely met jw who grew up and went to college and were held in high esteem- only in the last few years has wt somewhat soften up and then again not really - more like double messages, you can go, but if you really loved god you would pioneer type messages
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  blondie

  VM, it reminds me of the story about the Greek professor, Nicholas Kip, who's life story was in the 3/22/87 Awake "How Knowing Greek Led Me To God." I understand he is no longer a JW. I do know he is on his second wife. I

  g87 3/22 p. 13 How Knowing Greek Led Me to Know God ***

  From Phillips Academy I went on to college, to Princeton. In my senior year I decided I wanted to teach, and after graduating, I did start at an Episcopal boys? school, St. Paul?s, in New Hampshire. This was consistent with my background. Growing up, I was a longtime choirboy at the local Episcopal Church. In my area the respectable people were either Unitarian or Episcopalian. So I?d been steeped in the very High Church Episcopalianism but exposed to very little Biblical or spiritual understanding. The Bible was swallowed up in church formalism. Now at St. Paul?s I was immersed in it once again. Everybody?faculty and students?had to go to chapel every weekday and twice on Sunday.

  I taught Latin and Greek there for four years. After my first year I got married to a young lady named Suzanne. The next three summers I studied for and got my master?s degree in Latin and Greek. While considering going for my doctoral degree, I received a letter from my old Greek mentor at Phillips Academy, Dr. Chase. "I?ve just had an opening in Andover," he wrote. "I know you want to go to graduate school. But would you please come down and talk to us?" I did, and wound up teaching Greek there. I?ve taught there ever since.

  Incidentally, most theologians that I?ve met are not strong in Greek. The quality of Greek scholarship in the Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures, however, is very good. It?s the kind of thing that a person who really wants to work with the Greek, even though not knowing much Greek, can do a lot with. I feel it?s one of the greatly underappreciated jewels of the Watch Tower Society?s publications.

  http://www.andover.edu/

  http://www.andover.edu/publications/1999fall_bulletin/cominghometoteach/cominghometoteach8.htm
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  JT

  corr

  it is "NOT' like he grew up a jw kid and family and friends encouraged him to pursue his passion in this field-
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  Balsam

  I think the point is that no outside bible scholar would ever agree with him that the JW translation of the NT is good. He is probably just a nut.

  Now if I saw lots of bible scholars saying that the NWT was an excellent translation that would mean something. One man who claims to have a Phd. means very little endorsing the NWT.

  Ruth
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  VM44

  The article is also annoying as it is written in the first person, but it is VERY obvious that Dr Williams did not write the article himself (or else whatever he wrote was heavily edited by some WT writer)

  All the personal stories published in the Watchtower and Awake! have the same style, as if they were all written by the same individual!

  --VM44
• 

  AlmostAtheist

  I liked the fact that he was going to find "mathmatical inconsistencies" with the 1914 prophecy. There aren't any, are there? I mean, you take 607 BCE, which is most certainly when [whatever happened, happened {Babylon fell? Jerusalem?}] and add 2520 years to it and Bing! 1914. Did he think he was going to show them their math was wrong?

  My father-in-law would read this and be so impressed. "See? This Nuclear Scientist very smart and he tried to prove 1914 wrong. He couldn't do it. Couldn't be done."

  Of course, if you start with the "wrong" year, your mileage may vary...
• 

  hillary_step

  In my years of doing scientific research, I have never encountered a conflict between a proved scientific fact and a teaching of the Bible. Often, seeming conflicts are caused by a lack of knowledge?either of a scientific teaching or of what the Bible really says.

  The reason he did not encounter a proved scientific fact that contradicted the Bible is because he did not want to find it. Anybody who has been a Jehovah's Witness well knows the intellectual acrobatics one must perform in order to bend scientific facts to fit the WTS model - we have all done it at some stage. A small example : scientific fact proves the Bible to be incorrect in its chronology dating mankinds appearance on this planet to around 6000 years ago. Dendochronology alone disproves it.

  Another small example : the hunter predator instinct in animals exists throughout nature from its most primitive to its most complex forms. Without it no life would exist on this planet as all life needs to feed on other forms of life to survive. No amount of tales about lions eating straw in the zoos during World War II will make this scientific fact go away.

  Recall how the psuedo-scientists in the National Socialist years convinced the world that Poles were lower on the evolutionary scale than Germans and that the Arayan race came to planet earth via an Arayan man frozen in a block of ice who procreated and gave birth to the Arayan strain. Even scientists can be drawn into cultist thinking when they ignore science.

  Best regards - HS