Posts by AlanF

12

C-14 MADE SIMPLE

by Amazing in

jw
friends

c-14 made simple .

i am reading with amazement the comments about c-14 dating.

thankfully, larc brought my older posts on this back to the top.

Ah, I see you've returned for more punishment. When you signed off H2O a few months ago, I told you that you'd be back. Score one for Alan's predictive ability. Of course, your ability remains at -100.

As for a global flood, there is zero evidence in favor of one, and gigantic amounts of evidence against one. We have thoroughly documented proof of what massive, local floods do, from the geology of areas such as the "Channeled Scablands" of eastern Washington. If a relatively tiny cataclysm like the "Missoula floods" 13-15,000 years ago, which involved only a volume of water equal to Lake Ontario, could create such massive local devastation, then a far bigger global flood would of necessity create far more devastation over virtually the entire surface of the earth. The fact that we do not find such devastation is absolute proof that no such worldwide cataclysm occurred.

As for the fanciful "canopy theory", note that the Society stole that from the Young-Earth Creationists back around 1965, not long after the now-infamous YECs Henry Morris and John Whitcomb published their book The Genesis Flood in 1961, which went on to spark the modern YEC movement and the ICR (Institute for Creation Research) and its derivatives. Of course, Morris and Whitcomb got their ideas from the Seventh-Day Adventists via the writings of their most prolific and crackpot author, George McReady Price, who published many crackpot books from about 1900 to 1945. In jumping on the YEC bandwagon, the Society dumped its traditional teachings about the Flood, which were essentially those of the crackpot author Isaac Newton Vail, who started his own nutty movement with his 1874 publication (the year Christ returned ;-) ) of "The Earth's Annular System". This theory appeared prominently in Watchtower books such as the 1943 book The Truth Shall Make You Free and the 1927 book Creation.

Any way you look at it, Bobby, the Society is teaching what amounts to SDA and YEC ideas on the Flood.

Interestingly, the YECs did some studies on the "canopy theory" and concluded that physically, the earth's atmosphere could at most support a layer of water vapor amounting to the equivalent of a few inches. That's because of things like the greenhouse effect (the earth would heat up to intolerable levels with more than the equivalent of a few inches of water) and the fact that a vapor layer would be inherently unstable (i.e., because water vapor is lighter than air, it could not remain on top of the atmosphere but would quickly mix with it). So these days, the YECs are saying that the "vapor canopy", if any, contained so little water that it would have had negligible effect on Noah's Flood. For obvious reasons the Society is avoiding all mention of "evidence for the Flood" these days.

Another problem is that the Bible itself doesn't say a thing about a "canopy". That notion is entirely a product of the imagination of YECs and JW "science" writers. True, Genesis speaks about an "expanse", but whatever this "expanse" was, it was between the waters above and the waters below. Psalm 145 teaches that the clouds in the Psalmist's day were above the expanse, which simply shows that Genesis was calling whatever water is in the clouds "the waters above the expanse".

The Society teaches another bit of nonsense about this "expanse" -- that Genesis gives a picture of something expanded vertically, so that the "expanse" is actually the atmosphere. Yet many other scriptures disprove this notion. The "expanse", in many Bible passages, is clearly expanded horizontally not vertically, and so it simply refers to the horizontally spread out appearance of the blue sky as seen by someone standing on the ground, i.e., it's a metaphor for "the sky". Job gives a nice word picture of this, referring to the sky being "beaten out like a hard metal mirror". The very Hebrew word for "expanse", "raquia", essentially refers to metal that is beaten out thin so as to spread out over a wide area.

Really, Bobby, you're so far behind in the sciences that it's astounding. You haven't even managed to keep up with the Society's teachings. You don't even know that, for all practical purposes, they no longer have anything to say, except to repeat some old, thoroughly disproven ideas that they stole from the SDA's and YECS. What a sad commentary on you and your Fearless Leaders.

AlanF

28

What about the scriptural obligation to preach?

by lookingnow22 in

jw
friends

i've always been taught that each disciple of christ has a scriptural obligation to preach, and to do so in imitation of jesus and his disciples.

they did this by house to house, in synagogues, and in the marketplaces.

this is one thing that has always kept me close to jehovah's witnesses.

AlanF

To lookingnow22:

In addition to some fine points made above, consider this: If Jesus wanted his followers to preach, he must have wanted them to preach truth. JWs preach a mixture of truth and falsehood, but the latter dominates their message, so of what value is it?

Why can I truthfully say that JWs preach falsehood? Because their basic message is "put faith in our Governing Body as Jehovah's spokesman". This message is based on their demonstrably false "Bible chronology" which has Christ returning invisibly to the earth in 1914, being put on an invisible throne then, and appointing Rutherford and his cronies "over all his earthly belongings" in 1919. Since there is no evidence for the latter, and a great deal of evidence that disproves their claim that their leaders comprise a divinely appointed "faithful slave", their basic message is false. Therefore the preaching that JWs do is worse than valueless -- it is anti-christian.

AlanF

12

C-14 MADE SIMPLE

by Amazing in

jw
friends

c-14 made simple .

i am reading with amazement the comments about c-14 dating.

thankfully, larc brought my older posts on this back to the top.

AlanF

To lookingnow22:

Your point is well taken.

The quote you cited shows another form of deception by the Society: knocking down straw men. They mention that in the late 1800s, "some might still have doubted whether Isaiah chapter 53 had been written centuries before Jesus' birth." Who "some" is, is not specified. However, I don't know of anyone back then who wrote about any claims that Isaiah might have been written after Jesus' birth. Thus, the Society's statement is a mere straw man designed to knock down an argument that no one had made. A valid point would have been to say that various Bible critics doubted whether Isaiah was written as far back as the 8th century B.C.E., and that they dated its writing to at least as late as the 6th century B.C.E. But then the Society's writer would have had no point at all, since the Dead Sea scrolls are all at least 400 years later than that.

Having set up his straw man, the Society's writer proceeds mightily to knock it down: "However, discoveries since then have essentially removed any basis for doubt." Big deal -- there was never much doubt from any quarter that Isaiah had been written at least a couple of centuries before Jesus' birth.

This deceptive bit of writing also illustrates another method by which the Society often deceives readers into thinking it has proved some point: deliberate use of fuzzy language to confuse issues. The average JW who reads the Creator book is already convinced that Isaiah was written "centuries before Jesus' birth". How many centuries? More than seven. But by remaining fuzzy, and relying on the reader not to notice that the 'evidence' the writer cites is off by about 600 years, the writer deceives naive readers into thinking that the evidence actually supports the Society's dating of Isaiah.

This kind of deliberate deception by use of fuzzy, ambiguous language is well illustrated by how the Society has dealt in the last couple of decades with the question of how long the creative days of Genesis were. Until about 1985, they consistently taught that the days were 7,000 years long. In the 1985 Creation book they did not mention this number, but spoke of the days as being "millennia long". The last mention I can find of the 7,000 years is in a 1987 Watchtower, and all later references to the lengths of the days is to "millennia". Obviously, "millennia" can mean "7,000" or seven million or several billion. It appears to me that whoever is writing these books doesn't want to put in anything that can be overtly challenged, like a claim that life on earth began a mere 20,000 years ago, and yet doesn't want to upset the many JWs who have long believed, and still believe, that the 7,000 year per day notion is still taught. Thus the Society, by being deliberately ambiguous, deceives various readers into thinking that it supports their personal favorite notion of the length of the creative days.

It is astounding that so many JWs are unable to see through this sort of transparent subterfuge. But it is a measure of the lack of critical thinking skills of the average Jehovah's Witness.

AlanF

19

rutherford

by jurs in

jw
friends

ever since i started questioning wether the truth is really the truth.

i'm apalled at how much information is out there that just shatters the organization.

one intersesting site out of many is jesus-witnesses.com (the seven points of watchtower indoctrination) anyhow i never knew that rutherford smoked cigars and was a notorious alcoholic.

AlanF

As my grandpa used to say, Rutherford was 'some piece a woik' alright.

There is good evidence that Rutherford was an adulterer. Around 1928 he and his entourage were staying at some hotel, and one morning one of the Bible Student ladies who straightened up the rooms found a lady's hairpin in Rutherford's bed. His room was adjoined by that of his mistress of the moment, another Bible Student lady who doubled as Rutherford's cook. This discovery led to the resignation of a pile of Bible Students in the area of Buffalo, New York, who formed their own group.

This story was given to me by the son of one of the Bible Students who had resigned. Jim Penton has been gathering pretty solid evidence to support this.

AlanF

20

Which is the best translation of the bible...

by TheApostleAK in

jw
friends

50 years ago respected textual critic ernest cadman colwell created an apparatus of 64 scriptures to determine which is the best new testament.

i created a chart using the same criteria...and the results will surprise you!!.

http://hector3000.future.easyspace.com/colwell.htm .

AlanF

I really have to laugh at you, dshields. All you've done is to copy stuff from one or more stock-standard Fundy-Trinitarian anti-JW pages. Big Deal. Thousands of your ilk do it.

While the JWs are royally mucked up in many ways, their NWT agrees with quite a few other Bible translations on John 8:58. The fact that you present only the stock-standard Fundy-Trinitarian anti-JW arguments shows that you have no idea what you're talking about, but are merely parroting what certain Fundy leaders have told you. And they've royally misinformed you, just as JW leaders have misinformed JWs in so many other areas.

The simple fact is that John 8:58 -- in context -- has Jesus telling the Jews that he existed before Abraham. Greek usage is that in many cases what is technically the present tense, such as "I am", is often being used as the past tense. Modern French provides an analogy. One says, "Je suis allez" ("I went"; literally, "I am gone"). No one who knows French would claim that a speaker who used that phrase was referring to the present. Similarly, biblical Greek often uses the technically present tense as a past tense, so that context must be a guide to meaning for non-native speakers of this ancient Greek. To see this for yourself, simply go to a good library and look up the information in a solid Greek concordance like Moulton-Geden.

The solidly trinitarian New Living Translation renders John 8:58 this way:

"The truth is, I existed before Abraham was even born!"

The marginal commentary on 8:58 states in part: "When he said that he existed before Abraham was born, he undeniably proclaimed his divinity."

This commentary is easily argued with, but my point here is that a solidly trinitarian translation demonstrably comes down on the side of the hated NWT here, in terms of the specific words of translation. What those words mean is a completely separate issue from what they apparently translate to. Therefore, to pretend that the standard
Fundy/Evangelical interpretation of John 8:58 is unassailably correct is to ignore a great deal of scholarship by other Christians 'not of this fold' -- which is a shame.

Many Bible translations that have no problem translating the Greek form of "I am" into the contextually sensible "I was" or "I have been" or whatever in places other than John 8:58, are inconsistent in ignoring the context of John 8:58 and going along with tradition that can be traced back to St. Augustine. Thus these translations implicitly acknowledge that the literal Greek form "I am" also can mean "I was" and "I have been" and so on. But they don't inform the ignorant among their readers, and so we find that people like you, who are clearly completely ignorant of the original autographs, just go along with your leaders, much like JWs just go along with their leaders, since that's much easier than doing your own research and potentially bucking the system.

AlanF

29

just for fun

by peaceloveharmony in

jw
friends

hey everyone, here is a fun little test..... : http://www.mystcweb.net/misc/smart.htm.

enjoy .

love.

AlanF

Got 10/11. However, I think that the "legal in California" question is wrong. Anything not explicitly declared by a lawmaking body illegal is legal. No legislature in its right mind would make a law that a dead man had to follow. Assuming the California legislature is in its right mind -- which I'm not advocating -- it can't be illegal for a dead man to do anything at all.

AlanF

20

BigRocksFirst

by DevilsAdvocate_DA in

jw
friends

one day, an expert in time management was speaking to a group of business students and, to drive home a point, used a illustration those students will never forget.. as he stood in front of the group of high-powered overachievers he said,"okay,.

time for a quiz.

" and he pulled out a one-gallon, wide-mouth mason jar and set it on the table in fornt of him.. he also produced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one at a time, into the jar.

AlanF

To DevilsAdvocate:

You certainly struck a sour chord with some people with your post.

You said that the point of your original post was that "not people or
organization should be the big rocks in our lives, but Jehvoah God,
Jesus Christ and the holy spirit". All well and good in principle,
but there are several practical problems with this view.

For one thing, principle and practice within the Witnesses are often
inconsistent. Your stated "rocks" principle is not generally followed
by the average JW, although Brother Average Jaydub will tell everyone,
and perhaps even be convinced in his own mind, that he is following
God first, and the JW organization second. In order to first follow
God rather than humans, you must be convinced that you are fully able
to obey God directly, without human intermediary. If you let a human
intermediary tell you what God is supposed to be saying, then the
intermediary in effect becomes your God, because whether the
intermediary is right or wrong, you're obeying him first and God
second. This is exactly what JW leaders teach the JW community is
proper in God's sight, because they teach that God has appointed them
to this very position, i.e., God commands that to get his approval,
all proper Christians must obey his appointed representatives on earth
today. In other words, JW leaders teach that it is actually wrong for
you to exercise your own thinking ability to the extent of believing
or practicing something that goes against what JW leaders believe or
practice. Really, these men have inserted themselves between God and
humans. The practice of disfellowshipping people who reject this
Watchtower teaching proves my point.

I have no doubt that if Jesus returned along with 'celestial signs' as
described in Matthew 24 and elsewhere in the NT, most JWs would not
believe it until the Society published a Watchtower article about
it. Do you not agree?

I have no doubt that if the Society decided to teach that "new scrolls"
had been opened, per Revelation, which said that Jehovah had gone off
to new things and that from now on Jesus was to be worshiped and prayed
to, the majority of JWs would nod dreamily and comply.

Why do I make such claims? Because the Society has already convinced
JWs to do things that they would condemn as horrendously unchristian
in others. If I went around to your friends and family, and convinced
them that they should avoid you, completely shun you, think of you as
thoroughly wicked and worthy of extermination, simply because you don't
follow my personal teachings about God, and if they followed my
teaching, you would rightly condemn me as looney, and them as idiots
for being convinced to commit such folly. Yet that is exactly what
JW leaders have convinced the JW community to do with tens of thousands
of people. Yet you probably see nothing wrong with what JW leaders do,
simply because they've introduced such wicked teaching with smooth
words. How is it that an entire community of believers can see such
wickedness in others but not in themselves?

How do I know that you go along with such unchristian practice?
Because it seems to me that you have implicitly equated leaving the
Watchtower organization with leaving God.

For another thing, before you can properly adversely judge people who
don't go along with your notion of God, Jesus and the holy spirit, you
have to prove that they exist and have real effect in peoples' lives.
It is the experience of many on this forum, including myself, that
they have no effect at all. Prayer simply does not work. If God is
"out there", he doesn't respond, and he doesn't do anything. Such people
have justifiably concluded that people who claim to get responses to
prayer are fooling themselves, since they cannot actually demonstrate
that they have received responses. It's like a JW who needs, say, to
find a certain kind of cloth to complete a set of curtains for a KH
project, and she goes to a store and happens to find just barely
enough fabric on the roll to do the job. She concludes that Jehovah
somehow orchestrated the whole process of deciding what fabric was to
be used, then made sure that the last person to buy that particular
fabric didn't buy too much, then influenced the Sister to go to that
particular store on just the right date, etc. etc. etc. Sounds pretty
silly when you lay it out like that, doesn't it? Similarly, in most
cases I've heard, where people claim that prayers were answered, the
way things worked out is indistinguishable from pure chance.

Thus, your lament that some posters have left God is hollow indeed.
As JWs, they were never with God to begin with -- partly because their
loyalty was almost certainly to a manmade organization just like it is
with most current JWs, and partly because no one can demonstrate that
there is a God to be close to in the first place.

You posed a couple of questions that amount to, "If we don't stick with
the JW organization, to what organization should we go?" There are a
number of satisfying answers. Which one you like best will depend on
any number of factors.

First consider an illustration: suppose you were dreamily wandering down
a railroad track and didn't notice a train bearing down on you. If I saw
it and wanted to save you, should I first determine some other good
track down which you could safely wander, and then, having made such
considered determination, present you with a variety of evidence urging
you to consider stepping over to an alternate track? Or should I holler,
"Get the bloody hell off that track! A train is coming!" What would you
do if you were faced with such a thing?

Then consider that when Jesus asked his disciples if they wanted to
leave him because of certain problems, they answered not "Where shall
we go?" but "To whom shall we go?" The point is that they were not
concerned about which human organization to obey, but which supernatural
spiritual leader to obey. Jehovah's Witnesses are mostly concerned about
obeying human leaders, since those leaders claim to speak for God, and
JWs believe them.

Finally consider that a truly independent thinker doesn't need to be
told every little thing to do, either with everyday living or with his
religious life. He certainly takes in information and advice from many
quarters, but in the final analysis it is he or she who makes all of
the final decisions as to what is right and what is wrong. That is
precisely what we would expect from an intelligent person. And if you
believe that God created humans, that is precisely what we would expect
him to expect from his intelligent creation. Anything else amounts to
expecting people to behave as robots, and if that's the way you think
God expects people to act, then he might as well just have created
sophisticated tape recorders to play back on command whatever they've
recorded. Of course, that's exactly what the Society expects.

So I would say that a BIG ROCK that is offered by many posters here is
very simple: the mental freedom to think and decide for oneself without
the guilt imposed by the Watchtower Society, which guilt is a result of
its command not to think for oneself but blindly to obey JW leaders.
Whether such freedom involves the concept of God or not is irrelevant,
since God is not demonstrable. Many people, including me, are quite
happy without leaning on some God.

AlanF

8

The Blood Issue

by dutyfree in

jw
friends

i have a question about the infamous blood issue, which i am sure will be very easy for some people to answer.. in the bible, niv, nwt, kj or whatever, the line, '...you should abstain from blood...' is taken literally by the witnesses and they do not take into account other scriptures whilst reading it.. what other scriptures are there in the bible to support the theory that the writer's intended meaning was not to take it literally?

so, in other words, i have argued with jws that it means to not drink blood as there were no iv needles around then to inject the blood into the veins.

but are there any other scriptures to back this up?.

AlanF

Try Deuteronomy 14:21. It explicitly allows Israelites to sell gentiles an unbled carcass for food. If one acknowledges that God would not specifically allow an Israelite to aid and abet a gentile in disobeying what various Christians say is a universal law given to Noah in Genesis 9:4 about not eating blood, then it follows that the latter cannot mean "do not eat blood at all", but "do not eat the blood of animals you kill for food". The idea is to show respect for the Creator of life by doing something ceremonially special with 'the symbol of life' -- its blood, its soul.

Thus, Genesis 9:4 only prohibits eating blood from animals killed for food. Since blood for a transfusion is outside that catogory, and Acts 15 is not derived from the Mosaic Law but from Genesis, Acts 15 cannot be used to claim that "the Bible prohibits blood transfusions".

For a detailed discussion of this and more, see www.jwbloodreview.org .

AlanF

11

For Uncle_Onion

by AlanF in

jw
friends

been away for a few days, but i noticed that you posted a number of questions about c14 dating.. i strongly recommend that you read all the material you can find concerning c14 on the talk.origins website.

so far as i know, every one of your questions has been answered there, since you're pulling them off a yec website that merely repeats standard and long-debunked yec claims.

you really need to do your own research in this area if you want to understand it, and the talk.origins site will give you far better and more detailed information that will point you in directions where you can do your own research in primary source materials than anyone i know of on our discussion board is willing to provide.

AlanF

Hey Dave, you rotten old fart! Saw your email when I got home. Glad you surfaced! We've been wondering where you were. Disneyland, was it?

I'll send you my phone number when I get home.

AlanF

3

Question for Kismet from AlanF

by AlanF in

jw
friends

i've been away for a few days, so haven't kept up with postings.. kismet, last week you complained to me in my "greenlees sources" thread that i had not taken into account certain information you had provided me in past posts/emails/whatever.

i asked you to provide some kind of pointers to that information so that i could take it into account, or for you to tell me about it again.

i saw no response from you.

AlanF

Blow me, Fred.