slimboyfat

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Posts by slimboyfat

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  20

  Tried unwitnessing at LDS carts today

  by joe134cd in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  i was walking through a market today, and spotted lds cart witnessing.

  so i thought, what the hell, i’ll give him a go.

  i focused on the character of joe smith.

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  slimboyfat

  I once met a man in a Seventh-day Adventist Church who had been baptised as a Jehovah’s Witness, then a Mormon, and now is a Seventh-day Adventist. Some people seem to collect sectarian memberships like badges. Not a lot of people, but a peculiar minority do. This guy said he left the Jehovah’s Witnesses because they were anti-Semitic and he left the Mormons because all they wanted was his money. He claimed that as soon as he was baptised the Mormons asked for his credit card details while he was still wet from the baptism pool. I asked him why he thought JWs were anti-Semitic because this is something I had not come across. He claimed it was a statement in a Watchtower Study against the Jews. He did not make much sense to be honest. The funny thing was he was also critical about the Seventh-day Adventist Church when I met him (over three years ago, before the pandemic) so he may be onto his next church by now. What’s next? The Iglesia ni Cristo maybe? Or a Pentecostal group? 🤔
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  11530

  It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

  by Newly Enlightened in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  original reddit post (removed).

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  slimboyfat

  The "hotel maid" pictures you referenced were taken with Cara (pronounced "Sara") who is, at least to my knowledge, not a hotel maid. One of the rare enjoyable moments during my trip was spent with her and her friends. We met for dinner, ate some street food, had some drinks, and played some pool at the bar. All the while she was flirting with me - holding my hand, touching my leg, letting me put my arm around her. Then after walking her back to her hotel with her

  What a disgusting moron to write that to his wife. It’s hard to fathom a mind that thinks this is anything to brag about to anyone under any circumstances.
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  11

  John 5:27 and Harners thesis

  by Blotty in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  conclusion to harners thesis: https://digilander.libero.it/domingo7/h7.jpg.

  in 1973 a scholar by the name of philip b harner published an article in the journal of biblical literature that would be "revolutionary" he concluded that anarthorous predicate nouns preceeding the verb were primarily qualitative in nature.. in my view harner was correct, though he didn't agree with the "a god" rendering he also disliked the "god" rendering in john 1:1c providing an alternative which bibles like the net have paraphrased (to my knowledge).

  one he didn't cover in his thesis was john 5:27 i would say this "authoratative" why?

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  slimboyfat

  To Harner was essentially trying to provide a Trinitarian solution to John1.1c that was more credible than Colwell’s rule because it didn’t hold water.

  Have you seen the recent article on John 1.1 (apparently the author is a JW)?

  https://brill.com/downloadpdf/journals/hbth/44/2/article-p141_2.pdf
  
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  14

  Why didn't God create us to be obviously different?

  by SydBarrett in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  a silly question since i'm an atheist but one i thought of as a kid jw.

  why weren't human's created to be obviously different from animals?

  among believers there is some sort of universal hierarchy.

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  slimboyfat

  Isn’t the remarkable thing about humans just how different we are from other creatures? I know what you mean in that we are mammals and we are morphologically similar other primates and so on. But in terms of inner life, and our expression of meaning, is there any other creature that even comes close to humans?

  Who’s the scientist who likes to point out that human DNA is only 2% different from other primates, yet in the space of that difference exist Mozart, Michelangelo, and men going to the moon?

  Atheist philosopher Raymond Tallis argues strongly that humans are different from other animals in extraordinary ways. See his book Aping Mankind:

  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/16/aping-mankind-raymond-tallis-review

  To me, the uniqueness of humans is what makes me suspect that we really are in some sense “in the image of God”. As it is, we know of no other creature alive that appreciates the vastness and complexity of existence as humans do, or ponders the nature of existence, or all the other many facets of human consciousness that make us unique. Crows are very intelligent, and elephants have seemingly complex social and emotional lives, to give two examples in nature. Nevertheless humans display such range and diversely intricate social and intellectual lives, on a different scale than other animals, that seemingly set us apart from all other creatures.
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  20

  Tried unwitnessing at LDS carts today

  by joe134cd in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  i was walking through a market today, and spotted lds cart witnessing.

  so i thought, what the hell, i’ll give him a go.

  i focused on the character of joe smith.

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  slimboyfat

  Me neither. Are they copying JWs? Do they have posters on the carts, and literature to hand out?

  Pictures would be good 👍

  Searching “Mormon preaching carts” on google only produces hand carried wooden wheels and nineteenth century costumes 🤔
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  11530

  It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

  by Newly Enlightened in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  original reddit post (removed).

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  slimboyfat

  It strikes me that (as far as I know) he never talks to any of his guests about the so-called ‘defamation campaign’ and events that have brought his business down over the past year. If he was genuinely the victim of an ‘injustice’ wouldn’t he talk about it with people in livestreams and so on? Of course he would. He’d be all over it like a rash.

  The fact that he never talks about it with people on his channel indicates that he is fully aware that no reasonable person would agree with his version of events. He tried it out with Andrew Gold and failed miserably and now he’s learned his lesson. He probably could get a few of his crazier followers to come on his channel and agree with his version of events but they are so crazy they might end up saying such mental stuff that would undermine him even more.

  Come to think on it, the one person he did chat with about it on his channel was Tibor. That’s telling in itself because Tibor’s job literally depends on him agreeing with LE’s version of events. But outside of people whose job depends on agreeing with LE on the so-called ‘defamation campaign’ he knows there’s nobody, so he avoids talking about the subject. This makes me suspect he knows he’s in the wrong. A person who genuinely thought they were in the right and being victimised probably couldn’t stop themselves from talking about it. His strategic silence speaks volumes.
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  11530

  It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

  by Newly Enlightened in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  original reddit post (removed).

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  slimboyfat

  Small clip I saw he was blathering on how he doesn’t like to cover this topic because of the harrowing stories. I can think of another reason he doesn’t like to cover the topic.

  If his guests don’t know his backstory I think they were there under false pretences. If they do know, that’s their bad choice to make I suppose.
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  11530

  It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

  by Newly Enlightened in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  original reddit post (removed).

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  slimboyfat

  Any body clicking briefly on his vids for any reason remember you can avail yourself of the dislike button 👎

  I quickly buzzed through the video and he got a few donations including 27.99 dollars from Canada and 9.99 dollars for his “efforts”. Probably some others I missed. The donations appear in his livestream comments, but they are different than the later video comments. The donations we know about are the ones he chooses to highlight during the video, which may or may not be all of the donations he got during the livestream. Slim pickings compared to the glory days anyway.
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  33

  "How Long Would Jesus' Reign Be?"

  by BoogerMan in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  simple enough question for a jw to answer, because the org has told them for over 100 years that, .

  a) jesus would reign for 1000 years, and.

  b) that his reign began in 1914 when he became king.

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  slimboyfat

  BoogerMan I think you’re correct if you’re saying that the teaching about Jesus beginning his reign in 1914 but the 1000 years not starting in 1914 is confusing. At least I found it confusing as a JW.

  Nevertheless that is what they teach. So to press the point that if they did teach the 1000 years started in 1914 then the clock would be running on that time seems beside the point - because they don’t teach that.
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  16

  Did Jesus say the God of the OT is not the same God as mine??

  by Diogenesister in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  bart erhman states, in this you tube short presumably taken from the video series he has been doing with megan lewis*, that jesus said the god of the ot, the god of jeremiah, is not the (same)god as jesus.

  bart continues "jeremiah's god killed (the children) - jesus said let the children come to me.

  jesus' god said turn the other cheek" - the ot god was war-like etc (paraphrasing bart here a bit).. it's always been the thing that stopped my fully embracing the bible after leaving watchtower.

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  slimboyfat

  Yes I read Carrier’s book on Bayesian probability and history. I can’t say I was convinced. It all begins with making guesses. That’s fine, he claims, because the method works whatever starting point, but is my guess really as good as yours? His bigger book “On the Historicity of Jesus” doesn’t seem to have impressed many scholars. There’s one Australian scholar who gave it a good review. I found it a very dry read cut into small parts on diverse topics with slow and confusing progression.

  I liked his more recent book “Jesus from Outer Space” where he argues that the first Christians believed Jesus was the archangel Michael - remind you of anyone? But again, it don’t think it’s likely to become widely cited by scholars.

  I just looked it up and it’s cited by four scholars, including Christopher Hansen who wrote an article in response to mythicism. The abstract sounds like it will be an interesting read:

  In recent years a number of scholars (such as Richard Carrier and Robert Price) have published arguments in favour of a new model of the origination of Christianity from a mythological Jesus. Part of their argumentation has been to make the case for the concept of a pre-Christian Jesus who was worshiped, or a part of Judaism before Christianity ever arose. This article seeks to provide a new analysis of this topic, since there has been almost no academic literature published in response to the pre-Christian Jesus thesis in several decades. This article largely concludes that the concept, while interesting, is not convincing and would require far more substantial evidence to be considered a better alternative to historicist conceptions of early Christianity's development.

  Hansen, C. M. (2022). Re-examining the Pre-Christian Jesus. Journal of Early Christian History, 12(2), 17-40