james_woods

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Posts by james_woods

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  59

  Christians - Do you believe the flood occurred?

  by AlmostAtheist in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  when i was a bible believer, i accepted the flood.

  the frozen mammoths and seashells on mountaintops were "evidence", but the only needed proof was simply that the bible said so.

  as a christian, do you believe the flood story?.

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  james_woods

  So, if all the ice melted and all the water vapor presently up there fell as condensate, it would cover the top of Mt Ararat?
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  17

  WAS JESUS BORN 1/2 BC?

  by badboy in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  .

  jesus was baptized in the 15th year of tiberius's reign(ad 29) when he was about 30.. that means he was born about 1/2 bc!.

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  james_woods

  Explain about the 1307, etc...OK - here maybe I should just paraphrase briefly from the AEONS chapter on the subject:

  1. Ussher becomes obsessive about finding the date of human creation (ADAM). It was approximately 1620 or so.

  2. Ussher finds a literary agent in London named Thomas Davies. He commissions him to find the best existing old testament manuscripts in their original languages.

  3. In 1624 Davies finds for Ussher a partial OT (just the 5 books of Moses) in Samaritan. The following year, he finds another version - this time in Chaldean. He eventually also obtains a Greek and Hebrew version as well.

  4. Ussher now faces two problems:

  a> The chronology of Genesis for the time from creation to the flood is "floating" - i.e. there is no way to pin it to a modern calender (i.e. to the year AD 1) without finding something in secular history which can lock into a matching dated event.

  b> The four biblical manuscripts had different time measurement schemes and dates for the time from the creation to the flood - the Samaritan worked out to 1307 calender years, the Hebrew and Chaldean to 1656 years, and the Greek to 2242. Ussher took the 1656 mainly because there were two references to this number.

  5. Now Ussher works on the floating chronology problem for 24!! years: Finally he makes a discovery in the 2 Kings 25 verse 7:

  "and it came to pass in the seven and thirtieth year of the captivity of Jehoiachin king of Juday, in the twelfth month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, that Evil-merodach king of Babylon in the year he began to reign..."

  This was enough to link the OT chronology to the kings of Babylon: 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy linked Nebuchadnezzar to Greek history. The reasoning was that Evil-merodach must have started to reign when Nebuchadnezzar died. Now he could hook up the existing Julian calender to death of Nebuchadnezzar and make it 562 BC. Now he could add up all the prophets and kings, etc. and come up with the famous date 4004 BC for creation itself.

  And, as I was posting before, I am amazed at the honest intellectual effort this guy Ussher put into this work - way more than the stuff that Russel and later the WT dreamed up (based a lot on Ussher and others). Still, though a real look at how this date came about shows how fuzzy this kind of chronology really is - we don't really even know the date of Jesus birth - let alone exact numbers for all the rest of this string of chronology. (I.E. all the variance in the time creation>>flood). Real historians know this and don't insist on silly arbitrary dates.

  But now poor old Ussher has a lapse of reasoning, spending the last of his time on earth speculating up the month, day, and even hour of the exact day one of creation - 6 pm Saturday 22 October 4004 BC. This last (and maybe some of the first part) was all a figment of imagination.

  James
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  59

  Christians - Do you believe the flood occurred?

  by AlmostAtheist in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  when i was a bible believer, i accepted the flood.

  the frozen mammoths and seashells on mountaintops were "evidence", but the only needed proof was simply that the bible said so.

  as a christian, do you believe the flood story?.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  james_woods

  Well, for the global diehards, I still have a few simple questions that I cannot personally get past -

  What happened to all that water? It cannot just evaporate into space---its got to be still here in some form or another.

  What happened to all the PLANTS? Most of them will not survive being inundated. Even if Noah saved plant samples as well as animals, how did the other CONTINENTS get repopulated with their unique species. And don't tell me continental drift had them all as one landmass. That is cheating if you think this happened within the past 6000 years.

  Also, did you ever consider how HARD it would have to rain to accomplish this? 10" of rain in an hour is a pretty good downpour...what does that add up to over 40 days?

  For me, it is easier to keep some faith or respect for the OT if I let go of some of the church hardline stuff and just take the moral lessons given. Just like the literal creative days - and isn't 7000 year creative days as ridiculously out of touch with reality as 24 hours? Remember, the Pope was ready to kill Gallileo for saying the earth goes around the sun...
• 
  59

  Christians - Do you believe the flood occurred?

  by AlmostAtheist in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  when i was a bible believer, i accepted the flood.

  the frozen mammoths and seashells on mountaintops were "evidence", but the only needed proof was simply that the bible said so.

  as a christian, do you believe the flood story?.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  james_woods

  Some observations:

  If it really covered up everything (even the highest mountains), then where did all that water come from and subsequently go?

  How did any of the normal salt water sea creatures survive it? - that much rain must have really screwed up the chemical balance of normal ocean water...I leave it to those who have tried to run a salt water aquarium to ponder this further.

  How did Noah collect all the marsupials and then manage to get them back to Australia - (and ONLY Australia...)?

  And all this aside from the obvious - could this few people really build that big a seaworthy boat with not much more than flint knives?

  And catch all those animals in that short a time without getting eaten in the process?

  And as long as I am on this rant; I ALWAYS HATED the WT depiction of the Ark as a sort of coffin-shaped box. At least the romantic religionists painted it as sort of a good-looking ship...

  So, I put it just about up there with the trojan horse, jason and the argonauts, and captain Nemo and the Nautilus. Great literature and maybe good moral tales; but too many fantastic details to take literally.
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  17

  WAS JESUS BORN 1/2 BC?

  by badboy in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  .

  jesus was baptized in the 15th year of tiberius's reign(ad 29) when he was about 30.. that means he was born about 1/2 bc!.

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  james_woods

  This is fascinating stuff for me as well...I have a book by Martin Gorst "AEONS - the search for the beginning of time". He goes into detail of the effort by James Ussher (protestant Irish Bishop) who was an early proponent of 4B.C. Another enthusiast for an early ( earlier than 1 or 2 B.C.) was the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler. Also Scaliger, inventor of the Julian calender.

  It seems scholor Josephus put down an account of the last days of King Herod indicating that the year Herod died he put to death a dissident named Mathias and on that very night there was a spring lunar eclipse.

  Ussher got help scanning the astronomical tables, finding:

  * no eclipse at all in 3 b.c, the only eclipse in 2 b.c. was in summer, January eclipse in 1 b.c., but the only spring eclipse was 13 March 4 b.c.

  So, if you take >0 but <2 as Jesus age at Herod's death, 4-6 b.c. sounds fairly reasonable (provided Josephus and those tables were right...)

  BTW; this Ussher went back in time from there and cooked up the notion that human time began on precisely 6PM in the evening of Saturday 22 October 4004 B.C. He had to decide between THREE Old Testament fairly early manuscripts - a Samaritan, a Hebrew, and a Greek. The age of the ancients in these texts from Genesis added up 1,307 - 1,656 - or 2,242 respectively, so we can suppose that he had to use some "editorial judgement"! He chose the Hebrew text eventually. This was done about 1650 a.d.

  I got two practical points from all this compared to WT chronology:

  * This kind of thing is so uncertain that about all you can point to factually is the astronomical data.

  * Ussher, by all accounts, was at least doing honest research and made a great effort not to use bad translations. Yet, his certainty about the date certainly looks silly now in a.d. 2006!

  James
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  35

  Speaking in tongues

  by Stewart75 in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  there's something which has crossed my mind too often, after doing some research, meeting people myself- i have become more convinced that speaking in tongues was mis interpretered wrongly by the pentecostals.

  i would be interested to hear jw's view of speaking in tongues and why jehovah witness classify them as one of the christodom.

  which of their any of their customs/traditions which bible doesnt support, i am just trying to make myself aware, with help if possible.. clarification would be much appreciated

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  james_woods

  Seriously, I think I remember some CO saying that only the original apostles could both do the miracles and also pass them on...so when they died out and all those they directly passed it on to also died, then it was gone forever. It is possible that some other churches that reject tongues also hold with a similar tradition.

  Of course, I guess maybe you could still try to BUY the gifts in 1st C.B.C. like Simon Magus?
• 
  35

  Speaking in tongues

  by Stewart75 in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  there's something which has crossed my mind too often, after doing some research, meeting people myself- i have become more convinced that speaking in tongues was mis interpretered wrongly by the pentecostals.

  i would be interested to hear jw's view of speaking in tongues and why jehovah witness classify them as one of the christodom.

  which of their any of their customs/traditions which bible doesnt support, i am just trying to make myself aware, with help if possible.. clarification would be much appreciated

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  james_woods

  I was watching the Rev. Robert Tilton a few years back for the amusement value of watching him go into tongues.

  I swear that I actually heard him say "klaatu barata nicto" just like in The Day the Earth Stood Still!
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  21

  Jehovah, The Imposter God

  by THE SHOOTIST in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  what was jehovah thinking when he put that tree in the middle of the garden and the told adam and eve not to eat of its fruit?

  the real all-knowing god would never have done such a thing.

  didn't he know that making the tree and the fruit would absolutely ruin this perfect man and woman?

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  james_woods

  Perhaps this is the story of "ourselves (humanity) " rather than the secrets of the universe...

  Perhaps it is not such an easy thing to accept that we have self awareness...

  I.E. the power to choose between GOOD and EVIL...

  Maybe that is why we were left to work it out for ourselves; just with a little help from above...(sun, moon, stars, etc)

  BUT NOT SO MUCH THAT WE DO NOT HAVE TO RESEARCH AND THINK!!!
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  402

  IT HAS BEGUN "BIG" NEWS ON AP NEWS WIRE

  by DannyHaszard in

  1. watchtower
  2. medical

  religion today

  monterey county herald, ca - 2 minutes ago .

  new york - jehovah's witnesses are renowned for teaching that jesus is not god and that the world as we know it will soon end.

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  james_woods

  If you think about it, once the JWs start the hushed gossip about this, there will be very few who can resist sneaking a peek at a newspaper. The paper is not so "apostate" as going on the internet...Wonder when it will hit cable news channels?
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  25

  Quick Way To Shoo Away JWs

  by Bstndance in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  so last weekend i'm heading out of my apartment for a lunch date.

  as i am walking down the sidewalk to my car, two men in suits with bookbags walking towards me try to start a conversation by saying "excuse me" with big smiles.

  i just walked by them and said "i'm an apostate".

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  james_woods

  My new wife (after the JW ex) is Vietnamese. About 6 months ago on a Sat. morning a young pretty Viet girl and and older Viet man came to the door. I did not think anything about it, the girl just asked if anyone here spoke Vietnamese. I thought they were probably just some of Mai's friends from the Vietnamese community in Dallas. So I get her and the old man starts talking...then pretty soon I see the girl pull out a Watchtower! I stepped in front of Mai and made the anti-vampire cross with the two index fingers; turned and said to Mai in English; QUI|CK - GET BACK - THEY ARE FALSE PROPHETS - FALSE PROPHETS, DO YOU HEAR ME!!! They retreat in horror and drive off in a panic.

  Now, normally I try to talk to them reasonably if they identify themselves properly. However, this ticked me off. They were not going door to door; they had pulled directly up to my door in their car. I think they were going through the phone book for Vietnamese sounding names (our childrens phone is listed "Tran") and trying to take advantage of non-english speaking immigrants. They were probably looking to get to my innocent step kids.