james_woods

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Posts by james_woods

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  37

  How many people did Satan kill in the Bible?

  by Stan Conroy in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  for some reason i've been wondering about this lately.

  i've read the bible end to end many years ago, and i can't recall how many people satan personally struck down.

  i'm not talking about twisted reasonings and long term implications.

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  james_woods

  A fascinating subject...most literalist Hebrew-based religions have a real problem explaining the mystery of "Satan"...just a few random thoughts on this subject:

  * - you could make a pretty good case that "Satan" (through the snake) really told Eve the truth, while "God" lied to Adam & Eve. They didn't die "that day" from eating of the tree, but they did gain moral knowledge, as serpent said would happen. For example, Eve didn't know she was walking around naked until after they ate the apple. And then "God", off on vacation for the weekend we might guess, wonders why they made clothes...

  * - The whole Job story indeed does not paint God in any better light than Satan. This kind of stuff would not even have been allowed in Abu Ghraib...and while Satan may have had all the fun, it really happened on Jehovah's "watch", according to the myth.

  * - What was that stuff about Jesus going out in the wilderness to be "tempted by Satan"? Satan gets him up on a hill and says - I will give you all these cities, etc...!!! WTF??? For crying out loud - Jesus was God incarnate - he was heir to the whole universe! How was this tempting anybody?

  * - I personally have never been able to figure out how & why God would let Satan exist after all these centuries! The Hebrew God sure didn't hesitate to destroy whole cities on a whim, not to mention all the humans except Noah & Family once. But did he get the bad angels or their leader Satan at the point of the flood (after all, they were the perpetrators in that instance...)? NAAAH - just left them around to cause more trouble for another 4000 years or so, including maneuvering the killing of his "only begotten son" a couple thousand years later...

  Caution - careful reasoning on such items as the above may prove hazardous to simplistic religious dogma...

  James
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  124

  thirdwitness and other pseudo-scholars: Let's discuss the Hillah Stele

  by AuldSoul in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  thirdwitness and other pseudo-scholars, .

  firstly, i offer this disclaimer: i am not a scholar.

  but i can add and subtract.

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  james_woods

  I don't see the "celebrated scholors" coming out on the field of honor yet, AuldSaul -

  But, what a fascinating subject! I am doing some reading on this myself -

  http://www.hiddenmysteries.com/freebook/ebmyth/ch1.html

  - just as a start...James
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  19

  Help!! China and the Flood - insanity is nascent!!!!

  by hamsterbait in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  there was an asleep!

  magazine in the 80's or early 90's about chinese and how the pictographs illustrated things not mentioned in chinese mythology.. 1: the chinese symbol for "covetousness" or "stealing" is a woman plucking fruit from a tree.. 2: the pictogram for "survive" is a picture of a boat with eight people in it.. these exx.

  were claimed as remarkable since chinese myths do not include the corresponding biblical stories.. am i going mad?.

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  james_woods

  More on La Peyrere - (not to say of course that he was at all right about anything...), and to explain why I thought it was out of the "flood" context...

  _______

  Cain’s wife’s origin: why it matters!

  In the 17 th century, some Bible expositors, it seems, could not answer the question of where Cain got his wife. 1 One such was Isaac La Peyrère, a Jewish convert to Catholicism from Bordeaux. 2 To solve what he considered to be a problem, he proposed that Cain’s wife and the inhabitants of Cain’s city all came not from Adam but from pre-Adamic stock—beings who had lived in ‘the indefinite amount of time before Adam’. 3

  He said that Adam was the first Jew and the father of the Jews, but not the father of mankind, so it is not surprising that La Peyrère rejected the doctrine of Original Sin, i.e. that innate depravity is transmitted to all mankind because of Adam’s sin. He said that in the world to come everyone would be saved (universalism). He also argued that Eve was not the first woman, but the first Jewish woman, wife and mother. To explain the presence of Gentiles post-Flood, and to avoid the conclusion that they were all descendants of Noah and his family, he said that the Flood was local, not global. The Gentiles were descended from various pre-Adamites, not from Adam. This polygenesis of the Gentiles was his method of explaining the existence of the Negroes, Chinese, Eskimos, American Indians, Malays and other people groups being discovered.

  He also denied that Moses wrote the Pentateuch (i.e. Genesis to Deuteronomy), and he questioned both the accuracy of Genesis and the authenticity of the Biblical text. Although he was soundly refuted by Jewish and Protestant theologians, and declared to be a heretic by the Catholic Church, his questioning of the authority and accuracy of the Bible was the beginning of modern biblioscepticism. From it came the so-called modern ‘higher criticism’ of the Bible.

  In the 20 th century, the claim that other-colored people originated from pre-Adamites has been a key pillar for theistically inclined ‘white’ racists. 4 These have included British Israelites, Christian Identity, and some factions of the Ku Klux Klan. 5 What an incredible legacy of hate derives from the failure of the leaders of these organizations to correctly answer the matter of who Cain’s wife was!

  _________

  A little off the subject, but out of "intellectual honesty" here it is...
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  19

  Help!! China and the Flood - insanity is nascent!!!!

  by hamsterbait in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  there was an asleep!

  magazine in the 80's or early 90's about chinese and how the pictographs illustrated things not mentioned in chinese mythology.. 1: the chinese symbol for "covetousness" or "stealing" is a woman plucking fruit from a tree.. 2: the pictogram for "survive" is a picture of a boat with eight people in it.. these exx.

  were claimed as remarkable since chinese myths do not include the corresponding biblical stories.. am i going mad?.

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  james_woods

  the "earlier reference" quoted was "Men Before Adam" by La Payrere, published about 1655.

  I skipped it over because of context.

  James
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  19

  Help!! China and the Flood - insanity is nascent!!!!

  by hamsterbait in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  there was an asleep!

  magazine in the 80's or early 90's about chinese and how the pictographs illustrated things not mentioned in chinese mythology.. 1: the chinese symbol for "covetousness" or "stealing" is a woman plucking fruit from a tree.. 2: the pictogram for "survive" is a picture of a boat with eight people in it.. these exx.

  were claimed as remarkable since chinese myths do not include the corresponding biblical stories.. am i going mad?.

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  james_woods

  To quote from a book I have: it is [ AEONS, the search for the beginning of time ] by Martin Gorst...I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in "beginning of the world" chronology. It is the story of man's search for the origins of the earth and the universe.

  ____________

  In 1642 the Jesuit missionary Father Martino Martini arrived in China. For ten years he travelled the country, mapping its towns and villages, learning its language, and preaching the Catholic faith. (...) However, the more he learnt, the more he realised the scale of a problem that had dogged the Jesuit's attempts to teach Christianity since they had first arrived in the country seventy years earlier.

  The problem was one of chronology. When the first Jesuit missionaries had arrived in China, the Chinese had greeted their account of world history - drawn from the Hebrew Bible - with disbelief. The cause of this dissent was the story and date of the biblical Flood, the fearsome deluge in which, according to Genesis, all the people of the world had drowned except Noah and his family. According to the missionaries, this punishment from God had occurred in or around the year 2300 BC. The Chinese, however, dismissed this as impossible. Their own written history stretched back hundreds of years before this date, and made no mention of a worldwide flood. (...)

  Determined to correct this ignorance, Martini resolved to write a history of China himself. As he read through the (chinese) texts, however, Martini realised that the Chinese chronology posed a serious threat to the authority of the Bible. The dates of the Chinese Imperial dynasty indicated that the first emperor, Fu Hsi, had begun his rule in 2952 BC, some 600 years before the Hebrew date for the Flood.

  The Chinese records appeared more detailed and reliable than those of any other culture, including the Jews. They contained no bizarre myths or unbelievable legends, the lengths of the emperors' reigns were clearly documented, and even the earliest accounts had been <copied verbatem> by contemporary authors. With the intellectual honesty typical of his Jesuit training, he concluded these records to be genuine, and resolved to break the news to Europe.

  Like the response <..to an earlier reference published three years before...>, the reaction to the news that China's history pre-dated the Flood was overwhelmingly hostile. Most academics immediately assumed that the Chinese had exaggerated their history out of national pride.

  After the death of Martini himself, the contraversy he left behind continued to simmer for nearly a century. In response to the claims of the European scholars that the Chinese had fabricated their history, the Jesuits in China scanned the ancient texts for records of eclipses. By 1729 they had found 26 solar eclipses that "according to calculation fell on the exact year, month, and day indicated by the Chinese authors".

  For the Peking Jesuits, this proved that the Chinese chronology was correct, but it wasn't enough to convince their European colleagues. Nothing could even dent the Europeans widely held conviction that the world was less than 6000 years old.

  __________

  Amazing, is it not, how an established religion can take upon itself the illusion of having all complete and true knowledge, and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, just continue off in a stubborn pursuit of their own beliefs. "Intellectual Honesty" seems to be a concept which they do not posses.

  I think we have at least one such "celebrated Watchtower Scholar" here on this site!

  James
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  9

  The STRANGE CASE of MARIA and CHARLES

  by Terry in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  charles taze russell was born in 1852 (february 16) in pittsburgh, pennsylvania.

  he was raised in a strict presbyterian home.

  1868 (age 16) in an encounter with a non-believer he became disillusioned over the subject of whether god as a heavenly father would burn his children in hell.

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  james_woods

  Thanks, this was news to me. I knew of the divorce mess, of course, but not about how much she influenced the early doctrine. Sort of assumed it was his male ex-adventist cronies.

  This should be very useful information to act as an antidote to the occasional notion expressed that "Russell was really kind of OK, but Rutherford was the real Jerk" apology.

  This stuff makes C.T. look like a pretty big Jerk himself, at least to me.
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  21

  Did you stop believing Armageddon is coming?

  by plmkrzy in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  how many just stopped believing in the jw predictions/description of what armageddon is all about?

  ive met exjws that stopped believing in everything they were taught and ive met some that stopped believing in everything except armageddon.

  ive heard comments like: boy wont they be surprised when the day comes and they find out they arent the only ones surviving.

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  james_woods

  Aside from many other inconsistencies & the basic immorality of Armageddon, I always had a big problem with the time frames involved.

  OK, we first had the Jewish system, then came Jesus. Jesus dies...nearly 2,000 years go by. So, when was/is the "right time"? Wouldn't you think a long time ago? Every prophecy of an imminent time has failed up to this very day. For nearly 2000 years. Are we missing something?

  What was the point of letting the Earth get completely polluted, overpopulated, make all kind of wars and revolutions, etc...nearly 2000 years of frustating human development for nothing except our destruction. Why the long delay? If this were for real, did Armaggedon get posponed just to get plenty of people (approx 4+Billion) to make the killing fields of the Lord's Day really of Biblical proportion? Why not bring it on immediately, like the legend says the "Flood" was done...

  Even if you can accept the horrible lack of morality of this kind of destruction, such thoughts about the illogical time aspects led me to view this as a fable, like the flood, or Adam and Eve.
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  30

  Mel Gibson is out of control

  by SirNose586 in

  1. social
  2. current

  .

  this is some hilarious tomfoolery.

  his charles manson-esque beard doesn't seem to help, either.. mel may be a powerful guy, but something tells me there'll be a price to pay for his anti-semitic remarks, even if they were made in a sauced-up state.

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  james_woods

  Two thoughts on this -

  * - even if Mel goes down the drain after his "little incident", I am pretty sure that Russell Crowe will be able to follow in his footsteps. Heard that Russell is a pretty wicked hand with a hotel phone when he is in the way.

  * - With his millions, what the Hell was he doing driving himself anyway? Especially when out on a bender...

  PS - loved the Jay Leno take on it: "I don't know what he was drinking, but I think we can assume it wasn't Manashevietz"

  James
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  2

  Political Science....

  by Justice-One in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  political science by randy newman

  no one likes us-i don't know why.

  we may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try.

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  james_woods

  Political Science is an oxymoron, kind of like Military Intelligence.
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  30

  Mel Gibson is out of control

  by SirNose586 in

  1. social
  2. current

  .

  this is some hilarious tomfoolery.

  his charles manson-esque beard doesn't seem to help, either.. mel may be a powerful guy, but something tells me there'll be a price to pay for his anti-semitic remarks, even if they were made in a sauced-up state.

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  james_woods

  Maybe there should be a Hollywood rest home for the mentally deranged meltdowns -

  I nominate & certify the following: Mel, Danny Glover, Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Tom Cruise, PeeWee Herman,

  and in memoriam: Zsa Zsa.