Posts by peacefulpete

6

What is your experience with conversations outside jw.org

by Gorb in

jw
friends

i write many times how good it is to be pomo for me, my wife and children.

feeling better then ever.

jw family accept this status.

peacefulpete

I've been too forthcoming with people. I liken it to a recovering alcoholic.

At the same time, I've had great conversations with people who have had parallel experiences in other churches and think it was helpful for both of us to gain perspective.

Presently I fear I crossed a line with someone I consider a good friend, a former poster here. I didn't realize the extent to which they had returned to religion and started carrying on about something that only I found interesting. If you are reading this, forgive me.

12

Russia: Further Jail Term For Answering Fellow Prisoners’ Questions About Faith

by AndersonsInfo in

https://www.eurasiareview.com/01072024-russia-further-jail-term-for-answering-fellow-prisoners-questions-about-faith/.

july 1, 2024. by f18news.

by victoria arnold.

peacefulpete

A government without checks and balances, attacking a religion without the same.

People like Dmitry are double victims.

43

Members of congregation know it’s not true

by Mikejw in

we have lonely old folks and even some not so old.. they know the gb are not who they claim to be.. but they stay in the congregation because they are lonely.

i wonder what percentage of jws this is the case, i would guess a lot.

.

peacefulpete

BluesBrother said it well. Basically, if you are asking if this religion is true, you are already out.

37

Avoiding Temptation As a Young Elder

by TMS in

it was the summer of '72.

i was 24 but had been the presiding overseer or congregation servant of a small congregation in the county seat of an arkansas county for about 3 years.. my regular pioneer wife of nearly four years was big and pregnant, with our attempts at birth control unsuccessful.. one of my wife's several bible studies was with a young woman named brenda whom my wife had encountered in door to door work.. brenda had two young children she could barely handle and was married to a very countryfied arkie named henry who worked as a chicken catcher, one of the most difficult jobs at the local chicken plant.. brenda eventually revealed that she'd been raised as a jw, but was never baptized, having left home to marry henry at age 14. she spoke of her family in texas, mentioning her mother and two older sisters, all jws she said.. one morning, just before the meeting for field service, we noticed a small car in kingdom hall parking lot.

my wife and i were parked to one side of the hall in our aluminum nashua house trailer.. two young women got out of the car and soon joined us for the meeting for service, identifying themselves as brenda's sisters from texas.. the two girls, ages 17 and 20, were distractingly beautiful, with the eldest decked out like a magnificent southern belle including hat and heels, her high-end clothing accentuating her very obvious curves.. with no one else showing up for field service, it ended up just the four of us in the car group with the two texas girls in the back seat.. starting our time at a not-at-home, the 20 year old asked if she could accompany me to "hear my presentation.

peacefulpete

It's often when we get the 'freedom' to do things that they become less tempting. Forbidden fruit and all.

299

Who told the first lie?

by nicolaou in

this is a continuation of the discussion which sprang from an unrelated topic.. so according to genesis, who told the first lie?

god told eve that if she ate from the tree of knowledge she would die that very same day.

in response to that statement the devil told her she would not die.. eve ate from the tree and did not die.

peacefulpete

A last thought about that 'ancient writer' mentioned in my last post. Maybe the writer was just like many of us, struggling to understand his place in the world and clinging to a belief system in the face of overwhelming evidence against it. As part of a community of similarly conflicted believers, he wanted to appear resolute, so wrote about how his God had everything under control and how someday everything will be better. I can relate to that guy, as it wasn't so long ago I did the same.

299

Who told the first lie?

by nicolaou in

this is a continuation of the discussion which sprang from an unrelated topic.. so according to genesis, who told the first lie?

god told eve that if she ate from the tree of knowledge she would die that very same day.

in response to that statement the devil told her she would not die.. eve ate from the tree and did not die.

peacefulpete

However, God himself reveals exactly who he is.

The Bible writers depicted many faces of God. Some of those are not very attractive.

And altho the scriptures repeatedly demonstrate his consideration and affection for his creation,...

It's good you focus on that rather than the God that sends lions to kill innocent children.

...many simply cannot accept that he also has the final say.

Who gets the final say? The GB? the Pope? an ancient writer we never met? God hasn't said anything.

9

The true pronunciation of God's name....

by Kosonen in

jw
friends

i found a very interesting video by a jewish biblical scholar about how to correctly pronounce jehovah.

it's not yahweh as other scholars claim.. https://youtu.be/4vgxmmbst8w?si=yq7ggwstkpnd3f18.

peacefulpete

Gordon's theory is a mix of conspiracy (along with the typical dismissal of established scholarship) and a bit of showmanship in a digital age. He makes factual errors, ignores the extensive disconfirming evidence, uncritically accepts the folk etymology of Ex 3 and mocks the efforts of those more qualified.

In short, the name, YHWH or YH is ancient, predating it's adoption by Judah and Israel, it's original meaning possibly "blow", or "jealous" from an Arabic root HWY. Its pronunciation changed along with the languages in which it was used. The very exhaustively researched conclusion regarding the number of syllables and basic vowel sounds is that 'Yah" and 'Yahweh' are reasonable approximations for much of the time period in which the Bible was written. Regional cognates in Arabic, Samaritan, Egyptian, Ethiopic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Coptic, Greek support the Yahweh pronunciation.

20

What has the Spiritual Paradise of the WTS been over time

by blondie in

jw
friends

the first mention i find in the wts publications is 1958. although the wts says the index goes from 1930 to 1985, nothing appears before 1958 a search only found by using the phrase "spiritual paradise" not in the index.

in 2015 there was a clarification of the phrase "of course, we should not conclude that the terms “spiritual paradise” and “spiritual temple” are the same.

the spiritual temple is god’s arrangement for true worship.".

peacefulpete

It's propaganda. Repeat mantras/slogans that insist all is wonderful to prevent concerns about leadership. It's gaslighting. You are in a 'spiritual paradise', if you have a problem, the problem is you.

171

Alteration of Revelation 3:14 in the 4th century to support the emerging Trinity doctrine

by slimboyfat in

in an earlier thread another poster asserted that there is no evidence that revelation 3:14 played a part in the 4th controversy that led to the trinity doctrine.

this was claimed as evidence that the description of jesus as “the beginning of the creation of god” in the verse was not understood to mean that jesus was god’s first creation.

the scholarly greek–english lexicon of the new testament & other early christian literature 3e (2001) by bauer, arndt, gingrich, and danker, in its latest edition states that “first creation” is indeed the probable meaning of the greek phrase.

peacefulpete

...both sides in the fourth century debate took Wisdom/Word/Son to be a person at the beginning with God, the difference is Arians maintained the distinction that the Son was created and subordinate to God...

Bingo again. The Arians 'literalized' word pictures. They made too much of the expressions "son' and 'beginning' having been hundreds of years distanced from the esoteric language. When Wisdom was 'created as the beginning of God's works' the writers did not literally believe there was a woman in heaven that was created to perform for God. It/she was a hypostasis of God's power. JWs are similarly literalizing the words and making much noise about their uninitiated take on these passages.

I'll remind you that it's my position that the Catholic fathers had themselves mistaken metaphor for history, in large part because of the success of the Gospel stories that euhemerized and embellished the Logos concept into a Roman crucifixion setting. The Arians simply took it a small step further by reducing the Logos to a demigod because of focusing on descriptions such as 'created' and 'son'.

The EL/Yahweh and Yahweh/Michael parallels contributed to the 2 powers concept from a different angle.

The main point is that Schafer and others have demonstrated that there were indeed pre-Christian and early Christain concepts of God that eventually congealed into the Trinity doctrine formulation. The belief that the Christ was a manifestation of God was not secondary to Christianity it was a fundamental underpinning that literalizers complicated/ denied.

171

Alteration of Revelation 3:14 in the 4th century to support the emerging Trinity doctrine

by slimboyfat in

in an earlier thread another poster asserted that there is no evidence that revelation 3:14 played a part in the 4th controversy that led to the trinity doctrine.

this was claimed as evidence that the description of jesus as “the beginning of the creation of god” in the verse was not understood to mean that jesus was god’s first creation.

the scholarly greek–english lexicon of the new testament & other early christian literature 3e (2001) by bauer, arndt, gingrich, and danker, in its latest edition states that “first creation” is indeed the probable meaning of the greek phrase.

peacefulpete

Another thing that should be taken into consideration when looking at texts such as Rev 3.14; Col 1.15, John 1:1 and so on is that these passages are clearly drawing on the Jewish Wisdom tradition. In that tradition Wisdom was spoken about as God’s first creation, an archangel, or principal angel beside God. Therefore it’s entirely within the cultural context of the period to understand these passages in the NT along those lines.

Bingo. But somehow you have literalized these passages just as the 4th Arian 'heretics' did.