thinksnow, you hae a person who probably did not know much about her own religion. In the * New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures*, the geneaology of the Hebrews were approximated to be about 1500 years from Abraham to Jesus. That alone puts down her theory of the 2000 year-old Earth.
No, I said “I’m pretty sure it was 2,000, it might be 3,000, but you get the idea” for a reason, I don’t recall what she claimed.
<snrkfgh!> New keyboard, please!
Poly, I must tell you that if anyone could…make me nauseated…you’d be right at the top of the list. 
<d&r>
[sub]sorry, i just couldn’t let such a good set-up go to waste[/sub]
The thing that troubles me is that I feel we (on the boards, and as a society) hold certain religious groups to a higher standard than others. I go to a Lutheran church lately where my in-laws are members–but I wouldn’t drag out every document put out by the denomination and start taking them to task for inconsistencies between what the publications say and how they lead their lives. We seem to take a smug satisfaction in finding such “hypocrisies” among fundamentalist religions, and hold every espousing member to be worthy of scorn for any blip found. Doesn’t that bug anyone else?
I am not a JW, but I do have a friend who is one. She doesn’t talk a lot about her beliefs, but the important thing is, she’s mostly just a normal person. I wouldn’t go peering into her private life or her family tree looking for things I could say “AHA!” about any more than I would my Jewish or Catholic friends.
Religion and homosexuality seem to be two areas where it’s still okay to be bigoted. Even my most “enlightened” friends sometimes indulge in sneering remarks about certain religious groups. There’s no law against that, of course, but it’s unfortunate that they don’t think they’re anything but good open-minded liberals.
There needs to be a distinction made between being derisive of an idea and being derisive of a person. Religion is merely a set of ideas, and it doesn’t deserve any extra consideration than any other set of ideas, no matter how fervently believed or cherished. I reserve the right to judge people according to their actions and their beliefs. That is not bigotry. Bigotry is doing so by some arbitrary set of standards. White supremacists are bigots because they judge people on arbitrary conditions. Someone who says that the Heaven’s Gate folks are kooks are judging them by their actions and stated beliefs. There is a definite difference between the two points of view. Do I think that there are ridiculous belief systems out there? Of course, and I bet you do as well. Does a religious label on a belief system make it out of bounds for criticism? Nope. Flat Earthers or Scientologists, makes no difference at all.
It sounds to me like you are trying to say that “Just because a person happens to be a member of religion X, that doesn’t mean that they believe everything encompassed by religion X.” True enough. No generalization is going to apply evenly to every member of the generalized group. However, if a person proclaims themself a Moonie, it is reasonable to assume that they believe in the teachings of Reverend Moon until such time as they say otherwise. The larger and more varied the denomination, the less you can generalize of course.
Ptahlis, you’ve said that very well, and also poked the right holes in my muddled post. In retrospect I think bigotry was the wrong label to throw out there. However, the observation still stands–IME many people expect a Moonie, a Flat-earther, a JW to be more defined by (and accountable for the failings of) their religion and belief systems than adherents of other faiths.
While you might be enlightened enough to hold all belief systems up for equal scrutiny, that’s not as common in other people as I’d like. Would that more people felt that way.
I see what you are driving at now. This is, I think, pretty much the way of it. That’s because when people are confronted with something that is more or less on the fringe of society, all their attention focuses on that. Its sheer alienness (is that a word?), its essential unfamiliarity, dominates the other more mundane details. If someone walks into a room with a single horn jutting from their forehead, few people will recall whether he was wearing Nike or Reebok shoes.
Certainly there are some pretty odd mainstream beliefs when you get down to the meat of it. Transubstantiation and communion is pretty strange if you step back and think about it. So is the idea that we killed the creator of the universe by nailing him to a stick, and that was actually all according to his plan! But since we already know lots and lots of folks that believe these things, we are no longer shocked to hear of them. Plus, it’s hard for us to focus only on the particular beliefs when we know so much more about all of them as individuals.
Well, on my good days I catch my knee jerking. 
Yo, Gaspode-
Lookie what I found!
On the subject of the fudging that went on in the translation of the NWT, check out http://www.evangelicaloutreach.org/nwt.htm
My experience, though from the other side, is very similar. I was working with a carpenter–a German I have mentioned in other threads–at the furniture shop of a customer we both knew. Both of them were of my parents’ generation. What religious affiliation, if any, this customer had, I don’t know, and I never asked. He said, though, that ‘it used to be if you were a Jehovah’s witness–or a Mason–or a Mormon–or [naming other non-mainstream religious minorities] the majority would harry you mercilessly,’ for no other apparent reason that that you were different. The Moonies, the Baha’is, the Rosicrucians, and the Hare Krishnas, in the era during and following the Depression, would likely have been thrown into a river, or lynched, according to this customer’s observations. This came as no surprise to me, and I once quoted the customer to an old friend of mine, a sharp, intelligent woman whose daughter I went to high school with. She pretty much agreed with this; we skipped the sugar-coating, even when discussing controversial topics. I regret she is no longer living. 
It reminds me of a song by Jerry Reed, titled "Koko Joe,’ in which the hobolike Koko Joe secues a helpless child from floodwaters. At the end, Reed exhorts the listeners to show tolerance
*“to folks you don’t understand
Some day you might meet a man like Koko Joe.” :)) *
Thea, sites like the one you have mentioned, and the people supporting these sites have an axe to grind against Jehovah’s Witnesses for a long, long time. They are quite biased against them.
Perhaps so, but are there inaccuracies there that you care to point out? The site seems fairly well put together to me.
That says it all, Capacitor. Thanks. It ass seems to boil down to the same hatred I suffered from my drunkard stepfather. (We had enough of his drinking and moved out on him. He had an 8-year-old son at the time; I was 22. I wound up being the male authority figure–a surrogate father, if you will–during his later childhood and adolescence. Today my younger brother has a good job, and is well-adjusted and does not drink. I’m quite proud of him.
Maybe this shows one can love the Witnesses for some of the enemies they have made…
Great then dougie. Perhaps you would care to point out the inaccuracies then? I’ll take it as given that the site referred to above is biased against JWs, but are they inaccurate?
I sure like to know what were exactly written, in the original Greek and Hebrew scrolls used in the translation, the scriptures they claim to have been distorted. JW’s at least have probuced a version of the greek scriptures/new Testament with the original Greek and the English translation (as they saw it) side-by-side. We have only the web site’s assertations that the specific verses were mistranslated, however, they have produced the not a single verse in the original Greek and Hebrew on the page. Where are the original Greek verses in dispute, so that I can show them to my Greek teacher in college? That is not quite scholarly to omit the passages in the original language.
Also, they claim that even the KJV made mistakes in writing the name Jehovah at all, which is in direct conflict with the JW’s call to praise His specific name, not a title. The JW’s are breaking the taboo of not naming God by his proper name. Of course the site mentioned would be biased against that. Even if the name Jehovah is of a Catholic origin, as opposed to the original Yaweh, it really boils down to a variation on the pronunciation of the word as it came to different languages, and its eventual anglicization. By this logic, they better not call Jesus Christ by ‘Jesus Christ’, but by the Hebrew ‘Joshua Messiah’.
I also saw the paper on the Trinity. I can refute that with several statements. The Bible says that you can curse God and Jesus, but one must never, ever curse the Holy Spirit. How they can be equal and one when you set different standards for each of them? Also, Jesus’ final words before he died was “Father, why have you forsaken me?” Can one person forsake himself, and yet yell at someone else why ** that** being forsaken him, as if not knowing the answer, and be the same person? I would think not. There is no concept of the Trinity in Judaism, as Christiendom see it. That concept came from an outside source.
**
Well, I’m not sure if you noticed or not, but the site was extensively footnoted with a long list of print sources given. To say that this practice is “not scholarly” merely because the texts are not immediately hyperlinked is a bit unfair I should think. Many articles found online are merely a republication of material originally written for print media. To demand that all supporting documents also be available online isn’t very reasonable IMO.
The arguments about the Trinity and whether Jehova is or is not improper are, to me anyway, not things I care to get into here. I am really only interested in the issue of whether or not the site’s clear dislike of the JW religion warrants disregarding the points they raised about translational “fudging.” It seems to me that they present their case well enough (despite the regrettable practice of using too much* emphasis***), and have gone to the trouble of documenting sources. My whole point here is that I don’t think that such arguments as they present are well countered merely by alleging bias and moving on. I simply do not think that a group’s agenda renders all arguments from them invalid, especially if the arguments seem to be well supported.
(Personally though, just for the record, I find the concept of the Trinity to be dubious at best, and arguing over which name to call a deity in which I do not believe isn’t even on my radar screen.)
Indeed I would like to know what has been distorted. As it happens, I have a volume titled The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures, which uses the 1948 Macmillan edition of the Westcott and Hort Greek Text, one which has been used for quite a number of Bible translations in the last 50 years or so, including the Revised Standard Version of 1952. I also have several other Bible translations, including the King James red-letter Bible and one in Esperanto–as well as James Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, likely the most comprehensive reference work ever on the languages and text of the Bible.
Ptahlis, the sources they used are not so easily accessible anymore. In many other papers where translation from the original is crucial part of the dissertation, the author made sure that the passages from the original are presented in the original language, so that one can judge the assertations for oneself. It is quite unfortunate that I do not see the passages in dispute. Indeed, except for the passage about Yahweh/Jehovah, I see no passage of Bible text in the orignal Hebrew or Greek.