WTF? :eek:
Since at no time has Raindog said that he has ceased to be a JW, it is hardly inaccurate or misleading of Simster to call him a JW.
That he has apparently converted to atheism at some stage is hardly apparent, given that his posting history shows that he still overwhelmingly posts on religious threads with positions that support JW doctrine.
Genesis 6:1-4 offers another alternative; the “sons of God”. (Who are presumably like God in form).
Did Jesus make a full-blown case for the Trinity, using only his own words? No. He certainly said many things that seem to imply the Trinity (or at least his deity). As I mentioned in my earlier post, the Trinitarian baptismal formula at Matt. 28:19 needs to be explained if your position is that Jesus would have opposed the doctrine of the Trinity.
My question is, what’s the difference? There are a lot of doctrines accepted both by Christians and JWs that cannot be fully fleshed out from Jesus’ words alone. What is the point of cramming the truth into such a small box? If one believes the words of Scripture, then all of it is useful for discovering doctrine, not just the red letters. And if one does not believe the Bible, then why should he believe what Jesus says either? If the point that you are trying to make is that the Trinity cannot be a biblical doctrine because Jesus did not fully express it in his own words, then you will find very few doctrines of Christianity that will meet your criterion.
I pointed out several examples in which Jesus asserts his deity. I wrote my comments from the perspective of addressing a JW and his arguments, because I had been led to believe by comments in the thread that you were a JW, and, indeed, your own comments in other threads seem to have borne that out. So the question of whether you are a JW seems to be up in the air at the moment, because you have made contradictory statements on the subject.
In addressing the deity of Christ, I tried in writing my examples to anticipate what the JW response would be and address it in advance. The doctrine of the deity of Christ is a necessary building block for the doctrine of the Trinity. If Christ is not God, the Trinity doesn’t work. But if he is God, then the JW doctrine doesn’t work, whether we get all the way to proving the Trinity or not. So the pivotal question is really that of the deity of Christ, and not the Trinity.
In any event, I’m not sure what you are trying to get out of this thread. Knowing the JW mindset as I do, I’d expect that you are thinking what I said above - if Jesus himself didn’t give a full-blown explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity, then it can’t be a biblical doctrine. But that’s just not true. A biblical doctrine is one that can be demonstrated from the whole Bible, not just the words of Jesus.
I’m upgrading my note to a warning. If this story were true, mentioning it in this forum would be inappropriate and would violate some of our oldest board rules. But I am pretty sure it’s not true, which is worse. If you’re gay, that will definitely be news to your ex-wife and simster’s family and I don’t think the two of you could have gone to college together. I am not sure if you are being deceptive about your religious affiliation or just playing word games, but I’m not sure you have been honest about that either. So let me be crystal clear about this:
If you have any questions, you can ask me about them in private messages. Perhaps I’m mistaken about something here, but your credibility doesn’t look very good to me right now.
I’ll do just that.
Actually Marley23…
Now that I think about it, I think MBs might be a little like marriages. Some of them have a finite lifespan.
I “met” simster a year or two back when I links to posted 12 SCOTUS decisions on canvassing. 12.
simster replied in 6 minutes with a broad commentary on all of them. When I noted that he was able to assimilate the massive amount of info in 6 minutes, and still have time to type his response, he replied with -----and I’m not making this up---------- “I type fast.”
Since then every thread that I’m in that has anything to with religion, (the bible mostly) and I am a poster, he appears with an ax to grind about JWs. Thread after thread after thread I have to insist that my faith isn’t germane to my discussion. In fact, from time to time threads come up about JWs, or JWs are referenced, and I ignore them. I have zero interest in witnessing, and the fact that I’m a JW is virtually incidental to my participation here.
That’s not a mistake. While posters have made more than a few favorable comments about their interactions with JWs, the vast majority have been witless and juvenile. I’ve got enough aggravation IRL than to come here and insult each other.
So thread after thread if the topic is ‘horseshoes and hand grenades’ close -----and I’m a poster----he veers off topic and attacks JWs, with comments that are not only not germane to the OP, but have the intellectual complexity of tapioca.
It’s not as easy as putting him on the ignore list either. *This thread is a perfect example. * When simster shows up we veer off course and the thread becomes a referendum on JWs. Every one. In post 36 ----a common necessity when simster shows up-----I virtually disavowed being a JW so the discussion could stay on point, and had to re-iterate it in post 62, simply because simster turn any bible discussions I’m in to referendums on JWs.
Look at how much effort NeonMadman put into his initial post. It’s a referendum on JW’s. More times than I can count I’ve offered to use any bible a poster wishes. (because a couple of these simster screeds have been about the NWT.) More times than I can count I’ve offered to post as an atheist.
I know of no other poster who consistently has to ‘take his religion off the table’ in order to engage in a comprehensive conversation. I’m loosely aware of the affiliations of the regulars, and it would be tiring if I followed up every one of tomndebbs biblical posts with a rant about pedophile priests or Pope Leo X.
And your solution is that I Pit him?
So yea, I think simster is a stalker and a one trick pony. I can hold my own in any discussion I’m in. His witless screeds are nothing more than a nuisance. But it is tiring when he injects his JW screeds into every biblical thread I join.
So you’re threatening to ban me? Why don’t we make this my “last post on this site.”?
As I mentioned several times; The Psalmist is quoted as saying," I said you are gods and sons of the most high", that could mean all people are Gods, men are gods, or just Jewish men are gods, depending on how one translates it!
Looking back on History it seems to me that the word GOD, just meant a person of power.
The way the commandments are written, example: I am your God who led you out of Egypt, you shall have no other gods except me". One could take that to mean there are many gods, could they not?
Fascinating. Like I said, if you have a problem with simster, Pit him. Otherwise your personal feelings about him are of no interest. Do not air them in this forum and don’t hijack this thread any further.
From Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp (a Connecticut Yankee story – 20th-Century American archaelogist Martin Padway finds himself transported by a bolt of lightning to 6th-Century Rome; in need of money, he has just invented/introduced the process of distilling wine into brandy):
His post is not ‘fascinating’ - its full of half truth and more derisive comments that have no merit - I have a rebuttal typed - do I have permission to post?
No, you don’t. I’m sorry if you missed the sarcasm in my post; I thought it was pretty obvious. This isn’t a debate about the two of you personally, it’s supposed to be about the Trinity. If you want to talk about raindog, Pit him. I don’t want to read any more posts about this.
Fair enough, I did not catch the sarcasm - to the pit it goes.
Not at all. It was an attempt to answer your question in the OP as closely as it could be answered. However, given the fact that I had the impression that you were a JW, I framed it in such a way as to anticipate your responses to the examples I gave. I did that to conserve time and energy, frankly; I have found JWs to be remarkably consistent in their counter-arguments, an indication that their arguments are being fed to them from a central source, not arrived at through their own thought and research. In any event. I knew what the answers were likely to be had you actually engaged my arguments, and attempted to address them in advance. Since you never actually responded to the examples I gave, I guess my attempt was moot. And the fact that you have offered to ‘argue as an atheist’ makes little difference if what you are offering are essentially JW arguments. Frankly, if you were an atheist, what difference would it make whether Jesus taught the Trinity? You would not believe that his words were anything special anyway.
Now, admittedly, there was one area in my first post in this thread where I did veer a bit off topic. That was where I mentioned that the JW teachings about the organization itself could also not be established from the words of Jesus. I stated plainly in the post that I was going off topic, and I was doing so for the purpose of making an analogy. I was trying to illustrate that the “words of Jesus” requirement is not a valid way of interpreting the Bible; it’s one that is largely used by people who would like to throw away the rest of the Bible with regard to a particular topic. They appeal to the ‘red letters’ in order to restrict the amount of text that is available to resolve a controversy as to what the Bible teaches on a given topic rather than to address everything the Bible says on the subject. It’s almost as if I asked you to give me biblical proof of a certain major JW doctrine using only, say, the minor prophets.
And let me be frank here - it really seems to me that your aim in this thread is to get people to admit that Jesus didn’t explicitly teach the Trinity (which I agree that he didn’t) and use that as ammunition to argue that the Trinity cannot therefore be a biblical doctrine - thus advancing your JW doctrine as to the nature of Christ. But the latter does not flow from the former, any more than not being able to prove a doctrine from the minor prophets means that the doctrine is not biblical. If you asked me whether the Bible contains all the elements of the doctrine of the Trinity, I would say, yes it does. It seems clear that all of the three persons are referred to as God, and that there is only one God. If there is only one God and three persons are referred to as God, then we have a situation where the three persons must be the one God. Now, the details of how that worked certainly had to be fleshed out in the early centuries of the church, but the earliest Christian writers unanimously expressed faith in the deity of Jesus and the oneness of God.
Finally, I have no idea about your relationship with simster, and it’s not relevant to my discussion here. I will say, though, that I have argued with many, many JWs on the internet and in person, and I find that especially the ones on the internet love to argue as if they were not JWs. They do this precisely so that they can avoid the topics that are difficult for them to answer. JWs feel that, in certain doctrinal areas, they have all their ducks in a row, and they will always try to restrict conversation to those areas - such as the Trinity, hell, immortal soul, etc. They avoid like the plague anything that brings their organization’s authority into question, such as the Watchtower’s long history of repeated false prophecies, many instances of giving bogus medical advice, occult associations, etc. When these questions are raised, the JW response is almost always to try to divert the discussion back to one of the preferred doctrinal topics.
The problem is that JWs have been taught that the organization speaks for God and that they cannot comprehend the Bible without its guidance. They are forbidden even to think in a way independent of the organization’s teaching. This is a large commitment, mentally, but it is the commitment one must make to function as a JW. A JW who openly rejects that teaching will be disfellowshipped and shunned by even his closest JW friends and family. The investment is emotional, not intellectual. From that viewpoint, it’s easy to understand why the JW wants so much to avoid venturing into taboo territory, intellectually. I say all of this to point out the reason why discussions of this sort often must seem like JW-bashing to a JW. Those of us who are arguing from the other side aren’t willing to play by the JW rules. If the JW is being inconsistent in demanding a different level of proof for doctrines that he disagrees with then for doctrines he believes, it is necessary to point that out. That’s what I was trying to do when I wrote about deriving the doctrine of “God’s organization” from Jesus’ words alone. Clearly, a believing JW requires a much lower standard of proof for that doctrine than he does for the Trinity, even though the organization doctrine is absolutely central to all JW teaching. By pretending not to be JWs when having online discussions (though arguing strictly according to JW doctrine), the JW avoids all the baggage that comes with having to defend the organization and his own inconsistency as to standards of proof, but gets to confine the discussion to areas where he feels comfortable with his ability to defend doctrine.
I found that the JW’s that came to our house are unaware that their Bible is the word of the early Roman and Orthodox Bishops not God. So in reality they are using the Book of people they criticize. They also don’t know the Bible except the things they are told, or taught.
Most conservative Christian scholars would disagree. There is still a substantial scholarly community that maintains that the books of the NT were indeed written by the apostles and early followers of Jesus. In fact, hardly anybody at all really questions the authorship of the Gospels and the core Pauline letters. “Roman and Orthodox bishops” didn’t even come into existence until centuries later; the bishops were those of the catholic (universal) church, which is rather different from the Roman Catholic Church. The idea of the papacy and the split between the Roman and Eastern churches were much, much later developments.
Yeah, very true. It’s almost ironic that JWs call themselves “Bible Students,” since most do no direct study of the Bible whatsoever. They consider themselves to be doing "Bible study"when they underline the answers to the pre-programmed, catechism-style questions in the paragraphs of a Watchtower magazine or other JW publication. They believe that they can only get a true understanding of the Bible through the publications of “God’s organization” anyway, so most don’t even bother with the Bible, except perhaps to look up the proof texts in the publications (which often don’t prove the point the material is trying to make, but it’s impressive to see a long list of Scripture references after a paragraph of text).
This goes all the way back to the very roots of the Watchtower org with Russell’s ‘Studies in the Scriptures’ - which, surprisingly enough they do there best to disavow, which is ironic given the following quote -
[QUOTE=Watchtower, Sept 15, 1910]
If the six volumes of SCRIPTURE STUDIES are practically the Bible topically arranged, with Bible proof-texts given, we might not improperly name the volumes–the Bible in an arranged form. That is to say, they are not merely comments on the Bible, but they are practically the Bible itself, since there is no desire to build any doctrine or thought on any individual preference or on any individual wisdom, but to present the entire matter on the lines of the Word of God. We therefore think it safe to follow this kind of reading, this kind of instruction, this kind of Bible study. Furthermore, not only do we find that people cannot see the divine plan in studying the Bible by itself, but we see, also, that if anyone lays the SCRIPTURE STUDIES aside, even after he has used them, after he has become familiar with them, after he has read them for ten years–if he then lays them aside and ignores them and goes to the Bible alone, though he has understood his Bible for ten years, our experience shows that within two years he goes into darkness. On the other hand, if he had merely read the SCRIPTURE STUDIES with their references, and had not read a page of the Bible, as such, he would be in the light at the end of the two years, because he would have the light of the Scriptures
[/QUOTE]
But we have now gone on from the OP’s topic to what he was complaining about - but I guess
a) the OP has said he would no longer be posting here - he’s divorced us - (oh no)
b) the OP’s arguments have been pretty well trounced in this and his first thread - even within hsi very narrow framework.
c) we’ll never get that 3rd and 4th installment in the series - we’ll never get to see his ‘Pagan origins’ proof - (oh no!)
I guess we can conclude that
a) the Watchtower (OPs) logic is flawed in this regard
b) there will always be a debate as to the ‘Doctrine’ of the trinity, but ‘Christ’s Divinity’ is somewhat obvious in the NT - and is certainly a part of ‘mainstream’ Christianity teachings
Which, combined with a lot of extraneous shots at Jehovah’s Witnesses, constitutes a hijack.
Your conclusions may or may not be correct.
However, if anyone wishes to discuss the merits or faults of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, they need to open a new thread. That is not the topic of this thread and that hijack will cease.
[ /Moderating ]
It is true that there were writings before the Nicene Council, but the Roman and Orthodox Bishops decided what was of God and what was inspired and they left out a lot, or discarded writings from the other Apostles, only Peter. Matthew, and John were apostles, Luke and Mark were not. Very little of Peter’s writings were included, and it seems that Paul didn’t accept all that Peter seemed to say. and how much the Monks added or translated to fit the Church’s teachings or desires is a point to consider.
Both of these claims are posted in near-absolutes that distort history.
First, I would dispute the claim of “Most conservative Christian scholars.” There is a rather small group of people, many associated with the Moody Bible Institute and similar organizations, who tend to rigidly hold views of the bible that they carved in stone in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I challenge the label scholar when applied to them, as they generally spend most of their efforts quote mining and cherry picking data points to prove the conclusions that they set forth before they began their investigations. There are conservative scholars who do not accept every new proposal for dating and authorship, but they generally recognize conflicting information that is produced regarding sources, texts, dates, and other information that continually comes to light. As an example, anyone who insists that Matthew the tax collector/apostle is the author of the Gospel of Matthew pretty well sets himself outside the realm of scholarship. I am aware of a (very) few conservative scholars who would hold that Peter wrote at least one of the letters attributed to him or that John the apostle wrote some or all of the works attributed to him. Generally, scholars, even conservative scholars, recognize that those attributions are not accurate.
On the other hand, claims that some limited number of Bishops at Nicene “threw out” lots of texts and that there were a wide variety of different stories held by the believing community before that council is a complete distortion of history.
First, the Council of Nicaea did not name a single book as scriptural or not scriptural. That council, attended by the majority of bishops then serving in the church, merely noted that truths promulgated by the church had to be in accordance with scripture–said scripture was not, however, identified. The official recognition of the canon did not occur until the council of Rome (382) and was confirmed by a few subsequent councils. However, these late councils were not simply picking and choosing books that they liked and discarding others. While Christians had, indeed, been writing gospels and epistles and acts and other works attributed to all sorts of people across the breadth of the Roman Empire for over 300 years, the list of books that were actually set into the canon had remained fairly constant since the second century. The Muratorian Canon, a list of books from which readings were selected for liturgy, dates to about 170 and includes (and excludes) pretty much all the candidate books that we see discussed in the fourth century. Different commentators in the second through fourth centuries expressed approval for the Letter of Barnabas or the Shepherd of Hermas or the letters of Clement (the second pope), but no one championed the Gospel of Judas or the Infancy Gospel of Thomas or even the Protoevangelium of James as scripture.
The fourth century councils were establishing as accepted the traditions of 200+ years regarding what was scriptural. This does not mean that their decisions were historically accurate; I know no serious scholar of the last 30+ years who actually believes that Paul wrote the letters to Timothy and Titus. However, the notion put forth by some revisionists that a few bishops gathered in Nicaea in 325 (wrong place and wrong time) and simply chose the books they happened to like (inaccurate description of selection process) is utterly without merit.
Since your post didn’t even contain the word “Trinity,” I hope you’ll answer this serious question before asking me to open a new thread if I want to pursue it:
As an intelligent and informed Christian, can you explain why you continue to believe in a book that you know contains outright forgeries? If the authors are willing to lie about their own identities, and if the Church Fathers (and the Holy Spirit guiding them) were too incompetent to detect such lies, how can you trust in what they say about unverifiable subjects, like life after death?