Pudgy

These days, tortured souls are a dime a dozen. Even I am that way. And, not to complain, but I don’t think I’m getting anywhere near the love here that I need.
 
Okay, now I see the reason for Aruana’s, Thinking’s and my trouble with Alan. We ‘refused to learn.’ That would make anyone furious.

It's not that Jehovah doesn't "watch" errors, but he is all-knowing and all-understanding and has provided the ransom as a means for forgiveness. So he doesn't watch for errors to slap us down like a human boss might, and he doesn't judge by the number of errors.
But there is one exception for humans. We are to watch for errors in "teaching." And since ours is a teaching ministry, even for the youngest among us, we MUST watch for errors when it comes to teaching wrong doctrine and the possibility of misleading others:
(Matthew 16:12) . . .Then they grasped that he said to watch out, not for the leaven of bread, but for the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. (1 Timothy 4:16) Pay constant attention to yourself and to your teaching.. . . (James 3:1) . . .Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, knowing that we will receive heavier judgment.  (Galatians 6:1) . . .Brothers, even if a man takes a false step before he is aware of it, you who have spiritual qualifications try to readjust such a man in a spirit of mildness. . . . (Ephesians 4:14, 15) . . .So we should no longer be children, tossed about as by waves and carried here and there by every wind of teaching by means of the trickery of men, by means of cunning in deceptive schemes. But speaking the truth. . . (Matthew 23:15) . . .Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you travel over sea and dry land to make one proselyte, and when he becomes one, you make him a subject for Ge·henʹna twice as much so as yourselves. (Hebrews 13:17) . . .Be obedient to those who are taking the lead among you and be submissive, for they are keeping watch over you as those who will render an account, so that they may do this with joy and not with sighing, for this would be damaging to you. (Matthew 18:6) But whoever stumbles one of these little ones who have faith in me, it would be better for him to have hung around his neck a millstone that is turned by a donkey and to be sunk in the open sea.
 

Another ‘tortured soul,’ methinks, for whom I must have compassion.
The best way to heal and not to further inflict torture upon oneself is to forgive.
“If errors were what you watch, O Jah, Then who, O Jehovah, could stand?” (Psalms 130:3)
Errors are all people watch today, inside or outside of religion. Nobody stands in the face of such treatment.
 
What is that saying about resentment—that it is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die?

Because of the need for the WTS publications to sow seeds of doubt about Ptolemy, the Watchtower made the following statement about that same 621 BCE eclipse. The mistake they made is pretty obvious once you have seen Ptolemy's writing.
*** w69 3/15 pp. 185-186 Astronomical Calculations and the Count of Time ***
LUNAR ECLIPSES
Lunar eclipses, as found in Ptolemy’s canon and presumably drawn from data in the cuneiform records, have been used in efforts to substantiate the dates usually given for particular years of the Neo-Babylonian kings. But even though Ptolemy may have been able to calculate accurately the dates of certain eclipses in the past, this does not prove that his transmission of historical data is correct. His relating of eclipses to the reigns of certain kings may not always be based on the facts. Additionally, the frequency of lunar eclipses certainly does not add great strength to this type of confirmation.
For example, a lunar eclipse in 621 B.C.E. (April 22) is used as proof of the correctness of the Ptolemaic date for Nabopolassar’s fifth year. However, another eclipse could be cited twenty years earlier in 641 B.C.E. (June 1) to correspond with the date that Bible chronology would indicate for Nabopolassar’s fifth year. Besides, this latter eclipse was total, whereas the one in 621 B.C.E. was partial.
To me, that's just embarrassing. I don't think it was 'deviant scholarship' as @Arauna would have called it had I made a similar mistake. I think it was just grasping at any straws possible to sow seeds of doubt in Ptolemy's work. The problem, of course, is that Ptolemy said it was partial, and it shows up as partial in my software exactly as Ptolemy reported. But the Watchtower claimed that a better one 20 years earlier would be a TOTAL eclipse. In other words, someone in the Writing Dept found a reference, or went to the trouble themselves to find an eclipse exactly 20 years earlier (necessary to feed the 1914 theory) and somehow overlooked the fact that they were choosing a NON-matching eclipse over the matching eclipse. Rolf Furuli made the exact same attempt with lunar information from Nebuchadnezzar's 37th year, and made some of the same "wishful-thinking" errors over and over again.  
 

Dad had a "rebellious-lost son" who left and came back. But dad also had a "faithful JW-son" who showed that dad made a mistake somewhere in his upbringing. Not only with the "lost son" but also with the one who "stayed at home".
Now, did the father make a mistake in upbringing, so he created a "broken household"? And where was the mother? Or was he a "single father"? Or was the older JW son actually the "goat", because he showed all the accumulated negativity when his younger brother returned?
SO, MM made a good point. JWs have no solution even for their own social deviations. They have the same sufferings as the rest of the religious world, who are in "the safe place of their own religion".
I think the population of "nominal JWs" is increasing, regardless of whether they were "born into the religion" or accepted it by coming "from outside". 
My impression of this view increases when I see "mute" JWs standing by the carts and carrying on their private conversations with each other a few meters away from the "source of spiritual food".
Jesus was active in reaching people with the "good news". What is "active" about standing 10-15 feet from the cart?
On the other hand, JWs want to "fix the world", because they want to "fix people" so that they turn to God. So what exactly is the WTJWorg mission? "Going/flee out of the world" and not returning to it?
So why are they fighting for tax breaks and state money?  It is a form of returning to the world from which you supposedly escaped.
Or for "freedom of speech and belief"?  Within their church they have complete freedom to believe their own speech.

 
 

Yeah, just like the prodigal son’s dad ran a broken home. If he hadn’t, junior would have never departed. 
I dunno. You mean that every obnoxious troll on the internet is underneath it all a gentle misunderstood soul? Haven’t you spoken disparagingly of George88 or some of his personas? Alan behaved worse than he. 
I’ll concede that all I know of the man is the persona he chose to display here. I think what really set me off is not that he came after me, but that he also laid into Arauna and Thinking for doing no more than defending the faith.

I'm not the one saying it is significant. I'm only saying that all evidence so far consistently points to 587 BCE as the 18th year of Nebuchadnezzar. It's up to you to decide whether that fact has any significance:
(Jeremiah 32:1, 2) . . .The word that came to Jeremiah from Jehovah in the 10th year of King Zed·e·kiʹah of Judah, that is, the 18th year of Neb·u·chad·nezʹzar. At that time the armies of the king of Babylon were besieging Jerusalem, . . .
 

There are some magnificent threads buried within. Probably, just typing ‘AlanF’ into the search box will bring up a few.
The trouble is, if you held to faith, you were one of those ‘stupid people’ to him. I detest these people who think they can muscle through on brainpower alone. “By their fruits you will know them,” holds no sway with them. Not saying anything of him personally, but you would think people would assess critical thinking by the world it has collectively produced. It has been the chief export of universities for some time now, and few world leaders are not university-equipped. 
Witnesses, on the other hand, though not without the minor mishaps stemming from being ‘earthen vessels,’ have achieved a peacefulness, unity, cohesiveness, that the world can only dream of. Pew Research says their membership (in the U.S.) is almost exactly 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Hispanic, with about 5% Asian thrown in. Translation: They have solved racism, the issue that is ripping this world apart, despite its educational advantage.
Brotherly love is a concept that works, but it does not stand well up to ‘reason,’ especially reason with evolution at its root. It is not a concept that lends itself well to ‘proof.’ The truths that are declared ‘self-evident,’ that ‘all men are created equal,’ are not at all self-evident to those evolution-based. What is self-evident to them is the 2001 Space Odyssey humanoid discovering he can beat the snot out of his competitor with a leg bone, whereupon he throws it into the air and out comes this spacecraft to Jupiter. 

The gods must be crazy. I thought that movie was great!
The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980 film) The tribal people in a remote African desert live a happy life, but it is all torn to pieces when a Coca-Cola bottle falls from a plane. With the villagers fighting over the strange foreign object, tribal leader Xi (N!xau) decides to take the bottle back to the gods to restore peace.
I saw the Broadway play 'The Book of Mormon" and was reminded of the same movie.

Sounds like you knew him in his later years. By then he had settled down a bit.

The trouble with those who worship critical thinking is that they often presume they have a lock on the stuff. He did not suffer fools gladly, and a fool was anyone who disagreed with him.
To be sure, I used to egg him on a little. But I would later regret it. The self-congratulatory donkey could chew up an entire day.

Never in my life had I encountered a more unpleasant person than AlanF. He was fine if you acquiesced to him . . . but if you disagreed to any significant degree, he would launch incredible streams of non-stop insults. My greatest fear was that his cherished evolution teachings might be correct and that he was the end result. Without specifically naming him, (which would be mean) ‘In the Last of the Last Days’ tells of a voracious opponent whose headstone no doubt calls the cemetery caretaker a moron for supposing the surrounding flowers are creations of God. 
I didn’t like him very much.

AlanF would talk about Neo-Babylonian chronology until my eyes glazed and my ears were bleeding, and he'd still only be at the start of what he wanted to share. I'd have to open a bottle of fine wine and break off a piece of well-molded and stinky cheese to get him on another topic so I could rest.

AlanF commented quite often on this forum when he was alive. He and @scholar JW had a history going back for many years —decades—according to scholar JW. Same with Ann O’maly whom scholar JW also appeared to have communicated with for many past years. 
I hated AlanF’s position on evolution and complete dismissal of much of Genesis but I appreciated that both he and Ann O’maly were much more knowledgeable about neo-Babylonian chronology that I am. By a long shot. They both corrected me publicly with good evidence on several mistakes I made here while learning the topic. I always appreciate corrections by anyone, even a "public reproof." 

No. I don’t know what controversy you mean. Sorry. 
 
And I hope you will say something about how you are faring these days. Hadn’t heard from you in quite a while. 

That is the controversy. Don't you see it? 

This is another form of poisoning the well. The Watchtower relies on the world of archaeology to get the dates for Cyrus from flawed material. But the "ten-times-better" archaeological material is dismissed. The Watchtower does nothing but try to sow seed of doubt about the "ten-times-better" material. Note:
*** kc p. 187 Appendix to Chapter 14 ***
From a secular viewpoint, such lines of evidence might seem to establish the Neo-Babylonian chronology with Nebuchadnezzar’s 18th year (and the destruction of Jerusalem) in 587/6 B.C.E. However, no historian can deny the possibility that the present picture of Babylonian history might be misleading or in error. It is known, for example, that ancient priests and kings sometimes altered records for their own purposes. Or, even if the discovered evidence is accurate, it might be misinterpreted by modern scholars or be incomplete so that yet undiscovered material could drastically alter the chronology of the period.
Back in the 1870's when Barbour and Russell considered Ptolemy to be the only source of Cyrus 1st year as 586 BCE [sic], they praised Ptolemy as the astronomer with whom ALL reputable scholars agreed with. After it was discovered that it was the same data from Ptolemy that demolished 606 BCE, the WTS has done nothing but try to sow seeds of doubt about him. 
*** g72 5/8 p. 28 When Did Babylon Desolate Jerusalem? ***
As Ptolemy used the reigns of ancient kings (as he understood them) simply as a framework in which to place astronomical data, . . . Hence both Ptolemy’s Canon and “VAT 4956” might even have been derived from the same basic source. They could share mutual errors.
 
*** w77 12/15 p. 747 Insight on the News ***
How certain can we be of the presently accepted chronology of the ancient Babylonian Empire? For many years, chronologists have put heavy reliance on the king list of Claudius Ptolemy, a second-century Greek scholar often considered the greatest astronomer of antiquity.
However, in his new book “The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy,” the noted physicist Robert R. Newton of Johns Hopkins University offers proof that many of Ptolemy’s astronomical observations were “deliberately fabricated” to agree with his preconceived theories “so that he could claim that the observations prove the validity of his theories.”
In its comments on Newton’s book, “Scientific American” magazine notes: “Ptolemy’s forgery may have extended to inventing the length of reigns of Babylonian kings. Since much modern reconstruction of Babylonian chronology has been based on a list of kings that Ptolemy used to pinpoint the dates of alleged Babylonian observations, according to Newton ‘all relevant chronology must now be reviewed and all dependence upon Ptolemy’s [king] list must be removed.’”—October 1977, p. 80.
 
Not only have the accusations been thoroughly debunked, the WTS publications have been so anxious to present information that sows seeds of doubt, that they have been caught quoting authors and experts out of context to make it seem they were saying something that the author didn't say. One example is one that you allude to when you speak of the old Assyrian mythological king list where kings reigned for thousands of years instead of reasonable lengths of time. Quotations from books referring to those pseudo-chronologies have been used (even in the 1981 "kc" Appendix I quoted above) to make it look like they referred to the Neo-Babylonian chronology. Sometimes the "trick" has been to speak of ancient pre-astronomy Babylonian chronology (Nimrod/Hammurabi/etc) and make it seem like Neo-Babylonian chronology is being referred to. If this was done on purpose I guess that would be an example of what you called "deviant scholarship." At least I think you would have called it that if I had used such a "trick."
 

There's the tale of A.K. Dewdney, who wrote about a fictional character named Dr. Matrix, an eccentric mathematician.
In one story, Dr. Matrix spends years calculating the optimal way to peel a banana, determining the exact number of slits needed and their precise angles.
The idea of focusing on minutiae without practical purpose.
But then again, I binge watch TV with six seasons of 27 episodes each, which is worse.

@Arauna, just to respond more comprehensively.
It is not "scholarly deviancy" to claim that the WTS only relies on Babylonian sources. The WTS rejects the accuracy of the later Greek sources as shown in the comments about those sources in "Insight." The WTS rejects the accuracy of Olympiad dates that later Greek sources began tying events to.  And Insight admits very explicitly that it was ONLY Babylonian sources which gives them the date 530 BCE. And the date 530 is for the beginning of Cambyses reign (not the death of Cyrus)  The 530 date itself is not attested in the evidence, only the date, 523 and 522 which are said to be in the 7th year of Cambyses, so it's a matter of counting back from 523. If the WTS is only using the source they claim to be using, then it is only an assumption that Cyrus also ended his reign in 530. That assumption is based on the business tablets, and the fact that there have only been tablets discovered for years 0 through 9 of Cyrus. The WTS rejects that these same business tablets tell us about the rest of the Neo-Babylonian chronology. The WTS indicates that evidence may someday be found that would adjust the chronology in favor of the WTS, so the mere fact that the last discovered tablets in Cyrus reign are for his 9th year is not very meaningful if a 10th or 11th year might show up in the future.   The WTS explains in the Insight's Chronology article why those Greek sources are not irrefutable. Those Greek sources might also assume (correctly) that Cyrus died in his 9th year, but they do NOT tell us that year was 530 BCE.  Therefore, the "impression given above" was actually correct, and not a "deviancy."  The tablet the WTS uses is actually a tablet of inferior quality, a much later copy of a copy, with multiple corrections, and places where the copyist admits he had to try to fill in gaps because it was damaged and needed to be restored.
So, if the relatively poor and indirect evidence pointing to 530 BCE is absolute, then it is most definitely NOT the only date that is secularly absolute. ALL of the dates of the Neo-Babylonian period can be discovered in exactly the same way, including the date for Nineveh's fall in 612 BCE, the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar's 18th regnal year in 587 BCE, and Cyrus' accession year in 539 BCE. But there are something on the order of 40,000* of these business tablets dated to Nebuchadnezzar's reign. 
The reign of Nebuchadnezzar is attested not only with about 40,000 tablets, averaging about 1,000 for every year, but several of the years of his reign are attested in the exact same manner astronomically as the 7th year of Cambyses, as explained in the Insight book. And although several of these are also through eclipses, there are also several more important planetary observations which Rolf Furuli himself admits (in his book) can ONLY be associated with a year of his reign that places his 18th year in 587 BCE.
*I got the 40,000 number when I attended a seminar when I visited the British Museum in 2018 and met a man named Dr. Gareth Brereton who works there as a curator of Assyrian and Babylonian artefacts. He was in charge of a lecture on Assyria and Ashurbanipal at the time. I was also able to contact him one additional time in 2020 for some related follow-up questions. 
If you are right, that 530 is an absolute date, then ALL of Nebuchadnezzar's years are at least ten-times-better absolute dates. 

Sometimes, just for fun, I sometimes try to predict the responses of the more easily predictable participants, and put it in white on white text to show my oldest son what I was guessing. You can just take your mouse and highlight the blank text after the last sentence. In this case, you had two responses. I missed the first one about needing to supply an event, but I hit the second one right on target. In case your mouse highlight thing doesn't work I'll show you what I had typed:

In this case, of course, m.o. means modus operandi. I just meant that the usual thing to do instead of answering a question is to try to "poison the well" of astronomical evidence by associating it with an apostate. In this case, an apostate who was disfellowshipped specifically for sharing his research with other Witnesses instead of keeping it to himself as he was told to do.
For the record, of course, no one has to produce a specific event to attach a BCE year to a specific year of a king's reign. If you know someone reigned for 43 years and you know the BCE date for year 7 is, then you know also know year 17, and 18, and 19, and 20. He could have been asleep the entire year, or insane and eating grass the entire year, or conquering Tyre for all we know. If you know that I'm 66, and you don't know any specific event in my life during 1968, it doesn't mean I didn't exist in 1968.
Still, I can always change the question but I think you will either say you don't know or you will be otherwise just as evasive as you were with this last one: 
What year does the astronomical evidence point to for Nebuchadnezzar's 17th year? (Or, you can use his 16th or his 14th or his 25th, 26th, 27th or 28th or 32nd, or his 42nd year.) Nothing this time, sorry.

Arauna:
That all sounds very reasonable to me … but of what practical use is it today that makes this issue worth the considerable effort?

As you probably already know, the WTS publications are correct when they state:
*** kc p. 187 Appendix to Chapter 14 ***
Business tablets: Thousands of contemporary Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablets have been found that record simple business transactions, stating the year of the Babylonian king when the transaction occurred. Tablets of this sort have been found for all the years of reign for the known Neo-Babylonian kings in the accepted chronology of the period.
Literate Babylonians from various cities all over the empire could write "17th year of Nabopolassar" [with the month and day] or "18th year of Nebuchadnezzar" [with the month and day] just as readily as we would write 2/25/2024. And there is apparently an average of about 1,000 of these contracts per year covering EVERY year of EVERY Neo-Babylonidan king.
This means that if you could just put them in the right order, you would have the entire string of dates covered from Nabopolassar, to Nebuchadnezzar, to Amel-Marduk, to Neriglissar, to Labashi-Marduk, to Nabonidus, to Cyrus, to Cambyses, etc.
At that point you would only need to identify the BCE year for any ONE of those years and you would know the entire Neo-Babylonian chronology of every king. Evidence for any one year, serves as evidence for every other year. All of them interlock with no exceptions and no contradictions.
In other words, if you had evidence somehow that the first year of Cyrus was 538 BCE, that would also serve as evidence that the 14th year of Nabopolassar was 612 BCE. If you had evidence that the last year of Nabopolassar was 604, that would serve as the same evidence that Nebuchadnezzar's accession year was 605, and his first year was 604, and his 18th was 587 and his 43rd was 562. 
This is why a discussion of the actual 'solid' evidence for the Neo-Babylonian chronology is the best foundation for discovering the date of Nineveh's destruction, or the fall of Jerusalem, or the fall of Babylon, or the start of Evil-Merodach's reign.
I think you can tell, @xero, that a discussion that focuses on just the secular evidence would be useful to more easily reach exactly the same goal. And that goal could not only be more easily reached, but also more easily verified and double-checked and triple-checked, and quadruple-checked from various independent sources. 
I say this because there is no astronomical event recorded for the 14th year of Nabopolassar which is the evidenced date for the Fall of Nineveh.
But there is an astronomical event dated to the accession year of Nabopolassar in 626 BCE. That fact alone can tell us that Nineveh fell in 612 BCE. There is a separate astronomical event dated to the 18th year of Nabopolassar in 616. That fact alone can tell us that Nineveh fell in 612 BCE. And putting those two independent pieces of evidence together we have double-checked the date. But when the entire string of Neo-Babylonian kings is put in the right order, we also have astronomical observations reported for Neb 14 = 591, Neb 16 = 589, Neb 18 = 587, Neb 25 = 580, Neb 26 = 579, Neb 27 =578, Neb 28 = 577, etc. Each one of those pieces of evidence is ALSO therefore evidence that Nabopolassar 14 = 612, so that even an observation under Nebuchadnezzar becomes evidence that Nineveh fell in 612 BCE.  Of course, this also means that, when you put the entire string of Neo-Babylonian kings in order, any evidence that 539 is the correct date for Cyrus conquering Babylon is the same evidence that Nebuchadnezzar's 18th is 587. There is no such thing as choosing one without the other, UNLESS you are willing to discard the evidence from literally THOUSANDS of business documents, and also discard the double-checked, triple-checked, . . . octuple-checked astronomical data. And it would be highly hypocritical, because whatever reason you tried to give for discarding THOUSANDS of piecies of excellent evidence would apply moreso against the much weaker and less attested evidence for Cyrus in 539.
The reason for moving that kind of a discussion to another thread is because there will invariably be someone who is so fearful of the actual evidence that they will quickly say that first you have to prove exactly when the 70 years started and ended. Or, first you have to tell me why secular scholars haven't decided on whether it was Nebuchadnezzar's 18th or 19th year when Jerusalem was destroyed. Or, first you have to prove that Russell was really wrong in promoting Zionism. Those types of new goal posts and moving of goal posts can be distracting to someone who is more interested in the strength of the evidence for attaching BCE dates to the Neo-Babylonian chronology. 

And, as discussed previously about Gerard Gertoux on the forum, the above link you provided gets into some of those exact details that show how the Neo-Babylonian chronology is "set in stone:"
In your link, Gertoux states:
The fall of the Assyrian empire, which took place in October 609 BCE after the battle of Harran, is characterized by a quadruple synchronisms, since the year of Assur-uballit II corresponds to year 17 of Nabopolassar to Josiah's year 31 and year 1 of Necho II.
According to the biography of Adad-Guppi12, mother of Nabonidus, Nabopolassar reigned 21 years, then Nebuchadnezzar 43 years, Amel-Marduk 2 years, Neriglissar 4 years just before Nabonidus. According to the Hillah's stele there were 54 years between the destruction of the temple of Sin, in Harran, and the beginning of the reign of Nabonidus. According to a Babylonian chronicle (BM 21901) and Adad-Guppi's stele, the temple of Harran was destroyed in the year 16 of Nabopolassar.
Dated lunar eclipses are: year 1 and 2 of Merodachbaladan (March 19/20 721 BCE, March 8/9 and September 1/2 720 BCE); year 5 of Nabopolassar (April 21/22 621 BCE); year 2 of !ama#-#uma-ukîn (April 10/11 666 BCE); year 42 of Nebuchadnezzar (March 2/3 562 BCE). A diary (VAT 4956) contains numerous astronomical conjunctions in years 37 and 38 of Nebuchadnezzar dated from astronomy in 568 and 567 BCE. An astronomical journal (BM 38462)17 list some lunar eclipses in the years 1 to 27 of Nebuchadnezzar which are dated from 604 to 578 BCE.
I think it was pretty brave of Gerard Gertoux to stand up against the WTS tradition publicly and show just why the accepted, evidenced chronology is so difficult to change and try to discredit.

I'm not a fan of goal-post shifting, inventing of new goal-posts, or editing of people's comments and arguments. There is a natural flow which gets interrupted when those uncomfortable with a conversation try to steer it or control it. It's stifling and unless Jehovah decides to do it, I'm against it.

...but does your car have lifting hooks on the roof so when you stop for a break at McDonald's for a hamburger, you can have a helicopter take you back to the Territory?