JW Insider

1 hour ago, Space Merchant said:

people pushing to make it legal to the point the teachings of making such a legality has been on TED Talks already.

I'm sure both TED talks and LifeSiteNews would be happy for me to quote the following article in its entirety to clarify what some might find misleading in your statement, but I will only quote some relevant excerpts:

-------------------start of quotations from the site:  https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/ted-speaker-pedophilia-is-an-unchangeable-sexual-orientation-anyone-could-b

Introducing her theme with the “story” of “Jonas,” a 19-year-old pedophile who studies law and plays soccer, she asked her listeners to put aside their revulsion for pedophiles.

“Anyone could be born a pedophile,” she told them.

According to the medical student, pedophilia is just another “unchangeable sexual orientation just like, for example, heterosexuality.” Heine asked her audience to differentiate between sexual attraction to children, which she believes should be accepted and tolerated as involuntary “feelings,” and child sexual abuse, which she underscored was always wrong.

. . . For Heine, pedophilia is not something that someone actually does but something that someone would like to do, as a sexual preference that they would “live out freely,” if only it weren’t contrary to leading “an upright life.”

 . . . “We shouldn’t increase the sufferings of pedophiles by excluding them, by blaming and mocking them,” Heine said. “By doing that, WE increase their isolation and WE increase the chance of child sexual abuse.”  

Central to Heine’s argument is that pedophiles are not to blame for their feelings and thoughts, only for their actions.  . .

According to Breitbart, once it was posted to YouTube, Heine’s lecture resulted in a massive online backlash. In response, the organizers of the independent TEDx event removed the video, and the founding TED Talks media organization has been trying to remove “illegal copies” from the internet. . . .

“After reviewing the talk, we believe it cites research in ways that are open to serious misinterpretation. This led some viewers to interpret the talk as an argument in favor of an illegal and harmful practice,” they wrote.

. . .

TED Talks later added to its statement that it does not support or advocate for pedophilia.

-----------------------------------------end of excerpt quotations from site --------------------------------

1 hour ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

we still have the record of over 5,000 cases by 1,006 perpetrators.

I think that's very doubtful, unless you think that measuring abuse by all JW congregation members equates to just measuring only the priests and responsible officials of these Catholic diocese. Also, this is just Pennsylvania. You would need to add those reports from Massachusetts (made public in 2002 was it?) and several other states to get a parity population of Catholics here that matches that of the (JW) numbers from Australia.

I'm not saying we don't also have a serious problem that most Witnesses know very little about or can't acknowledge. I just don't think you can so easily make a true comparison from these separate "snapshots" of reports/studies. They cover different statistical "populations."

One thing in the report I found disturbing is that this was based on church records that detailed the crimes, but also detailed systemic cover-ups and even the promotion of priests and church officials involved in the cover-up. This went all the way up to cardinals and arch-bishops, ultimately even the Vatican.

The fight over statute of limitations laws that always comes up as an issue after these reports also tends to become embroiled in its own coverup on the political side. Although anti-Catholicism is common, there are often enough US politicians in high places who fight the change to statute of limitations laws because they are convinced that extending the prosecution window truly would bankrupt the Catholic Church. Governor Brown in California and Governor Cuomo in New York have been rumored to accept that "line" from the Catholic Church. But keeping these laws in effect, knowing the typical way in which abused children wait until they are adults before gaining the courage to face this publicly, these laws help produce a coverup of the number of cases that would otherwise be reported.

1 hour ago, Space Merchant said:

That being said, the Middle East has changed, I mean, it looked way nicer back in the day prior to Wahhabism, Iran being an example

There is virtually no Wahabbism in Iran except among the few remaining ISIS supporters and some Sunni extremist terrorists. Saudi Arabia would love to export more of it, but most Muslims hate it. So far, their society wouldn't allow it from the perspective of the government. It's true that the overwhelming majority of Iranian society is rural, conservative, but that is apparently what they want. Iran is still a freer society than the Arabian peninsula. Iran is not strict about the burka (or even lesser coverings for women) where it is still consider extreme and too piously self-righteous. Women are often a part of the government in Iran and the social hierarchy. Iranian women can still visit their conservative grandparents in the country wearing the headscarfs and then go visit their cousins in Lebanon on the weekend and wear a bikini.

Both Syria and Iran have been, even very recently, some of the more free countries in the Middle East. Iran is an Islamic Republic, but it's a "kind of democracy" but with a theocratic layer of government that acts like a very conservative "supreme court" that can block laws in the name of religion. They, the mullahs, are also corrupt, trying to control capitalist endeavors. But it is not illegal to be a Christian or Jew in Iran. By comparison there is nothing like democracy in Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc. Human rights violations are not as much of a problem in Iran as they are in say, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

53 minutes ago, Gone Away said:

I mean, what will mongooses do in the New World? Crack Brazil nuts for us?

True, it said that the mongoose relies on "God-given" defenses and abilities to defeat the cobra. No more anachronistic blaming of the teeth of saber-toothed tigers at least indirectly on Satan and the fall of the first human pair.

13 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Watchtower publications speak of the six days of creation being "epochs" and the period prior to their commencement being "aeons." Jehovah's Witnesses are not young-earth creationists.

Just an aside but this is a fairly recent article in agreement with TTH's statement above:

*** w11 2/15 pp. 8-9 pars. 10-13 Holy Spirit—At Work in Creation! ***

• 10 The Bible goes on to describe what God did during a series of creative days. These are not 24-hour days but are epochs. . . . 13 After aeons had passed and God had produced innumerable animate and inanimate works, the earth was no longer “formless and waste.”

But what do we make of a previous Watchtower article, just 15 years earlier, where we still have this:

*** w96 4/1 p. 13 par. 10 Praise the King of Eternity! ***

• 10 Wonderful developments took place on earth during the six creative “days” of Genesis chapter 1, each day covering thousands of years.

We know that there is absolutely no reason to put any emphasis on the "6,000 years of man's existence on earth" unless we believe that each of the creative days was 7,000 years long and that the millennium should therefore "fit" into God's rest day before the 7th day is finished. This is why we believe the 7th day is now coming to its close.

*** w98 7/15 p. 15 par. 6 Have You Entered Into God’s Rest? ***

• As “the seventh day” comes to its close, the earth will have become a global paradise inhabited eternally by a family of perfect humans. (Isaiah 45:18) “The seventh day” is set aside for, or dedicated to, the outworking and fulfilling of God’s will regarding the earth and humankind. In that sense it is “sacred.” . . .

  Though “the seventh day”—God’s rest day—is still in progress, . . . . [v]ery soon, the Messianic King, Jesus Christ, will take action. . . . During Christ’s Thousand Year Reign, Jesus . . . will bring earth and mankind to the state that God had purposed.

*** w94 7/15 p. 29 How Accurate Is the Jewish Calendar? ***

• Many thousands of years went by between the first creative day and the sixth, when Adam was created. Dating the creation of Adam at the same time as that of the physical heavens and earth is neither Scriptural nor scientific. . . . Still, how was it determined that the “Era of the Creation” began in 3761 B.C.E.?

[Of course, the point of the article was to dismiss the traditional Jewish calendar date of 3761 B.C.E. for the creation of Adam, even though our own chronology is only different by 265 years.]

*** w94 9/1 p. 6 Science, Religion, and the Search for Truth ***

• Religion Gives Creation a Bad Name  In a supposed attempt to uphold the Bible, the “creationists”—mostly allied with fundamentalist Protestants—have insisted that the earth and the universe are less than 10,000 years old. This extreme view has invited the ridicule of geologists, astronomers, and physicists, for it contradicts their findings.
• . . . Another excess of religion is the way some interpret the six ‘days’ of creation. Some fundamentalists insist that these days are literal, restricting earthly creation to a period of 144 hours. This provokes skepticism in scientists, for they feel that this claim conflicts with clear scientific observations. However, it is the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible—not the Bible itself—that is at odds with science. The Bible does not say that each creative “day” was 24 hours long; indeed, it includes all these ‘days’ in the much longer “day that Jehovah God made earth and heaven,” showing that not all Biblical ‘days’ contained just 24 hours. (Genesis 2:4) Some could have been many thousands of years in length.

The last sentence there was a very important change of doctrine because it allowed that each creative day might be a different length. Of course, this could potentially spoil the idea that the 7th day had to be 7,000 years in length. The idea that each creative day had to be exactly 7,000 years in length goes all the way back to the Photo-Drama of Creation and was a major theme.

It was still a crucial piece of the "1975" arguments, both before (as cautionary) and was used immediately after the "failure" of 1975 expectations, as a possible reason for the failure:

*** w76 7/15 p. 436 pars. 17-19 Keeping a Balanced View of Time ***

• There are reasons why we cannot know this. For one thing, even though Bible chronology clearly indicates that we have reached the mark of six thousand years since the time of the creation of the first human, Adam, it does not tell us just how long after that event the sixth creative day came to its close and the seventh creative period or “day,” God’s great rest day, began. . . . 18 But that great rest day did not begin immediately after Adam’s creation. Other events took place after Adam’s creation but before the close of the sixth creative day. One of these is of great importance to all of us. That is the creation of the first woman, Eve. . . .  19 How much time elapsed between the creation of the man and that of the woman? The Bible does not reveal this.

Again, the timing of the creation of Eve is meaningless in this context, unless we believe that the creative days were exactly 7,000 years each.

The Watchtower was still explicitly arguing for each creative day being 7,000 years even 10 years later. The following from 1987 is one of the last Watchtower articles in Fred Franz style on a Fred Franz topic outside of his work on Revelation - Its Grand Climax At Hand which was also completed in 1987/88

*** w87 1/1 p. 30 Questions From Readers ***
Does that Jubilee correspond to the period following God’s creative week of 49,000 years?

• Because the number 49 occurs in both cases, it might seem that the Jubilee would foreshadow the time following the end of a creative week of 49,000 years. But . . . what occurred during Israel’s Jubilee corresponds more with what will occur during the Millennium, the last thousand years of such creative week. . . . Second, a study of the fulfillment of Bible prophecy and of our location in the stream of time strongly indicate that each of the creative days (Genesis, chapter 1) is 7,000 years long. It is understood that Christ’s reign of a thousand years will bring to a close God’s 7,000-year ‘rest day,’ the last ‘day’ of the creative week. (Revelation 20:6; Genesis 2:2, 3) Based on this reasoning, the entire creative week would be 49,000 years long.
• Noting the similarity in numbers, some have compared the 49 years of the ancient Jubilee cycle to such 49,000 years of the creative week. . . .  and humans have existed, not for 49,000 years, but for about 6,000 years. The Bible shows that some time after Adam and Eve were created,. . . . By the end of the Millennium, mankind will have been raised to human perfection, completely free from inherited sin and death. Having thus brought to an end the last enemy (death passed on from Adam), Christ will hand the Kingdom back to his Father at the end of the 49,000-year creative week.—1 Corinthians 15:24-26.

I might move this discussion under a more appropriate topic, but I started it here because, even recently, we do still present ourselves as "young earth creationists." We allow that the earth could have been here for billions of years, but that the creative days were only on the order of thousands of years long. We never print a statement saying they could have been tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions. Therefore, this is still extremely young for the aforementioned geologists who find their evidence for creative days going back at least 125 MILLION years for plants bearing forth seed according to their kind.

Something happened to the doctrine between 1987 and 1994, but I don't know if there is any more information on the change other than just the fact that 1994 contradicts 1987 and we should therefore consider it to be 'new light.' But no one has commented on how this might change our view of the millennium fitting into the 7th day. Or whether we should still use Hebrews to show that the 7th day lasts for thousands of years.

• (Hebrews 4:1) . . .Therefore, since a promise of entering into his rest remains. . .

5 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

We ... They. . .

Yes, I'm sure it's humor. But even humor needs to be down-voted on occasion.

@Gone Away, Thanks for pointing to that thread from last year. I just skimmed it and I think it included just about all I personally would ever want to say about the topic again. I am always tempted to just rewrite from scratch, but not this time. Thanks again.

3 minutes ago, Gone Away said:

That's better. I was living on the street at 16 after experiencing "Catholic disfellowshiping" for not playing by the rules. I knew that wasn't right because I wasn't even a member!

Wow! I think you should find a Catholic discussion forum and bash that religion for a few years.

6 minutes ago, Gone Away said:

But on the point, I dont think this could be referring to "children" literally as it seems unlikely that these would be "disfellowshipped"?

It's not a new point. A disfellowshipped, grown child, not living at home should be shunned by the family except for absolutely necessary business that may need to be conducted with the child. This "child" is at least 18. The economy since 2008 has wreaked havoc with this rule, because so many more children in the 18-30 category are no longer able to get out on their own, and more disfellowshipped "children" in that age group claim it's economically necessary to remain at home.

Luke is also the one who gives extra attention to women and women's concerns. The ability to empathize with women has made some think that the author of Luke actually was a woman.

That said, it's not quite true what you said. I include things like "It's easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle, the 2-by-4 in your own eye, etc. (See  Mark/Matt and Matt) The exaggerated imagery gets attention. 

1 hour ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Jesus uses hyperbole all the time.

True. And in spite of the seriousness of the overall message, several of Jesus illustrations reach a level we might even call "comedy."

2 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Kurt is NYT's

Name was familiar, but his specific role was a blur. NYT has been as untrustworthy as others. I notice, now, that when I clicked on the Twitter account, that the above had been the #1 point of at least 8 separate points made.

3 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

War deaths are  ALWAYS somewhere around 70% deaths for non-combatants..

I've heard numbers like this, too. I recall that when Obama's collateral damage numbers seemed too high, the administration chose to at least call all males of potential military age "combatants." Whether they were doctors, nurses, teachers, students, or whatever clearly didn't matter. Of course, he was neither the first or last to try to cover for a very successful imperialist agenda.

3 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

To be overly upset about what is happening "over there"

I personally should be more upset, based on Bible admonition to love one's neighbor as oneself, but I am sadly still "underly" upset. It's difficult to empathize as we should. As Witnesses, we can fall back a bit on John 3:16, but it's difficult for us to fathom that kind of love, even for "enemies" and those not related to us in the faith.

3 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

in the fog of war, such stuff has always happened.   It is the nature of the beast.

Also the fact that when undenied State Department videos and communications get released through FOIA or leaks, etc., we find that it was not through the "fog" of war, but through highly focused satellite lenses. What we hear about as accidental collateral damage is too often the primary focus. As if the existence of combatants are the excuse, and sometimes, therefore, the actual collateral damage when real targets, at times, really are the women, children, the sick, elderly, life-sustaining infrastructure, food supplies, clean water supplies, etc.

Imperialists have long known that war must often focus on the latter to bring real terror and chaos to the enemy.

Don't know Kurt Eichenwald, but his statement is very well put. It is absolutely correct based on all the evidence we have about US support of the Saudis against Yemen.  And it now fits several recent admissions by the US.

3 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

Your statement without explanation AND PROOF !,  is completely useless.

I suspect that this Kurt guy has already been providing evidence and posting evidence of this claim for a couple years. At least I know that several others have been providing evidence of this particular involvement for that long. US Senators have put forth measures to halt US support of Yemen bombing raids. The US has admitted to picking the targets for Saudi Arabia, not speaking out against the atrocities, selling them the equipment, and managing the refueling process for the bombing raids with our own ships in the region. Obama favored bombing people here with drones that ended up hitting wedding parties, school buses, hospitals, women and children. All this from Obama's leadership through and including Trump's leadership has continued to turn Yemen into one of the worst humanitarian crises in our time. Cholera, famine, etc. The United States finds its own reasons to continue supporting and promoting war crimes, and this often means that the United States must align itself with the worst regimes it can find. If ever a "need" for regime change arises, and the US needs to invade another country, we will always have the excuse we need. Of course, I am not picking on the US. Every imperial power does such things.

When something is close to common knowledge outside the US, but is kept from US citizens through the corporate media filter (including Vox, Fox, Vice, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc.) it's usually still easy to get bits of the truth through accidental admission or state department correspondence.

In this case just go to Google (which also now filters against truth about US involvement in atrocities in the name of protecting us from "fake news") and type in "US support of Saudi Arabia against Yemen."

You will get many sites that report on what is already public about this war. (Some of the things I said above.) But the most important clue is how General Mattis, for example, responds to the allegations, by not denying them and admitting there is truth to them:

• Mattis said the U.S. assistance, which includes limited intelligence support and refueling of coalition jets, was ultimately aimed at bringing the war toward a negotiated, U.N.-brokered resolution.  (Reuters)
• “We need to get this to a negotiated settlement, and we believe our policy right now is correct for doing this,” Mattis told reporters, as he flew back to Washington from the Middle East. (Reuters)

You can't trust many headlines on their own even when they all say the same thing from 100 different sources. But if you keep in mind the portions that the US has already admitted, then several of these results from the first page of Google can be more revealing:

2 hours ago, Space Merchant said:

I was being very brief, but yes, in the EU, mainly the UK, hate crimes have been on an all time high and it is mostly directed by people of a specific race and or religious belief

Thanks. I understand much better what you were saying now. I agree with more of it this time around. ?

Yeaaahh!

I know persons who have been pushing for the "PVG" program going on 40 years now. It's really great to see it happen! I hope it expands further. Could also legitimize the work of the HLC in some hospitals where they are currently under suspicion too.

1 hour ago, Space Merchant said:

It may as well be the case for it is stated by former exjws known as anti-jws, having both jws and exjws (pretty much atheists) that a stabbing of a jw in the UK somewhere was a hate crime by means of influence, and this was even stated by the UK gov't, of all people, Theresa May, who is aware of religious hate crime due to influence, granted the hate spreading of muslims in the UK, it is done to jws too. 

I wish I knew exactly what you are saying. I haven't kept up with any hate crime issues in the UK. I think I follow a lot of what you have said, but I can't tell if I am reading you as intended, and I can't say that I totally agree with some apparent assumptions of yours.

I think you are saying that it may very well be the case that the perpetrator will turn out to be a disfellowshipped person. I meant the kind of disfellowshipped person who doesn't feel that he can come back to the fold, therefore I also called him an ex-JW. The idea that he has psychological issues seems obvious to me, based on the type of crime, although I really don't know much of anything about psychiatry.

But then you responded that I might be right because "it is stated by former exjws known as anti-jws, having both jws and exjws (pretty much atheists) that a stabbing of a jw in the UK somewhere was a hate crime by means of influence . . ." I think you are saying (in the next part of the sentence) that the UK has acknowledged that there are hate crimes against Muslims that are influenced from anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate speech. Perhaps you are saying that exjws who are anti-JWs are also influenced by anti-JW hate speech. This is always possible, although I would guess that the combination of factors influencing a person to do this crime will not be clearly traceable to influence by others. My guess is that he is mentally unstable and that whatever action was taken against him personally is perceived as a humiliation or rejection that he perceives he cannot or will not be able to overcome. Rather than merely producing anger, he is lashing out wildly and perceives himself to be punishing the system that is humiliating him, rejecting him, or treating him unjustly.

What you speak about is another possibility, that of a person (likely unstable) being influenced by others to lash out based on a frenzy whipped up by others. And another possibility is that the person really was treated unjustly and knows no other world, or feels trapped that he has no other means of survival but to to lash back at the "power" over him.

What I don't believe is a generalization that exjws are pretty much atheists. Perhaps the most vocal online are, and even there I wouldn't know. I suspect that out of one million exJWs in the world, that 990,000 just drifted into a different type of belief in God that didn't require certain activities that they no longer believe are a requirement from God. Of the other remaining 10,000, many of those are quite angry at policies that left them without access to their loved ones, or made them angry enough to look for reasons to dismiss religion altogether. This same group would be expected to produce the online opposers.

3 hours ago, indagator said:

Probably best to stick with the updated edition.

I get it, and thanks for the advice. If I were to buy every book I wanted to read, I would have spent tens of thousands, quite literally, and in the most literal sense of the word literal. ?

On 8/6/2018 at 12:18 PM, indagator said:

Happy reading.

It's exciting to see so much detail that turns out to be important. I had skimmed some of this before, but missed its relevance, because I had purposely dismissed it as unimportant. To me this info on Ιαω was like those books on the DSS (Qumram texts) that pushed so hard to make them relevant to early Christianity, John the Baptist, etc. I took the lot with a grain of salt. (Yes, pun intended, sorry!) But I realize that there really is a lot to learn even from those books if we can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Also, I was on a trek last year to get some well-respected references on early Christian physical artifacts and had a museum contact give me some good leads. Turns out Shaw's book was among the recommendations, although I was looking into several other points too. While just last week getting a copy of Shaw's book I ended up picking up some other books that I had delayed looking at due to price. But some of these are available only at libraries, and I am trying to work through a few things at once here, as I only visit the library once a week for two hours max.

So I hope you will stick around and be patient with me. I'm only about 25% through Shaw, but I'll definitely keep at it. I'm guessing you've also taken an interest in some of the other issues I'm looking into. So I hope you'll stick around for some other topics too.

I have just read pages 105 - 130 of this paper linked below and found its organized approach valuable. The main point in earlier pages and in the conclusion deal with the skepticism over the traditional/Biblical etymology, but the study leads to some good evidence about various possibilities of pronunciation and spelling. I know that Shaw already covers some of this, too. But I like the organized tables and charts. I found it by reading some more of Didier Fontaine's blog. I had seen areopage links in many places before but hadn't realized it was all him.

https://www.academia.edu/23163338/Making_Sense_of_the_Divine_Name_in_Exodus_From_Etymology_to_Literary_Onomastics

2 hours ago, Space Merchant said:

It would also seem that the New Guy, is taking a liking of you.

I think I'd recognize that "New Guy" anywhere. From what I can see, it's one guy in 30 persons, and 30 persons in one guy. He takes the idea of "trinity" to a whole new order of magnitude.

The following review of the NWT is in French regarding the French edition (2018) of the "2013 Revised NWT" but the review is good and very accurate (imo). It's from an excellent scholar -- the same one who @indagator highlighted for his excellent review of Frank Shaw's book. Currently it's the most recent content on his amazing blog. So you can find it here: http://areopage.net/blog/ or here: http://areopage.net/blog/2018/07/25/tmn-revisee-2018/

38 minutes ago, Nicole said:

“The suspicious device was made to look like a real bomb but in the end, it was found to be fake.”

If there are surveillance videos, I think they will catch him, and most US KH I know have such systems now. Probably will turn out to be a DF'd ex-JW with some pscyhological issues. Making fake suspicious-looking devices is usually helpful to investigators, although investigation might have to be done privately if police put their "forensic" budget only into homicide investigations.

They are not taking airline miles unless you have a significant amount. I just got 4 airport vouchers for $25 each for a delayed international flight. They are transferable but can only be used at CDG airport. I thought about donating them because we had already eaten. According to the website we can donate them.

https://apps.jw.org/E_DONRWRDSPROGRAM?selCntctCountryID=232

• It is not feasible to accept mileage transfers at this time. However, if you have a significant amount of mileage that you wish to donate, you are welcome to contact our JW Donations — Rewards Program Help Desk at: (718) 560-8000.
• Airlines sometimes give credits or vouchers for cancelled or unused flights, delayed baggage, etc. If these are transferable, then they can be donated. Please check with the airline to confirm if a credit is transferable before sending it in as a donation.

And yes, some of these old Brooklyn numbers (718) still work even where the office moved upstate.

8 hours ago, indagator said:

If you want something substantial to think about, try this:

It's all Greek onomastica to me.

The discussion about Esther should have been done in a different thread so as not to divert from the Shaw topic. There is a relationship to the questions about the Divine Name, of course. Esther was one of the later books to be added to the canon, and it should be looked at as a potential book that's on the cusp of those that might include/withhold the Divine Name.

I once heard that the Qumram texts might have been a depository for old scrolls that needed either safekeeping or even replacing after being overused or worn out. We have evidence from a nearby time period that there was a question about destroying scrolls by fire, and some Jewish thought at the time was that, even if the scrolls were from "apostates" that the divine name should be cut out first. All the books of the Hebrew Bible were partially represented at Qumram except Esther.

So there! Definitive proof that Esther did not contain the Divine Name. [Just kidding.]

What is true, of course, is that the importance and care taken with respect to the Divine Name would mean that any Jewish scribe or Jewish reader would quickly notice its presence and absence. Those looking to decide about canonicity would notice. Should note, too, that the rabbis and scribes of old (pre-Masorete) played several other word and letter games with the text. Not all of them caught on. There are people today who still waste their time counting the letters of the English Bibles to find the middle verse of the NT or OT, or OT+NT, or the middle letter, or the 666th verse. If you read through old rabbinical commentaries, you see it's NOT just numerologists and cabalistic gematriasts, but well-known and well-respected rabbis doing things like this. I just looked up "cabalistic" in Google and this [below] came up next to the top. But even without gematria, you will still see discussions of the meaning of each letter, and attempts to find significance in alternate spellings of names, etc:

Godwin's Cabalistic Encyclopedia: A Complete Guide to Cabalistic Magick

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1567183247

David Godwin - 1994 - ?Preview - ?More editions

the cabalistic method of explaining the Hebrew Scriptures by means of the cryptographic significance of the words. Thus, the first word of Genesis in Hebrew, meaning "in the beginning," has the numerical value 913, which is the same as that ...

2 hours ago, Gone Away said:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247826.php

Loosen up...please!

I went to the site and read about the kinds of testicular medical problems you can get from tight pants, and it reminded me of a dirty joke. Which you can find here: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/jokes/tight-underwear/1057145/

Or, it's a pretty old joke, so I could just copy it:

The doctor said, "Joe, the good news is I can cure your headaches. The bad news is that it will require castration. You have a very rare condition, which causes your testicles to press on your spine, and the pressure creates one hell of a headache. The only way to relieve the pressure is to remove the testicles."

Joe was shocked and depressed. He wondered if he had anything to live for. He couldn't concentrate long enough to answer, but decided he had no choice but to go under the knife.

When he left the hospital he was without a headache for the first time in 20 years, but he felt like he was missing an important part of himself. As he walked down the street, he realized that he felt like a different person. He could make a new beginning and live a new life. He saw a men's clothing store & thought, "That's what I need - a new suit."

He entered the shop and told the salesman, "I'd like a new suit." The elderly tailor eyed him briefly and said, "Let's see ... size 44 long." Joe laughed, "That's right, how did you know?" "Been in the business 60 years!" Joe tried on the suit. It fit perfectly.

As Joe admired himself in the mirror, the salesman asked, "How about a new shirt?" Joe thought for a moment and then said, "Sure." The salesman eyed Joe and said, "Let's see, 34 sleeve & 16-1/2 neck." Again, Joe was surprised, "That's right, how did you know?" "Been in the business 60 years!"

Joe tried on the shirt, and it fit perfectly. As Joe adjusted the collar in the mirror, the salesman asked, "How about new shoes?" Joe was on a roll and said, "Sure." The salesman eyed Joe's feet and said, "Let's see ... 9-1/2 E." Joe was astonished, "That's right, how did you know?" "Been in the business 60 years!"

Joe tried on the shoes and they fit perfectly. Joe walked comfortably around the shop and the salesman asked, "How about some new underwear?" Joe thought for a second and said, "Sure." The salesman stepped back, eyed Joe's waist and said, "Let's see... size 36."

[wait scroll for it]

Joe laughed. "Ah ha! I got you! I've worn size 34 since I was 18 years old." The salesman shook his head, "You can't wear a size 34. A size 34 underwear would press your testicles up against the base of your spine and give you one hell of a headache.