Malawi and MCP Cards?

[TrueTomHarley]

8 minutes ago, Many Miles said:

Have you read Under Two Dictators (1949) by Margarete Buber? It's an contemporary firsthand account of how female Bible Students coped with Nazi concentration camp oppression. In this case Ravensbrueck. Some of what went on, notably regarding the eating of blood and a couple other things, is pretty telling. A now deceased GB member's wife, Gertrude Poetzinger, was in the same camp at the same time, and she confirmed Buber's account.  It's worth the read.

I’m on that one, too, if I can find it, and if its not too much an arm and a leg as i suspect it might be.

[Many Miles]

23 minutes ago, Thinking said:

Perhaps his hands are tied by his own righteousness …

Yet the Omnipotent One determines that which is righteous. Hence He cannot be tied by His own righteousness because He can make righteous whatever He wants to deem righteous. Whatever the Omnipotent does it is purely His choice. That's the bottom line.

[Many Miles]

3 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

I’m on that one, too, if I can find it, and if its not too much an arm and a leg as i suspect it might be.

It's worth having in your personal library; that's for sure. But you can also ask whatever library you're affiliated with to loan a copy from another library for you.

[TrueTomHarley]

4 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

I’m on that one, too, if I can find it, and if its not too much an arm and a leg as i suspect it might be.

Ah. There it is on Amazon. They’ve made a Kindle version of it which is not too dear. Purchased. To be sure, it’s more than I get for my books, but then I’ve never been through the Holocaust. 

[Many Miles]

6 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Ah. There it is on Amazon. They’ve made a Kindle version of it which is not too dear. Purchased. To be sure, it’s more than I get for my books, but then I’ve never been through the Holocaust. 

Really? On Amazon? Kindle? I'm going to have to look that one up. My hardcopy is a first edition and, though I've read it, the binding is getting a bit cranky with age, and I want to take care of it.

[Many Miles]

11 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

They’ve made a Kindle version of it which is not too dear.

15 smackers is a good deal for that read.

I spent way, way more than that in time and resources to finally find and get a copy a few decades ago. But that was before folks were turning everything into digital stuff.

[Pudgy]

There are millions of free books on Gutenberg.org….

Sometimes I can use a regular search engine ( I prefer Safari ) to find a free downloadable book using TITLE.pdf, or TITLE.epub.

…. with a little effort I got 22 Jack Reacher books for free.

 

[TrueTomHarley]

18 hours ago, George88 said:

Rights! The story of Job in Job 31 comes to mind. In his boldness, Job dared to confront God, demanding to be proven guilty or declared innocent. This raises a fascinating question: Did Job, despite his misguided assumptions, have the right to question the very Being who created him? How does the modern mental state change when we presume to question our creator, as if we possessed greater knowledge than him?

He did confront God and that might read shocking to some. In the end, though, all was forgiven and he was cut considerable slack due to the agonizing stress he was under. His three interrogators, on the other hand, were cut less slack, since they used their good health to pound their fellow into the ground with their ‘holiness’ and assumed ‘theology’ which held that if you suffer, it serves you right. You must have done something wrong.

The scripture from Job that makes our day as Jehovah’s Witnesses—you can almost hear the cymbals crash at Kingdom Hall when it is cited—is “until I die, I will not renounce my integrity.” Right it is that it should be highlighted, for it demonstrates that man can, under the worst of circumstances, maintain integrity to God.

But it is part of a package: The full verse reads: “It is unthinkable for me to declare you men righteous! Until I die, I will not renounce my integrity!”

Part of keeping his integrity lies in not letting these three bullies gaslight him, not ‘declaring them righteous.’ He knows who he is. He knows he is not what they say, a hypocrite who fully deserves his own downfall. Defending himself before these three louts is part of ‘not renouncing his integrity.’

Apparently, not renouncing his integrity even involves challenging God. Job begins his speech with a preamble just 3 verses earlier: “As surely as God lives, who has deprived me of justice, As the Almighty lives, who has made me bitter.”

Of course he ‘dares challenge his Creator!’ Unless there really is a hellfire, he couldn’t possibly suffer more than he is doing at present! What’s he got to lose? What’s God going to do—kill him? That’s exactly what he wants. Although we go on and on about Job’s faith in the resurrection, even writing a song about it (and it’s a good song, too), the context of his remark appears to show he doesn’t have any faith in a resurrection at all:

He says: “For there is hope even for a tree. If it is cut down, it will sprout again, And its twigs will continue to grow. . . . At the scent of water it will sprout; And it will produce branches like a new plant. But a man dies and lies powerless; When a human expires, where is he? Waters disappear from the sea, And a river drains away and dries up. Man also lies down and does not get up. Until heaven is no more, they will not wake up, Nor will they be aroused from their sleep.” (Job 14: 7-12)

so that the verses we like, the verses that follow, read as though something he would like to see, but fat chance that they will! Wishful thinking they appear to be, no more: 

“O that in the Grave you would conceal me, That you would hide me until your anger passes by, That you would set a time limit for me and remember me! If a man dies, can he live again? I will wait all the days of my compulsory service Until my relief comes. You will call, and I will answer you. You will long for the work of your hands.”

It’s a little hard to tell for sure, but those first verses hardly seem a preamble for a speech lauding God for the resurrection hope.

Nonetheless, God makes it all good at the end. Job makes no accusation to God beyond what can easily be explained by the suffering he undergoes. His companions, under no stress at all, go well beyond anything Job says. ‘What does God care if you do what’s right? It’s impossible to please him. Even the angels can’t do it!’ — they revisit the point several times. ‘The very heavens are not clean in his eyes,’ say they.

While one might come online and chew out an Eliphaz, Bildad, or Zophar, one does not do it with a Job, condemnatory though some of his reasonings were. That role must be reserved for God. Even Elihu, who has words of correction for Job, makes clear his motive: “If you have something to say, reply to me. Speak, for I want to prove you right,”  he says to Job. (33: 32) In the meantime, he’s not going to take advantage of his health to bully a sick man, as the other three fellows do: “Look! I am just like you before the true God; From the clay I too was shaped. So no fear of me should terrify you, And no pressure from me should overwhelm you.” (33: 6-7)

He’s not going to be a Zophar. No one wants to be a Zophar, who to put it in modern terms, visits a patient on a respirator with COVID-19, who has lost his entire family to that plague, has lost everything else as well, who says something rash in his agony, so Zophar responds: “I have heard a reproof that insults me—my understanding impels me to reply.” (!) You almost expect him to challenge Job to a duel! It’s his mission to defend God from any ill talk, regardless of circumstances, but there are times to give it a rest.

You can’t tell a person that their experience is not theirs. No one should try. Everyone will have their say until God debuts with 70 questions to make you say, as did Job, ‘maybe I was a little rash.’ They’re not going to say it to me, or you, only to God after he makes an appearance. Meanwhile, nobody wants to be a Zophar.

 

 

[TrueTomHarley]

9 hours ago, Srecko Sostar said:

So, the famously silly claim that God allows evil on earth because his credibility must be proven and that it takes time, a very long time, in which, among other things, millions of innocent children and adults will be subjected to the greatest suffering and torture, does not hold up to the argument .

The Great Courses professor (David Kyle Johnson: The Big Questions of Philosophy) says that it does makes sense. It alone is logically consistent. He traces it to Augustine and says, ‘Maybe God permits evil because it is essential to his pursuit of his greater goal of allowing free will.’ This is essentially what the Watchtower says, though they develop it more.. Moreover, you who sniff because uneducated ‘dumbbells’ say it today might not sniff upon learning that a highly esteemed and educated philosopher also said it.

Johnson extracts a similar lesson from the Book of Job, in which God finally weighs in but doesn’t answer any of Job’s questions, much less his charges. Instead, he says ‘Where were you when I did such-and-such?’ Whereas Carl Jung (Answer to Job) just thinks God is being a bully, Johnson rightly draws the inference that maybe there are greater questions at work to be settled that Job doesn’t know about.

That doesn’t mean that Johnson accepts this ‘theodicy.’ He is atheist. 

People speak of weighty issues as though they are in vacuum, but atheism changes one’s outlook on everything. If you do damage, or allow damage to happen, and you can fix it, that makes huge difference from one who does damage, or allows it to happen, and cannot fix it. Thus, a doctor who breaks a child’s arm and sends you his bill is different from a doctor who breaks a child’s arm in order to set it properly, and upon doing so, sends you his bill. Holocaust is horrific—not to minimize the human suffering involved, but if you can fix it, even that memory in time becomes like a bad dream, a former thing no longer called to account.

But if you’re atheist, there’s no fixing anything. Any damage done is this life is damage done permanently, since this life is all there is. That’s why, while I can understand people falling to atheism, I can’t see them embracing it as though, it, too, is ‘good news.’ It’s a great tragedy, if true. You ought to be sad about it, as H.G. Wells was when he cited the demoralizing lack of faith that ensued in the wake of rapid acceptance of evolution. It’s not good. It’s bad. But eventually, when they accumulate enough, perceptions flip, and it becomes yet another instance of what’s bad is good and vice-versa. That everlasting life you once envisioned? It’s like paper gains in the stock market; they were never real anyway. The sooner you awake from that notion to ‘live fully’ the two or three decades you have left, the better. ‘Imagine’ that, as you are dying of Covid on a ventilator, there is ‘above you only sky’—and learn to find comfort in that prospect.

You should always ask, in any forum where one is critical of the faith, ‘Has this fellow gone atheist or not?’ Criticism of the human the organization to declare the genuine good news may really just be attacks on the belief in God. Nobody would deny there are flaws in the earthy organization, to the point where one may unexpectedly take one on the chin, but if you don’t believe in God, they are everything, whereas if you do believe in God, they are merely painful, like that sliver jabbing you in the butt when you slid over in the lifeboat to make room. Atheist critics come around and say, ‘Do you realize you could wake up one day and say all your life has been wasted?’ Of course you do. It’s called ‘shipwreck of the faith’ when that happens. It’s not as though the notion has never occurred to a believer. “If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are to be pitied more than anyone,” Paul says at 1 Corinthians 15:19

Although black and white thinking in general is not a great thing, and one does well to banish it in most day-to-day considerations, certain issues, such as belief in God, are indeed black and white. This is true even when such belief results in inconvenience, such as when a car group of sisters was rear-ended by a cop in an actual black and white who was insufficiently focused on his driving. Had they been atheist, it wouldn’t have happened.

 

[Many Miles]

46 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

The Great Courses professor (David Kyle Johnson: The Big Questions of Philosophy) says that it does makes sense. It alone is logically consistent. He traces it to Augustine and says, ‘Maybe God permits evil because it is essential to his pursuit of his greater goal of allowing free will.’ This is essentially what the Watchtower says, though they develop it more.. Moreover, you who sniff because uneducated ‘dumbbells’ say it today might not sniff upon learning that a highly esteemed and educated philosopher also said it.

You do know what you just wrote, right?

You just wrote that God permits evil because He wants to permit evil. The sole reason would boil down to God is going to do what God is going to do, because He can and He wants to. After cooking the soup, that's what you just said.

How does that fit conceptually into any human perception of a court case?

[Many Miles]

1 hour ago, TrueTomHarley said:

You should always ask, in any forum where one is critical of the faith, ‘Has this fellow gone atheist or not?’ Criticism of the human the organization to declare the genuine good news may really just be attacks on the belief in God. Nobody would deny there are flaws in the earthy organization, to the point where one may unexpectedly take one on the chin, but if you don’t believe in God, they are everything, whereas if you do believe in God, they are merely painful, like that sliver jabbing you in the butt when you slid over in the lifeboat to make room. Atheist critics come around and say, ‘Do you realize you could wake up one day and say all your life has been wasted?’ Of course you do. It’s called ‘shipwreck of the faith’ when that happens. It’s not as though the notion has never occurred to a believer. “If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are to be pitied more than anyone,” Paul says at 1 Corinthians 15:19

I would be more generous. I'd say some individuals find themselves atheists not because they want to be an atheist but, rather, because they find themselves incapable of doing otherwise. If, for instance, someone has examined evidence to the best of their ability, and they honestly come to the conclusion "there is no god", when in reality there is a god, what difference does that make to a almighty and benevolent god? An almighty and benevolent god would look for no more than any given human is capable of. How could he do otherwise?

In the case that God exists, and He's almighty and He's benevolent, the most He could possibly look for in any human is their best effort. Each human is unique and has their own capabilities. If, as it turns out, an honest person finds they are incapable of believing there is an almighty and benevolent God, then they have done their best. In this case the almighty and benevolent God would look upon an individual as one having no helper, and God would be their helper when the time came. In the meantime the individual would be held accountable for no more than abiding by natural law.

All that said, we're still left with a variable we cannot account for: what is or is not benevolent is entirely at the option of an almighty god.

[Juan Rivera]

On 11/27/2023 at 8:47 AM, Many Miles said:

Yes. I agree with that. And, people can debate the veracity of an interpretation. But once someone (anyone!) asserts an interpretation of a given text then they have no choice but to accept that interpretation equally and not pick-and-choose where and when they want that interpretation to apply. That is, if they want to use that interpretation rationally.

Here's an example of one such interpretation:

"So Satan’s ploy roused Eve’s curiosity; it got her to focus on the one thing in all the garden that was forbidden to her."

Short version:

There was only ONE THING in all the garden that was forbidden to Eve.

Among other things, that would mean:

Eve was not forbidden to eat meat, or blood.

Oh. Wait. That would interfere with a pet teaching, wouldn't it.

@Many Miles Sorry for the delayed response. I was out of pocket most of these past few days. I’ve been following up during work, but I hadn't really thought about your responses. When I open the forum, I feel as though an entire river is washing over me. I hardly know where to find my feet and focus; everything seems to be coming at me at once😂. All I can hope to do here is focus as narrowly as possible on the issue I previously raised, so that we can have some chance of picking out and fairly evaluating what's most relevant. Please note I'm not so sure I will succeed doing that. 

I do agree that Scriptural statements should not be a wax nose that can be turned any which way by those interpreting or that Scripture become in effect whatever one wants to it say.
 

On 11/27/2023 at 6:50 AM, Many Miles said:

Juan, that's a lot of words, and to be honest, I'm not really sure what you're trying to say.

Because above you write:

"The question is not whether one will have glasses through which to interpret Scripture, but rather which glasses are the correct ones?" [Underlining added]

Let's start with something simple. Check the box that applies:

We should believe teaching "x" because:

[______] it's rational.

[______] the society says so.

[__X_] some other reason other than because it's "rational" or "the society says so".

I believe the Scriptural text does possess meaning that we can access. But accessing that meaning requires bringing the proper interpretive framework to the text. It seems the first two options you have listed here do not exhaust the possibilities. From my view, we do not have to choose between a self-appointed authority and someone who can make a reasonable case for his interpretation. A third option is that we could choose to submit ourselves to those with teaching and juridical authority. According to Scripture faith is a different stance, believing not because we can see for ourselves that it is true or because we ourselves witnessed it being delivered directly from God or because we independently verified that these claims were directly delivered by God, but because of the divine authority of the ones speaking. This is how the people in the Hebrew Scriptures believed Moses. And so likewise when Jesus said to Thomas in, John 20:29 and then in John 17:20.

So my submission to a divinely authorized Governing Body depends on the truth that this GB is in fact divinely authorized, just as a our faith in what the Bible teaches always depends on the truth that the Bible is the word of God written. Cults (in that manipulative sense of the term) often take the faith-based path, by forbidding their members from investigating the authority of the cult. That’s not the epistemic state of a JW I believe . Our submission to the GB does not shut us off from the possibility of inquiring into the basis for the authority of the GB. It can’t. Our entire submission to the GB is based on it being actually divinely authorized. This is why there can be (and are) so many rationalist in our midst( I am concerned about this type of rationalism, that if one cannot verify for oneself something that Jehovah or Jehovah's spokesman reveal (Jesus), one does not have grounds to believe it, let alone an obligation to believe it. There's many things we cannot verify to be truth or that are falsifiable when dealing with divine revelation).

Yes, for the Congregation's claims to authority to make sense they have to be reasonable and consistent and faithful, but their authority does not come from their claims being reasonable and consistent and faithful. Epistemology (how we come to comprehend the authority of the Congregation) is not ontology (how the Congregation receives and possesses her authority). The Congregation does not lose her authority when her claims do not make sense to us, otherwise it would have authority only when we agree with what she teaches. Rather, when the Congregation, exercising her teaching authority, teaches something that does not make sense to us, it is we who must trust and seek to grow in our understanding, not the Congregation that in such cases must instead conform to our understanding.

So our continuing openness to the pursuit of truth through reason doesn’t make us rationalists, nor does it mean that we are not really submitting to the GB . Our submission is first to Jehovah , who is Truth, and who has revealed Himself in His Son, through the Congregation . And therefore, our submission is based on the Congregation truly being what and who she claims to be, the Congregation Jesus established.