Oakspear

Soul Searcher: Bullinger wanted to make all aspects of the bible fit together, he often compared sections of scripture that appeared to be referring to the same event and picked out what he saw as inconsistencies or contradictions. For instance, regarding the number of men crucified with Jesus, he pointed out that that in one gospel one of the two reviled him, while in another, both did. That, along with other details, were contradictions that a biblical literalist would want to reconcile so that scriptures would fit together. The same with his view that there were six denials; there are enough differences in the circumstances in each gospel, that the literalist is confronted with inconsistencies that must be resolved. Someone who is not so concerned with making it all fit together wouldn't be concerned about the contradictions; I am unaware how biblical literalists other than Bullinger reconcile these sections of the bible. But common sense would indicate that since each mention of the crucifixion only mentions two and each mention of the betrayals only mentions three, then there were two others crucified and three denials. I have a hard time seeing an omnipotent god who authored the scriptures playing those kind of numbers games. Other apparently parallel sections he just decides are talking about different events altogether. Where did Bullinger "get it from? I don't think he got it from anywhere other than his own desire to make sense of the many contradictions. Even though he was a clergyman in a major denomination (Church of England) he came to conclusions very different from mainstream Christianity. Personally I don't think you can eliminate all contradictions and inconsistencies because the bible was written by men and not God. Different viewpoints, theologies, opinions and agendas go into the bible, trying to make them fit together is like trying to harmonize different secular authors writing on the same subject.

Excellent question. In my opinion Bullinger was at his best as a "statistician" and a "linguist". I think he did a good job pointing out inconsistencies between the English translation and the Greek or Hebrew text and was a whiz at digging up quotes of other books of the bible in scripture, figures of speech, etc. I believe that he tried to hard to make everything fit into an outline or structure that wasn't necessarily there, bending his interpretation to fit with a preconceived idea. That being said, it's apparent that he put a lot more work into his research than Wierwille ever did Regarding threads being "long dead", I think the examples that I give in the initial post show how Wierwille certainly didn't come up with some of his stuff independently of Bullinger, if he did he wouldn't have come to conclusions that were unsupported by his premises.

The flip side of the LOB's "taking God out of the equation" is that it takes the blame off God when bad things happen...got run over by a truck? It must be your believing; it wasn't God's fault! Don't get me wrong, I'm not a proponent of the LOB or its implications within TWI, it was a blame game, full of condemnation, but the position that we have nothing to do with what happens and it's 100% God assumes a capricious and arbitrary God who might bless one person "beyond what they could ask or think", while another sinks in poverty; might miraculously turn away a hurricane one day while the next a tsunami kills thousands. The reason that the LOB appealed to me back when I first took PFAL was that it tried to explain why it wasn't God's fault when things went awry.

Like so many things, I just don't think that there's any evidence that the Law of Believing, believing God's promises or whatever you want to call it, works. Even if you're a believer in the innerrancy of the bible, if something doesn't work, maybe you just are reading it wrong, jumping to the wrong conclusions, misunderstanding. You can prove anything if you pick the right combination of verses, but if it's true, there should definitely be real world confirmation of it, wouldn't you think? For all the anecdotes about people receiving what they "believed for", the percentage of believing that really did, honest to God, 100% equal receiving, was not very high, was it? If the bible is God's Word and if it clearly says that what you believe you will receive, then you will receive what you believe; there wouldn't be any of this hedging, explaining, blaming etc that accompanied lack of receiving.

Huh? Have "we all" called you an idiot before?

You can get past a dog...but nobody f*cks with a lion!

As far as my feeble memory can recall there was a site several years ago that was nominally an ex-JW site where a lot of us GSers went to for a while out of curiosity. There was a lot of trashing of Pawtucket and other GS posters over there, much of which went way beyond the line of criticizing a site that you have disagreements with. I don't specifically recall anyone being mentioned by name, but it could have happened. The attacks that went on over there, in my opinion, made the worst of what goes on at GS look tame. I was informed a few months ago by a poster who is a member at MoChat that MoChat is a different site and entirely different than the old ex-JW site. I have no doubt that this is technically true, but a lot of the same people seem to be involved. In my opinion it's easy to see why someone might see the two as connected and that what went on a few years ago taints what goes on at the "new" site now. In my opinion accusing someone of trashing Pawtucket at the "new site", especially lacking membership in that site, while technically not true, is understandable given the continuity among members, and that it was open back when it was still the "old" site. Excathedra was certainly among the more vocal of the Pawtucket trashers before the site became MoChat.

Yup...some of us are pretty intolerant about getting preached at, myself included, then there are others who offer that virtual cup of GS coffee to even the biggest @ssholes. Welcome to life in the real world. Picture GS cafe as a real bricks & mortar coffee shop. The place is full, one table is full of people chatting about their spouses & kids, another table has folks playing nostalgia games, one group is arguing passionately about politics, up by the front door is a couple of tables pushed together with people talking about TWI leadership,the pitfalls of TWI classes and what they think of Wierwille and Martindale. People come and go, the volume and civility of discussions rise and fall, occasionally the owner or one of the waiters has to ask people to shoosh, the bouncer hardly ever wakes up from his nap. Then, in through the front door walks someone who has never been in before. He may have lurked by the front door, listening conversations, or run in to use the bathroom, or maybe even gotten a to-go cup, but today he's going speak. He plops himself down at the front table and announces that all those at the table should get back to 'The Word', get over it and stop hashing over negatives. What would happen in a 'real' cafe? probably much the same that happens here. Several good-natured souls would laugh indulgently and offer the newbie a cup o' Joe, a few more curmudgeonly denizens might reply with variations of 'bite me rubber-head' and one or two might offer to take it outside. We're here to tell the other side of the story. If healing and nurturing are part of that mission, so be it, all the better, but we're not a church, we're not a charitable organization, and yes, we're a little rowdy and we're more than a little opinionated. And just like that 'real' cafe, we're not all sitting at the same table and we move from table to table, we show up in varying moods and varying levels of patience, and with varying caffeine levels!

No...that's why I used more than one sentence That's pretty compassionate What part annoys you? That GS isn't for everyone? Do you think it is? We're all different? Do you think we're all the same? We all move beyond TWI in manifold ways? What? We don't?

Citizens probably started referring to themselves as "Americans" because "United States of America" has "America" in it and anything else would be kind of clunky. As far as I know none of the other nations in either North or South America has "America" in its name. The country to our south is officially named Estados Unidos Mexicanos, the United Mexican States, or United States of Mexico.

You'd be surprised perhaps...new people show up here every month. You're one of those who had the guts to "tell the other side of the story" as it pertained to your own experiences. Greasespot isn't for everyone; we're all different and move beyond TWI in manifold ways Forgotten what? I don't understand I think that it does, generally. Many of us here don't like getting lectured or patronized, which is when compassion sometimes turns into impatience. is this the forgetting that you are referring to earlier in the post? Yes, it is easy to forget. I remember what it was like to be a newbie here. I also remember being given the truth by people who weren't afraid to hurt my feelings.

Martindale and his henchmen continued this practice.In response to his "Original Sin of Mankind" teaching in the WayAP class I broke down his contentions about the supposed sexual connotations of various words showing his error. Our region coordinator at the time, T#m H#rr#cks, replied that the text might not back it up, but it must be true "based on what we know about homosexuality". In my opinion, the claims that TWI was research oriented was thrown out there to draw people in, and ignored when actual research got in the way of Wierwille's pulled-it-out-of-his-@ss theology.

Penworks: I read something recently, probably in something by Bart Ehrman, that one of the reasons that Church tradition and apostolic succession became the rule, as opposed to solo scriptura very early on in Christian history was that not only was it quickly becoming impossible to tell what the "originals" had written in them, but there was much disagreement over which epistles, gospels and other "books" should be included in the canon. One of the parameters generally agreed upon was whether the writing was done by an apostle or other witness to Jesus' ministry. This naturally led to an abundance of writing that had the name of an apostle attached to it, when it wasn't really written by the apostle. There were competing gospels and epistles floating around, each espousing different views of who Jesus was and what his ministry was all about. Most of the more egregious departures from what became orthodox theology were stifled and for the most part disappeared (other than fragments and references in other documents) although not all contradictions were excised or harmonized, as there still remain many contradictions to explain. In my opinion there is no reason to suppose that any of the bible is inerrant.

One would think that what you laid out in the post above would be the default position and any inerrancy would have to be proved. If the bible was inerrant, it stands to reason that that would be demonstrable.

There's several examples in Wierwille's stuff that illustrate this, often when he is using Bullinger to back up a point...more than a few times he demonstrates that he doesn't really understand Bullinger's point. This is one of those examples. When you read Bullinger's section on this verse in How to Enjoy the Bible, you can see that Wierwille completely misunderstands Bullinger's point, that the Greek word in question refers to the act of letting loose, i.e. expounding, explaining, opening up, not the dogs set upon the game after they are released.

If you're doing good, then I, for one, salute you. But since you're "not asking for anyone's blessing or permission, nor will be persuaded or dissuaded from an endeavor that [you] think is right..." it seems you're merely concerned about perception, or PR, as another poster put it. That being said, if you're building your "ministry" on PFAL foundations, in my book, you're an offshoot/splinter.

Yup, the "accuracy & integrity of the Word" was never any more or less than what Wierwille said it was. I have long thought that PFAL, for all it's sloppy scholarship and kindergarten research, was a master work at getting us to buy into Wierwille's theology. Wierwille starts off by hammering on the theme of The Word is true, is faithful, is without error etc. Then he shows you that in modern translations there are errors, but then miraculously, through the power of research, solves the problem and voila! no errors. He spends a lot of time contrasting what mainstream churches teach with what he reads for us in black and white, all the while deriding the priests, popes and theologians for teaching otherwise, undermining our trust in anyone other than him! We hardly notice when he stops reading exactly what is written and starts slipping in his own interpretations, and most of us never realize that he's making up definitions and referring to texts and documents that exist only in his mind.

If I remember correctly, the original point of bringing up the pre-Christian resurrection stories was as a counter to Wierwille's claim that Jesus' resurrection was unique among all the religions of the world. It wasn't. The existence of slain & risen gods born of virgins written about since antiquity doesn't in and of itself make the gospels false, but neither do the gospel stories make these others invalid. I guess there are at least two ways of looking at this: 1. The Devil knew what God was going to do and set up other deaths & resurrections and virgin births to dilute the affect of Jesus. 2. Jesus' biographers added details from pagan mythology to his life and background to make him seem more godlike to the non-Jewish world. 3. Just a coincidence! If you believe in a literal interpretation of the bible, I would imagine that you have to come up with scenarios like #1 in order to make it all "fit". If you do not believe that the bible is a divinely inspired book, then #2 would make more sense.

I would agree with Rascal in that in would behoove you to have the facts before venturing an opinion. Now, you can have an opinion, and you can share it without the facts, but the opinion carries a bit more weight when you know what you're talking about. Another thing, being free to express an opinion doesn't mean that no one is going to disagree with you.

Your opinion of what works for you is welcome. What's not welcome is your opinion of how everyone else should do it your way.

Umm...we have moved on. All you see is a small part of our lives....a really small part. So, is GS a splinter group? I would define a splinter group as a group of ex-wayfers dedicated to advancing the perceived original ideals of TWI due to the belief that TWI itself no longer embodied those ideals, whether those ideals are fellowship, research or WOW burgers. GS doesn't do that. We "tell the other side of the story" with no other unifying principle.

I am so thankful that ClayJay is here to warn us and set us straight. <_<

Excuse me in advance if I'm not using the correct definition of axiom, but I'm going to take a stab at talking about axioms in mathematics and axioms in areas of "faith". The examples of mathematical axioms like A=A or A+B=B+A cannot, it is true, be mathematically proven, in other words there is no simpler premise from whence you can deduce that A=A. But you can easily test and demonstrate their truth even to a skeptic. I'm sure though, that if we worked at it, we could easily come up with examples of axioms that can't be satisfactorily demonstrated to a skeptic. (I'm not working at it, so I've got nothin' ) The difference that I see in the existence of God as axiomatic is that while mathematics generally falls apart without the basics axioms or assumptions, one can function in this world without belief in a God or gods. I understand why someone might conclude that a creator God makes sense logically and build their worldview based upon that assumption, that premise, but other logical worldviews can be imagined that don't assume a creator. While you can't do even basic math without the axioms of mathematics, you can construct a worldview without assuming a creator. Mathematical axioms are necessary, assuming the existence of a god is not. (By the way, I'm not an atheist - but I sometimes play one on Grease Spot )

Um...the one mentioned in the posts on this thread... <_<

Wierwille also was inconsistent about when he played the Devil card. In Jesus Christ is Not God, he uses pre-Christian trinities (many of which really aren't trinities) to prove that The Trinity has pagan origins, but ignores all the other things like virgin birth, the sacrificial king, resurrection etc. that occurred in pre-Christian religions.