(Please: No politics - I make a fleeting political reference at the beginning of my post but it's not the main subject, and besides No Politics Allowed at RfM).


The US President today in a speech at the UN General Assembly used the phrase “peace and security”. I instantly thought of JWs and the end of the world as they teach that “Whenever it is that they are saying: ‘Peace and security!’ then sudden destruction is to be instantly upon them…”

Their central and strong belief that we’re living in the Last Days comes from 1 Thessalonians 5:3:

KJV:

“For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.”

New World Translation (JW Bible):

“Whenever it is that they are saying: ‘Peace and security!’ then sudden destruction is to be instantly upon them.”—1 Thess. 5:3.


JW article re the phrase signifying our “Last Days”:

https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1981844

Excerpts:

“…a South African magazine reported: “Mankind would appear to have reached an all-time low of savagery, immorality, irresponsibility, selfishness and greed.”

The article cites non-JW sources to back up the JW teaching that the end of the world is nigh. It goes on to outline JW theology on this topic:

“Conditions in human society today certainly parallel what happened on earth just before God destroyed an ancient world by means of a global flood, sparing only righteous Noah and his family. Of those days, the Bible says: “Jehovah saw that the badness of man was abundant in the earth . . . And the earth came to be ruined in the sight of the true God and the earth became filled with violence.” (Gen. 6:5, 11) “Just as the days of Noah were,” Jesus Christ foretold, so it is in our time. (Matt. 24:37) Once again the entire earth is “filled with violence” because “the badness of man” is abundant. Such conditions before the Flood gave evidence of the impending end of that ancient system of things. So today the evidence of world conditions in fulfillment of Bible prophecy clearly establishes the fact that this present system of things is in its “time of the end,” its “last days.” This has been so since the year 1914 C.E.—Dan. 12:4; Matt. 24:3-14; 2 Tim. 3:1-5.
“The saying of “Peace and security!” thus comes just before the “sudden destruction” of the world empire of false religion, which empire is called “Babylon the Great” in Bible prophecy. (Rev. 17:5) She also is spoken of as “the great harlot . . . with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication.” (Rev. 17:1, 2)

"Why such a severe judgment upon this world’s religious system? God’s Word answers: “For her sins have massed together clear up to heaven.” (Rev. 18:5)

"False religion continues to amass bloodguilt right down to this day. For example, the New York Post of May 18, 1981, reported: “Former President Carter said yesterday that hate and violence make it seem that ‘the world has gone mad.’” He also said that “deep religious conviction which should bind people in love seems often to be part of the madness and murder.” Similarly, two days earlier an editorial by Mike Royko in the same publication stated that Catholics, Protestants, Moslems and Jews “are expressing their devotion to [God] by killing each other.” He observed: “I guess they figure that if one side can wipe the other side out, it will prove that their way of worshipping is correct.” He also noted that while the pope of the Roman Catholic Church is said to be a peaceful man, “his followers have been known to shed a few million gallons of blood when their tempers are up.”

“Thus, the “great tribulation” rightly begins with the destruction of the blasphemous, hypocritical world empire of false religion. It is a righteous judgment because worldly religion, “Babylon the Great,” has claimed to serve God, but in fact has served the Devil. So by her “spiritistic practice,” hundreds of millions of people have been deluded into serving the Devil’s interests.

“World-shaking events will mark the “sudden destruction” of false religion and all of Satan’s world. But that destruction is immediately preceded by the saying of “Peace and security!”
“… after God’s “day of vengeance” is finished, his faithful servants will enter a righteous new system of things to begin endless life on a cleansed earth that will be transformed into a paradise. (2 Pet. 3:13; Rev. 7:9-17)

-----

The article goes into a lot of detail about this central JW belief. It gets a bit complicated. But basically the entire JW message is that this world and its inhabitants are doomed and Paradise will be restored (which was the original intention of God before the whole Adam and Eve thing didn’t work out, they say).

I was a starry-eyed teen when I met a nice JW lady (the mother of my favourite schoolteacher). It made sense to me at the time that, as she said, all the ills of this world weren’t how things were supposed to be and there would come a day when peace and paradise would be restored. Sounded great to me at the time and I joined up. I liked it enough to eventually choose to be a missionary for them, travelling to Quebec with my best friend and my high school French. A year into my (fruitless) missionary endeavours my father had a serious accident that threatened his life and I returned home to see my dad and help out my mom and younger sibs. The loving, peaceful JWs, aka God’s chosen ones, exerted pressure on me not to go, with my best JW friend saying “they’re not your family any more”. Nice.

My father’s bad day (and subsequent long and painful convalescence) is “all” it took for me to give my head a shake. Sure, paradise is a nice dream but meanwhile we have to live and cope with where we’re at in the meantime. Ever since that experience I see that actions demonstrate truth better than fine words. What good is preaching paradise if your faith beliefs prompt you to be mean and stifled?

Anyway, hearing the words “Peace and Security” on the news today instantly transported me back to the JW days. In retrospect, far from being appealing due to all the talk of paradise, their beliefs are hellishly depressing because as a member the teachings make you feel worthless (so “sinful”) and constantly thinking of the “End Times” is a total downer 24/7.

The fact that the words were uttered at the UN will undoubtedly be even more fodder for JW leaders as “Jehovah's Witnesses believe that God will use the United Nations to destroy "false religion", wherein all institutionalized religions except Jehovah's Witnesses will be destroyed, which they refer to as the beginning of the great tribulation.”

Funny the power of words. Some of these messages obviously sunk deep into my cerebral matter and are difficult to dislodge. It’s not that these words and ideas influence me any more, just that when they pop up they summon the memories.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2021 05:59PM by Nightingale.

The JWs (like every other flavor of bible thumper) have a dismal track record in predicting the end of days. 1914 and 1975 didn't work out so well for them. In a sane world, they would learn from their mistakes, but ours doesn't meet that standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology_of_Jehovah%27s_Witnesses

They have a huge problem looming regarding their prediction re end times (Armageddon). From the same article I linked in the OP:

"Jesus foretold that some of those who were alive when the “last days” began would live to see this system’s end. Already 67 years have passed since the “generation” of 1914 saw the start of these troubles. (Matt. 24:34) So time has nearly run out on this “crooked and twisted generation.” (Phil. 2:15) Shortly we may be eyewitnesses of the fulfillment of the many Bible prophecies related to ‘the passing away of this world.’ (1 John 2:17) And we can have complete confidence that these prophecies will be fulfilled in every detail. Jehovah, “the One telling from the beginning the finale,” the One who has inspired these prophecies, “has sworn, saying: ‘Surely just as I have figured, so it must occur; and just as I have counseled, that is what will come true.’”​—Isa. 14:24; 46:10; 2 Pet. 1:20, 21."


I didn't realize this article was so dated - from 1981. The writer states that 67 years had passed since 1914 and that is (or used to be) very significant to JWs. Based on their numbers, and their specific teachings, at the time of that article they were expecting the end to be imminent (because dating from 1914 to 1981 meant people alive at the time of the prophecy were getting up there in age). Now, in 2021, another 40 years have passed. People born in 1914 are 107 years of age at this point. But, as far as I understand (and recall) the prophecy, the 1914 folks had to be of a certain age, not babies, so they could understand the teachings, meaning you can't count babies and children. Therefore, you have to add on quite a few years to the 107 to make the prophecy work. Not too many "witnesses" then as they'd have to be up in the triple digits by now.

I wonder how JW leaders tap dance around these unfortunate (for them) facts. (I have no doubt they will. And will still get a significant number of people to believe). They spend their entire lives waiting, and sacrificing, for Armageddon.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2021 07:16PM by Nightingale.

Joseph Smith did the same thing, but in 1843, when he prophesied that the then "rising generation" would live to see the second coming.

McConkie tried to spin it in "Mormon Doctrine," attempting to extend the deadline for fulfillment past 2000. Now even that's long past, and the church has no other option but to try to memory-hole it, hoping that flagrantly embarrassing material like that can be buried forever. Fat chance.

I'm with logged out today. Jesus predicted the end of the world within the lifetime of his followers. When that didn't pan out, his apologists came up with an explanation. Almost all Christian religions have gone through the same thing at least once and often, well, often.

The thing about belief is it is impervious to incompatible facts and always ready to explain them away. The problem is manageable.

logged out today Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The JWs (like every other flavor of bible thumper)
> have a dismal track record in predicting the end
> of days. 1914 and 1975 didn't work out so well for
> them. In a sane world, they would learn from their
> mistakes, but ours doesn't meet that standard.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology_of_Jehov
> ah%27s_Witnesses

The problem is not with the sanity of the world; rather, the problem is with the sanity of those making the predictions. And a compounding problem is the willingness among some to continue to believe these people's further predictions even after the first ones are proven to be false.

It reminds me of the quote that the conservative commentator, the late Paul Harvey, used to make on his news and opinion pieces: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

I Wish that the phrase from a politician 'Peace & Security' wasn't political, it's a great idea!

"But, “Ah, Lord God!” I said, “Look, the prophets are telling them, ‘You will not see the sword nor will you have famine, but I will give you lasting peace in this place.’” Then the Lord said to me, “The prophets are prophesying falsehood in My name. I have neither sent them nor commanded them nor spoken to them; they are prophesying to you a false vision, divination, futility and the deception of their own minds." (Jeremiah 14:13-14)

"It is definitely because they have misled My people by saying, ‘Peace!’ when there is no peace." (Ezekiel 13:10)

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." "Ben Franklin)

If that is the measure of false prophets, what are we to make of Jesus saying of the apocalypse, "this generation will not pass away until all these things take place?"

--Take your choice of the synoptic gospels.

On the face of it, it looks like an unfulfilled prophecy: the generation he was addressing passed away two millennia ago. The key is the parable of the fig tree, just preceding it.

"...as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts out its leaves, you know that summer is near."

He didn't say summer (and the fig tree's fruit) is HERE--just that it is NEAR, i.e. approaching. The generation that sees the signs (approaching) will not pass away before the end times have concluded. Thus, the eschatological cataclysms may be fast, but no faster than the passing of a generation.

That makes it a future-perfect, not present continuous,(tense) prophecy.

That's a widely accepted interpretation. There are others. One is that "generation" may refer to the basic human type ("genea"), as in "this evil and adulterous generation," meaning the ones who continue to sinfully reject God's love and forgiveness through His Son--i.e. all of Mankind up and including us, today. I don't buy that, but I mention it only as an example.

I myself am more concerned with His "thief in the night" and "worthy steward" type of teachings. I'm not concerned with WHEN he comes, only that He WILL come--and if I'm alive in human state when He does, what have I been doing with my life?

Thanks for asking! It's a verse I usually skim over; you made me look into it.

I think your apology proves my point. Believers can find reasons to believe that any prophesy was misunderstood when it fails to materialize on schedule.

Sometimes when I say I believe the Bible, the ir/anti-religious say, "So you're a Fundamentalist--you take everything literally, huh?". (For the record, I don't believe in literal "streets of gold" or hellfire, even though I believe in an eternal and irrevocable separation of the lost from the saved.)

The Bible is literature, so in places I take it literally. Other sections are poetic, metaphor, allegory, symbolism and prophecy. The fig tree, for example, is a concise parable about what to expect, and when. There's much I don't understand, so I keep at it. (Hence, thanks for bringing up the subject.)

It seems here you're the literalist, while I'm trying to look at the exegetical context which suggests Christ's teaching isn't what a superficial reading seems to be. Some things in Scripture are just what they say they are, and hit the target point-blank, even when our (my) aim falls short. This verse calls for exploration, depth, and nuance.

Can we agree on something, anything? That the sky is blue?

Edit: your closing remark, "... when it fails to materialize on schedule," reminded me to add that I have no patience with anybody (JW's, LDS, Mary Baker Eddy, Harold Camping, etc.) who claims they can date Christ's return or any end-time prophesy.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/22/2021 02:14AM by caffiend.

I think your impatience with those who attempt to assign dates to the fulfillment of prophesies is wise. Because those who do that generally live to see their insights discredited, which can be embarrassing unless you are facile enough to reinterpret those prophesies and keep the disappointment prospective.

I am not a literalist. I love the Bible as literature and mythology and the stuff of history if not history itself, by which I mean the Biblical narrative is 75% nonsense as proved by the Bible itself. When Joshua enters Canaan and conquers cities that won't exist for centuries, we learn not onlyl that the Biblical account is fictitious but also that the emerging Jewish cult considered the myths of early Canaan important. Likewise, when the Book of Deuteronomy is written in 6th-7th century BCE Hebrew rather than 1,400 BCE Hebrew, we know that it was fraudulently produced to bolster the claims made at the turn of the 6th century by the priestly class that gave birth to the YHWH cult. The Bible thus gives us insights into true history through its factitious history.

But my attitude towards the Bible and its prophesies is neither here nor there. What matters is that a large proportion of Jesus's followers were literalists who were profoundly disappointed when his prophesy proved literally false. The same is true of those who thought the world would end in the 14th century or in the year 2000.

So it doesn't surprise me that you have your own rationale for why Jesus's words were not fulfilled in the 1st century. Any believing modern Christian would need to have such an explanation. But that, again, is not the issue in contest. The question is whether people believed it in the 1st century and were disappointed when the prophesy was not fulfilled, and the answer is yes--just as with the JWs, the Mormons, and a dozen other faiths in 19th, 20th, and 21st century America.

Anyone can come up with retrospective reasons why what was originally taken literally should not be taken literally.

The Franklin quote is missing a lot of background context.

Were I to explain it myself, you'd likely dismiss it. So I'll defer to an org that you might actually consider – the Hoover Institution.

https://www.hoover.org/research/what-benjamin-franklin-really-said

"Here's an interesting historical fact I have dug up in some research for an essay I am writing about the relationship between liberty and security: That famous quote by Benjamin Franklin that 'Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety' does not mean what it seems to say. Not at all."

The full explanation is found in the rest of the article, found here:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-ben-franklin-really-said

"The words appear originally in a 1755 letter that Franklin is presumed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor during the French and Indian War. The letter was a salvo in a power struggle between the governor and the Assembly over funding for security on the frontier, one in which the Assembly wished to tax the lands of the Penn family, which ruled Pennsylvania from afar, to raise money for defense against French and Indian attacks.

The governor kept vetoing the Assembly's efforts at the behest of the family, which had appointed him. So to start matters, Franklin was writing not as a subject being asked to cede his liberty to government, but in his capacity as a legislator being asked to renounce his power to tax lands notionally under his jurisdiction. In other words, the 'essential liberty' to which Franklin referred was thus not what we would think of today as civil liberties but, rather, the right of self-governance of a legislature in the interests of collective security.

What's more the 'purchase [of] a little temporary safety' of which Franklin complains was not the ceding of power to a government Leviathan in exchange for some promise of protection from external threat; for in Franklin's letter, the word 'purchase' does not appear to have been a metaphor. The governor was accusing the Assembly of stalling on appropriating money for frontier defense by insisting on including the Penn lands in its taxes — and thus triggering his intervention. And the Penn family later offered cash to fund defense of the frontier — as long as the Assembly would acknowledge that it lacked the power to tax the family's lands.

Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for frontier defense and maintaining its right of self-governance — and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former. In short, Franklin was not describing some tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade."

I know, it's a little too long to fit on a Power Line Blog meme, but there you have it.

I knew the tax and colonial legal dispute that was the context for Franklin's letter. Please note I used the full quote, including "a little temporary safety," and not some common but truncated version.

Strange that Hoover Institution posts Witte (Jim Comey's compadre) of Brookings and Lawfare, no?

Although the Franklin quote, in its immediate context, applied to the Pennsylvania colonial tax and frontier defense situation, it has broader applications, and is a precept worth considering elsewhere. In Scripture exegesis, you interpret a verse within its immediate context, then the chapter, the book, the Biblical genre, and widen it to how Church fathers and subsequent scholars analyzed, understood, and it applied.

Restricting Franklin's quote to the most immediate situation hamstrings his wisdom. What he espoused, and what we learn, from the colonial situation has wider, even universal applicability. He points out that Liberty is ESSENTIAL, and that safety gained (or purchased--great double entendre, Ben!) may only be temporary. He doesn't say such compromisers will inevitably lose both, just that they deserve to.

True then.
True now.

PS--it's Wednesday--maybe we'll get a "Geek In Pictures" on Powerlineblog!

Quite an exegesis indeed, and necessary in order to place the quote in proper perspective.

It's good that you were already aware of the purpose of Franklin's letter. To your credit, you did include the entire quote, including the appropriate capitalizations; well done. Most Americans, I'd wager, are not terribly familiar with the French and Indian War or taxing the Penn family land holdings.

That said, it remains that Franklin penned [pun intended] his famous line for a very specific reason. He didn't intend to convey a broader point about civil liberties vs. government power.

The problem occurs when the talking heads pull that quote from its moorings and interpret it in self-serving ways to support their own positions. It's done on all sides; the right uses it against the left, and the left against the right. So the quote, when ripped out of historical context as it usually is, can mean pretty much anything, and hence nothing at all. "Broader applications" turn out to be misapplications.

Your comparison to bible exegesis is apt, but in a different way. It's equivalent to cherry-picking a verse and then misapplying it to advance an agenda. The mormon church is especially good at this kind of quote mining, e.g., using Malachi 3:8-10 to justify their obscene tithing grab, and 1 Corinthians 15:29 to claim that the early church performed mormon-style proxy baptisms for the dead.

As for Hoover using a Brookings essay, I can't objectively say whether it’s "strange" or not. But you can't argue with Hoover's impeccable conservative credentials. That particular piece has been accessible on Hoover's website for ten years, and so it can reasonably be inferred that it has Hoover's approval and meets its standards. What more can you ask?

Go ahead and post PLB to your heart's content. Don't expect any response from me though; memes are (with rare exceptions) boring, repetitious and lazy communication tools, and not worth my time.

Jehovah's witless

You’d think that after the first three JW end of the world prophecies failed people would quit taking them seriously, but along comes an 8th end of the world ‘prophecy’ and ExMos be like, OMG JW’s predict End Of The World, again!
What makes this one any different from the past seven failed prophecies?