Are We Living in “the Last Days”?

Post Reply New Topic

See, I agree. Perhaps I SHOULD. But I have a real, live, JW right here in the forum who can help me understand and clear up some things. If I'm wrong, then I'm wrong--no harm done, and nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? It's just fascinating to me that one can make certain claims and not have a questioning spirit regarding those claims.

I'll be honest, for me, somethings such as the existence of God or the need for atonement are simply not up for debate. Those kinds of things, to me, are very plain and clear. But my attitude is such that I always seek a closer relationship with my God and my Savior. So if someone presents something that is theologically challenging, what reason do I have not to ask for answers?

If, for another example, the atheists are possibly right and there is no God/gods and my faith is deceptive from the outset, should I not feel some kind of need to examine my own beliefs and decide that MAYBE my faith causes more problems than it solves? Such a line of reasoning can lead right back to the Bible, examining the Scripture, and either accepting/rejecting certain other conclusions or adjusting one's position. For someone who has already attained strength of faith, there is no harm in examination of beliefs.

Christians are also often guilty of blind acceptance of what they've been taught, and I'm no different. So yeah, I do feel threatened when someone who doesn't believe pokes holes in logical discourse. Logically, if I am wrong in my thinking, that opens the possibility that I'm wrong about other things as well. What is the proper response? Examine the errors, compare the apparent errors with what is written in the Bible, and decide whether the errors really are errors or if, perhaps, the apparent errors only appear so because of, for example, false assumptions on the part of the one making claims contrary to faith. Making a person of faith actually THINK is a GOOD thing. And I suspect what we have here is the product of a failure of independent thought, hence the copy/pasting. I personally won't engage in it. If you want the truth of Christianity, the only source you need is the Bible. Read it and absorb it. No copy/pasting necessary.

excellent response!

Sometimes it is not worthwhile to deeply investigate the beliefs of crazy people. I have no interest in learning the finer points of "Creation Science" (you brought up AiG) when I already know enough to determine that the notion is bunk.

And my objection was to a continuing pattern of simply copy-pasting Watchtower tracts without providing any new content or insight. It just becomes spammy without adding anything to the forum.

i think you enjoy it more than you let on

i've been away from wp for a while, though, so maybe it's getting stale and i just don't notice.

to be honest, i might just have too much time on my hands and a terrible idea of what "entertainment" is.

i still think it's worth it. i think i was linked to jesusandmo for the first time in a thread by a ppr regular that was all copy/paste creation science anti-evolution drivel.

1: Woe on earth does not de facto prove there is war in heaven. Water in the sea does not de facto prove there is air in the sky.

2: “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.” Wars in previous years have lasted for literally decades (The slightly mis-named hundred-years war) and the bodycounts have been to scale just as horrific. That there are less people to kill in City A does not make the complete destruction of City A any less destructive. For the capabilities of the period, wars were fought to the extreme. (Any period.)

3: “There will be food shortages.” When have there NOT been food shortages? It doesn't take a scholar to go google millenia of starvation and famine and general "shortage" of food, especially in periods more held hostage to the weather for food production than in recent times.

4:“There will be great earthquakes.” Likewise to above. Earthquake damage is limited by what you can build and population density. A city of single storey huts will still fall down, but with less effect than a city of sky-scrapers. Likewise, as one goes further back in time, one looses the ability to accurately gauge the severity of an earthquake, save in florid descriptive terms, and also the records become discontinuous. “Earthquakes have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the last 100 years and improvements in technology have only slightly reduced the death toll.” is your quote. Change "hundreds" for "thousands" and you've got it spot on.

5: “There will be . . . pestilences.” Malaria increased when people started living in Malarial bands. Clue is in the name. The pests that propagated it were always there, but people used to quite wisely avoid these areas. Cholera: more people, more dirty water, more disease. And so forth. And as above, there have ALWAYS been vast pestilences. Even if one insists on using the Biblical sources alone, there are a few quite famous pestilences that are topped by the Black Death and that's about it. All the modern plagues came to nothing. Bird Flu, Swine Flu...nothing. And almost ALL diseases start out fatal and have no cure. Then someone finds a cure.

6 and on. I could do this all day, but the post would get far too long and it would be pointless. Nothing in the "End Of Days" list is unique to modern times, and most of it has been prevalent for centuries. Disobeying parents is as old as the hills, for example.

The only real difference is in the industrialisation of warfare, and in fairness, that happened before 1914. Efficiency and progress.

Actually Macbeth, you concede too much.

Modern wars (and yes, I include WWII) have been far less destructive than previous wars. Civilian populations have mostly survived. It has been a long time since we saw a war wipe out over a third of a nation's population, as used to happen. We no longer have the kind of wholesale slaughter and extermination of peoples.


More people are well-fed now than at any other time in human history.


People in developed nations in modern times do not die of infectious disease in any significant numbers.

We are living in the last days in the same manner as was the Apostle Paul. The death, burial, and resurrection of Christ marks a dividing point upon the timeline, after which all times then are the last days. This side of the cross is when the second coming of Christ will occur, but as Christ said, no one except His Father knows the day or the hour. Christ repeatedly said that He will come like a thief in the night. Peter said that it will be when almost everyone says "where is the promise of His return? Since as from when the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the beginning." Relayed by John, it will be when everyone is saying "peace and safety".

So, yes these are "the last days" as defined by the point of betweeness otherwise known as Christ's sacrificial death for our sins, but this exact era of time after the Cross is not necessarily when Christ will return. I think that rather the stage is being set for more antichrists to have power prior to the main one, but it is impossible to place a date upon even that. There is the possibility of after this, before this thinking, but not a "on this exact date" spiel of advertisement.

i think the jimi hendrix all along the watchtower is the preferred watchtower.

sorry, neighbors, you have one billion years left for silly arguments over the unknowable. know this,the sun will take you all, in aforementioned one billion years. no escaping that.

Crap, and I was going to do laundry.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Not Bob Dylan's?

Thinking on it, the present seems quite rosy. One could almost be optimistic. It certainly doesn't feel all that "apocalyptic".

Prophecy is ka ka.

ruveyn

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB8NFaJx-aE[/youtube]

Are we living in the last days? Yes we are. When does Christ return? When no one expects him.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64BjiXb2YL0[/youtube]

That video can go get f****d and get aids and die of cancer 5 painful years later. Katrina wasn't anything of any god. It was negligence on the part of local and federal agencies who ignored everyone saying that the infrastructure needed to be updated and reinforced and better pumps installed.

Good song IMO though. True, not everything came from God and yes it was ours or their fault Whether we made poor infrastructure or made the earth hotter. We are always causing trouble