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Wednesday 22 July 2015

Hebrews1-7New Jerusalem Bible

1)1 At many moments in the past and by many means, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets; but

2 in our time, the final days, he has spoken to us in the person of his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things and through whom he made the ages.

3 He is the reflection of God's glory and bears the impress of God's own being, sustaining all things by his powerful command; and now that he has purged sins away, he has taken his seat at the right hand of the divine Majesty on high.

4 So he is now as far above the angels as the title which he has inherited is higher than their own name.

5 To which of the angels, then, has God ever said: You are my Son, today I have fathered you, or: I shall be a father to him and he a son to me?

6 Again, when he brings the First-born into the world, he says: Let all the angels of God pay him homage.

7 To the angels, he says: appointing the winds his messengers and flames of fire his servants,

8 but to the Son he says: Your throne, God, is for ever and ever; and: the sceptre of his kingdom is a sceptre of justice;

9 you love uprightness and detest evil. This is why God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness, as none of your rivals.

10 And again: Long ago, Lord, you laid earth's foundations, the heavens are the work of your hands.

11 They pass away but you remain, they all wear out like a garment.

12 Like a cloak you will roll them up, like a garment, and they will be changed. But you never alter and your years are unending.

13 To which of the angels has God ever said: Take your seat at my right hand till I have made your enemies your footstool?

14 Are they not all ministering spirits, sent to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?

2)1 We ought, then, to turn our minds more attentively than before to what we have been taught, so that we do not drift away.

2 If a message that was spoken through angels proved to be so reliable that every infringement and disobedience brought its own proper punishment,

3 then we shall certainly not go unpunished if we neglect such a great salvation. It was first announced by the Lord himself, and is guaranteed to us by those who heard him;

4 God himself confirmed their witness with signs and marvels and miracles of all kinds, and by distributing the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the various ways he wills.

5 It was not under angels that he put the world to come, about which we are speaking.

6 Someone witnesses to this somewhere with the words: What are human beings that you spare a thought for them, a child of Adam that you care for him?

7 For a short while you have made him less than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honour,

8 put all things under his feet. For in putting all things under him he made no exceptions. At present, it is true, we are not able to see that all things are under him,

9 but we do see Jesus, who was for a short while made less than the angels, now crowned with glory and honour because he submitted to death; so that by God's grace his experience of death should benefit all humanity.

10 It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should, in bringing many sons to glory, make perfect through suffering the leader of their salvation.

11 For consecrator and consecrated are all of the same stock; that is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers

12 in the text: I shall proclaim your name to my brothers, praise you in full assembly; or in the text:

13 I shall put my hope in him; followed by Look, I and the children whom God has given me.

14 Since all the children share the same human nature, he too shared equally in it, so that by his death he could set aside him who held the power of death, namely the devil,

15 and set free all those who had been held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death.

16 For it was not the angels that he took to himself; he took to himself the line of Abraham.

17 It was essential that he should in this way be made completely like his brothers so that he could become a compassionate and trustworthy high priest for their relationship to God, able to expiate the sins of the people.

18 For the suffering he himself passed through while being put to the test enables him to help others when they are being put to the test.

3) 1 That is why all you who are holy brothers and share the same heavenly call should turn your minds to Jesus, the apostle and the high priest of our profession of faith.

2 He was trustworthy to the one who appointed him, just like Moses, who remained trustworthy in all his household;

3 but he deserves a greater glory than Moses, just as the builder of a house is more honoured than the house itself.

4 Every house is built by someone, of course; but God built everything that exists.

5 It is true that Moses was trustworthy in the household of God, as a servant is, acting as witness to the things which were yet to be revealed,

6 but Christ is trustworthy as a son is, over his household. And we are his household, as long as we fearlessly maintain the hope in which we glory.

7 That is why, as the Holy Spirit says: If only you would listen to him today!

8 Do not harden your hearts, as at the rebellion, as at the time of testing in the desert,

9 when your ancestors challenged me, and put me to the test, and saw what I could do

10 for forty years. That was why that generation sickened me and I said, 'Always fickle hearts, that cannot grasp my ways!'

11 And then in my anger I swore that they would never enter my place of rest.

12 Take care, brothers, that none of you ever has a wicked heart, so unbelieving as to turn away from the living God.

13 Every day, as long as this today lasts, keep encouraging one another so that none of you is hardened by the lure of sin,

14 because we have been granted a share with Christ only if we keep the grasp of our first confidence firm to the end.

15 In this saying: If only you would listen to him today; do not harden your hearts, as at the Rebellion,

16 who was it who listened and then rebelled? Surely all those whom Moses led out of Egypt.

17 And with whom was he angry for forty years? Surely with those who sinned and whose dead bodies fell in the desert.

18 To whom did he swear they would never enter his place of rest? Surely those who would not believe.

19 So we see that it was their refusal to believe which prevented them from entering.

4)1 Let us beware, then: since the promise never lapses, none of you must think that he has come too late for the promise of entering his place of rest.

2 We received the gospel exactly as they did; but hearing the message did them no good because they did not share the faith of those who did listen.

3 We, however, who have faith, are entering a place of rest, as in the text: And then in my anger I swore that they would never enter my place of rest. Now God's work was all finished at the beginning of the world;

4 as one text says, referring to the seventh day: And God rested on the seventh day after all the work he had been doing.

5 And, again, the passage above says: They will never reach my place of rest.

6 It remains the case, then, that there would be some people who would reach it, and since those who first heard the good news were prevented from entering by their refusal to believe,

7 God fixed another day, a Today, when he said through David in the text already quoted: If only you would listen to him today; do not harden your hearts.

8 If Joshua had led them into this place of rest, God would not later have spoken of another day.

9 There must still be, therefore, a seventh-day rest reserved for God's people,

10 since to enter the place of rest is to rest after your work, as God did after his.

11 Let us, then, press forward to enter this place of rest, or some of you might copy this example of refusal to believe and be lost.

12 The word of God is something alive and active: it cuts more incisively than any two-edged sword: it can seek out the place where soul is divided from spirit, or joints from marrow; it can pass judgement on secret emotions and thoughts.

13 No created thing is hidden from him; everything is uncovered and stretched fully open to the eyes of the one to whom we must give account of ourselves.

14 Since in Jesus, the Son of God, we have the supreme high priest who has gone through to the highest heaven, we must hold firm to our profession of faith.

15 For the high priest we have is not incapable of feeling our weaknesses with us, but has been put to the test in exactly the same way as ourselves, apart from sin.

16 Let us, then, have no fear in approaching the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace when we are in need of help.

5)1 Every high priest is taken from among human beings and is appointed to act on their behalf in relationships with God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins;

2 he can sympathise with those who are ignorant or who have gone astray, because he too is subject to the limitations of weakness.

3 That is why he has to make sin offerings for himself as well as for the people.

4 No one takes this honour on himself; it needs a call from God, as in Aaron's case.

5 And so it was not Christ who gave himself the glory of becoming high priest, but the one who said to him: You are my Son, today I have fathered you,

6 and in another text: You are a priest for ever, of the order of Melchizedek.

7 During his life on earth, he offered up prayer and entreaty, with loud cries and with tears, to the one who had the power to save him from death, and, winning a hearing by his reverence,

8 he learnt obedience, Son though he was, through his sufferings;

9 when he had been perfected, he became for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation

10 and was acclaimed by God with the title of high priest of the order of Melchizedek.

11 On this subject we have many things to say, and they are difficult to explain because you have grown so slow at understanding.

12 Indeed, when you should by this time have become masters, you need someone to teach you all over again the elements of the principles of God's sayings; you have gone back to needing milk, and not solid food.

13 Truly, no one who is still living on milk can digest the doctrine of saving justice, being still a baby.

14 Solid food is for adults with minds trained by practice to distinguish between good and bad.
6)1 Let us leave behind us then all the elementary teaching about Christ and go on to its completion, without going over the fundamental doctrines again: the turning away from dead actions, faith in God,

2 the teaching about baptisms and the laying -- on of hands, about the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgement.

3 This, God willing, is what we propose to do.

4 As for those people who were once brought into the light, and tasted the gift from heaven, and received a share of the Holy Spirit,

5 and tasted the goodness of God's message and the powers of the world to come

6 and yet in spite of this have fallen away -- it is impossible for them to be brought to the freshness of repentance a second time, since they are crucifying the Son of God again for themselves, and making a public exhibition of him.

7 A field that drinks up the rain that has fallen frequently on it, and yields the crops that are wanted by the owners who grew them, receives God's blessing;

8 but one that grows brambles and thistles is worthless, and near to being cursed. It will end by being burnt.

9 But you, my dear friends -- in spite of what we have just said, we are sure you are in a better state and on the way to salvation.

10 God would not be so unjust as to forget all you have done, the love that you have for his name or the services you have done, and are still doing, for the holy people of God.

11 Our desire is that every one of you should go on showing the same enthusiasm till the ultimate fulfilment of your hope,

12 never growing careless, but taking as your model those who by their faith and perseverance are heirs of the promises.

13 When God made the promise to Abraham, he swore by his own self, since there was no one greater he could swear by:

14 I will shower blessings on you and give you many descendants.

15 Because of that, Abraham persevered and received fulfilment of the promise.

16 Human beings, of course, swear an oath by something greater than themselves, and between them, confirmation by an oath puts an end to all dispute.

17 In the same way, when God wanted to show the heirs of the promise even more clearly how unalterable his plan was, he conveyed it by an oath

18 so that through two unalterable factors in which God could not be lying, we who have fled to him might have a vigorous encouragement to grasp the hope held out to us.

19 This is the anchor our souls have, reaching right through inside the curtain

20 where Jesus has entered as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest for ever, of the order of Melchizedek.

7)1 Melchizedek, king of Salem, a priest of God Most High, came to meet Abraham when he returned from defeating the kings, and blessed him;

2 and Abraham gave him a tenth of everything. By the interpretation of his name, he is, first, 'king of saving justice' and also king of Salem, that is, 'king of peace';

3 he has no father, mother or ancestry, and his life has no beginning or ending; he is like the Son of God. He remains a priest for ever.

4 Now think how great this man must have been, if the patriarch Abraham gave him a tenth of the finest plunder.

5 We know that any of the descendants of Levi who are admitted to the priesthood are obliged by the Law to take tithes from the people, that is, from their own brothers although they too are descended from Abraham.

6 But this man, who was not of the same descent, took his tithe from Abraham, and he gave his blessing to the holder of the promises.

7 Now it is indisputable that a blessing is given by a superior to an inferior.

8 Further, in the normal case it is ordinary mortal men who receive the tithes, whereas in that case it was one who is attested as being alive.

9 It could be said that Levi himself, who receives tithes, actually paid tithes, in the person of Abraham,

10 because he was still in the loins of his ancestor when Melchizedek came to meet him.

11 Now if perfection had been reached through the levitical priesthood -- and this was the basis of the Law given to the people -- why was it necessary for a different kind of priest to arise, spoken of as being of the order of Melchizedek rather than of the order of Aaron?

12 Any change in the priesthood must mean a change in the Law as well.

13 So our Lord, of whom these things were said, belonged to a different tribe, the members of which have never done service at the altar;

14 everyone knows he came from Judah, a tribe which Moses did not mention at all when dealing with priests.

15 This becomes even more clearly evident if another priest, of the type of Melchizedek, arises who is a priest

16 not in virtue of a law of physical descent, but in virtue of the power of an indestructible life.

17 For he is attested by the prophecy: You are a priest for ever of the order of Melchizedek.

18 The earlier commandment is thus abolished, because of its weakness and ineffectiveness

19 since the Law could not make anything perfect; but now this commandment is replaced by something better-the hope that brings us close to God.

20 Now the former priests became priests without any oath being sworn,

21 but this one with the swearing of an oath by him who said to him, The Lord has sworn an oath he will never retract: you are a priest for ever;

22 the very fact that it occurred with the swearing of an oath makes the covenant of which Jesus is the guarantee all the greater.

23 Further, the former priests were many in number, because death put an end to each one of them;

24 but this one, because he remains for ever, has a perpetual priesthood.

25 It follows, then, that his power to save those who come to God through him is absolute, since he lives for ever to intercede for them.

26 Such is the high priest that met our need, holy, innocent and uncontaminated, set apart from sinners, and raised up above the heavens;

27 he has no need to offer sacrifices every day, as the high priests do, first for their own sins and only then for those of the people; this he did once and for all by offering himself.

28 The Law appoints high priests who are men subject to weakness; but the promise on oath, which came after the Law, appointed the Son who is made perfect for ever


Darwinian argumentation is not evolving

Flagellar Diversity Challenges Darwinian Evolution, Not Intelligent Design
Casey Luskin July 22, 2015 3:56 AM |


Over the past week I've been writing about the latest iteration of the Darwinian response to Michael Behe's argument for intelligent design based on what Dr. Behe calls irreducible complexity. I use the word "iteration" not in the sense of our seeing something new, but in the sense that it's another round of the same unworkable objections that we've seen before.

Behe's case for ID goes back nearly twenty years now, yet the objections to it have not evolved much in that time. I have been looking specifically at an article written by biophysicist Matt Baker for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, "The bacterial flagellar motor: brilliant evolution or intelligent design?," arguing that the flagellum is not irreducibly complex. In the first part of my response I showed how he misunderstands how we test irreducible complexity, and in the second part I showed why the Type III Secretory System cannot serve as an evolutionary precursor to the flagellum.

But Dr. Baker has one other argument up his sleeve to try to show that the flagellum evolved. In his view, God wouldn't have done it that way. Essentially, Baker has imbibed Nick Matzke and Mark Pallen's fallacious theological argument that because there is diversity among flagella, the structure must not have been designed. He writes:

In the aftermath of the first legal challenges to curriculum requirements to teach intelligent design, evolutionary biologists Mark Pallen and Nicholas Matzke wrote "either there were thousands or millions of individual creation events ... or one has to accept that the highly diverse contemporary flagellar systems have evolved from a common ancestor".
Now maybe some (or even most) flagella are indeed related to one another, but there's no reason why a designer couldn't design diverse flagella. After all, in our experience with technological systems devised by human beings, we see incredible diversity! Look at all of the different ways that people have designed cell phones, trucks, or even something as simple as a key. These devices come in all kinds of myriad forms. Diversity doesn't negate design.
Thus, Baker is proffering a theological argument that is simply irrelevant to the scientific case for intelligent design. In reality, flagella are distributed in a polyphyletic manner that doesn't fit what we'd expect from common ancestry:

tim_flag_phyl_500.jpg

Reprinted from Figure 2, Trends in Microbiology, Vol 17, LAS Snyder, NJ Loman, K. Fuetterer, and MJ Pallen, "Bacterial flagellar diversity and evolution: seek simplicity and distrust it?," pp. 1-5, Copyright 2009, with permission from Elsevier.

What you see in the figure above are various major groups of bacteria, represented by triangles (or in some cases written text). They are arranged here according to a standard phylogeny of bacteria. The purple groups have flagella throughout the clade, and the groups with question marks have only a minority of species with flagella within that clade. The white triangles show groups not thought to have flagella.

What's the problem? The groups with flagella are scattered all about the tree and do not form a single monophyletic group. In other words, the diversity of flagella cannot be easily explained by common ancestry. Writing in Trends in Microbiology, the authors of the figure reprinted above explain the problem:

When we attempted to map the known distribution of flagellar genes on to a recently published 'tree of life', instead of a single monophyletic grouping of flagella-bearing phyla, we found multiple apparent points of origin for flagellar systems on the phylogenetic tree (Figure 2). This highlights a fundamental problem with any simple model of flagellar divergence: although there is some agreement as to the existence of bacterial phyla, there is no consensus on the order of their divergence.
The problem here is that flagella do not fit into the nice, neat nested hierarchy that you'd expect from common ancestry. Quite the opposite -- their diversity conflicts with what you would expect from a Darwinian origin of the flagellum. Indeed, the caption for the figure above from the paper states, "Arrows indicate apparent points of origins for flagellar lineages." Common descent predicts there should be just one arrow, but as you can see on the diagram there are five arrows, because there are no fewer than five clades -- widely separated on the tree -- that have flagella. This is not what common descent predicts. Common design, on the other hand would predict that complex features like flagella might be re-used in a manner that doesn't match a nested hierarchy, which is exactly what we see here. Ironically, the nature of bacterial flagellar diversity -- far from being a problem for intelligent design -- is actually a significant problem for Darwinian evolution.
Baker's argument here is ironic. We constantly see evolutionists arguing that homology (i.e., sequence similarity) between proteins is evidence that they evolved. In particular, we see this argument made regarding the flagellum. In fact, in a striking comment that appears after his article, Baker himself states that he feels no obligation to provide anything like a stepwise explanation for the evolution of the flagellum precisely because "commonality" between proteins is sufficient to demonstrate flagellar evolution:

I don't think we need to actually directly show an injectisome can be step by step evolved into a flagellum, the field of experimental evolution is very young! We can look, with greater and greater ease, at the historical genetic record, and look for commonality. This is the basis of most evolutionary genetics. By phylogenetics and common ancestors, we can show that systems share elements, and we do.
Yet in his article he affirmatively quotes Pallen and Matzke saying that the "highly diverse" nature of flagellar proteins also demonstrates their evolution. So now apparently both similarity between proteins and differences between proteins demonstrates evolution. No matter what you find, it demonstrates evolution!
What a sweet deal it must be to be a Darwinian evolutionist. You don't have to provide any evidence that your theory is true (i.e., offer some semblance of a stepwise evolutionary explanation), and no matter what evidence you do find, it is guaranteed to show that your theory is true!

Indeed, Pallen and Matzke's paper presents other related contradictions. They repeatedly denigrate "typological" thinking, stating:

As the great evolutionist Ernst Mayr noted, one of Darwin's greatest achievements was to abolish typological or essentialist thinking from biology; instead, the emphasis in biology is on variation and individuality3. Therefore, when discussing flagellar evolution it is important to appreciate that there is no such thing as 'the' bacterial flagellum. Instead, there are myriad different bacterial flagella, showing extensive variation in form and function.
Since their article is an explicit attack on ID, I suppose their point is that they're trying to tag ID as a form of typological thinking, wrongly suggesting that ID can't accommodate the diversity among flagella. Ironically, however, Pallen and Matkze later admit that "all (bacterial) flagella share a conserved core set of proteins," numbering around 20 proteins, and they further concede that there is a common core of subsystems found in known bacterial flagella:
Three modular molecular devices are at the heart of the bacterial flagellum: the rotor-stator that powers flagellar rotation, the chemotaxis apparatus that mediates changes in the direction of motion and the T3SS that mediates export of the axial components of the flagellum.
There you have it: despite all the apparent "diversity" of flagella, and the evolutionists' distaste for "typological thinking," they admit that all bacterial flagella share a conserved core of about 20 proteins, and a common core (what I would call an irreducible core) of subsystems: a motor, a chemotaxis mechanism, and a secretion apparatus. It seems like the many diverse types of flagella are variations on a common thematic archetype.
And how do we know this core is irreducibly complex? Because the experimental data shows it is. Scott Minnich's genetic knockout experiments on the E. coli flagellum have shown that it fails to assemble or function properly if any one of its approximately 35 structural parts are missing.

Baker discloses none of this, but simply asserts that the irreducible complexity of the flagellum has been refuted:

Typically, intelligent design proponents persevere despite this evidence. They simply adjust their goal posts by selecting other systems to act as poster boys for irreducible complexity. It is difficult to respond to these movable challenges. But as we learn more about the origins of these and other complex systems, we can at least reduce the number of available candidates used to prop up the theory of intelligent design.
Actually ID proponents haven't abandoned arguing for the irreducible complexity of the flagellum because, as we've seen, it was never refuted in the first place. Rather than moving goal posts, we're building a formidable team, as ID advocates have expanded their arguments far beyond irreducible complexity. But I suspect that Dr. Baker doesn't pay any much attention to any of that.
Thus, he closes with a typically inaccurate rant about the dangers of intelligent design:

While all this may seem relatively harmless, the intelligent design movement is well funded, slickly presented, and actively challenges educational curricula in many countries. It is a dangerously well-articulated distraction from the large body of evidence supporting evolutionary theory.
Actually our funding is nothing compared to the wealth of support available to upholders of Darwinian evolution. Setting that aside, consider Baker's claim that ID distracts from the "large body of evidence supporting evolutionary theory." In fact, as we've seen, both evidence and logic contradict Baker's arguments. In fact, he openly refuses to demonstrate what Darwinian evolution requires: a stepwise evolutionary explanation of the flagellum! He apparently wants to blame ID for his failure to make a convincing case.

The world is very different from the one that many Darwin advocates believe they live in. Despite their protests to the contrary, this debate is far from ov

Frequently asked question III

What Is the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society



The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania is a nonprofit corporation formed in 1884 under the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, U.S.A. It is used by Jehovah’s Witnesses to support their worldwide work, which includes publishing Bibles and Bible-based literature.
According to its charter, the corporation’s purposes are “religious, educational, and charitable,” in particular, to “preach and teach the gospel of God’s Kingdom under Christ Jesus.” Membership in the corporation is by invitation only and is not based on how much a person has donated. The corporation members and directors assist the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Cooperating Legal Entities

Besides the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, Jehovah’s Witnesses use dozens of legal entities in various countries. Some of these entities include in their name such terms as “Watch Tower,” “Watchtower,” or a translation of one of these.
These various legal entities have enabled us to accomplish much since they were established, such as the following:
  • Writing and publishing. We have published some 220 million Bibles and about 40 billion pieces of Bible-based literature, in over 700 languages. The jw.org website allows people to read the Bible online without cost in more than 120 languages and to get answers to such Bible questions as, “What is the Kingdom of God?
  • Education. We conduct a variety of schools for Bible instruction. For example, since 1943, over 8,000 of Jehovah’s Witnesses have benefited from the intensive training provided by the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead, enabling them to serve as missionaries or to stabilize and strengthen our worldwide work. And each week, millions of people, including non-Witnesses, receive instruction at meetings conducted in each of our congregations. We also conduct literacy classes and have produced a textbook in 110 languages that teaches people to read and write.
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Although much has been accomplished through the corporations and legal entities that we use, our work is not dependent on any of them. Each Christian has a personal responsibility to fulfill the God-given mandate to preach and teach the good news. (Matthew 24:14; 28:19, 20) We believe that God is backing our work and that he will continue to be the one who “makes it grow.”—1 Corinthians 3:6, 7.