Caffeine-addicted student of history

Perhaps I should have done this before, instead of trying to slip into the group unnoticed. Anyway, the quiet guy sitting at the back now comes forward for formal introduction.
I named myself after a Conservative politician, which warns you what kind of politics to expect.
I'm the son of two schoolteachers and the grandson of another one (does this count as a "bloodline"?), which probably explains why I get a kick when somebody says "now I understand".
I was born with a wide-ranging sense of curiosity, which soon focussed on history. This was what originally brought me to ATS, which is a fascinating place for anyone interested in history. Where else can you get the chance to study the growth of so many new religions at first hand?
I am now a Christian, but I was once an atheist. This means that, up to a point, I can see both sides of the argument. I certainly won't be wading into unbelievers and trying to beat them up, because I still remember that it doesn't work.
I'm contemplating making a few threads on Revelation, which will make some people groan. I do promise you, though, that my recipe for interpreting Revelation includes no dates. If you're allergic to dates, this will be good news.
This seems to be a reasonably friendly place, and I'm expecting to enjoy myself.

Welcome from another caffeine addicted history buff. I am fascinated by the renaissance period and the Tudor and Elizabethan years the most.

It's great to have you here and I hope that you enjoy your stay!

Take care,
Cindi

reply to post by DISRAELI
Welcome to ATS. Grab an avatar so your posts have an identity people can recognise and learn to hate, love or avoid

History is a popular topic around here especially on the Ancient & Lost Civs forums...where 'aliens did it' is the most sensible explanation for nearly everything. Take it easy and enjoy the place...

reply to post by DISRAELI



Hi DISRAELI, and welcome to the ATS community. For now, you can reply to any thread in any member forum you wish, as well as send & receive U2U's (messages) to Staff only.
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Sauron,
Moderator.

Welcome to the madness
Sound like you should fit right in with the rest of us...
you know that means your qualified to receve therapy now, right?

Originally posted by DISRAELIAnyway, the quiet guy sitting at the back now comes forward for formal introduction.

It's usually the quiet ones you have to worry about.

Welcome!


[edit on 27/3/2010 by Iamonlyhuman]

I m posting these two clips because I'm teaching myself how to embed Youtube videos and I need the practice.
Will keep tinkering until I have sorted out how to make it work.





[edit on 14-7-2010 by DISRAELI]

[edit on 14-7-2010 by DISRAELI]

Sorry, just practising Youtube links again.
I want to make sure I've got the number right.





[edit on 15-7-2010 by DISRAELI]

reply to post by DISRAELI

This is my philosophical definition of the Christian God, and I am attaching it here so that I can find it again if I need it in a hurry.

If anyone else is interested in reading it, be my guest.

Definition of God



[edit on 18-8-2010 by DISRAELI]

reply to post by DISRAELI

Just setting a link to the first (in chapter order) of my threads in Revelation;

Fear Not

My critics

"Those who beset him round
With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound;
His strength the more is."

While I've been writing a series of threads on Revelation, the criticism coming in from non-believers has been very encouraging. It made me feel I was on the right track.

Obviously many unbelievers are simply uninterested in religious matters. This being ATS, they often feel the need to write in and say so.
Thus, on the subject of Satan falling from heaven, Saabacura observed;

Who gives a rat's A* wheter he fell from the heaves or the sky...

Since the subject held no interest for them, they felt that work on it was a waste of time.

Baloney wrote
You are looking WAY too much into this all...

vjr1113 wrote;
I've got a question, do you think your over-thinking...

While Prevenge observed;

IMO your efforts are complex, yet fruitless these mysteries of revelation are going over your head...

And jontap

you put a lot of work into this, but honestly it's all just fairy tales, hate to say it but it is

That was another comon theme, viz.questioning the value of the material I was using;
Thus MessiahToothFairy;

Sorry to have to reveal this to you, but your source of reference is a fictional book that is simply a copy of predated stories...

MessiahToothFairy has since been banned.

Similarly aorAki;

Seriously, it's a fable, a made-up story...Oh, what backward people we are, relying on tales from the dim mist to guide us

And LilDudeissocool;

I hate to break it to ya, but Revelation is all kite crypt

Another one who "hates to do it"? What is this irresistable force that drives people to do things against their will?
In the case of DarkRedSoda, it was obviously inspiring the writing to something verging on poetry;

Woe to the paranoid superstitious commoners whom [sic] know no better than to entertain superstitions of fiction as if they are non-fiction...
Woe to you; for your lack of study you are rewarded with fear and false hopes...

Excuse me, "lack of study"? I've just been told that I was doing too much study. Make up your minds, guys.

They began giving me advice;

Reevster wrote;
Give it up already with all this religious baloney

RobertAntonWeishaupt wrote;
Put aside the Bible and start looking at the reality of the world around you

EnactedEgoTrip wrote;
Please do yourself a favour and stop believing in something so literally that you cannot prove, and has been proven incorrect time and time again.

EnactedEgoTrip has since been banned.

Yes, I get the message "Give it up. Stop doing it"
When I showed no sign of taking this advice, a note of exasperation began to creep in.
Thus Zamini;

Enjoy the little pit you have dug for yourselves while it lasts, knowledge fills any gap, and the world is moving towards dismissing your royal fairy tales...
ATS is a place for denying ignorance...Right now, your ignorance is being denied.

Sorry, that mantra did not work. I'm still here.

Most touching of all was the plaintive query of dyingsun;

Are you done yet?...All you actually do here is scare people who believe in what you say

This objection needs to be placed in context. This was in November, at the height of the great frenzy of Nuclear War/False flag speculation. The forum was being swamped with suggestions that we were all to be blown to radioactive particles in a couple of days. And in the middle of all this- I was supposed to be the one who was "causing fear"?
dyingsun seems to have registered for the purpose of making that complaint, and hasn't been seen since.

All the above have been very helpful to me in maintaining my determination to continue, and I'm very grateful to them.




.

Severest critic

But my severest critic has undoubtedly been the one who wrote;

I must say that I am quite amazed at your ability to talk at such length about things of which you have absolutely no Knowledge whatsoever.

Yet, in some respects, he has a high opinion of me;

He is very,very, very, very, clever.
Seriously.
I fully suspect he has additional thousands ("their name is legion") of the thoughts of the "thinker" about the Revelation of John.
But does he have any Knowledge of the Revelation of John?
Of course not.
But if you want to entertain yourself with the thoughts of the "fallen" consciousness about the Revelation of John, have at it.

I was so taken by this grudging and evidently sincere endorsement that I was tempted to incorporate it into my signature.

Michael and I agree that my approach involves "thinking", and that his approach does not.
As a result, he dismisses my conclusions as nonsensical;

I would suggest that he try reciting these things in a monologue on Saturday Night Live.
I would probably be able to laugh enough for the entire audience...
Such nonsense is merely representative of the kind of nonsense that has been vomited up by the "beast of the earth" consciousness of the "thinker" for almost 2000 years now.

He also objects that "thinking" does not produce beauty;

There is no poetry, no music, no geometry, and no beauty in your interpretation

I questioned this claim. I suggested that the concepts themselves were beautiful. Yes, indeed. Did not Keats write;
"Beauty is truth, truth Beauty; that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know".
But the appeal to Keats had no effect. I suspect that Michael has more affinity with Shelley.

But the real key to the difference between us is this question of Knowledge.

In order to understand the Revelation of John, one must have- duh- a revelation

Anyone who attempts to "interpret" or "explain" the Revelation of John is claiming to have received a revelation

I don't agree that this is necessary.
If I set out to interpret a speech in one of Shakespeare's plays, I'm not claiming to be Shakespeare, I'm not even claiming to be a playwright. I'm just claiming to be a student of language.
Similarly, Revelation is a deliberate attempt to communicate in written language. So explaining the book involves trying to grasp what the writer means by the words he's using. It;'s an exercise in understanding language.

So I made no claim to have received a "revelation" of my own.
Whereas Michael told me, at one point, that he was the "only individual in human history" qualified to speak on these matters.
There were times when he seemd to identify me as the chief opponent in his cosmic drama.

I understand your efforts at providing your "explanation" as determinedly and specifically opposed to my efforts to diminish the loss of life that will result from people following the thoughts of the "thinker" rather than the Revelation

Hardly "specifically". I started this project long before you had arrived on the scene.

But I had no idea just how personally he was taking things, until this point was reached;

The Revelation of John has been my constant companion for almost 36 years...
It is almost as if the Revelation of John is my wife.
And Disraeli is touching my wife.
My goal here is not just to destroy this thread.
My goal is to stop Disraeli from touching my wife.
You will probably not understand what I mean by this unless you are married

This is the kind of difference that cannot be bridged easily.
Obviously I cannot accept the claim to exclusive rights on this book.
But I have carried through this project in faith and in good faith, and I believe that the work has been honourable.

Greetings, welcome and put the kettle on. I am addicted to caffeine too.

Look forward to your posts.

reply to post by rigel4

Thank you for your welcome.
Let me confess- I've been here for a while. It was just convenient to add a couple of things to my introduction.
But if you want to see my posts, let me nudge you in the direction of my series of threads on Revelation,

Well seems i am the nub. I''l go right over there and have a read.
I am a believer of sorts in a non dom kind of way.

All right, what went wrong?

I mean, specifically, what went wrong with the thread "4 Horsemen-Running".
Was it the title?

The two threads on this theme were originally going to be called "4 Horsemen-Why?" and "4 Horsemen-How?", which accurately reflected the relationship between them. One was about the motives for sending them, the other was about what the experience would look like.
Then, at the last minute, the second title was changed to "Running"- not exactly "sensational", but trying to convey some sense that it was a dynamic episode.
The result- by one standard of measurement, the least popular thread in the whole series.
Was it that parts of the argument were running against currently popular views? But that's happened in a number of these discussions, without having quite the same effect.

The irony is that when someone with a different view of the subject went off to present a thread of his own in the Theology forums, he copied my title for the purpose. With slightly more success, but not much.

I still think it's a good thread. Doesn't deserve to be the neglected child of the family.

Revelation and the "Predictions and Prophecies" forum

""This forum is for the discussion of published clairvoyant predictions from contemporary psychics and "prophets" as well as ancient prophecies and prognostications"

One of the objections raised by the critics about my series on Revelation was that this sort of discussion "doesn't belong on ATS".
So I quote the above rubric, found at the top of each thread, as a complete refutation of that argument.
.ATS has deliberately established a place for the discussion of various topics which include "ancient prophecy"
Revelation is undoubtedly a piece of "ancient prophecy", so it's included in the category of items for discussion.
If ATS has deliberately established a place for it, you cannot say that it is "out of place".
Therefore Revelation does belong on ATS.

One thing I've noticed over the last twelve months is that the "ancient prophecies" element of the forum seems to have diminished. I'm sure there used to be many more discussions not just of Christian prophecy but also of older writers like Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce.
One possible explanation is that a younger generation may simply be less interested in people writing before their own lifetimes.
But there is a more disturbing possibility. In recent months, people have been finding "predictions" in film and TV scripts, in cartoons, and in the songs produced by the music industry. What have these sources got in common? Isn't it the fact that none of them require much reading? So this trend may be a symptom of the decline of the reading habit, and that's what ought to be disturbing.

The origin of this series on Revelation

I could be romantic, and trace it back to a tapestry-filled room in the chateau of Angers, which seemed to present a much more sraright-forward narrative than I had been led to expect.
My brother's Art exam paper, at school, invited him to illustrate ch1 vv12-16, which propmted me to look it up.

But the real starting-point was the syllabus of a Theology examination.
One of the papers was on the Greek text of a selection of short New Testament passages about the theology of Christ. They included a well-known passage from Philippians, another well-known passage from Colossians, and they also included chs 1,4, and 5 from Revelation.
I was struck by the fact that the marginal cross-references gave so much help in understanding what John was trying to say. I set out in later years to see if this would work all the way through the book; I think I've demonstrated that it does.
When I started this project on ATS, I had a word-processed manuscript which had been lying around for a decade or so, but I haven't even looked at it for many months. This has been an opportunity to make a completely fresh start in presenting the material.
I have to say that the self-imposed discipline of producing a topic on a weekly basis, one passage at a time, has been extraordinarily helpful. It enforced a sense of focus. It obliged me to consider points (like the "seven kings") which I had been tending to ignore, and I think that the resulting interpretation is much more rigorous and complete than it had been before.

I'd like to thank all those members of ATS who've been encouraging me in this task, adding supportive comments from time to time.
I hope the finished product brings as much encouragement to those who read it.

Jewish religious festivals were established to celebrate what God did for his people, one way or the other.
But I don't see that he's given any sign of intending to do things the other way round, and follow the festivals as a kind of timetable.
In fact the festival of Hanukkah exists precisely because the event that it celebrates didn't co-incide with any of the existing festivals. God chose a new date.
Hence the theme of my thread The futility of date-setting