I am not a believer, and I doubt you will be able to convince me otherwise. However I have one question for believers in a higher power or higher powers:
When you look to other religions and say "that's ridiculous" at the idea of a wine god or a god with the head of an elephant or spirits and ferries or Zeus or Thor wielding his hammer, have you ever considered one thing.... is your religion any less ridiculous????
I'm a believer, and the fact is of the "holy" books out there, only one has fulfilled prophecy, archeology, and other facts to prove it. Only a Creator outside our time-frame construct could tell the future from the beginning; the Bible has shown this time and again. Other groups, like let's pick the Mormons, claim prophecy from Joseph Smith. One of their favorites is that he predicted the Civil War would start in South Carolina. Thing is, if you investigate, the weekend before he issued that prediction, there was an editorial in the Sunday paper in the town a few miles from his settlement at the time which said exactly that. To those at the time, South Carolina was the state full of firebrands, and it was pretty obvious to everyone that would be the starting point.
And on the other hand, there are a number of failed prophecies by him as well (like Mormons would not have to cook).
Bottom line: only one book contains totally accurate predictions, that's why I believe and why I see others as having flawed and provably false beliefs.
Flame retardant suit on, there are probably some Mormons out there who want to spin Joe's failed prophecies.
Yes Maria worked for Real - in marketing. Those on the 'net in those days may remember she was crowned "Queen of Spam" as she started a lot of the unsolicited commercial email practices in the early days. I have to live with her as my senator, and let's just say she is known in Washington as Maria Cant-Vote-Well.
Ignore Hislop vs. Keating - just answer this: what's the origin of auricular confession - the Bible or paganism? What's the origin of infant baptism - Bible or pagan? The origin of celibate priests? Of mother-and-child worship? Of purgatory? Of indulgences? Of the "queen of heaven"?
All of those are pagan ideas, not Biblical ideas. All are unique to the Catholic church, and are not found in true Biblical Christianity. Whether Hislop traced the path correctly or not, the facts remain that the RCC put Christian labels on pagan practices, and continues it today.
As to whether Chick is right about the conspiracies, consider what the wealthiest organization in the world could accomplish. Note the RCC position on immigration: they want countries with a population that is a minority of RCC members to have open borders to countries that can up the ratio; but they are strongly against open borders where it would dilute the RCC membership. So the RCC is for an open US-Mexico border, but against islamic immigration into France for example. Add unlimited power to unlimited wealth, and the conspiracies can be seen to be more believable.
Research the history of Beziers some day - see what the popes and the RCC do to their enemies when they have no opposition.
Who said he was alive for 3 days? He could have died and God could have resurrected him, that would make Jesus Christ's note that the "sign of Jonah" would be as His resurrection more clear anyway.
Was Eve fashioned out of Adam's rib?
The rib God used is the one rib that grows back (others don't), and from Adam's DNA just duplicating the X chromosome could create a woman. As to whether God could do it, well, He created the universe, so making one person is not a stretch at all.
the earth has four corners
You are apparently attempting to claim the Bible teaches a flat earth. On the contrary the Bible teaches a spherical earth; just because the pagan-derived Catholic Church didn't like that does not make the Bible incorrect, it makes the RCC incorrect.
Which Bible
You claim the canon was settled in 313, it was settled long before that. Again, you seem to be subscribing to the RCC version of history, which is not the Biblical Christian view of history.
Why do you go to church on Sunday
The name of the day is not Christian, as the names of the months are not Christian. So what? As for why Sunday, that is the day the Lord arose from the dead. It's a new dispensation, we are freed from the law and not subject to the rules of the Israelites.
Why do most of the Christian[sic] holidays coincide exactly with pagan holidays that are centuries older
The long answer can be found here. The short answer is: the RCC took pagan ideas, symbols, practices, and theology and put Christian names on it. The mother-and-child motif is from Ishtar and Tammuz, that was turned into Mary-and-the-infant-Jesus. Nowhere in the Bible is there anything about worshipping Mary; in fact Jesus says that His mother, brothers and sisters are those who believe. Nowhere in the Bible is there a birth-of-Jesus celebration; that is a Catholic invention. Nowhere is there a "lent" or a "meatless friday" or an "ash wednesday" or auricular confession or sprinkling infant baptism or the eucharist or purgatory or celibate priests. All of these items are pagan imports via the RCC that are not Christian. True Biblical Christianity shuns all of them. Although we are a pretty tiny minority.
The point though is not in these details - the point is simply that all other religions are about man trying to reach God. Biblical Christianity is about God reaching out to man, dying for us to pay the price for our sins. Other religions are about DOING something to EARN one's way to a great afterlife; true Biblical Christianity is about accepting a GIFT of GRACE, not about works.
My one Windoze device left got this thing on 4/27. Norton's AV updated to catch it on 5/2. My laptop was fully MS up to date. So there is some other path to infection...
Timing is everything. This beastie was in the wild a long time before it was caught.
You point out that application serving can be a profit center based on GPL'd code. True. But if you put up a GPL code based app server, so can I. So can 5000 other geeks. Competition occurs. Soon, profit is nil. The business model does not work.
See here for a book that has hard data on the cause of Alzheimers and many other diseases. It's not popular with the mega food companies, as it puts a lot of the blame in their laps. But it makes a lot of sense.
It has to do with excitotoxins, such as glutamates, aspartates, and others when present in abnormal, imbalanced quantities.
The requested document is freely available only to registered users with an online subscription to Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences
So I guess you are somewhere that gets past that.
Miller-Urey is used as proof, it was so taught to me at a high-prestige institution in an advanced (i.e., majors only, past pre-meds) organic chemistry seminar course.
Natural selection as in providing descent with modifications, a key part of progressive evolution, is only going to occur with fidelity in reproduction. Otherwise the traits for success will be lost in succeeding generations.
Indeed physics and chemistry are deterministic - they go where the Gibb's free energy dictate they go. Which is why polypeptides don't spontaneously form. Stochastic processes run toward releasing the most energy. Aside from chlorophyll, where does adding sunlight produce anything but decay? A freezer is an intelligently designed mechanism, of course it can direct heat flow in one direction against the energy and entropy gradients, that is not the point.
I have read far more on the topic than the abstract you mention, it's just typical of the work in the field (probably why you selected that one).
You seem to understand fundamentals of chemistry - work out the equilibrium constant of a moderate sized protein in an aqueous solution, given the energy of peptide bonds for a selection of amino acids. Figure it out to 150 or 200 proteins in the peptide. I could give you the answer but working it out yourself you may learn something significant.
I brought up Miller-Urey because that discredited experiment is still taught so widely that many folks here cite it as proof, since it's what they were taught was proof of evolution. It's nice to talk with someone who is beyond that.
That article at the Royal Society (at least from its abstract, the article is not freely available for a couple of years it looks like) makes the classic error that all of the prebiotic auto-replication theories do. The talkorigins summary is also a very good summary of an amazingly bad theory.
The key point that is never addressed in any papers I'm aware of is that in order to get to an accurately reproducing cell where natural selection could take over and exert an effect on reproduction, the fidelity of reproduction has to exceed any stochastic process by so many orders of magnitude. The fidelity cannot be absolute of course, or no mutations could occur. Yet simple probstat will show you that any non-deterministic reaction or process will tend toward the mean, toward increasing entropy. Until the RNA stage, there is no possible high-fidelity reproduction mechanism. And in the early earth (by current theories) there was not a superabuncdance of O2, hence there was not a strong ozone layer, and there was a lot of hard UV around. That alone would tend to break up any long chain molecules, if the temperature and other reactants didn't get in the way.
Yet the authors of this and other papers blithely talk about natural selection occuring in what amounts to small soap bubbles. How absurd - there is no equal fractionation of the reagents in the bubble when it buds, there is no accurate reproduction involved. Split a soap bubble up and you don't get inherited characteristics in the offspring, you get whatever happens to be around in that part of the bubble. There can no more be natural selection in that process than the easter bunny can be found in a mosque.
It's the height of folly to assume such a process as the papers you cite occurs. Yet to defend evolution, abiogenesis has fallen to this. Sad.
Indeed it is far from the only such species found. Consider the coelacanth, known for a time as the "lungfish". This blighter is still used as an index fossil for 70-140 million years old. Yet you can go catch one if you're good at really deep fishing off the coast of Africa.
Ummm.... yep that's right, it's still an index fossil. Find a rock with coelacanth bones in it, and you'll have "proven" that the rock is 70-140 million years old. Even if your neighbor is chowing down on a fresh-fried identical specimen.
Let's see your evidence for abiogenesis. Are you going to cite Miller-Urey????
On November 9, 1965 this happened before. Maybe not exactly the same thing, but from roughly the same area, and cascading in what sounds like (based on preliminary reports) in the same way.
Deregulation was not in effect then; so if there is a strong parallel between the cases, it's then doubtful that it was due to dereg.
That proves it, we are different; I use qmail and emacs and am still a TR advocating independent Baptist. Oh I use vi for speed sometimes, but serious work is easiest for me in emacs.
I will agree my statements were sweeping generalizations about the DSS, but fairness dictates pointing out your statement
most KJV proponents also don't know history, science, or any number of other things. If you aren't just another ignorant fundamentalist, please, by all means, answer at least *some* of these questions
Which does seem to engage in sweeping generalizations as well.
I don't believe I used Riplinger as a reference point in our discussions or indeed in this thread at all. I tend not to use her (I've read her, true) since I find her book to be extremely poorly edited and more than a tad sensationalist. Her "the symbol for the NKJV is 666" seems to be like the folks who manage to force 666 into any number of odd places, which to me seems a bit like tinfoil hat time. I do think there are some valid points in her book and in other books you don't agree with, but I don't consider any of them flawless. I did use some concepts that they summarize things with, but when communicating concepts in sound bites, I used oversimplifications to convey a point. However that is inaccurate, and I must agree with your points that doing so was an error on my part, which I do regret.
Again in balance, your statements against the KJV position were also sound bite type responses, particularly since your reading in the subject has excluded the more reputable holders of those opinions.
I don't like reading books online either, but I have a duplexer for my printer which makes it more possible to handle small to medium tomes.
An offtopic question (you can always answer using my email) if you don't mind: coming from a TR/Baptist background, what led you to accept the oral tradition concept of Eastern Orthodox? And a second, what's the delta between the RCC and the EO on Marian doctrine?
Seems part of the issue here is different meanings of KJV-Only. If we go with your definition, as in Gipp and Ruckman, then I'm firmly against it, as it promotes the nut-case idea of the KJV being superior to the original Greek. One major reason I think that's crazy is that it means God's complete word was unavailable for 1500+ years, and leads to bad things like people translation from the KJV into other languages. In my thoughts, any translation should start with the TR, not with the KJV. The KJV is a great translation, but it is a translation. The originals were inspired, not the translations. This is why I so strongly state my anti-Ruckmanite position, as you could see in a number of my posts in this thread (before we started). There are two distinct (at least) camps in the pro-KJV group. One is the Ruckmanites, the others are pretty much in agreement with what I just outlined. We have several Ruckman and Gipp books, and if we ever get a parakeet I think we'll line the bottom of the cage with pages from those books.
I was not intending to and did not think I changed argument points from TR superiority to Zondervan profits. My point about Zondervan is that relying on them for why the TR is not as good as W&H is only wise if you keep in mind that they have a profit motive for one side of that discussion. In saying that most modern translations (Jay Green's aside) are based on W&H is simply labelling the W&H family as being the text family that the NIV, ASV, RSV, NRSV, NASB, NLT, etc. were translated from. Yes only the ASV was taken from W&H if you want to be extremely precise, but talking about version numbers of Nestle/Aland is a bit too obscure for slashdot. In fact I'm still amazed that I'm typing on/. about this topic anyway. Qmail vs. postfix is a much more likely debate here.
In talking about the DSS Isaiah is indeed what I was referring to, and yes Jeremiah has different ordering and other differences. But again that was in my estimation a bit deeper than/. discussions warranted; your qualifications are, I would bet if I were a bettor, unique on/., and therefore making the detailed points for one person seemed a bit over the top. I admit I was probably in error in not being thorough, and apologize for summarizing in a dramatic fashion. I have read some Metzger, though I don't agree with him.
If you are interested in the non-Ruckman KJV position at all, I suggest Waite or Burgon, their level of scholarship is something I think you could appreciate.
About your quantity of matches for "occult" and "bible", things like Anton LaVey's "Satanic Bible" would get matches there, as would negative references. But your point is well taken, and thanks for the Tufts link, I just bookmarked it.
Actually something like the Pentium FP bug was understandable and provable by an assembly language capable person with access to a range of systems. That is a much larger set of people than those with access to the proprietary microcode of the Pentium, those who knew what went wrong to create the bug. Yes there were a lot of people who would not know, as you point out; but there is a significant sized group who would be able to figure out the problem in enough detail to get to the chip as the problem.
Eliminating those verses about praying and fasting together required to drive out some demons is indeed major in my view, since without those verses it is not as clear that there are demonic issues which require fasting specifically to be dealt with (except of course by Jesus Himself).
Your assumption about the baptism issue and my thoughts on it is a bit incorrect. I realize the RCC and Orthodox churches do indeed baptize converts, but the point to me is about whether a mature belief is required prior to baptism. Acts 8:37 shows that belief is a prerequisite to baptism, while the RCC (and I assume but don't personally know the Orthodox) church will baptize infants who clearly do not have a full understanding of the gospel and of surrendering their lives to Christ.
I see your point about logos, and it's a good point. However the translation "Word" also adds something, in this case strengthening the tie between the Godhead and the Bible. I'd say we could agree to disagree comfortably on this point.
As for 1 John 5:7, my personal opinion is that it belongs there. I have not researched that as deeply as I intend to in the future, so it's not something I can discuss in vast detail yet.
Commenting on an ancient manuscript is a lot different than knowing whether the chip in your computer functions correctly (and I am not an expert in computer technology, as you can see what I spend my time studying). However, how would an average user know that a chip is bad, even if things were going wrong on their computer? They would need greater knowledge than that just knowing how to turn it on and run a few programs. Likewise, how can you know what the quality of a manuscript is with poor sources, and when you cannot even read the language (much less do so even if you had access to a reliable copy of the manuscript).
Yet (I don't know if you recall this, here's a summary in case) when the Pentium had a floating point error in the chip, very few people knew about it, but it was harming a lot of work in a lot of fields. It caused errors that were undetected; figuring out there was a problem was done just by seeing what the results were. Only Intel's engineers could find the resultant chip-level problem, but anyone with a spreadsheet or even just the windows calculator program could find and prove the existence of the error. Analogously, we can detect errors in the manuscripts without having to see or possess the originals.
For example, the word "fasting" in Matthew 17:20 and Mark 9:29. This key doctrinal point is absent in the NIV etc. (or footnoted and labelled as "not in the best manuscripts"). Since fasting is portrayed as increasing the power of our supplications, removing it would does remove a key doctrine.
I was talking about Acts 8:37, not:47. And no I don't believe it should be there because it agrees with a doctrine I like; if the manuscripts I know are most accurate have a doctrine clearly taught that I don't like, then I had better change my opinion of the doctrine; God's word is infinitely more important than my desires to believe some particular point. I have revised my beliefs as He has shown me that I was wrong, and I'm mighty glad He did.
The point I was making about "Expressed reason" is that other places in the NT refer to Jesus Christ as "the Word", and removing that parallelism reduces the impact of John 1. I did not mean to say you were a JW, and apologize if that came across that way.
As for inaccuracies or places where the KJV does not agree with the source, a lot of that is judgment, examining a word in isolation can lead to some pretty weird translations. However to answer you, one place is the name "Cainan" in Genesis 5:9-14 and "Kenan" in 1 Chronicles 1:2.
You claim never to have seen quality scholarship in the TR camp. You keep slamming KJV-only; would you please clarify if you mean Peter Ruckman, Sam Gipp, D.A. Waite, or Dean Burgon? What do you mean by your term "KJV-ONLY"? Please be specific with a couple of examples; I know you don't care for Gail Riplinger, but could you please cite some of the other books you've read and found wanting?
Your argument for older preferred to younger is one thing, but what about the fact that those who knew the most about Sinaiticus had it on the scrap heap to be burned? If it were anywhere near as valuable to them as it is to many modern scholars, then it would be in a place of greatest safekeeping instead. As for your question of why it would be kept if it were known to be inaccurate / corrupt / wrong / flawed, one possibility is that it is kept as an example of what problems can happen with to-rapid copying (words, verses, clauses are dropped in fast work). In fact if you ever did a drill of "hand copy this manuscript, you have 45 seconds, GO" I think you'd find that a lot of little things get dropped. It's at least as plausible a reason for less content in the Aleph and B etc. manuscripts than in the TR than deliberate insertion in the latter.
Since Xenophon did record some conversations (Anabasis, e.g.) with Socrates on the topic of which gods to sacrifice to, so your suggestion of turning him into an occultic source is not much of a stretch. Or do you consider sacrifices to pagan gods to be not occultic? (An aside: google for "xenophon occult" and there are 692 hits.)
Since you hold to (as you mentioned in an above post to a side-thread) the concept of "shorter is more accurate" in textual criticism, you are clearly in the strongly anti-KJV camp. For those just reading along here, the oft-cited reasoning for that position (shorter is better) is that scribes would magnify the holiness of a position or doctrine, being so besotted by it that they would insert additional items favorable to their positions or doctrines. Thus the outcome of the critical scholar is reductionist manuscript all along the way.
They also maintain that the oldest intact manuscript is clearly the best. Yet the refutation of that position is trivial; which book on your shelf is your favorite book, and which is one you couldn't wait to put down. A glance at the bookshelf shows the answer: the one that's heavily used is the favorite, and the gobbler is in pristine condition. Some years ago I had to buy a new copy of Lord of the Rings trilogy, I wore out the old one I had. Same with my copy of the Foundation trilogy.
So which is more reliable, the manuscript that survives untouched for 1500 years because it's never been used? No, the one that never gets used is the one that everyone knows as being no good. This is simple reasoning, no scholarship required. A reliable, heavily used manuscript wears out; it's copied and that one is then heavily used. The gobbler, corrupt, wrong, bozo-bit-on manuscript is the one that lasts forever.
Even the residents of the monastery at Mt. Sinai knew Aleph was worthless, they had it on a heap of items to be burned. They had lived with it for years, why is their opinion of it deemed irrelevant?
About HPB, certainly her opinion is not pure truth, but you seem to have missed the point of my quotation of her. It's not that she considers those books to be useful in the occult, it's that she traces them directly to definitely occult origins. I think you'd have to agree that she's an authority on the occult, and when she points out the strong ties between her purely occult sources and something else, it is not easily ignored. Yet you seem to be doing so. Neither of us is (I assume) heavily into the occult, so we're not experts; we need to rely on those who are expert to learn about it. HPB is clearly expert, and her opinion is clear. And her conclusion that Hermas is based on documents she knows extremely well should not be taken lightly.
You claim you make no comments about things you don't understand, but you have an absolutist rejection of the KJV position. Certainly you're welcome to your position. Yet you will only accept a defense of the KJV position if it is written by someone who disagrees with the position.
Do I care that I'm outside the RC/Orthodox Church? Absolutely I care, I listen to what Jesus said: "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues". I am thrilled not to be in either Church. I pray you will respond to that call some day as well.
Your claim that I have to possess an intimate knowledge of Koine Greek to comment and hold opinions on the quality of manuscripts is absurd. It's like claiming I need to understand dopant deposition in silicon wafers to comment on the usefullness and reliability of a chip. Or that I need to know how to implement code for regular expressions to have an opinion on programming in Perl. How is your Syriac? Do you allow yourself to form an opinion on the Peshitto manuscripts?
Your position is one held by many scholars; basically "don't think, we'll do that for you". God did not make His word something that only scholars could rightly divide; all of us are called upon to do that. You ask for books written by people who do not agree with the TR's superiority that defend the TR's superiority. Man, that's nuts. That's like me asking you for books by evolutionists that defend six-day creation. You state you will not listen to those who hold an opinion contrary to yours, citing so far only the scholarship of Gail Riplinger.
I'm surprised you haven't attacked her more yet, that's a typical tactic of many in the anti-KJV camp. But I gave you a number of sources of those with formal qualifications, yet you only point out one of Gail Riplinger's books. Okay, let's leave "New Age Bible Versions" alone. Let's ignore it. It's far from my favorite anyway. How about Dean Burgon's work? Have you read all of his works? How about Dr. Waite's, or Sorenson's?
How about Abbo Martin? He's a Catholic textual critic who claims that Aleph and B were fabricated by Origen et al. (see Schaff's work for details).
I never suggested accepting the KJV over the original; it seems you may be making assumptions that I'm a Ruckmanite. As I posted several times in this thread already, Ruckman is not reliable in my estimation.
The similarity between your translation of John and the NWT is that both downplay the deity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Not saying He is the Word is the way your translation did so; the NWT inserts a definite article. Hopefully we can at least agree that the NWT is badly corrupt, is that one point of agreement we can strike?
You try to equate the mass slaughter by the RCC (did you check on Beziers yet?) with what King James did. Note that the Catholics tried hard to kill him, Bloody Mary didn't get that nickname from tomato sauce on her tiara either. The point here is not about the sins of one person or another; we're all pretty rotten sinners when it comes down to it. The point is about what are the best manuscripts, and are there any which have dangerous errors in them, errors which creep into the translations based on them. It doesn't take eight years of conjugating verbs to figure out that Acts 8:37 is missing. Removing it is very advantageous for those who hold to pedobaptism, and very embarassing if it's left in. Since the manuscripts in question were held by the Orthodox and RC churches, who do hold to pedobaptism, the issue is not moot. On the other hand the TR was published by a Catholic (Erasmus) yet it includes Acts 8:37. In legal terminology, this could be considered a statement against interest, and therefore would be given stronger consideration than something which agreed with his doctrine.
Here's another point on topic: Jesus said in Matthew 4:4 "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. ". Every word. Yet the text the NIV is based on has 2866 less words in it than the TR; seems like there's a problem here. If you hold that Aleph and B are more accurate (to what? They disagree with each other so often!), then what about the deluded souls who for 1500 years had only the TR? Did God deny them His true word? Why did so many church fathers quote from the TR and not Aleph or B?
If you have read the Shepherd of Hermas and consider it orthodox, then clearly you are so far from reality that this discussion is pointless. Hermas teaches a dualistic, gnostic, Taoist point of view (matter is evil, spirit is good). It teaches that a man desiring his wife is sinful. It teaches that a man must divorce his wife if she is unfaithful; Jesus teaches the opposite.
As for Barnabas, it is clearly antisemitic. It also teaches "thou shalt work with thy hands for a ransom for thy sins [Ch. 19]". That is works salvation, clearly taught against throughout the NT (see Romans, Ephesians 2:8-9, etc.).
If you want evidence of their occultic bent, consider that HP Blavatsky considered these two books to be vehicles of Luciferian doctrine and the occult. From "Isis Unveiled", Vol. 2, p. 243:
passages from the work of
The Pastor of Hermas, which are complete sentences from kabalistic literature.... [N]early everything expressed by the pseudo-Hermas... is a plain quotation, with repeated variations, from the Sohar and other kabalistic books.... not only purely kabalistic without even so much as a change in expression, but Brahmanical and Pagan
As with most older works, the heavy-duty KJV defense is not postable, as it is many volumes and has never been put into electronic form. However one quick summary, given at a recent Dean Burgon Society meeting, is available. More is available here about Dean Burgon. But if you think Hermas and Barnabas are edifying, then I fear you are a lot further away than just which manuscript family to follow.
What gives you the standing to determine these issues? You write as if you believe you have great authority yet you don't provide the documentation of it. You assert that "an honest man would know these details". That's your opinion, nothing more. There are many honest men who would not know these details, your accusations notwithstanding.
You ask for a critique of a translation you provided; other than the fact that it sounds suspiciously similar to the Watchtower version, no merit is apparent in it.
Aleph and B are uncials (aka majuscule); that likely means little to anyone reading this thread, so why do you care if I know what they are? Uncial, for those who are perusing, comes from the Latin word uncialis meaning "inch-high", and refers to a style of Greek and Latin writing done in all capital letters, with little if any inter-word spacing or punctuation.
As for the inks used, do you mean when originally written or when corrections/alterations were made at various times? Please be more specific if you're going to ask really nit-picky questions. (Note to perusers: think "African or European").
Where do they disagree the most? Well as mentioned before, missing all the pastoral epistles and Revelation is a pretty strong point of disagreement, what could be stronger than omission?
Matthew 15:1 is a string of characters that the lameness filter prevents posting. Don't blame me for not putting the greek up here,/. is not aiming to be somewhere that Greek can be posted. Why are you hammering at that verse anyway, when there are 162 verses in Aleph and B which are either partially or completely missing?
You assert that the KJV had a strong political bias behind it; I'd rather accept a bible from the background you claim than one based on manuscripts kept by the organization that is drunk with the blood of Christians, the RCC. If you don't know what that refers to, check out the history of Beziers or the Hussites some time.
Of course most scholars can be paid to say the TR is corrupt; they are paid by people like Zondervan and other publishing houses that have copyrighted translations that they make a mint from. You have to be aware of the profit motive here, it is not trivial.
That said, the scholarly defense of the TR and KJV is from people like Dean Burgon, D.A. Waite, D.H. Sorenson, D.A. Cloud, and others.
The most useful book I've found is here, though others are more rigorous and detailed, particularly Dr. Waite's works.
As for the English Language, having "ye" vs. "thee" is sufficiently basic a point that I'll leave the elucidation for the reader.
You have some questions about Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Their names are also given as Aleph and B, respectively. Vaticanus omits 2877 words in the gospels alone. Both Aleph and B omit most of Matthew 16:2 and all of 16:3. Aleph omits 3455 words - I could go on, but the point of their differences even between each other is pretty significant. See Dean Burgon's works if you are interested in vast detail on the topic.
Vaticanus completely omits Revelation. Sinaiticus has 140,000 in Revelation 7:4 and 141,000 in 14:3; the TR correctly has both as 144,000.
Aleph includes occult books as well, such as the shepherd of Hermas and the epistle of Barnabas. Both include the apocryphal books as well, obviously, since they're Catholic manuscripts.
Also note that the "missing" verses of Mark 16:9-20 had space left in both those manuscripts for them; see Aleph and B. Like someone removed them...
ALso missing from B are most of Genesis, Hebrews 9:14 to the end, all the Pastoral epistles, and as mentioned, Revelation.
The Sinaiticus manuscript was found by Lawrence Tischendorff in the 1800s at a monastery where it was in a pile of things to be burned. The monks knew it was a corrupt and useless manuscript. Think about it - how does a manuscript survive for 1500 years? By heavy use? No, by total disuse. This manuscript was so bad that it had not been used, and therefore had survived.
In fact more recent discoveries of far older sources than Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (the other principal manuscript used by the ASV, RSV, etc.) have been strongly toward the TR side, with the result that the later Nestle-Aland Greek NT is moving away from the Westcott and Hort text that the ASV, RSV, NIV, NLT, NASV were based on and back toward the KJV manuscript base.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a believer, and the fact is of the "holy" books out there, only one has fulfilled prophecy, archeology, and other facts to prove it. Only a Creator outside our time-frame construct could tell the future from the beginning; the Bible has shown this time and again. Other groups, like let's pick the Mormons, claim prophecy from Joseph Smith. One of their favorites is that he predicted the Civil War would start in South Carolina. Thing is, if you investigate, the weekend before he issued that prediction, there was an editorial in the Sunday paper in the town a few miles from his settlement at the time which said exactly that. To those at the time, South Carolina was the state full of firebrands, and it was pretty obvious to everyone that would be the starting point.
And on the other hand, there are a number of failed prophecies by him as well (like Mormons would not have to cook).
Bottom line: only one book contains totally accurate predictions, that's why I believe and why I see others as having flawed and provably false beliefs.
Flame retardant suit on, there are probably some Mormons out there who want to spin Joe's failed prophecies.
Yes Maria worked for Real - in marketing. Those on the 'net in those days may remember she was crowned "Queen of Spam" as she started a lot of the unsolicited commercial email practices in the early days. I have to live with her as my senator, and let's just say she is known in Washington as Maria Cant-Vote-Well.
Nope. Apple paid to ship the battery to me, and gave me a prepaid return. Net cost to me was just running to the post office to drop off the dud.
Ignore Hislop vs. Keating - just answer this: what's the origin of auricular confession - the Bible or paganism? What's the origin of infant baptism - Bible or pagan? The origin of celibate priests? Of mother-and-child worship? Of purgatory? Of indulgences? Of the "queen of heaven"?
All of those are pagan ideas, not Biblical ideas. All are unique to the Catholic church, and are not found in true Biblical Christianity. Whether Hislop traced the path correctly or not, the facts remain that the RCC put Christian labels on pagan practices, and continues it today.
As to whether Chick is right about the conspiracies, consider what the wealthiest organization in the world could accomplish. Note the RCC position on immigration: they want countries with a population that is a minority of RCC members to have open borders to countries that can up the ratio; but they are strongly against open borders where it would dilute the RCC membership. So the RCC is for an open US-Mexico border, but against islamic immigration into France for example. Add unlimited power to unlimited wealth, and the conspiracies can be seen to be more believable.
Research the history of Beziers some day - see what the popes and the RCC do to their enemies when they have no opposition.
Who said he was alive for 3 days? He could have died and God could have resurrected him, that would make Jesus Christ's note that the "sign of Jonah" would be as His resurrection more clear anyway.
The rib God used is the one rib that grows back (others don't), and from Adam's DNA just duplicating the X chromosome could create a woman. As to whether God could do it, well, He created the universe, so making one person is not a stretch at all.
You are apparently attempting to claim the Bible teaches a flat earth. On the contrary the Bible teaches a spherical earth; just because the pagan-derived Catholic Church didn't like that does not make the Bible incorrect, it makes the RCC incorrect.
You claim the canon was settled in 313, it was settled long before that. Again, you seem to be subscribing to the RCC version of history, which is not the Biblical Christian view of history.
The name of the day is not Christian, as the names of the months are not Christian. So what? As for why Sunday, that is the day the Lord arose from the dead. It's a new dispensation, we are freed from the law and not subject to the rules of the Israelites.
The long answer can be found here. The short answer is: the RCC took pagan ideas, symbols, practices, and theology and put Christian names on it. The mother-and-child motif is from Ishtar and Tammuz, that was turned into Mary-and-the-infant-Jesus. Nowhere in the Bible is there anything about worshipping Mary; in fact Jesus says that His mother, brothers and sisters are those who believe. Nowhere in the Bible is there a birth-of-Jesus celebration; that is a Catholic invention. Nowhere is there a "lent" or a "meatless friday" or an "ash wednesday" or auricular confession or sprinkling infant baptism or the eucharist or purgatory or celibate priests. All of these items are pagan imports via the RCC that are not Christian. True Biblical Christianity shuns all of them. Although we are a pretty tiny minority.
The point though is not in these details - the point is simply that all other religions are about man trying to reach God. Biblical Christianity is about God reaching out to man, dying for us to pay the price for our sins. Other religions are about DOING something to EARN one's way to a great afterlife; true Biblical Christianity is about accepting a GIFT of GRACE, not about works.
Win2K is version 5.0; but XP is only 5.1. I have noticed that the version numbers are one honest thing Microsoft has about their OS's.
Come one, come all, see this site and admire the stylish and attractive choices.
Seriously, this guy worked for a real good friend of mine for a while, and he is real serious about this stuff.
Yow...
My one Windoze device left got this thing on 4/27. Norton's AV updated to catch it on 5/2. My laptop was fully MS up to date. So there is some other path to infection...
Timing is everything. This beastie was in the wild a long time before it was caught.
You point out that application serving can be a profit center based on GPL'd code. True. But if you put up a GPL code based app server, so can I. So can 5000 other geeks. Competition occurs. Soon, profit is nil. The business model does not work.
See here for a book that has hard data on the cause of Alzheimers and many other diseases. It's not popular with the mega food companies, as it puts a lot of the blame in their laps. But it makes a lot of sense.
It has to do with excitotoxins, such as glutamates, aspartates, and others when present in abnormal, imbalanced quantities.
Miller-Urey is used as proof, it was so taught to me at a high-prestige institution in an advanced (i.e., majors only, past pre-meds) organic chemistry seminar course.
Natural selection as in providing descent with modifications, a key part of progressive evolution, is only going to occur with fidelity in reproduction. Otherwise the traits for success will be lost in succeeding generations.
Indeed physics and chemistry are deterministic - they go where the Gibb's free energy dictate they go. Which is why polypeptides don't spontaneously form. Stochastic processes run toward releasing the most energy. Aside from chlorophyll, where does adding sunlight produce anything but decay? A freezer is an intelligently designed mechanism, of course it can direct heat flow in one direction against the energy and entropy gradients, that is not the point.
I have read far more on the topic than the abstract you mention, it's just typical of the work in the field (probably why you selected that one).
You seem to understand fundamentals of chemistry - work out the equilibrium constant of a moderate sized protein in an aqueous solution, given the energy of peptide bonds for a selection of amino acids. Figure it out to 150 or 200 proteins in the peptide. I could give you the answer but working it out yourself you may learn something significant.
I brought up Miller-Urey because that discredited experiment is still taught so widely that many folks here cite it as proof, since it's what they were taught was proof of evolution. It's nice to talk with someone who is beyond that.
That article at the Royal Society (at least from its abstract, the article is not freely available for a couple of years it looks like) makes the classic error that all of the prebiotic auto-replication theories do. The talkorigins summary is also a very good summary of an amazingly bad theory.
The key point that is never addressed in any papers I'm aware of is that in order to get to an accurately reproducing cell where natural selection could take over and exert an effect on reproduction, the fidelity of reproduction has to exceed any stochastic process by so many orders of magnitude. The fidelity cannot be absolute of course, or no mutations could occur. Yet simple probstat will show you that any non-deterministic reaction or process will tend toward the mean, toward increasing entropy. Until the RNA stage, there is no possible high-fidelity reproduction mechanism. And in the early earth (by current theories) there was not a superabuncdance of O2, hence there was not a strong ozone layer, and there was a lot of hard UV around. That alone would tend to break up any long chain molecules, if the temperature and other reactants didn't get in the way.
Yet the authors of this and other papers blithely talk about natural selection occuring in what amounts to small soap bubbles. How absurd - there is no equal fractionation of the reagents in the bubble when it buds, there is no accurate reproduction involved. Split a soap bubble up and you don't get inherited characteristics in the offspring, you get whatever happens to be around in that part of the bubble. There can no more be natural selection in that process than the easter bunny can be found in a mosque.
It's the height of folly to assume such a process as the papers you cite occurs. Yet to defend evolution, abiogenesis has fallen to this. Sad.
Indeed it is far from the only such species found. Consider the coelacanth, known for a time as the "lungfish". This blighter is still used as an index fossil for 70-140 million years old. Yet you can go catch one if you're good at really deep fishing off the coast of Africa.
.... yep that's right, it's still an index fossil. Find a rock with coelacanth bones in it, and you'll have "proven" that the rock is 70-140 million years old. Even if your neighbor is chowing down on a fresh-fried identical specimen.
Ummm
Let's see your evidence for abiogenesis. Are you going to cite Miller-Urey????
On November 9, 1965 this happened before. Maybe not exactly the same thing, but from roughly the same area, and cascading in what sounds like (based on preliminary reports) in the same way.
Deregulation was not in effect then; so if there is a strong parallel between the cases, it's then doubtful that it was due to dereg.
When more facts are in, we will know.
I will agree my statements were sweeping generalizations about the DSS, but fairness dictates pointing out your statementWhich does seem to engage in sweeping generalizations as well.
I don't believe I used Riplinger as a reference point in our discussions or indeed in this thread at all. I tend not to use her (I've read her, true) since I find her book to be extremely poorly edited and more than a tad sensationalist. Her "the symbol for the NKJV is 666" seems to be like the folks who manage to force 666 into any number of odd places, which to me seems a bit like tinfoil hat time. I do think there are some valid points in her book and in other books you don't agree with, but I don't consider any of them flawless. I did use some concepts that they summarize things with, but when communicating concepts in sound bites, I used oversimplifications to convey a point. However that is inaccurate, and I must agree with your points that doing so was an error on my part, which I do regret.
Again in balance, your statements against the KJV position were also sound bite type responses, particularly since your reading in the subject has excluded the more reputable holders of those opinions.
I don't like reading books online either, but I have a duplexer for my printer which makes it more possible to handle small to medium tomes.
An offtopic question (you can always answer using my email) if you don't mind: coming from a TR/Baptist background, what led you to accept the oral tradition concept of Eastern Orthodox? And a second, what's the delta between the RCC and the EO on Marian doctrine?
Seems part of the issue here is different meanings of KJV-Only. If we go with your definition, as in Gipp and Ruckman, then I'm firmly against it, as it promotes the nut-case idea of the KJV being superior to the original Greek. One major reason I think that's crazy is that it means God's complete word was unavailable for 1500+ years, and leads to bad things like people translation from the KJV into other languages. In my thoughts, any translation should start with the TR, not with the KJV. The KJV is a great translation, but it is a translation. The originals were inspired, not the translations. This is why I so strongly state my anti-Ruckmanite position, as you could see in a number of my posts in this thread (before we started). There are two distinct (at least) camps in the pro-KJV group. One is the Ruckmanites, the others are pretty much in agreement with what I just outlined. We have several Ruckman and Gipp books, and if we ever get a parakeet I think we'll line the bottom of the cage with pages from those books.
/. about this topic anyway. Qmail vs. postfix is a much more likely debate here.
/. discussions warranted; your qualifications are, I would bet if I were a bettor, unique on /., and therefore making the detailed points for one person seemed a bit over the top. I admit I was probably in error in not being thorough, and apologize for summarizing in a dramatic fashion. I have read some Metzger, though I don't agree with him.
I was not intending to and did not think I changed argument points from TR superiority to Zondervan profits. My point about Zondervan is that relying on them for why the TR is not as good as W&H is only wise if you keep in mind that they have a profit motive for one side of that discussion. In saying that most modern translations (Jay Green's aside) are based on W&H is simply labelling the W&H family as being the text family that the NIV, ASV, RSV, NRSV, NASB, NLT, etc. were translated from. Yes only the ASV was taken from W&H if you want to be extremely precise, but talking about version numbers of Nestle/Aland is a bit too obscure for slashdot. In fact I'm still amazed that I'm typing on
In talking about the DSS Isaiah is indeed what I was referring to, and yes Jeremiah has different ordering and other differences. But again that was in my estimation a bit deeper than
If you are interested in the non-Ruckman KJV position at all, I suggest Waite or Burgon, their level of scholarship is something I think you could appreciate.
About your quantity of matches for "occult" and "bible", things like Anton LaVey's "Satanic Bible" would get matches there, as would negative references. But your point is well taken, and thanks for the Tufts link, I just bookmarked it.
Actually something like the Pentium FP bug was understandable and provable by an assembly language capable person with access to a range of systems. That is a much larger set of people than those with access to the proprietary microcode of the Pentium, those who knew what went wrong to create the bug. Yes there were a lot of people who would not know, as you point out; but there is a significant sized group who would be able to figure out the problem in enough detail to get to the chip as the problem.
Eliminating those verses about praying and fasting together required to drive out some demons is indeed major in my view, since without those verses it is not as clear that there are demonic issues which require fasting specifically to be dealt with (except of course by Jesus Himself).
Your assumption about the baptism issue and my thoughts on it is a bit incorrect. I realize the RCC and Orthodox churches do indeed baptize converts, but the point to me is about whether a mature belief is required prior to baptism. Acts 8:37 shows that belief is a prerequisite to baptism, while the RCC (and I assume but don't personally know the Orthodox) church will baptize infants who clearly do not have a full understanding of the gospel and of surrendering their lives to Christ.
I see your point about logos, and it's a good point. However the translation "Word" also adds something, in this case strengthening the tie between the Godhead and the Bible. I'd say we could agree to disagree comfortably on this point.
As for 1 John 5:7, my personal opinion is that it belongs there. I have not researched that as deeply as I intend to in the future, so it's not something I can discuss in vast detail yet.
For example, the word "fasting" in Matthew 17:20 and Mark 9:29. This key doctrinal point is absent in the NIV etc. (or footnoted and labelled as "not in the best manuscripts"). Since fasting is portrayed as increasing the power of our supplications, removing it would does remove a key doctrine.
I was talking about Acts 8:37, not
The point I was making about "Expressed reason" is that other places in the NT refer to Jesus Christ as "the Word", and removing that parallelism reduces the impact of John 1. I did not mean to say you were a JW, and apologize if that came across that way.
As for inaccuracies or places where the KJV does not agree with the source, a lot of that is judgment, examining a word in isolation can lead to some pretty weird translations. However to answer you, one place is the name "Cainan" in Genesis 5:9-14 and "Kenan" in 1 Chronicles 1:2.
You claim never to have seen quality scholarship in the TR camp. You keep slamming KJV-only; would you please clarify if you mean Peter Ruckman, Sam Gipp, D.A. Waite, or Dean Burgon? What do you mean by your term "KJV-ONLY"? Please be specific with a couple of examples; I know you don't care for Gail Riplinger, but could you please cite some of the other books you've read and found wanting?
Your argument for older preferred to younger is one thing, but what about the fact that those who knew the most about Sinaiticus had it on the scrap heap to be burned? If it were anywhere near as valuable to them as it is to many modern scholars, then it would be in a place of greatest safekeeping instead. As for your question of why it would be kept if it were known to be inaccurate / corrupt / wrong / flawed, one possibility is that it is kept as an example of what problems can happen with to-rapid copying (words, verses, clauses are dropped in fast work). In fact if you ever did a drill of "hand copy this manuscript, you have 45 seconds, GO" I think you'd find that a lot of little things get dropped. It's at least as plausible a reason for less content in the Aleph and B etc. manuscripts than in the TR than deliberate insertion in the latter.
Since Xenophon did record some conversations (Anabasis, e.g.) with Socrates on the topic of which gods to sacrifice to, so your suggestion of turning him into an occultic source is not much of a stretch. Or do you consider sacrifices to pagan gods to be not occultic? (An aside: google for "xenophon occult" and there are 692 hits.)
Since you hold to (as you mentioned in an above post to a side-thread) the concept of "shorter is more accurate" in textual criticism, you are clearly in the strongly anti-KJV camp. For those just reading along here, the oft-cited reasoning for that position (shorter is better) is that scribes would magnify the holiness of a position or doctrine, being so besotted by it that they would insert additional items favorable to their positions or doctrines. Thus the outcome of the critical scholar is reductionist manuscript all along the way.
They also maintain that the oldest intact manuscript is clearly the best. Yet the refutation of that position is trivial; which book on your shelf is your favorite book, and which is one you couldn't wait to put down. A glance at the bookshelf shows the answer: the one that's heavily used is the favorite, and the gobbler is in pristine condition. Some years ago I had to buy a new copy of Lord of the Rings trilogy, I wore out the old one I had. Same with my copy of the Foundation trilogy.
So which is more reliable, the manuscript that survives untouched for 1500 years because it's never been used? No, the one that never gets used is the one that everyone knows as being no good. This is simple reasoning, no scholarship required. A reliable, heavily used manuscript wears out; it's copied and that one is then heavily used. The gobbler, corrupt, wrong, bozo-bit-on manuscript is the one that lasts forever.
Even the residents of the monastery at Mt. Sinai knew Aleph was worthless, they had it on a heap of items to be burned. They had lived with it for years, why is their opinion of it deemed irrelevant?
About HPB, certainly her opinion is not pure truth, but you seem to have missed the point of my quotation of her. It's not that she considers those books to be useful in the occult, it's that she traces them directly to definitely occult origins. I think you'd have to agree that she's an authority on the occult, and when she points out the strong ties between her purely occult sources and something else, it is not easily ignored. Yet you seem to be doing so. Neither of us is (I assume) heavily into the occult, so we're not experts; we need to rely on those who are expert to learn about it. HPB is clearly expert, and her opinion is clear. And her conclusion that Hermas is based on documents she knows extremely well should not be taken lightly.
You claim you make no comments about things you don't understand, but you have an absolutist rejection of the KJV position. Certainly you're welcome to your position. Yet you will only accept a defense of the KJV position if it is written by someone who disagrees with the position.
Do I care that I'm outside the RC/Orthodox Church? Absolutely I care, I listen to what Jesus said: "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues". I am thrilled not to be in either Church. I pray you will respond to that call some day as well.
Your claim that I have to possess an intimate knowledge of Koine Greek to comment and hold opinions on the quality of manuscripts is absurd. It's like claiming I need to understand dopant deposition in silicon wafers to comment on the usefullness and reliability of a chip. Or that I need to know how to implement code for regular expressions to have an opinion on programming in Perl. How is your Syriac? Do you allow yourself to form an opinion on the Peshitto manuscripts?
Your position is one held by many scholars; basically "don't think, we'll do that for you". God did not make His word something that only scholars could rightly divide; all of us are called upon to do that. You ask for books written by people who do not agree with the TR's superiority that defend the TR's superiority. Man, that's nuts. That's like me asking you for books by evolutionists that defend six-day creation. You state you will not listen to those who hold an opinion contrary to yours, citing so far only the scholarship of Gail Riplinger.
I'm surprised you haven't attacked her more yet, that's a typical tactic of many in the anti-KJV camp. But I gave you a number of sources of those with formal qualifications, yet you only point out one of Gail Riplinger's books. Okay, let's leave "New Age Bible Versions" alone. Let's ignore it. It's far from my favorite anyway. How about Dean Burgon's work? Have you read all of his works? How about Dr. Waite's, or Sorenson's?
How about Abbo Martin? He's a Catholic textual critic who claims that Aleph and B were fabricated by Origen et al. (see Schaff's work for details).
I never suggested accepting the KJV over the original; it seems you may be making assumptions that I'm a Ruckmanite. As I posted several times in this thread already, Ruckman is not reliable in my estimation.
The similarity between your translation of John and the NWT is that both downplay the deity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Not saying He is the Word is the way your translation did so; the NWT inserts a definite article. Hopefully we can at least agree that the NWT is badly corrupt, is that one point of agreement we can strike?
You try to equate the mass slaughter by the RCC (did you check on Beziers yet?) with what King James did. Note that the Catholics tried hard to kill him, Bloody Mary didn't get that nickname from tomato sauce on her tiara either. The point here is not about the sins of one person or another; we're all pretty rotten sinners when it comes down to it. The point is about what are the best manuscripts, and are there any which have dangerous errors in them, errors which creep into the translations based on them. It doesn't take eight years of conjugating verbs to figure out that Acts 8:37 is missing. Removing it is very advantageous for those who hold to pedobaptism, and very embarassing if it's left in. Since the manuscripts in question were held by the Orthodox and RC churches, who do hold to pedobaptism, the issue is not moot. On the other hand the TR was published by a Catholic (Erasmus) yet it includes Acts 8:37. In legal terminology, this could be considered a statement against interest, and therefore would be given stronger consideration than something which agreed with his doctrine.
Here's another point on topic: Jesus said in Matthew 4:4 "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. ". Every word. Yet the text the NIV is based on has 2866 less words in it than the TR; seems like there's a problem here. If you hold that Aleph and B are more accurate (to what? They disagree with each other so often!), then what about the deluded souls who for 1500 years had only the TR? Did God deny them His true word? Why did so many church fathers quote from the TR and not Aleph or B?
As for Barnabas, it is clearly antisemitic. It also teaches "thou shalt work with thy hands for a ransom for thy sins [Ch. 19]". That is works salvation, clearly taught against throughout the NT (see Romans, Ephesians 2:8-9, etc.).
If you want evidence of their occultic bent, consider that HP Blavatsky considered these two books to be vehicles of Luciferian doctrine and the occult. From "Isis Unveiled", Vol. 2, p. 243:
As with most older works, the heavy-duty KJV defense is not postable, as it is many volumes and has never been put into electronic form. However one quick summary, given at a recent Dean Burgon Society meeting, is available. More is available here about Dean Burgon. But if you think Hermas and Barnabas are edifying, then I fear you are a lot further away than just which manuscript family to follow.
What gives you the standing to determine these issues? You write as if you believe you have great authority yet you don't provide the documentation of it. You assert that "an honest man would know these details". That's your opinion, nothing more. There are many honest men who would not know these details, your accusations notwithstanding.
/. is not aiming to be somewhere that Greek can be posted. Why are you hammering at that verse anyway, when there are 162 verses in Aleph and B which are either partially or completely missing?
You ask for a critique of a translation you provided; other than the fact that it sounds suspiciously similar to the Watchtower version, no merit is apparent in it.
Aleph and B are uncials (aka majuscule); that likely means little to anyone reading this thread, so why do you care if I know what they are? Uncial, for those who are perusing, comes from the Latin word uncialis meaning "inch-high", and refers to a style of Greek and Latin writing done in all capital letters, with little if any inter-word spacing or punctuation.
As for the inks used, do you mean when originally written or when corrections/alterations were made at various times? Please be more specific if you're going to ask really nit-picky questions. (Note to perusers: think "African or European").
Where do they disagree the most? Well as mentioned before, missing all the pastoral epistles and Revelation is a pretty strong point of disagreement, what could be stronger than omission?
Matthew 15:1 is a string of characters that the lameness filter prevents posting. Don't blame me for not putting the greek up here,
You assert that the KJV had a strong political bias behind it; I'd rather accept a bible from the background you claim than one based on manuscripts kept by the organization that is drunk with the blood of Christians, the RCC. If you don't know what that refers to, check out the history of Beziers or the Hussites some time.
Of course most scholars can be paid to say the TR is corrupt; they are paid by people like Zondervan and other publishing houses that have copyrighted translations that they make a mint from. You have to be aware of the profit motive here, it is not trivial.
That said, the scholarly defense of the TR and KJV is from people like Dean Burgon, D.A. Waite, D.H. Sorenson, D.A. Cloud, and others.
The most useful book I've found is here, though others are more rigorous and detailed, particularly Dr. Waite's works.
As for the English Language, having "ye" vs. "thee" is sufficiently basic a point that I'll leave the elucidation for the reader.
You have some questions about Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Their names are also given as Aleph and B, respectively. Vaticanus omits 2877 words in the gospels alone. Both Aleph and B omit most of Matthew 16:2 and all of 16:3. Aleph omits 3455 words - I could go on, but the point of their differences even between each other is pretty significant. See Dean Burgon's works if you are interested in vast detail on the topic.
Vaticanus completely omits Revelation. Sinaiticus has 140,000 in Revelation 7:4 and 141,000 in 14:3; the TR correctly has both as 144,000.
Aleph includes occult books as well, such as the shepherd of Hermas and the epistle of Barnabas. Both include the apocryphal books as well, obviously, since they're Catholic manuscripts.
Also note that the "missing" verses of Mark 16:9-20 had space left in both those manuscripts for them; see Aleph and B. Like someone removed them...
ALso missing from B are most of Genesis, Hebrews 9:14 to the end, all the Pastoral epistles, and as mentioned, Revelation.
Now did you want to discuss abiogenesis next?
The Sinaiticus manuscript was found by Lawrence Tischendorff in the 1800s at a monastery where it was in a pile of things to be burned. The monks knew it was a corrupt and useless manuscript. Think about it - how does a manuscript survive for 1500 years? By heavy use? No, by total disuse. This manuscript was so bad that it had not been used, and therefore had survived.
In fact more recent discoveries of far older sources than Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (the other principal manuscript used by the ASV, RSV, etc.) have been strongly toward the TR side, with the result that the later Nestle-Aland Greek NT is moving away from the Westcott and Hort text that the ASV, RSV, NIV, NLT, NASV were based on and back toward the KJV manuscript base.