Earthquakes increase in number? Prove it.

by Not Feeling It 15 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  Not Feeling It

  So I saw a JW Last Days ©1914-2009 alert email today. This one was trumpeting the following link and associating it with WTS last days prophesy around "earthquakes in one place after another". Heads up if you get this fear mail. They spread like missing fingers in a leper colony.

  I haven’t fully analyzed the data from the link claiming there are so many more (http://www.thehorizonproject.com/earthquakes.cfm) but it seems The Horizon Project is a sensationalist organization.

  Any takes on the dramatic increase shown in the past ~10 years? USGS indicates better monitoring, but is this the case since 1999 too?

  From the USGS:

  http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/eqlists/eqstats.html

  http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learning/faq.php?categoryID=6&faqID=110

  I plotted the last 150 or so years. Earthquake *magnitude* has stayed the same. However, the USGS seems to attribute this to more and more seismometers in more remote places. See the link for more detail.

  This topic has been rehashed thouroughly here in the past and recently with the "Yellowstone gonna blow up -- Sho' 'Nuff" thread.

  Mark Twain said, “figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” Sounds appropos enough.

  -- Not Quaking It
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  rmt1

  You must have the wrong translation. In mine, Jesus clearly and unmistakeably says that "there shall be car crashes in one place after another."
• 

  Not Feeling It

  "there shall be car crashes in one place after another."

  Comedy. Good thing that isn't what it says -- is it? -- 'cause I hear lots of people die from car crashes every year. They should be regulated or something.
• 

  rmt1

  There's a famous matrix that squares the complex non-commutative sum (do know + don't know), so that the results are:
  1) you do know that you do know (like basic essential skills, how to drive a car)
  2) you do know that you don't know (like awareness of gaps in knowledge, which takes a while to set in)
  3) you don't know that you do know (like instincts)
  4) you don't know that you don't know (like the truly unknown that evades our ability to even define as a gap in knowledge)
  
  Take a circle with radius named "time": as the radius (and time) increases, the circumference increases at a greater rate (2 pi). The circumference or perimeter is essentially the interface between the area of things that are known (you know that you know) and the external area of things that are unknown (you don't know that you don't know). From inside, what can be perceived of that vast area of unknown is just the perimeter itself, a line, and that amount is what you know that you don't know. This principle lies behind the adage that the more you know the more you don't know - it's a proportion gained by or appreciated through experience.
  
  This earthquake business, about which several denominations including JWs make much ado, is a case of that circumference increasing and causing new knowledge to fall into the area of known things. The mistake they make is to act as if quantitative increase in data constitutes a difference in behavior of a system. It doesn't - just it means you have more data. Population growth and geological demographics are the main factors in any increase in mortality, but JWs treat them as trivial factors.
  
  I really doubt a JW will allow themselves to be pinned down at the door about the behavior of a system. They try to tell themselves that they are not Biblically literalist fundamentalist evangelicals, but they retain the animistic suspicion that certain phenomena have a ghost in the machine, and the ghost is angry.
• 

  leavingwt

  To the JW pedaling the earthquake data: "Please name one single thing the Watchtower has ever predicted in advance, accurately?"

  If he can provide an answer to that, I might think about researching earthquake data.

  -LWT
• 

  hamsterbait

  No Witless should still be saying an increease is part of the so- called "sign"

  The Awake most recent that deals with this says that "Christ was not saying

  that earthquakes would be more frequent."

  In fact when the disciples asked for a sign he said "do not be DECEIVED" by what?

  Then he says "the end is not yet." The whole point he makes is that it would all happen suddenly,

  unexpectedly at an hour his disiples "do not think to be it" The fact that JWS have trumpeted

  the imminence of the end for 140 years shows they have been deceived. (Luke 21: 8)

  The Proclaimers Book p137 says that Christ "did NOT return (even invisibly) in 1914."

  HB
• 

  blondie

  http://corior.blogspot.com/2006/02/watchtower-society-backpedals-on.html

  An interesting article
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  veen

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1556_Shaanxi_earthquake

  That is all
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  Homerovah the Almighty

  Hey you know whats interesting back in ancient times and in ancient cultures , earthquakes were thought to be caused by vengeful gods, is there any plausible connection with that fact. ? ummm
• 

  Farkel

  Anyone who has read "The Sign of the Last Days - When" by Carl Olaf Jonnson has seen extensive documentation proving that earthquakes have in fact NOT increased since 1914, they have not even increased in intensity. Claiming they have is just another red herring to promote a hidden agenda. Like Global Warming(tm).

  Farkel