JW's one of the Most Dangerous Religions?

by Mindchild 27 Replies latest jw friends

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  Abaddon

  D wiltshire; It's interesting you ask Skip' for a shorter version because complicated conjecture is "prone to error".

  The Bible is so open to interpretation that it is likely to confuse people and make them... prone to error. This is logically inconsistant with a god who cares if one accepts that any errors in interpretation can have a delitrious effect on one's life.

  Even if errors on one's own part cannot cause a delitrious effect on one's life, one reflects sadly on the fate of those who suffered because of other peoples' errors in interpretation... being burnt because someone disagrees with your opinion must suck.

  So, why ask Skip' to give a shortened version of something that has no attached claims of accuracy or inspiration?

  Surely it's better to ask god why a book with claims of accuracy and inspiration is open to finate interpretations AND is not the only book that makes such claims!

  I've made this point (more or less) to you before, and felt I should point out you're asking of a mortal what I ask of god... lack of conjecture...

  People living in glass paradigms shouldn't throw stones...
• 

  mommy

  Skipper,
  I have to say I am impressed, I was right in saying it would be a whammy of a post. I too liked what Abaddon had to say concerning the scientific rationalism meme combatting the faith meme. I would prefer that scenario over yours. Of course that is probably my faith meme talking

  As far as a collapse of the religion of JW's I had not thought of the prospects of so many needing help. I know we see here on a smaller scale those who have a time regrouping, and starting over again, after they had left. To imagine that on a much larger scale is mind boggling. I agree that it will be a strain on any govermental body or community to provide services to those.

  Not long ago I was of the mindset that those inside the religion especially the olders ones are better off inside, with their blinders on. They are content with their lifestyle and happy to have a wonderful promise of paradise. My mind had changed on this and I felt that it is important to tell others the truth about the religion they so blindly follow. After reading your article, I am not so sure.

  Thanks you for taking the time and effort and posting this for us. I do appreciate it.
  wendy

  When I leave, you will know I have been here
• 

  Mindchild

  Room215thanks for your feedback.

  D wiltshire I debated giving a condensed version of my post as I think Abaddon has a good point. One of the key elements in the whole long post is that we can't just trust someone else to do our thinking for us. Even if that person claims to be scientific in their thinking or has impressive credentials, it doesn't mean squat. Look at how industry has used scientists to create what is called "junk science" to hide their shameful and dangerous memes. If you had faith in science or just the fact that someone did a scientific study, you could easily be duped. Even many professional people are duped this way. Otherwise how could these horrific things go on for so long? The important point is that nobody will do our thinking for us and we have to kick all the crap out of the way by doing our own research on the matter. This doesn't mean we have to be skeptical of absolutely everything someone tells us, but if there is probable cause for personal interests look out!

  Having said this, here is only the previews of what I said above. You should find enough information in the article to judge the validity of the concept yourself and you can do further research with some of the references I quoted at the end.

  ABSTRACT

  Memes follow rules of Darwinian evolution and just like their biological counterparts, will do whatever they can to stay alive and to replicate, even if it means killing their host. Our world is full of these dangerous memes, which are ruthless in their exploitation. They exist in the economic systems, political systems and religious systems. Memes are what is responsible for most of the wars and killing in the world. The Jehovah’s Witnesses as a religion are a meme. They are only mildly dangerous now and only kill a small number of their hosts. When the circumstances arise where they become threatened with extinction, they will kill many more people. The moral: don’t be deceived by things that look too good to be true…they could well kill you.

  Jigrigger You asked me what I thought about superstitions. I would think that these are simply memes also. There are many well known urban myths that are excellent examples of memes, like the old lady drying her poodle off in the microwave and killing it. These ideas survive because they are either shocking, easy to remember, or press our emoitonal buttons. Superstitions do exactly that as well. Even the JW's have superstitions. Can you think of any?

  proplog2 Nationalism is certainly a meme, as well as prejudice. We can see all kinds of memes being expressed in both religious and other meta-meme contexts. Some other religious memes likewise have rejected the nationalism meme. There are many flavors of memes and mixing of them.

  Martini your observation is appreciated. It is sad but true that we are currently all sitting ducks in a meme war. Just remember to duck.

  Skipper
• 

  Mindchild

  Wendy Thanks for your encouraging words. I would certainly prefer Abaddons scenario over mine as well! I'm hoping that eventually we collectively can get a handle on how to prevent dangerous memes from multiplying out of control and killing their hosts.

  One of the things that came as a shock to me in making my decision to leave the Borg was the huge coverup done by the WTS about the massive amount of mental illness that happened in the years after 1975 in the Jehovah's Witnesses. Some European mental institutions became so full of Witness patients that they literally started calling them Watchtower Houses! You can find scientific documents on several of the ex-JW websites that document the scope of this mental illness epidemic that happened but I watched it happen to some people I know. There was severe depression in the congregation I attended in several families. Many of the younger publishers got involved in drug use to deal with their own depression or engaged in extreme forms of sexuality (like becoming secret prostitutes just for the kick of it) and we even had one couple in our congregation that were found naked wandering in the streets and got arrested. I also remember one woman who came to our Kingdom Hall only wearing a slip, she forgot to put on her dress. I later even talked to two dubs who had been hospitalized for severe depression and suicidal behavior.

  The most disgusting thing about the whole thing was that when I did research about this at a local college library and gave a report to the elders of my congregation about the growing epidemic of mental illness, they went to the college library and destroyed the references that I used. Literally tearing out the pages from the books. When I later confronted them with it, they claimed it was better to put a millstone around your own neck than stumble your brother and was charged with trying to stumble my brothers! This was incomprehensible to me then, but I understand why it happened now.

  A thought about those inside be happy with their fantasy...well that is a tough one isn't it? We are supposed to believe that everyone has the right to freedom of worship. Bin Laden showed us that this isn't a smart strategy. Will the Watchtower teach us the same lesson?

  Thanks for your input.

  Skipper
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  D wiltshire

  MC,

  So you are saying both atheist and belevers in god have memes and these memes fight to survive by killing those that disagree or challenge.
  And that when killing those is not an option ridicule and other means are used.

  So are you saying that evolutionist who are not open minded to new ideas that run contrary to their beleifs have this infection just as much as beleivers in creation?

  If someone lived a trillion X longer than you, and had a billion X more reasoning ability would he come to the same conclusions as you?
• 

  Satanus

  mindchild

  I'm enjoying you ideas. I was just thinking of how the religious group known as the world wide church of god changed from a cult similar to jws to mainstream protestantism after the founder died. I would suggest that in some ways the wt is going in that direction as well: loosening field service requirements, allowing blood fractions, making voting a conscience matter in some countries, making political/religious/economic alliances/connections, efforts at political correctness, compromises of members. If this does turn out to be their future direction, it would be much less traumatic for all concerned.

  Thanks SS
• 

  Mindchild

  D wiltshire some memes do better than others for survival. The memes themselves of course have no more intelligence than a strand of DNA does, it is an emergent value, but essentially yes the more invested a collection of memes is (like a religion or belief system) the more they will fight for survival and the more importance they are to the hosts to fight and even kill for.

  There are certainly scientists which include evolutionists who are not open minded. This may or may not be because of some type of "faith" in science or it may be because they have done enough research to satisfy themselves that the collection of data for evolution is strong enough that they don't need to consider a radically different hypothesis or meme set. Evolutionists and other scientists argue all the time about evolution but their arguements relate to the flow of memes inside the theory itself. In other words, they are arguing about the ways that evolution happens, and not disputing that it did happen.

  Even so, many well respected scientists will occassionally release really radical memes which tend to shock other conservative scientists. There is great reluctance to accept these new memes in the scientific community as a whole, but because of the respect they have for the accomplishments of the scientist and the caliber of his or her work, they may give the new memes consideration whereas if these memes came from say either you or I, we wouldn't get the time of day. Scientists are human just like everyone else and fall prey to belief systems that are composed of meme sandwiches. Some scientists do really sloppy or inaccurate work, and some are even dishonest and fudge their results. Again, look at the motives behind these factors and you see the problem.

  Seeing the problem though should help you see your own responsibility to learn truth telling skills and learn enough to accurately judge the validity yourself from published research. Forget reading popularized and watered down versions of research...go to the actual papers themselves and you can see the evidence and procedures they used, the references they give and so forth. This is the real power of science, and that of peer review as other scientists may challenge the results and do their own studies to determine if it is valid.

  In reality, all "beliefs" are an infection and all of us have varying forms of beliefs we have collected in our experience in life that may or may not have validation. Most people in the American culture are aware that they exist in a world of half truths. None of us has the resources or the patience to verify each meme that comes our way, and we do the best we can in being skeptical of things until we see enough evidence from reliable studies to consider it valid until a better meme comes along and replaces it.

  Saint Satan I do think that if there is no dramatic threats to the borgorganization and nothing that comes along to trigger their Armageddon fantasies...that this certainly could happen for the WTS as well. Memes don't normally get virulent until they are threatened for survival. No immediate threats suggests a mellowing out and a slower evolutionary adaption.

  Skipper
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  D wiltshire

  Mind,

  That was a reasonable post.

  But I think in your conjecture you make some faulty assumptions and forget about alternatives to your senerios.

  Example:

  What is it that the virus doesn’t want you to discover?
  In the last ten thousand years since first contact something remarkable has happened. Humans have developed skills that communicate, process, and store the virus with greater efficiency. First there was spoken language that allows us to organize our thoughts and name things. Then came written language that allowed us to pass our thoughts through time and space. The result of both of these is that the store of human memes and beliefs has virtually exploded.

  This may or may not be true.

  And this:

  As the memes thrived, we thrived. The parasite allowed us to develop technology and sciences that extended our lives and gave us material goods that made life worth living. We returned the favor for the virus by increasing the growth of the memes. When the Industrial Revolution came along though, we humans started to become a risk to ourselves and to the virus. We became capable of wholesale destruction that could bring down civilization and all the memes that made it up. Remember what I said earlier about what parasites do when their host is threatened with destruction?

  Do all viruses act to preserve the existence when danger threaten?
  And you postulate that a virus knows it is threaten and knows it needs to act to preserve its existence.

  I didn't know all viruses respond this way when threatened with destruction:

  They reproduce massively.

  So what will these memes do now?:

  Do you think it is a coincidence that right after we developed nuclear weapons we entered into the Information Age? It was after we developed the tools to destroy ourselves that we developed the Information Superhighway and the global village that it created. In the late 1980’s there was a milestone. It was then that the total storage of knowledge contained in computers exceeded the amount stored in human brains. Does this make this human memes or just memes? The virus perpetuates itself through its hosts, and soon the new hosts will be computers that effectively foster reproduction of the virus much faster than humans ever dreamed possible.

  Are you implying the memes will switch hosts and leave the human brain and find space on some hard drives to survive?

  If someone lived a trillion X longer than you, and had a billion X more reasoning ability would he come to the same conclusions as you?
• 

  Mindchild

  Hi DW,

  A few comments about your post and a few answers to your questions.

  First, you should know that I presented a theory. A theory is simply a model that may or may not be the best reflection of reality. I used the anology of memes with their biological counterparts of genes and viruses. Nothing new there, but I extended the anology more than others did. This was also written for a general audience and not as a college thesis or for presenting it to the scientific community.

  Second, what I did was infect you and everyone else that read it with memes. In some individuals, these new memes might be unplatable or totally alien whereas in others they will be more acceptable based on their own world view.

  Third, I presented the information in a storyline that gave a continued appeal (or tried to) with the intended auidence, in this case ex-JW's) Some compromises were made doing this vs. if I were trying to argue points with someone.

  You asked some questions also. In terms of viruses or microbes multiplying themselves massively when faced with destruction, no not all do this but it is a documented behavior of some pathogens. As far as I know, the emergent behavior of viruses is survival regardless of the mechanism by which the DNA or RNA uses to replicate itself. You need to remember that viruses don't collectively "know" on a group level that "the host is dying...everyone multiply like crazy." Rather, it involves causative dynamics and opportunity. Look at the example I gave again of the host dying and the Ecoli multiplying. Do Ecoli have esp? No of course not. What happens is that certain changes occur in the biological enviornment that enable the bacteria to massively reproduce. The resulting reproduction of bacteria can easily kill the host. In the same way, memes exploit opportunity. They don't have a collective intelligence that allows them to think conciously, they individually emerge as a result of opportunities that come their way.

  Look at the example of the lead industry meme package expanding because of the corruption of politicians and others made it possible. If there were no dishonest and foolish politicians, we wouldn't have pollution. See how the memes took advantage of that?

  You said something very interesting when you asked:
  

  Are you implying the memes will switch hosts and leave the human brain and find space on some hard drives to survive?

  I was wondering if anyone was going to pick up on that! I'm making the claim that they will both use the new hosts (which will be intelligent machines that create themselves) and that their memetic evolution will be millions of times faster than in humans. When AI arrives in a few years, it will be able to communicate with other mindchildren at incomprehensible rates by our standards and undergo social and memetic evolution at blinding speed. They should be able to accomplish over 10,000 years of cultural evolution in a few years because humans think at 300 mph and they will think at the speed of light. If their growth is unchecked...they will become Gods.

  Skipper
• 

  lauralisa

  "The prophet is not diverted by illusions of past, present and future. The fixity of language determines such linear distinctions. Prophets hold a key to the lock in a language. The mechanical image remains only an image to them. This is not a mechanical universe. The linear progression of events is imposed by the observer. Cause and effect? That's not it at all. The prophet utters fateful words. You glimpse a thing "destined to occur." But the prophetic instant releases something of infinite portent and power. The universe undergoes a ghostly shift. Thus, the wise prophet conceals actuality beyond shimmering labels. The unititialted then believe the prophetic language is ambiguous. The listener distrusts the prophetic messenger. Instinct tells you how the utterance blunts the power of such words. The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and let you peer through for yourself."

  The Stolen Journals

  Frank Herbert, May, 1981