The comment, "you are still at it" was meant that you were still going door to door so to speak trying to convince people of your belief system, whatever that may be at the moment. Yes, I am well aware that jw's believe in a god and then they also have their bigger god jehovah. But in their minds they still only have one. I guess math isn't their strong point.
If not the WT/JW relgion where else are 'we' to go? Why not atheistic/scientific philosophical naturalism?
by Disillusioned JW 99 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
-
-
Disillusioned JW
A moment ago I rediscovered that I had created this forum topic (it wasn't listed when I clicked on the link which lists the topics created by me). This topic is a great place for me to promote scientific naturalism thus I am reviving this topic.
Yesterday while doing an internet search on how to persuade a Christian to become an atheist I found the fascinating web page located at https://www.wikihow.com/Persuade-a-Christian-to-Become-Atheist .
While doing an internet search on scientific naturalism I found an article by Sean Carroll in which Sean says he is a naturalist. I then searched for more information about him and found a Wikipedia article about him this link .
-
Disillusioned JW
On page 3 of this forum topic I said I wonder if "some people might have some paranormal ability". But I now don't wonder if such exists. I currently strongly think that such does not exist. I get that impression partly because of research I have done in the past few months on the topic of ESP.
-
TonusOH
I dunno about that. I've met some people that were preternaturally stupid. It might even have been possible to prove it scientifically.
-
Disillusioned JW
The above mentioned Wikipedia article about Carroll says the following.
"Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology. ... He is known for atheism, critique of theism and defense of naturalism.[5][6][7][8] He is considered a prolific public speaker and science populariser.[8][9][10] ...Carroll has also worked on the arrow of time problem. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. They claim that the universe is infinitely old but never reaches thermodynamic equilibrium as entropy increases continuously without limit due to the decreasing matter and energy density attributable to recurrent cosmic inflation."
-
Disillusioned JW
Rocketman123, regarding people "looking for help and assistance in their problematic sociological lives" help can be found in some self-help books and articles written from a secular perspective that make no promotion of religion. My experience has been that the good books in that category are very hard to find, since the vast majority of self-help books mix in religion, but they do exist.
-
Disillusioned JW
How did life get started by naturalistic means? Well scientists are getting closer to learning how it got started, or at leaning more steps of some ways it might have got started. (Though could be many naturalistic ways for life to get started, and as a result any individual specific way might not have been the precise way it got started the first time. Earth might not have even started on Earth, but instead might have come to Earth. I also might have got started in multiple places each at a different time and even by somewhat different methods.)
It looks like cyanide might have played a key role on how life got started. There is an article from July 28, 2022 about this located at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220728112005.htm and there is an article about from February 3, 2022 at https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/cyanide-may-have-played-a-key-role-in-the-origin-of-life-on-earth-and-could-help-us-find-et/ .
The article from February says in part the following.
'Though perhaps better known as the lethal substance taken in pill form by captured spies in cheesy thriller movies, cyanide may have helped life to evolve on Earth.
... The team have shown that the chemical compound, which contains a carbon atom bonded to a nitrogen atom, could have enabled some of the first metabolic reactions on Earth that created carbon-based compounds from carbon dioxide. Metabolic reactions are reactions that create energy out of food and are essential for sustaining life.
... As they already knew that cyanide was present in the atmosphere back then, they mapped out a set of reactions that could potentially use cyanide to produce more complex organic molecules from carbon dioxide and then tested them in the lab.
“It was scary how simple it was,” said Krishnamurthy. “We really didn’t have to do anything special, we mixed together these molecules, waited and the reaction happened spontaneously.”
The article from July says in part the following.
' "We've come up with a new paradigm to explain this shift from prebiotic to biotic chemistry," says Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, PhD, an associate professor of chemistry at Scripps Research, and lead author of the new paper, published July 28, 2022 in the journal Nature Chemistry. "We think the kind of reactions we've described are probably what could have happened on early earth."
... After their success using cyanide to drive other chemical reactions, Krishnamurthy and his colleagues suspected that cyanide, even without enzymes, might also help turn α-keto acids into amino acids. Because they knew nitrogen would be required in some form, they added ammonia -- a form of nitrogen that would have been present on the early earth. Then, through trial and error, they discovered a third key ingredient: carbon dioxide. With this mixture, they quickly started seeing amino acids form.
.. Because the new reaction is relatively similar to what occurs today inside cells -- except for being driven by cyanide instead of a protein -- it seems more likely to be the source of early life, rather than drastically different reactions, the researchers say. The research also helps bring together two sides of a long-standing debate about the importance of carbon dioxide to early life, concluding that carbon dioxide was key, but only in combination with other molecules.
In the process of studying their chemical soup, Krishnamurthy's group discovered that a byproduct of the same reaction is orotate, a precursor to nucleotides that make up DNA and RNA. This suggests that the same primordial soup, under the right conditions, could have given rise to a large number of the molecules that are required for the key elements of life.'
There is also an article from July 29, 2022 located at https://interestingengineering.com/science/discovery-may-explain-origin-life . It says that the experiment "... provides the simplest hypothesis yet for the chemical reactions that sparked life on Earth." That article in part says the following.
"The new discovery brings us a step closer to understanding how life flourished in the ancient past. It adds a new, strong hypothesis for the origin of life on Earth, detailing the materials and reactions that may have taken place long ago.
... Now, the Scripps scientists developed their own version of the primordial soup based on materials that were thought to be abundant in the early stages of life on Earth. They discovered a new set of chemical reactions using relatively simple ingredients that could have led to the first life on Earth.
... Alpha-keto acids are used by living cells today to make amino acids. Ammonia provides nitrogen, which is required for the conversion process. The cyanide enables the conversion, while the carbon dioxide speeds up the whole process.
... The scientists believe that, as their process is simpler than other hypotheses, it is more likely to have occurred during the earliest stages of life formation on our planet."
-
Disillusioned JW
A discovery was reported in April 2013 about how prebiotic "amino acids believed to exist on Earth around 4 billion years ago were capable of forming foldable proteins in a high-salt (halophile) environment. Such proteins would have been capable of providing metabolic activity for the first living organisms to emerge on the planet between 3.5 and 3.9 billion years ago." Besides the words quoted above the article says the following.
"Today the human body uses 20 common amino acids to make all its proteins. Ten of those emerged through biosynthetic pathways—the way living systems evolve. Ten—the prebiotic set—can be made by chemical reactions without requiring any living system or biosynthetic pathway.
... Using a technique called top-down symmetric deconstruction, Blaber's lab has been able to identify small peptide building blocks capable of spontaneous assembly into specific and complex protein architectures. His recent work explored whether such building blocks can be comprised of only the 10 prebiotic amino acids and still fold.
His team has achieved foldability in proteins down to 12 amino acids—about 80 percent of the way to proving his hypothesis."
-
Disillusioned JW
I don't see many people commenting in this topic during the past one year. I wonder why. Since there are atheists who post elsewhere on this web site I would think that more of them would be commenting on this topic. Perhaps it is largely due to the wording of title of this topic thread.
Scientific naturalism explains so much about our universe, including life itself. That makes it very fascinating to me and to at least some others.
Use of scientific knowledge can even greatly help us remain healthy for much longer than would otherwise be case. Furthermore it can help us to live longer than would otherwise be the case. For example, consider what https://novoslabs.com/reversing-aging-how-to-reverse-aging/ says. It has a fascinating article from August 25, 2022 called "How To Reverse Aging in Humans". [However that article says that drinking milk accelerates ages, but that claim might only be partially correct. I recently read an article which says drinking milk which has no more than 1% milk fat results in less biological aging than drinking no milk, and that it results in less biological aging than drinking whole milk and than drinking milk with 2% milk fat.]
Knowledge of scientific naturalism can help us in so many ways that supernatualistic minded religious teachings can not. So, why not use a scientific naturalist approach to improve your life?
-
Disillusioned JW
An anti-aging scientific study was published in 2019. It sounds very impressive. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6755196/ .