Posts by Onager

68

The paranormal.

by Lost in the fog in

i know that a lot of the people on here have turned their backs on the idea of a deity deciding that god does not exist.

but what about the unseen spirit world generally such as poltergeists, jinns, voodoo, etc.

if you have become agnostic, atheist, or just don't care since leaving, do you think that there are spirits out there or have you decided that is also hokum?

Hi Caves, I was an active poster on the James Randi Education Forum for many years. I only had a few short, written, exchanges with Randi but nothing about him ever smacked of him being a hoax or a fraud. What would the hoax be? That he isn't really a debunker of paranormal claims? A lot of people have claimed that he doesn't have the million dollars to pay out on his challenge, but that has been comprehensively refuted, so how is he a fraud?

I tried to follow your links, but the first is broken and the second is just a short history of the million dollar challenge. If you think it's significant (or dubious) that they changed the rules so that an applicant had to have a media profile and academic endorsement, I know that is because the foundation was receiving far more applications than they could deal with.

The problem was that lots of the applications were from clearly disturbed people who had decided on their own that they had magic powers. It was simply impossible to design protocols and get to all these people. The media and academic thing was purely to screen out the majority of claimants because if they couldn't convince a journalist or a professor they had paranormal powers then they surely didn't.

If that's not it, what is it that convinces you he is a hoax and a fraud?

9

Did they mean to say the F word here?

by ILoveTTATT2 in

jw
friends

this is from the golden age, august 5, 1931. it is related to an article denouncing the entire medical profession.

i wonder if they meant to say the f word but didn´t dare to.. fudge!.

.

Onager

Fudge means nonsense in that context doesn't it? Like when you fudge the numbers. The numbers are made up nonsense.

9

Epiphany #2

by Solzhenitsyn in

so after much emotional struggle out into the open comes why my dear wife continues to want to stay with the wt organization.. i simply couldn't understand why someone so intelligent would suffer from such confusion wether to stay active or fade away when she has faced and accepted the anti-jw facts.

simply put: she was raised with such sick instability that jw life was the only thing that provided stability, the only thing she felt she could count on.

to this day this remains the primary reason she stays "in".

Onager

Hi Solzhenitsyn, love your books by the way. :)

Any suggestions on how to approach this deeply entrenched emotional matter?

With love.

And patience.

11

Paradise After Death:Mark Twain calls out some of the stupider ideas-

by Captain Schmideo2 in

jw
friends

"in paradise, i am going to visit [insert favorite bible character here]" - said at least once in their life by every devout jw.now, for some hard, cold practicalities-excerpt from "captain stormfield's visit to heaven"“oh, there are a lot of such things that people expect and don’t get.

for instance, there’s a brooklyn preacher by the name of talmage, who is laying up a considerable disappointment for himself.

there’s millions of people down there on earth that are promising themselves the same thing.

Onager

I think stillin has been taken up to heaven...

48

Baker backed by UK court.

by waton in

story in the guardian: .

"--freedom of expression, as guaranteed by article 10 of the european convention on human rights, includes the right “not to express an opinion which one does not hold”, hale added.

“this court has held that nobody should be forced to have or express a political opinion in which he does not believe,” she said.--".

Onager

"--Freedom of expression, as guaranteed by article 10 of the European convention on human rights, includes the right “not to express an opinion which one does not hold”, Hale added. “This court has held that nobody should be forced to have or express a political opinion in which he does not believe,” she said.--"

My argument against that is that making a cake with a message on it isn't an expression of the baker's belief. Neither is anyone forcing the baker to hold or have any political opinion.

50

Belief in God

by jdash in

when did you guys start to doubt your faith in god?'.

what made you doubt your faith in god?.

thanks !.

Onager

The Creation book raised serious doubts. Then looking into the flood myth and the epic of Gilgamesh. After that I was agnostic. Then I found the James Randi Education forum and argued religion on there, then I read books like Combating Cult Mind Control by Steve Hassan and God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens and finally ended up at Atheism.

One of the main factors was you're not born knowing that God exists, someone tells you that he exists. How do they know? They read it in a book. How did the writers of the book know? They say that God told them. How do we know God told them? The writers say so. This means that to believe in God you actually have to have faith in men. The person that told you that this book's God is the right one, the person who tells you that their interpretation of the book is the only correct interpretation, the people that wrote the book (and the people who translated the book, and the people who printed the book), you have to have faith in all of them first before you can believe in God.

28

At least 2 of current Governing body are not honest about even their names.

by Not_Culty in

many don't know that at least 2 of current governing body are not honest about even their name.

mark sanderson is actually douglas mark sanderson.

stephen lett is mark stephen lett .

Onager

My mother uses her middle name, my father in law uses his middle name and my aunt uses a name which is similar to but NOT her first name.

And I don't trust one of them a damn, the shifty mongrels... :)

Seriously, none of them have done it to hide anything in their past, they just don't like their first names, so while there's a wisp of smoke with GB members messing about with their names, I don't think it's enough to assume there's a fire.

11

Anti-witnessing mistake by me !

by Phizzy in

a couple of times while i was anti-witnessing i have made a fundamental mistake, which was to try to show the believer that it was neither intellectually nor scientifically necessary for there to be a creator.

the discussion got to this point because i said i was an atheist.. this latest time was talking to a street preacher who was not a j.w, but he did the same thing they do, i.e not really listen to the points i made, tried to rubbish science etc.. i have decided when, (if), this happens again i shall say something along the lines of " whoa there !

you have done a huge leap from talking about your bible god to the matter of a creator, if i concede there was a creator, how can you prove it was your god ?".

Onager

I'm not sure that's a mistake as such. Whatever line of reasoning that you go down based on logic and evidence is going to run into the brick wall of blind belief. I reckon that if you're having fun then don't worry about it and carry on! :)

62

TO ALL BODIES OF ELDERS "Handling Cases of Drug Abuse" September 1, 2018

by Not_Culty in

https://jwglossary.blogspot.com/2018/09/to-all-bodies-of-elders-handling-cases.html.

to all bodies of elders "handling cases of drug abuse".

september 1, 2018. to all bodies of elders re: handling cases of drug abusedear brothers: as noted below, the procedure for handling the misuse of marijuana and the abuse of medi- cal, illicit, or addictive drugs has been adjusted to harmonize with the procedure for handling the misuse of tobacco.

Onager

I once went to a party on a Friday night and took a bunch of magic mushroom caps and had a wild, trippy, time. On the Saturday night I went to a JW bbq party, in a town called Evesham in the UK. Before I left for the bbq my friend who I'd partied with the night before suggested we share the mushroom stalks, which I agreed to because I thought they might give a mild buzz.

Turns out there's at least as much psychoactive ingredients in the stalks as there are in the caps. The problem is it can take a good couple of hours to start having an effect, so I was well into the JW party, burnt sausage bun in hand, when it all began to kick off. Have you ever tried to have a conversation about the ministry with someone who has the face of a cat? It's hard. When someone asked me why I'd been staring at the sky for over half an hour (clouds becoming teddy bears... riveting), I managed to get someone to drive me home. Suffice to say I won't be doing that again!

(The JW party, not the mushrooms!)

37

God and the afterlife. Do you need to believe in both

by moley in

i consider myself an atheist, i completely reject the idea of a totalitarian desert god/any god and the bible is a book of fairytales and folk legends.. i do however sort of believe that this life is not all there is.

i’m not talking about heaven or hell but in a tangible state of being.. there are a few experiences i’ve had in my llife.

could be imagined could be real.

Onager

Hey Moley,

Have you read this book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sum-Tales-Afterlives-David-Eagleman/dp/1847674275

I found it fascinating. There's so much possibility out there and we have no idea and no way of finding out what comes after and anyone that says they do know is a fraud.

I also found this article very interesting:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/dd52796e-5935-414e-af0c-de9686d02afa

It talks about the sensation of "Ego death" when taking DMT, which is somewhat analogous to dying but still being aware. It's all in your head of course, but it perhaps gives an insight into a world without you in it.