the chances that anyone on this forum is my biological brother or sister, purely from a statistical point of view, is rather low.
but how many generations back would we have to go to have a fair chance that one of my ancestors married one of your ancestors (or procreated anyway)?.
i was born in 1985. less than 20 years before my birth my two parents were being conceived by a combined 4 parents of their own.. and if we go back even further, to 40 years before my birth, then i'll find an additional 8 ancestors.. around the 60 year mark i have another 16 ancestors.
While it's correct to say that we're all related, your math ought to account for the fact that no one's family tree is completely free from looping back around on itself when you go back that far. If it where then going back far enough would yield more ancestors than the human population of the time.
Edit: I just looked at the article you linked and that was one of the first points made....my bad.
hey everyone.
i'm sorry that this isn't a very thought provoking post but i could really use some advice on how to handle this.
there isn't anyone else in my life i can ask right now because, being dfed, all of my friends are "worldly" and don't know how witnesses function.
I was never an elder so I could be wrong, but something tells me that the typical BOE might not look so kindly upon you reporting this "exemplary" MS. You, are DFed (and are not to be mourned and are to be viewed as having been killed by Jehovah, according to a recent WT study) and you're a lowly weaker vessel. Making a choice between you and one of their own isn't going to be difficult for them. Once they decide that your information isn't worth acting on they'll then have to sort out a punishment for you for bringing it to them in the first place. It might not be a conscious decision to punish you for it, but given the paranoid nature of the cult I wouldn't be surprised if they "circle the wagons" and make sure you don't get reinstated because you now are seen as having a tendency to try to "cause divisions" or slander men in authority. You've absolutely got the deck stacked against you here.
Whether you move to a different congregation or not, I have no idea. Maybe someone who's an elder can give you some advice there as to whether there's any time penalty for getting reinstated in another congregation. If not, you'd probably have a better chance of getting reinstated if you can win over elders that don't know you and are starting fresh and get them to recommend you for reinstatement vs trying to win over elders that already have a bad opinion of you.
they say ignorance is bliss... well, i wish that god did not give adam free will.
i am ok to not have free will if it means i will live forever in perfect paradisiac conditions.it has been explained that free will is a gift from god.
they say 'who would want to live life like a robot?
a recent thread i read about bethel " sending an old man packing" has bought to my attention it's one of many threads that show the most " loving" organisation in the world is cold and without love.. how can an organisation that is so unloving, have so many kind hearted people as members?.
this is the sincere question that i have not found an answer to.. the rebel..
part 1 - protein functional redundancypart 2 - dna functional redundancypart 3 - ervspart 4 - smelly genes.
in part 4 we saw that roughly half of the 800 genes in the human genome that code for olfactory receptors are broken remnants of our evolutionary history.
they were vital to our distant ancestors but in humans, as in our primate cousins they have been allowed to fall into disuse as our eyes became more important to our survival than our nose.
Ease off, clambake. This is all really basic stuff regarding evolution that Cofty is taking time out of his day to organize and post in a thoughtful way for those that are interested. He makes no claim to be furthering evolutionary research and he makes no claim to have special qualifications aside from having done his own research on the matter.
Has any of what you are spewing been peer reviewed?
Yes, all of what he's been posting has been, because it's all very well understood and accepted fact in the field of evolutionary biology.
i wanted to post a serious, profound quote in stillin's thread but my mind went blank and i'm pretty crap with serious quotes anyway, so i put a jokey quote from the red dwarf computer holly: .
it's better to have loved and lost than to have listened to an album by olivia newton-john.. when a bemused lister asks why, holly replies "because anything's better than listening to an album by olivia newton-john!".
this got me thinking, what are everyone's favourite comedy quotes?.
Mitch Hedberg is responsible for a great many of my favorite comedic quotes/one-liners:
This shirt is "dry-clean only"...which means it's dirty.
I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that.
And one of his that I always think of in relation to JWs, particularly the cart witnessing:
When someone hands you a flyer, it's like they're saying here you throw this away.
There's also a lot of good Mark Twain quotes out there, I think my favorite is:
The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.
hello could someone please help me with the actual letter that rama singh wrote asking wt to retract and apologise for misquoting him in the january 2015 awake?
i am giving it to the elders in my former congregation as part of my farewell letter.
Related threads, in order of my estimation of their usefulness to the OP are below. Looks like you're right, Steve - they told Dr. Singh that they'd pulled the quote but certainly did not print a retraction and probably did not apologize. At least there's no mention of an apology.
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/286780/awake-january-2015-how-did-life-begin-more-misquotes
hello could someone please help me with the actual letter that rama singh wrote asking wt to retract and apologise for misquoting him in the january 2015 awake?
i am giving it to the elders in my former congregation as part of my farewell letter.
It doesn't appear to be up on the original link anymore, but maybe this will help:
http://taze.co/2015/01/17/rama-singh-awake/
http://www.inquisitr.com/1766536/biology-professor-creationist-magazine/
Also, here's an article he wrote about it. I don't think this is exactly the same as what he wrote in the open letter, but it makes many of the same points:
http://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/5474687-religion-science-driven-by-reason/
maybe it is just me but when i read this paragraph all i could do is shake my head and wonder how i used to buy into this crap and how people don't wonder what the hell the writers are thinking'.
"imagine what life would be like if god did not have love for mankind.
we merely have to look at the awful history of this world with its human rulerships under its unloving and wrathful god, satan the devil.
this one is worth repeating.
it was buried in a thread and u've been thinking about it all day.. a quote from mark twain, one of my all-time heroes.. "it's easier to fool a man than it is to convince him that he has been fooled.".
isn't that the truth....
In the same vein, I love this Carl Sagan quote:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
