OneEyedJoe

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Posts by OneEyedJoe

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  49

  A philosophical question .... what does the word God mean to you personally ?

  by Finkelstein in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  to myself it means to seek knowledge and understanding of are selves and the world in which we live.. unfortunately history has shown whenever one tries to connect to god and of his knowledge through men who say they themselves are connected to god through spiritual wifi ie.

  gb members of the jehovah's witnesses for example, one usually ends up finding a accumulation of only man's acquired knowledge.

  over thousands of years of trying to connect to a god(s) for help and answers, mankind has eventually relinquished himself to seeking answers through scientific investigative acquired knowledge of the world in which we live in.

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  OneEyedJoe

  God is an excuse to be lazy. Don't understand something? It's god. Someone doesn't have it as good as you? They must've pissed off god. Want to feel superior? Imagine that god approved of you. And on it goes.
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  57

  Any ExJw Millenials here? If not which Gen do you fall under?

  by Hidethevelociraptors in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  if anyone had to guess, what do you think the average age of the community actually is?.

  are more millennials actually waking up or is it pretty even amongst previous generations as well?

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  OneEyedJoe

  I'm with QMI - I'm technically in the group but don't relate to a lot of things that are considered to be their hallmarks. I was always the youngest of every group I was a part of until very recently, so I think I grew up more as a young GenXer would've.

  Aside from the culture that lends itself more to sites like reddit and facebook, I wonder if the lack of a strong millennial presence here might also be down to the fact that JWs in their early 20s seem to take the whole thing a lot less seriously than folks did in my day. The less seriously they take the cult while their in it, the less painful it'll be when they wake up to the lies. If they always regarded it as a social club and just slowly and naturally fade from it as they get older and develop normal friends outside the cult, it might not even occur to them to seek out an exJW group online when they realize they were raised in a cult.

  That's even assuming that they're having the sort of waking up moment that most of us here relate to - for those that don't really take it seriously, maybe they just let it go and move on and just don't care enough about it to force it into a particular box of being "true" or "lies" instead they just put it in the box of "who cares" and live their lives. The obsessive disproving of doctrine and unraveling of all the deceptions and history of the cult may, in some ways, be somewhat specific to the older crowd that took things more seriously while they were in the cult.
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  90

  Evolution Hole #1 - Origin of Life

  by shadow in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  disclaimer: my graduate degree is in business, not science so i'm writing as a layman in this field.

  yes, i know that someone is going to say that evolution does not encompass this topic and should be sectioned off under abiogenesis.

  i'm not trying to argue semantics here but it seems like a case of avoiding an uncomfortable subject.

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  OneEyedJoe

  Evolution advocates have commented almost 100% as predicted so this thread is a complete success.

  Thanks for confirming my suspicions. I figured the only reason someone would start a thread like this while fully acknowledging the mistake you made in the OP was so that you could avoid actually having a thoughtful discussion of the topic while being able to tell yourself "I tried."

  I'm glad my instincts were right and I didn't put a lot of effort into helping you educate yourself on the topic as I normally might've.
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  52

  $10 per pub. Money begging session last night

  by StarTrekAngel in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  last night, during our "christian life and ministry" meeting, we had a session on local needs.

  elder opened the talk with a disclaimer saying that this was a reminder (cited psalms about how david loved jehovahs reminders).

  he reminded us of how bless we are of having our own local assembly hall.

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  OneEyedJoe

  The last assembly I went to we were quoted $11 per publisher as the rate the society had set.* So $10 per publisher on top of whatever was received at the assembly seems really high. It must vary from region to region - do you know what the supposed cost of the last assembly was and what the announced deficit was?

  *I've posted about this on here before but it always cracks me up to think about. The man that gave the accounts report was from my former congregation and is well known for being a little "simple" to put it nicely. So he gets up to do the accounts report and announces that the society has seen fit to raise the per-publisher rate of our assembly that they use to determine the assembly's cost. Because they had raised the cost to $11 per publisher, and there where x publishers the cost we were expected to cover was y. The way he explained it, he made it clear as day that the "expenses" of the assembly had absolutely nothing to do with the actual cost of maintaining the building and turning on the lights, etc. I don't think this is typically common knowledge among JWs, and something tells me he won't be doing the accounts report again.
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  38

  Honestly, Did Jehovah's Witnesses Do Anything POSITIVE For You?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i was raised as a witness and am very thankful that i am out.

  having said that, i think my upbringing produced positive qualities in me.

  do you believe that anything positive came from your being a witness?

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  OneEyedJoe

  There were definitely some good aspects to being a JW, though they are few and far between. Was any of the good stuff something that I would be unlikely to have gotten had I not been raised in the cult? Absolutely not.

  So yes, you could say there is some good to the JW cult, but that's buying a new car at full price and upon finding out that it doesn't run you say "well at least the heater works!"
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  54

  "Even if it isn't the truth, it's still the best way to live"

  by Simon in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  have you heard that old chestnut?

  i have.. typically it's the last resort when you have dismantled a jws beliefs and they have no way of defending them.

  they know they are beat so they come out with that one.. its effectively an admission that you are right and they have no argument but they are still going to attend meetings because they like the social club.. what a lame way to defend your faith..

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  OneEyedJoe

  I've definitely heard it, though I can't relate to what it takes for someone to get to that thought. Well before I knew TTATT, I'd already determined for myself that if it wasn't the truth, it was just about the worst way to live. It was only ever remotely justified (and even barely at that - I had my doubts about whether eternity in a bland paradise was worth not living now) because I thought the doctrine was correct.
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  42

  Evolution is a Fact #10 - Non-Coding DNA

  by cofty in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  every cell in your body contains a big book of how to build another you.. although it's approximately 3 billion letters long only a small fraction of it contains instructions on making humans.. imagine trying to use a workshop manual but it reads like somebody messed up at the publishers.

  there are a few paragraphs of meaningful text followed by pages of gibberish, another page or so of useful instructions then 9 more of random words.

  some of it looks like copies of original text but full of typing errors.

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  OneEyedJoe

  There is.
  

  Please, do share.
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  42

  Evolution is a Fact #10 - Non-Coding DNA

  by cofty in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  every cell in your body contains a big book of how to build another you.. although it's approximately 3 billion letters long only a small fraction of it contains instructions on making humans.. imagine trying to use a workshop manual but it reads like somebody messed up at the publishers.

  there are a few paragraphs of meaningful text followed by pages of gibberish, another page or so of useful instructions then 9 more of random words.

  some of it looks like copies of original text but full of typing errors.

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  OneEyedJoe

  There is no basis whatsoever to dispute that the earth is round (oval) It is an indisputable fact.
  

  There is no basis whatsoever to dispute that all species on earth evolved from a common ancestor. It is an indisputable fact.

  How am i doing?

  In case you're having trouble with it, my point is that there is a preponderance of evidence that evolution is factually accurate. If you want to come in and declare it not to be a fact, then you'll need to present some sort of evidence to support your claim. Otherwise your claim can be dismissed as easily (and appropriately) as you dismissed my claim that the earth is flat.

  Edit: Arg! Cofty beat me by a millisecond!
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  42

  Evolution is a Fact #10 - Non-Coding DNA

  by cofty in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  every cell in your body contains a big book of how to build another you.. although it's approximately 3 billion letters long only a small fraction of it contains instructions on making humans.. imagine trying to use a workshop manual but it reads like somebody messed up at the publishers.

  there are a few paragraphs of meaningful text followed by pages of gibberish, another page or so of useful instructions then 9 more of random words.

  some of it looks like copies of original text but full of typing errors.

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  OneEyedJoe

  Facts cannot be disputed. Since there is basis to dispute evolution, it is not a fact.
  

  Facts cannot be disputed. Since there is basis to dispute that the earth is round, it is not a fact.

  I can do it too!
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  13

  2015 WT CD ROM Trying to Hide the Past

  by The Searcher in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  when installing, it asks if you'd like to receive automatic updates via the internet.. in other words, "we will re-write our history without you knowing what was written previously.".

  the corporation knows that many will never exchange their cd rom for the puerile online library, so doctoring their previous "truths" is the best solution.. a bit like the creed painted on the barn door in "animal farm.

  " .

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  OneEyedJoe

  Steve2 - I agree that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it, but the way the WT does it is deceptive. If you read online news articles you'll often see a list at the bottom of what they changed since first posting the story. I've read articles 10 minutes after they were posted and they had already gotten a correction or two made and listed at the end - it would be easy in cases like that to fix it and hope no one saw it, but they don't because they have some journalistic integrity. The watchtower, on the other hand, prints hard copies of their magazines and leaves the version up for months only to change it later without acknowledgement of any kind. Look at the January 2015 awake that they changed - you'll find absolutely no acknowledgement anywhere of the change.