Posts by Mephis

41

Does Believing in God Make You Dumb?

by Brokeback Watchtower in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzqaeusdmtk.

http://jdc.jefferson.edu/jmbcimfp/5/.

abstract.

Mephis

Of course I assume everyone here is college-educated with a degree

A lot of us are. And then some. We just don't make a big thing of it other than to encourage others to consider the options which work for them with education, or professional qualifications. Best time on some of the other ex-jw groups are when people post up their graduation pics. Always so cool because we all have some idea of how much it takes to get there. Oh, personally, I have BA (hons), MA, PGCE (ie MA equivalent), plus similarly weighted professional qualifications. Like my privacy, but the universities were Russell Group standard although cost was a bigger factor than anything else in my choices.

Anyhows, well done on your bachelor degree. Genuinely. If you wish to use education as a very loose proxy for intelligence, I think that's fair enough as long as allowance is made within this particular community for the difficulties around that. It's also worth keeping in mind that in the wider world, an undergraduate degree isn't uncommon. The average secondary school teacher here in Britain will have at least that and, commonly, the MA equivalent teaching qualification.

2

UK report 1in 5 charities misuse more than half of their income!

by sherrie11 in

i understand that there is charities commission happening in the uk.

i have read its really hard to loose charity status.

how is this affecting the org?.

Mephis

Donations are included under income for WBTS. But the Charity Commission are investigating the polices and procedures related to abuse of children, vulnerable adults and survivors rather than financial affairs of WBTS. Until the Commission reports back on what has happened, it's hard to say what the impact will be. In the past there have been other investigations (eg Mill Hill congregation) and other promises to sort out a proper child protection policy which ultimately led to not a lot changing. They're very, very unlikely to lose charitable status unless they go full derp on implementing adequate policies. I can see a scenario where they'd willingly relinquish it in order to avoid having to have outside oversight on what they're doing but it would be expensive for them.

16

Do People Have Spirits? What Do the Early Texts Say?

by Cold Steel in

for years adventist sects, including the jws, have believed that the dead sleep at death and remain non-existent until the resurrection.

its strongest argument seems to be text in the non-escchatological book of ecclesiastes in the old testament.

although a part of the canon of scripture, the book is not written by a prophet, nor is there any prophecy or recognizable doctrine contained therein.

Mephis

Josephus tells us that the Sadducees had no belief in the immortality of the soul. And that tends to support a view that the Torah (which the Sadducees followed) is sufficiently ambiguous to allow both that belief and the beliefs of the Essenes and the Pharisees to all be permissible readings.

Wouldn't a fundamental problem be, and apologies if this is overly secular as a reading, that there's no real set belief in Judaism which is then transmitted into Christianity? If you're trying to hammer together one narrative from texts written over a period of 700 years, with oral history traditions adding a few more centuries to that, then you're inevitably going to get texts at odds with each other as there was no single unchanging truth being transmitted. Just a series of texts reflecting the beliefs of individual writers from various points within that time frame.

eg Saul went and spoke to Samuel's spirit. Samuel talked back. At one point Judaism may have had some concept of life after death which wasn't a result of Greek thought. Perhaps an Egyptian conception of soul/body? But that was clearly not something which the person who wrote that story down wanted to write about.

You get to the time of the Hellenistic apocrypha and you really start seeing the Greek influences in it. You can push that further on to things like Philo's writings a bit later on too.

Definitely agree that the early non-canonical christian writings I've read have some element which at least strongly implies an immortal soul of some type. Just not sure how far one can then push that onto some form of proto-orthodoxy in 1st century christianity. Broad church was broad.

41

Does Believing in God Make You Dumb?

by Brokeback Watchtower in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzqaeusdmtk.

http://jdc.jefferson.edu/jmbcimfp/5/.

abstract.

Mephis

The Duke study doesn't show believers become more stupid? It shows that very religious and very non-religious people may, generally, have a smaller hippocampus. A smaller hippocampus is associated with hyporeligiosity in some conditions, but away from those it "has been linked to clinical outcomes, such as depression, dementia, and Alzheimer's Disease". The study, as the full length article in Scientific American points out, doesn't show causation. Stress factors related to religion are proposed, to help explain why this also seemed to be something which non-believers have. I found it interesting that people who meditate seem to have a larger hippocampus.

Link to study itself: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017006

39

Evolution is a Fact #12 - Lenski's E. coli Experiment

by cofty in

evolution works by the non-random selection of random mutation.

natural selection accumulates favourable random chance events.. the experiment that was began on 24th february 1988 on e coli bacteria by dr richard e. lenski and his team is surely one of the clearest demonstrations of the power of this process.. e.coli is one of the commonest bacterium on earth, there is around 100 billion, billion of them in the world at any given time and around 1 billion of them in your gut right now.

most of the time they cause no problem, until a new strain wreaks havoc on its host's digestive system.. if we assume the probability of a particular gene mutating to be 1 in a billion, the size of the population is so high that just about every gene in the e.coli genome will have mutated somewhere in the world every day.

Mephis

His threads are spam and quite annoying.

Then don't read them. :)

I personally find them a nice 5 minute read, do some reading around based on what Cofty posts and then crack on with my life. Would have enjoyed these threads as a born-in being inside though, know that. Encouraging people to think for themselves, to go and chase down sources, even to get some education if they've been denied it (even if it's something like a free online course from a decent university on edX or coursera), that's a big thing for some of us leaving.

9

What's in the secret rooms beneath Chelmsford:

by bohm in

jw
friends

the basement.

Mephis

All the magazines that every JW in Britain said they'd placed but didn't really. No, that's my parents' attic. With the bodies.

133

What are the biggest holes in evolution?

by shadow in

how honest are the proponents of evolution?

idk but curious to see what type of response there is on a topic like this or does their study only seek to confirm their preconceptions and ignore uncomfortable facts?

Mephis

Oh true enough, but evolution doesn't really set out to address ultimate origins of the universe and beyond where our science is no longer relevant. But in this universe, complex systems can arise from fairly simple interactions (cheesy example - the weather) so evolution itself holds up. Hawking's an interesting read, but there are other theories [edit: just clarifying for others here] and it's been a while since I did more than just browse headlines on what is the latest consensus on this. It's just one way to try and get beyond causality. I find it hard to do that, I think the human mind is wired to try and find cause for the effect. Agree with you that it's turtles all the way down at some point in a 4 dimensional universe otherwise.

133

What are the biggest holes in evolution?

by shadow in

how honest are the proponents of evolution?

idk but curious to see what type of response there is on a topic like this or does their study only seek to confirm their preconceptions and ignore uncomfortable facts?

Mephis

Obviously you weren't arguing for any particular god, because your argument vanishes into an infinity of successively more powerful gods. This has nothing to do with evolution though? I did notice your movement through time suggestion, I'm just not sure what relevance cosmology 101 has to a debate on evolution. But if you want an explanation, try something on 'imaginary time' for one model which works to explain things. eg Hawking lecture here: http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html

46

Books I read when I deprogrammed

by OrphanCrow in

jw
friends

blondie suggested someone start a thread with a list of books that are valuable to read when exiting the jws.. i will start.. i left the jws way back in the early 70s and didn't actually deprogram until into the 80s.. one of the first books i read was "the orwellian world of jehovah's witnesses" by gary and heather botting.

canadian exjws from calagary.

an excellent book and one that still resonates with young people today.

Mephis

Don Cameron's Captives of a Concept is very good.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Captives-Concept-Anatomy-Illusion-Cameron/dp/1411622103

17

Wear were you in the "Pecking order" in the congro??

by karter in

we were right down with the very lowest.. father never a jw we had a po with little mans syndrome and love to pick on sisters that had no husband to stand up for them,he picked on my mother only to find out he picked on the wrong person,she came from a hard up bringing and didn't take any s###t from anyone particularly this little bully and we were very poor...how low can you get!.

karter..

Mephis

I didn't know there was a pecking order until a couple of years back when someone pointed it out to me. Elder's kid plus male. Lots of leeway I didn't even realise was leeway at the time.