Sadly not possible for a repressive state and a repressive religion to both lose the same court case. I do hope that the court cases don't lead to more mob violence and heavy handed police raids for JWs in Russia caused by one group of Biblebashing zealots not wanting competition.
Mephis
JoinedPosts by Mephis
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Two Jehovah's Witnesses congregations abolished by courts - Russia
by OrphanCrow intwo jehovah's witnesses congregations abolished by courts.
today, 11 february 2016, an administrative lawsuit by the prosecutor of belgorod province for finding the local religious organization of jehovah's witnesses in the city of belgorod to be extremist and liquidated was granted by decision of the belgorod provincial court.
yesterday the provincial court issued a decision on the administrative lawsuit of the provincial prosecutor for liquidation of the local religious organizations of jehovah's witnesses in the city of stary oskol.. the above quote is from one of 5 articles at link.. the fourth article, doctors in court: "jehovah's witnesses died after refusing blood transfusions", gives a synopsis of the hearing in the belgorod provincial court on feb 8.. two doctors were summoned into court as witnesses in order to learn whether religious convictions have affected the state of health of jehovist patients and whether they could be the cause of the death of patients.
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Evolution and Atheism - please help
by Fernando innot being familiar with either, my question is:.
what is the relationship between evolution and atheism?.
i'd love to hear from anyone and everyone, and also from any perspective.. without limiting the conversation in any way, i would of course also appreciate comments that are simple, clear, direct and correct (as i don't have the capacity to do a phd in evolution or atheism)..
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Mephis
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Why I'm not agnostic
by Coded Logic ini think the time to be agnostic is when you have evidence on both sides of a claim.
for example, i'm agnostic about the existence of a historical jesus.
i think a reasonable case can be made that jesus was a man who was turned into a legend over a period of a couple of decades.
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Mephis
My agnosticism is around knowledge of whether a being I'd call 'God' exists. I don't know. To all intents and purposes, I don't care. It's irrelevant to my life. If one did exist, up til now my life is irrelevant to it. For me, that's an intellectual honesty check on my beliefs, well, my lack of them. Until some pretty major questions about the origin and nature of the universe are answered then I see little point in being overly dug into a position. Should those questions be answered, then I'll reassess. This is as of equal priority in my thinking, actually less, to 'what is at the bottom of a black hole?'.
I could also happily recite lists of gods I don't believe in. It's probably as long as the number of gods imagined up by humans. Agnosticism to me certainly isn't a 'sitting on the fence' position because of a lack of thought. It's a word which pretty perfectly describes where I'm at with things. If I were convinced either way, then I'd use a different word.
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Is a piano inevitable?
by slimboyfat ini was at a concert last night and the presence and stature of the piano struck me.
and i thought: if the piano wasn't invented when it was, would it have been invented by someone else instead?
or if there was a world the same as our, except with a different history, would it have pianos now too or would it be modern world, similar in many respects, only without pianos?
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Mephis
Writing is said to have developed independently at least twice, in Mesopotamia and in Mesoamerica. It seems inevitable. The Wasteland was only written once, and it seems to have been... not inevitable
The Wasteland was also heavily edited into shape, to the extent Pound joked he should be called the midwife. Would another word salad pruned to suitably sized slabs have sufficed? Modernism actually arose at least twice within European literature, and from very different roots each time. Was writing not inevitable because cuneiform doesn't look like glyphs?
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Article: Free Exercise, Penance, and Delaware Court by John M. Grondelski
by AndersonsInfo inhttp://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/02/free-exercise-penance-and-delaware-court.
free exercise, penance, and delaware court.
by john m. grondelski february 9, 2016. regular first things readers know that the late father richard john neuhaus never tired of arguing that the first amendment contains not two religion clauses but one: “no establishment” and “free exercise” are not two free-floating provisions at occasional loggerheads with each other but one.
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Mephis
SykesFive schooling a Catholic theologian attempting to write a scare piece on 'why it's our Catholic right not to have to report child abuse'. Amusingly true and accurate from her/him. -
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Evolution is a Fact #20 - Lucy in the Sky ....
by cofty inwhen donald johanson and his colleagues returned to the afar region of ethiopia in 1974 they were full of optimism.
it was their second season searching for human fossils around hadar.
the previous november johanson had found a fossilised knee joint that was dated to more than 3 million years ago.
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Mephis
One of the things which always strikes me about the Lucy skeleton is just how tiny it is. Hip height to me when I've stood next to reconstructions. So incredibly small. -
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Good NYT article on gravitational waves discovery
by done4good inhttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=homepage&clicksource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&wt.nav=top-news&_r=0.
probably the biggest find since the higgs.. d4g.
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Mephis
A huge feather in the cap for American science. 40 years to get the right instruments to measure them. Incredible foresight and scientific good stuff. The impossible takes just a little longer.
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When is a theory 'just a theory'?
by HB inthe titles of cofty's excellent recent posts are all preceeded by the words "evolution is a fact...".
richard dawkins is encouraging people to use the term 'fact' in relation to evolution, especially when debating with creationists as the word 'theory' is confusing to many, and the latter often takes the discussion off on an often unproductive tangent.
the following may be of interest, it's from the bbc website - part of a regular series of articles called 'the vocabularist', discussing the origin and meaning of words: .
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Mephis
That may be the case -or maybe not if evolution comes up with something new.
It's creationism which uses magic to explain how genes get where they are. Evolutionary theory is quite happy to explain it by things having sex. This stuff is on the level of a paternity test at court, or the evidence for how closely related to other primates modern humans are. It's that solid. The hard part was getting the DNA to examine. And now figuring out when the sex was taking place, and whether it was directly between modern humans and Neanderthals, and where it was taking place, and... lots of interesting questions still left. But it happened. :)
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When is a theory 'just a theory'?
by HB inthe titles of cofty's excellent recent posts are all preceeded by the words "evolution is a fact...".
richard dawkins is encouraging people to use the term 'fact' in relation to evolution, especially when debating with creationists as the word 'theory' is confusing to many, and the latter often takes the discussion off on an often unproductive tangent.
the following may be of interest, it's from the bbc website - part of a regular series of articles called 'the vocabularist', discussing the origin and meaning of words: .
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Mephis
Bolony. I remember an article in National Geographic(I think it was) about 10 years ago that stated that DNA confirmed that "Neanderthal man" did not breed with homo sapiens. A couple of years later I read another article somewhere that said that they did. In fact anyone taking a dna test now can see some Neanderthal in their lineage. You figure it out. Where neanderthal humans?
Was that the first attempts to pull Neanderthal DNA out? Sounds familiar. One group thought they'd found evidence of human and Neanderthal's having offspring, the other group found no evidence. Most confusing but also a reflection of just how darned hard it is to pull DNA out of remains 40,000 years old.
The fun part of that confusion was a huge collaborative project to map the entire Neanderthal genome. That's based at the Max Planck Institute. Anyways, long story short, we did interbreed with Neanderthals. No confusion now. Problem solved by more science. Since then, the techniques have improved further and more and more evidence is building up. To the point where we can identify where the Denisovan genes entered our gene pool (best example - Tibet and the gene which allows Tibetans to live more easily at high altitude) and even identify other species who contributed to the Denisovan gene pool.
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WBTS goes to Court of Appeal (Charity Commission investigation)
by Mephis inafter a number of high profile cases where both children and survivors clearly weren't adequately protected, the charity commission here in the uk launched an investigation into the wbts as a whole here in britain.
the main concerns are around the child safeguarding policies being inadequate.
wbts have fought every step of the way so far.. wbts have been to the high court, who told them to complain to the proper tribunal.. wbts have been to the proper tribunal, who told them that too darn right there were suitable grounds for the charity commission to want to investigate their inability to protect children.. and now the wbts have gone back to the court of appeal to demand that the charity commission inquiry be halted.. i hope the court of appeal tells them that, yes, they too need to have proper safeguarding measures for children and to get on with co-operating with the investigation.. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/charity-commission-defends-its-investigation-into-jehovahs-witness-charity-in-the-court-of-appeal.
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Mephis
Reports in voluntary sector press confirming some of what was said yesterday.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses charity, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Britain, yesterday appealed to the High Court to allow its case against the opening of a statutory inquiry by the Charity Commission to be heard as a judicial review.
The charity and the commission have been engaged in a long-running legal battle since the regulator opened a statutory inquiry into the charity’s safeguarding measures in May 2014.
The WTBTSB sought a judicial review of the decision to launch an inquiry and of a commission production order that requested documents from the charity. It said both the inquiry and the order were too broad in scope, and the production order breached the Data Protection Act because it would require sensitive personal information to be shared.
But this application was rejected on 12 December 2014. The judge said the case should be taken to the charity tribunal, and an appeal to the tribunal made 10 days later was rejected in March 2015 because it had been made outside the 42-day time limit.
In yesterday’s hearing at the Court of Appeal, the panel of judges, led by Lord Dyson, the Master of the Rolls, did not reach a judgment, which could take several weeks.
The WTBTSB argued that its case could not have been heard by the charity tribunal because it was seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry, something it said would be outside the tribunal’s powers under the Charities Act 2011.
Representing WTBTSB, Richard Clayton QC, said: "The tribunal’s powers are confined to a stark choice – either dismissing the appeal or exercising the power to direct the commission to end the inquiry."
He said it would have been less "convenient and effective" for the WTBSTB to have taken its case to the tribunal and then appealed its decision later at judicial review because it would take more time and incur more costs.
"It would be much simpler and preferable to deal with the issue of scope first and put it to one side before starting a tribunal review, rather than having to thrash out all the arguments at tribunal," Clayton said.
But Iain Steele, for the Charity Commission, argued that the charity was seeking a review only because it had missed the deadline to appeal against the inquiry in July 2014. Clayton denied this.
Steele pointed to the similar case of the Manchester New Moston Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, which appealed against a statutory inquiry opened at the same time, but chose to appeal through the tribunal – despite, Steele said, strong similarities in the grounds of its claim.
"If anything, the appellants are arguing that the remedy available through the first-tier tribunal is too effective," he said.
"They want this to go away completely. Rather than being concerned about the scope, they want it to stop."
He said the commission had written to the WTBTSB, hoping to make some progress, asking what elements of the inquiry it did not contest and suggesting that names could be redacted to help resolve the data-protection issue. But the charity had issued a "polite but firm refusal to engage" while legal proceedings were ongoing, Steele said.
Chris Willis Pickup, head of litigation at the commission, told Third Sector after the hearing that a judgment in the WTBTSB’s favour could leave smaller charities confused about which route they should take to seek redress.
Asked if the commission would consider asking the government to amend the Charities Act to allow the tribunal to limit the scope of an inquiry, rather than simply quash it, he said: "Having just celebrated the passing of the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill through parliament, we would not be keen to go back to the government and say ‘OK, here’s the next charities bill’."
He said the commission did not believe there was a problem with existing legislation.