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

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.

143

Fidel Castro and the WT

by Hecce in

i am going to engage on a trip to the past and share with you some of the matters that marked the beginning of the jws persecution in cuba.

you will be surprised that the pattern that was followed is very similar to what happened in other dictatorial countries.. in the cuban case, i am going to surprise you and tell you that like what happened with hitler; the wt was partially responsible for their clash and confrontation with the cuban government.

during the early 60s the revolution was fighting for survival and they were willing and ready to demolish any perceived enemy to their cause.. a prime example was their war against the catholic church that was the most influential religious entity in the country; it took the supreme leader only a few public discourses to send the vast majority of clergy packing and back to their country, in this case spain.. the jehovah’s witnesses were an insignificant minority but they over estimated their importance and displayed a belligerent attitude, it was known that this was a us based religion and an easy target to connect them with the cia.

Mephis

They've recently tried a similar corporate shell game here in the UK with Charity Commission. They tried to argue that as COs get controlled by "Christian Congregation of JWs" (which isn't registered as a charity) then anything they did (eg certain judicial committees) couldn't be investigated by the Charity Commission. Judge didn't buy it in the slightest.

Thanks for your posts Hecce. All kind of a pattern, but with horrific consequences for the individual JW when the Brooklyn stupidity clashes with authoritarian regimes.

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

even a greater ingenuity would be required to create such a process in the first place

That's not an argument for a God though prologos. That's an argument for God being made by an even bigger God who was made, in turn, by a yet bigger God ad infinitum. Turtles all the way down argument.

30

Original Sin / Salvation without a literal Adam and Eve?

by Coded Logic in

something i've never understood is if adam and eve are just metaphorical where did "original sin" come from.

and, if there was no original sin, what is the value of jesus sacrifice?.

i know a lot of christians believe in evolution but i've never understood how such a belief is structured.

Mephis

Interesting idea. I've a lot of time for theories of things being handed down which may have a truth (of some sort) contained in them. Problem with that idea is that there's evidence of ritual (and worship?) in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A remains which have been found, which takes you to around 8000 BC and places us in Palestine as well as Mesopotamia and parts inbetween too. One of the main sites for them was the biblical Jericho, which was a town of a few thousand people even back then. If Gobekli Tepe is a religious site, and is also related to this culture/set of closely related cultures, then you could push that further back again by 1000 years or so. It's hard to reconcile the biblical narrative with that. Perhaps there was a theme being picked up on with roots in history and pre-history, but Genesis was likely written as far away in time from the start of recorded history as we currently are from when Genesis was written. (ie c.2600 years), so figuring it out from the bible is likely going to be very difficult. Possibly easier to start from the archaeology and work from that?

(Paper on ritual within Pre-Pottery Neolithic written by one of the world's experts on the subject: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adrian_Goring-Morris/publication/227138426_Foraging_Farming_and_Social_Complexity_in_the_Pre-Pottery_Neolithic_of_the_Southern_Levant_A_Review_and_Synthesis/links/53d888e40cf2631430c32337.pdf )