Posts by Mephis

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.

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.