@Sliced - Take the most uneducated JWs, throw them in one place, add a touch of mental illness, a heaping helping of delusion, equal part unjustified arrogance, and you have the JW Talk forum.
dubstepped
JoinedPosts by dubstepped
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14
no...No...NOOO...JW's are not a cult!
by FedUpJW injust read this over on jw talk:.
will we be willing to leave unbelieving mates and unresponsive kids behind when given direction on what to do???
what about grandkids who fall under their parents who are not witnesses???
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"ah yes Dad, do you mean those times when Jehovah made those mistakes and errors?"
by stuckinarut2 inso...while chatting with my ultra "spiritual elder" father on the phone this afternoon, i couldn't resist using that line!.
i had sent him that video of the recent convention showing brothers and sisters dancing to the "kingdom song" and waving their illuminated phones and arms in the air like some sort of revival church concert.
(perhaps someone can post that link to that thread again here?).
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dubstepped
He might get mad now, but he can't un-hear that line of thinking. Good work!
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66
Since leaving the JW Organization, who is believing?
by Issa ini left the jw organization last year during summer.
maybe some of you can relate.
who of you are agnostic or an atheist?
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dubstepped
My plan was to leave and become an independent Christian. Then I applied the same critical lens to the Bible as I had to Jehovah's Witnesses and realized it was just as flawed as the cult I just left. I am an atheist now, as is my wife. I certainly don't believe in any god from a so called sacred text. Could there be something more? Sure. But if there is and it wants anything from us then it isn't worthy based on it's lack of ability to communicate. I see no evidence. I would have to want the things around me to be evidence and that's an act of will, not an act of some god.
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340
Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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dubstepped
Wow, so much to take in here. Thanks again Cofty and others. I've got some books to make my way through with time. I do certainly have a better understanding now. I'm less frustrated. That book frustrated me because every time I thought I was close to learning something he'd go on a rant again about creationism, and some of the searches that I did on Google turned up either confusing information or put me in the middle of some concept. Being able to have my questions answered from the jumping off point that I got through that book helped a lot.
I don't necessarily need or want to be an expert in the field but I want to have a working knowledge of the subject. For so long I thought I knew it all and knew nothing. Now I know very little but actually know something.
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340
Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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dubstepped
These are not really phrases that would be used by most biologists. Changes in the frequency of particular versions of genes -alleles - accumulate over time. Deciding when micro becomes macro is very subjective. Obviously when a population has changed sufficiently that they can no longer interbreed with the parent species then an important line has been crossed. That can be a subtle as the difference between Herring Gulls and Lesser Black-backed Gulls or as startling as the gap between chimps and humans. It's all the same mechanisms at play.
Aha, so there is no real micro and macro so to speak. Or if there were just to play the word game the macro isn't like one huge jump, it is millions of years of micros and isolation that allows them to continue down that path.
Yes. The key thing to remember is that nothing ever adapts to its environment. Rather a variety of genetic variation exists within a gene-pool. When changes happen in an environment in an isolated breeding group then some of those variations will confer a slight advantage. The frequency of that mutation will then become more common - or even ubiquitous - in that population.
Okay, so adaptation is an incorrect term then? The environmental pressures do impact changes, but only in that they allow the various mutations that exist already to flourish or fail? Those that flourish eventually win over through breeding and the failing mutations disappear or go latent?
I'm getting hung up on the notion that nothing adapts to the environment. In Prothero's book he mentioned some birds and an island where the food source changed to nuts. So then, the birds that had beaks that could break open the nuts for sustenance already existed on the island, it isn't like over time they developed, but they now had an advantage? I could swear that I've read about animals that adapted to different climates and such. So that was incorrect?
Just to clarify we and chimps both evolved from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago. Both lineages have been changing since then. The genetic difference is now about 1.5% but that means that our genome has only changed by about half that amount in that time.
Oh, so we didn't evolve from chimps. Right, that's linear and not accurate. As the tree branches grew on this tree of life there was a limb that was common to us, but the branches off of that limb were different, gradually so of course and over time.
Three things to sort out here. One is that a change of just a few percent in a genome is still an awful lot of changes. We have three billion base pairs in our genome. Most mutations happen in the non-coding region and has a neutral effect.
That cures my issue with such seemingly "small" changes affecting such great differences. They aren't so small after all. Makes sense.
The other thing is to think about the genome more like a chemical formula or a recipe than a blueprint. A small change in a blueprint results in a small change in the building. A tiny change in chemical formula can have a radical change in the end result - be that a chemical compound or a sponge cake.
This blew my mind. I was thinking more of the blueprint. A change in the blueprint still results in a building being formed. Maybe different in appearance slightly, but still a building. Chemistry is on a whole different level. Fascinating.
The third point I want to make is about selective pressure. Life has evolved over millions of years to fill every possible niche on the planet. Having refined their design by natural selection there just isn't a strong pressure on most species to change.
So then, in some ways, evolution does kind of end with us, barring some strong change in environment. Of course, if environment itself evolves over time, so will other things. However, the isolation factor is not as easy to find anymore so that kind of removes one factor that contributes to a mutation's survival.
That is also why we get so many genetic illnesses in old age. There is no evolutionary pressure to eradicate those from the gene-pool.
So these illnesses come out because we can no longer procreate? With men still being able to procreate and women not being able to after a certain age, are there higher percentages of genetic illnesses found in the female population? Or am I missing this point altogether?
I hope I'm getting this. Feel free to correct any incorrect assertions above. Man, I don't know why this is so hard for me to grasp. I've always been a very linear thinker and the cult really pushed me in that way. I went and looked at some tree of life images to help me see things more clearly in my mind, and that video above from jp kind of helped too.
Thanks for working with me on this. I am sincerely trying to grasp this and change my mind over from the way I was taught. At the same time I don't want to just say that I accept evolution without understanding it, otherwise I'm not much better than my old creationist self, just accepting things blindly because an authority said so. I like that there is visible evidence for this stuff.
Oh, and are we related to the plants too? If I have to throw them in the mix my brain my break, lol.
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15
O no!!! The HQ song
by Gorbatchov innever througt there would be a jw.org hq song.. they have become mad.. https://tv.jw.org/#nl/mediaitems/latestvideos/pub-osg_40_video.
g..
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dubstepped
I think you meant Oh Yes!!!! They made a song about the JW HQ!!!!
Yes, they are mad.
Je-hovah has given us a com-pound
Full of his mindless drooooones
Dispensing the wisdom Jeho-vah
Deposits while sitting on his throoooone
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340
Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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dubstepped
Yes! Thank you Cofty for going through my posts and breaking it down bit by bit. That's exactly what I was looking for. I'm at work now but I read through it and that's what I needed. I'll get deeper in later when I get home and see if it sparks any other questions but I can already tell that you cleared some things up. Instead of merely expressing your paradigm you jumped into mine head first and started there. Awesome!
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340
Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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dubstepped
@Anders Anderson - Thanks for the book recommendations, in order. I'll see what's available in audio format. I have "Why Evolution Is True" in my wishlist on Amazon for the audio book but audio is more expensive and I was hesitant to pull the trigger. The same person that recommended it recommended the one I bought that wasn't so great.
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Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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dubstepped
Fred Franztonean hour agoan hour ago
If you're still using terms like microevolution, macroevolution and primordial soup, then you have a very very long way to go with your studies. Read some more books, and choose them wisely.Why is this site erasing my posts over and over again once I use the "quote" function? Fuck! I've now lost my post twice.
Let's just say that the above is a non-answer. If you have better terms then supply them. If you have better books then recommend them. I asked for help and am open to it. Who knows if this will show or get erased by the forum monster once I click save but here you go.
I want to understand HOW these things happen on the macro (is speciation a better term) level. Micro (is that adaptation?) is easy to see. I don't get the bigger form of evolution and want to see specific examples of how that occured so I can understand it, not just espouse it as a vague concept.
I'd like to understand how "macro" is still occurring or if it is. Did large changes end with us?
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Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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dubstepped
Well crap, the site erased my reply and now I can't get out of this quote box on my phone, lol.