What about medical Marijuana, vaped or otherwise?
Village Idiot
JoinedPosts by Village Idiot
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Any updates on Vaping?
by longgone ini was wondering if the gb has forbidden vaping yet, so i did a search.
there was a thread from a year ago, the comments covered all the bases i suspected the wt would come up with.
i'm out, so it doesn't really matter to me.
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Village Idiot
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How many JWs still have a personal conscience?
by contramundum inin conversation with an old jw friend today, it struck me that most jws have replaced their personal conscience with a collective one.. instead of training their own mental powers to distinguish right from wrong, as the bible encourages, they are content to shift personal accountability away from themselves and onto the impersonal org.
whatever behaviour may prompt an ordinary person to have serious misgivings ( such as ignoring glaring misapplication of scripture or rejecting basic human decency in favour of unchristian shunning ) they prefer to have those decisions made for them.. history teaches us, however, that there is no absolution for people who behave unethically or cruelly by allowing the excuse of 'obeying orders' to override what their inner voice should scream is inherently wrong..
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Village Idiot
How many JWs still have a personal conscience?
As many as become apostates.
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The day after Armageddon
by Pronger1 injws are scattered across the globe.
a few million people left, pretty isolated from each other.. telephone lines and power goes down since the people who supported the infrastructure are dead.
communication across town, state, country, etc is cut off.
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Village Idiot
As a person who loves apocalypse fiction I can think of many ways that a tiny minority of people can survive after a major die-off. It takes imagination but the solutions are there.
Assume that one out of a thousand persons survive and they start gathering together to live close together.
Telephone lines and power goes down since the people who supported the infrastructure are dead. Communication across town, state, country, etc is cut off.
Ham radios and walkie-talkies.
Oil refineries shut down, gas for travel starts becoming unavailable.
There would be thousands of gallons of fuel per survivor and the fuel at gas stations can become available when they are given electricity through means of generators. Any further transportation can be arranged by bicycles and any surviving horses. Keep in mind that people will be living close together in neighborhoods and have a lessened need for long distance transportation.
Crops dying in the fields, livestock used for milk and meat start their process of dying.
There is enough food in supermarkets to last every individual now living for 3 days. If one out of a thousand survive then there would be almost 9 year's worth of food as crops are planted. Of course Jehovah can arrange for a few farmers to survive and feed the rest.
Manufacturing of replacement parts for automobiles gone.
Go to Cuba and see how 1950s vintage cars are kept running without any factory made replacement parts. Besides, there would be over a hundred vehicles per survivor at a .1% survival rate.
Read Stephen King's book The Stand to get an idea of how a few thousand people can reclaim one city.
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Why do some Jehovah's Witnesses choose to be atheist or agnostic?
by Cassaruby in"traumatic as the initial transition may be, it can lead to the development of a truly personal relationship with these two greatest friends [the father and the son] .
.. "whatever sense of 'belonging' that membership in some religious system may create, it can never compare with the power and beauty and strengthening benefit of the intimate personal relationship the scripture presents .
from reading joseph campbell i've come to understand that there are functions to religion or mythology.
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Village Idiot
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with that choice. It just seems to me that it might be like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, so to speak.
If you don't find anything inherently wrong with that then why are you using the metaphor of jumping from frying pan into the fire? The metaphor is the same as referring to the greater of two evils (the fire).
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Short stay
by midnight inafter much research and prayer i am returning to being a jehovah's witness i can find nothing that eliminates them from being god's directed people , in the end they will reach the end of there journey despite mistakes and errors just like the israelites entered the promised land , thanks for your input and all the best on your personal journey ☺.
midnight..
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Village Idiot
midnight,
...I can find nothing that eliminates them from being God's directed people...
Yes you can.
This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Do not listen to what the prophets are prophesying to you; they fill you with false hopes. They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. - Jeremiah 23:16 New International Version.
The visions of your prophets were false and worthless; they did not expose your sin to ward off your captivity. The prophecies they gave you were false and misleading. - Lamentations 2:14 NIV
13 The word of the Lord came to me: 2 “Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel who are now prophesying. Say to those who prophesy out of their own imagination: ‘Hear the word of the Lord! 3 This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing! 4 Your prophets, Israel, are like jackals among ruins.- Ezekiel 13:1-4 NIV
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Is strong faith or belief in religion or "God" a mental disorder?
by kpop init is a most interesting study.
when one studies anthropology, one can see how the "need" for belief in a higher being evolved from early man.
and it served a purpose.
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Village Idiot
Ancient humans such as Homo Sapiens had cave paintings that modern day anthropologists interpret as having religious significance. They didn't necessarily believed in a "higher power". They basically worshipped what they ate. That is a religion worth having compared to the ones we have now.
It was later in our history, when we became civilized, that our religions would have undergone a significant change. Society became authoritarian with dictators running our life. We went from worshipping what we ate to worshipping what eats us namely sentient cosmic entities (gods) who were projections of the tyrannical nature of societies rulers.
We need a new religion, one based on what we know of the universe. Carl Sagan, of the memorable Cosmos series, thought that science might want to use the power of religious sentiments that would lead us into worshipping the Universe. A form of cosmic pantheism.
I agree with Sagan. Instead of despising religion and disparaging those who are religious we should change the very structure of religion into something useful.
Long live the Cosmos!
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Some apostates are coming across as crazed psychopaths
by jambon1 ini'm not sure whether or not my view on this is correct so please leave your input.
in recent months i've been viewing youtube videos.
again, it might just be my view but there has been an increased amount of random people grabbing a camera and doing vlogs.
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Village Idiot
Some apostates are coming across as crazed psychopaths..
That is not a proper use of the word psychopath even though it's misused by many as such. Most psychopaths have no more anger than your regular John Doe. Psychopaths simply have no conscience and are known to be manipulative for their own gain.
As for combative ex-JWs, that's perfectly understandable even though we may wish that their tactics be different.
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Autocracy: Rules for Survival
by Village Idiot inpardon the cut and paste but i simply can not do better than the author.. autocracy: rules for survival by masha gessen.
i have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about vladimir putin’s russia.
i have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect.
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Village Idiot
I wonder how many people are moving to Canada. But then Canada has had its share of right wing a$$holes. No one as bad as Trump I'm sure but, since they're next door, Trumpism might, under the right circumstances, be contagious.
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Autocracy: Rules for Survival
by Village Idiot inpardon the cut and paste but i simply can not do better than the author.. autocracy: rules for survival by masha gessen.
i have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about vladimir putin’s russia.
i have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect.
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Village Idiot
GrreatTeacher,
I felt dark winds blowing in the US not too long after Obama was elected.
He was vilified even before he took office. I remember, shortly after his becoming president a group of armed men posting themselves on a church lawn (with permission of the church) at some distance from where he was going to speak. They held signs saying that they came in peace this time.
I'm sure his name will live on in infamy in the eyes of conservatives. Every conspiracy crackpot and his sister will say something to the effect that:
- Obama is planning to launch a coup against Trump.
- Obama is going to take over the U.N. and open up concentration camps for Conservatives.
- Liberals are arming themselves to overthrow Conservatives.
- Etc. ad nauseum.
And there's no exaggeration in what I just posted. I go to rightwingwatch.org every day and they reveal crackpots, some of them influential, saying similar things. The situation is just going to get critical one of these days.
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Autocracy: Rules for Survival
by Village Idiot inpardon the cut and paste but i simply can not do better than the author.. autocracy: rules for survival by masha gessen.
i have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about vladimir putin’s russia.
i have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect.
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Village Idiot
Pardon the cut and paste but I simply can not do better than the author.
Autocracy: Rules for Survival by Masha Gessen
I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one.
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To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture members of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets again—but by that time Dubnow had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in history—it’s just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.
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The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.
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Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.
Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This means not only that Trump will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.
Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats in Congress will begin to make the case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything done—or at least, they will say, minimizing the damage. Nongovernmental organizations, many of which are reeling at the moment, faced with a transition period in which there is no opening for their input, will grasp at chances to work with the new administration. This will be fruitless—damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.
Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.
