Posts by ILoveTTATT2

27

The two paths of exJWs

by Simon in

it's easy to think of exjws as being a single amorphous group but the more i think about it, the more i believe that there are two distinct sub-groups and wonder if you agree.. there are those who believe and those who don't.

i know that seems obvious but let's break it down a bit more.

there are those who don't and never believed and some who are looking for a religion to match their beliefs.. i used to think this split would be between born-ins and converts but of course it's possible for born-ins to be believers although i suspect that many, like with other faiths, do so simply because they have never experienced anything else or made a conscious choice.

ILoveTTATT2

I think that my "religion" is an evidence-based life. I believed in the JW's, in the Bible, in God, until the evidence proved otherwise. The second I read jwfacts and confirmed what it said, I stopped believing in the JW's. The second I confirmed that the Bible has contradictions and that it has followed a tortuous path to get to us, and that there are many different versions, let alone translations, that was sufficient for me to stop believing in the Bible.

And when I learnt about evolution, that was enough for me to stop believing in "God", as in the God of the Bible.

Now I am a "6" on Dawkin's belief scale, and I think it would show great hubris to be a "7".

23

Evolution is a Fact #2 - DNA Functional Redundancy

by cofty in

in the first thread in this series we looked at how the same protein molecule can be assembled by many different sequences of amino acids.. we took the example of cytochrome c and saw that there are many times more possible sequences than atoms in the known universe.

however the sequences in humans and chimps are identical, and as we look at species less closely related to us by evolution the more differences we find.

this is very compelling evidence for common ancestry.. in this post we are going to look more closely at the dna code behind those amino acid sequences.. the "language" of dna is made up of just 4 "letters" - a,c,g and t.. sequences of letters are read off in groups of 3 called codons.. acggcctcgaatgccttc would be read as acg gcc tcg aat gcc ttc.

ILoveTTATT2

The 4 letters are:

Position 56
Human:C
Chimp: T

Position 110
Human: T
Chimp: C

Position 140:
Human: C
Chimp: T

Position 246:
Human: C
Chimp: A

This link has a software and files that allow the viewing of the sequence:

http://www.montana.edu/kalinowski/Software/SequenceViewer.htm

155

Survey: How long were you in the cult vs what year you were baptized

by ILoveTTATT2 in

jw
friends

hi people,.

i want as much data as possible on the effect of the internet on the time captured by the cult.. please answer the three following questions about yourself or about someone you know (for example, if your parents or grandparents were jw's and left).

1) were you raised as a jw, or did you convert?.

ILoveTTATT2

Hi everyone:

I spoke with a friend who's got a PhD in Economics and he told me that I need to make a "time to death" graph, it is done in hospitals for analysis of whether one treatment leads to less mortality or not, and it is used by engineers to determine time to failure, etc...

So it can be applied here... the "time to failure" is the time from when you were baptized to when you came out. It can be compared between decades...

20

A Sincere Question Regarding Macroevolution

by jacobm in

jw
friends

i have a sincere question related to macroevolution:.

microevolution happens on a small scale (within a single population), while macroevolution happens on a scale that transcends the boundaries of a single species.

despite their differences, evolution at both of these levels relies on the same, established mechanisms of evolutionary change:.

ILoveTTATT2

While such evolutionary biologists Theodosius Dobzhansky, Bernhard Rensch and Ernst Mayruse the term, many neo-Darwinian do not, preferring instead to talk of evolution as changes in allele frequencies without mention of the level of the changes (above species level or below). Use of the term is most common in the continental European traditions (as Dobzhansky, Mayr, Rensch, Goldschmidt and Schindewolf were) and less common in the Anglo-American tradition (such as John Maynard Smith and Richard Dawkins). Hence, use of the term "macroevolution" is sometimes wrongly used as a litmus test of whether the writer is "properly" neo-Darwinian or not.[6]

21

If a proposed bill in Mexico passes, new law will mean jailtime for JW´s

by ILoveTTATT2 in

jw
friends

apparently it's true!!

omg!!.

i did not want to believe these news, i still feel it's a hoax, it can't be true!.

ILoveTTATT2

I am not almost 100% convinced that the story is fake.

Checking the original source of the story, it seems to be a fake news site with the quality of National Enquirer.

Then many other low-quality sources started copying it.

Today was different, a "decent" quality source had it and so I thought it was true. But I called that newspaper, and the newspaper from which that newspaper got its story, and here's the thing:

Zocalo newspaper - the lady that wrote the article refused to give me her source.

El Debate newspaper - the editor said that she agreed with me that there was a problem with the story because Zocalo did not list its sources and there has been no official word on the news story on the Senate.

21

If a proposed bill in Mexico passes, new law will mean jailtime for JW´s

by ILoveTTATT2 in

jw
friends

apparently it's true!!

omg!!.

i did not want to believe these news, i still feel it's a hoax, it can't be true!.

ILoveTTATT2

I called both newspapers that had the note, and, in an appalling display of lack of fact-checking (welcome to Mexico), there is no actual source for the news.

I called the Mexican senate and apparently it is not possible to know what will be discussed in the future unless the senator who plans to introduce the bill tells you.

I don't know how to confirm, but I would really love to confirm if this is real or not.

21

If a proposed bill in Mexico passes, new law will mean jailtime for JW´s

by ILoveTTATT2 in

jw
friends

apparently it's true!!

omg!!.

i did not want to believe these news, i still feel it's a hoax, it can't be true!.

ILoveTTATT2

These days, though, they'd be way too chicken.

Not the Mexican JW's!! I think they will fight this tooth and nail!

20

A Sincere Question Regarding Macroevolution

by jacobm in

jw
friends

i have a sincere question related to macroevolution:.

microevolution happens on a small scale (within a single population), while macroevolution happens on a scale that transcends the boundaries of a single species.

despite their differences, evolution at both of these levels relies on the same, established mechanisms of evolutionary change:.

ILoveTTATT2

There have been many documented, visible cases of speciation. These usually occur in small living things, like mosquitoes, bacteria, etc because of the short time it takes for them to have a new generation (some bacteria can duplicate as fast as every 20 minutes). Because changes big enough for it to be considered a speciation event take possibly thousands of generations, it is very difficult to observe speciation in a human lifetime.

Even at 20 minutes and 1000 generations, it would take almost two weeks for an appreciable change to occur. If the change happens within 10,000 generations and the time between generations is an hour, it would take 1 year and 52 days...

This experiment with E. Coli takes about 4 years for every 10,000 generations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment

The E.Coli bacteria evolved new features!

This is another experiment that shows that unicellular life can evolve into multicellular:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7536/full/517531d.html

21