Posts by Terry

98

Beards - September 2016 Watchtower

by Listener in

the issue of whether beards are acceptable or not is addressed in the september 2016 watchtower - well sort of.

it is as clear as mud as to whether they are allowed in places like australia, usa and britain.. 17. what are some factors that may affect whether a brother wears a beard?17 what about the propriety of brothers wearing a beard?

the mosaic law required men to wear a beard.

Terry

What--if any--differences or distinctions are there between:

the CUSTOMS of men

and the TRADITIONS of men?

25

Remember when you 1st learned "The Truth"? Want to experience that tingle in a new way?

by Terry in

you can't unring a bell once rung.. you can't unknow nor can you forget being deceived, tricked, lied to and misled.. the truly awful aftershock of waking up to the 'truth about the truth' is the death of wonder,.

belief, and absolute certainty that you know what life is all about.

in fact, for most of us the path is the same.we begin investigating our foundational belief system.

Terry

I'm really really sorry I posted this topic because it isn't as funny as I thought it was at first.!
More and more young people are falling for it. Uneducated people relying on their "intuition" don't trust the idea that the real world can, and of is, counter-intuitive.
For conspiracy theorists, intellectual honesty is for OTHER people and not for themselves.
Intellectual honesty is the willingness to admit you are wrong when the facts go against even your most cherished "truths."

Here is a very brief breakdown of the skeleton beliefs behind Flat Earth Theory:

The leading flat-earther theory holds that Earth is a disc with the Arctic Circle in the center and Antarctica, a 150-foot-tall wall of ice, around the rim.
NASA employees, they say, guard this ice wall to prevent people from climbing over and falling off the disc.
Earth's day and night cycle is explained by positing that the sun and moon are spheres measuring 32 miles (51 kilometers) that move in circles 3,000 miles (4,828 km) above the plane of the Earth.
(Stars, they say, move in a plane 3,100 miles up.) Like spotlights, these celestial spheres illuminate different portions of the planet in a 24-hour cycle.
Flat-earthers believe there must also be an invisible "antimoon" that obscures the moon during lunar eclipses.
Furthermore, Earth's gravity is an illusion, they say. Objects do not accelerate downward; instead, the disc of Earth accelerates upward at 32 feet per second squared (9.8 meters per second squared), driven up by a mysterious force called dark energy.
Currently, there is disagreement among flat-earthers about whether or not Einstein's theory of relativity permits Earth to accelerate upward indefinitely without the planet eventually surpassing the speed of light. (Einstein's laws apparently still hold in this alternate version of reality.)
As for what lies underneath the disc of Earth, this is unknown, but most flat-earthers believe it is composed of "rocks." [Religion and Science: 6 Visions of Earth's Core]
Then, there's the conspiracy theory: Flat-earthers believe photos of the globe are photoshopped; GPS devices are rigged to make airplane pilots think they are flying in straight lines around a sphere when they are actually flying in circles above a disc.
The motive for world governments' concealment of the true shape of the Earth has not been ascertained, but flat-earthers believe it is probably financial.

"In a nutshell, it would logically cost much less to fake a space program than to actually have one, so those in on the Conspiracy profit from the funding NASA and other space agencies receive from the government,"

- See more at: http://www.livescience.com/24310-flat-earth-belief.html#sthash.D3oEofvH.dpuf

25

Remember when you 1st learned "The Truth"? Want to experience that tingle in a new way?

by Terry in

you can't unring a bell once rung.. you can't unknow nor can you forget being deceived, tricked, lied to and misled.. the truly awful aftershock of waking up to the 'truth about the truth' is the death of wonder,.

belief, and absolute certainty that you know what life is all about.

in fact, for most of us the path is the same.we begin investigating our foundational belief system.

Terry

To me, rational thinking for animals has a practical limit moderated and (in some instances) nullified by stronger impulses.
Effort is required to be rational whereas there is no effort at all to acting emotionally.

Societally, we are conditioned to act on cues. When those cues interfere with rational thinking, cognitive dissonance provides a rescue. We compartmentalize.

Cults are a means of feeling safe at the cost of rational thinking. Instead, we get self-justification and willful blindness. Loyalty supplants self-preservation and BINGO, altruism is born.

Becoming invested in any belief system begins with self-preservation. If we feel our world view is threatened by a conspiracy to deceive us--we lean in and listen. That is why cults use fear so skillfully. Cults scare us into questioning whatever world view made us feel safe. "What if we are being fooled?" It all begins with making us doubt we have THE answers.

25

Remember when you 1st learned "The Truth"? Want to experience that tingle in a new way?

by Terry in

you can't unring a bell once rung.. you can't unknow nor can you forget being deceived, tricked, lied to and misled.. the truly awful aftershock of waking up to the 'truth about the truth' is the death of wonder,.

belief, and absolute certainty that you know what life is all about.

in fact, for most of us the path is the same.we begin investigating our foundational belief system.

Terry

A caller is given as much respect as humanly possible when Flat Earth question is asked. What ensues is an entertaining exploration of, in my view, basic ignorance leading to cult beliefs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsOz_J6tJVU

25

Remember when you 1st learned "The Truth"? Want to experience that tingle in a new way?

by Terry in

you can't unring a bell once rung.. you can't unknow nor can you forget being deceived, tricked, lied to and misled.. the truly awful aftershock of waking up to the 'truth about the truth' is the death of wonder,.

belief, and absolute certainty that you know what life is all about.

in fact, for most of us the path is the same.we begin investigating our foundational belief system.

Terry

Here we have the EXACT same reasoning by an Islamic scholar answering

a question posed to him as to whether the earth revolves or remains motionless.

http://www.memri.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/4787.htm

25

Remember when you 1st learned "The Truth"? Want to experience that tingle in a new way?

by Terry in

you can't unring a bell once rung.. you can't unknow nor can you forget being deceived, tricked, lied to and misled.. the truly awful aftershock of waking up to the 'truth about the truth' is the death of wonder,.

belief, and absolute certainty that you know what life is all about.

in fact, for most of us the path is the same.we begin investigating our foundational belief system.

Terry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNVvRxQWb6g

25

Remember when you 1st learned "The Truth"? Want to experience that tingle in a new way?

by Terry in

you can't unring a bell once rung.. you can't unknow nor can you forget being deceived, tricked, lied to and misled.. the truly awful aftershock of waking up to the 'truth about the truth' is the death of wonder,.

belief, and absolute certainty that you know what life is all about.

in fact, for most of us the path is the same.we begin investigating our foundational belief system.

Terry

I guess my sense of "fun"is different.

I never realized how FRAGILE factual knowledge has become in our modern world and how susceptible to disruption and mistrust we become if we aren't on guard.

http://www.space.com/20514-apollo-moon-landing-hoax-poll.html

20 percent of Republicans believe that President Obama is the Anti-Christ, compared with 13 percent of Independents and 6 percent of Democrats who agree. -
Still, about 7 percent of Americans polled in the study think NASA did indeed fake the Apollo moon landings, the study found. Seriously...7 percent.

This Flat-Earth and Faked Moon Landing movement exists mostly among young college age persons who weren't alive when the moon landing took place.
Young people have little life experience. They are highly susceptible to "inside" information.

What do cults and conspiracies have in common?

The Governing Body is what? It is a SECRET SOCIETY with special inside knowledge unavailable to everybody else.

Guess what? We fell for this crap!

The 'anointed' the 'faithful and discreet slave' and the 'remnant' were spooky terms I'd never heard before I began studying with my friend Johnny in 1959.

It all sounded silly. It WAS silly. But after I had heard it a thousand times and began to associate with people at the Kingdom Hall who accepted it as true---the novelty of the stupidity vanished.

Have you heard the old saying, "Perception is Reality"?

That should scare us into vigilance.

These documentary-style propaganda videos on YouTube I posted are manipulative and interestingly so. Maybe not to you--but to plenty of others.

WHY?

Because, if you just let a tiny doubt creep in that you have been lied to--it triggers a survival mechanism!
Us vs. Them kicks in.

Who lied? What else did they lie about?

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/20/flat-earth-believers-youtube-videos-conspiracy-theorists
A New York magazine piece on flat-Earthdom is skeptical of some who claim the mantle: “The line between actually believing the theory and enthusiastically entertaining is unclear. Being a Flat Earther exists in the same online space as chemtrails and the notion that 9/11 was an inside job: there are some who believe it sincerely, and magnitudes more who entertain the notion ironically.”
______________________

How does this happen?

Gradually, insidiously and on purpose.

Asking one simple question after another which undermines authority and trust disables our certainty and balance and triggers curiosity about more and more.

Vetting sources and doing research is NOT easy if you are diligent, tireless and thorough. But, if you are lazy, you fall prey to false information and go down the rabbit hole with the rest of the low-hanging fruit,.

You see, lots of very "trustworthy" leaders are j-u-s-t fake enough to lie about a little all the time. If you call them on it and they cover- it- up, you never trust them again.

If we are not wary, once we leave the JW's we can easily become drawn into the next swindle and the next cult and the next phony cause or conspiracy. How?
Our brains have been wired to do so by years of habit!!
__________

Remember this, to current JW's the "apostates and their videos" are exactly the same as Flat Earth believers!

We are all bent, twisted and messed over in some way as a result of our meat-grinder experience among the Dubs.

It's all too easy.

Being an individual rather than part of a 'belief group' is difficult for many of us.
Every day outside a Control Group is a test.

Like quitting any other habit or addiction, maintaining healthy skepticism without becoming a nutjob just ain't easy! :)

25

Remember when you 1st learned "The Truth"? Want to experience that tingle in a new way?

by Terry in

you can't unring a bell once rung.. you can't unknow nor can you forget being deceived, tricked, lied to and misled.. the truly awful aftershock of waking up to the 'truth about the truth' is the death of wonder,.

belief, and absolute certainty that you know what life is all about.

in fact, for most of us the path is the same.we begin investigating our foundational belief system.

Terry

We all know Forrest Gump invented the smiley face emoticon, right? Well, what if somebody came along and told you Professor Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University was the one who created it in a message on one of Carnegie Mellon’s online bulletin boards at 11.44 a.m. on September 19, 1982?

Would you snort and laugh or investigate?

25

Remember when you 1st learned "The Truth"? Want to experience that tingle in a new way?

by Terry in

you can't unring a bell once rung.. you can't unknow nor can you forget being deceived, tricked, lied to and misled.. the truly awful aftershock of waking up to the 'truth about the truth' is the death of wonder,.

belief, and absolute certainty that you know what life is all about.

in fact, for most of us the path is the same.we begin investigating our foundational belief system.

Terry

Well.... at least there are people more gullible than JWs.

I'm fascinated by the HOW of how people are seduced, persuaded, convinced against their societally conditioned sense of what's true.

If somebody is able to get you to consider for one minute any one thing which you are convinced is true / not true AND POINT OUT a DISCREPANCY--it draws you in.

"How can this be?"

If you watch the above video all the way through--I guarantee you'll be in a tender position of semi-doubt.
That is a joyous and giddy thing!
The off-balance sense of losing your certainty for even a tenth of a second is alluring as hell :)

25

Remember when you 1st learned "The Truth"? Want to experience that tingle in a new way?

by Terry in

you can't unring a bell once rung.. you can't unknow nor can you forget being deceived, tricked, lied to and misled.. the truly awful aftershock of waking up to the 'truth about the truth' is the death of wonder,.

belief, and absolute certainty that you know what life is all about.

in fact, for most of us the path is the same.we begin investigating our foundational belief system.

Terry

How can anyone seriously watch something you know to be bogus?

__________

For me, Simon, it is the way the riddle is proposed with a quiet elegance and careful tone of non-hysteria and j-u-s-t enough tangible shadows-of-doubts that it becomes like working a Crossword Puzzle in which clues are propounded which cause you to stop and reflect on what you know / don't know.

Please just watch THE BIGGEST LIE video above and you'll see what I mean.
It's quite a fun lark!