We can go even further. Gods people, according to the bible, record their dealings with god, their instructions on how to live, their revelations from god not simply for their benefit but as a testament to the world. If the JWs aren't producing any scriptures, no written records of their dealings with Jehovah, then how can they be said to be testifying of him. If the Israelities of biblical times were happy to simply preach we would have no OT, no knowledge of Jehovah, if the early xian authors didn't record their dealings with God via Jesus but simply preached we would have no NT and by definition we would have no JWs since you are a product of the book. It looks like JWs are trying to make a virtue of having nothing to write about, the lack of divine interaction means the JWs can produce no scripture, they can make no lasting impact, their testimony is simply the spoken word alone, a spoken word that has no defined stance. JWs have no publications of their own that are inspired of God.
Posts by Qcmbr
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398Jwfacts, Why Do You Equate Miracles With Magic?
by Recovery ini have a question for the author of the website jwfacts.
as i was reading the sparlock article, i couldn't help but notice something seriously wrong:.
"the bible abounds in vivid fantasy, such as its many celestial descriptions, or the portrayal of warring kingdoms with imaginary beasts.. the sparlock message is confusing, as much for an adult as for a child, as the bible shows that god's followers practice magic, even if they are usually referred to as miracles.
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398
Jwfacts, Why Do You Equate Miracles With Magic?
by Recovery ini have a question for the author of the website jwfacts.
as i was reading the sparlock article, i couldn't help but notice something seriously wrong:.
"the bible abounds in vivid fantasy, such as its many celestial descriptions, or the portrayal of warring kingdoms with imaginary beasts.. the sparlock message is confusing, as much for an adult as for a child, as the bible shows that god's followers practice magic, even if they are usually referred to as miracles.
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Qcmbr
Recovery - I see you ignored my post. Fine.
If you wish to say that miracles are the manifestations of your version of Jehovah then you also have to explain why you don't believe that any miracles are occurring today because that is tantamount to saying that your Jehovah is not manifesting his power via the JWs. In short you are unable to receive revelation, inspiration, new light, gifts of the spirit, answers to prayers, guidance from prayers. It's just you, a canon of scriptures copied, codified and ratified by bishops from other faiths ( they certainly weren't JWs) containing numerous interpolations of men and no divine way to verify what is authentic and what is false. Your case fails.
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398
Jwfacts, Why Do You Equate Miracles With Magic?
by Recovery ini have a question for the author of the website jwfacts.
as i was reading the sparlock article, i couldn't help but notice something seriously wrong:.
"the bible abounds in vivid fantasy, such as its many celestial descriptions, or the portrayal of warring kingdoms with imaginary beasts.. the sparlock message is confusing, as much for an adult as for a child, as the bible shows that god's followers practice magic, even if they are usually referred to as miracles.
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Qcmbr
Recovery, since I have no belief in Jehovah nor any other bronze age gods the term miracle and magic, as applied in myths is one and the same, they are both supposed suspensions of the laws of physics and the occurrence of an event emanating purely from willpower. I don't think the term 'miracle' is a preserve of Xians alone so why do you claim that it is? I find your wordplay a fairly common JW style. Are you trained to 'strain at a gnat' to make a point when really the important stuff is about love and actions ( at least that was my overall reading of the NT) , so for example if you wished to discuss how JWs do lots of charitable public service ( say soup kitchens, saving lives by giving blood, litter picks, battered women's refuges, hospitals etc.) then I'd be more impressed than what you've said so far. To summarise.
JWs don't have any miracles going on.
JWs believe magic is ongoing ( odd - I've not seen any fire from heaven, sticks turning to snakes but maybe it's just only in secret places )
JWs are desperate to be right and will push the primacy of JW thought even if they themselves get new light and reverse a teaching ( so showing that they were zealously preaching falsehood ). Since JWs cannot be trusted to remain steadfast on any doctrine ( they may receive new light at any time ) then it seems rather silly to make a tenuous semantic stand on the definition of a miracle, a definition you JWs don't own.
You are not providing a good witness nor are you supposed to associate with apostates so you are simply dishonouring your own faith anyway. I will discuss your example with JWs next time they are at my door.
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American Theocracy
by Band on the Run ini am currently reading this book.
the author is opinionated and not a fundamentalist or evangelist for certain.
my experience is so eastern american.
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Qcmbr
Is the education link fundamental because Mormonism , second generation onwards , can't be called uneducated?
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JWS vs LDS
by tresdecu ini came across a mormon "sisters" blog...reading through some of her missionary experiences, it sounded so much like jw pioneer "sis" relating hers.
just swap out some of the cult-language words and it's suddenly a jw experience of sharing "bible truths" with some poor worldly sap.. here's an taste of it:.
1)we were also led by the spirit this week to a former investigator's home.
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Qcmbr
The closeness of the shared LDS/JW cult experience is one thing that draws me here. This forum was a fundamental part of my awareness that the LDS world was not very unique at all.
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Dawkins and Killers frontman clash over Book of Mormon
by cedars inhere is the video... (the interesting bit starts at 07:30 or thereabouts).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjwsg36xtz8.
and here is the article covering it.... http://www.gigwise.com/news/76350/watch-brandon-flowers-rows-with-richard-dawkins-about-religion.
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Qcmbr
It's got a much better story than other strands of xianity. Theologically it is much cleverer than traditional xian theology. It is much easier to understand. The culture is much more practical, useful and devoid of obvious xian crazy ( speaking in tongues, falling on the floor etc.) it has a mixture of all the fun parts of religion ( grand architecture, self improvement, strong cultural activities, competitive ethic, self sufficiency, education, pragmatism etc.)
Need I go on? I found it ridiculously easy to believe in. What I lacked was what all religious believers lack. We all know what makes our belief 'true' what we don't know is what would make it untrue.
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Believing in God - Challenge
by jgnat ini invite king solomon and anyone else that is interested, to discuss if believing in god may be helpful.
i am not restricting the discussion to the biblical god.
i'm ready to look if this belief may be helpful both from a societal and from an individual point of view.
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Qcmbr
I can see some basic benefits of god belief:
1 - Without the tools with which to inquire about the world around them and with limited food resources it was of low survival benefit to contemplate the unknown methodically but of high survival benefit to believe in supernatural forces, to conceptualise those forces as other living things and to delegate the evidential requirements for belief to a faith based heuristic that stood in for teh unknown or the feared.
2 - Socially, religion provides a shared conceptual space in which to perform exchanges. Just like money acts as a means of exchange and a store of value, religion and belief in a God can act as a means to create relationships, pass on information and to engender action.
3 - Evolution required us to go through most of our development keenly hooked to our adrenal systems alert to the need to fight or flee at the merest hint of danger. As civilisation took over our brains are not well dapted to relatively benign environments. To adapt our evolutionary fear of the physical world while allowing us to pragmatically live within a safe society the concept of God can be seen as an excellent compromise (an external threat requiring constant vigilence) to channel our instinctual overreactions into more civilised social behaviour.
4 - Belief in a supernatural being can be a source of great hope in a condition of despair (such as lonliness, slavery, addiction etc.) and also as a great aid in hiding the inherant lack of justice in a natural world.
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A question for Athiests
by EndofMysteries ini really do not understand how any can be athiests from thinking real hard about it.
how can you think everything on this earth just happened?.
from my understanding, to be athiest, this is pretty much how it goes.
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Qcmbr
Nomad - like all other poorly thought out arguments this one will fade when the first permanent Mars bases are up and running and we prove that Mars is also habitable with the right tech. What's amazing to me is how much of the earth itself is downright hostile to life.
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125
A question for Athiests
by EndofMysteries ini really do not understand how any can be athiests from thinking real hard about it.
how can you think everything on this earth just happened?.
from my understanding, to be athiest, this is pretty much how it goes.
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Qcmbr
Fernando - the odds of each individual through to species through to life itself is astronomically high. If you went back in time and re-ran the system but changed one small thing then , depending on when you made the change, things would turn out very different. For example , the night before you were conceived, you change the music being played, now your parents (to be) dance instead of chatting, sure they still end up in bed but they do so an hour later, the sperm that represents you get's juggled to a different location in the great race and doesn't even make it into your mother. Sure your parents still conceive but its your genetic sibling that exists while you no longer do. Widen the scale to the first life (whether seeded from an asteroid or beginning here) and , statistically, you almost certainly don't get self-aware, poetry creating, truck driving humanoids but maybe you get a world where reptiles rule 'forever' until one day getting wiped out by a ELE asteroid (the one mankind in our timeline sends Bruce Willis up to knock out.)
What I'm saying is be awed by the improbability of you and be grateful for your existence but don't be fooled by the figures and assume that you couldn't have been here despite all the events that preceded you unless some divine being was selecting pre-sex music choices. In short you are the amazing but humble result of history not a necessary, imperfect result of a divine plan.
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A question for Athiests
by EndofMysteries ini really do not understand how any can be athiests from thinking real hard about it.
how can you think everything on this earth just happened?.
from my understanding, to be athiest, this is pretty much how it goes.
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Qcmbr
Night Owl - hopefully you aren't trolling. Asking questions is the root of the debate. You've asked one of the hardest questions first and one which scientists are searching for answers for each and every day.
Why not start with the simpler questions where we can share common understanding. We could talk about the age of the earth and what actual evidences exist for that, or we could talk about DNA and how it can be copied but each copy will statistically contain copy-mistakes and what that means for DNA, we can talk about how natural selection works and look at what observed things improve a genes chance of being passed on and what factors reduce its likelhood, we can discuss chemistry and how elements are formed in a few cataclysmic seconds in the hearts of dying stars (and why stars are the only place they could come from).
If however, you simply wish to prove God by asking a question you know we don't have the answer for (but may well discover answers for within your lifespan) then you've weakened your god by making a bet against science. A little like arguing for God a thousand years ago because you need an explanation for rainbows. Its not that the question shouldn't be asked, just that you are only asking the questions you know can't yet be answered in order to avoid facing the conclusion that a deity wasn't causitively involved in some observed phenomenom.
Science is such an adventure why try and make it a religious battlefield? Science is not about disproving your god or proving your god, the inherant combative nature of faith based belief is damaging to the wonder of unfettered discovery. If your god is real then they can't untimately be threatened by science based discovery and will be revealed by it, if your god is false then the painful yet mature approach is to be grateful to be disabused of a notion that is wasting your time and mental effort. Metaphorically discovering that your planet is not flat , nor supported by pillars may cause you a little soul searching doubt but it opens up so many possibilities to re-evaluate who you are, where you are and what you can do.
I confess, when I watch the latest science on TV, especially the ones based on cosmology, it is so awe inspiring and the numbers are so vast that I struggle to expand my understanding to contextualise it and make sense. There is a constant pressure to give in and say wow, there must be a creator and delegate the comprehension effort into a simple packaged bearded meme, but then I remind myself, man up, face the information deluge, hang on the coat tails of hard working, brilliant scientists and rememeber the awesomeness that is the knowledge that I'm the result of what happens when you have hydrogen in a universe like ours and leave it for 14 billion years. I am the atoms from the beginning discovering myself.
Despite once being a believer I have to admit that god, any god, anyone's god just isn't close to being sufficient to explain or justify this, this self aware universe.