Morality, my views? Okay, I'll bite. Morality is not man made. It is immutable, discoverable, natural. Like gravity or orbital mechanics, it is the same everywhere in the universe. As with orbital mechanics, (we can chose to believe that the planets and stars are held in place by being part of giant crystal spheres, or we can understand this thing called gravity and how that works on free bodies in space) reality often seems to run counter to "emperical" data. Our "western" civilization has set up a belief structure based upon the premise that a higher power has chosen to give us all of the moral truths in the universe, while other civilizations tend to lean toward the experimentation or empirical, thus conjuring up the idea of "attaining" various levels of "consciousness" or "existence" thru strictly mental processes or of constant rebirthing. Personally, I lean towards the former, but then, I'm a product of western culture.
Annanias
JoinedPosts by Annanias
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60
MORALITY: what is it really?
by Terry inwhat is morality?
how is it different from ethics?
do we just make it all up to suit our fancy?
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EMOTIONS; DO WE UNDERSTAND THEM?
by Terry incause and effect 101. .
obi wan kenobe tells luke skywalker: "trust your feelings, luke".
listen to people say they will: "go with my gut feeling".
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Annanias
Stinky, you are quite correct, as I have physical issues that I have to deal with as well. As far as the chems go, the brain guys also point to dopamine and the physical brain being able to maintain a certain level of it as the diff between depression and "normalcy". The concept that your brain is another organ in your body like your pancreas, your liver, your spleen seems to escape a lot of people.
Terry, your threads are always cool. There has been a raging debate in science for about 200 years now as to whether the human brain is smart enough to understand itself. You sound like a participant in that debate. I don't know if you've heard of Cognitive Therapy or not, but it is fast becomming accepted in psych circles as the real thing. The numbers are showing that CT is as effective as traditional therapy and drugs alone, with almost half the rate of remission. The basic premise of traditional psych is that people have dark, gloomy thoughts because they are depressed, while CT feels that we are depressed because we have dark and gloomy thoughts. To realize and control our dark and gloomy thoughts and we control our depression. An interesting case that was the basis of the book "The Terminal Man" dealt with an individual who would have sudden and uncontrolable outbursts of anger. As kind of a last ditch effort, the docs placed electrodes in the guys brain so that when he felt an episode comming on, he could push a button which would send an electrical shock to an area of the brain and he would reduce, if not avoid, the oncomming outburst. Funny thing happened along the way. The docs, as an experiment, took the batteries out of the shocker device but didn't tell the guy, with the results being the same.
Your discussion of emotions is excellent, but I have a question. If emotions are the result of prewired "survival" instincts, why has the highest form of human endeavor always been the denial of self?
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Trotting out the JW credentials...
by Odrade inthe people who care don't matter, and the people who matter don't care.. i'm asking because i notice that even though i've pretty much rejected everything connected with the religion, i still find myself setting out who i knew, who knew me, how involved i was, how many meeting/assembly/convention parts i had... on and on ad nauseum.
(it's nauseating.. remember when there were records and record players?
you'd get a skip in the record, then everytime you played it, the needle would fall in the skip.
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Annanias
Terry - As the Brits say, "Here, here!" You are the first person that I've run across on this site who has postulated self-accountability, but then, I haven't been here very long. I was beginning to worry, though. One thing that I finally figured out along my trek thru the land of WTs was that the "elders", the "society", the "brothers and sisters" had as much hold on me as I gave them. One of my favorite people on this planet was a brother named James (no last names please). James is now dead, having succumbed to cancer many years ago, but this guy had always impressed me because he had spent a true lifetime of service to Jehovah, but never, ever, once used it against anyone else. We were discussing filed service once and I asked him how he dealt with the "One More Door" syndrome. The syndrome being that at the end of any FS day, I could always do "one more door" until I'm doing it 24x7. His answer was so cool for as much what he didn't say as to what he did. He didn't say, "Oh, well, there's a national average in the KM", nor did he say, "Well, when you got baptised, you dedicated your body to Jehovah", nor, "Well, brother blah-blah has 16 children, 5 jobs, pancreatic cancer, and one eye tied behind his back and he still gets in ...." He just said, "You know how much you should do. That's all Jehovah expects." It took a couple of months before the full impact of what he had told me sunk in. Yeah, by golly, it is up to me! Just me and nobody else. From that time on, most of the "admonishments" that came from the platform just became a lot of noise.
There was a study done at UC Berkeley (see how the credentials thing is pervasive) where the prisoner/prison guard psychology was studied. They took a group of students (50-60) and divided them up at random and made one group (2/3 of the students) prisoners, and the remainder were made guards. In the basement of one of the campus buildings they had built a jail and on a particular friday night the prisoners were loaded into their cells and the guards began guarding them. Now, the experiment was to run from friday night to sunday night and everybody knew this. Plus, the rules of the prison were explained to everybody: no abuse, prisoners had to obey the guards, the guards were there just to keep order and see the prisoners didn't escape, etc, etc. The entire group were given all of this info together in an auditorium before the start of the exercise. In less than 24 hours, the guard students were screaming at the prisoner students for the slightest of perceived infractions, while the prisoner students were screaming back. Some student guards were actually beating on some prisoner students. I'm not positive about this, but I think that the exercise had to be called off prematurely because things were starting to get out of hand. My point is that this is what happens to people. No matter how amiable bro. Goodguy is when he becomes an elder, unless he is a most unusual man, he is naturally going to gravitate in the direction of the student prison guards. A lot of the stress within the congs is caused not by religious intolerance or malice or ill will, but simply by humaness. The more that we tend to give of oursrselves to the other person, be it our loyalty, our love, our admiration, the greater will be the hurt when they abuse it. I call it an "emotional investment". What James had told me (and you confirmed, Terry) is that we bear some responsibility to ourselves when we give ourselves away.
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Absolutely terrible WT article Re: Repressed Memories.... WARNING: Triggers
by Nosferatu ini was absolutely furious when i came upon this watchtower article.
it makes me absolutely sick to read such horseshit.. comments and emphasis: mine.
watchtower, nov 1, 1995 p 25-29repressed memories".
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Annanias
This thread is interesting in the date of the article. wheres caleb's recital of the embittered pioneer sister sounds very close to me. I was abused by my father, but the memories were not repressed by any means, and it left me terminally angry. When this particular article came out, it seemed to be in response to a trend going on in the psycho world dealing with repressed memories, in that many less than scrupulous psychologists of dubious abilities were bringing criminal charges against a lot of innocent people (and fame to themselves). There was a case in the cong I was in at the time where a sister (who had had a terrible life, no doubt about that) was suddenly "remembering" all sorts of things. What these memories served to do was to give her attention and a certain amount of power. Neither of which she had ever had before in her life. As time went on, her "memories" became more and more bizarre as she tried to maintain this newly found level of attention and power. The problem is that whatever truth might have been in her original claims got lost. She ended up spending some time at the state mental hospital, and I'm not sure if she ever recovered. My heart hurt for her, because she had obviously suffered from some sort of abuse that had left her scarred, like me. But it was also very painful to see the damage she had caused to others who had been as innocent as she when her own wounds had been induced. She wasn't doing it out of malice, she was just very, very sick. I think that the WT article was trying to do too much at one time and, as usual, ended up making a hose job out of the whole thing. You have to remember, there is a whole lot of people out there who cannot, translate: refuse to, think for themselves and will do absolutely, positively, only what they think they read in the WT. Like talking to a 12 year old heading out the door, you have to say as much as you can before their brain shuts off. This includes the "elders" as well, or maybe, especially. I was engaged to a somewhat reknown psychologist after I had left and we used to have the most volatile arguments over this subject because she believed that I was suffering from horrendous repressed memories. I never seemed to make her understand that it was not the memories I couldn't recall that was barfing my mind, it was the ones that I COULD recall. If a trend like "repressed memories" were to get loose in the hollow world of the KH, where most people have already lived lives of quiet sorrow with little understanding as to why, the people would turn into Lemmings. (Oh, Jim Jones, wherefore art thou?)
It seems that a lot of the bitterness towards the borg comes from the fact that for years now they have claimed, both in writing, from the platform, and at the door, that they have the all answers to all the worlds problems. And then, when you or I go up to them, as innocent believers, and say, "I've got a problem, please fix it." , their answer, of course, is, "Oh, we can't fix that. Here, take two hours of field service and call me in the morning."
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Bush Announces "Peace and Security" (non-political thread only please)
by Confucious inok, in bush's speech last night, his theme was "peace and security" or "peace and saftey" which i believe was his actual words.
well, we know the jw retoric about "peace and security.
does anyone here have insite on what the the bible is talking about with "...when they are announceing peace and security that sudden destruction will be instantly upon them..." .
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Annanias
"Mangled Baby Ducks. Mangled Baby Ducks. With a name like 'Mangled Baby Ducks' it has to be good!"
-Dan Akroyd-
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Isaiah 43:10 "You are my witnesses"
by Gordy in.
the jw's use isaiah 43:10 as the excuse for their name.. i'm trying to find information that refutes this.
i came across a good one on a website but now can't find it.. anyone one know of a good refutation of the jw's use of this scripture..
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Annanias
I always thought that the Isaiah scripture was a point of inspiration for the name, rather than a source of some divine proof. I realize that within every cong you're going to get the gaggle of turkeys that thinks it is proof of something, but I don't recall it ever being thought of such "officially". I mean, they could have called themselves "The Rockin' Robins of Zooterville" if they'd wanted.
John Lennon - "It's just a name, y'know, like "The Shoes'."
Paul McCartney - "Yeah. Right now your children could be listening to music by 'The Shoes'."
It's kind of like why people are called "Christians" instead of "Michaelists", or "Jesusists", or "Melchizedecians".
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Five Meetings and David's Five Stones (and other goofy things)...
by Confucious ini don't think this was ever written in a wt, but i've heard it more than once as a comment.
that when david reached into his bag to sling a stone at goliath - that he had five stones to choose from.
and the comment was... .
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Annanias
You guys never got the mama duck and her ducklings story? You guys will go absolutely ape dodo over this one. Got it from a CO. I thought about it from many different angles, but all I ever got was a bunch of question marks popping out of my head. The story is about the CO at this really idyllic place by a stream and he sees a mama duck paddling in the water and she had five little baby ducks swimming behind her. So he steps on this twig and it makes a noise and the mother duck lets out one loud "quack" and she and the baby ducks instantly turned away. See, we were explained to, the baby ducks did just what they were told "immediately and without questioning" because it meant their survival. The moral is, of course, the mama duck is the org, and we're the baby ducks and we should obey just like they did because it means our survival.
Now, I'm sorry, but things like that really stimulate my smart-ass gland, but I stayed cool. I didn't ask him if he was trying to kill the ducks. I couldn't help but think of that National Lampoon joke: I felt sorry that I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.
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Trotting out the JW credentials...
by Odrade inthe people who care don't matter, and the people who matter don't care.. i'm asking because i notice that even though i've pretty much rejected everything connected with the religion, i still find myself setting out who i knew, who knew me, how involved i was, how many meeting/assembly/convention parts i had... on and on ad nauseum.
(it's nauseating.. remember when there were records and record players?
you'd get a skip in the record, then everytime you played it, the needle would fall in the skip.
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Annanias
O, I think you answered your own question. You state that you define yourself via the environment, people, deeds that you did while you were "inside". This is a curious statement. You go on to say that you don't have to do the defining thing with other aspects of your life, that you are quite comfortable with who you are. You seem very comfortable being on this board (or forum, or whatever), is that because you are really anonymous? Or is it because you are secure in knowing what you know about yourself now that you are "out"?
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God and the Concept of Time
by ezekiel3 input your waders on, we?re going in the deep end?.
jw premise: god created jesus, and then together they created everything else.. fact: time and space require at least two points to exist.
you cannot reference time or space with only one thing.. so before god created jesus, there was no way to measure time.
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Annanias
zen, as I said, it is a personal slant. If nobody is there to care, then the mafia is right.
As for the fempto second, I agree, all you need to do is divide time up. You can divide a fempto second into a 1000 different parts (millifempto?). The things was, it took quite a lot of engineering to be able to do that practically. In other words, even though it existed, until these guys "made" a fempto second, it didn't exist, except in theory.
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Bush Announces "Peace and Security" (non-political thread only please)
by Confucious inok, in bush's speech last night, his theme was "peace and security" or "peace and saftey" which i believe was his actual words.
well, we know the jw retoric about "peace and security.
does anyone here have insite on what the the bible is talking about with "...when they are announceing peace and security that sudden destruction will be instantly upon them..." .
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Annanias
The "peace and security" quote has always seemed a bit non-sequitor, but only because of the word "they". To quote The Wild Bunch, "Who the hell are 'they'?" If the general population is meant, okay that puts a certain slant on the sentence, if it's the religious leaders, another, political leaders, still another yet, and so on. I suppose you could insert "disgruntled postal workers" in there if you wanted. Sometimes I think writers should pay 50 cents for every pronoun they use (oops, what am I up to, 2 bucks?).
But situations seem to be lining up, somewhat. I mean, as long as we're guessing here. Since the "instant destruction" seems to indicate armegeddon, the "they" would have to be something dealing with the onset of armegeddon, not necessicarily the execution of it. What supposedly brings on armegeddon is the sudden destruction of religion by the political/military folks. Which would indicate that the "they" are probably the religious leaders. But the problem with all of this to me is the word "instant". How instant is instant? I mean, to a guy to whom a day is as 1000 years and 1000 years is as a day, instant can have a pretty broad meaning. I'm just a person, and it still takes 24 hours to make one day for me. So, if the "instant" is more than, say, in the millisecond range, it's not quite "instant" to me, and the 1Thess scripture starts to become watered down as time goes by.
A question to the gen pop here though, did anyone notice that when the US military (aka UN) went into Afghanistan and dismantled the Taliban, they were destroying a religion? It seems like, although I can't get much out of mainstream media (go figure), that the political survival of Iraq is a bazillion times more important to the US than it's religious survival and that it wouldn't take a lot to piss off GWB enough to just eradicate the religions so democracy can flourish in the mid east. Does it seem like that to anybody else? Wouldn't it seem cosmically ironic for babylon the great to begin being destroyed in the land of babylon itself?