Sorry to hear that his baptism was precipitate. I left a good/deep/best friend in the 'truth' ( huh... I never eat water chestnuts...), but not before a long drag-out tearing away of our mutual pretensions. I had never believed the 'truth' since at 14yo my brain had hit the minimum critical mass for thinking beyond parents, and he was perfectly straight with me that even if the 'truth' was a chimaera, it was where he belonged - with his wife, with his family, with his circle of associates. Now, this he didn't enunciate, in the way that powerful people know how to say-not-say a thing, but as a male he would have access to huge amounts of power vis a vis underlings per education level we're talking about. So in that evolutionary respect, I cannot fault him as much as if he was staying in it purely out of faith or something non-quantifyable. The _power_ that an elder has over minions has got to be so emotionally immense that it compensates for being a JW in the first place. {Ex-Elders care to correct me? - I'm talking before you're jaded.} Of course, this power is restricted to males, and to those particular females who have access to such males. My friend and his sparky little pioneer wife were on a trajectory for such a dynamic of power, and his decision is fine with me, even though I'll never see him again. I understand and sympathize if this anecdote cannot help, and you're far more human than I am if you try to keep some minimal contact. At 30+ he didn't get baptized because of cognative delusions - it was something deeper in the limbic system, fear of losing human warmth. Some are not leaders, some are not followers.
Posts by rmt1
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14An Old JW friend has just pissed his life away...
by Sam the Man inwell, a few of you are aware of my situation.
for those that are not, basically i more or less admitted to my wife that i no longer believe (after being raised a dub, bethel 'service' etc) and that led to altercations with her and the elders.
i had a friend in the congreation who, after also being raised a jw, had done none of the things i had, even not been baptised (thats right, not in 30+ years!!!
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15
Is "Perfection" really desirable?
by JH inimagine the new system where "everybody" is perfect...... people with no faults.... this sounds almost dull to me !!!
i find that there is something attractive about imperfect people, imperfect actions, .
huey lewis lyrics.
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rmt1
Brooklyn bankrolled on owning the definition of "perfect". There's no Platonic ideal floating around out in the ether to which they have the T3 line of meaning. It's a case of Orwellian NewSpeak when any one central force gets to consolidate, confine, restrict a signifier's signification. That being said, here is some worldly wisdom from some utterly misled pagan pre-Christian Classical figures: Hesiod in his Theogony talks about two kinds of strife and two kinds of hope. The bad strife is negative envy of your fellowman when you don't do the work to pull yourself through; the good strife is positive envy, when you see something someone has and you say, Self, I will work hard until I can reward myself with that thing. There is the evil form of hope - false hope such as inherent to false promises; there is also positive hope which works along with positive strife: reasonable expectations for reasonable inputs. Lucretius the Epicurean spoke of various forms of pleasure: Katastematic, when you fill a need up to the point of being filled, like eating when you're hungry. Kinetic, when you partake of something not needed but pleasurable, like having a cold beer (after you're full). Ataraxia, a mental state of untroubledness because you know and feel content that your needs have been met. Chara, the pleasure of anticipation, or desiring and imagining the imminent fulfilling of a need. The "Perfection" that Brooklyn insists upon would have you operate at such a statistically median zone of pleasures (ahem, tame), and would require your brain to perform phenomenal intuitive operations that account for innumerable permutations until your conscious mind's actual decision is so Promethean AND Epimethean, 20/20, anti-climactic, in a word, unchallenging. Perfection would eliminate the struggle that our brains have evolved to interpret as pleasureable. What Brooklyn's "Perfection" REALLY is is an infantile regression to a Lacanian Pre-Mirror Stage in the Mother's lap, which is before the infant has had the traumatic discovery that the thing-out-there, (the mother), is NOT actually him/her the baby, but is an entirely different thing, object, person. And Woe when the baby discovers its own lonesome individuality amongst a confusing array of indifferent objects. Brooklyn wants you back in infancy, in the unitary perfection of all your needs being met pronto, without speech. "Perfection" as an idea of human operation is just a smoke screen for infantile imperious refusal to seperate from the Mother and use your own damn fingers to pick up your Cheerios.
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11
Effect or Affect???
by misspeaches ini never know the answer to this one.... please help.... .
what is the correct word in the following sentence... .
please allow one hour for the changes to take affect/effect.
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rmt1
You can't 'take affect', as an affect is something which you create from within and is subject only to your own agency. You affect to be cool, smart, hip, etc. Whether or not your 'affect' has the 'effect' on someone else of them agreeing with your affect / aka affectation, is not within your agency. That being the case, you can 'effect' things that you are actually able to make happen. You can effect a transformation, a change in habits. You can also affect a transformation.
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39
How long would it take? (Physics question, sort of. Maybe)
by AlmostAtheist inlet's say i've got a length of solid material that is one light year long.
it's just hanging there in space, between galaxies, not affected by gravity enough at any point along its length to be twisted, bent, whatever.
let's also say that it is resistent to flexing.. i'm at one end of this impossibly-existing rod, and you are at the other.
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rmt1
Thank you DanTheMan. http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae658.cfm. An attempt to summarize: As unintuitive as it is, we are not permitted to imagine that JUST because a hypothetical I-beam of pure space time (check out Greg Bear's EON) has no mass ergo no intertia, and no internal structure except one contiguous light-year long unity of length ergo no compression, that it is STILL allowed to act upon a point one light year distant from its original impulse. The structure of space time is what limits the partical-wave of light to go at "only" the speed of light, same with gravity and all EM in vacuum, and apparently the impulse of information. I think it sucks. It doesn't bode well for purchasing a Millenium Falcon (a hybrid, of course).
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39
How long would it take? (Physics question, sort of. Maybe)
by AlmostAtheist inlet's say i've got a length of solid material that is one light year long.
it's just hanging there in space, between galaxies, not affected by gravity enough at any point along its length to be twisted, bent, whatever.
let's also say that it is resistent to flexing.. i'm at one end of this impossibly-existing rod, and you are at the other.
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rmt1
DanTheMan, does that book have any sort of explanation to back up the assertion? Is it saying that space-time itself cannot accomodate the transmission of an impulse, however inflexible/incompressible the medium, that moves FTL?
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13
Mankind doesn't have the ability to govern himself, true or false?
by JH injeremiah 10:23.
23 i well know, o jehovah, that to earthling man his way does not belong.
it does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.
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rmt1
Something is lost in translation here. There’s a disconnect between the ownership of agency and the efficacy of agency. “to direct” is an infinitive, which is a noun, in the same way that ‘way’/path is a noun. What this English translation literally says, if Brooklyn would stay out of it for a second, is that ‘man does not have ownership/possession over the verbal noun which means the directing of his own steps.’ Literally, these two sentences have nothing to do with making a judgement as to man’s pability to direct his own steps. And since Jeremiah’s statement is already premised on belief in a more powerful being, he could, for the sake of argument, be telling Jehovah in perfect irony that he acknowledges God’s right to tell man that man does not own man’s governance, without actually believing that man is incapable of governance.
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In a fear- inspiring way I am adequately made
by toby888 inwhat i have learned from evolution, heh heh.
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rmt1
Good word choice. Adequate, from pp of adaequare, to make equal to. Still, I have to admit, and creationists can get all medieval on this, but I haven't yet heard a good evolutionary explanation for the storage capacity of our brains that sometimes appears to be 'excess' to the necessity of the environment. Is it excess? adequate? wonderful? C'est l'e'ternite' dans leur coeurs? Anyway, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4251299.stm
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23
How many more years before no one believes in God?
by JH in.
do you think there will come a time, where no one will believe in god or even talk about him?.
children at school aren't taught religion any more around here since years.. so, how long do you think it will take before no one talks about god anymore?
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rmt1
The belief that an incorporeal religiously and morally obligating authority figure exists beyond our observation is inversely proportional to knowledge base. GOD is the big answer at the end of the monster book when we are unable 'to bravely not know what every man has known before'. The absenses or interstices in our knowledge are like the pressurized cavity of a submarine. The wish for simplicity, the despair of no one having easy answers, causes G O D to rush into these cavities of knowledge like the Thresher in concrete galoshes. Some TIME article argued that monothesim is favored for selection by evolution. If so, it seems unlikely that evolution would abandon a working strategy: internalizing/endogenizing believers will statistically sustain reproduction vis a vis declining birth rates in externalizing/exogenizing individuals/states/nations where dopamine oops G O D is not up the dendrites.
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67
anyone ever wonder whether IT could be the TRUTH?
by Cordelia ini cant believe im posting this either!.
but ive got a huge decision to make wont go thru it all again its on my last thread, and i have decided that i am stopping going to the meetings completly (ive been dfed 7 months and because i didnt want to hurt my family even more i continued going to all the meetings and hid my boyfriend, wno was wonderful about it, put a letter of reinstatement in which they refused but relised by the way i paniked when i thought they might reinstate me that it is not what i want!).
i love my bf and want to be with him without any secrecy but i also want my family to accept him and still speak to me but i know that will not happen, so i have two choices either get reinstated and then leave (and risk losing mybf) or tell them now i dont want it and stop the meetings altogether before i go insane.. thing is to be free of the meetings and be with my bf, i will lose my family they are all so strong in the 'truth' they will not have any contact with me and my husband is divorcing me so ill lose finacially and my house and have to share time with my daughter, not to mention all my old friends who are wanting me back, and if i stop now all those months of trying to be reinstated will be wasted id be set right back,.
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rmt1
"Truth" is not an infantile surrender to a Lacanian FATHER with his Cleaver-ly promises, but a very uncomfortable, ceaseless, knawing worry that human morality is constructed, and/or that the individual is most perfect and least sinless when they do not abrogate their own reasoned judgment on what is right or wrong. Need it be said this is all mercurial and relative like an Archimedes without a fulcrum? Welcome to the terror of being "in the World." The fear of death by an inflammation of the Armageddon ("apocolitis") quickly begins to pale in significance next to the sheer joy of having in your own hands the entire remainder of your life, however little they have left you (or much, if you're very lucky).
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8
Thesis defense
by ChrisVance intomorrow is my master's thesis defense.
i've been working on my master's degree in applied linguistics for three years.
i'm really nervous in spite of the fact that the defense has nothing to do with my grade.
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rmt1
Any exdub that gets this far has all my admiration and positive envy. Good luck. Bona fortuna. (I used to say "God speed" when concluding the 5-min service meeting before heading out for the 15 minutes of service that preceded the coffee break.) God speed, if you truck with that, etc.