All this stuff is a function of exponential/logarithmic global population growth. As long as there is such growth, causing a saturation of news as various surfaces grate against each other, man against man, man against nature, man against self, fundamentalist apocalyptic religions will never run out of material. Religion is not an aberration of man, it is a function of preliminary evolution. Graduation from religion is a function of continuing and advanced evolution. If free energy and free resources allow the several man VS X faults to diminish in intensity, graduation from religion might occur. If circumstances cause these faults to rear their ugly head, graduation from religion diminishes. Not until you have free energy and free resources running rampant over the globe will you have a chance of seeing mass graduation from religion.
Posts by rmt1
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28IF gas prices go to $10, and these major disasters continue......
by AK - Jeff in....like the one in myanmar now, will we not see the apocalyptic religions just explode in growth, including jw's?
even during relatively calm times, these groups can stir the 'sheep' to believe that the tribulation is just around the corner.
if we continue to see major disasters, what effect do you see in these groups?.
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69
Why does an atheist have to disprove anything?
by digderidoo ini have noticed alot of debate in posts lately between an atheist argument and a christian one.
it seems to me that the atheist is asked to disprove god's existence.
some times these debates have started to get personal with one side attacking the other with insults and i do not want to start another argument like these.. but i dont get it?
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rmt1
A few posters are trying to argue against creationists and theists and are investing an embarrassing amount of emotional energy. Please invest in an extremely small exercise of the fingers and Google "Joseph Bulbulia evolution religion" and "James W. Dow evolution religion". I swear that if you have at least two brain cells this will soften much of your gall. I have come to regard religious types as distant cousins in the whole homo sapiens project. I don't need to be angry with them.
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Does Religion have any place in the modern world?
by Fisherman inceremoneys, costumes, spending time in church listenning the same thing again and again, forced to believe in things that cannot be proven.
code or mindset that seperates you from others, wars, violence,....
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rmt1
As far as I can tell from what I've researched, religion is a hard-wired capacity of the homo sapiens who have been most fit so as to kick other homo sapiens' asses, taken their women and oil (or food), and survive. So if someone is alive today, the strongest odds are that they have the hard-wiring of religious capacity. The fact that people in this era of free energy are able to stand up, think for a second, take some measurements and discover, HAY! There might not in fact be a cumulonimbus herm in the heavens! does not negate the fact that most people operate on their hardwiring, a capacity (filled invariably by social conditioning) to subscribe to a divine rather than agnostic authorship of reality. To be agnostic or atheistic is merely to graduate from religion but it does not by itself grant superior fitness. Fitness goes to those who are morally empowered to take what does not belong to them because they are in fact entitled to it of unique divine mandate. This phenomenon of homo sapiens will not be going away in the 21st century, 22nd, 23rd or 24th.
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69
Why does an atheist have to disprove anything?
by digderidoo ini have noticed alot of debate in posts lately between an atheist argument and a christian one.
it seems to me that the atheist is asked to disprove god's existence.
some times these debates have started to get personal with one side attacking the other with insults and i do not want to start another argument like these.. but i dont get it?
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rmt1
The book "Rare Earth" lists several interesting coincidences required for sentient / intelligent life to arise. I won't say that it has made me a fallen atheist. But it has allowed me to /not/ want to bite the head off the shoulders of every idiot spouting that there's some cumulonimbus herm up there. But this change of attitude also is not acknowledgment of creationists' insistence on some divinity without having put in hard time studying the scientific underpinnings of their otherwise rather improbable existence.
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So how do you uncult a cultist?
by easyreader1970 inthis is my wife i am talking about.
i'll get that out of the way first.. she was essentially born into the truth and she is hardcore.
she is a zealot.
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rmt1
The cultist lives inside an event horizon; all the universe rotates around their conception of themselves, and their concern, however much they insist it is agape in action, never fails to proceed only so far before turning back to themselves. There's nothing *you* do to uncult a cultist, and additionally there is nothing you *do* to uncult a cultist. All you can do is prepare yourself for the moment that something clicks in the cultist and they themselves make the opening. (try http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=217)
Perhaps you can search for, locate, and make a strategic reserve of sanity in the future prospects of your children having been "raised in", but thankfully 'graduated from', the whole JW mess. I suppose there are ways to develop a special compact with each child, individually, which triangulates, by extremely small parallax, the de facto, observable *oddity* of certain JW inanities, and your own profound reserve on their credibility. If this compact can be maintained over time, over years, the child might get through the traumatic, idealistic and emotional adolescent years without investing credence in the edifice.
Since you said the children are the big factor in your decisions, do some Hamiltonian gene expression engineering: Make a family tree of all their relatives. Rate each relative on their real-world wealth. Then rate each relative on their individual gene expression to-date (I.e. in how many offspring are they already represented). Then rate each relative on their degree of cultism (use positions in the cong as a factor). Then rate each relative on their affinity, fondness, relationship to the children. Using these datapoints, try to make some best guesses on the stress vectors that each relative feels towards 'whether or not' your children remain 1) "strong" in the JWs and 2) in the JWs at all. A high gene concentration = high stress, such as if your children are her parents' only grandchildren. A low concentration = a gaussian distribution, such as if your children are only three of many.
The entire edifice is based on the presumption that there will always be 'weaker ones'. If it was not based on this presumption, women would be in positions of equal power. Because it is, and because 'weaker ones' are required, it is possible for you to arrange to provide them the 'weaker ones' they need. Now, what they don't want is for 'weaker ones' to leave. No, because then there is no perceived observer of the 'strong ones' (let's call them the bourgeoise and elites of spiritual affluence, as opposed to, say, the proletariat). What they want is for enough people to be 'weaker ones', proletariat, without leaving, so that they have virtual 'worldly ones' in their own midst, inside the JW halls, that they can secretly point at and exclude. -
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Why do they call it "The Truth" ?
by jwblog inif the "truth" keeps changing shouldn't they call it "in search of the truth"?
an orange is always an orange, and apple always an apple they do not change.
so how is it "truth" can change?
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rmt1
Whoever controls the linguistic field of meaning, a field charged with the mostly native but occasionally reprogrammable charge or valence of words and phrases, controls the perception of what is and what is not physically possible, and can overturn or contradict such silly ideas as gravity, causality, thermodynamics. "Truth" is an offensive / defensive linguistic combo. Visualize the Roman soldier with their 'right-handed' gladius of ""Truth"" and their 'left-handed' shield of Faith. When the GB chooses to offend, they charge the word "Truth" with being a single bright light in the darkness, a unique divine mandate to anger the nations, shake loose the meek, separate families. That's their gladius. Its square area (very small) is proportional to the moments in life where the universe conspires to suggest that there may be some organized methodology or ultimate purpose behind the existence of suffering and evil (very few). When the tables are turned, when the flock asks how it is the "Truth" keeps changing, they switch to defensive linguistics. The "Truth" is not a single coherent ordered list of unchanging mathematical or scientific identities or theorems, no, it is more of a fluxing list of best practices whose vector heading changes slightly in time, but which is always within just a handful of degrees of bearing/heading of the actual distant "Truth" on the horizon. Or, the Truth is as far away from them as the horizon, but at least they are pointed towards it more often than anyone else. So, they oscillate between "We have the Truth" and "We have the best wind-tacking bearing towards the Truth", depending on who's listening, who's being impressed, who's being frightened, who's being shamed. Terribly complex calculations they have to perform. The de facto absence of truth lies behind the 'shield of faith'. The square area of the shield of faith (very large) is proportional to the moments in life where one may doubt there is any truth or methodology at all (often). The burning missiles of the Devil are in fact realizations. We don't want them! Frank Herbert's Dune has Duke Leto mention of the Fremen that they have the 'esprit of secret covenant'. The impossibility of the mission, the exorbitant costs of keeping the faith, fall under the "handicap principle" of evolutionary psychology. In short, only those crazy enough to do all this crap (e.g. refrain from cheating the social contract) deserve our material support. Critical to upholding this secret covenant, and thereby the right to use the sword of truth, is the faith that a universe-class authority has bequeathed any truth to any one group at all.
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I am fed up with "Where else would I/We Go?"
by OnTheWayOut init is a standard answer that i get from the few jw's that i speak with.. "the organization has it's flaws, but where else would we go to be among.
people who strive to do [jehovah's/god's] will?".
"i don't understand all the doctrine, nor take it as seriously as you do, but .
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rmt1
"If it's the 'truth', why do you have to ceaselessly *call* it the 'Truth'? Shouldn't |truth|, in its truest sense and definition, be universally discoverable in a way that surpasses semantics? Ordinary truths are. What is so different about the JW's 'Truth' that they cannot simply allow it to demonstrate itself to be its own independently and reproducibly confirmable truth?" The Kubler-Ross model has 5 stages of grief- Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Ceaseless assertion that what they have is "The Truth" is stage one, Denial. I.e., they consciously recognize it is not separately reproduceable. But I've known JW's who have stayed in well beyond the point of knowing it was all bullshit, largely because of the social and familial networks which are the foundations of religion to begin with. I salute those who psychologically worked their way up through the stages of grief, even to acceptance, and stay in the whole JW thing, but do so only because they them-own-damn-selves have counted the cost of leaving/building a new life, like Jesus said, and chosen to stay with a lesser evil, as they *personally* evaluate it.
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to LOST fans out there (possible spoiler alert for non-US viewers)
by Pwned ini am so excited about the return of lost tommorrow.
to me this has been the 2nd best season, right after season 1. any theories for the second half of the season?
i hope i am wrong but i think claire dies.
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rmt1
The historical Michael Farady was the first to liquify chlorine gas. During the Crimean War, the British asked him if he would help produce large quantities of poison gas, and he refused. At no time as yet have we heard that the non-Oceanic 6 are actually dead. For all evidence presented, they are still on the island and only the Oceanic 6 have come to be known about as survivors. What is really neat about LOST is that the writers keep increasing the stakes of the game so that there might actually be a sympathetic reason for wanting most of the literal survivors to actually remain on the island. The writers have just about every character intersect with every other character. This can be silly or sobering. Check out 'strange attractor' and 'lorenz attractor', and the coincidences might switch from being silly and campy to 'OMG'. Particularly the recent scene where Widmore lets Desmond contact Penny. It may only be coincidence, or, Widmore may have foreknowledge. A friend believes the coffin could be Michael, as she saw evidence of it being a black urban neighborhood. Watch for a Richard Alpert / Black Rock / Charles Widmore connection.
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Kicked off a plane for praying! Or *was* it for that...?
by AlmostAtheist inthe headline reads: "praying passenger is removed from plane" i figured it was some poor shmuck whose religion requires him to babble or mumble or something and someone smelled "terrorist".
but no, he was a just praying, maybe even quietly.
the problem was, he was standing at the back of the plane prior to take off, he had begun a prayer, and apparently was unable to stop once he starts.
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rmt1
Sorry, Israelites, but this is broken wing flapping and crying fowl of the finest kind. Where in that entire airport could this faithful gentleman NOT have found a damn two minutes on two square feet to successfully negotiate the perils of a good pray? This is shoving one's religion down another's throat by indirection, claims to persecution, and guilt. There is not the slightest need for hand-wringing by those who watched him get escorted off. There should be no apologies, either. JWs LIVE for this shit.
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WHEN DO JWS BELIEVE NATIVE AMERICANS CAME TO AMERICA?
by badboy inrecent discoveries indicate native american were present from 14,300 years ago.. what do jws make of that?.
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rmt1
Imagine what it must be like to be the holodeck operator in Brooklyn. You have only so many physical concepts, data points and ingredients to work with, but you have to mix, match, recombine, reconstitute, alternate, fudge, slip, slide and Abednego so that you have what will be on average considered to be an actual new product of spiritual food at the proper time. You have a temporal radius of 6000 years: draw a line from that act of creation to the present and you have a Hawking light cone of increasing geographic radius centered, for basically all of history, on one tiny subset of homo sapiens who happened to have written one of the more intriguing, zesty and occasionally compelling narratives. A couple of Roman accidents later, and lo, post hoc ergo propter hoc absolutely demonstrates that the emergence of the JWs was written in frikin stone before God thunk of getting out of bed. And you have to mix and match so well that there appears to be actual variety or granularity that can compete, nay, supercede the granularity of questions on the scale of where the Native Americans came from. It is a constant battle of switch-hitting between the right-handed sword of logos, using modern science to point to some divine creation, and then in a split second using the shield of faith to deny that modern science can penetrate 'assured realities'. Sun Tzu would be so proud of this legerdemain that he'd roll in his grave. That has got to be one busy, dirty, thankless job. Mike Rowe should do an episode in Brooklyn.