I'll offer a simple model for how time could have looping cause or a non-existent First Cause:
Time flows in one direction.
The earth rotates in one direction.
Time is contiguous and continuous along all points we observe.
The earth's surface is contiguous and continuous.
A single causality in time has a small adjacent set of causes and a small adjacent set of effects.
A single point on the exact Equator has a single adjacent point to its West, and a single adjacent point to its East.
Now think of our 3D reality existing within a 4D hypersphere where time is a fifth orthogonal direction. And think of East as cause and West as effect. If time wraps around the hypersphere, then any individual line of causality will meet its (Eastern) "cause" if it traces its effects down the 'Westward' line, and will meet its (Western) "effects" if it traces its causes down the 'Eastward' line.
You will logically ask, well who created the 5-dimensional hypersphere with time as a continuous loop, and you got me.
Posts by rmt1
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17
In The Beginning...
by Blueblades inbeginnings are always difficult.
wherever one starts, there is always the question: what was before that?
this question comes from our sense of objective causality - that everything must be preceded by its cause.. must everything have a cause?
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rmt1
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60
"We Are No Longer Minutes Aways From The New System ---We Are Seconds"
by minimus inthat's the latest being circulated from our dear witness friends and relatives.
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rmt1
Hard economic times are the JW version of Black Friday - it's when they recoup losses in RNF that occurred during the times when the normal majority of humanity had a decent livelihood and level of happiness. This is when they can store up the necessary number of converts for their next lean time. But they have to act soon!! There's only so many shopping days left for them to store up enough nuts for winter.
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4
Myth...
by Quirky1 in1.a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation, esp.
one that is concerned with deities or demigods and explains some practice, rite, or phenomenon of nature.2.stories or matter of this kind: realm of myth.
3.any invented story, idea, or concept: his account of the event is pure myth.
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rmt1
I would not flatter the JWs, or Brooklyn, or the FDS, or Russel, or Rutherford, or any of the great lights of the JW experience with the word 'myth'. Any good leader takes the best of what his people offers and guides or facilitates them in that direction; he has the 'mandate' of the people. Any good textual representative of a people (eg Homer) takes the best of what the people believe in their daily lives, their traditions, their etiologies, their sentiments about wind and weather, and distills them, along with peers (eg Hesiod), into a barely coherent but extremely compelling narrative that lives on far longer than its language of origin. It says something often true, and often crude, about our reality.
JWs expect someone to get fired up and give a crap because Jesus came invisibly in 1914. Nope, sorry. JWs do not qualify for the word 'myth'. Their storyline is derivative, arbitrary, top-down not bottom-up; they do not seek to represent the daily lives, traditions and etiologies of their rank and file. Instead they seek to impose those things to a conformity. JW doctrine attempts to cover all bases so hermetically that they invent God's intentions and hidden meanings in terms of blood, birthdays, etc. JWs own God, control his voice, control his meaning, and make him do their bidding. "Jehovah" is their brand name, after all. They could be "Jehovah's Handlers" for all that. Mythology is more open to daily experience, and not a dogmatic policy text. -
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Were There Certain Bible Events That U Used 2 Question As Really Happening?
by minimus inanything that you used to raise your eyebrows to, biblically speaking?
?
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rmt1
The highest energy expenditure post-creation miracle was Joshua and the sun standing still. Get the earth to stop rotating, now hold it (Bacardi), now start up again. If all God did was to hold the crust of the earth still while the core and mantle continued to rotate beneath, then that's probably why we will be having earthquakes in one place after another. The next highest energy-intensive miracle was the parting of the Red Sea. This one can be plausibly accounted for by local tectonic activity that caused a tiny tsunami - it drew the water away, then threw it back.
Miracles are a form of taxation, and a security badge swiped by believers when encountering other believers so they know who is who, and who is with them, and who is worthy of being in their graces. If you believe in a low-level miracle, you get access to a set of goods offered by the tribe/denomination. In JW terms, if you believe that God created all, you get low-level acknowledgment and encouragement. As you move up to successively harder-to-believe, more inscrutable and erudite miracles, like God caught up Elijah in a whirlwind or Jonah survived three days and nights in a shark, or Jesus' fishes kept spontaneously replacing themselves, then you get higher levels of access. You might get invited over as a good associate for a meal. Later you get trust, and possibly invested responsibilities. (I omit the obvious main taxation and indicator of group investment, field service.) Miracles are also an evolutionary display of cognitive load capacity. If I can believe something so incredible as God caused a virgin to spontaneously conceive, and still get by physically in terms of fitness, then (in evolutionary terms) belief in that miracle, which should by all physics render me less fit, is actually an indicator of excess or reserve cognitive capacity. In a complete vacuum, with no other co-believers to observe your stake in a particular miracle, there is no particular advantage to believing in that miracle, other than the hope itself that God might redirect a miracle to you. Hope is another evolutionary adaptation related to but separate from belief in miracles.
google "evolution of religion" fitness belief display -
29
Life after being a Witness...What are your beliefs now?
by Quirky1 insome here have moved on, some have found new faith and some have haven't.
did you maintain christianity or do you no longer believe?
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rmt1
You asked. I am an atheist but I am smoking the month of December for all the Christmas brain chemistry (dopmine, serotonin) that can be had from what they call 'the greatest story ever told'. I admit I have not read many of the world's spiritual products, and I admit there could be cultural bias, but it is my opinion that the Christians of yore had better weed than Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Hinduists, Native Americans, Africans, Scandinavians, or Celts. Granted, this 'greatest story ever told' has integrated elements of most of these religions and or cultures with their dominating religious outlook, but it has been Christians who have sewn it up into a package. To sum this up (puff), the Christian story provides the deepest hit of domanine and serotonin.
That being said, I still am governed by the rationalist and atheistic pursuit of truth. There is a symmetric and elegant beauty in mathematics that a normally enculturated homo sapien might be tempted to insist can only be the handiwork of an intelligent designer (Xian or not). I resist that temptation, even though the math (and the physics) are sometimes as beautiful as 'the greatest story ever told'.
So, my message would be: embrace and make peace with the religious capacities of your homo sapien brain, because those fascinating, beautiful capacities are there due to the success of your ancestors who gained evolutionary advantage from them. Those ancestors of the human project who told the best story gained the most attention, adherents, then power. the |story|, itself, is how Christianity grew up and overcame the Roman collection of jejune and quotidian rituals. E.g. offering incense to the emperor or the family ancestors did not give you the same serotonin and dopamine hit as did this business of dreaming about a king and castle coming with the clouds. And alliteration always helps, which is why Beowulf kicks ass as a fine example of Christians taking the best of 'pagan' culture and reorienting it along the vector of the 'greatest story.'
Or even, don't try to bend the spoon, try to understand there is no spoon. -
42
List of do's and dont's on a first date..........
by mtsgrad ini was planning on wearing my hairy chest and medallion.
can i have some more do's and dont's please?
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rmt1
I've been married too long to remember what our first official date was, but I think it had to do with 1) meal/restaurant (which is like a fly-over where you gather critical bird's eye view intelligence) and then 2) a walk around an active setting, in this case a downtown river boardwalk with arts/shops/scenery/tons of people, the idea being that the pressure came off the 1-to-1 'confrontational' conversation and now became a comparison of reactions to new stimuli, where the actual self might be more easily revealed (for both of your benefits).
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49
I like swearing
by Newborn ini have to admit that i love being allowed to swear .
damn!.
/bad newborn.
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rmt1
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=p&p=32 gives this etymology: "profane (v.) 1382, from L. profanare "to desecrate," from profanus "unholy, not consecrated," from pro fano "not admitted into the temple (with the initiates)," lit. "out in front of the temple," from pro- "before" + fano, abl. of fanum "temple." The adj. is attested from 1483; originally "un-ecclesiastical, secular;" sense of "unholy, polluted" is recorded from c.1500. Profanity is 1607, from L.L. profanitas, from L. profanus. Extended sense of "foul language" is from Old Testament commandment against "profaning" the name of the Lord." The when-to of profanity is a fascinating question. The instinctiveness of wanting to utter something, whatever it is, in response to some external event belies our need to linguistically control the situation, demonstrate to ourselves that we have some explanation or accounting for what just happened, even if to ratify that we don't fully understand it. JWs (e.g. my mom) would use euphemisms like "Oh my word!" (aka oh my god), darnit, heck, all the usual suspects. My discovery of the f-word occurred when I was about 7, and at the Tuesday night book study, and was using the brute force method of attaching each alphabetic letter to the front of "uck". Why not? Now, the upright brother who told my father I had "used the f-word" of course did not bother to explain what this innocent 7-yo was doing, so my dad had to get to the bottom of it while I was utterly bewildered what the (*#^*$(^*&^%*Q# was going on. Anyway- this homo sapien predilection to linguistically seal an unexpected/unfortunate event seem to me the opposite of the predilection of instantaneous belief in god during an instant of danger. I'm perfectly atheistic but in my reality my homo sapien forebears had an evolutionary advantage by believing in god, and if I panic (e.g. child about to get hit by car - something real), it's that evolutionary heritage leaping into active mode.
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24
"Good" JWs Are Like Terrorists
by minimus inthey don't care if they die, as long as it's for the cause.
they will zealously implement their agenda no matter how unreasonable or ignorant it is.
if "mother" told them to become martyrs, they follow the direction.
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rmt1
Also, adherence to Excommunication is a tiny form of cleverly not noticing a Holocaust in progress.
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Earthquakes in one place after another.
by rmt1 in"expert: small ark.
earthquakes could be warning"; http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/aleqm5gfmhrvlmlrqtwwnjzodjogi6imqad94nss4o3
who do jws blame for earthquakes?
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rmt1
"Expert: Small Ark. earthquakes could be warning"; http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gFMHRVlmLRQtwwnjzoDjOGi6iMqAD94NSS4O3 Who do JWs blame for earthquakes? All the signs of the times/composite sign are symptoms of man's protracted loss of god, but how to earthquakes fit into that? They could perhaps chalk up some tectonic activity to oil extraction? But if one plotted earthquakes on a map and compared it to lives lost, I don't think that oil extraction and earthquakes are correlated. Do they explain earthquakes as a nefarious activity of Satan? And if they refuse to acknowledge something so silly, who do they pass the buck to? Is it because of fallen creation, i.e., part of the 'curse the ground' thing God did to Adam? As far as I was aware, the JWs allowed the 'curse the ground' to be figurative to underscore the difficulty of Adam's life as a newly-minted imperfect man, not to underscore that God did a physical thing to the planet or transformed the character of thermodynamics and entropy. If a JW could be made to acknowledge that they don't know who causes earthquakes, and if they are not part of some modification or curse that God placed on the Earth, and if they are not part of some developing protracted presense of too much 'worldy mankind', then there's piece of the puzzle missing. Somehow, something bad is happening that 1) is not punishment from God 2) is not caused by God for any other reason 3) is not caused by Satan 4) is not caused by man. Did I miss anything? Is this a real hole in their story? Or have they filled it in?
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139
Santa & Kids - To Lie or Not To Lie?
by sweet pea inthis will be our second christmas since leaving the wts but we will be away in nz with besty's extended family so probably won't bother much with trees and decorations but the santa issue is playing on my mind, especially now podlet no.
1 is at preschool.. do we bring the children up to believe in santa & co with all the magic, mystery and excitement associated with the fairytale or do we tell him right away what the deal is - either route is going to feel very strange.
my gut feeling is to go along with the myth and give them those happy memories of wonder and anticipation - what do you all think?.
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rmt1
Take the magnitude of impact that high-level JW lies had on your very life, and then compare that to the magnitude of impact that high-level 'worldly' lies had on your very life. Now take the impact that low-level worldly lies (Santa Claus) have had on children's/people's lives around the world, and compare that to whatever low-level JW lies there are. Such as some technical who-gives-a-shit detail that they drummed up about the FDS just in time for the quarterly or biannual shot in the arm fakeout to make the rank and file think there's still someone at the helm. All the JWs are doing when they make the Santa story into A LIE IT'S A LIIIIEEE OHMYGOD IT'S A LIIIEEE!!!! is to deflect their own high-level lies, the magnitude of which defy all conscience. (blood issue leaps to mind...)