I'm in Tucson. Grew up in Harrisburg PA area. Moved here late 2001.
Posts by rmt1
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4
Any Ex-Witnesses Live in Phoenix?
by Dinah-sore ini'm been out of the org for about 4 years now, and have lived in phoenix for a couple years.
i was surprised at how many witnesses i see out in field service on a regular basis here, and even more surprised at their casual dress.
i've had sisters approach me in at bus stops in slacks and sleeveless shirts...when i was in the organization a woman would have never worns pants in service.
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16
Hubby found out about me celebrating my kids birthday...
by cognac intold on me of course.
apparently, the other jw thought he was kidding.. i just said, you tell on me and take my family from me, we are done.
we will get a divorce and you will lose me, your home, and more then likely won't get to see your kids everyday the way you get to now.
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rmt1
(Hi, everyone. All my immediate blood relatives are dead in the cult and will never escape. I have no reason not to post on this forum. I grew up in Central PA / Harrisburg congregations.)
I'd put holidays right at the top of the list of ways in which JW born-in are permanently damaged and rendered susceptible to neuroses and psychopathy. A little closer to what I think is the medical reality: born-in JW _brains are permanently damaged_ from the chronic sustained cognitive dissonance of adhering to the holiday issue against all evidence of general enjoyment, marking the year, and social support. As this goes on in age it creates a sunk-cost incentive to circling the wagons in denial, requiring further gymnastics in dissonance, more brain damage, more lying to yourself our of your own mouth and into your own ear.Ideally, you will get them out before they have the faintest clue or slightest appreciation for your salvation. If you make it work, you'll be better off to have temporarily thankless children who have a future, and who go through a typical maturation process, than amputated, lobotomized, porceline angels who duck step and hand out tracks when your platform talking heads wind them up.
I believe the highest metric of your success will be if they never thank you for it, because you saved them before they started recording their lives.
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3
The sun's outwardly migrating habitable zone
by rmt1 injws explain that the earth is at a precise distance from the sun because god made it so, and that the 'earth stands forever'.. whether or not god made it so concerning the orbit, science suggests that the sun has other ideas for whether or not the earth 'stands forever'.. if one reduces the reasons for earth's precise orbital distance to the necessary and sufficient, one uncovers an anthropological conceit: the orbit of the earth is so precise not because the earth is designed to harbor intelligent life, but rather intelligent life is able to be harbored on earth because these last few billion years have found the earth remaining within the sun's outwardly-migrating habitable zone.. "distant future of the sun and earth revisited".
http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.4031.
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rmt1
"God can refuel the sun"
Ug. There can be no finer rationale for the intelligent design of a pan-galactic gargle blaster.
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3
The sun's outwardly migrating habitable zone
by rmt1 injws explain that the earth is at a precise distance from the sun because god made it so, and that the 'earth stands forever'.. whether or not god made it so concerning the orbit, science suggests that the sun has other ideas for whether or not the earth 'stands forever'.. if one reduces the reasons for earth's precise orbital distance to the necessary and sufficient, one uncovers an anthropological conceit: the orbit of the earth is so precise not because the earth is designed to harbor intelligent life, but rather intelligent life is able to be harbored on earth because these last few billion years have found the earth remaining within the sun's outwardly-migrating habitable zone.. "distant future of the sun and earth revisited".
http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.4031.
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rmt1
JWs explain that the earth is at a precise distance from the sun because god made it so, and that the 'earth stands forever'.
Whether or not god made it so concerning the orbit, science suggests that the sun has other ideas for whether or not the earth 'stands forever'.
If one reduces the reasons for Earth's precise orbital distance to the necessary and sufficient, one uncovers an anthropological conceit: The orbit of the earth is so precise not because the earth is designed to harbor intelligent life, but rather intelligent life is able to be harbored on Earth because these last few billion years have found the earth remaining within the sun's outwardly-migrating habitable zone.
"Distant future of the Sun and Earth revisited"
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26
The New Star Trek....
by Quentin interry sent this to me this morning...... .
imagine being given the opportunity to reboot an old and beloved tv series with an uneven history of spotty films which pretty much had run its course.. j.j.abrams did what only a one in a million director could do: he knocked the ball out of the park!.
this film is outrageous fun!.
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rmt1
Plausible spoiler.
"Star Trek 2009" is Star Trek in HDADHD. I value Abrams for consistently delivering Edmund Burke's principle of the "sublime" on LOST and Cloverfield, but in the Kirk building scenes this offering panders to a Fast-And-The-Fewest-Neuron denominator. In every other scene, the movie moves too recklessly for the stateliness of the classic source material. The scene with Kirk's dad and mom was spastic and trite. There are other ways to involve and integrally incorporate women into science fiction plots, and Abrams should know those better ways, because he has consistently used them on LOST. Maybe it's just a problem with time limitations.
Having said all that, and allowing for the above choices as calculated generational target market constraints, I dare say the movie is not just a decent addition to Trek, but in fact quite good. Urban steals his scenes, and Quinto's command of the Spock character is shocking. I do hope for more of this ensemble.
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How do intelligent people get involved in organized religion?
by easyreader1970 inis it because of the fact that once you're involved in the religion, when it comes to god, the bible (or whatever religious text the religion is based on), thinking is no longer encouraged?
that thinking is somehow wrong, immoral?.
i know plenty of really smart people who could just have easily been astrophysicists.
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rmt1
Not in a thousand years of digital computers will you separate the category of religion from the category of homo sapiens. Religion is evolutionarily inextricable from the social contract. When you see a person with huge potential sufficing themselves with intellectual pablum, it's because they are evolutionarily driven to not add additional stresses to themselves by poking the elephant in the room. That elephant is there for a reason - it got homo erectus up through homo sapiens by shrewdly wagering that moral right is justified and demonstrated by physical might, (opposite the JW formulation), a course which accrued greater fitness to those with that newfangled loquacious gene.
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How do you go from hatred of the WBTS to indifference to it.
by easyreader1970 inright now i am filled with burning hatred towards the wbts.
not just to what it has done to me and my family but to people all over the world.
i want to see nothing but the governing body exposed as the charlatans that they are and for all to see the great evil that is the wbts.
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rmt1
Articulate whatever purpose you feel you have during your stay on Earth.
Identify that small handful of things that place you squarely in the center of your purpose.
Know how your purpose and activities therein differ from those in your life as a JW.
Keep chipping away at your purpose by doing those things.
If you are doing them only often enough that you still have mental energy available to give in to schadenfreude, you're not doing them enough.
Schadenfreude is a shelter and reassurance for the weak, which frequently include those who will be, but are not yet, recovered.
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39
What songs or song lyrics remind you of your escape from the Witnesses?
by cluless injudus priest ..."i was lost and found".
and niel young ..i believe in you..... "now that you find yourself loosing your mind are you here again-.
finding that once what you felt was real has gone and changing....... .
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rmt1
circa that period: Right Here Right Now / Jesus Jones, Joey / Concrete Blonde
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15
Earthquakes increase in number? Prove it.
by Not Feeling It inso i saw a jw last days 1914-2009 alert email today.
this one was trumpeting the following link and associating it with wts last days prophesy around "earthquakes in one place after another".
heads up if you get this fear mail.
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rmt1
There's a famous matrix that squares the complex non-commutative sum (do know + don't know), so that the results are:
1) you do know that you do know (like basic essential skills, how to drive a car)
2) you do know that you don't know (like awareness of gaps in knowledge, which takes a while to set in)
3) you don't know that you do know (like instincts)
4) you don't know that you don't know (like the truly unknown that evades our ability to even define as a gap in knowledge)
Take a circle with radius named "time": as the radius (and time) increases, the circumference increases at a greater rate (2 pi). The circumference or perimeter is essentially the interface between the area of things that are known (you know that you know) and the external area of things that are unknown (you don't know that you don't know). From inside, what can be perceived of that vast area of unknown is just the perimeter itself, a line, and that amount is what you know that you don't know. This principle lies behind the adage that the more you know the more you don't know - it's a proportion gained by or appreciated through experience.
This earthquake business, about which several denominations including JWs make much ado, is a case of that circumference increasing and causing new knowledge to fall into the area of known things. The mistake they make is to act as if quantitative increase in data constitutes a difference in behavior of a system. It doesn't - just it means you have more data. Population growth and geological demographics are the main factors in any increase in mortality, but JWs treat them as trivial factors.
I really doubt a JW will allow themselves to be pinned down at the door about the behavior of a system. They try to tell themselves that they are not Biblically literalist fundamentalist evangelicals, but they retain the animistic suspicion that certain phenomena have a ghost in the machine, and the ghost is angry. -
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Earthquakes increase in number? Prove it.
by Not Feeling It inso i saw a jw last days 1914-2009 alert email today.
this one was trumpeting the following link and associating it with wts last days prophesy around "earthquakes in one place after another".
heads up if you get this fear mail.
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rmt1
You must have the wrong translation. In mine, Jesus clearly and unmistakeably says that "there shall be car crashes in one place after another."