Posts by rmt1
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69Science still doesn't have the answers on how life first appeared
by EndofMysteries insince so many athiests in this thread, and since i'm going to college, i was curious if what i would learn in biology would change my thoughts and show that life clearly and easily spontaneously happened.
just looking up the origins of dna or rna there is nothing conclusive.
for example, scientists today are able to manipulate life.
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Everlasting Life on Paradise Earth - My musings of why it cannot be true
by leaving_quietly inactually, just one musing.. there are a number of scriptures that wtbts uses to support their doctrine of everlasting life on paradise earth.
the vast majority come from the hebrew scriptures.
using just one verse, i believe i can disprove this doctrine quite soundly.. the verse is john 6:68.. simon peter answered him: lord, whom shall we go away to?
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rmt1
Being out of the cult 15 years or so... I think the paradise pictures were, in general, carefully inclusive of all material fantasy of things not obtainable in the present ""Systems of Things"" (unbeknownst due to being under the thumb of the WTBS, under Derridean erasure). To wit, a child cannot pet a panda in actuality because the child is forbidden from getting higher education and some degree in veterinary science and going to exotic locations and getting a wash of oxytocin from engaging directly with fellow mammals. The adult can fantasize about, and more importantly covet, the 2000+ square foot house on the hill with the sweeping vista that raises the real estate value and the carefully cultivated garden that says real eating because the adult is forbidden from taking paths in life that lead to material benefits. The paradise pictures are like an officially sanctioned Two-Minutes Covet. Of course they all serve Jah because they want to of course. Not for anything resembling a supply and demand curve.
And buttressing this coherent, rifled covetousness into an indeterminate future is the sanction against learning enough science to recognize what "eternity" and "everlasting" mean in quantifiable terms. I bet every single JW has enough brain cells to question the silliness and unfoundedness of the Everlasting Paradise Earth reward / motivation / sky cake / goal / prize.
By way of irony, the JW cosmology has the earth only being built 6000 years ago {someone now claims no, it's not a literal thousand years per day...?} when the science has our surroundings going back 13.5 billion years, and the JW is expected to make a decision about |Eternity| based on a world context of ~6000 thousand years. This 'ontogeny recapitulates the phylogeny' that JW young are expected to (have their parents force them to) consider getting get baptized at <10 and maybe around 5yo.
The closest thing to JW Paradise paintings (dreamy, surreal, won't-happen) that I have seen are the depictions of a Stanford Torus by Don Davis from the 70's. http://www.donaldedavis.com/BIGPUB/STANTRUS.jpg -
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Sister in congregation diagnosed w/AML Leukemia. I'm so mad right now.
by azor ini just need to vent.
i want to scream from the rooftops right now.
life is hard enough when you battle blood cancer but is an unnecessary evil put upon good people by this evil cult.
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rmt1
Class action lawsuit.
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33
Higher Education... Some ideas for those that think it is too late
by adjusted knowledge inso many witnesses lost the opportunity to pursue higher education in their youths.
perhaps it took decades for many here to leave and now feel it is too late.
degree you will also earn multiple certifications from other agencies:.
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rmt1
NewYork44M "I finished my doctorate at 50 and am now teaching as a tenured track professor. It is NEVER too late."
An excellent data point. How long did the doctorate take? Can you trace an influence between non-academic life experience and getting tenure so quickly?
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27
A picture of a WT dream
by Sour Grapes inpeople stay jehovah's witnesses for several reasons.
the foremost is because they are taught that they could cheat death and not have to die or even better yet not have to get old.
the second is they can see their dead relatives again , who have a direct pass to paradise, and that we must obey to get there to see them in the resurrection.
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rmt1
What might be useful to questioning cult members is some web server showing every last image of this type that can be collated and curated by knowledgeable persons, placing it in its year of release, its original publication, perhaps later publications. There's got to be 40 or so years now of this kind of image. Plenty of quality color images since the 4 color presses. You could get a lot of good statistical data from such an ensemble.
Just as a prediction: Do the houses / places of residence in the image reveal the latent deferred materialism of the cult member consumer, with arguable resolution in terms of average residential square footage of median incomes of that year, architectural vogue. Quantifiable things. How does the depiction of diversity change over time? Can you identify intrusions of realism as a function of time?
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Understanding our CURE from ADDICTION to the Watchtower cult.
by Fernando inwould it be fair to say many of the posts on jwn are in essence about this?.
if we could better understand what worked for us, would we be better able to help others?.
where do basic human needs ("met" by the cult) end, and where does addiction start?.
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rmt1
Well, more power to you on this line of inquiry.
I never felt addiction to the social and financial and creature comforts, being a child or young adult, that came with remaining in good stead with family and in-cult friends. that was not addiction. That was just meeting a mammalian need within the constraints of the compulsive prison.
So this argument goes as, you're addicted to Oxygen, how did you get over it. You're addicted to liquid water and iron and minerals and nutrients and how did you break the habit. You're addicted to Maslow's needs of maintaining body temperature and skin safety through use of clothing and shelter and how did you finally put a stop to this destructive disorder.
More power to you in this line of inquiry. You MAY uncover something insightful about cult science, cult engineering, cult formation, cult propagation in general.
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The lure of reading the wt is equivalent to a college education came about
by MTSman ini've been out for, god, six years now.
it only seems like yesterday when i was before three a-holes pleading for my life.
relecting back, i've come to realize having the ax fall on me was the best thing.
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rmt1
A college education is comprised of individuals, using their own brains, collecting their own data, arriving at their own conclusions, testing their findings, and then standing or falling by the review of their peers, who are able and entitled to reproduce said findings. College is also replete with different interpretations deriving from the same sources, and then engaging in the act or process of persuasion, and being subject to the court of public opinion. Conferences or seminars or conventions at the college level are busy affairs with multiple tracks in multiple rooms, with many speakers addressing handfuls or gobs of willing voluntary listeners, who paid dearly to be there to hear the new research, and not all messages or interpretations are the same, and not all agree. Differences of opinion can be polite or outrageous, and poaching turf is met with defensiveness, and undermining one's life's interpretation can lead to throwing chairs. But these behaviors are natural reactions by people who are permitted to use their own brains. A college education involves meetings where you sit around a table reviewing the latest research paper and some different person each week leads the discussion by highlighting what they found insightful or misguided in that paper, and yours is printed out and marked up and cross referenced if you prepared well. Everyone is free to agree, disagree, interpret, interrupt, question, disregard, dismiss. A college education involves weekly evening public talks by local faculty where you sit attentively, whether dressed up well or in your jeans, and you hear out the subject matter and you feel compelled based on the merits of their argument, or their presentation, and they generally have some kind of audio visual medium that provides a structure upon which to shape your understanding. A college education involves undergraduate level clubs where you meet and figure out what your volunteer activities will be and how you will interface with the public, and then you haul a bunch of crap in your vehicles, you set up shop, you face the public, and you put yourself out there and draw listeners to you to hear what your club and activity is about, and how it impacts that random person, and how that random person can become involved, or see the next iteration of activity, if they so desire.
Manifestly, a regular habit of reading the Watchtower and Awake is the precise equivalent of getting a college education. How could anyone doubt it?
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70
Feeling sad over a wasted life in watchtower
by wannaexit init's been 12 years since i first read ray franz's books and the scales came off my eyes.
by that time i was in my forties.. since 2002 i went back to school and have worked with 3 very professional organizations.
but my biological clock is ticking away and while my peers are looking forward to retirement, i am only beginning.
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rmt1
Magnum, and 2+2=5: I hear you loud and clear. I have got ZERO ounces or inches or shades of smoke to blow your way. You have nailed it. There is no silver lining to this monster other than it did not kill whoever is still posting, yet.
Here's my grim take on being too old to start doing what you want. I do not classify it as silver lining. I recently went to the 2014 AAS DPS meeting in Tucson where planetary scientists talk about exoplanets and the Solar System. There were a ton of young grad students (I'm 41), mix of early middle to early senior aged people, and a thin serving of what I could only characterize as spunky gray-haired and white-haired guys who were still doing their science, still getting up before the audience, still razzing the young speakers, still interrupting their peers in their polite way, and they had to be north of 65 years old, maybe 70. Not many of them, but an unambiguous statistical presense. They were doing what they loved doing. I will not make it through any higher degree than I have, but I'm reducing data on an exoplanet (before this lunchbreak), and it fills a huge gap of alienation from the life I think I could have fit into.
I won't get back the life the JWs stole. I can calculate that as being a longer period of time than the actual years you were under the KH roof, because the act of starting some learning experiences after your cohort has moved on carries STEEP opportunity costs in time, money, political and relationship capitol, etc. So just to estimate a metric from my own experience, the years that the JW borg steals from you is roughly a factor of 1.5. If you did not know yourself, you have to meet yourself. If you did not have loving, caring, wise, learned, concerned advice from parents or invested parties who knew how reality worked, then you had a steep learning curve to "catch up", if ever, to something resembling the civilized and socially responsible adult. You never stop experiencing this opportunity cost curve. Things you should have known at a younger age delay learning things you should be knowing now.
There is also the penalty of not being able to focus and finish what you started, because there are so many things you want from life that were prevented by all this delay. I've got zero good advice there. Worldly people have to face the same crisis of focus, but they got to do so in their normal cohort, under the wing of invested persons with experience in reality.
IMHO
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70
Feeling sad over a wasted life in watchtower
by wannaexit init's been 12 years since i first read ray franz's books and the scales came off my eyes.
by that time i was in my forties.. since 2002 i went back to school and have worked with 3 very professional organizations.
but my biological clock is ticking away and while my peers are looking forward to retirement, i am only beginning.
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rmt1
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Human+rights+abuse
" human rights
pl.n. The basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law. "
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My 88 Year Old Mom Is Going To Special Meeting Today And Shouldn't!
by minimus inmy mom only goes out for doctor's visits.
they are "encouraging" her to spend three hours to hear the annual meeting at the kh.
she is on oxygen and can barely move.
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rmt1
"my theory on why they insist on attending in person is this: if you are not at a meeting in person your reactions can not be observed during a talk being given. All the self righteous spies are watching everyone seated there to try to read minds and determine the level of everyones' gullibility. Additionally, if you're not there you can't feel approved of or disapproved of; you can't see the expressions on the elders' faces as they either beam at you or frown at you or even shake their heads at you.
Physical presence is mandatory to keep mind control effective. That's why they harp continuously at meetings that if you miss meetings you won't have Holy Spirit - meaning, they lose control of your thinking process."
A convenient word already wraps this up, "Facecrime".
