Freemont, I attended HBG North way back, then Halifax, then Swatara. I had friends all over, in Mountainside, Edgemont, Swatara, Palmyra, Reading, Camp Hill, Elizabethville. I left in '99.
Posts by rmt1
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9Any Central Pennsylvania JWs or Ex-JWs I used to know ?
by foreverfree ini'm looking for any jw's or x-jws near harrisburg, pa i used to know to catch up with and compare notes.
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rmt1
BA English and Classics. I took them to observe how language and meaning function and are abused and how the linguistic field of meaning can be subtly tweaked with plausible deniability, in order to deprogram 25 years of JW genocide against the kindred, reason, sense and logic. Computer operations at a university.
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"Why does America always bomb other countries?", my son asked tonight.
by digderidoo infirst of all i do not want to turn this into an american bashing thread, that is not my intention at all.. i would like to hear americans opinions as to what my thirteen year old son asked me tonight.. on the way back from swimming tonight my two sons (13 and 11) and myself started talking about wars.
my 11 year old was the first to bring it up talking about wwi & ww2.
we had an interesting conversation about it, then the subject got onto nuclear bombs.
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rmt1
The 13 yo's generalization needs to be factored. The America that "is" is not the America that "was", so there is no "Always", and subsequently there is no single "why". Multipolar America dropped a Fat Man to accomplish a certain set of objectives, including fanfare as a potential superpower. The present unipolar America remotely pilots a Reaper to bomb a carload of turbans to accomplish a different set of objectives, including minimization of newsworthy nuisance in the maintenance of a civilized petroleum-driven exceptionalism. Regarding the earlier set of objectives, one could compare Stalin's political death toll of at least a few million (and the total USSR unnatural death toll of tens of millions) against the two demonstrations of the atom bomb to the Russians and incidental Japanese death toll. Regarding the present set of objectives, he might explore the American sense of entitlement to the open road, and all its subprocesses, including extended suburbia/exurbia, McMansion Farms, urban sprawl, strip malls, the SUV phenomenon. Americans have the greatest surface area of interface with their physical environment, which is matched by having the greatest ecological and energy footprint. No normal American desires to give these things up. But if/as American exceptionalism and unipolarity decay, this would/will be inevitable, at least for the lower classes.
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Our CO gave a talk to kids. Stay OUT of school!
by easyreader1970 inhe wanted to talk to the young ones in the congregation.
the main theme of the talk had to do with avoiding higher education.
basically the main idea was this: witnesses are losing alot of young people here in the last few years.
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rmt1
Although Brooklyn certainly benefits from advanced skill sets that can serve as trophies in individual congregations or as life savers in pedophilia lawsuits, the only MONEY Brooklyn needs is that generated by dopamine, the cheapest motivator on the planet. All you have to do is tell the best tall tale to solicit the most investment from your listener. If your listener is not acquainted with other, more competitive tall tales (e.g. Illiad), then they'll stick with you and keep generating the dopamine that gets them through their long blue collar day. All you need is a certain critical mass of these blue collar dopamine-driven to continue reproducing as 'proof of concept', and their fine tableau example will suck in other unfortunates, 'new ones' with elevated dopamine viewing such spiritual bliss, in order to sustain the cycle. "Keep in anticipation..." of some truly interesting new twist on present Truth. "Faith is the assured expectation of things unseen, the evident demonstration of realities not beheld." "Elevated dopmine is a result of anticipation of reward." - http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/8113/8113pittcon2.html White Dove- getting angry isn't all dark side. If you know the direction that you want to go with your years-till-life-expectancy, then plow your anger into it. There is so much to know and explore that the rate of discovery (mathematically, the slope or derivative) may be at times steep enough that it eclipses the lingering, unforgettable tragedy that was the JW experience. I say at times, because while I could be studying at this instant, I am at this moment admittedly indulging in schadenfreude, in that I delight to discovery what latest stupidity has been foisted upon the faithful, and whether or not they have fallen for it (again). Alternately, I try to cheer on those adult nontraditional students, who will reap more pure joy in unhindered exploration in a year than hardcore JWs will get in several.
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Did you start college before or after you left the WT?
by White Dove inok, "leaving" can be mental &/or physical leaving.. what time in your life did you start?.
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rmt1
Got a BA in English and Classics at 32yo. It was necessary to deprogram 25 years of JW bullshit, but there's no money in it. Tried a masters in history; it was riddled with too much narrative fiction (more bullshit); now working on hard science undergrad. It's a crime how much knowledge the JWs keep from trickling down to their adherents. The JWs are one big Myanmar cyclone.
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IF 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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rmt1
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.
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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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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.