the one constant in life.
there is only one significant constant in life and that constant is simply: we all die.
no matter how successful we become, we will die.
Great piece Farkel, as always
He tells us that little kids would play over the lair of the asp. So far this sounds like the plot in a typical Disney or Warner Bros. Cartoon
If the asp had hypnotic eyes and a rabbit in a dress whacked it full in the face with a frying pan then that's a paradise I wanna be in!
let's hear the weirdest comment or suppossed logical thought you've ever heard a witness say.. i'll start: out in service once a sis and her son were in the same car group as i was.
he was having a nose bleed and told his mom that the blood was running down the back of his throat.
his mother said " well don't swallow it yo uknow how jehovah feels about blood don't you!".
Brother: "If homosexuality was an accepted form of sexuality, we would see it in nature."
Actually homosexuality is seen in nature in apes, monkeys, giraffes, mice... in fact most species. Even plants have homosexual tendencies.
i stopped all jw activity on june 12, 1996. my 18th birthday.
i made arrangements to stay with some friends and they even lined me up a summer job.
i snuck out in the middle of the night and left my parents a note.
I've been out 3 years. It feels like 3 months though.. I wish it hadn't passed so fast.
let's hear the weirdest comment or suppossed logical thought you've ever heard a witness say.. i'll start: out in service once a sis and her son were in the same car group as i was.
he was having a nose bleed and told his mom that the blood was running down the back of his throat.
his mother said " well don't swallow it yo uknow how jehovah feels about blood don't you!".
I could fill a quarry with messed up logic that my family come out with if only you could materialise stupid.
I remember I was told not to eat red M&M's or Skittles cos they were made from cochineal (sp?) which was made from insect's blood or something.
I wasn't allowed to watch Scooby Doo (not that I wanted to) cos it usually had a haunted fairground or something similar in it. Screwy thing is it never turns out to be haunted but just the manager.
At Mayday we couldn't dance round the maypole but we could sit on it to steady it for the other kids. Turns out we were sitting on the representation of a giant phallus.
Recently I was watching who wants to be a millionaire with my grandma and the guy answered the £250,000 question (something about British history) she said 'Ohh, the demons must be whispering the answers to him'. I said 'Hold on, you got the answer right too. Are demons telling you the answers?'. Her reply was 'Well he's black, he wouldn't know stuff like that'. Absolutely priceless. I thought the ignorance of the first comment couldn't be topped but she trumped it with an awful racial slur.
My family still hold to the rule that 'everything is either angelic direction or demonic intervention'. That statement is verbatim what a CO once said from the platform and it served to galvanise their ignorance and paranoia.
does god exist?
camp one: yes!, camp two: no!.
were we created, or, evolved, or, both?
I understand your feelings exactly. The trouble is no-one has all the answers but I tend to disbelieve those who have a bias or ulterior motive for offering their resolutions. Some scientists have a bias but it's mainly religionists who are the main culprits. At least for a scientific hypothesis to be truly vindicated there has to be tangible proof but for a religious thought all that's needed is faith. Of course science has no real answers to a lot of things like life after death, the supernatural, how everything began etc.
It's hard to figure out where we figure personally in the grand scheme of things and whether we are just part of the cosmic cycle of life and death and we are no more important in the universe than an animal or a tree. Maybe it's egotistical to think so but we, the human race, seem to be worth more than that. Possibly is it's in our own hands to prove that and by having open enquiring minds the human race can move forward and learn more about what life and the universe is really all about.
I don't think the answer will come in my lifetime but I feel if I have lived a good honest life and have taken in as much knowledge as possible and made some accomplishments I can be proud of then I have done all I can do. Hopefully by many people doing the same and many doing more by reshaping knowledge and accomplishing much greater things we are always moving forward.
The trouble with religious promises is they are always reliant on personal salvation at the expense of others based on arbitrary rules. Maybe it's a togetherness and peacefulness of everyone that's needed to earn God's love. I don't know, I'm still working it all out like you are. At the moment I don't believe in God in the biblical sense but that maybe there is a higher intelligence. I believe that evolution on the whole is correct but beyond that going back to how the universe came into being or how life sprang up I'm not sure.
After being a JW it's incredibly difficult to let go of thoughts and promises that were so real to us for so long. I've been out about 3 years too the same as you and I'm thinking maybe we are in a settling down period. After having our world shook up when leaving the JW's we are in the process of finding our niche and can then re-evaluate our hopes and goals in life. I take consolation in the fact that I may not know where the road I'm on is taking me but it's better then the one I was on before.
I don't know if you've ever read any of Thomas Paine's writings but he expressed some of the issues you had in your post. The Age Of Reason is very interesting especially since he wrote it about 300 years ago. Here's a link if you wanted to have look -
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/index.shtml
I don't know what happened.. I voted for this guy -
Dirk Benedict I
Please laugh, it took me an hour to make it
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/2078050.stm
obituary: sir john mills
for nearly 70 years, sir john mills enjoyed a reputation as one of britain's finest actors.
Goodbye John
He was a fine actor and a real gent on and off screen. I always thought he was one of a handful of outstanding actors that made acting not look like acting, a real natural. I really hope the beeb show some of his old movies like Hobson's Choice (with the brilliant Charles Laughton and a very young and foxy Prunella Scales from Fawlty Towers), Ryan's daughter and Great Expectations.
The film you're thinking of Simon was Whistle Down The Wind. It did star Hayley Mills but not John Mills, the male lead fella was Alan Bates, another great actor imo. The rest of the cast of kids were normal children from a village in Lancashire and not actors. It's an absolute classic and is funny and poignant in equal measure.
new delhi, india - hopes of a potential nuclear conflict dimmed this weekend, after the leaders of india and pakistan confirmed that the peace process between their two nations was "irreversible".
"it seems as if both sides have just lost the will to fight," said one un observer, "they both have plentiful natural resources, there are many disagreements between the two cultures, and a rich history of animosity.
millennial religious groups around the world have met the news with disappointment.
Haha... first time I read it I thought it was a proper news article. It is the sort of thing dubs think though so it's not far from the truth.
well i can't recall now which public talks it was - one of my first - and it dealt with field service / preaching.
so i thought i would interview several people in the congregation about service and their thoughts and feelings on the subject, expecting something very different than what i got.
to my shock (i was an over zealous young buck who thought the sun rose and set on the wt) three sisters burst into tears as they told about their feelings of inadequacy and guilt over field service.
To me the whole point of 'field service' had been lost decades ago. It was outdated and unproductive. The idea of having pioneers working 40, 60, 90 hours a month preaching on territory that was being re-visited every 2 months or so by normal dubs seemed ludicrous. The idea of reaching and proselytising to people was secondary to a more personal salvation and the appearance of a super-spirituality among those who volunteered for the work. This isn't a criticism of those who pioneered, rather of those who made it seem that putting in those hours was required to please God and inability to fulfill the contract made them a failure.
It may seem like a jaded view of those who pioneered but I got the feeling that a lot of new recruits signed up to pioneer as they saw it as a way of appeasing God for their past misdemeanors in the 'world'. The truth was they were just following the orgs rules designed to flog more books and booklets. Of those more established in the congs like those who grew up in the org many just felt it was something they should do and if they didn't they'd be looked down on. Many who were so called 'spiritually weak' pioneered to keep themsleves busy and so avoid the temptations of the world.
For some love of God was a primary motivator but for many it was the idea of making more sure of their place in the 'new world'. Some of the tricks employed by pioneers to count time illustrate this, like the pioneer walk, driving or walking to outlying territory and counting the whole journey, talking to people informally at work maybe and right at the end of the conversation mentioning the witnesses and counting the whole time etc etc. I'm not saying it was wrong. I say fair play, I did it too. It must be admitted though that pioneering is done firstly to please men, secondly to feel good about yourself and thirdly to please God.
