http://www.objectivistcenter.org/showcontent.aspx?ct=384&h=51
even though you can live forever, you do not have immortality; it is still possible for you to die, should you have a fall from grace.
also, they bring answers to the most asked questions: "why do bad things happen to good people?
Interesting article. Thanks for posting it. People's Bethel experiences fascinate me as it's often coupled with a disillusionment with what goes on there.
I think when the article says 'at the top of the organisation' it's referring to Bethel as a whole as it's the headquaters where decisions are made and not to him personally.
i read in your profile where you state that evolution is the reason for your leaving the organization.
that's interesting.
care to elaborate and does this mean you no longer (if you ever did) subscribe to a belief in creationism?.
Hope you don't mind me jumping in on the party but I have the same viewpoints as Sickoflies.
I have read some of Prof Flews literature, both when he was an atheist and subsequent theist. His arguments for a 'prime mover' or 'first cause' type of creator aren't anything new and have been postulated by the ID community for a while. I have a hard time accepting his viewpoints as there's very little science in his ideas and they're mostly of the philosophical kind and his understanding of evolutionary science is outdated.
It was big news when Prof Flew changed his atheist views to some sort of theist theory but it must be remembered that he isn't a scientist, he's a philospher.
Here's a bit of discourse about Flew by Richard Carrier-
friday, march 17, 2006
autum ashante: child prodigy or something else?
in new york city, a seven-year old african-american girl named autum ashante has stirred-up
I agree totally with what you said Sunnygal. Young Autum is obviously an intelligent kid and when she's a bit older will hopefully figure out historical fact from parental half-facts.
with the memorial coming up (and all of you attending of course, haha) i wanted to post a topic that's been bugging me for quite a while:
ok, we were all taught that the last supper coincided with the passover, which was required by jews to celebrate annually.
however, i've got a couple of questions on this:
IMO the whole story of the last supper is apocryphal. Apart from the points already put forward against the story there were pagan cults which had been around for hundreds of years which memorialised a saviour son of God's death by eating bread for the flesh and wine for the blood. This and many other gospel stories were probably added to make them more palatable to the largely pagan Roman world as it was slowly turned toward christianity.
As has been mentioned the freeing of a prisoner by the Roman authorities is totally untrue. It's thought that the story originally was that the Jewish crowds wanted Jesus himself freed. This was later changed to two seperate people - Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas. The fact is Barabbas isn't a proper name and was never used as such. The derivation is of it is Son of the Father. The text was changed by christians to make it better accepted by the Roman authorities as Pilate comes out of it in a fairly good light in contrast to the Jews who are portrayed as a blood thirsty mob.
Sickoflies, I'd like to know which Roman documents prove that Jesus was killed on Nisan 14. As far as I knew there are no contemporary documents from that time that even acknowledge Jesus existence. The first mention of a Jesus Christ apart from the gospels is by Josephus.
do you think the wts is behaving like a religion or like a commercial enterprise (operation) that is aping religion in order to derive profit out of it?
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i see them as a business whose imitation of religion is so inept that it can easily be detected.
They're just carrying on a long tradition of religious heirachies. From the earliest pagan cultures, including the hebrews, the priestly classes kept the community in fear of the god's wrath, which only they could placate because of their special mystical relationship. If you greased their palm and brought your best animal for sacrifice (which was subsequently their supper) they'd put in a good word for you. They held your salvation and your pocket book in their hands.
In France... They have to pay lots of taxes and are denied the status of religion altogether
Yeah they've been having a hard time in France
That's why UK Bethel has been printing all the books & mags for them. For all the French govnmt's faults they seem to have seen through the WTS facade so kudos to them.
you only have to read the bible a small amount, to know that god does not always put his people in good situations.
sometimes he even allowed his people to be put into slavery, to make them see a lesson he wanted them to know.
so with this in mind, i am always amazed at how people in modern christian religions, always label the good in their life as god helping them and yet ignore the fact that their god might be the one who caused the problem in the first place.
Yeah, as Scully says it's a form of superstition. Like a CO once said at my cong "everything that happens in life is either down to angelic direction or demonic inervention". Apart from the obvious meaning you can catch the insinuation that bad things are Satan's doing and most good things down to God.
It really winds me up when athletes, singers, actors etc thank God for any success they achieve in their respective professions and then on the other hand people curse God for sending earthquakes, floods etc. As if God could give a crap about getting a semi-talented warbler a grammy rather than saving thousands of lives
I'll give you good bets that the first words to come out of the Pop Idol winners mouth will be a thankyou to God. Maybe God was so busy watching Pop Idol he forgot about Christian worker Norman Kember in Iraq and he ended up getting kidnapped.
Thank God I'm an athiest.
oh you bloody apostates have gone too far this time!out of sheer disgust i have had to start a new thread to readress the damage done to some perfectly good films.i will not mention names but by the film titles you will know who you are... blair witch project(unique and started a 100 different parodies) van helsing(vampires,werewolves,frakenstein etc..what do you people want) fargo(no comment needed......arghh...the wood chipper scene....) the last samaurai(2 hours of quality entertainment) kill bill vol 1(quentin is a genius) basketball(these boys can do no wrong) american physco(fan-bloody-tastic) vanilla sky (gripping) the ring(one of the scariest films ever made) and.... and..... and....
showgirls!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(jesus wept,what is wrong with you people..i mean..you see everything!
Well Showgirls was my choice for the worst film ever... but it is one of those that's so bad it's good. The sex scene in the swimming pool is hilarious, it was like the dude was shagging an epileptic dolphin.
American Psycho and Fargo are two of my fave films too. Each actors perormance in Fargo was excellent especially William H Macy and Patrick Bateman is Christian Bales' best role to date imo.
well, i went ahead and killed my laptop.
unfortunatly i didn't use a shotgun or a assault rifle, i used a .45 automatic pistoli .
its not as dramtic as i had hoped but its still felt really good killing that thing.
Haha, excellent
The ultimate stress buster! Shooting the crap outta your laptop. Love it.
"if you can't do da time don't do the crime".
former church elder denied parole montana standard - 2 hours, 35 minutes agoanaconda parole was denied wednesday for a former jehovahs witness church elder convicted of fleecing more than $7 million from a 100-year-old deer lodge womans trust estate.
former church elder denied parole man convicted in 2003 for bilking elderly deer lodge woman out of $7 millionby vera haffey - 03/24/2006.
Interesting case. I wouldn't like to be witnessing in that neighbourhood after that story hit the press, I bet they got some real stick
The amount of money paid back is appalling. Can't the court seize their assets? Surely they can't have squandered $7 million.
what was the first ever computer that you owned?
no doubt some here had some of the earliest home computers that came out such as the commodore 64. .
i bought my first one relatively late in 1997, it had cpu 200 mhz mmx, 2.3gb hard disk, 64mb ram, 2mb graphics card, modem 36k.
Another Atari VCS 2600 fan here. I had the commodore 64 too. Learnt quite a lot of programming on the C64 cos one of the guys in my cousins congregation worked for Alternative Software which were quite well known for games back in the day. Think they got bought out by Ocean software in the end. Anyway he used to teach us how to program BASIC and the C64's native machine code.
I also had one of these -
I've just spent 30 mins trying to find out what it was called cos I couldn't remember. It was an Atari XEGS. I wish I'd have kept it now cos they're pretty rare.
BTW I didn't have a gun with mine
