There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy
Big Dog
JoinedPosts by Big Dog
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543
Encouraging scriptures for the day
by Kosonen inhello my friends,.
here are some encouraging scriptures for the day:.
revelation 21:2 i also saw the holy city, new jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from god and prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.. hebrews 11:10 for he (abraham) was awaiting the city having real foundations, whose designer and builder is god.. revelation 21:24 and the nations will walk by means of its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.. revelation 22:1 and he showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal, flowing out from the throne of god and of the lamb 2 down the middle of its main street (of the holy city).
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Big Dog
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My goodness! Fourteen years since I began posting here...
by garyneal ini'm not sure if anyone remembers me since i do not post here much anymore.
i sometimes pop in around christmas time to see if anyone is interested in exchanging christmas cards like we used to back when i first posted on this site.
speaking of which, the holiday season will soon be upon us.. if you recall, i was married to a jehovah's witness and i had a daughter i spoke of a lot.
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Big Dog
Hello Gary, I have stopped by myself after a 15-year hiatus from posting for a return visit. I think I had already left by the time you arrived. I came back by because someone I never thought would wake up from the Borg did and it got me to thinking about all of us who passed through this site and I wondered if they might be here right now, the same place I was 19 years ago.
It has been interesting to see what has changed and what remains the same and for sure the soul sucking, life hating and fun adverse mindset that the Borg wears like a badge of honor is tough to shake but given enough time it's possible.
Best wishes for a satisfactory outcome on your personal issues.
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Big Dog
Ron W, what it means is that you can have a church that is not an organized legal entity. You set up a pulpit and start preaching and you are a DeFacto church. When a church wants to be officially recognized as a not for profit the IRS they will form a not-for-profit corporation and then apply to the IRS for not-for-profit status.
What the WTBS did was simply remove the "church" element from the corporate entity. This was accomplished by resolutions and consents filed in the corporation so that that religious arm is stand alone and the publishing arm is a separate legal entity. Outwardly not much of an effect and almost no one would notice, but for certain legal and tax purposes a significant distinction.
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Big Dog
The annual meeting is actually a legal requirement for both for profit and not for profit corporations. Under Section 519 of the New York not for profit code:
According to Section 519 of the New York Not-for-Profit Corporation Law, not-for-profit corporations in New York are required to present an annual report of directors at the annual meeting of members1. This report should be verified by the president and treasurer or a majority of the directors, or certified by an independent public or certified public accountant or a firm of such accountants selected by the board1. The report should include details such as the assets and liabilities of the corporation, revenue or receipts, expenses or disbursements, and the number of members1. The annual report of directors should be filed with the records of the corporation and entered in the minutes of the proceedings of the annual meeting1.
It's interesting how they always turned this into a "religious" event. Making announcements about how the borg had grown, new book releases or doctrine changes etc when at its root it's a house keeping meeting where the tax returns and financial statements from the previous fiscal year are reviewed and ratified.
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JW.ORG Needs Lawyers
by Vanderhoven7 injehovah's witnesses are not encouraging university education... but those who are lawyers already can apply to volunteer to help at bethel.. https://youtu.be/5d_-1lbg-oc?si=fsxeewic-fkczu9p.
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Big Dog
Send lawyers, guns and money.
I remember as a child asking my parents, wouldn't it make sense for JW's to go to college, that way you could have talent, lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc., that were born in the faith rather than converts? I was told, no, born in are the lucky ones, we get to be paupers and preach, when God needs talent, he'll import it. One of those things that just made no sense to me.
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break time for me
by purplesofa ini am going to try to live without needing the board so much for awhile.
the only reason i am saying anything is that i am horrible at sending pm's, emails, etc.
and i dont want people to wonder in the back of their mind where i am, if all is ok.. i am tired all the time and i just want to see what my life can be like not in constant thought about the jw world running through my brain.. i will wonder how everyone is doing and would welcome emails.
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Big Dog
I heard through the grapevine that the Purps was making an exit so I had to come out of semi-retirement to wish her all the best.
Here's to you Purps, one of the finest people I have had the pleasure of knowing.
Love you long time.
xoxox
BD
ps. See you in Venice.
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WHO IS THE INJURED PARTY? What is wrong with this doctrine?
by Terry inwho was the injured party?
in the garden of eden when both adam and his wife, eve rebelled against instructions from their landlord, jehovah.. "in the day you eat of it (the fruit) you shall surely die.".
adam and eve ate of it.
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Big Dog
The question is moot, God has Sovereign Immunity.
Case dismissed.
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The God Delusion
by XU inlet's not turn this into an argument thread over religion vs. atheism, ok?
i just bought the book and it's really refreshing to read his thoughts.
i need a dictionary though because his vocab range is broader than mine.
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Big Dog
Some review blurbs regarding the book.
- "He is spectacularly inept when it comes to the traditional philosophical arguments for God, such as the cosmological, the ontological and the arguments from design. (...) Dawkins is so dismissive and often so skewed or superficial that he doesn't make much contact with Christians like me. Real challenges to theism certainly exist, but he tends to skate over the top. He is at his best and most likeable when his deep love for science and enthusiasm for sharing it, his evangelical zeal, I'm tempted to say, come to the fore." - Barney Zwartz, The Age
- "Mr Dawkins is an atheist, an evolutionary biologist and an eloquent communicator about science, three passions that have allowed him to construct a particularly comprehensive case against religion. Everyone should read it. Atheists will love Mr Dawkins's incisive logic and rapier wit and theists will find few better tests of the robustness of their faith. Even agnostics, who claim to have no opinion on God, may be persuaded that their position is an untenable waffle." - The Economist
- "In The God Delusion, in lively, even provocative style, Dawkins sets out to demolish God; to assess the costs of religion and the evils to which it can be put; and to re-orient the debate on the whys and wherefores of life and humans within it. This is not a wholly destructive enterprise. (...) The God Delusion is a fascinating book, designed to tease as well as please. It is written in more than one style. (...) Both are expressed in sparkling language, which makes the book not only a pleasure to read but also a stimulus to thinking across this widest of spectrums." - Crispin Tickell, Financial Times
- "It is a spirited and exhilarating read. In the current climate of papal/Islamic stand-off, it is timely too. There is no hesitancy or doubt here. Dawkins comes roaring forth in the full vigour of his powerful arguments, laying into fallacies and false doctrines with the energy of the polemicist at his most fiery. (...) This book is a clarion call to cower no longer. Primed by anger, redeemed by humour, it will, I trust, offend many." - Joan Bakewell, The Guardian
- "Dawkins does not admit sympathy for believers, or acknowledge the extent to which religion may constitute their sense of identity. He disregards the risk that attacking a people's religion may amount to an attack on them as a group. Some comments and quotes in this respect are reckless. The most shocking quotes, though, are all from the Bible. His greatest polemical asset is having that particular God on his side." - Marek Kohn, The Independent
- "That I must give a howling boo to much of The God Delusion is a recommendation. Again and again, it forces the reader to ardent thought. (...) As a critic of faith, Dawkins is thus pretty lame; as the bard of materialist myth, his only rival is Philip Pullman." - Murrough O'Brien, Independent on Sunday
- "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. (...) As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it. (...) There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann." - Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books
- "(A) very uneven collection of scriptural ridicule, amateur philosophy, historical and contemporary horror stories, anthropological speculations, and cosmological scientific argument." - Thomas Nagel, The New Republic
- "In spite of the evidence that holding religious belief has become part of human nature through natural selection, Dawkins looks upon it as superfluous and the root of much violent evil. But however clever his reasoning (and it is clever), The God Delusion sounds like a personal vendetta, complete with elitist undertones and some uncomfortably dictatorial passages. In the preface, he expresses the hope that religious readers who open the book will be atheists when they put it down. That is academic arrogance -- and shows negligible insight into the way humans behave." - Margaret Cook, New Statesman
- "Dawkins is, of course, quite right to express horror at Biblical fundamentalism, especially in the neocon form that centres on the book of Revelation. But it is not possible to attack this target properly while also conducting a wider, cluster-bomb onslaught on everything that can be called religion. Since this particular bad form of religion is spreading rapidly in the world, we urgently need to understand it: not just to denounce it but to grasp much better than we do now why people find it attractive. It is not enough to say, as Dawkins does, that they are being childish." - Mary Midgley, New Scientist
- "Here he has marshaled his full case against the existence of God, and the result is compelling, fairly familiar and often entertaining.(...) (U)ltimately, he makes an interesting case for dumping our "overweening respect for religion" and demanding that religious people justify their faith." - Emily Bobrow, The New York Observer
- "What Dawkins brings to this approach is a couple of fresh arguments -- no mean achievement, considering how thoroughly these issues have been debated over the centuries -- and a great deal of passion. The book fairly crackles with brio. Yet reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie. There is lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes, but the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy. (...) Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins’s failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience." - Jim Holt, The New York Times Book Review
- "Dawkins' tone ranges narrowly from strident to snide. (...) Dawkins is deluding himself if he thinks The God Delusion would impress any reasonably informed theist. He seems completely unaware, for example, of the works of the great mystics, or of seminal works such as Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy. His characterization of God and religion amounts to caricature." - Frank Wilson, The Philadelphia Inquirer
- "It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad ? Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory, it has none of the style or verve of his earlier works." - Andrew Brown, Prospect
- "The God Delusion is a fine and significant book, and this is largely due to Dawkins' willingness to employ the sharp edges of his intellect to cut through a paralyzing propriety whose main effect is to stifle conversations -- about religion, about intellectual responsibility, about politics -- that we very much need, at this particular moment in our history, to be having. (...) Dawkins is at his best in his exposure of one of the big lies of our time: the claim that there is simply no conflict between religion and science. (...) Indeed, it should be said that while it deals with matters of the utmost gravity and urgency, The God Delusion, particularly in its early chapters, is a very funny book." - Troy Jollimore, San Francisco Chronicle
- "Richard Dawkins' new book about religion is unapologetically Benthamite in approach, and consequently is long on contempt (though it is rarely good-humoured). It is also sophomoric, repetitive and, on occasion, startlingly poorly written (.....) Dawkins is both sublimely indifferent to what a religious conception of human beings actually involves and altogether more confident than most moral philosophers are that secular sense can easily be made of the idea that every individual human being is precious." - Jonathan Derbyshire, Scotland on Sunday
- "But it's not anger that fuels this work. If anything, it's exasperation, the frustration of a man who sees himself directing people to their own noses. And a surprising and controversial thing about The God Delusion is that fanatical religion is not its target, though he does spend time imagining a world without it. Dawkins rejects all belief in the supernatural, even at its mildest. (...) The God Delusion is unevenly weighted, often repetitive and less eloquent than Dawkins's previous works. But that doesn't mean it fails. It takes flight when he moves beyond the yes/no argument about God to explain why evolution has created an abundance of religion." - Jon Casimir, Sydney Morning Herald
- "Exasperation is the dominant note: it irritates our author beyond endurance that religion is so often given a respectful hearing. And theology infuriates him even more. (...) Despite the hyped-up praise on the dustjacket ("my favourite book of all time"; "a heroic and life-changing book"), this is a deeply disappointing effort, when compared, for example, with Dawkins' brilliant earlier work, The Selfish Gene. Some of the earlier energy and ebullience remains, but the book is too hectoring, too insistent, too one-sided, and too irritable to change the views, let alone the life, of any fair-minded reader." - John Cottingham, The Tablet
- "Dawkins is Britain's most famous atheist and in The God Delusion he gives eloquent vent to his uncompromising views. (...) The moral of the story is that if you want an understanding of evolution or an argument for atheism, there are few better guides than Richard Dawkins. But treat with extreme caution the pronouncements of any one who takes his political cue from an ex-Beatle." - Kenan Malik, The Telegraph
- "I'm in awe of Dawkins, and of the ease with which he makes tricky science clear, but I'll eat my Sunday hat if this book persuades even the most hesitant half-believer to renounce religion -- not because he fails to make his case, but because to defeat an enemy you have first to understand it, and Dawkins is just too baffled and disgusted by faith even to try to see its point." - Mary Wakefield, The Telegraph
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Why is it considered so wrong to be anti-religious or aggressively atheist?
by nicolaou ini'm not talking about the simple belief that there is no god and that religion is a brake on the development of humanity but the aggressive and vocal campaign to convince others of such?.
what's wrong with that?
why do believers feel so offended when i try to reason with them on the invalidity of their faith and the abusive nature of religious institutions?
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Big Dog
The sickness of secularism
The threat to tolerance and coexistence no longer comes from religion.
Soumaya Ghannoushi
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October 31, 2006 04:57 PM | Printable version
We are witnessing the rise of an arrogant secularist rhetoric founded on belief in the supremacy of reason and absolute faith in science and progress, dogmas which arouse ridicule in serious academic and intellectual circles nowadays. Hearing its proponents defend their rigid notions, you would be forgiven for thinking you were in the presence of the fathers of positivism: Auguste Comte, Diderot, or Condorcet, or that you were back in the Victorian and Napoleonic eras with their high hopes of remaking the world and human destiny in light of the utopias of reason and progress.
These high priests of rationality, who in Britain include in their ranks such names as Richard Dawkins and Anthony Grayling have erected a world of dichotomies, borders and fences: secular v religious, rationality v superstition, progress v backwardness, public v private. This simplistic worldview fails to take account of the complexity of cultural and historical processes, or of intellectual and human phenomena.
"Reason" itself, whose praises they sing night and day, is a perpetually changing mixture of many overlapping elements. It is neither abstract, nor intentional and does not confront the rich, labyrinthine human world as its other. It is quintessentially imbedded therein, in its emotions, languages, historical experiences, religious traditions and cultural heritage. There is no such thing as an ahistoric reason.
This means that we do not have one but many rationalities, the Christian European, the Islamic, the Chinese, the Indian to name a few, each stamped by the specific conditions of its evolution, and in turn incorporating a multitude of sub-rationalities. Neither do these traditions of rationality exist isolated from each other. They have much in common, the product of the interactive and communicative activity of cultures.
Aristotle's logos, Descartes' intellect and Kant's transcendental reason, are illusions, which no self-respecting thinker can afford to defend in the 21st century. The truth is that today's self- proclaimed guardians of enlightenment and rationality are offshoots of the intellectual poverty of eighteenth century positivism and scienticism, who disfigure philosophy and thought, history and reality. They are the victims of what may be referred to as a sick secularist consciousness.
These contrast reason's absolute virtue with the evil of a straw man they have christened religion: a pack of superstitions, fairytales, demons, and angels, which intervene in the world only to corrupt and destroy it. They fail to realize that just as there are different species of secularism - the intolerant and the dogmatic (such as theirs), the open and the tolerant - there exist multiple forms of religion. Religion can be legalistic, spiritual, Gnostic, rationalized, conservative, innovative, quietist, reactionary, moderate and radical. These many expressions do not exclude one another but may be present in the same type of religiosity. An example of such intricate overlapping is the great Muslim thinker Abu Hamid al-Gazali (d. 1111), who was at once a brilliant jurist, philosopher, theologian, and mystic.
Just as they simplify the breathtakingly complex phenomenon that is the human being, these missionaries of secularism impoverish the social order, filling it with sacred boundaries between the private and the public, and strictly laying down what may and may not be practiced in each. You may indulge in your religious "superstitions" behind the thick closed doors of your home, church, temple, or mosque. But the moment you step outside into the light of the secular sphere, you must discard your cross, turban, or headscarf. Communication, they insist, is only possible within uniformity. Such was the argument used in France to ban the Islamic headscarf in schools and government offices last year, and which is gaining currency in Britain today.
What these ignore, willingly or naively, is that unless you suffer from schizophrenia, everything in your cognitive universe is interlinked and forms part of a single coherent whole through which you make sense of the world, its components and what takes place therein. There is a difference between recognizing the sanctity of the private and transforming it into a high fenced prison cut off from the rhythm of public life. A measure of the dynamism of a public sphere is its ability to incorporate multiple modes of expression and forms of life. If the radically secularist have a problem communicating with those who dress or speak differently from themselves, it is their problem and a symptom of their exclusionist dogmatism. It is not the problem of the religious.
Secularist dogmatism is no less dangerous than its religious sibling. Secularism itself can be, and indeed has been in many historical instances, highly destructive. We should remember that Europe's modern history is scarred with the brutality of secular totalitarianism. Neither the Jacobites, fascists, Nazis or Stalinists were priests or theologians. They were fanatical secularists who worshipped in reason's grand temple and sacrificed hundreds of thousands for the god of progress, fervently vowing to create a new man and a new world on the ruins of the old.
With the retreat of Christianity and shrinking of the ecclesiastical institution in Western Europe, the threat to tolerance and coexistence no longer comes from religion. What we should be dreading today is the tyranny of an arrogant secularism which hides its exclusionist and intolerant face behind the sublime mask of reason, enlightenment and progress. -
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The God Delusion
by Peppermint inold dawkins is on the rampage again.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/5372458.stm.
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Big Dog
Do you think Dawkins is the one strapping bombs on his chest and blowing up civillians, assassinating abortion doctors or trying to prevent the teaching of scientific facts in public schools in the name of some fictional deity? Give yourself a reality check.
I always have to chuckle at these kinds of threads where religion is so demonized and science is praised to the hilt. Yes I appreciate what science has given us in terms of quality of life etc. but many seem to forget science has its own darkside. The chemical explosives these that these guys strap on were developed by chemists somewhere, and let's not forget those wonderful chaps in the white lab coats that gave us biological weapons, sarin gas, ICBM's, etc. I have often wondered how a scientist who works on developing a virus that will indiscriminately kill every man, woman and child it is loosed upon rationalizes that is a higher use of science and his vast intellect, how does he sleep at night?