yaddayadda

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Posts by yaddayadda

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  33

  A Search for Truth?

  by Rooster in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  a search for truth.

  c. t. russell was born in the united states, in allegheny (now part of pittsburgh), pennsylvania, on february 16, 1852. he was the second son of joseph l. and ann eliza (birney) russell, who were presbyterians of scottish-irish descent.

  charles mother died when he was only nine years old, but from an early age, charles was influenced by both of his religiously-minded parents.

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  yaddayadda

  certainly an occultist

  I know there is some evidence that suggests he was a Freemason, and he was certainly into pyramidology, but an occultist? Come on...
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  49

  What was "it" that opened your eyes?

  by jiggulz in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  like so many people, i'm (very carefully)trying to convey the obvious "truth" about the wtb&ts to some of the members of my family.

  is there any key point that "stands out" in your memory as pivotal in the opening of your eyes?

  or any particular point that may have opened the eyes of your loved ones?

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  yaddayadda

  TS, you havn't really made a lot of sense to me. When you boil it down evolution insists that ultimately everything developed from a huge explosion that came from basically nothing. And I see that you cannot be bothered offering a proper critical refutation of that article on genetic mutations that I posted.

  The ultimate 'cause' for evolutionists is the big bang, billions of years ago, triggered by something that evolutionists have no idea about. Evolutionists put their faith in a whole raft of things that are then said to have occurred over eons of time. Their God really is 'billions of years of time and blind chance'. Yet because God has been 'silent' in man's affairs for just a few millennia they conclude that therefore there is no God. They are quite willing to blindly put their faith in billions of years of time where matter and highly complex lifef orms are said to have developed from a giant explosion, yet they scoff at the idea of a God that communicated with humans just a couple of millennia ago. They have proven nothing in laboratories. Evolutionists like to imagine that their theory is falsifiable, but the reality is they have failed to do that. After decades and decades they have totally failed to provide even one proper example, either through the fossil record or produced in a laboratory of one species definitely change to another. They have so far completely failed to even come close to demonstrating that life can come from non-life. It's entirely just as 'unfalsifiable' as the belief that there must be some grand design or intelligence behind it all. And not everything is falsifiable, as you well know. When you feel appreciation for something beautiful, or feel love, can that be falsified in an experiment or lab? Obviously not, yet those feelings are very real to you. You know they exist.

  Here's the thing. Perhaps it is not the God of the bible per se that is our Creator, but ultimately it makes more sense to me to believe that something cannot come from nothing. And since the 'something' on this planet is just so incredibly complex and bears the hallmarks of design, then I am forced to believe that the great original 'cause', whatever it is, must exist.

  If I walk into an art gallery and see a painting, it matters not that I don't know a single thing about the painter or who he/she was, or when they lived, whether they were good or bad, whatever, it doesn't matter a jot. I am still forced to acknowledge that that painting was created. It had a designer. It is just the same with a belief in God. Perhaps who 'God' is, this ultimate 'cause', is really is just a mystery after all and the bible should not be taken quite so literally, but that doesn't change the fact that there must be some intelligence behind it all. It's just simple cause and effect.

  Both are ultimately articles of faith. It's just that belief in some kind of original intelligent design is a little bit less of an article of faith to me than belief in absolutely nothing.
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  33

  A Search for Truth?

  by Rooster in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  a search for truth.

  c. t. russell was born in the united states, in allegheny (now part of pittsburgh), pennsylvania, on february 16, 1852. he was the second son of joseph l. and ann eliza (birney) russell, who were presbyterians of scottish-irish descent.

  charles mother died when he was only nine years old, but from an early age, charles was influenced by both of his religiously-minded parents.

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  yaddayadda

  Agree with you Heathen. Russell et all discarded a lot of paganised teachings that are not in scripture, but at the same time kinda swapped them for a lot of speculative, presumptous prophesying, chronology and replacement theology.
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  14

  my son will be fighting pay for view

  by rekless in

  1. jw
  2. friends

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  just talked to my son seth walker and he has a king of the cage fight in october 2006 in reno, nevada.

  it will be a pay for view contract.. then the promoter is trying to get both seth and wesley a fight at the mgm in las vegas, nevada.. they both hold black belts in savate .

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  yaddayadda

  Ouch, pretty brutal career choice. Good luck to him. Will look out for his fight.
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  49

  What was "it" that opened your eyes?

  by jiggulz in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  like so many people, i'm (very carefully)trying to convey the obvious "truth" about the wtb&ts to some of the members of my family.

  is there any key point that "stands out" in your memory as pivotal in the opening of your eyes?

  or any particular point that may have opened the eyes of your loved ones?

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  yaddayadda

  TS, so that must make both creation and evolution nothing but unproved theories. Yet are are adamant that creation is an established fact.

  Yep it was from the answersingenesis website. I don't accept all of their views by any means, but there is a wealth of good stuff on there.

  You can't 'debunk' a website. You can only 'debunk' opinions and claims. I'll wait for you to provide information refuting the article on mutations that I pasted.
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  49

  What was "it" that opened your eyes?

  by jiggulz in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  like so many people, i'm (very carefully)trying to convey the obvious "truth" about the wtb&ts to some of the members of my family.

  is there any key point that "stands out" in your memory as pivotal in the opening of your eyes?

  or any particular point that may have opened the eyes of your loved ones?

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  2. 
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  yaddayadda

  I'll give more serious consideration to the theory of evolution the day that a scientist discovers just one indisputed example of a living thing changing into another living thing through it's genetic code gaining new information. On the contrary, all examples held up by evolutionists of beneficial mutation involve loss of genetic information or a switching of already-existing information. There are indeed examples of natural selection and mutation, but it never involves the acquisition of new genetic information, which is absolutely required for a new, permanent, beneficial function or feature to appear. There are only side-ways variations within a group that occasionally result from mutated genes that nearly always weaken the specie. This is a critical weak-link in the theory.

  Argument: Some mutations are beneficial

  Evolutionists say, ‘Mutations and other biological mechanisms have been observed to produce new features in organisms.’

  by Jonathan Sarfati, with Michael Matthews

  When they begin to talk about mutations, evolutionists tacitly acknowledge that natural selection, by itself, cannot explain the rise of new genetic information. Somehow they have to explain the introduction of completely new genetic instructions for feathers and other wonders that never existed in ‘simpler’ life forms. So they place their faith in mutations.

  In the process of defending mutations as a mechanism for creating new genetic code, they attack a straw-man version of the creationist model, and they have no answer for the creationists’ real scientific objections. Scientific American states this common straw-man position and their answer to it.

  10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

  On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism’s DNA)—bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example. [SA 82]

  This is a serious misstatement of the creationist argument. The issue is not new traits, but new genetic information. In no known case is antibiotic resistance the result of new information. There are several ways that an information loss can confer resistance, as already discussed. We have also pointed out in various ways how new traits, even helpful, adaptive traits, can arise through loss of genetic information (which is to be expected from mutations).

  Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae, and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow. [SA 82]

  Once again, there is no new information! Rather, a mutation in the hox gene (see next section) results in already-existing information being switched on in the wrong place. 1 The hox gene merely moved legs to the wrong place; it did not produce any of the information that actually constructs the legs, which in ants and bees include a wondrously complex mechanical and hydraulic mechanism that enables these insects to stick to surfaces. 2

  These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses. [SA 82]

  Amazing—natural selection can ‘test for possible uses’ of ‘non-functional’ (i.e., useless!) limbs in the wrong place. Such deformities would be active hindrances to survival.

  Gene switches: means of evolution?

  William Bateson (1861–1926), who added the word ‘genetics’ to our vocabulary in 1909, found that embryos sometimes grew body parts in the wrong place. From this he theorized that there are underlying controls of certain body parts, and other controls governing where they go.

  Ed Lewis investigated and won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for discovering a small set of genes that affect different body parts (Hox or Homeobox). They act like ‘architects of the body.’ Mutations in these can cause ‘dramatic’ changes. Many experiments have been performed on fruit flies (Drosophila), where poisons and radiation induced mutations.

  The problem is that they are always harmful. PBS 2 showed an extra pair of wings on a fly, but failed to mention that they were a hindrance to flying because there are no accompanying muscles. Both these flies would be eliminated by natural selection.

  Walter Gehring of the University of Basel (Switzerland) replaced a gene needed for eye development in a fruit fly with the corresponding gene from a mouse. The fly still developed normal fly eyes, i.e., compound eyes rather than lens/camera. This gene in both insects and mammals is called eyeless because absence of this gene means no eyes will form.

  However, there is obviously more to the differences between different animals. Eyeless is a switch—it turns on the genetic information needed for eyes. But evolution requires some way of generating the new information that’s to be switched on. The information needed to build a compound eye is vastly different from that needed to build a lens/camera type of eye. By analogy, the same switch on an electric outlet/power socket can turn on a light or a laptop, but this hardly proves that a light evolved into a laptop!

  All the same, the program says that eyeless is one of a small number of common genes used in the embryonic development of many animals. The program illustrated this with diagrams. Supposedly, all evolution needed to do was reshuffle packets of information into different combinations.

  But as shown, known mutations in these genes cause monstrosities, and different switches are very distinct from what is switched on or off. Also, the embryo develops into its basic body plan before these genes start switching—obviously they can’t be the cause of the plan before they are activated! But the common genes make perfect sense given the existence of a single Creator.

  Increased amounts of DNA don’t mean increased function

  Biologists have discovered a whole range of mechanisms that can cause radical changes in the amount of DNA possessed by an organism. Gene duplication, polyploidy, insertions, etc., do not help explain evolution, however. They represent an increase in amount of DNA, but not an increase in the amount of functional genetic information—these mechanisms create nothing new. Macroevolution needs new genes (for making feathers on reptiles, for example), yet Scientific American completely misses this simple distinction:

  Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism’s DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features. [SA 82]

  In plants, but not in animals (possibly with rare exceptions), the doubling of all the chromosomes may result in an individual which can no longer interbreed with the parent type—this is called polyploidy. Although this may technically be called a new species, because of the reproductive isolation, no new information has been produced, just repetitious doubling of existing information. If a malfunction in a printing press caused a book to be printed with every page doubled, it would not be more informative than the proper book. (Brave students of evolutionary professors might like to ask whether they would get extra marks for handing in two copies of the same assignment.)

  Duplication of a single chromosome is normally harmful, as in Down’s syndrome. Insertions are a very efficient way of completely destroying the functionality of existing genes. Biophysicist Dr Lee Spetner in his book Not By Chance analyzes examples of mutational changes that evolutionists have claimed to have been increases in information, and shows that they are actually examples of loss of specificity, which means they involved loss of information (which is to be expected from information theory).

  The evolutionist’s ‘gene duplication idea’ is that an existing gene may be doubled, and one copy does its normal work while the other copy is redundant and non-expressed. Therefore, it is free to mutate free of selection pressure (to get rid of it). However, such ‘neutral’ mutations are powerless to produce new genuine information. Dawkins and others point out that natural selection is the only possible naturalistic explanation for the immense design in nature (not a good one, as Spetner and others have shown). Dawkins and others propose that random changes produce a new function, then this redundant gene becomes expressed somehow and is fine-tuned under the natural selective process.

  This ‘idea’ is just a lot of hand-waving. It relies on a chance copying event, genes somehow being switched off, randomly mutating to something approximating a new function, then being switched on again so natural selection can tune it.

  Furthermore, mutations do not occur in just the duplicated gene; they occur throughout the genome. Consequently, all the deleterious mutations in the rest of the genome have to be eliminated by the death of the unfit. Selective mutations in the target duplicate gene are extremely rare—it might represent only 1 part in 30,000 of the genome of an animal. The larger the genome, the bigger the problem, because the larger the genome, the lower the mutation rate that the creature can sustain without error catastrophe; as a result, it takes even longer for any mutation to occur, let alone a desirable one, in the duplicated gene. There just has not been enough time for such a naturalistic process to account for the amount of genetic information that we see in living things.

  Dawkins and others have recognized that the ‘information space’ possible within just one gene is so huge that random changes without some guiding force could never come up with a new function. There could never be enough ‘experiments’ (mutating generations of organisms) to find anything useful by such a process. Note that an average gene of 1,000 base pairs represents 4 1000 possibilities—that is 10 602 (compare this with the number of atoms in the universe estimated at ‘only’ 10 80 ). If every atom in the universe represented an ‘experiment’ every millisecond for the supposed 15 billion years of the universe, this could only try a maximum 10 100 of the possibilities for the gene. So such a ‘neutral’ process cannot possibly find any sequence with specificity (usefulness), even allowing for the fact that more than just one sequence may be functional to some extent.

  So Dawkins and company have the same problem as the advocates of neutral selection theory. Increasing knowledge of the molecular basis of biological functions has exploded the known ‘information space’ so that mutations and natural selection—with or without gene duplication, or any other known natural process—cannot account for the irreducibly complex nature of living systems.

  Yet Scientific American has the impertinence to claim:

  Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this [duplication of genes] is how the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years. [SA 82]

  This is about the vital red blood pigment hemoglobin that carries the oxygen. It has four polypeptide chains and iron. Evolutionists believe that this evolved from an oxygen-carrying iron-containing protein called myoglobin found in muscles, which has only one polypeptide chain. However, there is no demonstration that gene duplication plus natural selection turned the one-chained myoglobin into the four-chained hemoglobin. Nor is there any adequate explanation of how the hypothetical intermediates would have had selective advantages.

  In fact, the proposed evolution of hemoglobin is far more complicated than Scientific American implies, though it requires a little advanced biology to understand. The a- and ß-globin chains are encoded on genes on different chromosomes, so they are expressed independently. This expression must be controlled precisely, otherwise various types of anemia called thalassemia result. Also, there is an essential protein called AHSP (alpha hemoglobin stabilizing protein) which, as the name implies, stabilizes the a-chain, and also brings it to the ß-chain. Otherwise the a-chain would precipitate and damage the red blood cells.

  AHSP is one of many examples of a class of protein called chaperones which govern the folding of other proteins. 3 This is yet another problem for chemical evolutionary theories—how did the first proteins fold correctly without chaperones? And since chaperones themselves are complex proteins, how did they fold? 4

  Identifying information-increasing mutations may be a small part of the whole evolutionary discussion, but it is a critical ‘weak link’ in the logical chain. PBS, Scientific American, and every other pro-evolution propaganda machine have failed to identify any evidence that might strengthen this straw link.
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  49

  What was "it" that opened your eyes?

  by jiggulz in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  like so many people, i'm (very carefully)trying to convey the obvious "truth" about the wtb&ts to some of the members of my family.

  is there any key point that "stands out" in your memory as pivotal in the opening of your eyes?

  or any particular point that may have opened the eyes of your loved ones?

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  yaddayadda

  Silentwatcher, I'm puzzled how discovering that the 1914 thing was a crock made you completely stop believing in God, the afterlife, etc. Would be really interested in your expanding on the logic behind that.
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  21

  Jehovah's Witnesses

  by Honesty in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  are they being spiritually abused by the watchtower society?

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  yaddayadda

  I think to say that the only ones doing the abuse are witnesses abusing each other is similar to saying that no one is stumbled from being a JW unless they 'let' themselves be stumbled. JW's may sincerely believe that are doing what they do purely because of their own free will, but that cannot possibly be the case when they are so thoroughly information-restricted, brain-washed, and mentally controlled by their leaders, historically and currently? The average JW is in many ways a victim of a propagandized, high-control, brain-washed belief system in the same way as those in more extreme examples, eg, Jim Jones, Moonies, Nazi's, Satanists, or whatever. You could argue that the person who allows themselves to become so controlled is responsible for their own abuse, but they are still an unfortunate victim of an insidious process that has stacked the odds against them. Often it can be put down to nothing more than who we are born to and the beliefs we inherit from our parents.
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  18

  Are Jehovah's Witnesses....

  by Honesty in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  victims of an evil group of men masquerading as the voice of god?

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  yaddayadda

  
  That's very interesting Confession. Reading that GB scenario is disturbingly similar to portions of Ray Franz's books wherein he recalls comments and the general direction of certain GB meetings that he kept records of. I found those the most fascinating parts of Ray's books. They were so enlightening as to the kind of group-think forces at work on the GB. For example, we learned via Ray Franz that there were always a few dominant ones at every meeting, that there were certain 'camps' of loyalty to these dominant ones, that some GB members were basically passive, silent at every meeting, offering no real input, that discussion of important issues was often, personality-based, whimsical, unstructured, desultory. Important points and facts were often entirely glossed over or ignored.

  Ray Franz stood out like a shining light in his desire to see things considered in a more thorough, systematic, patient way. The lack of any real approach by the GB that incorporates proper critical reasoning and research methodology is quite staggering. The most they seem to do is to commission certain persons, (like Ray Franz for instance), to go away and do a whole pile of research on something, yet when the findings of that research are presented, basically just rationalise it away if it flies in the face of a currently accepted interpretation or policy.
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  20

  I just got promoted.... Again!

  by ColdRedRain in

  1. jw
  2. friends

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  hey, i thought i'd just share this with you guys.

  this is a picture of me at my green belt ceremony.. .

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  yaddayadda

  Yep that's true ColdRedRain. You need a balance between stand up and ground. A good raining combo for UFC type fighting is BJJ/ sub wrestling, boxing, and kick-boxing. The thing though is that a stand-up fighter may sometimes get lucky with a sucker punch like Royce got that time, but if the other guy wants to take the fight to the ground it is almost impossible to stop him. Once a great ground fighter has you down there, which is easy for someone to do from a wrestling or shoot-fighting background, you are stuffed.