I'm sending out for pizza....anybody else got the munchies?
Posts by TopHat
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39How long would it take? (Physics question, sort of. Maybe)
by AlmostAtheist inlet's say i've got a length of solid material that is one light year long.
it's just hanging there in space, between galaxies, not affected by gravity enough at any point along its length to be twisted, bent, whatever.
let's also say that it is resistent to flexing.. i'm at one end of this impossibly-existing rod, and you are at the other.
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61
A reminder for Witnesses who deny this
by gumby inhere's a precious little gem for jehovahs witnesses who deny what their organisation really teaches.. when they are directly asked..." do you believe your the only ones who will be saved"?
they try and wiggle out of it with some vague, obscure answer.
below is what they really believe.. watchtower 1989 september 1 p. 19 remaining organized for survival into the millennium .
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TopHat
I am thinking: Could the WTS and GB be the one that puts it's self above God?
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24
WHAT ARE SOME TITLES YOU COULD SEE IN THE WT?
by stillAwitness intitles you could see in a wt/awake magazine:
1. candy-can it detract us from true worship?
2. rape victims-you are now allowed to scream again!
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TopHat
Greed: Is it really a bad thing after-all
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37
Holy Crap! Star Trek's Sulu is gay!
by Elsewhere inlooks like lots of people are "coming out" right now.... http://www.cnn.com/2005/showbiz/tv/10/28/people.georgetakei.ap/index.htmlgeorge takei, 'trek's' sulu: i'm gay.
los angeles, california (ap) -- george takei, who as "star trek's" sulu was part of the starship enterprise crew through three television seasons and six movies, has come out as a homosexual in the current issue of frontiers, a biweekly los angeles magazine covering the gay and lesbian community.. takei told the associated press on thursday that his new onstage role as psychologist martin dysart in "equus," helped inspire him to publicly discuss his sexuality.. takei described the character as a "very contained but turbulently frustrated man.
" the play opened wednesday at the david henry hwang theater in los angeles, the same day that frontiers magazine featured a story on takei's coming out.. the current social and political climate also motivated takei's disclosure, he said.. "the world has changed from when i was a young teen feeling ashamed for being gay," he said.
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TopHat
At first I thought I read "SuLU is Gray" Like gray hair!
I need new glasses
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54
Skirting the issue
by Virgogirl inwhat argument is put forth that women must only wear dresses or skirts to the meetings or in service and are not permitted to wear slacks?
where does it say it's wrong for sisters to wear pants, and how are they convincing women in 2005 to buy into this?
i remember many bitterly cold chicago mornings with frozen legs running to doors and back to the warm car as quickly as possible, wearing a skirt which was ridiculous and inappropriate to the weather conditions.
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TopHat
Men would look rather womanly in my pants suits
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25
November is WTS Fundraising Month
by Severus indeep a bit deeper friends:
this is from the kingdom ministry november 2005 "service meeting schedule".
fundraising starts early during the week of 14 november:
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TopHat
Why do they need money anyways, if the end is coming any minute?
"soon now" I assume WTS will not need money in the New System? That's the little note all should put in the donation box!
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22
anyone else write anti J-DUB poetry????
by theinfamousone inmy mom found this one and flipped..... .
benevolently greedy.. ridiculously wise.. unfortunately lucky.. painfully happy.. stupidly smart.. a contradiction in terms;.
blind,.
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TopHat
***HIGH FIVES** TO ALL....very talented bunch you are!
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22
anyone else write anti J-DUB poetry????
by theinfamousone inmy mom found this one and flipped..... .
benevolently greedy.. ridiculously wise.. unfortunately lucky.. painfully happy.. stupidly smart.. a contradiction in terms;.
blind,.
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TopHat
Good one Lady Lee ***HIGH FIVES***
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37
JW Urban Ledgends - Fact or Fiction?
by clear2c ingrowing up as a jehovahs wittness my parents used to rationalize or have a urban ledgends reguarding why we could not do something or why something was evil/bad.
some of these i have heard in various forms around here in the forums.
here are some expamples of what i mean.
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TopHat
I found an interesting article in the WSJ on how we humans perceive God. Thought you might like to read it. I am not promoting anything...click on the link dogfeathers.com..intriguing!
To See Only the Good,
Leading Some to God
October 28, 2005; Page B1Life is full of surprises, but it's rare to reach for a carafe of wine and find your hand clutching a bottle of milk -- and even rarer, you'd think, to react by deciding the milk was actually what you wanted all along.
Yet something like that happened when scientists in Sweden asked people to choose which of two women's photos they found most attractive. After the subject made his choice, whom we'll call Beth, the experimenter turned the chosen photo face down. Sliding it across the table, he asked the subject the reasons he chose the photo he did. But the experimenter was a sleight-of-hand artist. A copy of the unchosen photo, "Grizelda," was tucked behind Beth's, so what he actually slid was the duplicate of Grizelda, palming Beth.
Few subjects batted an eye. Looking at the unchosen Grizelda, they smoothly explained why they had chosen her ("She was smiling," "she looks hot"), even though they hadn't.
In 1966, Time magazine asked, "Is God Dead?" Even then, the answer was no, and with the rise of religion in the public square, the question now seems ludicrous. In one of those strange-bedfellows things, it is science that is shedding light on why belief in God will never die, at least until humans evolve very different brains, brains that don't (as they did with Beth and Grizelda) interpret unexpected and even unwanted outcomes as being for the best.
"Belief in God," says Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, "is compelled by the way our brains work."
As shown in the Grizelda-and-Beth study, by scientists at Lund University and published this month in Science, brains have a remarkable talent for reframing suboptimal outcomes to see setbacks in the best possible light. You can see it when high-school seniors decide that colleges that rejected them really weren't much good, come to think of it.
You can see it, too, in experiments where Prof. Gilbert and colleagues told female volunteers they would be working on a task that required them to have a likeable, trustworthy partner. They would get a partner randomly, by blindly choosing one of four folders, each containing a biography of a potential teammate. Unknown to the volunteers, each folder contained the same bio, describing an unlikable, untrustworthy person.
The volunteers were unfazed. Reading the randomly chosen bio, they interpreted even negatives as positives. "She doesn't like people" made them think of her as "exceptionally discerning." And when they read different bios, they concluded their partner was hands-down superior. "Their brains found the most rewarding view of their circumstances," says Prof. Gilbert.
The experimenter then told the volunteer that although she thought she was choosing a folder at random, in fact the experimenter had given her a subliminal message so she would pick the best possible partner. The volunteers later said they believed this lie, agreeing that the subliminal message had led them to the best folder. Having thought themselves into believing they had chosen the best teammate, they needed an explanation for their good fortune and experienced what Prof. Gilbert calls the illusion of external agency.
"People don't know how good they are at finding something desirable in almost any outcome," he says. "So when there is a good outcome, they're surprised, and they conclude that someone else has engineered their fate" -- a lab's subliminal message or, in real life, God.
Religion used to be ascribed to a wish to escape mortality by invoking an afterlife or to feel less alone in the world. Now, some anthropologists and psychologists suspect that religious belief is what Pascal Boyer of Washington University, St. Louis, calls in a 2003 paper "a predictable by-product of ordinary cognitive function."
One of those functions is the ability to imagine what Prof. Boyer calls "nonphysically present agents." We do this all the time when we recall the past or project the future, or imagine "what if" scenarios involving others. It's not a big leap for those same brain mechanisms to imagine spirits and gods as real.
Another God-producing brain quirk is that although many things can be viewed in multiple ways, the mind settles on the most rewarding. Take the Necker cube, the line drawing that shifts orientation as you stare at it. (A cool version is at dogfeathers.com/java/necker.html .) If you reward someone for seeing the cube one way, however, his brain starts seeing it that way only. The cube stops flipping.
There are only two ways to see a Necker cube, but loads of ways to see a hurricane or a recovery from illness. The brain "tends to search for and hold onto the most rewarding view of events, much as it does of objects," Prof. Gilbert writes on the Web site Edge. It is much more rewarding to attribute death to God's will, and to see in disasters hints of the hand of God.
Prof. Gilbert once asked a religious colleague how he felt about helping to discover that people can misattribute the products of their own minds to acts of God. The reply: "I feel fine. God doesn't want us to confuse our miracles with his."
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November is WTS Fundraising Month
by Severus indeep a bit deeper friends:
this is from the kingdom ministry november 2005 "service meeting schedule".
fundraising starts early during the week of 14 november:
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TopHat
How SLY, Just like Old Jimmy tugging at your heart strings.