Posts by MuadDib

28

Inventing new rituals

by Narkissos in

jw
friends

one tragic mistake (i think) in the modern western world is to reduce the notion of religion to beliefs or doctrines.

and perhaps morals.

ritual is actually more central to religion, in a wider historical and geographical perspective, than any of the above.

I tend to think of rituals more from the anthropological perspective - as dominant or group symbolism, participation in which secures an individual's status as a legitimate member of a given social group. Baptism is an important ritual in Christianity, as you mentioned, since it affirms one's status not only before God (which might be worth nothing) but before the other believers (which is worth everything). But there are many, many more. As JWs or ex-JWs we're all familiar with the song and prayer combo as a ritual to legitimize religious proceedings: performing the ritual once signifies the commencement of formal religious activity during which our behaviour must conform to certain standards, while performing it again in reverse order signifies that this activity has ended and a different mode of social behaviour now governs our interaction. Service is another ritual activity signifying legitimate participation in the social circle: people who don't go in service regularly are "weak in the truth" (ie undesirable members of the group) while those who regularly participate are held up as models of socially acceptable behaviour. And the JWs regulate sexual behaviour through ritualization by deeming it a sin unless the participants' union is formally acknowledged by God - and, again more importantly, by other members of the congregation, the primary social group.

The social dynamics involved in group interaction essentially force participants to behave in a manner conformist to the standard demanded by the dominant symbolism simply through fear of rejection and alienation by others. To participate is to be safe and secure; to behave differently is to be alone. For our purposes the corollary to all of this, of course, is the WBTS' clever method of forbidding Witnesses from participating in secular or "worldly" rituals that would affirm their legitimate membership in the rest of human society. Witnesses don't participate in birthday rituals, holiday rituals, political rituals, or even "safety valve" type rituals like office parties. This encourages Witnesses to see the congregation as the only social group to which they legitimately belong - hopefully ensuring their continued loyalty to the organization - while simultaneously encouraging them to view other normal human social activity as delegitimized.

So I would actually say that the mirror ritual and the greeting ritual aren't really rituals at all, unless widely adopted by other people as an essential set of behaviours that define legitimate social interaction. I don't know that it's actually possible to create any truly new rituals as they will all take the same essential form: they will confirm some kind of higher governing authority over one's behaviour or perception (irrespective of that authority's true nature) and dictate what is socially proper to do, think, say, etc. I say the hell with ritual: let's all do our own thing.

26

Messy people vs. neat people

by kristyann in

jw
friends

my boyfriend is so messy!

i just arrived here at his apartment and seriously, the place is gross.

he has improved quite a bit since he met me... but i surprised him and he wasn't expecting me so the place is nasty.

MuadDib

I'm pretty neat, mostly because I don't own enough possessions to actually create a substantial mess. But my roommate is a complete slob. He used to leave dishes piled up by the sink for days until I snapped on him last week and told him to be like me and just wash every single dish he uses the instant he finishes using it (since I eat out most of the time this is very easy for me). Our living room is awash in envelopes, CD cases, clothes, papers, fallen posters, books, and other assorted crap - ALL of it his. His room is a total write-off. He'll leave laundry in the washer or dryer for days on end. And don't get me started on his bathroom habits.

One of these days I'm really going to snap and give him two days to clean his shit up or I'll just find somewhere else to live. Swear to God.

31

Everything I knew was wrong

by Franz in

jw
friends

looking through the internet i learned that everything i have ever know to be true is a lie

at the beginning of time aliens created the earth and the heavens.

they are the greater force and also the fallen angels that are prophesized in the bible.

MuadDib

"If nothing happened out of the ordinary with evolution then why are there still monkeys?"

Sounds like it's you who needs to familiarize yourself with the facts, man. They taught me that in like ninth grade science.

91

Which massacres did Jehovah sanction?

by Spectrum in

the ones i'm familiar with are from the repercussion of the rape and murder of the levites concubine.

judges 19-21 .

about 100,000 died in battle then all the towns of benjamin were put to the sword as were the people that didn't join in against the benjamites.

MuadDib

That's a pretty lengthy post, but for all the verbiage nowhere in there could I find a single compelling reason for a society to create a law that forces women to carry children to term. This talk of bringing pregnant women in front of panels of legal and ethical experts is nothing but bullshit. Who cares what experts in which fields have to say about anything? A woman ought to be permitted to do as she pleases with her own body whatever some expert philosopher on some politically charged board has to say about the matter. Who cares if fetuses have legal and ethical rights? The legal and ethical rights of the woman trump whatever rights the fetus allegedly has.

Bottom line: what a woman does with her own body is her business and nobody else's.

91

Which massacres did Jehovah sanction?

by Spectrum in

the ones i'm familiar with are from the repercussion of the rape and murder of the levites concubine.

judges 19-21 .

about 100,000 died in battle then all the towns of benjamin were put to the sword as were the people that didn't join in against the benjamites.

MuadDib

"Why should the state be obligated to offer free abortion?"

I would argue that it's a medical procedure or service like any other, so if the state is providing medical care to its citizenry then there's no reason for abortion not to be included. I would further argue that the provision of abortion to women is not done on the understanding that abortion is "ethically unproblematic" but rather on the understanding that some women are going to have abortions, for whatever reason, and they should be provided with a safe and secure means of doing so rather than being forced to resort to less healthy methods of dealing with the situation.

But you might have a point here: why can't private clinics or medical institutions take care of the demand for abortion? Perhaps the state really should be removed from the process altogether, and the issue left entirely in private hands - between women and their own medical consultants.

I'm glad we were able to find a compromise.

91

Which massacres did Jehovah sanction?

by Spectrum in

the ones i'm familiar with are from the repercussion of the rape and murder of the levites concubine.

judges 19-21 .

about 100,000 died in battle then all the towns of benjamin were put to the sword as were the people that didn't join in against the benjamites.

MuadDib

@Spectrum: No superior knowledge here! Just a nerd's love of history books. :) I would think that to sustain 185 000 fighting men in a region that, according to most archaeologists, likely only sustained that number as a total civilian population during peacetime, the Assyrians would have to have some quite sophisticated logistics indeed. The relative distance of the march would be offset by the protracted nature of the siege (which, as I recall, also involved other sieges and battles as part of the general Assyrian campaign). And as an Empire, the Assyrians may indeed have been able to muster a force much more sizeable than most of their competitors - certainly one much larger than the city-states and fractured polities of the Levant. But I would doubt that they would be able to do so without significant disruption to their normal economic activities, having drawn off such a huge proportion of their working adult male population into this army. And to then lose them all would have damaged their civilization beyond recovery.

@Pro-lifers: I commend you for your respect for the sanctity of human life, but your connection of this stance with state power is frightening. Again, I ask the reverse question: if the state can force a woman to bear a fetus to term, can it force her to abort one? And if one, why not the other? If you're going to allow the state a free hand in biological determinism it strikes me as inconsistent to say that it can force a woman to do one thing but cannot force her to do something else.

Bottom line: government has no business whatsoever in the affairs of a woman's own body. If you don't like abortion then educate against it, make sure people are making informed choices based on open and accessible information. Creating a Draconian society where old rich men tell women how to live their lives is not a progressive solution.

91

Which massacres did Jehovah sanction?

by Spectrum in

the ones i'm familiar with are from the repercussion of the rape and murder of the levites concubine.

judges 19-21 .

about 100,000 died in battle then all the towns of benjamin were put to the sword as were the people that didn't join in against the benjamites.

MuadDib

"As for father's rights.... what rights?"

Exactly. If Joe Premature wants to keep the child, let him carry it. Maybe he should learn to pull out next time.

91

Which massacres did Jehovah sanction?

by Spectrum in

the ones i'm familiar with are from the repercussion of the rape and murder of the levites concubine.

judges 19-21 .

about 100,000 died in battle then all the towns of benjamin were put to the sword as were the people that didn't join in against the benjamites.

MuadDib

Oh, and also: Herodotus' account of the Persian invasion records 1 700 000 men and 1 330 triremes under Xerxes' command. Modern historians do indeed consider that these armies are totally unsustainable and the stories are cooked over to make the Greeks look like superheroes. So these sorts of things do happen.

91

Which massacres did Jehovah sanction?

by Spectrum in

the ones i'm familiar with are from the repercussion of the rape and murder of the levites concubine.

judges 19-21 .

about 100,000 died in battle then all the towns of benjamin were put to the sword as were the people that didn't join in against the benjamites.

MuadDib

Good points, Spectrum. The army of Xerxes I may have approached 200 000 men, but this only serves to prove my own argument: in order to obtain this force he had to spend lots of money on gathering troops from all across his empire, in territorial terms the largest polity the world had yet seen, and very wealthy thanks to his recent reconquest of Egypt. Sennacherib could not have hoped to draw a similar number from a vastly smaller and poorer area. In addition, the Persian army had the distinct advantage of being supplied by the enormous Persian fleet that sailed along the coastline in company with them, ancient water transport being much more effective than land transport (as is the case today). Sennacherib would not have had such an opportunity.

The First Crusade also serves to illustrate my argument. By the time the Crusaders arrived at Constantinople they were broke and hungry and had to be reprovisioned by the Byzantines, without whose aid they would never have attained their objective. Who filled this role for Sennacherib? The Crusaders' march through the Holy Land to Jerusalem took two years and many of them died along the way from hunger, thirst, and disease - not even close to 100 000 of them were left by the time they obtained their objective, which is why they immediately had to be reinforced and resupplied by other expeditions exploiting the mercantile fleets of the Italian maritime cities - Venice, Genoa, Amalfi, and Pisa - which, of course, is another helpful advantage unavailable to the ancient Assyrians.

Of course outside chances can and do happen, and people are capable of powerfully ingenious feats of military engineering and logistics when they put their minds to it - but context is always vital to any analogous discussion of history.

91

Which massacres did Jehovah sanction?

by Spectrum in

the ones i'm familiar with are from the repercussion of the rape and murder of the levites concubine.

judges 19-21 .

about 100,000 died in battle then all the towns of benjamin were put to the sword as were the people that didn't join in against the benjamites.

MuadDib

It doesn't really matter which massacres Jehovah sanctioned because, as has been hinted at in this thread, none of them ever happened. The single example of the Assyrian army is proof enough. To begin with, the Assyrians were likely unable to muster 185 000 troops for a single campaign because such a number probably amounted to an enormous proportion of the adult male population of their empire. The ancient Middle East was so economically backward and politically fragmented that societies had to be relatively small almost by default, and this meant that large armies were simply nonexistent. Even the most sophisticated, wealthy, and populous polity of the era - Egypt - could only field an army of 20 000 men at any given time; to do more would have meant a much too drastic disruption of the normal economic and political activities that sustained these ancient societies. The loss of all these men would have meant not just the end of the Assyrian Empire but the end of Assyrian civilization - but we know that both continued for generations after Sennacherib.

Furthermore, even if the men had been available, keeping them all supplied, fed, and disease-free in the arid, primitive conditions of the Iron Age Levant would have been practically impossible. Forces of that size weren't able to mount sustained offensive operations until the early modern period, thanks to advances in medecine, logistics, and technology centuries in the making, and even then they faced enormous difficulties in keeping themselves organized, fit, and supplied enough to actually fight. Where would 185 000 troops have found enough food to feed themselves in a region characterized by subsistence agriculture in dry conditions? Even if they could have found enough in the area around Jerusalem, how would they have transported it in once they'd stripped their immediate environs bare, given the absolutely primitive conditions of land transport at the time? It doesn't make any sense.

And then there's the matter of body disposal. How did the citizens of Jerusalem deal with 185 000 corpses piled up around their city? Dealing with the problem - and it would have to be dealt with quickly before the bodies began to putrify and spread disease - would have required a monumental cleanup job made all the more difficult by the primitive technology available to them at the time. Even today dealing with the masses of victims produced by severe natural disasters or international conflicts is extraordinarily difficult and requires the diversion of many resources away from other essential activities. Where did Jerusalem get all the surplus labour? Another point: standard ancient practice was to heap up battle casualties in a giant mound and burn them, in order to prevent the contamination of water supplies and farmland and halt the spread of disease from the corpses. 185 000 corpses isn't just enough for one colossal mound - it's enough for eight or nine. Presumably these would have to have been in the immediate environs of Jerusalem. So where are they? The burial mounds of many ancient battle victims have been excavated and still constitute readily visible landmarks in many parts of the ancient world. One would think that there would have to be some evidence of these massive casualties since archaeologists have excavated so many other, much smaller mass battle graves. Yet we have none.

These are just a couple of the problems that modern science can easily find with the purported "history" of the Bible. Wax eloquent all you want about the moral quality of a God who condones the massacres of innocents; to me, it's more important to establish whether these stories are truthful to any extent at all. Short answer: they aren't.

As for abortion, I kind of like to look at the issue in reverse. If a state can prevent a woman from getting an abortion, what's to stop it from forcing her to have one? Seemingly if the state is to have greater control over her own body than she herself does, it could decide who gets to give birth when. Of course, we would never dream of allowing any level of government to force a woman to abort her child. So where do lawmakers and self-righteous pro-lifers get off forcing women to bear children they don't want?