Yes indeed it would. It's odd that anyone could have the gall to claim a scholar as "celebrated" when he won't even reveal said scholar's name. Well, it's odd until you connect that reluctance to the total intellectual bankruptcy of his position.
MuadDib
JoinedPosts by MuadDib
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16
70 years and Zechariah
by ackack inthe nail in the coffin of the society's understanding of the seventy years appears to be zech 1:12 and 7:1. both of these verses refer to the 70 years as ongoing rather than past events.
i'm not sure how anyone can claim the society has a "holistic" view of the 70 years when they haven't even dealt with these two verses.. i should say they haven't dealt with them at all, there is one article for each of those verses, but, iirc, the argumentation was very weak.
anyone happen to have those references off hand?.
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Overheard at the Book Study
by under_believer inhere are a few comments that i overheard at this week's book study (of the third chapter of the bible teach book), and the thoughts i had after hearing them: .
conductor: "as food shortages become more and more common as the time of the end advances, they will make excellent field service points since they were predicted by the bible.
me: great.
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MuadDib
blondie made a really good point about the practicality of Paradise. She's exactly right: killing 99% of the people on this planet would sink the remaining 1% right back into the Stone Age because the maintenance of our complex society depends upon an equally complex support structure driven by the contributions of all participants at every level. Expecting that everything would simply continue on the basis of current systems is patently ridiculous and demonstrates just how severely out of touch JWs are from the world they have rejected.
A similar line of thought developed in my mind as I took more history classes and learned about how profoundly different the modern age is from every other epoch in the development of our species. If a hunter-gatherer from North America in 1700 BCE was resurrected tomorrow, on what level would you be able to relate to him in an effort to educate him about the "Good News"? Even if you spoke the same language your respective cultural experiences would be so manifestly different that communication would be all but impossible. The same applies to any era in history. How would you explain Pauline views of sexuality to a Pecheneg nomad from the ninth century? Would your theology make any sense to a Sumerian peasant farmer? How would a Han Dynasty bureaucrat react to the idea of religion as a form of behaviour and thought control that dominates your every action? What kind of sense would legalistic, formal JW religion make to an Arawak headhunter or a Minoan merchant? None at all. And the JWs propose to educate every single one of the untold billions who have lived across wildly diverse eons of time and space in a belief system heavily dependent on a very recent form of social organization in the space of one thousand years.
It's just not practical. Ideas like this belong in the realm of fantasy and are propounded only by those who don't know any better.
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70 years and Zechariah
by ackack inthe nail in the coffin of the society's understanding of the seventy years appears to be zech 1:12 and 7:1. both of these verses refer to the 70 years as ongoing rather than past events.
i'm not sure how anyone can claim the society has a "holistic" view of the 70 years when they haven't even dealt with these two verses.. i should say they haven't dealt with them at all, there is one article for each of those verses, but, iirc, the argumentation was very weak.
anyone happen to have those references off hand?.
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MuadDib
The nail in the coffin is the fact that the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BCE, and not 607 BCE, as demonstrated by reputable scholars and researchers with actual academic credentials and analytical ability, and in spite of the sputtering protestations of ignorant, miseducated, fundamentalist amateurs on this message board and elsewhere.
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Combating Terrorism
by El Kabong ini urge all people in the usa and other nations to participate in this activity.... .
we all know that it is a sin for an islamic male to see any woman other than his wife naked, and that he must commit suicide if he does.
so next sunday at 4:00 pm eastern time, all women are asked to walk out of their house completely naked to help weed out any neighborhood terrorists.
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MuadDib
If we were to institute this as a regular (read: daily) occurrence, it would effectively trap terrorists indoors permanently. Doesn't have to be a one-time thing...
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607
by Zico incan anyone provide me with any evidence (links to other sites is fine) that jerusalem could not have possibly fallen to the babylonians in 607?
thanks again for your answers.
zico
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MuadDib
"you are making a virtue out of shortsightedness."
What more do you expect? He's a JW.
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COULD YOU KILL SOMEONE?
by Mary inand under what circumstances?
would you kill someone if they molested your child or your spouse?
what about drug dealers or terrorists?
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MuadDib
I don't think I'd have any second thoughts about knocking off an American or two. Practicality, as was said above. What's one less redneck in the world?
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The Challange of Faith
by truth_be_told ini stumbled on this site dong some research, i post now only for those you have not sinned against jehovah's holy spirit, since only jehovah knows this, some value might be taken form this.
i currently serve as the service overseer in my congregation, i have been an elder for over 10 years.. the fundmental issue that challanges every jw faith at some point are the imperfections of the wtbs, & those that take the lead sometimes make huge errors.
as a third generation jw with a huge network of elders, i have heard many bad things about those that take the lead.. some of these have effected myself and my family, this is the test, no different than what job faced, but it is more on the emotional and mental level.
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MuadDib
"The Flood, you had no option but to be on the ark if you wanted to live, agree or disagree that is a fact.
Sodom & Gommorah you had to let those Angels lead you away from the city and not look back, fact.
Passover in Egypt, blood on the door posts for the firstborn to survive,fact."
None of those are facts, they are pure mythology. Not only can they be disputed, they can be entirely disproven. Fact.
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Meet the shock troops of the Christian right?
by Makena1 inmeet the shock troops of the christian youth .
tell a friend .
battle cry for theocracy!
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MuadDib
"Because, as a general rule, it is the Judeo-Christian ethic that has bettered the conditions of man."
Ah, yes. This would be the same Judeo-Christian ethic that taught for centuries that blacks did not have souls and so it was therefore alright to institute a global slave trade that produced the deaths of twenty million completely innocent people, not to mention the thorny problems related to the issue that we still confront today. This would be the same Judeo-Christian ethic that informed the creation of world-spanning empires based on hierarchies of race and ethnicity, resulting in the indescribable destruction of countless native cultures and the production of entire classes of people who live virtually as aliens in their own societies. This would be same Judeo-Christian ethic that unleashed the unspeakably barbaric Crusades against the Muslims, Jews, and yes, Christians of the Middle East. This is the Judeo-Christian ethic associated for two millennia with oppression, tyranny, behaviour and thought control, inequality, injustice, and virtually every single misstep made by humanity in the time period.
Conversely, every single advancement in human rights that has taken place throughout history has come about due to the efforts of people who did NOT follow the Judeo-Christian ethic - and were in many cases persecuted by that ethic's elites for their trouble. It wasn't the vested interests of the Judeo-Christian ethic that produced the American and French revolutions. It wasn't the Judeo-Christian ethic that yielded female suffrage or improved labour conditions. It wasn't the Judeo-Christian ethic that provided for the compulsory education of children. Rather, it was the Judeo-Christian ethic that stood staunchly in the way of all of these things, which have actually served to better the conditions of man, and we are much, much the better that the Judeo-Christian ethic did NOT prevail when people like yourself would have claimed it was being "attacked" or "threatened" by these GOOD THINGS.
The general rule is that human societies are intrisincally given to the persecution of dissent when it appears to threaten certain vested interests. It doesn't matter whether a society is spiritual or secular (and a lot of grey exists between the two), and secular societies have produced human catastrophes of extremely destructive degrees as well. But the fact is that the Western world became a beacon of progress after it ditched its idiotic commitment to religious fundamentalism and adopted secularism as its guiding philosophy, not before. When religion occupies its proper place in society, below the crucial safeguarding of people's basic rights before the secular and impartial law, society succeeds. Imbuing a religious ethic into society has never yielded anything but stagnation, oppression, and eventually collapse. History tells us this story over, and over, and over.
The one relevant point I got out of that article (I highly doubt these Army of God lunatics wield any real power to change the way things are) is that my generation is going to have to clean up the most monumental mess in history, thanks to the preceding generation and its bumbling greed, arrogant incompetence, and downright lack of ability to hold its shit together. And here they are again poisoning more young people with their lunacy, cutting us down and making it even harder for us to make a start of creating peaceful, productive, cooperative societies on the ruins of the steadily declining global situation. No guidance, just empty promises and hollow ideology while the world goes down the crapper.
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Evolution's Bottom Line - Commercial Application - NY Times Op Ed
by hawkaw inthe usefulness of scientific theories, like those on gravity, relativity and evolution, is to make predictions.
when theories make practicable foresight possible, they are widely accepted and used to make all of the new things that we enjoy like global positioning systems, which rely on the theories of relativity, and the satellites that make them possible, which are placed in their orbits thanks to the good old theory of gravity.. creationists who oppose the teaching of evolution as the predominant theory of biology contend that alternatives should be part of the curriculum because evolution is "just a theory," but they never attack mere theories of gravity and relativity in the same way.
the creationists took it on their intelligently designed chins recently from a judge in pennsylvania who found that teaching alternatives to evolution amounted to the teaching of religion.
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MuadDib
That is a good article. It's right on point - but I think it actually fails to get to the true heart of the issue. While the writer recognizes that fundies who dispute the conclusions of science will eventually be left out in the cold, he doesn't recognize that the fundies don't care. They don't see any point in competing globally or in improving society, because in the very near future this globe and the human societies who dwell on it will be mercifully destroyed by the vengeful return of the Messiah. The central issue is not restricted to who will be allowed to innovate where and when, but encompasses an intellectual duel between those who believe in the concrete nature of reality and what we can do to make things better, and those who believe in fanciful fantasies and consider our problems to be of divine making, solveable only through divine intervention. Catastrophism vs. uniformitarianism. Perhaps the greatest danger confronting humanity right now is the possibility that the fundies, whether in the Middle East or the Bible Belt, will win and doom us all to a reinvention of the Dark Ages.
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607
by Zico incan anyone provide me with any evidence (links to other sites is fine) that jerusalem could not have possibly fallen to the babylonians in 607?
thanks again for your answers.
zico
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MuadDib
"All that concerns me are the facts and nothing but the facts and I am staunch advocate for truth"
If that were actually true you would hardly go about your research in the manner you do. You simply parrot a religious party line and sidestep perfectly legitimate questions that undermine your lunatic conclusions. You are no scholar, you are no advocate of any valid truth, and you are not at all concerned with fact. You are a promoter for a fundamentalist religion that relies on exactly your type of stunted intellectual myopia to convince people of its harebrained eschatology. All of the rational skepticism that accompanies real scholastic research is entirely absent from your dogmatic, uncritical, vapid repetition of obsolete religious speculation.
You're just digging yourself in deeper, man. "The best of your abilities" just isn't good enough. It is plainly obvious that your real purpose here is to irritate people who do have a genuine respect for knowledge - but shit, if that gives me the opportunity to make the intellectual failure of the JWs even more apparent than it already is, by all means keep posting. I never tire of being right, so it's delightful that you seemingly never tire of being wrong. :)