Posts by RodentBoy

27

CO calls meeting to discuss association with my parents

by Stress Free in

jw
friends

i'm so furious at the moment my keyboard is smoking whilst i'm typing this message.

i just got informed through one of my contacts that at the recent visit to my parents cong the visiting co brought the elders together to discusss with my father who is still an elder, to decide if he should be allowed to associate or even speak with me.

who in the hell do they think they are?

RodentBoy

garybuss wrote:

I'm not sure if the division is on purpose, of if there is really a struggle going on and it's become so obvious. I think there's a struggle.
Or could it be the elders are out of control?

I think you may be on to something. I know one of my aunts has been saying "Oh, the Society is so much more tolerant and forgiving than it used to be, now that there's new blood at the top" (whatever that means), and yet I heard just a year or so ago that an older brother (who was a good friend of the family at one time) was disfellowshipped for something that apparently happened decades ago. The worst part about this is that he's in his late 70s or early 80s, and due to advanced Parkinson's Disease, is in a extended care home. My grandmother, who due to being housebound and the fact that, oddly enough, ministering to the elderly doesn't seem to be big on the elders' agenda, doesn't know as much as she'd like, has still heard that a new group of elders has come in, and a few of the old time elders (who had had there positions since I was a kid, twenty years ago) were deleted, and that there's been some moving and shaking going on.

I know one lady who is a dear friend of my grandmother's whose husband lost some responsibilities at the book counter because they had attended their son's high school graduation (well that's what they figure, as the explanation given was pretty vague). It looks like every sin real and imagined is being put under the microscope now, though apparently the other congregation in town hasn't been hit by this new wave of uber-morality, so I'm not sure what that means.

27

CO calls meeting to discuss association with my parents

by Stress Free in

jw
friends

i'm so furious at the moment my keyboard is smoking whilst i'm typing this message.

i just got informed through one of my contacts that at the recent visit to my parents cong the visiting co brought the elders together to discusss with my father who is still an elder, to decide if he should be allowed to associate or even speak with me.

who in the hell do they think they are?

RodentBoy

What an obscene way to apply the screws to you, Stress Free. It's shameful, but of course, it's all in the name of God, so it's okay if they cause your parents such pain.

5

Horizon - A War On Science

by City Fan in

jw
friends

.

for anyone who's interested, bbc documentary series horizon is showing a program called 'a war on science' this thursday 26 jan 9pm on bbc2.

should be interesting!.

RodentBoy

jaffacake wrote:

Hey don't get me wrong, I'm a believer and have no problem speculating on the possibility of a creator, but not at the expense of good science. I'm not 100% sure that evolution is quite the whole answer as many believe. But it upsets me when folks try to pass I.D. off as scientific.

The problem here is that no theory is 100% complete, and it's difficult to imagine any time when they will be. Science isn't really about that, it's about the best explanation that fits the evidence and that allows us to make predictions based upon it. On those grounds, evolution is in fact one of the most successful theories. Other theories have even bigger wholes. Physics has far bigger problems trying to unify General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, or in trying to come up with an adequate explanation of the Standard Model of subatomic particles, and yet you don't hear Creationists running around decrying them (well almost, you'll get them latching on to slow light nonsense if they're YECs trying to explain how we observe galaxies that are billions of light years away).

The fact is that Creationists are offended by the notion that they're related to apes.

41

Here We GO - Can't Fade No More

by unique1 in

ok, a little update on my story.

i told him yes.

i told him, i just couldn't do it.

RodentBoy

unique1 wrote:

We do love you unconditionally so does Jehovah, but as stated above, unconditional love is not without priorities, rules, boundaries and values.

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

58

Creatiolution. This could be the answer.

by Spectrum in

this is a continuation of a discussion i've had with abaddon.

we were at loggerheads in the beginning but i'm coming round to his way of thinking to a certain extent.

i still haven't given up my belief in an intelligent creator but at the same time there is evidence for evolution which cannot be discounted.

RodentBoy

kid-A wrote:

Its always interesting that on all the creationist threads, as soon as the clear and obvious fossil evidence for proto-hominid and early hominid human ancestors is raised, they have no answer whatsoever. I guess they assume god planted the fossil evidence in the ground to mislead and 'test' the faithful! The simple fact is the creationists cannot offer a valid explanation for the hominid fossil evidence, not to mention the overwhelming evidence for Neanderthals.

The standard line (which as I recall the JWs use as well) is that all these ape-men are either "just apes" or "just people". They just handwave away evidence like bipedal apes with brains a third our size, or of very clear morphological differences between Neandertals and moderns. There's this nebulous, never-defined line where it's apes or humans, and it can never be quantified as far as brain size or tool kits.

It's getting even tougher now, with the large amount of molecular data being gathered. Our relationship to the great apes is becoming clearer. Genetically we share a great deal, right down to viral insertions in our genes, which rather makes the "common design" claim seem even weaker than it already is.

Simply put, JWs and other Creationists just give in to the ick factor. "We aren't animals. We aren't apes." and so on, and yet by golly H. sapiens sits right into a hiearchy along side apes, primates, mammals, chordates, etc.

16

Apostate music

by Bumble Bee in

jw
friends

as a jw kid, i was always hearing about not listening to certain music.

one reason my mother called me apostate is because she saw some cd's i had - she called it gospel.

some of them were decidedly what is termed "chrisitan" music in the store, some are crossover artists (chrisitian but played on mainstream/top 40 radio) and there is alot of country music that is spiritual for lack of a better word.. i was always under the impression that "unapproved" music would be songs with lyrics that go against biblical principals - sex, drugs, etc, not music that promotes good things in life, or glorifiying god and jesus.

RodentBoy

All music (including Gospel) outside of the kingdom melodies is not pleasing to the fds and jehovah and therefore apostate

Which was always a real pity, because the music was so bad and the lyrics so banal (even by modern religious music standards). Thank goodness they never found out about my secret AC/DC and Black Sabbath collections. They could barely tolerate the Beatles, which my uncle said was nothing more than drug music, and not for true Christians to listen to. Oddly enough, I never knew many JWs who frowned on Classical, though many compositions are of a profoundly religious nature.

58

Creatiolution. This could be the answer.

by Spectrum in

this is a continuation of a discussion i've had with abaddon.

we were at loggerheads in the beginning but i'm coming round to his way of thinking to a certain extent.

i still haven't given up my belief in an intelligent creator but at the same time there is evidence for evolution which cannot be discounted.

RodentBoy

I find, in general, those that have a problem with scientific theories that conflict with their particular beliefs usually want science to give those beliefs some special leg up. Simply put, science is always going to overthrow certain world views, and if your faith stems from such a way of looking at things, then you're out of luck.

Evolution and common descent are observations. We know evolution happens, and we can see from the molecular data that all extant organisms evolved from a common ancestor. The inference here is that the force that lead from the common ancestor to modern living populations was evolution. And remember that inference is perfectly legitimate in science, otherwise we would have to deny the existence of electrons, black holes, gravity and all sorts of phenonoma that we cannot observe with the naked eye.

58

Creatiolution. This could be the answer.

by Spectrum in

this is a continuation of a discussion i've had with abaddon.

we were at loggerheads in the beginning but i'm coming round to his way of thinking to a certain extent.

i still haven't given up my belief in an intelligent creator but at the same time there is evidence for evolution which cannot be discounted.

RodentBoy

I agree that evolution is always "under construction" -however many evolutionists are aiming at something-that is for non-designer explanations for the world around us.

Really, can you cite some examples in peer review or primary literature where this is claimed? And if evolution is to be allegedly guilty of this, what about hydrodynamics, geology and germ theory? None of these mention a designer either.

Simply put no science can deal with supernatural claims, and ultimately the Designer claim is supernatural. It isn't testable, not falsifiable, and whether it is true or not isn't even an issue. God can explain also possible observations, and thus has no explanatory power at all.

Imagine being a police investigator who finds a man with a hole in his head that fits the general pattern of a bullet wound. Now you infer that someone shot the man. However, I come along and say "An angel did it." Now, no test you can create will every falsify my claim. It might even be true, but it isn't science.

Evolution is no different. It is a theory based upon the same basic premise that allis biological theory), all because people seem to find methodological naturalism somehow noxious when applied to human origins, while they happily accept other scientific theories based upon the same basic methodology every day.

17

New light for the Catholic Church

by TallTexan in

this may have been covered already, but i missed it if it was.. a lady i work with who is catholic told me that not too long ago the new pope changed the catholic doctrine on purgatory - in that now it no longer exists.

of course i couldn't help but think "hmmmm....new light....".

my question to her was "well, do all the people that paid to get their loved ones out of purgatory get a refund?".

RodentBoy

First, I think you'd better get some evidence that the RCC has altered anything on purgatory. I have some pretty heavy doubts about the claim.

Second, the Church simply does not do big sweeping reversals in dogma. It took centuries for it to even apologize about Galileo, for goodness sake. Change for the RCC is measured in decades at the smallest increment, and even the most sweeping changes of Vatican II were as much procedural changes and clarifications that really didn't intrude on underlying theological assertions, and even VII has irritated a lot of conservative Catholics.

58

Creatiolution. This could be the answer.

by Spectrum in

this is a continuation of a discussion i've had with abaddon.

we were at loggerheads in the beginning but i'm coming round to his way of thinking to a certain extent.

i still haven't given up my belief in an intelligent creator but at the same time there is evidence for evolution which cannot be discounted.

RodentBoy

Given the philosophical worldviews accompanying evolution (materialism/naturalism)*, as well as the evolutionary theorists ability to adapt evolution to virtually any data, it would be a daunting task to come up with any way to "pull the carpet out" that would convince the theorists/ materialists.

First you make a fallacious argument. Evolution, like all scientific theories, is an example of methodological naturalism, and of philosophical naturalism.

Secondly, I'd like you to give me some examples of your allegation that evolution has been adapted to fit any data. Give, say, three examples of lines of evidence that have been made to fit evolution.