Cool. I'll check out the website, but do you have any of Rand's essay collections you might be able to recommend? It's something I've been meaning to read up on once I get a break from school and work.
apfergus
JoinedPosts by apfergus
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31
Are you a fan of Ayn Rand works and/or Philosophy?
by Eyebrow2 ini have done a lot of reading of rand's fiction, and have been reading a lot about her philosophy over the past several months.
i attend a local study group on her philosophy, and my family and i often attend get togethers that a local objectivist group puts on once or twice a month.. i am interested in talking with other ex witnesses that enjoy her work, and may be interested in discussing her philosophy.
i won't call myself an objectivist just yet, because i still am studying the philosophy.
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31
Are you a fan of Ayn Rand works and/or Philosophy?
by Eyebrow2 ini have done a lot of reading of rand's fiction, and have been reading a lot about her philosophy over the past several months.
i attend a local study group on her philosophy, and my family and i often attend get togethers that a local objectivist group puts on once or twice a month.. i am interested in talking with other ex witnesses that enjoy her work, and may be interested in discussing her philosophy.
i won't call myself an objectivist just yet, because i still am studying the philosophy.
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apfergus
I'm personally not a huge Rand fan. While I do think she had some interesting points, I just don't see eye-to-eye with her on economics at all and I found Atlas Shrugged to be so boring and poorly written that I couldn't get more than a couple hundred pages into it. If I could just get myself to read a little more of her essays, I'm sure I'd have something more constructive to say. Having said that, I can't stand Leonard Peikoff. I think he's the one primarily responsible for the Ayn Rand Objectivist "cult" some other people have hinted at.
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A New Voice
by apfergus ini haven't been involved with the jws in nearly five years now.
i was raised as a witness from the time i was seven until i was 17 and a junior in high school.
i don't have any particularly sad stories to tell, really, except that the process of leaving the organization--even though i was never baptised--was the hardest thing i've ever gone through.
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apfergus
Good question, actually. It's all because of quantum mechanics. Back in the early-ish 20th century a guy named DeBroglie came up with a relationship between an object's momentum and it's wavelength. This completely counterintuitively implies that things with no mass, such as light waves, can have momentum--a property usually reserved for massive particles. Also, massive particles could be wave-like. This blurred the lines seperating waves from particles and now pretty much everything is just colloquially referred to as a particle--gluons, neutrinos (once thought to be massless, now we're working on measuring their mass), photons, and gravitons (never actually been observed, but theoretically massless).
Hopefully that helps. It's one of those things that kind of requires a bit of suspension of disbelief before you can really accept it. Quantum mechanics is just plain weird sometimes. -
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What is your favorite Bible?
by inquirer ini have a couple: new american bible, new jerusalem bible, new world translation and the world english bible.
i know i am going to cop it because i like the new world translation -- i have done a lot of research on it, and don't come to the same conclusion as nearly everyone else and think it's automatically bad just because it's done by the jw's.
doesn't mean i am pro-catholic because i like their bibles too...
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apfergus
I'm partial toward the Skeptics Annotated Bible.
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What Bible Characters Fascinated You?
by MissBehave ini grew up like alot of you on my book of bible stories with all the beautiful illustrations .
thinking back the characters that i was most fascinated with were those like jezebel, delilah, queen vashti etc.
being a young teenage girl, to me they seemed way more interesting.
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apfergus
I have two. One was Ehud. I don't remember the story too well, but he took the handle off a sword and used it to assasinate a king who was so fat that they couldn't find the murder weapon afterward. I just found that amusing.
The other is Mahershalalhashbaz--the longest name in the bible. It supposedly means "the spoil, the spoil, make haste to the spoil". I have no idea what he did, but his name was awesome. And by awesome, I mean crazy. -
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A New Voice
by apfergus ini haven't been involved with the jws in nearly five years now.
i was raised as a witness from the time i was seven until i was 17 and a junior in high school.
i don't have any particularly sad stories to tell, really, except that the process of leaving the organization--even though i was never baptised--was the hardest thing i've ever gone through.
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apfergus
The answer is always 42. It's just a matter of finding the right units. In all actuality, though, we're trying to double check a measurement made in a previous experiment called LSND (Los Alamos Solar Neutrino Detector). Either the LSND measurement is wrong, or if it isn't then there's another generation of subatomic particles that we haven't found yet. I'm personally hoping for the latter of the two--that's job security right there.
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Current GB—None of the 1975 GB left
by AuldSoul init just dawned on me that not one single person from the governing body of 1975 is on the governing body today.. here are a few other facts about the current gb:.
geoffrey jackson was 20 years old in 1975, he was not at risk of being drafted for viet nam because he was too young at the time.. sam herd and guy pierce were 21 the year sputnik was launched.. gerrit losch was 20 at the dawn of flower power and the free love era in the united states.
of course, his circumstances were very different in the country in which he was located.. david splane, stephen lett, and anthony morris were all of an age to be at risk for the viet nam draft.. a brief rundown of historical context for 7 of the 10 current gb members.
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apfergus
Wow. I had no idea that the entire governing body was anointed. I was actually kind of hoping that once all the 144,000 died that the whole organization would have no choice but to crumble. But from what it sounds like, they've already thought about that and have worked some nonsense into the doctrine about the anointed still being present when Armageddon comes to justify the continued presence of the anointed even though they probably now number in excess of 144,000.
Kind of makes me glad that they're "politically neutral". I sure wouldn't want politicians that slimy running the government. -
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A New Voice
by apfergus ini haven't been involved with the jws in nearly five years now.
i was raised as a witness from the time i was seven until i was 17 and a junior in high school.
i don't have any particularly sad stories to tell, really, except that the process of leaving the organization--even though i was never baptised--was the hardest thing i've ever gone through.
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apfergus
Whoah. Sorry about the delay. But as to what area of physics I'm in, I work on neutrino physics. I'm working on Mini-BooNE (Booster Neutrino Experiment) at the moment, but I've been involved in a couple other things on the side. It's all really cool, or at least I think so.
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WAS JESUS CRUCIFIED ON APRIL 3 AD 33?
by badboy inthis was the day a lunar eclipse happened,the gospel does say the moon went blood red.
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apfergus
Even if it was on April 3rd according to the Gregorian calendar, remember that the day of the Memorial is set using the lunar calendar and the date changes year to year.
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WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE NOW?
by bubble ini've been disfellowshipped for 4 years now (for loose conduct - lol) .
what i want to know is, what am i supposed to believe now?
i was brought up a jw but i know that so many of their teachings and doctrines are completely false.
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apfergus
I've been right where you are now. I identified myself as an agnostic for years before I ever managed to find anything more certain (and as an atheist/secular humanist, I'm still not too much more certain). But as JW you've been taught that everything you were told was certain and undeniably true. Now it's just starting to dawn that there isn't anything in life that you can actually know for absolute certain. I know that I spent a good few years just searching for certainties. It took me a long time to get comfortable with living with doubts, but once I did I could never go back.
Best of luck in your search for fulfillment. Just remember that you might find it in places you would have never suspected before.