Your asking questions! That's the best way to start. The answers don't always come easy. In fact, a lot of the time they don't even come at all. If you'd like to keep looking for answers in the Bible I recomend checking out a 12th century Jewish philosopher by the name of Maimonides. He's best known for his extensive commentary on the Torah, but I enjoy his works explaining why he wrote his comentaries more than the comentaries themselves.
apfergus
JoinedPosts by apfergus
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48
Why is truth is so hard to find in Bible
by The Dragon ini have been studing it for years looking for answers....yet for every answer i find there is a counter to it.
the words themselves are twisted by leaders/teachers to fit their personal opinions and adgendas, as well as twisted by trying to rely on our own reasoning to understand them.. a good example would be the way our current system of laws work.. if the supreme court writes a law into the book..say for example.."evil" is anyone who does this....... it is then turned over to a bunch of undereducated enforcers to interpert and judge others they feel are "evil".
they are allowed to accuse and shoot first asking questions later.
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Power of Prayer Demonstrated
by Carmel inlast night i took one of my daughter's highschool friends to the rodeo with me since noone else was interested.
we had a good time with the freebee vip tickets, barby and then the rodeo.
before the first event there was a half hour of pagentry which was okay, but it was interrrupted by an "invocation" by one of the local baptist ministers.
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apfergus
I always cringe when I hear TV interviews with natural disaster survivors. It often goes like this: "Well, the good lord musta been lookin' out for me and my famly today. We lost our home, but we still got our lives. God was sure listenin' to our prayers."
I could not agree more. If it was God's will to save them, it was clearly also God's will that everyone else be killed.
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if an atheist does something good...
by DannyBloem in.
if an atheist leads good life with high moral standards, because he choice to do so and thinks for logic it is a good thing, does it not mean much more then when a theist does the same, because his gods tells him to do it?
what's your thoughs on this?
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apfergus
Now concerning the "atheist worldview" now don't be offended when I say this, I am referring to the "worldview" not the atheist individuals themselves. As a previous poster joked before "they will do good if it is for survival" that is exactly the atheist worldview, "survival of the fittest" If this is the case then we cannot say what Hitler did was wrong, in the end war is just that "survival of the fittest" In an atheist worldview, there cannot be any certain "right" and "wrong" "good" or "bad" So as an atheist supporting the atheist worldview one cannot say "I do GOOD things" If they do, then they are contradicting their worldview. ....What is good exactly? Where do our morals originate from? If there is no certain good and evil Then the closest we can get to is "disagreement" You can't really say "my opinion is right and yours is wrong" concerning morals, because there is no "right" and "wrong"! Think of a world with no moral law...
Okay. This is wrong. Just plain wrong. There are no such things as moral absolutes. Nobody can name a moral absolute, because there is no such thing. All morality boils down to is either emotional attatchment to a certain idea of righteosness or a logical conclusion based on a careful assessment of the situation. Moral relativists (not necessarily atheists, but I think moral relativism is what's being questioned here and not atheism) make moral judgements based on the latter process wanting the resulting situation to be that which is best for not only themselves but for everyone else as well. Morality follows exactly from the question, "What is best for human-kind as a whole?" No God is necessary to answer that question, simply care and logic.
Moreover, if one makes moral decisions based on unquestionable lists of things that are "good" or "bad" then it is relatively easy to fall into a trap when something from the "bad" list suddenly becomes the best solution to a situation or something from the "good" list would bring harm to others. While some paradigms might have relatively effective lists, reality is not always so cut-and-dried and eventually situations will arise where the list-based morality fails. Even if one were to use such a system as a starting place, I think that eventually everyone has to develop some ability to drop them when the time comes and make a judgement call on their own using good sense and reason. -
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Can you prepare solid meals?
by greendawn incan you prepare interesting solid meals or do you not have the flare for it and instead prefer to live on take aways, restaurant meals or simple casual snack meals at home?
i find it hard to concentrate on cooking though i always want to do it and i have actually put together some interesting recipes several times.
there is a strange resistance blocking me.
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apfergus
I love cooking and do so whenever I can. Between school and work, though, a lot of the time I'm stretched pretty thin. I've actually wound up coming up with some fairly original recipes that I can make really quick, though. I do cheat and use pre-made ingrediants sometimes, but I can forgive myself for that.
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Gay JW
by Wordly Andre inanyone left the org, because they were force out for being gay?
i am not gay i am married but have a few gay and lesbian friends.
i was just wondering about that.
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apfergus
I'm decidedly non-heterosexual, but it has little to do with my leaving the organization. Actually, I doubt anyone from my days in the Watchtower even knows anything at all about me now. I really don't go out of my way to hide anything, but I do avoid anything having to do with The Truth (TM) whenever I can.
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September AWAKE
by stillajwexelder ingot the september awake tonight.
marked on the front cover special issue in orange letters.
the title is " is there a creator".
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apfergus
I'd like to read it, if anyone can scan a PDF or something.
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How open are you to new ideas.
by poodlehead inwhen i was a jw, i believed what i was told to believe.
after all it was the truth.
but now i no longer believe that what they were telling me was the truth.
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apfergus
I aproximate my openess to new ideas to Carl Sagan's "baloney detection kit" rules from The Demon Haunted World. I'll consider any idea placed before me, but if it doesn't stand up to some kind of basic logical criteria I see no reason to take it seriously.
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Favorite Band as a teenager........
by whyamihere inas a teenager, what was your favorite band?
this band can be a local, main stream etc..... my favorite local band was little blue crunchy things, they were from milwaukee, wi.
(even hung out with them)!
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apfergus
I really liked The Moody Blues (and still do, in fact), but the greatest band ever is still Dream Theater.
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apfergus
There were a couple younger elders in my congregation who I really looked up to as a child. They would always bring pop-culture references and humor into their talks and I would always try to immitate that when I got to give talks an the ministry school. The only specific humorous moment I remember was a talk one brother gave that featured a few original short plays--one of which involved me pretending to be a mainline protestant. It really wasn't all that funny. It was just a clever presentation of a strawman argument, but it got a good laugh out of everyone.
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Has being a Jehova's witness totally shattered your faith?
by Silvia Plath injust because the watchtower society is wrong doesn't mean that there is no god, nor does it mean there is a god.
it would interesting to now how former members have adjusted thier cosmology, or whether they are now atheists and why.
i personally see religion as a more personal matter, rather than belonging to an organization.
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apfergus
My faith was shattered, but I don't think it was by the Watchtower. I still clung to a lot of the crap I learned from my years in the ranks for a very long time after I left. The straw that finally broke the camel's back was a stack of Stephen J. Gould books and a university course in evolutionary biology. Science and the scientific method has brought me more than anything any religion ever has.