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serotonin_wraith
JoinedPosts by serotonin_wraith
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66
The Gift of Speaking in Tongues?
by Maddie inwith the increase in evangelical churches there seems to be a lot more emphasis on the practise of "speaking in tongues".
i quite like the way these churches conduct services, with live music and great singing.
it is so different to the kh meetings and like fresh air.
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16
Reaching Out
by cluless inas witnesses we were always encouraged to reach out for the privalige of doing this or that or a whole lot of other stuff that doesnt make any scence now .. but its important in life to have something to reach out to.with me i have my wife my little kid and financial security (the kid came aftter i left the witnesses) .
only i havnt found anything to replace the importance of reaching out.as a witness (however misguided that reaching out was).
what in your life has replaced your once sincere belives and given your life the purpose you once had?.
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serotonin_wraith
Right now, working with elderly people and trying to help people out of their delusional god beliefs. Other times it's just been being there for close friends. You can even take time out to focus on just your own happiness. There's a lot of good you can do in one lifetime, and you don't have to do it all at once.
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18
Watching my 4 year old JW nephew today.....
by whyamihere ini have come to realize and thank whomever(maybe god...lol) for not raising my children into such a cult.. i'm sorry, he is a horrible, rotten brat from the dark pits of hell!
annoyingly screams all the time, his usual punishment is spanking(or beat as my sister calls it) - i avoid this because, 1) it's not my child.
2) spanking isn't the answer.
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serotonin_wraith
Thanks funkyderek, some good conscious raising there.
I was the same. My parents were JWs, I wasn't. I was just forced to copy them and believe what they did because they abused my open forming mind.
I know if I knew a kid in that religion personally, I'd show them it was all false and not to worry. I'd have loved to have met an adult like that when I was young, but people often respect religious beliefs, even if it means innocent children are made to have nightmares.
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75
The Biblical Flood Thoroughly Trashed
by Farkel inthere are many new ones on this board who may not have seen this.
my old friend alan feurerbacher who has done an unbelievable amount of scholarly research on many subjects must have spent about two or three thousand years researching virtually every aspect of the biblical flood story, and am providing the link to this subject (together with links to other excellent work by him).
it's long and detailed and definitely not for those who get bored with more than four sentences of information and sound bites.
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serotonin_wraith
If the land of Noah (southern Mesopotamia) was destroyed by a flood, and it has never been destroyed again since then, then God's word to Noah were true.
If being the operative word. If there was a God talking about a local flood, and it wasn't a real local flood that became legend and part of stories such as the Epic of Gilgamesh (
2150-2000 BCE) and the Genesis account (around 1450 BC).
southern Mesopotamia resembling a "trough." There are now no "mountains" in southern Mesopotamia. And even the "high hills" in the area were not so high at the time.
Genesis 7:20
The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.
One gap in the mountain range would have the water pouring away before it reached the mountain tops.
Assuming all the hills/mountains surrounding the trough were exactly the same height (which I find very unlikely- well, it would have to be one long circular mountain), the waters would have overflowed, not carried on for another twenty feet.
All people in the land of Noah.
Your words, not the Bible's.
This seemingly universal language must be understood from Noah's perspective. The world as Noah saw it was a much smaller place 5,000 years ago. No jet planes, no world wide web, etc.
I think they were aware there was much more to the world beyond their 'trough'. Come on now. And forget 5000 years ago, didn't 'Moses' write the account 3500 years ago?
Why did God choose to deal in a special way with the Jews and not with the American Indians? The answer to such questions is usually that God has chosen to use small groups of people in the Middle East to teach all mankind large lessons.
Another answer could be that this was a religion made up by the Jews in which the god they worshipped is on the side of ... the Jews, funnily enough. Neither of us believe in the gods who apparently took an interest in the Egyptians (according to the Egyptians). What I'm doing is applying the same reasoning to the Jewish god, and you're making an exception.
Maybe God wanted Noah's actions to represent a future judgment that will truly be "world wide" - as we now use that phrase.
Maybe it's just silly to honestly believe two kangaroos swam to what is now modern day Iraq to board a boat, live through a flood, then return to their native Australia once it was over. Same with other animals.
Peter's comment about Noah being a preacher almost certainly came from these extra-biblical histories which have since been lost, many no doubt at the destruction of Jerusalem's temple and its library in AD 70.
Or, perhaps people thought it was strange that Noah didn't try to warn people and that God didn't tell him to, so Peter wrote that line to make things right.
Very possibly enough room for everyone in his land who might have repented but did not.
Apologists have a hard enough time explaining how all the millions of animals fitted into the Ark. Plus the food and other things that were needed (as seen by these recent Noah threads).
I didn't say accepting Christ is not necessary for salvation. I just suggested that God may judge the Christian world before the entire world has had an opportunity to accept Christ and that they will be given that opportunity afterwards.
Still, better to stop setting people up perhaps. Take me. I've been told about Christianity, and I don't believe for the same reason you don't believe in the Egyptian gods. I've got just as much reason to believe in them as I have to believe in your choice of god. But if I see a third of the world being judged/raptured/whatever, I'll know your god is real, and I will believe. Therefore giving me a much better chance of survival.
The Bible certainly contains much fodder for unbelievers and much that even believers find hard to understand. I could offer what I consider to be reasonable explanations to all such criticisms. But I doubt you would find them convincing.
Perhaps not. That wouldn't be to spite you, it would just be me being honest about what I was reading.
I've gone into the Adam/Eve/evolution stuff in another thread, so rather than copy that here I'll link you to what my thoughts were.
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/12/146464/1.ashx
To add to that, if there were humans already around, what's going on when it says God made Adam from clay and divine breath, and woman from his rib, Adam being shown potential animal mates when women was already around, the snake being made to crawl on its belly (when it had been doing so long enough!) and well, the rest is in that thread if you're interested. I'll go in to what you've put on the subject next time.
One thing I'll answer now:
A careful reading of the Genesis account shows us that living forever would have been as unnatural for Adam and Eve as it would now be for us.
I think living for hundreds of years is unnatural, yet back in those days, the Bible has people living for hundreds of years.
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66
The Gift of Speaking in Tongues?
by Maddie inwith the increase in evangelical churches there seems to be a lot more emphasis on the practise of "speaking in tongues".
i quite like the way these churches conduct services, with live music and great singing.
it is so different to the kh meetings and like fresh air.
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serotonin_wraith
I think it's euphoria mainly.
Emotions of entire audiences can be changed. It happens at rock concerts and cinemas every day. Think of the scene in Independence Day when the President gives his rousing speech. Everyone feels a part of something bigger, something powerful. Others cheer so it feels natural to join in.
If you were alone in a room with a speaker who was yelling 'Feel the power of GOD! The Holy Spirit is in you!' you may look at him funny. But in a group situation where you see others being emotional, you'd feel like the odd one out for not joining in. Humans like to copy. There was a show called Space Cadets on a couple of years back, and there was a test which had people guessing the number of marbles or something in a jar. Once they'd guessed, they were shown a chart with other guesses given earlier. But the other guesses were fake, and were much higher than the average person would think. As a result, these fake guesses influenced people to change theirs, to a higher number. People like to join in with others.
So if they see some people falling down when a preacher touches them, or speaking in tongues, inhibitions go away and it feels natural to go along with it. You can't feel like a fool, because everyone else is doing it. They may have the power of God in them, you want that too. You feel emotionally charged by the atmosphere, you believe in the holy spirit, you feel the urge to just give in to the euphoria, and away you go, speaking gibberish, influencing others to do the same.
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75
The Biblical Flood Thoroughly Trashed
by Farkel inthere are many new ones on this board who may not have seen this.
my old friend alan feurerbacher who has done an unbelievable amount of scholarly research on many subjects must have spent about two or three thousand years researching virtually every aspect of the biblical flood story, and am providing the link to this subject (together with links to other excellent work by him).
it's long and detailed and definitely not for those who get bored with more than four sentences of information and sound bites.
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serotonin_wraith
Sorry to take so long to respond, I've been away.
No, his promise was to never again destroy the land (not earth, as in the globe, check the Hebrew) of Noah with a flood.
Yet land has been destroyed by floods. While it may be temporary in some places, that's the same with the Biblical flood too, right? Things still grew there afterwards.
The Hebrew could be either 'land' or the entire Earth.
the earth
'erets (eh'-rets)
the earth (at large, or partitively a land) -- common, country, earth, field, ground, land, natins, way, + wilderness, world.http://lexicon.scripturetext.com/genesis/6-13.htm
Now with water, could it really travel as high as the tallest mountain in that area and not spread out over other areas? It's water. It's not sand.
Regardless, the Bible does say things which makes me think it's talking about the entire Earth.
Gen 6:13
..."I am going to put an end to ALL people,...
Gen 6:17
...to destroy ALL life under the heavens...
(now does 'heavens' really mean a patch of sky?)
EVERY creature that has the breath of life in it.
Gen 7:19
They rose greatly on the earth, and ALL the high mountains under the ENTIRE heavens were covered.
Why would God only be concerned about the humans in a small patch of land in the middle east? Why not look at the morality of ALL humans?
After the flood Noah would immediately need animals to serve as beasts of burden, for food and for sacrifices to God. He would not have time to travel great distances in search of these animals. There may well have also been symbolic significance to Noah's actions which we don't now fully understand
Yeah but the story says he had to save EVERY kind of animal. Not just ones that would help him when he got out of the ark. So if it was a local flood, why save every kind of animal? Why not just ones indigenous to that area?
I can't help but see 'symbolic significance... we don't now fully understand' the same as saying 'I know it makes no sense, but I'll still believe this is God's word'. It's the ultimate cop-out. Basically, whatever you can't answer won't matter to you, it'll be answered 'in due time'. So this post is probably just a waste of my time.
The Bible calls Noah. "A preacher of righteousness." He may well have served in that capacity, giving the people of his land an opportunity to repent and find and be saved from the coming destruction, right up until the time God closed the door to the ark.
And yet in the Genesis account there's no mention of God telling Noah to preach. His mind was made up. He was going to kill every human except Noah and his family. 'Preacher of righteousness' is so vague. It doesn't mean he warned people about an impending destruction, that there was even a chance others could be saved. Even if others had wanted to serve God, that wouldn't guarantee their survival either. Being innocent didn't matter - innocent babies and children were drowned.
And that verse was added to the canon hundreds of years after the Genesis story. So for hundreds of years, no one knew he'd tried to warn people or preach?
With all the animals on the ark, how much room was left for converts?!
Quite possibly. When Christ returns He may judge only the Christian world. Two-thirds of the earth's population has never even heard the good news of Jesus Christ, including billions of people in lands like China and India. The Watchtower Society teaches that God will soon kill all of these people. I think they are wrong. This does not sound like the God of love, justice and mercy I worship.
I don't believe the Bible is from any god, so it's hard to argue this issue from the opposite perspective. I think the Bible can say whatever you want it to say. Jesus told someone the only way to be saved was to believe in him, and there's a verse about the good news being preached throughout the entire earth, and then the end will come.
If people who don't hear about Jesus can avoid hell or destruction etc, why not just keep quiet about it and not set people up? If they don't know about Christianity, they'll be okay. Right? You have a view that I don't think most Christians would agree with. Accepting Jesus as personal saviour is the only way to be saved according to them, but maybe you know better. There's so many interpretations of the book. If I was a god who wanted to save humanity, I'd have made it easier to understand personally.
I can't agree with the 'god of love, justice and mercy' thing though. I don't see a god like that in the Bible. Genocide, slavery and women being worth less than men aren't loving things in my eyes.
Just because you don't understand something does not mean it never happened.
Well to take one example, there wasn't a first man and woman made 6,000 years ago in a garden who were pursuaded by a talking snake to eat some magic fruit. Hence, fairy tale. Even if it's some metaphor, that story is still a fairy tale. There was no original man and woman, humans were around much earlier than that and things like pain in childbirth existed before 6,000 years ago.
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Could the widespread belief in God be evidence that he doesn't exist?
by DT infirst of all, i'm an agnostic and don't know if there is a god or not.
however, i do think it possible to intelligently review the evidence and come to some reasonable conclusions, even if we can't have absolute certainty.
it's a big topic, so i'll just discuss the main reason that many people believe in god.
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serotonin_wraith
It does basically come down to a feeling at the end of the day. There's no reason at all to believe in a god. Every 'reason' I see in this thread can be refuted easily enough.
I think if we (or most of us) had an inborn belief in a god, there would be no need for parents to teach children all about their particular god. They would just know. I know that if I thought there was a god, I would have to look at the nearly 3000 gods that have been worshipped and decide if I thought any of them were real, before moving on to some deist creator, perhaps.
But as shown by some posts in this topic, some people have narrowed that huge list to just one god, and I bet they haven't even entertained the idea of looking into these other gods! In fact, they dismiss them without a second thought. Flippin' amazing! They truly believe they've overcome the 1 in 3000 odds that they have the correct god, and the 1 in however many thousands of religions. Yet somehow they cannot accept conditions being right on this planet for life to come about - even when there are so many planets in the universe that if the chances of life coming about were 1 in a billion, there would still be a billion planets supporting life!
It's evolutionary in a sense. I hadn't thought of the leaves rustling/intelligence example before. I see it as evolutionary in the sense that children have to trust what their parents say in order to survive, and if a parent happens to teach their child all about a particular god, the child will believe. They may give up that belief in the future or they may not, but the chances of them choosing another god over the one their parents taught them about is small. I'd bet all the money I have on saying Chalam wasn't raised a Muslim, for example.
So it can be childhood indoctrination, or a child who isn't raised in a religion can still come to believe in a god if they want there to be one, or they don't have the humility to admit that some things in this universe are still unexplainable to us here and now.
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140
I have a theory. Please take my poll!
by changeling ini'd like you all to tell me 2 or 3 things:.
1- were you raised a witness or not?.
2-if you were, was your family very "theocratic" or not so much?.
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serotonin_wraith
Perhaps another criteria could have been added- Did you like being raised a witness?
Plenty only left when they found out it was a lie, not because they minded God killing nearly everyone or the hope of a JW only paradise.
It was those things which took away my want for God. Learning facts led me naturally to atheism.
Raised in a nicer religion, I may have wanted there to be a god, and I'd have had two things to overcome before becoming atheist (my want for a god and my ignorance of facts). The JW religion just stripped one factor away for me.
Though I'm not atheist because I don't want Yahweh to be real. That never stopped me believing when I was young.
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140
I have a theory. Please take my poll!
by changeling ini'd like you all to tell me 2 or 3 things:.
1- were you raised a witness or not?.
2-if you were, was your family very "theocratic" or not so much?.
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serotonin_wraith
1. Yes.
2. It varied. One summer we went preaching almost every day, other times I got away with an hour a month. Some periods we'd look at the JW 'thought of the day' (I forget its name) and study together, other periods we were left to 'educate' ourselves. We went to almost every meeting however.
3. Atheist.
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75
The Biblical Flood Thoroughly Trashed
by Farkel inthere are many new ones on this board who may not have seen this.
my old friend alan feurerbacher who has done an unbelievable amount of scholarly research on many subjects must have spent about two or three thousand years researching virtually every aspect of the biblical flood story, and am providing the link to this subject (together with links to other excellent work by him).
it's long and detailed and definitely not for those who get bored with more than four sentences of information and sound bites.
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serotonin_wraith
Burn:
Shepherds within living memory of the catastrophic flooding of the Black Sea (which is not far away) are tending their flocks in the Ararat mountains. They either were witnesses of the flooding or the flood story was orally passed down to them without too much of a time lapse. (it looks like Durupinar is only a couple of hundred miles away from the shores of the Black Sea).
They come upon this huge shiplike rock formation and the story of an enormous ship that saved a remnant from the Great Flood is born!
Looks fine to me, but as you follow the Bible, why would God allow a man made myth to be put in his book? I don't get it.
Couple more questions. If it was a local flood, and God said he'd leave a sign (the rainbow) to remind us he'd never do it again, does he have to answer for all the local floods that have happened since?
What's actually the point of the Noah story? A local flood would mean there'd be no point in rescuing two of every species - a few hundred miles away there'd be plenty of them. Seems odd to have an ark built when Noah and his family could have just travelled out of flood range, and come back later if they so wished.
Was it about heeding God's warning? As someone else pointed out, all life on earth (which I'm guessing is code for 'everyone in that small area') was wiped out without warning. Noah didn't go preaching as far as I can see, and even Jesus says at Matt 24:39 "and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man."
That last part too - when Jesus returns it will just be a local event? Oh.
It just bugs me when people say "It's not supposed to be taken literally!" and then not actually bother to look at what it means if it isn't literal. I see a ton of questions come up about it, and even if I was the slightest bit interested in wanting the Biblical god to be real, I couldn't just ignore things like this. The Bible is becoming more and more a book of things that never actually happened, and people still think it was inspired by God. Creation story - never happened. Garden of Eden story - never happened. Nativety scene - never happened. Man living in a whale - never happened. Talking donkey - never happened. Hair with magical strength-giving powers - never happened. It's a book of fairy tales, and even if the author is God, it's STILL a book of fairy tales.