Posts by humbled

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

i have reached a frontier dreamt about as a child -- the outer reaches of a vast realm under stars.. though an imaginative and inquisitive lad, my forward-looking mind and open heart could never have conjured up this fabulous, this infinite unreality into which i have been catapulted.

what may appear a distortion of my former reality i tentatively accept as a cosmic tableau that threatens both to fascinate and crush my frail, puny body and spirit.

i am unable to comprehend what i gaze upon with frightened, delicious terror.. my recent escape from lunaria was of sheer necessity: my people have been overtaken by a scorpion race of alien malefactors whose intent toward us was not one of beneficient intervention but that of conquest.

humbled

Darn it, Coco! Why'd ya have to remind me of my dirty dishes!

O, what a mood you make!

I really should be doing them. But reading this has been much more fun.

Good night, Coco.

5

Ponder daily these 6 things

by Terry in

6 things we probably need to wrestle with and keep before our mind to challenge our view of true and false, good and bad, right and wrong.. .

1. it boggles the mind.

most religions are smart enough to keep their doctrines out of the area of objective disproof.. the watchtower society obsessive date-setting has put it all to the test over and over again.. how do they get away with it?.

humbled

I was baptized in 1985. I was well in to my JW life before I heard about 1975. I heard about it from a householder in the door-to-door work. It was hard to find any info on it.

What a rotten product--the JW thing.

And I bought it for 22 years! And worse: I tried to sell it to others.

39

Allow Me My Dreams

by compound complex in

jw
friends

today, today, as with all those new days before, .

i awoke from the sweet dreams of nocturnal .

flights of fancy, and that they should take .

humbled

Absolutely, Coco. Absolutely.

Free to feel completely. Eyes open in the morning and you enter into the beauty of each day without guilt.

82

Religion VS Atheism and the decline of ethics and morals

by EndofMysteries in

being back in college after leaving the borg, one of the required classes for a degree at my college is ethics.

after learning a few things, i am curious where morality and ethics is heading for the future of humanity.

i wish i could find the source again, but several weeks ago i recalled reading a transcript of a very old document that talked about when christianity was being spread in europe, it brought civility and community.

humbled

An almost humorous footnote to the benefits of having a Christian slave master is in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

Young slave then, Douglass was with a cruel master, Hugh Auld. So irreverent before his conversion at a Methodist camp revival, Master Auld would wait until the Sabbath for to beat "bad" slaves.

Douglass witnessed Auld's conversion and wondered what effect it would have on the man.

After the Lord "saved" him, Hugh Auld beat his slaves on Monday.

I read a slave account that noted that slaves sold to Louisiana plantations were grieved to find that those predominantly Catholic planters tended to work slaves 7 days a week as opposed having to work only 6 days for those of the Protestant denominations.

Religious slaveholders were delicate not to separate and desecrate marriages between slaves by having to sell a husband or wife-

--Solution? Do not allow a "legal" or "church" wedding! Hence the slave custom of "jumping over the broom" to symbolize a union. There was, as a result, immediately following the Civil War a tremendous surge of legitimizing the unions of couples so long denied the dignity of recognition.

There is no end to the hypocrisy needed to buy and force labor from another human being. And Christians proved well able--justified often by their church leaders--many of whom held slaves themselves.

234

Suicide - How many do you know within the JWs

by Lady Lee in

thw wts likes to play games with their statistics.

one interesting but truly tragic is the number of jwhovah's witnesses who commit suicie.. now i suspect that if a person commits suicide shortly before or after they are disfellowshipped then the elders would say that person wasn't a witness or that they had done something so terrible that they were too guilty to admit it and by their action of committing suicide they pretty much declared they were no longer a jw.. yup fancy talk to make sure any crap didn't fall on them.. so my question.. do you know of cases like this?

if so then can you answer a few more questions.. had this person been dfed or in real danger of being dfed or whatever the equivalent is if they were never baptized?.

humbled

In Iowa young brother not long married. Jumped of a bridge, can't remember if w/ a rope around his neck.

An elder I knew in NW Arkansas.

24

Reoccurring dream I have

by punkofnice in

.........although sometimes slight differences.. bear in mind i am in the uk and we don't go a bundle on therapy and i can't afford it anyway.. here is the dream manifest content as best i can recall.............. i am in a town or city.

i come across a shop which inside is more like an indoor market, sometimes a cavern.

it sells marvel comics.

humbled

Cindarella said:

"A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes"

Did born-ins get to see this? it invoved a fairy god-mother.

30

What is it with teens/adults and dependency on everyone else?

by punkofnice in

jw
friends

i've seen a lot of this lately here in the uk, where teens and young adults still depend on their parents when they live away from home.. some just don't seem able to earn enough.

some are on benefits.

some earn more than me and are in debt.

humbled

RIGHT-O, Hamsterbait!

24

Reoccurring dream I have

by punkofnice in

.........although sometimes slight differences.. bear in mind i am in the uk and we don't go a bundle on therapy and i can't afford it anyway.. here is the dream manifest content as best i can recall.............. i am in a town or city.

i come across a shop which inside is more like an indoor market, sometimes a cavern.

it sells marvel comics.

humbled

I know we change over time, punky. Even establishedartists have evolutions in their work.

Loss of youthful optimism? Maybe. But that you keep looking again and again--

Have you ever looked online for persons, places, sources for instruction in developing your skills in graphic art? If you are a songwriter already you have aptitudes for imagery and narrative. Go on with it. You also have a clarity in processing dispersed elements of seemingly unrelated bits of information.(as in: you got out of the JWs after finding a "2" here and a "2" there and then putting 2+2 together.) In my mind, a person who does that can put out a sharp story.

I'm not a dream interpreter. But maybe dreams serve as prompts to our own inner core. If a thing like this prompts thoughts such as your own--My feeling is to kick it around.

All the best--

Maeve

71

Theism Makes Science Impossible

by cofty in

it is not impossible to be a great scientist and a theist - kenneth miller and francis collins are good examples.. however, science depends on methodological naturalism - a working assumption that there are natural causes for observed effects.

please note that methodological naturalism is not the same as ontological naturalism.

in other words scientists may believe in a spirit world or not as long as god is never invoked as an answer.. contrast this with theism which, unlike deism, declares god to be immanent and active in the world.. consider a scientist who is also a theist doing research into the efficacy of a new drug that cures heart disease.

humbled

Lol. Too true, cofty. Atheism flourishes in the trenches. Not everything a soldier says is true. But this is:

I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy. Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum, With crumps and lice and lack of rum. He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads go by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.

Suicide in the Trenches (1917) Sigfried Sassoon