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?.
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.
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 .
Absolutely, Coco. Absolutely.
Free to feel completely. Eyes open in the morning and you enter into the beauty of each day without guilt.
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.
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.
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?.
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.
.........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.
Cindarella said:
"A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes"
Did born-ins get to see this? it invoved a fairy god-mother.
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.
RIGHT-O, Hamsterbait!
.........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.
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
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.
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
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.
Galaxie addresses Seraph to say that "belief through faith is no more than guess work... Would it not be more productive/intelligent to have something concrete to base it on?" And further "Science should be congratulated for at least trying to give an answer no matter how long it takes."
I am not in dispute over those remarks.
But I look at that iconic picture of the woman and dead child from the tsunami, the one cofty posted to steady-up the "epic" thread. And again and again I HAVE understood why Christian theism doesn't answer this picture --but again and again I understand why many DON'T need concrete proof of god even where life is so harsh--don't need it among the very people for whom, if there were a god, he would have so much to answer FOR.
It is simply beyond the power of many of us to NOT pray. Even to NOTHING. (I understand you, Kate!).Even in anger.It is beyond habit. Life is so huge and horrible and what befalls us can be so beautiful and baffling.
There is a soldiers' saying "There are no atheists in the foxhole".
Why ain't he a' waiting for answers?
Maybe he is. Many prayers, mine, just say"I'm scared"or "this moment is wonderful"or'thanks"
Waiting for answers is what we all do--have to do. That woman and child. If she find any comfort in a god I would neither tell her this nor that. Because both in the beauty of life and in its terror and aloneness-- in our not-knowing--some of us pray.
anyone else bored with religion versus atheism or is it just me?.
i'm planning to go to greece in may.. i'm thinking about planting rocket and beetroot in my garden this year because they are getting rather expensive to buy.. this week i want to make chocolate refridgerator cakes.
some for my daughter who is coming home from uni this weekend and some to take in to work to give away with free tea and coffee because it's national libraries day on saturday.. i just finished reading the humans by matt haig which was brilliant.
It's frozen roads and stoking the stoves at our house. The noisy guineas and the lone rooster crowding the porch for hot mash and warm water.
I rescued our little red hen from her doomed first effort to hatch a batch of eggs in a briar thicket by the root cellar. Poor thing! she had hid out for a week on her hidden nest til I tracked her back in the snow after she showed up for water and mash. She had bravely been setting her eggs that almost certainly were damaged by the extreme temperature during her time of laying them the 2 weeks before.
My husband Dick and I got an old wood box in near the heating stove, dumped several inches of sawdust in the bottom and then straw. It took "Goldie" a while to settle down to it. She is a dandy girl, happy and warm now. were she to have success it would be on Valentine's Day. It would be a miracle if any chicks hatch. She has 14 eggs.
It has been quite a wrangle on the forum over theism vs. atheism, hasn't it? Twice I have thought "Enough!" But I have this time now, being winter and indoors so much to read, reason and write about the ideas others have put out on the subject. I am not facile with writing or the computer so it takes me a bit of time to participate. and I needed to sort it out. at least a little.
I am a hunt and peck typist.
Soon I need to go off the forum. I have to finish straightening our old house. When spring comes, we'll have to fix up the fence for Dick to bring down his little team to work the garden. He is old now, no getting around it. He's 80. He is fit but with long hard years of work and an embarassment of broken bones. I'm 61 and have fought cancer this past year--and, maybe, beaten it.
Our youngest child graduates this June. She hopes we all will save the date and our money to travel across the country to Williiamstown,Massachusetts. Our oldest daughter reserved a house big enough for all 9 of us should we make it.
I left the JWs in 2009. It has been years with richness and trouble and heart-aches. My father got sick, stayed sick and died. My hsband broke his leg. My oldest son was sent to prison for drugs and returned. While the interim was filled with turmoil among father, sons and my own efforts to work. then my own sickness, diagnosis and treatment and now recovery. And we moved.
But life is good. I am so glad I didn't have to go through this as a JW.
Take care. I'll check this thread from time to time. Good place to hang out.
Maeve
P.S. If she hatches any, I'll croww about it here.
