Posts by Alpaca

37

Just want to say thanks to all of the fair, thought-provoking, and balanced posters here--this board has been a huge help to me....

by Alpaca in

jw
friends

....but there are a few who insist on just being plain nasty for no reason.. so, i am leaving for a while to concentrate on other stuff that i need to do.

right now, it is a degree of negativity that i just don't need in my life.

if you cannot post about even a benign subject without getting vicious comments it is time for a break.

Alpaca

Thank you Gregor and John Doe for accepting my apologies. This has been a useful dialogue. All of the comments on this thread are appreciated.

Maybe others can benefit from this experience and keep things cool on the board.

Now, I really feel like coming back after a break...so you will see me here again at some point down the road.

The only poster who did not weigh in here after the apologies and acceptances was cameo, so I hope she sees the rest of the dialogue at some point.

All the best to everyone 'til I get back...and thanks again. I think the thread is about spent.

Alex

37

Just want to say thanks to all of the fair, thought-provoking, and balanced posters here--this board has been a huge help to me....

by Alpaca in

jw
friends

....but there are a few who insist on just being plain nasty for no reason.. so, i am leaving for a while to concentrate on other stuff that i need to do.

right now, it is a degree of negativity that i just don't need in my life.

if you cannot post about even a benign subject without getting vicious comments it is time for a break.

Alpaca

You know what? I probabaly did over react and I want to offer Gregor and John Doe both sincere apologies (I have had some nasty exchanges with both of them).

I think Rodbar and cameo probably had at least partially correct observations about me, so thank you for saying something.

If you guys accept the apologies that would be appreciated. If not I understand but at least it's out there.

Just in case John Doe and Gregor do not come back to this thread, I will send them both PMs of apology.

I am still going to take a break when this thread is spent.

37

Just want to say thanks to all of the fair, thought-provoking, and balanced posters here--this board has been a huge help to me....

by Alpaca in

jw
friends

....but there are a few who insist on just being plain nasty for no reason.. so, i am leaving for a while to concentrate on other stuff that i need to do.

right now, it is a degree of negativity that i just don't need in my life.

if you cannot post about even a benign subject without getting vicious comments it is time for a break.

Alpaca

Thanks Ninj

I think I have your outside e-mail address but just in case send me a PM with it. I will definitely try to see you next time I am in Europe.

37

Just want to say thanks to all of the fair, thought-provoking, and balanced posters here--this board has been a huge help to me....

by Alpaca in

jw
friends

....but there are a few who insist on just being plain nasty for no reason.. so, i am leaving for a while to concentrate on other stuff that i need to do.

right now, it is a degree of negativity that i just don't need in my life.

if you cannot post about even a benign subject without getting vicious comments it is time for a break.

Alpaca

....but there are a few who insist on just being plain nasty for no reason.

So, I am leaving for a while to concentrate on other stuff that I need to do. Right now, it is a degree of negativity that I just don't need in my life. If you cannot post about even a benign subject without getting vicious comments it is time for a break. I might be back...I might not.

In any event, thanks to all of you who have posted your thought provoking comments and observations.

19

Looking for a haircut? Try this place. Read first three reviews...

by Elsewhere in

jw
friends

he asked me if i wanted a free shave, i said sure.

other than that, it was a great place to get a hair cut and free shave.. .

by gretch03/15/2009pretty good haircut.

Alpaca

I dunno...when I was in China a couple of years age haircuts were about the equivalent of of $3 and they came with a 1/2 hour upper body massage.

NOOOOOOO...problem...haircut, once a week.

7

PER NOACHIAN ARTIFACTS

by badboy in

do jws believe artifacts predating noah's flood have been found?.

any takers?.

Alpaca

Hey badboy,

I love your thread topics...but how did you develop the fixation with Noah?

12

If you love google and other search engines...you might want to re-think that?

by Alpaca in

jw
friends

we have arrived at a time & place where we take access to information for granted.

easy, right...you type your query into the search engine and bam, you've got 100 gazillion hits on your subject.

and, most of us are saavy enough to know that a preponderance of the info is total bullshit.

Alpaca

Thanks for all of the input.

What scares the shit out of me is this...the founding fathers recognized that one of the ingredients of a healthy democracy is freedom of the press...ie., to allow the free flow of information without governmental constraints.

We have entered an era that will probably witness the demise of most, if not all newspapers and news magazines. If electronic forums become the primary (only?) source of information available there is will be no way to know how information is being filtered at the behest of a government's "requests." The reality of "1984" can no longer be dismissed as remote or "quaint" in the way that it once was. I don't know about you guys, but I trust the American government to do the right thing only slightly more than I do the Chinese government.

Dissenters might have no other choice but to go back to hard copy and share information through their networks the old fashioned way. Ironically, maybe new newspapers would flourish???

In any event, I think it safe to say that we should question everything, and accept nothing at face value.

19

another newbie

by Adrianoblue in

jw
friends

i`ve been "hanging around" on this jw.net for a while, so this is my very first posting.

i`m a former jw from germany, learnt the truth at the age of 20, got babtized 3 years later, and left the wt (for various reasons) about 4 years ago.

so i just like to say a warm friendly "hello" to everyone.

Alpaca

Welcome to our international non-Brotherhood.

Not that we're not gonna' love ya' like a brother....

12

If you love google and other search engines...you might want to re-think that?

by Alpaca in

jw
friends

we have arrived at a time & place where we take access to information for granted.

easy, right...you type your query into the search engine and bam, you've got 100 gazillion hits on your subject.

and, most of us are saavy enough to know that a preponderance of the info is total bullshit.

Alpaca

We have arrived at a time & place where we take access to information for granted. Easy, right...you type your query into the search engine and bam, you've got 100 gazillion hits on your subject. And, most of us are saavy enough to know that a preponderance of the info is total bullshit. Then it becomes a process of winnowing out the truth or at least the most accurate info you can find.

But, what if the truth wasn't even in the returns? What if it had been deliberately removed so that all you had access to was the bullshit? Being human, you would end up winnowing and you would begin to draw conclusions based on the info you had available to you, but your conclusions would be irrelevant in the overall scheme of things, because the "truth" was unavailable to you.

That is exactly the agreement the Chinese government has extracted from the search engines, like google or yahoo, that want to provide their services in China. The Chinese internet is connected to the rest of world across an electronic "gate" that has been deemed the "Great Firewall of China." It is literally a set of huge cables that convey electronic data between China and the rest of the world. Anything from outside the borders of China is highly censored at the "Great Firewall."

I experienced this for myself when I was in China in 2006. If you type "Tianenmen Square" into any search engine all of the returns are about happy tourists and history, blah, blah, blah.....or if you type "Tianenmen Square Massacre" into the search engines, it will give you a message that says "your search returned no results." Any of the search engines that operate in China do so with a version that is distinguished by a ".cn" extension. All of the search engines are whores and they agreed to it because it meant they could make money in China if they agreed to the government's censorship standards. BTW, they had to create new programs and softwares that would automatically insert the Boolean operators that would restrict the results.

Think it can't happen here?

45

Atheists/Theists: What is the best argument FOR theism (a God's existence) you have heard?

by Spook in

i have lived for the last 3 years with two phd philosophers as roomates, both in the last year of their dissertation at reputable institutions (notre dame, penn/uic respectively).

they are both moderate semi-christian theists after having been fundamentalists as youths.

i have a sceince and engineering background and am a naturalist atheist former jw.

Alpaca

First I will say that on the scale of 0 (no doubt about God's existence) and 100 (complete doubt in God's existence) I am at about 98.5. I cannot go all the way to 100 because the atheist is just as dogmatic as the believer.

Some of the new things being discovered in physics and astrophysics that cannot be explained with the knowledge base we currently have seem to suggest that there are other dimensions beyond our ken. What makes it bizarre is that the effects of the events that happen in those dimensions can be observed in the dimensions we know and can observe.

For example, one of the things all of us have come to accept as "immutable fact" is that nothing in the universe travels faster than speed of light. Now, astrophysicists have discovered that there are action-reaction events that can span significant distances of the universe, even across the entire known universe. How does that happen?

And there are lots of other similar discoveries that, at the very least, give pause to the assumption that we can know one way or the other whether God exists.

Science marched forward at an astonishing rate since the 17th Century with one phenomenon (often attributed to God) after another being stripped of the mystery that shrouded it from the beginning of human existence. Now, we have entered a period when the answers are not coming so easily or quickly.

So, it is the complexity of the universe and the unknown dimensions of space and time that make the belief in God (who must have no limitations imposed by the dimensions we know), at least, reasonable. On the other hand, humans have plenty of experience with scienctific explanations eventually triumphing over supernatural explantions, that persisted from time immemorial, for observable phenomena. Therefore, it would be premature to jump to any conclusions about "proof" for God's existence.

One thing is pretty clear...if God does exist the unmistakeable evidence is not being volunteered.