whereami

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Posts by whereami

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  60

  FYI: Something is going on in Brazil that's interesting

  by AndersonsInfo in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  posted on www.christianwitnesses.com.

  the federal public ministry at ceara, brazil, on july 14, 2011 filed a civil action against the religion of jehovah's witnesses in the 8th federal court for practicing religious discrimination against former members.

  prosecutor nilce cunha rodrigues has taken on official representation of sebastian oliveira (ramos) who, after being expelled from the religion was discriminated against by colleagues, friends and relatives, including his mother, in accord with norms of the jehovahs witnesses who are headed by a governing body of the watchtower society.

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  whereami

  Here's the video:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB-xvnyXYyA&feature=player_embedded
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  Simple Faith- Just trust Jesus... and a lot of other stuff too.

  by whereami in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  funny.

  .

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqz-di3jghi&sns=em.

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  whereami

  Funny

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqZ-dI3JghI&sns=em
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  15

  The Very Best of Farting Preacher

  by 3Mozzies in

  1. social
  2. humour

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  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kck3tbii1qq&feature=player_embedded#at=93.

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  whereami

  "I'm very bold, I know that".

  Classic.
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  As atheists know, you can be good without God

  by whereami in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-07-31-atheism-morality-evolution-religion_n.htm.

  one cold chicago day last february, i watched a federal express delivery man carry an armful of boxes to his truck.

  in the middle of the icy street, he slipped, scattering the boxes and exposing himself to traffic.

• 

  whereami

  http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-07-31-atheism-morality-evolution-religion_n.htm

  One cold Chicago day last February, I watched a Federal Express delivery man carry an armful of boxes to his truck. In the middle of the icy street, he slipped, scattering the boxes and exposing himself to traffic. Without thinking, I ran into the street, stopped cars, hoisted the man up and helped him recover his load. Pondering this afterward, I realized that my tiny act of altruism had been completely instinctive; there was no time for calculation.

  • 

    By Alejandro Gonzalez, USA TODAY

  By Alejandro Gonzalez, USA TODAY

  We see the instinctive nature of moral acts and judgments in many ways: in the automatic repugnance we feel when someone such as Bernie Madoff bilks the gullible and trusting, in our disapproval of the person who steals food from the office refrigerator, in our admiration for someone who risks his life to save a drowning child. And although some morality comes from reason and persuasion — we must learn, for example, to share our toys — much of it seems intuitive and inborn.

  USA TODAY OPINION

  On Religion
  Faith. Religion. Spirituality. Meaning. In our ever-shrinking world, the tentacles of religion touch everything from governmental policy to individual morality to our basic social constructs. It affects the lives of people of great faith — or no faith at all. This series of weekly columns — launched in 2005 — seeks to illuminate the national conversation.

  Many Americans, including Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian, see instinctive morality as both a gift from God and strong evidence for His existence.

  As a biologist, I see belief in God-given morality as American's biggest impediment to accepting the fact of evolution. "Evolution," many argue, "could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality. For if we were merely evolved beasts, we would act like beasts. Surely our good behavior, and the moral sentiments that promote it, reflect impulses that God instilled in our soul."

  So while morality supposedly comes from God, immorality is laid at the door of Charles Darwin, who has been blamed for everything from Nazism to the shootings in Columbine.

  Why it couldn't be God

  But though both moral and immoral behaviors can be promoted by religions, morality itself — either in individual behavior or social codes — simply cannot come from the will or commands of a God. This has been recognized by philosophers since the time of Plato.

  Religious people can appreciate this by considering Plato's question: Do actions become moral simply because they're dictated by God, or are they dictated by God because they are moral? It doesn't take much thought to see that the right answer is the second one. Why? Because if God commanded us to do something obviously immoral, such as kill our children or steal, it wouldn't automatically become OK. Of course, you can argue that God would never sanction something like that because he's a completely moral being, but then you're still using some idea of morality that is independent of God. Either way, it's clear that even for the faithful, God cannot be the source of morality but at best a transmitter of some human-generated morality.

  This isn't just philosophical rumination, because God — at least the God of Christians and Jews — repeatedly sanctioned or ordered immoral acts in the Old Testament. These include slavery (Leviticus 25:44-46), genocide (Deuteronomy 7:1-2; 20:16-18), the slaying of adulterers and homosexuals, and the stoning of non-virgin brides (Leviticus 20:10, 20:13, Deuteronomy 22:20-21).

  Was God being moral when, after some children made fun of the prophet Elisha's bald head, he made bears rip 42 of them to pieces (2 Kings 2:23-24)? Even in the New Testament, Jesus preaches principles of questionable morality, barring heaven to the wealthy (Matthew 19:24), approving the beating of slaves (Luke 12:47-48), and damning sinners to the torments of hell (Mark 9:47-48). Similar sentiments appear in the Quran.

  Now, few of us see genocide or stoning as moral, so Christians and Jews pass over those parts of the Bible with judicious silence. But that's just the point. There is something else — some other source of morality — that supersedes biblical commands. When religious people pick and choose their morality from Scripture, they clearly do so based on extrareligious notions of what's moral.

  Further, the idea that morality is divinely inspired doesn't jibe with the fact that religiously based ethics have changed profoundly over time. Slavery was once defended by churches on scriptural grounds; now it's seen as grossly immoral. Mormons barred blacks from the priesthood, also on religious grounds, until church leaders had a convenient "revelation" to the contrary in 1978. Catholics once had a list of books considered immoral to read; they did away with that in 1966. Did these adjustments occur because God changed His mind? No, they came from secular improvements in morality that forced religion to clean up its act.

  Where, then?

  So where does morality come from, if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing — even notions of fairness. This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is built partly on the genes of our ancestors.

  And the conditions under which humans evolved are precisely those that would favor the evolution of moral codes: small social groups of big-brained animals. When individuals in a group can get to know, recognize and remember each other, this gives an advantage to genes that make you behave nicely towards others in the group, reward those who cooperate and punish those who cheat. That's how natural selection can build morality. Secular reason adds another layer atop these evolved behaviors, helping us extend our moral sentiments far beyond our small group of friends and relatives — even to animals.

  Should we be afraid that a morality based on our genes and our brains is somehow inferior to one handed down from above? Not at all. In fact, it's far better, because secular morality has a flexibility and responsiveness to social change that no God-given morality could ever have. Secular morality is what pushes religion to improve its own dogma on issues such as slavery and the treatment of women. Secular morality is what prevents ethically irrelevant matters — what we eat, read or wear, when we work, or whom we have sex with — from being grouped with matters of genuine moral concern, like rape and child abuse. And really, isn't it better to be moral because you've worked out for yourself — in conjunction with your group — the right thing to do, rather than because you want to propitiate a god or avoid punishment in the hereafter?

  Nor should we worry that a society based on secular morality will degenerate into lawlessness. That experiment has already been done — in countries such as Sweden and Denmark that are largely filled with non-believers and atheists. I can vouch from experience that secular European nations are full of well-behaved and well-meaning citizens, not criminals and sociopaths running amok. In fact, you can make a good case that those countries, with their liberal social views and extensive aid for the sick, old and disadvantaged, are even more moral than America.

  Clearly, you can be good without God.

  Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at TheUniversity of Chicago. His latest book is Why Evolution is True, and his website is www.whyevolutionistrue.com.
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  21

  JW- Out of brooklyn by 1/1/14???

  by lrkr in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  it appears that the residents of brooklyn heights have figured out a win-win.

  wt moves out.

  wt buildings are converted to residences.

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  whereami

  They'll use it as a sign of the end.

  Only the WTS knows how to spin stuff like this.
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  13

  Science and religion: God didn't make man; man made gods

  by whereami in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  science and religion: god didn't make man; man made godsop-edin recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's "dna.

  "july 18, 2011|by j. anderson thomson and clare aukoferbefore john lennon imagined "living life in peace," he conjured "no heaven ... / no hell below us .../ and no religion too.".

  no religion: what was lennon summoning?

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  whereami

  Science and religion: God didn't make man; man made gods

  Op-Ed

  In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's "DNA."

  July 18, 2011|By J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer

  Before John Lennon imagined "living life in peace," he conjured "no heaven … / no hell below us …/ and no religion too."

  No religion: What was Lennon summoning? For starters, a world without "divine" messengers, like Osama bin Laden, sparking violence. A world where mistakes, like the avoidable loss of life in Hurricane Katrina, would be rectified rather than chalked up to "God's will." Where politicians no longer compete to prove who believes more strongly in the irrational and untenable. Where critical thinking is an ideal. In short, a world that makes sense.

  

  In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's "DNA." They have produced robust theories, backed by empirical evidence (including "imaging" studies of the brain at work), that support the conclusion that it was humans who created God, not the other way around. And the better we understand the science, the closer we can come to "no heaven … no hell … and no religion too."

  Like our physiological DNA, the psychological mechanisms behind faith evolved over the eons through natural selection. They helped our ancestors work effectively in small groups and survive and reproduce, traits developed long before recorded history, from foundations deep in our mammalian, primate and African hunter-gatherer past.

  For example, we are born with a powerful need for attachment, identified as long ago as the 1940s by psychiatrist John Bowlby and expanded on by psychologist Mary Ainsworth. Individual survival was enhanced by protectors, beginning with our mothers. Attachment is reinforced physiologically through brain chemistry, and we evolved and retain neural networks completely dedicated to it. We easily expand that inborn need for protectors to authority figures of any sort, including religious leaders and, more saliently, gods. God becomes a super parent, able to protect us and care for us even when our more corporeal support systems disappear, through death or distance.

  Scientists have so far identified about 20 hard-wired, evolved "adaptations" as the building blocks of religion. Like attachment, they are mechanisms that underlie human interactions: Brain-imaging studies at the National Institutes of Health showed that when test subjects were read statements about religion and asked to agree or disagree, the same brain networks that process human social behavior — our ability to negotiate relationships with others — were engaged.

  Among the psychological adaptations related to religion are our need for reciprocity, our tendency to attribute unknown events to human agency, our capacity for romantic love, our fierce "out-group" hatreds and just as fierce loyalties to the in groups of kin and allies. Religion hijacks these traits. The rivalry between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for example, or the doctrinal battles between Protestant and Catholic reflect our "groupish" tendencies.

  In addition to these adaptations, humans have developed the remarkable ability to think about what goes on in other people's minds and create and rehearse complex interactions with an unseen other. In our minds we can de-couple cognition from time, place and circumstance. We consider what someone else might do in our place; we project future scenarios; we replay past events. It's an easy jump to say, conversing with the dead or to conjuring gods and praying to them.

  Morality, which some see as imposed by gods or religion on savage humans, science sees as yet another adaptive strategy handed down to us by natural selection.

  

  Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom notes that "it is often beneficial for humans to work together … which means it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals." In groundbreaking research, he and his team found that infants in their first year of life demonstrate aspects of an innate sense of right and wrong, good and bad, even fair and unfair. When shown a puppet climbing a mountain, either helped or hindered by a second puppet, the babies oriented toward the helpful puppet. They were able to make an evaluative social judgment, in a sense a moral response.

  Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist who co-directs the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has also done work related to morality and very young children. He and his colleagues have produced a wealth of research that demonstrates children's capacities for altruism. He argues that we are born altruists who then have to learn strategic self-interest.

  Beyond psychological adaptations and mechanisms, scientists have discovered neurological explanations for what many interpret as evidence of divine existence. Canadian psychologist Michael Persinger, who developed what he calls a "god helmet" that blocks sight and sound but stimulates the brain's temporal lobe, notes that many of his helmeted research subjects reported feeling the presence of "another." Depending on their personal and cultural history, they then interpreted the sensed presence as either a supernatural or religious figure. It is conceivable that St. Paul's dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus was, in reality, a seizure caused by temporal lobe epilepsy.

  

  The better we understand human psychology and neurology, the more we will uncover the underpinnings of religion. Some of them, like the attachment system, push us toward a belief in gods and make departing from it extraordinarily difficult. But it is possible.

  We can be better as a species if we recognize religion as a man-made construct. We owe it to ourselves to at least consider the real roots of religious belief, so we can deal with life as it is, taking advantage of perhaps our mind's greatest adaptation: our ability to use reason.

  Imagine that.

  http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/18/opinion/la-oe-thompson-atheism-20110718
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  4

  Howard Stern Show - Creationism vs Evolution & Glenn Beck's Anti-Evolution Logic

  by whereami in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  warning, remember, this is howard stern so this is not " g " rated for language content .

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2naxsusxubk&feature=player_embedded.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4npm-bcb8q&feature=player_embedded.

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  whereami

  Warning, remember, this is Howard Stern so this is NOT " G " rated for language content

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NaxSUSXuBk&feature=player_embedded

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4nPM-bCB8Q&feature=player_embedded
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  6

  Human Ancestor Older Than Previously Thought; Finding Offers New Insights Into Evolution

  by whereami in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  human ancestor older than previously thought; finding offers new insights into evolution .

  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110629181853.htm?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=feed%3a+sciencedaily+%28sciencedaily%3a+latest+science+news%29.

  sciencedaily (june 30, 2011) modern humans never co-existed with homo erectus -- a finding counter to previous hypotheses of human evolution -- new excavations in indonesia and dating analyses show.

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  whereami

  Hey Larsinger58, how's the end of the world coming along?
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  8

  Another Great Video From Dark Matter

  by cantleave in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ikkfbklapy&feature=uploademail.

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  whereami

  Get ready for the mountain of excuses and mental gymnastics.

  Drum roll please.
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  8

  Christian Mingle. FAIL!!!

  by whereami in

  1. jw
  2. friends

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  whereami