Posts by DT

5

A Few Moral Dilemmas

by DT in

jw
friends

how do you judge what makes a certain action moral?

do you feel that morality is determined by universal rules (either determined by a deity or by general agreement) or do you feel that it is more important to consider the consequences of a decision and its affect on the greater good depending on the details of the situation?.

for example, would you be willing to kill one person to save two, or ten, or a million?

DT

How do you judge what makes a certain action moral? Do you feel that morality is determined by universal rules (either determined by a deity or by general agreement) or do you feel that it is more important to consider the consequences of a decision and its affect on the greater good depending on the details of the situation?

For example, would you be willing to kill one person to save two, or ten, or a million? Most of us are probably familiar with scenarios that ask if you would be willing to pull a switch to divert a train from a track with two people on it to one with only one person. How you respond to questions like this says much about your views on morality and life in general. I think it is valuable to analyze situations like this, even if it makes some people uncomfortable. It's especially relevant to people who have escaped from the Watchtower Society where we have often been asked to do things because God or the organization says so, even though it can lead to great harm (or avoid things that could result in a lot of good).

I will present a scenario and a question that will be easy for some to answer, but will be a troubling moral dilemma for others. Then I will present an additional scenario for those who say yes and for those who say no that may be more difficult. Scenario #1: Assume that you are a doctor. You have two patients that are brothers. One needs a heart transplant. If he can get one soon, he will probably recover fully and lead a normal life. It's very unlikely that a compatible heart will become available before he dies. His brother has a terminal illness. He may live another year or two, but it will be very painful for him. He doesn't have enough strength or coordination to commit suicide. He is a compatible donor for his brother. He asks you to give him a lethal injection and give his heart to his brother and his other organs to whoever may need them. Assume that this would be completely legal in your country, but no other doctors are willing to do this. Would you be willing to end one life to save another? Scenario #2: If you said no to #1, how would you respond to this situation? You have a patient and discover that he has two terminal illnesses. One is easily treatable, but will result in a mostly painless death in less than a month if left untreated. The other illness is untreatable, but will be unlikely to display any symptoms for about five years. It will then progress rapidly causing a great amount of pain and loss of mobility and then death. You explain the situation to the patient and ask him to consent to the treatment that will extend his life for about five years. He says he really wants the extra five years to get his affairs in order and to make sure that his children are taken care of properly. However, he is absolutely terrified of dying painfully from the second illness. He says that he will consent to the treatment only if you will personally assure him that you will give him a lethal injection when he starts showing symptoms. (Assume again that this would be completely legal in your country, but no other doctors are willing to do this.) Would you let him die now, or agree to kill him to extend his life? If you agree to kill him later, would you be telling the truth? Assume you are confident that you can manage his pain effectively with new drugs. If you aren't willing to actually kill him, would you be willing to lie to him in order to extend his life? Scenario #3: If you said yes to #1, how would you respond to this situation? Two patients lie dying in the same room. One needs a new heart, the other a new liver. If either one receives a transplant, then it's likely that he will recover and have a normal life expectancy. The window of opportunity for both is about a week. Otherwise, they can expect to die within a year. You have become famous for killing one patient to save another in Scenario #1. They discover that they each have a healthy organ that can save the other's life. However, neither is willing to make that sacrifice. They propose a different solution. They are both willing to sign a contract that would have them restrained in their beds and connected to a device that can deliver a lethal injection at the press of a button. They would ask you to flip a coin. You would then push the button on the loser's machine and have the other prepped for surgery. (Assume again that this would be completely legal in your country, but no other doctors are willing to do this.) Would you agree to this? Remember that this would involve killing someone who doesn't want to die and might even be struggling to prevent it. I look forward to your comments.

243

Victoria, Australia: Steven Unthank's Press Release: JW's Hierarchy Formally Charged Today With Child Abuse

by AndersonsInfo in

jehovah's witnesses hierarchy charged.

immediate press release: 26 july 2011. link to this press release: http://wp.me/p1g1hc-4o.

worldwide church hierarchy charged with child abuse.

DT

I think that the presence of parents or other adults is mostly irrelevant to the requirements of the law. The law doesn't apply to cases where the contact with children is directly supervised. However, it says, "Supervised has its ordinary, everyday meaning. A supervisor is a person who has the role of overseeing the work of another person while that person engages in the work." It doesn't matter, according to the law, if an elder is meeting with a child alone or a child with his parents. A parent isn't the elder's supervisor. The parent may be supervising the interaction, but not in the sense as defined by the law. It's also church doctrine that both adults and children follow the lead of the elders, so it is clear who has the power. It only makes sense that someone who has power over both the parent and the child would be subject to a background check. It's also naive to assume a parent will always be present.

243

Victoria, Australia: Steven Unthank's Press Release: JW's Hierarchy Formally Charged Today With Child Abuse

by AndersonsInfo in

jehovah's witnesses hierarchy charged.

immediate press release: 26 july 2011. link to this press release: http://wp.me/p1g1hc-4o.

worldwide church hierarchy charged with child abuse.

DT

I wonder if any of the Governing Body members who are believers are welcoming this as a sign of the end and an inevitable inconvenience before the end. Some might even welcome the idea of publicly suffering for their faith in prison and appearing as strong and faithful as Rutherford and his gang. If so, I expect that the experience of being a foreigner in an Australian prison, convicted of crimes against Australian children, could be a rude awakening. It wouldn't even be easy to spin this in a way that would make sense to committed JW's who know that the law doesn't conflict with any Biblical principles.

7

Where did God live before he created the heavens?

by DT in

jw
friends

i used to assume that that the heavens mentioned in genesis 1:1 are just the universe.

however, i have learned since then that the bible refers to at least three different heavens.

(for example, paul speaks of a third heaven.

DT

I used to assume that that the heavens mentioned in Genesis 1:1 are just the universe. However, I have learned since then that the Bible refers to at least three different heavens. (For example, Paul speaks of a third heaven.) According to some scholars, the first heaven is the earth's atmosphere, the second is outer space and the third is where God and the angels lives. Since Genesis 1:1 says that God created "the heavens" it would seem to include all of them. This raises the question of where God lived before he created his own heavenly home. Most believers think that God is eternal, otherwise they would be left with the question of who created God. I guess it's not strictly necessary that the heavenly home of God is eternal. He could have been homeless for an infinite amount of time before he started creating things. He could have had an old heaven where he lived before deciding to upgrade. Maybe he thought that his new son and the other angels wouldn't like the old heaven he had been hanging out in for an eternity.

Another possibility is that the heavenly home of God coexisted with him for an eternity. In this case, it would seem that Genesis 1:1 is either poorly worded or just plain wrong. Perhaps it should have been worded as, "In the beginning God created two out of three of the heavens and the earth." Otherwise, a footnote might have been useful to make the precise meaning clear without altering the Bible's great opening line.

Even if Genesis 1:1 only refers to two out of three of the heavens, there are still questions that arise. According to scientific evidence, the formation of the universe (second heaven) and the formation of the earth's atmosphere (first heaven) happened billions of years apart. It is rather odd to group both events together in "the beginning". Of course some believe that both events happened about the same time in the recent past, but it is becoming more common for believers to try to harmonize the Bible's account with the scientific evidence for an ancient universe.

Could Genesis 1:1 refer to more than three heavens? Suppose a heaven just refers to the universe and multiple heavens refers to multiple universes within the multiverse. This would be consistent with certain modern scientific theories. It also helps to resolve certain difficult philosophical problems. For example, it is troublesome to assume the the universe had a definite beginning while the creator had no beginning. This would mean that the creator spent literally an infinite amount of time before creating the universe. He wouldn't be the grand creator so much as the grand procrastinator. It is impossible for us humans to comprehend a poor work ethic on this scale.

He could have made other universes before this one, this makes him seem a little less lazy, but as long as the number of universes is finite, there would still be a first one and an infinite amount of time before that where he just wasn't that motivated. In such a case, he might not be very emotionally attached to this one specific universe. He might intend to do something to make life better here, but he might be procrastinating and this could mean a very long wait.

An endlessly procrastinating creator isn't the only possibility. If an eternal creator had created an infinite number of universes, then it wouldn't imply a single, infinitely long period of procrastination. He could just space them out in a schedule that is comfortable for him.

This has some interesting implications. Such a creator wouldn't have to give much thought to the basic parameters of the universes. He could just shuffle them randomly with the assurance that some would be suitable for the development of life (if he even cared whether the universes were hospitable or not).

Such a creator could be intelligent, but wouldn't have to be. He could be just a physical process that allows for the formation of an unlimited number of universes. It makes little difference how well tuned the parameters have to be to support life or how rare the development of life is in such a well tuned universe. Given an unlimited supply of experiments, the development of life would be inevitable.

Some scientists point out that that certain mathematical theories indicate that the formation of unlimited universes may be possible. I don't understand most of the mathematics, but I welcome your comments on this.

So what do you think? Is Genesis 1:1 literally true? Is it partially true? If so, in what sense does it correspond to reality?

19

djeggnog, YOU were a professional musician...answer THIS non-religious question.

by the pharmer in

jw
friends

don't worry, this should be an easy elementary question, especially for a former professional musician.

(those of you wondering why i ask, i wonder just how stubbornly he will hold on to his false statement -- one of many -- even though it is a relatively benign and non-religious topic.

how many intervals in a harmonic minor scale, djeggnog?

DT

Thanks for the review of what happened. It is a little amusing how a simple question turned into a complex discussion of music theory.

19

djeggnog, YOU were a professional musician...answer THIS non-religious question.

by the pharmer in

jw
friends

don't worry, this should be an easy elementary question, especially for a former professional musician.

(those of you wondering why i ask, i wonder just how stubbornly he will hold on to his false statement -- one of many -- even though it is a relatively benign and non-religious topic.

how many intervals in a harmonic minor scale, djeggnog?

DT

the pharmer,

I reviewed the context, but didn't read the entire thread due to it's length and complexity. The music theory is of some interest to me, but I don't have the time to follow every argument and error that may have been made. My general impression is that he made a mistake about which note was the minor third in an A minor chord that he might have avoided if he considered the scale in relation to the entire chromatic scale. It's easy to make mistakes like that when tired (or even fully awake). My impression of the source of the problem could be wrong and I would welcome a correction if I'm mistaken and anyone cares enough to explain it.

The whole thing about enharmonic equivalents is quite interesting, if not as important as it once was. There was a time when different tunings and temperaments were used and notes like C sharp and D flat were actually slightly different notes so it was important to distinguish between them. Even then, I understand they were sometimes notated incorrectly out of convenience and the performers could just rely on context or intuition to get the right intonation or else they were close enough to not make a practical difference.

I have done some composing in microtonal temperaments. For example, if you divide the octave into seventeen equal intervals instead of twelve, the enharmonic equivalents are no longer equivalent and actually differ significantly. I composed a piece for a concert that used two microtuned pianos to account for all seventeen notes in that temperament. One piano played the sharps, while the other played the flats and some notes were available on both pianos. It was a little confusing and my piece had a harmonic structure that had little to do with the type of music theory that led to this confusing situation. I often use a different way of notating that kind of music when composing, but this had to be translated into standard notation with the sharps and flats notated correctly so they would be played by the proper piano. I'm certainly not an expert, as I sometimes still get confused by all this. I sometimes find it easier to try to forgot this kind of music theory so I can explore different kinds of structure and ways of thinking about music, so I'm pretty tolerant when others get the details wrong.

19

djeggnog, YOU were a professional musician...answer THIS non-religious question.

by the pharmer in

jw
friends

don't worry, this should be an easy elementary question, especially for a former professional musician.

(those of you wondering why i ask, i wonder just how stubbornly he will hold on to his false statement -- one of many -- even though it is a relatively benign and non-religious topic.

how many intervals in a harmonic minor scale, djeggnog?

DT

I don't know the background of this thread, so I'll just comment on this statement.

"I had to have been exhausted to have completely ignored the fact that there are 12 intervals (half-steps) in a musical scale when I wrote what I did about the harmonic F#-minor."

I don't see the problem. There are 12 intervals in a musical scale. That scale is the chromatic scale. It's the basic collection of notes in our modern twelve note equal tempered system. They are used to form a large variety of other smaller scales that are more commonly used in musical settings. (major, minor, pentatonic, whole tone, etc.) It's not true that there are 12 intervals in the harmonic F#-minor scale. However, he didn't say that and I don't think he even meant to imply that. I certainly wouldn't have interpreted that statement in that way. He could have stated things a little more clearly, but that doesn't mean he made a false statement, in this case.

120

Hear Ye, Hear Ye: Barbara Anderson sharing April 10th Australian Newspaper Article about WT and back ground checks

by AndersonsInfo in

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad/former-witness-taking-on-watch-tower/story-fn6bfmgc-1226036543156.

former witness taking on watch tower graeme hammond from: sunday herald sun april 10, 201112:00ama former jehovah's witness is to launch a private criminal prosecution against the religion's world headquarters.

his action is in protest at its refusal to require church elders to submit to working with children police checks in victoria.

DT

I think a big problem for the WTS is that they don't know what to do with those who fail the background checks. They believe every member of their religion has to participate in the preaching work. Think of what it will do for morale if they tell some of their members that they shouldn't go door to door. How do they explain this to the other members? What happens when some suddenly stop going out in the ministry? What do they say when busybodies start inviting them to go out in service with them because they noticed that they stopped being active in the ministry? On the other hand, if they are allowed to go door to door after failing the background checks, then the WTS will expose themselves to all kinds of legal liability.

It would be a great embarrassment if they allowed the government to force some of their members to stop the door to door ministry, the activity that comes closest to defining them as a religion. They could fight for the right of all their members to practice their religion in this manner, but this would be terrible for public relations. It would just advertise the fact that they are sending pedophiles to people's doors. It would be hard for them to spin this as defending human rights.

Would they disfellowship the people who fail the background checks? In many cases, they already knew that these people had a questionable history. In cases where it's new information, it would seem like they needed the government to step in and help them keep their organisation clean. In any case, it would be a major embarrassment.

11

Jehovah's Witnesses and Google

by DT in

jw
friends

i was recently doing some keyword research with google's keyword tool.

it gives you information about how many people search for certain things on google, the world's largest search provider.

it's very useful for people who build websites.

DT

Thank you for all your comments. I'm amazed at what poor brand recognition Jehovah's Witnesses have. Less than one percent of searches for information about them use the correct form of their name. This is just among the people who even care enough to even look up information about them. I think any secular advertising agency would be fired for results like that. The fact that the public can't get their name right indicates that they aren't being educated about who Jehovah is and that the Witnesses are "owned" by him. A lot of people seem to think that the JWs are Jehovahs or that Jehovah is some kind of adjective. Imagine what these figures would look like if they bought just one Superbowl ad. Of course, that would draw too much attention to them, even though the cost would be small in comparison to the man hours wasted in door knocking. Here are some more interesting figures: jw.org - 246,000 www.jw.org - 110,000 watchtower.org - 60,500 www.watchtower.org - 74,000 Presumably, these searches are done primarily by JWs. These figures are higher than the searches that are done mostly by the public. This is a poor result for an organization that devotes its time to advertising something. Imagine if the employees at an ad agency that promotes a big brand like Pepsi searched for information on the company more than the entire rest of the world. Keep in mind that this is just searches for these website addresses. It doesn't include the people who type these into the address bar and are taken directly to the site. One implication is that JWs aren't very Internet savvy. Another is that they are are terrified of running across apostate sites, so they type in the exact domain instead of a simpler, general search that may include some apostate results.

11

Jehovah's Witnesses and Google

by DT in

jw
friends

i was recently doing some keyword research with google's keyword tool.

it gives you information about how many people search for certain things on google, the world's largest search provider.

it's very useful for people who build websites.

DT

I was recently doing some keyword research with Google's keyword tool. It gives you information about how many people search for certain things on Google, the world's largest search provider. It's very useful for people who build websites. I thought I would do some research on how the door to door ministry of Jehovah's Witnesses affects people's search habits on the Internet. Surely, over seven million people knocking on doors for well over a billion hours a year must have a profound impact on the public consciousness. It is reasonable to question whether all this activity serves to inform people about who Jehovah's Witnesses are, who Jehovah is and what the relationship is between Jehovah and his Witnesses. Here is the worldwide monthly search volume I discovered for these exact match phrases. Jehovah Witness - 60,500 Jehovah Witnesses - 5,400 Jehovahs - 590 Jehovah's Witness - 390 Jehovah's Witnesses - 590 Jehovah Witness cult - 2,400 Jehovah Witness religion - 260 Jehovah - 27,100 They seem to have done a pretty poor job of educating the public about who they are. Hardly anyone searches for them according to their proper name and it seems likely that a large fraction of these are Jehovah's Witnesses themselves or former members. A lot of people search for the term Jehovah, but this doesn't seem to have much to do with the "Jehovahs" that knock on doors. What do you think of these figures compared to the the billions of hours spent knocking on doors?