there are two witnesses that work in the insurance office i do business with .
one of the women has known me most of my life over forty yrs.
today when i stopped in she was by herself and she asked if she could have my personal email address .
I know...Witnesses all live in some sort of imaginary, self imposed totalitarian state where everything they do is monitored by the congregation elders all the way up to the GB.
Big Brother has nothing on the GB. The CIA would give their right arm to have a spy network like that!
i know there are a lot.. one belief i never understood is that blood fractions might be ok for a christian but not "whole blood".
to me the "blood doctrine" is ridiculous from a scriptural point of view..
God, where to begin? The stupid is so much.
I could never get behind that 1914 thing. I'm not a math whiz, but if you can get 1914 as the date of Christ's return or presence out of that game of Bible hopscotch, more power to you. In fact, if I were a math whiz, it'd probably taken less time for me to realize it's total crap.
several decades ago a researcher named solomon asch conducted an experiment on conformity to determine the conditions under which individuals will deny their own senses in order to conform with a group.
if you view the video clip, you will notice in the first two scenarios presented that those who conform tend to do so for one of two reasons: one, they doubt their own judgement in the face of unanimous opposition or two, they still believe they are right but conform in order to avoid conflict within the group.. the key to total shunning of dfd and dad individuals, as well as constant pressure to avoid "bad associations" is based not only in the conformity behaviors mentioned above but due to what asch discovered in the third scenario presented in the video, when the test subject has a single confederate who agrees with him.
the key to conformity within a group is unanimity.
Yes, that's true. It's like the old "I'm leaving you as monitor" situation in a classroom, which teachers avoid like the plague anymore.
What happens is you give one kid this "authority" to tell on everyone, and so he ends up writing down other kids for stupid things like squirming in their seats to please the teacher.
We're all a bunch of brown nosing apple polishers by nature, apparently. Give us an inch and we all think we're middle management. LOL
There are SO FEW people who will buck what they perceive as an established authority that will punish THEM if they don't treat other people badly.
We used to do those experiments in psych class where you can make someone think they're really sick if nearly everyone tells them something like "Man, you don't look so good." as they come in. It's really mean, but it works every time. If you tell someone something over and over, they believe it, and they even make it happen! Pretty soon, the person was pale, had a headache or a stomachache, felt nauseous, and sometimes, even developed a fever.
We're so susceptible to that that a person who truly believes they are sick will develop all sorts of symptoms even if there's no organic reason for it, and if they do it long enough, the body reacts to that altered state by actually developing certain illnesses.
i thought about that question myself and i don't think i really hate anyone.
i guess i could hate bin laden or some nameless evil terrorist but no one comes to mind..
Billy Mays, but he's dead, so I'm good for the moment.
I HATE people who yell at me, for any reason.
Oh, and child molesters. I'm usually pretty compassionate, but these people, well...they should be tied to stump in a swamp and be made into alligator food.
Terrorists...well, I don't like what they do to other people at all, but they're people who've been brainwashed by religion masquerading as politics a good lot of the time.
We all know how some religions can do that....
Oh, my family's only claim to genetic fame is that I'm distantly related to Butch Cassidy, who started out as a horsethief and went on to bigger and better things, and didn't look a damn thing like Paul Newman.
Really really distantly, he was the cousin of a great great great uncle in my family, which is from the same place his was, West Valley Utah, which used to be called Granger back in those days.
I also had a Scots great grandmother who was a distant descendent of the Earl of Hay of the Hay clan of Scotland. I guess we have a tartan that is kind of an olive green and orange thing. (I actually like it, but someone told me it looks like peas and carrots! LOL) My great grandmother was quite proud of being a Hayes, she named one of her sons Hayes to carry on the name since she had no brothers who had children.
Weirdly, my mother in law's Scots half is also from the Hay clan, so I apparently married a very distant relative in spite of meeting him halfway across the country. I gather most of us are very distant cousins in America, though, if you're of mostly European descent.
It's okay...14th cousins don't count.
I usually refer to myself as a pasty white example of what too many white people keeping to themselves in Western Europe created.
Seriously, what I wouldn't give to have my husbands much darker skin! (he's a nice brownish color in the summer, dark enough that he once was asked if he was an Arab. Without the tan, though, he mostly looks French, I think.) I just had a boat load of pre cancerous spots taken of my back and my legs and arms.
Ugh, I have to slather on a bottle of 50 SPF sun block just to go outside and garden or swim for half an hour. Aggravating.
how to construct a creationist/theistic argument - by ben spencer.
step 1. come up with a supposed self-apparent, universal, unbreakable, and yet ultimately unprovable "law".. for example:.
all effects require a cause.
Kiddies, I only know the definitions I read in the dictionary.
Supernatural means outside the natural order of existence or the visible natural universe, sometimes used to refer to ghosts, spirits, demons, gods, demigods, angels, geni, and the One God of the Bible.
Also, departing from the usual or normal as relates to physics, science, natural order.
Natural, one of the vaguest words ever, means "the inherent qualities of someone or something" and is a very subjective word. One person's idea of natural is anothers artificial crapola.
I'm not a physicist, obviously, (although I got straight As in it in high school and beyond) but I used to teach English writing and grammar and I am a writer who edits the works of other writers. I try not to use words that I don't know the meaning of because that is just silly and pretentious.
I haven't heard any good scientific argument against there being a Supernatural Super Being, nor have I ever heard a good one for it.
I like the idea that you get to choose what the hell you want to believe in, or not believe in as far as anything supernatural. What good would the whole idea of free will, which is a very appealing idea to most people, be without that uncertainty?
I sometimes hope it's deliberate and that God is sitting up there just laughing his ass off at humans and their endless debates about it, because it doesn't really make any difference.
There are good and bad people in both categories, the believers and the non believers. If it made such a huge damn difference for humans to believe in God, I'm sure God would make it possible for there to be definite proof so everyone would have no trouble at all believing. And if he's making it this hard on purpose, well, what an asshole! Who wants to have anything to do with such an asshole of a God anyway?
several decades ago a researcher named solomon asch conducted an experiment on conformity to determine the conditions under which individuals will deny their own senses in order to conform with a group.
if you view the video clip, you will notice in the first two scenarios presented that those who conform tend to do so for one of two reasons: one, they doubt their own judgement in the face of unanimous opposition or two, they still believe they are right but conform in order to avoid conflict within the group.. the key to total shunning of dfd and dad individuals, as well as constant pressure to avoid "bad associations" is based not only in the conformity behaviors mentioned above but due to what asch discovered in the third scenario presented in the video, when the test subject has a single confederate who agrees with him.
the key to conformity within a group is unanimity.
They do it because, like so many other people who have treated others unjustly, they think God wants the to do it.
It's amazing how awfully you can get people to treat another human being if you brainwash them into thinking God wants them to do it.
If they accept that as the ultimate authority and then it's backed up by a strong and enforcing visible authority, man, you can get people to rape, torture, murder and incarcerate people all in the name of God.
Hell, shunning is just the first stepping stone to dehumanizing someone to where you think it's fine for them to die in a fire, don'tcha know?
That's what they wish on every Df'd person and every worldly person, God wants them to do it, so why bother treating them like humans?
LOL, I usually just answer "American" but saying of European ancestry isn't that eludicating either. I think the Europeans in general were pretty much mixing with everyone they could find by the late 1400s.
But, heck, the story of the Indo European languages is all about one tribe conquering another and assimilating their languages until we got Indo-European or "Caucasian" everything.
God knows what is mixed up in that supposedly pure whiteness....probably a lot of Asian, since the Indo Europeans conquered into Mongolia and got them all pissed off at one point.
People who talk about a "pure white race" make me laugh, especially if they're American. It tickles me to think that statistically, a third of Neo Nazis or KKK members have some African or Native American ancestry, no doubt. Probably some Jewish in there too, like I do in my German bit of ancestry, oh horrors!
put yourself in the mind of an ignorant early human.
he can speak, he can understand his surroundings and can even chart the stars in the night sky.. .
one other thing this man can understand is injustice: when bad things happen to people who didnt do anything to deserve them.. .
I've heard that there are two different creation stories from a rabbi too.
Makes sense, there's a lot of dissonance in the Genesis account, in the first 5 books, actually, but I figure it's a lot of cobbled together myths from different times and thinking among the Jews.
I try to remember that it's all about the Jews. If you're not Jewish nor follow the faith of the Jews, then its not your book, your people or your rules!
Yes, I know Jesus was Jewish, but hey...according to Christianity, he was God in the flesh, and that flesh just happened to be Hebrew. I'm not sure you could say that God had a racial preference, technically, since he supposedly created ALL humans, not just the Hebrews.
