The answers are all scientifically available, it all depends on how you frame the question as to if you get the answer you want to hear. If it is simply living cells, then every person alive forms an unbroken chain back to the first replicating cell. If it's the point where two seperate DNA meet and combine to form another, you get another answer. If you define it in terms of a stage that "has" to happen to work, such as implantation, you get another answer. If it's where the clump of cells can respond to external stimulii, you get a different answer. If it's when that clump of cells begins to develop features we recognize you get another answer. If it's when memories begin to form you get another answer. If it's when it can survive outside the womb, it's another answer that changes depending on current technology. It all depends on how you frame the question. And how you frame the question depends on what your bias is.
Razziel
JoinedPosts by Razziel
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Razziel
By this logic, you aren't really dead until several days after your hearts stops and you stop breathing, since many of our cells live on for a good while after that happens. That's just plain dumb. Think about some of your arguments.
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What could trigger a large proportion of JWs at once that this religion is a scam
by Mr Facts ini am just thinking if there could ever be anything that would raise consciousness in the minds of millions of jws that this a completely hoax.
what could spark millions of them at once, any thoughts?..
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Razziel
Nothing will. There's a sucker born every minute, and most of the RF are suckers. Myself included, even as a born-in.
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Steven Unthank: What do we really know?
by SweetBabyCheezits ini'm gonna play the skeptic today on a topic that is painful for a lot of people on this forum.
my intent is not to stir anything up but to make sure facts are confirmed.
bear in mind, i'm sickened by the wt's role (and the heirarchy down to elders) in child molestation cover-ups.
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Razziel
Ad Hominem attacks galore, on both sides. Sadly, these attacks have real meaning. Someone getting caught in an untruth shouldn't logically take away from the merits of their root argument. But it does. Always has. Always will.
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Razziel
BTS, the distinction between "passive" and "active" is simply a construct to assuage our conscience and apportion the degree of culpabillity.
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Razziel
First, let me say unbiased education is the key to reducing the number of abortions. Not making them illegal, or making laws that intimidate women into not having them.
Secondly, and this is off-topic, but I want to point out, there is a price on every human life, regardless of the moral belief that every life is priceless.
The city/county installs a stop light at a busy intersection once so many are killed there every year (because they can't afford to put them everywhere). They just put a price on human life.
The military provides standard protective gear that is nowhere near the best available to avoid serious injury and death (because it would be prohibitavely expensive). They just put a price on human life.
The auto industry could produce vehicles virtually guaranteeing you would never die in a vehicle crash (but they'd be so expensive few could afford them). They just put a price on human life.
The insurance industry puts a price on human life everyday and will provide you a quote. There are a million examples of how a price is given for the value of a human life every day.
My point is, beyond morals, every life has value. But it's not priceless, and that value is defined in monetary terms. You can argue that yeah, we have free will, where the unborn don't, but it doesn't matter. Statistics don't lie, and for every dollar spent on safety and education, a certain percentage of human lives are saved. So whether you feel life begins before, or after conception, in the third trimester, or at birth, it's still not priceless. Even if you feel it should be against the law except when the mother's life is in danger or in cases of rape or incest, you still just put a price on it.
Should we really be suprised that prenatal life carries the least value of all? Not really. This isn't a perfect world, and holding to utopian beliefs only makes matters worse. There aren't stoplights (or better yet cops directing traffic) at every intersection because we can't afford it. Our soldiers don't have the latest and greatest because we can't afford it. We don't drive crash-proof cars because we can't afford it. And some people terminate their pregnancy because they can't afford or otherwise provide a good life to the child. I wish adoption was considered more often than it is, but conservatives have historically stigmatized and given the scarlet letter to women giving up their child for adoption almost as badly as abortion.
At least we don't eat our young like some animals do.
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Latest Watchtower page 30... They have some nerve to put this!
by TimothyT inone thing that i have always noticed even when i was a jw is that the jw org has lots and lots and lots of rules for allsorts of stupid petty rules which make no difference.
when you read the bible you see how they are clearly in the wrong here and are acting like the pharisees themselves, who imposed so much pressure on others to conform to the law.
am i missing something here!?!?
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Razziel
I'm glad some of you have the patience to respond to posters like this. I don't. 10,000 years ago, if I were the leader of a tribe, I'd try to explain things a couple of times to the village idiot, then he'd get run out of the village with the idiot stick and exiled.
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The Surprising Faith Of 8 American Presidents... # 6 is interesting!
by koolaid-man inhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/darrin-grinder/the-presidents-and-their-_b_1283210.html.
6. dwight d. eisenhower.
eisenhower may have been instrumental in bringing "under god" to the pledge of allegiance and making "in god we trust" the national motto, but he was reared in a religious tradition that does not allow its adherents to take oaths of office or to recite the pledge of allegiance--the jehovah's witnesses (a religion/denomination born in the united states, as was mormonism).
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Razziel
He was never baptized. I read about this several years ago, as I have a habit of picking a subject or person in history and then reading all the wikipedia links about it, and read his bio while reading about WWII. At the time, I had just left the organization, and as a born-in, I found a lot of respect for Eisenhower. His upbringing obviously influenced his life, but he seemed like a logical man and found a balance between principles and reality. He took the good stuff, left the rest behind, and followed his own path in life.
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Latest Watchtower page 30... They have some nerve to put this!
by TimothyT inone thing that i have always noticed even when i was a jw is that the jw org has lots and lots and lots of rules for allsorts of stupid petty rules which make no difference.
when you read the bible you see how they are clearly in the wrong here and are acting like the pharisees themselves, who imposed so much pressure on others to conform to the law.
am i missing something here!?!?
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Razziel
"but in my opinion only, such a child isn't teaching me and cannot teach me, ok? Maybe one day he or she will, and if it's a "she," she will be unmarried and I will be the only baptized male in the Kingdom Hall and in an incapacitated state, so that this child, now a baptized minister of God, will teach me with "her" head covered to signify her submission to God's arrangement."
I guess also in your opinion, humility is only applicable to women and children. Makes you feel powerful and good about yourself doesn't it? You're already in the top 25% since you're not a woman and aren't a child. Why don't you rewrite some more literature for us, and tell us what the Society meant to say, or how they should have worded things. They use weasel words for a reason. One of them is so people like you, can write crap like that.
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Do you know of judicial committee cases about a bro/sis who denies to have sex with the confessing one?
by testando inhi people, this is my first post here.
nite for everybody.
i wanna know if you ever heard of judicial committee where an accused bro/sis denies to have sex with a confessing bro/sis.
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Razziel
To add, in my situation, it was an issue between me and a sister in another congregation. I didn't do anything "wrong", (neither did she, it was all immature boy/girl bullshit). It's complicated, but the short of it is my elders took my side, and her elders took her side, the CO, DO and even the Society got involved, and their resolution to assuage everyone was to say we were no longer without reproof, remove our privileges and assure us we'd have them back again in a few months after it all blew over. Again, it gets even more complicated after that, as we had begun talking about getting together again, gotten our privileges back, and then she was killed in an accident, and I began the long road of fading and some bad relationship decisions.
But the point is, you are pretty much up to the mercy of your local body of elders.