Posts by Razziel

31

Should you ever tell tour aging parents the truth about the truth

by Star tiger in

since finding out the truth about the truth myself and having successfully extricated myself and my parents about the jw's, i find myself with a new dilema that being they still believe the bible as a literal book for their salvation as i has read all of thomas paines works and how the bible is not very good for the human family, as they are of advancing years would it be inappropriate to shatter their illusions of some kind of paradise and let them flounder in a moral precipice and wonder what their lives have been about.

on the flip side once their time has come how would i feel for not telling them their false views.

at the moment i am in the deist point of view, with a tendency of the agnostic, it is quite a dilema!.

Razziel

I recently revealed to mine that I'm atheist now, and I think their reaction was worse than if I had told them JW's were just a carrot on a stick. When we talked doctrine before, they rallied around canned answers or got defensive if I really struck a nerve. We had given up talking the bible, but recently my mom mentioned something about JWs and I casually mentioned I'm athiest now.

This time, they just got sad. And it wasn't sad for me, their son the unbeliever, either. It was the "we're old, and tired of life" sad. And it is sad. I won't go into detail because it's about the only thing that can bring tears to my eyes, but to give up all your hopes and dreams in life because a religion told you it was the way to salvation, to have no retirement planned and basically have to work manual labor until the day you die old and decrepit, and then to begin to realize in the last few years that something is wrong with the whole belief system is sad beyond words.

When the parties involved are relatively young, helping friends and family out is a service. But eventually, it's not a service anymore, it's just selfish. People pursue noble goals for selfish reasons all the time. I wonder if sometimes we do the same thing. I think it's a mixture of wanting to help them, but wanting to help ourselves too.

11

The lying upper class??

by darthfader in

interesting article:.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/02/shame-on-the-rich.html?ref=hp.

the team's findings suggest that privilege promotes dishonesty.

Razziel

I want to know... does privilege promote dishonesty or does dishonesty promote privilege? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

40

Random thoughts about the organization. In 20 years.....

by stuckinamovement in

jw
friends

many people will scoff at the thought that the org will collapse.

i agree that it will never collapse but the crumbling has begun.

think about the following.....they have a serious lack of potential future leaders.

Razziel

When the baby boomers (born 1946-1964) are all in retirement and heading into nursing homes, which oddly enough happens to occur right in the leadup to 2034, it will be the end of a JW era. I'm sure the organization will go on, but it will change. They way I reckon it, there have been four major generations of JW's.

1. The ones from "the lost generation" that saw the pre-Rutheford days, and were old and dying during the institution of "organization". 2. Those of "the greatest generation", born during the great depression, seeing WWII, and reaching retirement during the 1975 debacle into the 1980's reorganization of the organization. 3. The "baby boomers", who lived their most productive years during the 1970-1995 glory days of end time prophecy are starting to retire now. So I think we're due for the next big organizational shift in the next 10-20 years, regardless of outside influences such as the internet. I'm not sure what to call the 4th generation, but I think they will get left holding the bag, only to find it's empty. The prophets of gen 2 are long gone, and nobody has lifted up the flag to take their place.

89

+$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

by designs in

will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

Razziel

Solar is a good option in some locations for powering homes and offices, but I don't think it will see much large-scale use in powering vehicles, at least in the US. The Nissan Leaf is rated at 34kw-hr/100 miles. The average home in the US used 31.5 kW-hr/day in 2010 per the DoE. There's just too many cars, and we drive too many miles (over 3 trillion miles per year in the US) for solar to be used to provide a great percentage of that power.

I did another quick calculation, and if we drove those 3 trillion miles in Nissan Leafs (not possible since much of that is commercial trucking) running off solar, we'd have to cover 750 square miles in solar panels. A little less land area than the State of Rhode Island. Much better to concentrate our efforts to onsite solar power generation for homes and offices, utilizing unused space on roofs like you mention, designs. I think we're going to have to use another energy generation source for transportation.

89

+$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

by designs in

will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

Razziel

Well here's one such article from the WSJ that mentions it. I think my post was pretty self-explanatory about what I meant by IP. I was talking about all of the shiny steel tools used to get oil out of the ground. Those are designed and manufactured primarily by oil-service companies, but that's a distinction most people don't make. They lump them all together as "oil companies."

89

+$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

by designs in

will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

Razziel

Something like 80% of the world's oil reserves have already been nationalized. The commercial oil producers still have a lot of clout with the rest, but it's the sovereign oil producers that call the shots. Many of the nationalized companies don't respect intellectual property or patent law either. They'll take a product from a commercial company, send it off to the local machine shop, reverse-engineer it, and start making their own (often inferior) copies, and then shut out the commercial company altogether.

89

+$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

by designs in

will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

Razziel

The first calc is in watt-hrs. The second is in watts. Hence why one is multiplied by 24 and the other one isn't.

89

+$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game

by designs in

will it put pressure on politicians to approve the keystone pipeline.. should the nation's refineries stop selling as much gasoline as exports.. how does +$4.00 gasoline affect your monthly budget, how do you adjust..

Razziel

I think you saw the 85% and stopped reading from there. I didn't use the 85% in the estimation , I used the 25% in calculating the square footage to produce the kw-hr equivalent of 1 gallon of gas. And I also used the 240 watts/m^2 average from the article you posted, NOT 1400 or 1000 watts/m^2. I just listed that for reference.

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