i know this has been re-hashed many times here.
in great detail with quotes from former watchtower articles, etc.
i'm going to cut to the chase and just make this brief and direct.
Excelent thread mr. flipper! i hope it does not get distracted and it will get some real on-the-point response.
SoM: dude, its just to darn hard to argue with a guy to whom god speaks personally... why dont you create a thread and talk a bit about your personal experinces? that stuff about the gel sounds like sound advice.
a freind of mine reckons that the ultimate in intelligence is to be "serious", never to have any fun, never anything "lowbrow", always watch serious tv programs, always read serious books, disscuss serious subjects etc.. and this means... if you are not "serious" in this manner then you simply cannot have any brains??!!.
i know this must be wrong... but i can't figure out why...?.
.
here is why it is wrong: a) humor is really a mix of different 'soft' intelligences - if its impossible for him to be funny, he is really a retard :-)
b) when he look back on his life, will he really remember the times he had fun with his friends, or the times he was serious?
i asked this once before but got no responses.. i just remember this one website where there were lots of famous convention and other talks, even by ray franz and fred franz from the 70s.
it wasnt long ago (some months) when i accidentaly found this site - but now i cant find it anywhere!!
any ideas what it might have been?
jwproclaimers seem to require a username?
keep it simple if possible........i like the ice core samples.........thanks, this was not my big issue but i may be able to use it.......oompa.
feel free to direct me to another thread btw...... or maybe i should read the second page of olins thread!.
oh boy, i got a de-ja-vu to previous flood/evolution discussions right now. reniaa, regarding your quote, "With both bible readers and those that prefer evolution they are both having to do the same thing. which is fit the evidence to their framework of belief", is that really the way you want us to assume hereon that you believe we and yourself treat evidence?
the top 100 most dangerous websites for your pc enlisted.
http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20090820/854/ttc-the-top-100-most-dangerous-websites.html.
bangalore.
plz make the links clickable ;-).
i will have a conversation with a j-dub in which i will attempt to understand why they are so certain that they are in the troof.
the conversation will usually involve myself asking them how they know they are the true christian religion.. the answer?
"we are the only ones doing god's will!".
logically, one should a-priori believe all religions are equally true, ie. false, and then seek evidence so strong the logical conclusion was that one particular religion was true and the rest false. how exactly that investigation is circumvented eludes me... at the convention, a speaker said: "the best evidence we have for noahs ark is that jesus mentioned it", and i thought to myself "WTF, does the man not realise that what he does is not to provide proof for anything, he only makes it such that evidence AGAINST noahs ark is evidence AGAINST jesus being Gods son?".
at my study i desided not to grill my conductor on the flood, but i did say that the way i saw it, the fact that the bible PREDICTED very non-trivial things like noahs flood and no evolution is actually very interesting from a scientific standpoint and (by Poppers definition) turns the question if the bible is gods word into a valid scientific theory with very non-trivial predictions. I then wondered why believers did not carry out that investigation and then once and for all PROVED the bible was gods word and not just played passive on issues such as evolution and the flood... i felt he didnt like to think about the bible that way.
my only conclusion is that (strict) believers in the bible dont want to carry out such an investigation simply because they know they wont like the outcome, even though they would happily discard a religion which predicted the earth is flat on scientific grounds alone.
i was driving to work monday and the local oldies rock station had on a public service ad for the local blood bank...mentioning a dallas lady who had to have an emergency caeserian section, but they were able to save both her and the baby.
it required several units of blood.. it set me to thinking - what if???.
what if the entire united states were placed under jw "theocratic" law and every single person was denied a blood transfusion option?
that number just seem to darn high.. here: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/deaths.htm it would seem the mortality rate is about 0.8% (800 out of 100'000). that would make blood the number one killer right away several orders ahead of cancer...am i missing something?
yeah well, back in the day a group of people built a tower to heaven, so god confused their languages so they would not build a "mega city" and become powerful.. or if you want to used half a brain....languages evolved over time as a form of comunication between different tribes.
many languages are related, slavic or asian languages share the same or simular words.
oh and the cherry on top is adam and eve spoke yiddish.....ooie mashugana!
reniaa: seriously, have you even tried a simple google querry to educate yourself on this matter before posting it here as a "problem"?
i see people take positions all day long and i rather suspect both sides are woefully ignorant.. i read and hear people speak of the volumes of data pro or con and when i ask for specific examples of what each may be referring to, i am often met with silence.. .
I see people take positions all day long and I rather suspect both sides are woefully ignorant.
I read and hear people speak of the volumes of data pro or con and when I ask for specific examples of what each may be referring to, I am often met with silence.
i dont mean to offend you, but is this topic not about asking a convoluted, vague question, then act condescenting at perfectly valid interpretations of said question? if i had made a topic like this where evolution was replaced with the bible, would it not have seemed strange? did not expect any of us to write *all* we know did you?. i gave you a link with many pieces of very specific data that was so well-referenced that you could go out and find the books/articles or even in many cases email the authors.
as i read your post now, it seem that you want comments not just about data, but about mechanisms. i wont put it here because i dont have the time, but you can start by reasearching the shitload of emperical work on genetic algorithms which shows that evolution is not 'just' a theory or a fact, its a engineering tool that is being used every day to create usefull things!. for crying out loud, download a cracked version of matlab and you got your own genetic algorithm toolkit right there where you can play around with the mechanisms of evolution (as you put it) and see that it actually has an effect on the performance.
The argument is not in any way about weather the mechanisms of evolution can produce novel designs, its about if it can produce designs which are as novel as those found in nature. nothing else. and if i had understood your question the way you interpret it to begin with, i would have put replication, mutation, selection as the 3 basic mechanisms, and added "sexual replication" to the list if we were talking about higher animals, because its very important to weed out genetic damage and increase the speed of evolution (yes, the reason humans have sex are at the bottom information theoretical ;-) ).
i see people take positions all day long and i rather suspect both sides are woefully ignorant.. i read and hear people speak of the volumes of data pro or con and when i ask for specific examples of what each may be referring to, i am often met with silence.. .
i am not a biologist but have educated myself quite a lot about evolution the past six months. if you want destilled, well-researched evidence, go here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ . i study information theory and have recently written about information geometry, so i know with high certainty there is no basis for the specific claim that evolutionary processes cannot increase information.
(bring it on, jw apologists, i love to talk about math ;-) )
