Posts by JanH

124

I Think That I Chose My Parents.

by Englishman in

jw
friends

do you believe in reincarnation?.

i dont think i believe in it in the same way that most believers do, which is that we keep coming back in different fleshly bodies until we have achieved perfection.. i do, however, strongly suspect that we may well be spirit creatures who find it necessary to inhabit a fleshly body from time to time, and that this entails us having to leave behind most of our past memories.. i say most memories, because many people seem to have some vestigal recollections that don`t seem to fit in with earthly experiences.. i`m pretty sure that i chose my parents!

i have a recollection of being shown a young and kind couple through some form of astral telescope and choosing to become their son.

JanH

Wendy,

What I find amazing is that you can't question, disapprove someone own feelings or experiences.

Do you mean what you say here, or the opposite?

You can't get in their head and prove to them that how they "feel" is fact or fiction.

As they say: you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

You either accept them and respect the human race enough to keep your mouth shut. Or you speak up, and trivialize their thoughts. Best leave it alone unless you can prove it.

This is an amazing statement. What you are saying is, in essence, "don't confuse me with facts." Not only do you not care how this universe is built up and what laws governs it, you actually want to prohibit people from doing a systematic inquiry of these questions, and to communicate their results. You want, effectively, to shut down science.

I'll be interested in knowing where you think this web board, and the Internet generally, came from. Do you think it fell down from heaven? Aliens brought it from the Pleiades?

If your supernaturalism was correct, why do we need to mess with circuit boards, cables, microschips and electricity to communicate these thoughts, Wendy? Why not just engage our "hidden powers" and use telepathy?

You know the answer to this as well as I do: because telepathy like chadras and whatever the new agers decide to call it this month is just nonsense. There is no such thing. It doesn't work. It may be a funny cocktail party conversation topic, and most people can tell vague stories about "unexplainable" events, but when it comes down to it: it's just fantasies without foundation in facts.

The whole project called science, which has brought humans from the misery of all past civilizations to where we are now, has one cornerstone: doubt. It works by testing assumptions and beliefs, including all old superstitions about ghosts, spirits and magical forces, and it has found them wanting. It has thus rejected these beliefs. What remained was an actual understanding of the mechanics of the universe, which has again made it possible for us to exercise some control over our environment. So we no longer engage witch doctors to fight disease; we engage science. And that is why you and I are still alive.

That you want this immensely successful project abandoned, out of fear of offending the sensibilities of the millions of still-superstitious people who believes the nonsense, is beyond me. It is a genocidal proposition, that can only come from a mind anaesthetized by entertainment and a comfortable lifestyle in ignorant bliss about what holds our civilization together.

- Jan
--
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein

11

'I Still Believe It's The Truth'!

by ISP in

jw
friends

we have heard that recently from two individuals.

one is a df'd sister,who works in a city centre dept.

store and another is a sister who has simply left the hall and moved to another address.

JanH

Yup, experienced it many times.

Generally, people who respond with horror to people leaving JWdom over doctrinal or ethical issues are people who 1) know very little about their own religion, and next to nothing about its history; 2) never were very active in the first place, thus being hypocrites; and 3) violates what they claim are their own moral principles, again being hypocrites.

My experience is that all you can do in such cases is to let them politely know you'd be willing to help them if they should decide to engage their brains one day, and then do the proverbial shaking-of-dust-from-shoes and get on with life. As exJWs we have no obligation to run around saving people, especially not from their own idiocy. There's a life ahead for us, and we gotta live it.

- Jan
--
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein

103

The "Ransom Sacrifice" short version.

by Norm in

jw
friends

in the christian part of the world not many of us have escaped the much hyped and published sacrifice christ supposedly made when the romans executed him.. i myself was going around for years parroting this strange concept without giving it much thought.

thinking and faith some times do not mix very well.. anyway, apparently god made a royal blunder when he created the first humans and they plunged mankind into death and despair first crack out of the box, while god stood by and watched helplessly.

then we are told that god for this reason, in his infinite wisdom took mankind for ransom for thousands of years.

JanH

RR,

So unlike the Watchtowres purpose, where God really has no control, just trying to keep up to Satan, the scriptures teach us that God is in complete control, and everything is going acording to his plans.

Now what a reassuring idea! The black death, the inquisition, dhengis khan's devastations, the countless famines, pestilences and horrible tragedies that have befallen humankind, including the holocaust, it is all going according to God's Great Master Plan (of course, noone comes close to telling what this plan is).

I'm sure that the victims of God's little killer agents are very relieved to learn that their suffering and agony is all due to a great plan by an omnipotent deity, as opposed to random bad luck.

It's always fascinating to see Christians and other supernaturalists at work trying to explain the horror of suffering, and then trying to reconcile this with their belief in an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent Creator-God. The hoops of logic, squirming, huh-ha'ing and bad excuses are a spectacle to behold. I even invented a word for it some time ago: excusogetics. I'm glad the word has caught on, cause it is really descriptive of a sad process at work.

There are two general lines of argument when the Christians tries to reconcile the reality of suffering with the postulated existence of a God.

First, we have those who somehow thinks throwing around the word "free will" explains anything. This seems to be what aChristian does above. A word like "free will" means so much and so little that Christians think they have escaped the quandry just by throwing it around. Interestingly, in earlier times theologists were well aware that any sane application of the "free will" argument violates God's omnipotence, and still doesn't explain much anyway. That is why pelagianism was denounced as heresy by Augustine, and that is why Luther and Calvin both denied that there is such a thing as free will.

What is "free will"? Does it mean that humans can do whatever they want? Can I fly to Mars? Can I decide to live forever? Could I write a symphony to eclipse Mozart's 40th? Of course not. Humans possibly have a will, but it is never and was never free. It is constrained by the forces of nature, by the limitations of both our brain and our bodies.

Knowing this, we see how utterly shallow the "free will" argument is. Christian apologists will have us believe that if God interfered and stopped Hitler's murder of millions of people, that would have infringed on the Führer's "free will." How come? Hitler was already constrained by the limits reality (which allegedly was created by God!) placed on his powers. Some Jews, after all, were able to escape and survive. Hitler lost the war. The tank divisions of the Allies severly restricted Hitler's "free will", ending in his premature death at his own hands. How could a discrete intervention by a supreme God be more of a restriction of whatever "free will" he had? And what, more importantly, about the alleged "free will" of his millions of victims? Many had no choice in the matter of being exterminated.

"God didn't want to create robots," we hear the apologists say. People had freedom to do evil things, and God could not restrict this without making humans into complete automatons. Thus, in this world, Christian apologists have been forced to assert that either humans have to be totally free of god's restrictions, or they are helpless slaves. No middle ground. What, then, about the future? All Christian systems of belief have an after-life, where humans live (either in heaven or on earth) in eternal bliss. Does this mean God will finally put an end to free will? No, I have never heard a Christian apologist say that. After all, if he disposes of free will in the future, what good does it do us now? Will this afterlife then be full of suffering, death and evil? No, what would be the point, then?

So we see that Christian apologia is totally self-defeating. If God cannot create a world where happiness coexists with free will now, then he can't do that in the future either. The whole afterlife dream is a bluff; the hell on earth will just be repeated in the next life. Alternatively, then, God could make this life happy and free of suffering, without infringing on any "free will". Thus, we see that the "free will" argument above totally evaporates.

We are then left with the final possible argument of Christian apologetics, or may I say excusogetics: God wants the world to be like it is, suffering and all. This position is sometimes called Calvinism, but it was taught by Augustine and Luther as well. It states that free will is an illusion, that suffering is the will of god, and that God elects who will be saved and who will be tortured forever based on divine whim. This position does not really answer the problem of suffering, it simply postulates that God is evil. People who chose to follow an evil deity have thus labeled themselves, since men makes gods in their own image.

- Jan
--
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein

124

I Think That I Chose My Parents.

by Englishman in

jw
friends

do you believe in reincarnation?.

i dont think i believe in it in the same way that most believers do, which is that we keep coming back in different fleshly bodies until we have achieved perfection.. i do, however, strongly suspect that we may well be spirit creatures who find it necessary to inhabit a fleshly body from time to time, and that this entails us having to leave behind most of our past memories.. i say most memories, because many people seem to have some vestigal recollections that don`t seem to fit in with earthly experiences.. i`m pretty sure that i chose my parents!

i have a recollection of being shown a young and kind couple through some form of astral telescope and choosing to become their son.

JanH

I don't remember who said it, but it is true: when people stop believing (in Christianity, he meant, but anything does the job), they don't start believing in nothing. They start believing anything.

I think many people long for there being some higher meaning in life: that there exist comsic energies, that there are space aliens looking out for us, that we have been living before, that dreams can tell us about the future, or whatever.

It's amazing how otherwise intelligent people can believe such stories. It's hard to explain but for the fact that humans have a desire to believe in sort-of a higher level of organization in the universe. No matter how weird or contrary to known facts the ideas are, they do catch on.

- Jan
--
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein

29

i have a question

by willy_think in

jw
friends

my farther is a jw, my mother is rc i am neither.

i have done a study of world beliefs from, atheist to zoraster.

this includes many wtbts writings, old & new.

JanH

thanks for the post JanH, do you think that the accidental use of an ocult egyptian symbol apples to russell who studed the pyramids where the symbols are to be found?

Russell was of course well aware that e.g. the winged sun was an ancient Egyptian symbol. He believed that there was an ancient tradition of true worship in Egypt, but as far as I know, he never really made this very concrete, or explained his use of this symbol.

The connection to the pyramid is, as you note, obviously relevant. In his books, Russell seems to subscribe to the idea that the Pyramid was built by the Hyxos (a slightly mysterious people who ruled Egypt for a time), whose ruler -- he argued -- was noen other than Melchizedech. This he had from the pyramidologist Seiss ("Miracle in Stone").

Btw, I don't know from where you got the idea that anything you wrote offended me. I am not in the being offended business

- Jan
--
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein

30

Did Christ exist?

by uncle_onion in

jw
friends

jesus christ is the main feature of christianity.

what proof is there of him existing?

we touched on this subject on the the last thread that i started, but i would appreciate in depth veiw points and "evidence" please.

JanH

To an American, this phrase IS a "put-down".

It may be, to anyone who considers style more important than content.

It DOES imply that whoever made the original statement must be stupid in your eyes.

No it does not, NL2. That is where you are totally confused. There is a clear difference between a person him/herself and a statement made by this person.

Don't you understand such a simple fact?

It IS a way to "be-little" a person - i.e "you be little, so I be big".

That is hopelessly wrong. If you can't differentiate between a person and a topic, you have no business discussing anything publicly. If your ego is so small and fragile that it breaks apart as soon as it encounters opposing viewpoints, I think I would suggest leaving it in some cozy little sect somewhere.

Of course, if you paid any attention to the actual statements made (what a crime!), you would see that the statement I proclaimed nonsense was one uttered by someone in a TV documentary. It was one where Shauna was merely quoting somebody else, not referring to this as her own opinion. That Shauna should feel "belittled" by me considering these claims nonsense is well beyond me.

No one likes to be treated in this manner.

Again, something you'd expect to hear from someone who is much more worried about being right than about getting it right, and whose little ego is just a little fact away from breaking apart.

NL2: I think someone may be saying something that offends you in thousands of discussion boards on the Net today. Hurry up and run, so maybe you can make it, and can satisfy your desire to practice this popular American pastime of being constantly offended by everyone and everything.

- Jan
--
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein

11

Three Reasons

by neyank in

jw
friends

this question was asked by tina on a different post.. and the person did not come back to her with an answer.. so i will ask it now.. this is obviosly directed toward those that still believe the wts.

is gods orginization.. .

what are 3 reasons we should go back to the wts?.

JanH

1. It's the night of the memorial and you like crappy wine.

2. You want to pick up a new WTLib CD-ROM and feel lucky tonight.

3. You're really, really desperate for a chick (or guy, depending).

- Jan
--
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein

30

Did Christ exist?

by uncle_onion in

jw
friends

jesus christ is the main feature of christianity.

what proof is there of him existing?

we touched on this subject on the the last thread that i started, but i would appreciate in depth veiw points and "evidence" please.

JanH

No prob, Shauna.

Yes, I'm from the "say it as it is" part of the world .

- Jan
--
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein

29

i have a question

by willy_think in

jw
friends

my farther is a jw, my mother is rc i am neither.

i have done a study of world beliefs from, atheist to zoraster.

this includes many wtbts writings, old & new.

JanH

The problem with this line of thinking, as you must surely realize since you have studied many world religions, is that no religion is an island. Symbolics -- like ideas -- have been floating around and been used by many differing systems of belief.

Egyptian religion had a profound effect on early Christianity; most of its ideas on the afterlife seems to have come from Egypt. The idea of a dying and resurrected saviour reminds very much about the Isis-Osiris myths.

The worst you can do, is to talk about "freemasonary" symbols. As far as I know, no such things exist. Freemasons use all sorts of symbols from all cultures and religions; being very syncretistic. The "cross and crown" which many now claim are freemasonary symbols can be found on many 19th century religious books and magazines. I have on good authority that this is not a symbol a freemason will normally be terribly familiar with.

- Jan
--
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein

30

Did Christ exist?

by uncle_onion in

jw
friends

jesus christ is the main feature of christianity.

what proof is there of him existing?

we touched on this subject on the the last thread that i started, but i would appreciate in depth veiw points and "evidence" please.

JanH

Jesus Christ is the main feature of Christianity. What proof is there of him existing? We touched on this subject on the the last thread that I started, but I would appreciate in depth veiw points and "evidence" please.

In history, we don't use the word "proof". We talk about evidence. Various forms of evidence has different weight. Some claims, like there being a man called Jesus in 1st century Palestine, and some people thought him to be a saviour, are not all that remarkable. Stories about actual miracles are extraordinary claims that will require extraordinary evidence.

The earliest testimony to Jesus is what we find in Paul's letters, around 50-60AD. However, we find no references there to Paul ever having seen or met Jesus in real life. He relates no eyewitness accounts, no biographical data, nothing except claims of supernatural revelation. Nothing really suggests a real person living only around 20 years earlier. But it does suggest some belief in a "Christ" sometime earlier, in the Jerusalem area.

The gospel accounts are extremely weak evidence. Thet seem to believe all sorts of supernatural stories. They relate hearsay; none of the authors claim to be eye-witnesses, or even know any real eye witnesses. The stories are wild, fantastic, self-contradictory and everything you'd expect from deeply superstitious people who were out to sell you a religious saviour-tale. As a source to any historical Jesus, these stories are very near worthless. You can mix up all sorts of verses from these, and make a plausible story about a miracle-worker, a revolutionary, or indeed whatever you want to have your Jesus to look like. This has been done countless times. These "historical-jesus" reconstructions are interesting, but probably pretty worthless if you have rigurous demands on yoru work.

The secular evidence to Jesus is actually just one: Jospehus. But the two references to Jesus in the Josephus we have today have both been tampered with, to say it mildly, by Christian scribes. It can be doubted weather any real reference to a historical Jesus was behind any of those. Most scholars seem to still assume there was some vague reference there, but the arguments didn't really impress me the last time I reviewed them.

There are some references, like Tacitus, that talks about Christians and the claims made by Christians. This is nothing like any independent testimony to the historical Jesus.

So, to conclude, there may be slightly more reason to believe a real, historical man called Jesus really existed, than to assume he was just made up from scratch. Who or what he was, what he did, we know nothing about.

That's the foundation of the Christian faith. Not much.

- Jan
--
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen"
-- Albert Einstein