Posts by HappyGuy

16

Ho hum the time has come!

by MisfitMeL in

jw
friends

well it's very close.... i knew this would kinda happen at some point in my life.... still you only realise the full extent of the situation when you are facing it.. i never was a 'hard core' jw and all of the 'secret' boyfriends i've had were non-jws.

present one included.

except now, we have decided to get married and i have the most unpleasant task ahead of me.. 1) i'm indian, so dating isn't really accepted as the norm and most parents are very conservative.. 2) my mum is a jw and i was raised as one (though i am an atheist now, but she doesn't know this!!

HappyGuy

MisfitMel,

When you say you are Indian, are you from the subcontinent or are you Native American?

8

Conference Call in 15 mins - some here may like to listen

by Gayle in

the watchtower organization is very much aware of what is going on in their false religion.

too many witnesses no longer believe their teachings to be biblically correct.

an intensive effort to discover disloyalty, subversion, and those causing divisions is now taking place.

HappyGuy

EOM,

Have you noticed taht the "correct" time never comes? What scandal has ever been resolved satisfactorially? What injustice has ever been corrected and the offending company men disciplined or removed? What financial scam has ever been admitted to and the money returned? None, none, and none.

When convention centers all over the country caught the WTBTS red handed stealing parking money (claiming that they were not charging for parking and then charging for parking by selling parking tickets in the KHs prior to the assemblies), did the WTBTS admit their wrongdoing and return the money? No, they claimed that these convention centers were "persecuting" them for religious reasons.

20

For non theists : What is the conscience and does it really matter?

by cyberjesus in

since we dont believe in a set of moral standards based on the desires of a powerful god, on what do you base your conscience?

"how do you define it?

and if at the end of everything we are going to die, why does it matter to have a conscience?

HappyGuy

Humans are born with a conscience. Whether the Bible exists or not does not affect our conscience.

I have lived among aboriginal people who never heard of the Bible and couldn't have read one anyway. These people were very sweet natured, kind, caring, loving, and considerate. Once I was sitting with the women, and one of the children took something out of my backpack, this tribe did not have technology, they had almost no individual possessions. One child was playing with the object she took out of my backpack and another child tried to take it away and the first child hit the second child with the object.

The second child started crying and the first child screamed and threw the object on the ground as if it had suddently come alive and spouted fangs. The entire tribe was traumatized and the elders came and did rituals for the rest of the day, there was obviously a lot of consternation, and the elders talked a lot about what to do about this horrific act.

I asked one of the elders why this was such a big deal and I didn't quite understand everything he said but he kept pointing to his head and making a sign for "hurt" and pointing to the children and mimicing the hitting. Like "the idea of a child hitting another child hurts my head". He was obviously talking about the conscience. The child who hurt the other child was deeply hurt all day and cried and cried. We finally had to take the object from my backpack away from the tribe and throw it away, to get rid of the "evil thing".

It was very obvious that those sweet people were born with the notion that physical violence was an extremely "bad" act, they obviously had a conscience.

71

A honest question to all creationists

by bohm in

hey!.

i have a question regarding creation thats burning me.

i dont have any clever arguments depending on what is answered, i am just curious.. first off i want to say that i think people are free to believe whatever they want.

HappyGuy

TD,

Another DNA question. Another poster posed a question something like "can humans develop wings". I would answer that by saying only if human DNA has a code in it already for wings. If the code is not there then humans cannot develop wings.

ARe you saying that the DNA could change sufficiently that human DNA could then contain the code for wings?

71

A honest question to all creationists

by bohm in

hey!.

i have a question regarding creation thats burning me.

i dont have any clever arguments depending on what is answered, i am just curious.. first off i want to say that i think people are free to believe whatever they want.

HappyGuy

TD,

Would a wise Creator make only static forms of life or would he design life that could adapt and change over time?

Adaptation and change over time, I am okay with. If you are calling that evolution, I guess that's okay, I don't view evolution as being that, but I have not "studied" evolution the way a biologist would.

So, you are saying that the dog family has a common ancestor with the fox or the dog is the ancestor of the fox or the fox is the ancestor of the dog? Either way they now are not compatable reproductively so they are not the same species but they are related to each other. Okay (I guess).

That kind of variation I can undertand and I don't think anyone rational would disagree with it as being something that happened naturally.

When I read the word evolution, though, I am thinking more about "and life started as a single cell and then there were fish then the fish grew legs and then the monkeys became humans". That is what I cannot accept.

And then you have the problem how did the chemicals that became that first cell obtain the spark of life? Then I have the problem of imagining that everything that lives is here totally by chance and if the earth had a very different atmosphere or gravitational pull or any other number of myriad factors that life would be completely different. It is this totally indeterminate randomness that bothers me. Then there is the issue of sentience. how can sentience be the result of a random process? I can't accept that.

21

Is the LAW still binding?!?!

by EndofMysteries in

this is kinda scary, for those who believe in the bible, first jesus said that he wasn't abolishing just fulfilling the law.

the penalty of sin is death, so he covers that.

many take that as most things are okay then.

HappyGuy

I find it interesting that the supposed word of God is so convoluted that even its believers cannot figure out how to follow its teachings.

71

A honest question to all creationists

by bohm in

hey!.

i have a question regarding creation thats burning me.

i dont have any clever arguments depending on what is answered, i am just curious.. first off i want to say that i think people are free to believe whatever they want.

HappyGuy

TD,

The way you understand what DNA is, does DNA hold the encoding of what we are or of what we could become?

For example, if I make a blueprint for constructing an office building the blueprint holds the encoding of what the office building IS.

On the other hand, if I make an AI agent that can learn by experience, then the software code for the AI program is an encoding of what the AI agent can become.

71

A honest question to all creationists

by bohm in

hey!.

i have a question regarding creation thats burning me.

i dont have any clever arguments depending on what is answered, i am just curious.. first off i want to say that i think people are free to believe whatever they want.

HappyGuy

bohm,

So that big yellow round thing in the sky IS the sun? Hmmmm.

Yes, species means different things to different people. I'm not sure how to rectify that.

Here is an example. Maybe we can start from that. Instead of using the term species I will use the term group, a group is simply individuals that share traits to such a degree that outsiders looking at them would call them by the same label. Look, geese. Look, rabbits. Look, hookers. Fair enough?

Okay, so we come to the fertile / non fertile issue. Group A can procreate with Group B and produce fertile offspring. Group B can procreate with Group C and produce fertile offspring. But, group A and group C cannot procreate and produce fertile offspring. I would say that Groups A and C are definitely different "groups". But, are groups A and B and groups B and C different "groups"?

So, maybe species can be delineated by the ability to procreate and produce fertile offspring?

71

A honest question to all creationists

by bohm in

hey!.

i have a question regarding creation thats burning me.

i dont have any clever arguments depending on what is answered, i am just curious.. first off i want to say that i think people are free to believe whatever they want.

HappyGuy

is this like scientology?

I have no idea, I don't know anytihng about scientology.

As I said it is a HYPOTHESIS. A wild one I admit.

13

Why Do I Not Care Anymore? Possibly a Rhetorical Question

by cantleave in

there was a time, not so very long ago, when a purpose in life was so important to me.

it mattered to me what i believed as to how we came here.

it mattered to me what happens after death.

HappyGuy

cantleave,

I think I know why. I went through the same thing.

I do not beleive that we can know the answer to the questions "why are we here?", "how did life start?", "where did the material unverse come from?", etc.

Whatever caused the universe to come into being is outside our universe. Being inside the universe we cannot have a frame of reference to understand it. We possess neither the words, nor the symbols, nor the imagery to understand it.

It is like showing a line a cube and asking the line to describe the cube. The line will only describe a line because it will not have a frame of reference to comprehend the cube.

Mysticism comes as close to the answers as I have found. Most people won't like the answer. I will try to explain it, I don't fully understand it and will have to use words familiar to me becuse the ancient words cannot really be translated into modern language.

I have posted this before in different forms so I will try to be brief.

We know that the material universe came into being at a fixed point. I don't say fixed point in time because we don't know if time existed at that point. What existed before the material universe? Einstein can help us here. Relativity theory says E=MC2, what we want to know is how to create mass, before the material universe came into being there was no mass, so solving for M we get M=E/C2. So, prior to the material universe existing what existed was E, energy.

Mysticism teaches that this Energy is love, that all of us come from this energy, all of us have this energy inside of us, and all of us can connect to the universal energy anytime we want. And when we die we will go back there, to this universal love. Mysticism teaches that the purpose of life in the material universe is so that we can perfect love because without strife there is no way to perfect love. How can I learn compassion if I am never in a position where I need to be compassionate?

Now, what is the nature of the universal energy? No one knows. We have no way of knowing, we lack the words to describe it because it is outside our universe.

So, while we can know that energy existed prior to the material universe and our life force comes from that universal energy, we cannot know what it is, other than to know that we are part of it, can connect to it, and will go back to it when we die.

I am not describing "God" here or anything to do with the Bible.

This knowledge is very old and was unversal until religionists tried to stamp it out.