In many cases neither.
They believed in demons and were prone to ascribe agency to all sorts of coincidental events and incidents.
'Shit happens' is less exciting than deemonz.
Posts by cofty
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21Were These People “Demonized” or Simply Mentally Ill?
by minimus init seems that every congregation had a problem with people being affected by the demons.
looking back i have to wonder was it that more people were emotionally or mentally unbalanced?
or they simply off their medications or were they in need of meds?.
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Solicitors Appontment Tomorrow - Advice Appreciated
by pale.emperor infollowing up on this thread: https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/5012900121935872/am-overreacting-here?page=3#!#5179106934128640.
im seeing my solicitor tomorrow to see about getting an order in place making sure any contact my daughter has with my jw family goes through me and not my ex-wife.. explained the situation briefly to the lawyer, she was asking more and more about why should i be concerned if a jw had access to my child.. i mentioned the blood issue, the shunning, the inappropriate pictures of armageddon in books/mags etc.
do you think i should bring in watchtower literature to show them what i mean?
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cofty
Yes I would take along any printed material you can to show why you are rightly concerned.
Personally I told my in-laws that they could have the children for short visits but only if they were first prepared to sit down with me for a conversation about the ground-rules. That was over 20 years ago. Still waiting for them to get back to me.
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cofty
He was a salesman who turned the gospel into a commodity.
He manipulated the crowds and applied emotional blackmail to coerce frightened and gullible souls to come forward and repeat the magic spell that would save them from hell.
I have no idea if he believed his bullshit or not but either way he was a huckster.
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113
No Bible = No God?
by menrov insome doubt about the bible completely, some partially.
what if the bible turns out to be a product of humans, nothing divine.
would you still believe in a creator?.
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cofty
The one that I personally can't get past is believing that hundreds of people would choose persecution, family rejection and many of them death for something they knew to be a lie.
Except they didn't.
You are creating a false dichotomy between actually seeing the risen christ or deliberately lying about it. Human psychology is more nuanced than that.
They believed Jesus was still with them in some sense. It is a common phenomena when somebody close has died and even more so when all of their hopes had been dashed by Jesus' death.
These men had walked out on their families to follow Jesus. Their emotional investment was as great as any of the millions who have died for religious delusions.
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Disproving one verse of the Bible means proving another verse!
by Ireneus inlast week’s newsweek magazine (february 10, 2018) made a surgical strike on jws teaching that soul is something that can be “destroyed” (mathew 10:28) and man is ‘dust unto which he would return’ (genesis 3:19) when its article (the increasing signs that human consciousness remains after death) made this conclusion: soul “does not become annihilated just because we’ve crossed the threshold of death.” (http://www.newsweek.com/where-do-you-go-when-you-die-increasing-signs-human-consciousness-after-death-800443) interestingly, bible also contains verses that show man has an eternal aspect (eccl 3:5; 12:7).. science is now in the right direction in line with the prediction francis crick, co-discoverer of the double-helix dna, made: “it is not true that mere firing of neurons in the brain could indicate consciousness….
physics has yet to explain how consciousness could come about through firing of neuron in the brain.”.
this also explains why some of the gospels were not included in the canon.
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cofty
the concept of macro-universe of relativity and mass-energy dualism of Albert Einstein, the subatomic wave-particle equation of Erwin Schrodinger, the probability wave concept of Max Born and the Uncertainty Principle of Werner Heisenberg…..
None of which lend any support to Cartesian dualism.
There is no ghost in the machine. We are our brains.
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Most interesting info you've found
by Freedom rocks ini was wondering what is the most interesting or the strangest fact you've found out since leaving the jws about:.
the bible.
god .
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cofty
The bible
That it promotes a moral code that is as debased as that of an Afghan warlord
God
If he was more than a fictional character he would be a moral monster
Evolution
Too much to mention. Probably the most fascinating stuff relates to embryonic development - evo devo - and how small changes in DNA can result in significant changes in phenotype.
Satan
He doesn't even appear in the bible until after the Babylonian exile
Jesus
He worshipped and adored the monstrous god of the Old Testament. He was a false prophet and a destroyer of families.
Religions in general
Some are more toxic than others. Some serve a useful social function that secularism struggles to replace.
How did the information you found affect or change your whole belief system?
Radically! I no longer look for patterns in the vicissitudes of life. 'Shit happens'. Find pleasure in all the good things that happen every day. This is the only life we will ever have. We are the lucky ones.
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29
Most interesting info you've found
by Freedom rocks ini was wondering what is the most interesting or the strangest fact you've found out since leaving the jws about:.
the bible.
god .
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cofty
Evolution: It will always remain a theory since we cannot travel back in time - scratchme
A scientific theory does not mean something less than a fact. It is an explanation for a whole body of facts and observations. It is itself a fact as certain as anything else you can claim to know beyond all reasonable doubt.
Sorry this is off-topic but it is such a basic misunderstanding that has been explained countless times in the past.
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Disproving one verse of the Bible means proving another verse!
by Ireneus inlast week’s newsweek magazine (february 10, 2018) made a surgical strike on jws teaching that soul is something that can be “destroyed” (mathew 10:28) and man is ‘dust unto which he would return’ (genesis 3:19) when its article (the increasing signs that human consciousness remains after death) made this conclusion: soul “does not become annihilated just because we’ve crossed the threshold of death.” (http://www.newsweek.com/where-do-you-go-when-you-die-increasing-signs-human-consciousness-after-death-800443) interestingly, bible also contains verses that show man has an eternal aspect (eccl 3:5; 12:7).. science is now in the right direction in line with the prediction francis crick, co-discoverer of the double-helix dna, made: “it is not true that mere firing of neurons in the brain could indicate consciousness….
physics has yet to explain how consciousness could come about through firing of neuron in the brain.”.
this also explains why some of the gospels were not included in the canon.
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cofty
arover - How would you define that difference exactly?
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Cart observations from Cardiff South Wales
by freddo ini was in a suburb of cardiff, capital of wales where it was difficult to get near to my customer's offices to deliver and install what i do.
i had my car parked about a hundred yards away and had to make several trips with goods and tools past a local jw trolley cart.
as i was working i didn't stop but observed much of the time from an upper floor office window.. in the hour or so i was there, on a warm sunny (for late february) lunchtime/early afternoon - right by a bus stop and several local shops, cafes and banks with plenty of people about - not one person stopped at the cart.. the two women at the cart i guess were about 50 and 75 respectively - pleasant looking motherly/grandmotherly types.
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cofty
'The good news of this website will be declared in all the inhabited earth for a witness to all the nations and then the end will come.'
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10
Disproving one verse of the Bible means proving another verse!
by Ireneus inlast week’s newsweek magazine (february 10, 2018) made a surgical strike on jws teaching that soul is something that can be “destroyed” (mathew 10:28) and man is ‘dust unto which he would return’ (genesis 3:19) when its article (the increasing signs that human consciousness remains after death) made this conclusion: soul “does not become annihilated just because we’ve crossed the threshold of death.” (http://www.newsweek.com/where-do-you-go-when-you-die-increasing-signs-human-consciousness-after-death-800443) interestingly, bible also contains verses that show man has an eternal aspect (eccl 3:5; 12:7).. science is now in the right direction in line with the prediction francis crick, co-discoverer of the double-helix dna, made: “it is not true that mere firing of neurons in the brain could indicate consciousness….
physics has yet to explain how consciousness could come about through firing of neuron in the brain.”.
this also explains why some of the gospels were not included in the canon.
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cofty
Ireneaus - As Earnest said correctly the article is reporting on recent discoveries about the process of death - it is not an instantaneous event.
The last paragraphs of the article are not reporting on any scientific findings but on unsubstantiated rumours, at least some of which have proven to be fraudulent.
Your comment that, 'Science is now in the right direction in line with the prediction Francis Crick', is unwarranted. There is no scientific support for consciousness after death. On the contrary everything that neuroscience has discovered in recent years supports the conclusion that we are our brains.