i am already reading that some plan to drop their medical insurance coverage on january 1st and just pay the penalty-.
an individual with $30,000 annual income would pay a $300 penalty in 2014, $600 in 2015 and $750 in 2016.. an individual with $50,000 annual income would pay a $500 penalty in 2014, $1,000 in 2015 and $1,250 in 2016.. an individual earning $100,000 a year would pay a $1,000 penalty in 2014, $2,000 in 2015 and $2,500 in 2016.. here is your insurance subsidy calculator-.
http://healthreform.kff.org/subsidycalculator.aspx#incomeagetables.
My opinion is that Obamacare will crash
It's designed to crash and kill a lot of people in the process. The Federal Reserve will be celbrating it's 100th birthday with an economic bang. I just hope that we can disarm the bomb before it's too late.
-Sab
being the inquiring sort, i've read deeper in to the past of some of my heroes, and found....flaws.
it shakes me up.
i wonder; is my hero worth emulating?
This triangle is used by law enforcement to help clean up neighbourhoods. There are very simple deterrents, when implemented, are effective in preventing crime.
Crime is mitigated would be a better way to put. Sadly, your ideology leaves out a small percentage of people you deem essentially unexplainable. You have created labels for them like "psycho", "sadist", "pathological", "sociopath", "egomaniac" etc, but all of them while incredibly useful theories are inexact sciences. They all make attempt to explain the problems created by lack of family qualitatively, and quantitatively. We don't have a solution to what's shredding apart our family's so our best guess is to call out the culprits as simply animalistic. Animals murder and rape each other all the time, we expect it from them. But for some reason, for a few brief stretches of history across the globe, human family values were given the utmost importance in society, even to a fault at times. It was after that event took place that humanity started on a path that would literally skyrocket them into space and beyond.
-Sab
being the inquiring sort, i've read deeper in to the past of some of my heroes, and found....flaws.
it shakes me up.
i wonder; is my hero worth emulating?
Take for instance the broken windows theory of crime prevention, which had such a big impact on New York. Take care of the little things, and the big things take care of themselves. Say we have someone with criminal desires. We put this person in an environment where there are no targets and no opportunity. The person's reasons may be shallow, but eventually we have a reformed criminal.
The question is what creates the criminal thoughts, and more importantly what compels them to action? I think it's a little naive to assume isolation can somehow magically rehabilitate a criminal. What if the criminal feels perfectly justified? What if they have a legitimate grievance that is not being acknowledged? What if they are being victimized by the very system that purports to be in their best interest? I guess that's what locks are for.
-Sab
being the inquiring sort, i've read deeper in to the past of some of my heroes, and found....flaws.
it shakes me up.
i wonder; is my hero worth emulating?
I am thinking, for the smooth operation of civilization, sab, that the motive is not nearly as important as the result. If a robbery is foiled because a criminal is spooked by onlookers, or because the criminal has been successfully rehabilitated, the result is the same. The family is not robbed.
A criminal being spooked by onlookers is a random beneficial event. Rehabilitation would require the criminal to choose at some point to stop being one. The result is not the same at all because the first example only prevents one robbery, the second prevents an indefinite amount of robberies as you can never be sure how many they would have engaged in without the rehab.
Wrong motives will eventually corrupt and decay into oblivion and it will go wholly unnoticed by the majority of the public until it's too late. Take a look at the condition of government right now for instance. What is percieved as a good intention is not necessarily the truth. The door opener's intention to appear good is fundamentally different than one of a willingness to help. Think about when we raise our children. Do we tell them that manners are good because it makes you look good, or because they are actually good for the world? The former will develop a stereotypical drone and the latter an honorable citizen.
-Sab
is jwn my new congregation?.
i realizing that some things never change.
i am behaving the same way i did at the kh as i am now in this forum.
you and I won't be judged as inadequate here
...unless you preach about God. Then you're singled out by a certain ilk of posters and neutralized while everybody watches, takes sides and eats popcorn. If you don't have hard scientific evidence for an extraordinary assertion, you are singled out and laughed out of town. It's sad because it's all caused by just a handful of bad eggs that are given free reign. Without them this would be a tranquil place of healing for all instead of only some. The Watchtower creates a refugee situation and this place is supposed to be safe harbor for them. It is a great help to many, but there are improvements that could be made.
-Sab
being the inquiring sort, i've read deeper in to the past of some of my heroes, and found....flaws.
it shakes me up.
i wonder; is my hero worth emulating?
People have the capacity to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Think about someone opening a door for someone else. The intention could be to help another person, but it also could be because the person opening the door is merely keeping up appearances. Even though the events appear exactly the same, one is much more shallow than the other.
-Sab
i have lately tried to rethink my position on gods existence and tried to be more critical of the atheistic position.
this has partly been spurned by my impression objections to theistic arguments often rely on the same errors atheist accuse theists of, for instance using the shotgun-method (i.e.
picking 3 faults with all premises in the arguments) or building conclusion on a web of arguments and, when considering a particular argument, supporting it by other parts of the web or simply not addressing the argument very well.. as part of this i came across collins 1999 article on fine-tuning.
Awesome read. Marked.
-Sab
in the first post in this series i connected the watchtower with the beast out of the earth, or the "world empire of false prophets.
" then i showed that babylon the great is the composite city of corrupt mother earth ruled by these false prophets.
after that i revealed the purpose of the idol of the beast out of the earth which is to expose the holy ones of the planet in order to exterminate or neutralize them.
2 years ago I wrote a thread about Kingdom Hall Hypnosis. I determined that the KH format induced a type of hypnosis in the audience. I remember consistantly feeling extreme tiredness while in a meeting and then when the prayer ended I felt invigorated. Then when I was driving home with my wife we would try to recount what the meeting was about and we always seemed to have a hard time remembering the points made.
But why would the Watchtower need to hypnotize their members? The answer is that there's just no way they could ever get anybody to believe their lies without it. They would also have zero control over the lives of their members without implanting in them ideas through a sophisticated system of mind control.
Charles Taze Russell didn't believe that all the members of the Watchtower society required going door to door to preach. That was a Rutherford change. The question is how does the Watchtower get their rank and file to believe that their preaching work is a commission from God for every single person on the planet? Lets re-read paragraph 4 in the Watchtower quoted in the OP:
4 After being informed of God’s intentions and receiving his commission, Noah built an ark to preserve men and animals alive. (Gen. 6:13, 14, 22) Noah also proclaimed Jehovah’s impending judgment. The apostle Peter calls him “a preacher of righteousness,” indicating that Noah strove to help his neighbors appreciate the gravity of their situation. (Read 2 Peter 2:5.) Do you think that it would have been reasonable for Noah and his family to focus their efforts on developing a business, getting ahead among their contemporaries, or establishing a comfortable lifestyle? Of course not! Knowing what lay ahead, they avoided such distractions.
Now lets read the question that was asked when this article was studied by JW's all around the world:
4. How did Noah use his time after receiving his commission from Jehovah, and why?
The Watchtower is being very cunning here because they are staying relatively true to the story because they don't explicitly state that God's commission was for Noah to preach God' impending judgement. They state that his commission was to "preserve men and animals alive" which is similar to the Watchtower message of coming into Kingdom Halls for survival from Armageddon. However, they are fishing for a certain response from the audience. The format of the Watchtower study is that the conductor gets the main answer to the question and then accepts supporting points that don't deviate from the paragraph at hand.
A first person might answer, "Noah used his time to preserve men and animals alive similar to the world wide preaching work."
The second person might offer a supporting point from the paragraph like this, "Noah also proclaimed God's impending judgement on mankind to help the people appreciate the gravity of their situation."
What is happening here is that the Watchtower is getting the rank and file to lie for them about the story of Noah and the flood. They didn't say that it was God's commission to Noah to preach about the impending judgement, they get the rank and file to say it, which is then confirmed in the minds of the audience. That's why the hypnosis is important, because they need the audience in a hazy mental state so they don't understand what is truly going on. Which is that a lie is being implanted into their minds in order to compel them to action. Cults always have unethical recruitment policies and this is one way they create their army of unethical recruiters.
After the first two points are covered another person will raise their hand and say something like this, "Noah used his time wisely by warning people and saving lives. We should follow his example and not take on unnecessary life burdens to establish a comfortable lifestyle or get ahead of our contemporaries."
Interestingly, getting ahead of your contemporaries was exactly why God favored Noah in the first place which is what the Watchtower condemns. He was refered to as "blameless among his people" which meant that he was ahead of them. Notice what paragraph 3 of the same article has to say about Jesus reference to the "days of Noah":
3 Jesus drew a parallel between Noah’s time and ours. “Just as the days of Noah were, so the presence of the Son of man will be,” he said. They were “eating and drinking, men marrying and women being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark; and they took no note until the flood came and swept them all away.”
The Watchtower wants their members to believe that when people reject them in their ministery that it's the same thing as when the people of Noah's day rejected his message (which is why they painted the picture of Noah getting rejected which is included in the article). However, as we read in the OP in the story Noah never preached God's impending judgement. Not only would there be no point, it would also distract him from his actual commission of building the ark which took 40 years to complete. Every second counted so there would be no reason to go preaching to people who will never listen in the first place. Yet, the Watchtower wants their members to identify with this character they made up which is based on the Biblical narrative of Genesis 6-9.
This teaching does two things. It creates new evangelizers for the cult and it reinforces the decision of people who chose to go into the preaching work. It freshens up their mind as to why they are frittering away their lives for the Watchtower instead of establishing a comfortable lifestyle.
-Sab
hours after the pope said he was leaving lighting strikes.. see picture on link below.. .
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-21427713.
.
We need Tom Hanks and Nicolas Cage to solve this mystery!
-Sab
is this report credible?.
jehovah's witnesses recover best from surgery, despite refusing blood read more.
This is pure propaganda. These are some very intelligent scum bags. They are trying to paint an image to the world that refusing blood transfusions actually increased medical scientific progress and saved lives in the process. They operate on the false notion that the medical community somehow needed their child blood sacrifices in order to progress in bloodless surgery. When in reality the medical community was forced to watch children die needlessly under their care. What resulted was a dire necessity to keep it from happening again. Bloodless surgery is a great technology and the Watchtower has NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. They are life takers, not savers. The Watchtower has their own personal holocaust and just like the Nazi's they are making a desperate attempt to cover up the brutal truth.
Dwight Eisenhower, an EXJW, had this to say after taking a tour of a death camp:
The same day I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never been able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain however, that I have never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock.
I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda". Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through with the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and the British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.
The Watchtower is trying to cover up the mass graves they have created just as the Nazi's did. They call US the propaganda artists. Like I said, intelligent scum. The world must know the truth about the truth.
-Sab
