Posts by sabastious

I do not see life this way. You appear to, and then seem to add god in to the straw man scenario to make it all better. I think this is getting off topic. So will not address this any further.

The OP states that depending on technology has made our brains stupider. This furthers the concept that we are doomed for failure, it's no different than the Bible saying it's not for man to direct his own step. A JW would LOVE to use this article to "prove" their faith that man is a degrading species. This subject has undertones of religion because that's the question that God frameworks answer. And if you believe in the Torah you will know that we were actually created to be good and progressive and that anyone who works counter to that has actually lost their natural affection for the nature of humanity. It's not off topic, and I think it's funny that you would say what you said and THEN tell me the discussion is over. It sucks you live in New Zealand, we would get along.

-Sab

233

Human Devolution? Interesting Article...

by AGuest in

jw
friends

are humans really getting dumber (may you all have peace)?

there have many positions on this for both sides.

saw an announcement on the news this morning and was intrigued: could it be true?

sabastious

Its called peer review for a reason. You have to understand something before you can critique it.

I do understand it, I know what peer review means. I am just showing the flaw in it (it can't be verified without secular knowledge and education), what would you say are the flaws in peer review Cofty?

-Sab

233

Human Devolution? Interesting Article...

by AGuest in

jw
friends

are humans really getting dumber (may you all have peace)?

there have many positions on this for both sides.

saw an announcement on the news this morning and was intrigued: could it be true?

sabastious

Ah...but sab. It is not the technology that is the problem. And the chances of there being a nuclear war seem more religious based than science based. In fact. Scientific method would NEVER cause a war. It would eliminate the cause based on lack of evidence.

I never said technology was the problem, I am saying the lack of accountability of the people who create it are the problem.

This isn't true from my perspective...I do not consider human beings to be biological robots or doomed for destruction. I think there is always a possiblity that even if our planet cannot sustain the populaiton growth we may, in the future be able to inahabit other planets. Out technology is advancing at such rates this is not out of the question any more.

You want to speak from a planetary viewpoint, but you failed to factor in the universal doom that looms before us all. We are either going to freeze, rip apart or a variety of other doomsday scenarios. There is no "happily ever after" when it comes to our cosmic future and most likely not our planetary future either (not even factoring in climate change). The only idea that is positive is that we MIGHT be able to escape this universe into another, but that doesn't really sound feasible to me. If traveling to the a new continent for the first time brings mass destruction through introducing foreign pathogens to a population, just think about inter-dimensional travel would do. You want to plop down in a new universe and be the sole cause for it's destruction? That sounds real nice.... It's ALL BAD when you remove the idea of God, it's plain and simple. You are just focusing on the positive when your ideology is actually ultimately negative because all life eventually is snuffed out. "We had a good run" that's the end of the atheist story. We start and end in silent Nothing. The article in the OP simply follows suit.

-Sab

233

Human Devolution? Interesting Article...

by AGuest in

jw
friends

are humans really getting dumber (may you all have peace)?

there have many positions on this for both sides.

saw an announcement on the news this morning and was intrigued: could it be true?

sabastious

Think of a fact as a pure compound. A hypothesis may look a pure compound (fact), but the only way to guarantee it's purity is to put it through a filtering process. If no contaminants appear in the filter . . . the compound is pure. If contaminants exist, they can be identified and quantified as removable . . . or the impurity of the compound is confirmed and it is discarded. You can't purify it simply by adding more compound . . . the contaminants have to be found and dealt with. Falsification is a purification process in that respect.

I understand that purification process and I am an advocate of it. However, I am strongly against leaning on that falsification process while tackling the big questions like "were we created by an intelligence?" or "Will life be allowed to cease to exist?" Because the falsifications to these types of inquries are going to heavily lean on philosophy simply because the universe is so old and we are so young. So if the conclusions are going to be Science-Philosophy hybrids to end with, there is no reason to discount the opposite which would be Philosophy-Science.

-Sab

233

Human Devolution? Interesting Article...

by AGuest in

jw
friends

are humans really getting dumber (may you all have peace)?

there have many positions on this for both sides.

saw an announcement on the news this morning and was intrigued: could it be true?

sabastious

The Intelligent Design argument is dead in the water becasue there is no positive evidence to support it.

Saying that we have the ability to critique God's creation and deem it unworthy of being called Intelligent Design is actually what is dead in the water. And the argument that if it's beyond us we should not strive to understand it is foolish. That's what we were made for, to push towards our creator and eventually meet Him. Creating means FROM NOTHING, and we have magically been given that ability and we should be greatful for it. Therefore that leaves the question of evil which is then shown to support the initial flawed conclusion against intelligent design. To me the atheist crux is the question of evil, not critiquing creation like God has to be similar to human engineers.

Sab, I find Evolution to be very beautiful and not negative at all. The process of falsifying with the goal to finding the better answer is not negative at all. It's liberating. It tamps down egos, and it cuts off bias---two things that can prevent progress.

I alsofind evolution to be extremely beautiful, but I think it's stupid if it ends in a deep freeze. Lets just freeze us now and get it over with is how I feel. It's so discouraging to work knowing that it's all going to be destroyed by a war, famine, pestilence or a hurling celestial body. It sounds like you just brush this off and replace it with "evolution is beautiful." Frankly it sounds like Witnesses defending their preaching work. I don't mean to offend, I am just making a genuine observation and descibing my feelings on the matter.

There is falsification for the sake of being contradictory and argumentative. That is not what we are discussing here. That would not bring about the results we are all trying to achieve. ID is this way. It is not honest debate, but has an agenda. For scientifically minded people we find the scientific method to be beautiful, not negative, because it brings us closer to the answers and that is what really excites us. The better answers and the process that leads to them.

I don't see how you can act like Science doesn't have an agenda. Maybe the scientific method doesn't (unless it was designed to have one), but surely scientists all have their own agendas. Peer review is flawed because laypeople cannot reproduce top level science, they require a measure of faith, but this is explained by a "study hard and you won't need faith" clause. Yes, people could become astrophysicists, or whatever, to explain something to themselves but they can't enter and become an expert in every field. Science fundamentally is exactly the same thing as ID it just uses a more rigid methodology and seeks prove existing phenomenon instead of answering really big questions of religious philosophy. It just sounds like you are putting up Evolution against ID and we all know that's a dead horse. It's a logical stalemate and my thread on disproving creationism serves as solid evidence of this.

You seem to think that scientists sit around in a room sniping at each other and getting personal. That they view the entire world with cynicism. We are pretty much too blown away at the granduer of what we are learning to worry about being overly cynical. It's' humbling. I'm sure that because it is driven by humans, there are personality conflicts, but this is why it is even more important to keep the process pure.

No, I love the process of science, but I don't like that the community that surrounds it refuses to admit accountability. They want to say that their process is perfect and that's just not true. The reason being is that it's governed by people and people are highly flawed therefore any system ran by them will be subject to flaws. There is no difference between a group of people who decide to use the Bible as their content and one's who choose to use the natural world. Both groups will come up with vastly different conclusions, but if those conclusions show measurable use in the external world, then they are a legitimate group with a legitimate method.

In the end, you are arguing against results. It is through this method that we have reached some pretty astounding results. And yet you seem to resent that the approach is not more phylisophical. Learn to compartmentalize. Philosopy has its value for some, and perhaps even draws on science for further enlightenment, but it is a different area with a different method. Science does not ask that Philosophy be more scientific. Why must you lament that the scientific method is not more philisophical? They are separate issues that feed very different things.

Now wait a minute, it works both ways. Science draws from philsosphy just as philosophy draws from science. They are compliments of each other, but that's not what the majority of the scientific community thinks and especially not the leaders like Dawkins and deGrasse Tyson. They seem to purport that philosophy is a dying breed and that eventually it will a thing of the past and science will be king. It's just an agenda to replace the ideas of the past when those ideas are NOT obsolete and never will be. It just wreaks of power play to me, but what do I know?

But the notion that scientifically minded people just see all life as organic robots is just wrong. It is reducing something very complex and layered to the barest minimum and most rididulous.

I think you are taking the "organic robot" remark too personally. Logically the metaphor really works because we are just a bunch of complex components wired together with a power source that works for 70-80 years. It's not a put down to anyone, it's just the way they look at humanity. Sure they understand how to interact with people because they are people, but the world view is ultimately worrisome. Just because YOU can control yourself with this world view and still find humanity worth working with doesn't mean everybody else will. There is certainly a depopulation directive being played out by elites that exist on this planet. I would be willing to bet that most of them are secular mystics working with unknown sciences. It's just too logical to say if we kill off our population that we'll live further into the universal timeline. The ends justify the means argument becomes very attractive once God is removed from the equation. Otherwise you have to get the approval of God which is a process. I think your world view is dangerous, again, no offense, these are just my thoughts on the matter.

-Sab

233

Human Devolution? Interesting Article...

by AGuest in

jw
friends

are humans really getting dumber (may you all have peace)?

there have many positions on this for both sides.

saw an announcement on the news this morning and was intrigued: could it be true?

sabastious

Sab, I'm not sure why you are associating scientific method of disproving, with negativie outlook on life. It is simply a method that gets rid of false ideas. I see that as VERY positive.

There is very little positivity because for every positive thing that technology brings to the table it can all be rendered obsolete by a massive solar flare or a space rock. Also technology will always be used as a weapon of mass destruction, which is NEGATIVE. You don't acknowledge the bad with the good because if you did, you'd see the bad outweighs the good. Which is why you don't believe in God, right? True hope is telling your child that everything is going to be OK. You don't want to preach blind hope, but science doesn't seem to be in the industry of hope, only as a selling point of hope. But they also use doomsday scenarios as much as any religion, also for the purposes of sales and they just use logic and reason only, instead of that plus spiritual doctrine and Scripture. The article in the OP paints this point perfectly. Apparently, all we know how to do is devolve into lesser forms and fade into time. "We had a good run" is about all science can offer as far as hope goes. Like I said every peice of technology like the Tricorders for example are a moot point when thinking about the cosmic picture. If we are all just going to freeze to death, why not just make as much money as possible and ride the backs of the working class? Why not cheat to get ahead? Morals exist for a reason and they are actually why we are still on this rock not only alive, but alive and well ready to move onto the next step, whatever that may be. Maybe YOU can keep positive, but that's not the way I look at it. I see it as hopeless doom with no point and counters logic itself. God is a much more elegant explanation.

Once something can no longer be dismissed the result is either positive or non viable and can lead to other types of enquiry. There is nothing that I can see that is negative about dismissing non truths.

That's exactly how Monotheism was discovered, eventually it just couldn't be dismissed and once it become the precedent people needed to conform to the truth or fade into time. There is a lot of negatives to concepts that involve the destruction of life as we know it. Mass devolution is NEGATIVE. Why is that hard to understand? Evolution works one way: progress and that's what humans do, we progress. There is no reason to paint these doomsday scenarios other than to develop interest in the field of science, an urgency if you will, much like my former religion.

Whos world view is it that we are biological robots doomed for destruction? It certainly isn't mine. I see an evolution of a species that is awe inspiring and a universe that makes us appear so insignificant, and yet we are as vital to it as it is to us. We are all interconnected just because we exist. What's negative about that?

Atheists don't ever say they are biological robots doomed for destruction becaues it's bad PR. But that's what we are when you factor in all the data. We were NOT created remember? There is NO direction to life, only natural selection which only appears to be intelligently directed. In the atheist "reality" we are set for destruction, the universe will eventually cool down to the point where no life is supported. There is always a "game over" scenario that isn't really talked about, but looms in the distance like a superstorm just waiting to tumble your house across the street. Then you are asked to work your fingers to the bone on your house when you know one day it will just be whisked away.

It's flabbergasting to me that you can say that Intelligent Design is stupid because it would mean God is a monster and then you say that the life that God didn't create actually isn't negative. I just don't understand atheists, I yearn to understand their position, but frankly it's so contradicting that's hard to respect much less keep up with.

-Sab

233

Human Devolution? Interesting Article...

by AGuest in

jw
friends

are humans really getting dumber (may you all have peace)?

there have many positions on this for both sides.

saw an announcement on the news this morning and was intrigued: could it be true?

sabastious

Confirmation comes as the result of the principle of falsification, and is not a seperate tenet of the scientific method. The falsification process is not simply a debunking of theory . . . it involves the continued testing and experimentation of previously presented hypotheses, in a search for genuine exceptions and flaws . . . it is only through this process that these become exposed and dealt with. The results of the process confirm . . . or otherwise.

What I am asking is when do you test to see that something is true rather than false? If you are testing exclusively to see if it is false then you are going to end with a vague conclusion unless there is a plethora of data (which is rarely the case). "It's not X" isn't really a conclusion, it's just a useful point of reference. "It's not X, and it is Y because" sounds to me like a legitmate way of coming to a conclusion. It's not that I don't understand the scientific method, I'm just not sure I agree with it. Methodical falsification is just asking for negative mindset. Most atheists think that the earth could be destroyed by varying cosmic phenomenon such as a massive solar flare. This is not a positve outlook on life and frankly it's just scaremongering in my opinion. "We are being protected" is just as valid a scientific conclusion as "we are not being protected." When was the last time humanity was wiped off the face of the planet by a natural disaster? The argument could easily be made that we are cared for by something that wants us to survive as a species. You could falsify that all day long, but you will just be contributing to the world's problem of chronic negative thinking. Falsification is negative outlook. When used for the search of absolute truth it's useful, but when applied to human filled environments it starts to show it's massive flaws and contrast to human nature. No matter how much we may want to believe it, we are NOT biological robots doomed for destruction, we are living breathing beings that are heading in the progressive direction. We transcend therefore we are.

-Sab

233

Human Devolution? Interesting Article...

by AGuest in

jw
friends

are humans really getting dumber (may you all have peace)?

there have many positions on this for both sides.

saw an announcement on the news this morning and was intrigued: could it be true?

sabastious

Size, isn't the principle of confirmation, as opposed to falsification, also a tenent of the scientific method? Doesn't this give a measure of flexibility to how the method can be used? You could use it with a "lens of falsification" and a "lens of confirmation" and then compare the two approaches to develop a coherent theory. Why must everybody focus on falsification? Some seem to be better at one and others another. There seems to be legitimate flavors at work here. Also, what if the observation at hand doesn't have a whole lot of measurable data, like seeing an unexplained orb. It's easier to confirm than to falsify when there is litte data. There is a large amount of data right in front of you, but you have no way of converting all that data into written form other than it's physical appearence and how it interacts with it's environment. It may be working with sciences that have yet to be fully discovered or use a combination of sciences that we are unaware work in mysterious union.

-Sab

62

New JW Apologist here

by Christ Alone in

i was a jw for a lot of years, like many of you.

i wanted to try an experiment and try out my jw apologist chops.

since we have such a hard time finding a jw apologist that can argue well, i thought i'd give it a whirl.

sabastious

CA, I think the child abuse topic is the most useful. If you can actually get past the initial walls and enage in meaningful disucssion a seed of truth can be implanted. Witnesses don't seem to grasp how much they take from society, but yet only give their preaching work back. They have to see that everything can't be about the preaching work and that other outfits that give back by ways of helping the poor, hungry and underprivileged are worthy organizations. How many Witnesses are first responders, firemen and policemen? Can they really hold onto the idea that their message is grander than all of these concepts put together? I know it's an easy yes to many Witnesses because that's what they are taught, but if you really measure the effects the JW preaching work has on the populace and weigh it against the accomplishments of similar outfits such as the Catholic or the Mormon church, they just pale. That's why Witnesses have to constantly study articles about how wonderful their message is because it's actually not wonderful at all and it pales in comparison to competition. It's like a businessman who just can't run successful business and the decides to use unethical means and rationally justifies it.

The court systems actually regard JW's as full citizens, but the JW's don't believe themselves to be full citizens, believing that bothers their Watchtower-trained conscience. The governments of the western world want to work with them and not against them. The ruling on the Governing Body for the Candace Conti case is wide open to the public. I don't see how a Witness can reconcile Romans 13 and the idea that the Governing Body are somehow innocent victims of Satan's World when they have a conviction of child abuse cover up by a California Jury. They would do well to see that the world actually does work in unity, but that it's run by everyday people more so than government fat cats. That is a thing of the past, we can vote our servants in, but if you discourage voting we might not get the right people in there. Without voting the people's interests are hidden. How would the US government change if there was suddenly 1 million more active voters in the game? That would come with change you could measure. The question is why do they take and not give back in the same way that they take? How does a tract made from low quality paper compete with a hospital that delivers babies into the world and saves the lives of as many people as economically possible? How can you reject a 12 man jury that rules against your religious leaders? I simply cannot understand that. If someone brought this information to my attention when I was a dub it would get me thinking, it might even give me a couple of sleepless nights and pave my way out mentally. The Watchtower is a viritual third world country and are all kept in a state of mental fog where it's easier to just blindly push forward then to stop and examine your environment.

-Sab