alice.in.wonderland

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Posts by alice.in.wonderland

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  103

  Damage Control on Secret Societies

  by alice.in.wonderland in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  damage control on secret societies .

  http://www.watchtower.org/e/19970601/article_01.htm .

  satanic activities of secret societies.

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  alice.in.wonderland

  yknot I don't believe you're one of Jehovah's Witnesses just so you know. You've destroyed your credibility in my book. You should quit advising me.
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  69

  The God Delusion

  by alice.in.wonderland in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_god_delusion.

  the god delusion is a 2006 bestselling non-fiction book by british biologist richard dawkins, professorial fellow of new college, oxford, and inaugural holder of the charles simonyi chair for the public understanding of science at the university of oxford.. .

  in the god delusion, dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.

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  alice.in.wonderland

  "Alice, you highlighted my comments, but then made a completely irrelevant response. I asked for your opinions comparing similar religions with similar roots to the Watchtower, so why repeat information condemning Catholicism. As reprehensible as I feel Catholicism has been, it is a huge monolithic organization that has made tremendous changes considering its size and history. Witnesses have displayed a similar struggle coping with pedophile issues with its elders, even though it is far smaller and easier to manage.
  
  It is even more pointless to use Dawkins as the source against Catholicism, as I can guarantee that if you asked for Dawkins opinion on Witnesses he would strongly condemn them as dangerously deluded."
  
  I've been in the organization most of my life and there's not a pedophile issue in Jehovah's Organization that can be distinguished from any other organization. For starters child abuse, physical or sexual is a societal problem. This is an in-depth psychohistorical study of childhood and society.
  
  http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/05_history.html
  
  The History of Child Abuse
  by Lloyd deMause
  
  The Journal of Psychohistory 25 (3) Winter 1998
  
  The only reason abuse would be concentrated into a specific demographic is because there's a psychological mechanism involved that is separate from the rest of society.
  
  http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/mar2002/chur-m29.shtml
  
  Why the epidemic of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church?
  
  As deplorable as the abusive priests’ conduct is, we are not inclined in this case, as in any other, to attribute it, in the words of John Paul II, to the “mystery of evil.” The priests in question are not monsters, they are human beings, some no doubt originally motivated to join the Church by idealism. They themselves are victims, of the Catholic Church itself.
  
  The attempt by Church officials to blame the behavior on a few individual predators, overcome by evil, is absurd. That the abuse is a long-standing and worldwide phenomenon demonstrates it is not aberrant behavior, but something ingrained in the institution and its practices. Contrary to the pope’s view, there is hardly any “mystery” whatsoever about the source of the misconduct: it emerges ineluctably from the inhuman and unnatural celibacy requirement and related medieval teachings and practices of the Church on human sexuality, associated with the doctrine of man’s Original Sin. After decades, or perhaps centuries, of concealment, the psychologically perverse consequences of these teachings and practices have been exposed for all to see.
  
  The crisis over sexual abuse by members of the priesthood underscores the profoundly reactionary and anachronistic character of the Catholic Church as an institution. Its corrupt and hypocritical officials, living like kings, preach against sin and vice, oppose birth control and abortion, inveigh against homosexuality, enthusiastically advocate censorship and intellectual repression, universally ally themselves with the powers that be and generally make life miserable for tens of millions of people.
  This mass of social reaction and backwardness must find reflection in personal relationships both within the Church and between priests and parishioners.
  
  There are a host of questions bound up with the abnormal psychology often found in the priesthood that are beyond the scope of this article. Eugene Kennedy, a former priest, now married, has written about the issue. In regard to previous sex abuse scandals, he writes about “revelations of the miserable, furtive, and immature personality growth of many priests, of which their preying, helplessly, on young boys, helpless, was a major symptom.”
  
  The Catholic Clergy take a vow of secrecy upon ordination.
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  49

  Ray Franz Tribute

  by besty in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  over at freeminds we didn't want this day to pass without some recognition of the life and death of ray franz.

  in view of his stated wishes not to have a memorial or service we hoped for something that he would have liked for all of us to take a moment over.. .

  we owe a note of thanks to v for his graphics work and atjeff for the obituary writing - i know neither of them need mentioned by me.. .

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  alice.in.wonderland

  "....and if you bothered to read the first post, and the spirit of the posts that followed, you can see where this thread is.

  Death is a serious thing. Lets show some respect. You are more then welcome to start your own thread on Ayn Rand if you want."

  I know little about Ray Franz except for his descent from the governing body.
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  49

  Ray Franz Tribute

  by besty in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  over at freeminds we didn't want this day to pass without some recognition of the life and death of ray franz.

  in view of his stated wishes not to have a memorial or service we hoped for something that he would have liked for all of us to take a moment over.. .

  we owe a note of thanks to v for his graphics work and atjeff for the obituary writing - i know neither of them need mentioned by me.. .

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  alice.in.wonderland

  "Thanks for sharing AIW. That will be all from you on this thread."

  Can I at least ask if you're a forum moderator or you know the moderators? There's a difference between paying your respects and a tribute to a person's accomplishments.
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  49

  Ray Franz Tribute

  by besty in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  over at freeminds we didn't want this day to pass without some recognition of the life and death of ray franz.

  in view of his stated wishes not to have a memorial or service we hoped for something that he would have liked for all of us to take a moment over.. .

  we owe a note of thanks to v for his graphics work and atjeff for the obituary writing - i know neither of them need mentioned by me.. .

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  alice.in.wonderland

  "It's nice that even admitted Jehovah's Witnesses will miss Ray Franz."

  I will say all of this is really weird just from a secular point of view. Ex-religionists may honor philosophers or free-thinkers that provide an alternative to religion, but they don't have a religious specific darling to which they give tribute.
  
  The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. . . . Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. . . . Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith . . . The purpose of man’s life . . . is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual
  
  Rand developed an integrated philosophical system called "Objectivism." Its essence is "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
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  49

  Ray Franz Tribute

  by besty in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  over at freeminds we didn't want this day to pass without some recognition of the life and death of ray franz.

  in view of his stated wishes not to have a memorial or service we hoped for something that he would have liked for all of us to take a moment over.. .

  we owe a note of thanks to v for his graphics work and atjeff for the obituary writing - i know neither of them need mentioned by me.. .

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  alice.in.wonderland

  A tribute to the bitterness of mortality! Beautifully done.
• 
  104

  Ezekiel 29:12 - Prophecy of the Desolation of Egypt for 40 years

  by VM44 in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  ezekiel 29:12. new international version(1984).

  i will make the land of egypt desolate among devastated lands, and her cities will lie desolate forty years among ruined cities.

  and i will disperse the egyptians among the nations and scatter them through the countries.. new living translation(2007).

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  alice.in.wonderland

  "The lazy way out is to simple say "Bible right, history wrong" and leave it at that."
  
  That's not my perspective and my other statements have indicated that's not what I'm saying. For secular studies you choose to conduct a thorough investigation into ancient history to assess the credibility of the Bible. I appreciate your scholarship, but I choose to investigate cosmic and biological evolution to answer questions about the origin of nature, the physical universe and existence of God and then I go from there. History can lie but science cannot and that's an indisputable fact. While it works for you, for me; depending on ancient history for a worldview, to answer fundamental questions about the existence of God would be a sure path to mental ruin.
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  103

  Damage Control on Secret Societies

  by alice.in.wonderland in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  damage control on secret societies .

  http://www.watchtower.org/e/19970601/article_01.htm .

  satanic activities of secret societies.

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  alice.in.wonderland

  "LOL & ROTFL
  
  So I suppose Russell's teachings of pyramidology was not of the occult. Sorry sweetie, but I am afraid Joseph "Judge" Rutherford and the current GB members of the Watchtower Society would disagree with you.
  
  Look closely at the cover of the Studies in the Scriptures. See the symbol...the winged sphere? Do you know what that symbol is? It is the Egyptian Sun God, Ra. Now ask yourself a question. Would Jesus, when examining the religions of the world, chose a group that had the symbol of another God, on the cover of the main teaching tool of that time?

  Seriously?"

  Russell didn't start out in the 21st century and work his way back to the 1800's. He was a student of all religions so some of his earlier writings may have been a bit esoteric although I haven't seen any that are. Making generalizations about symbols without any intuition are baseless theories.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taze_Russell#Early_life
  
  At age sixteen, a discussion with a childhood friend on faults perceived in Christianity (such as contradictions in creeds, along with medieval traditions) led Charles to question his faith. He then began to investigate other religious views and philosophies, including Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, but concluded that they did not provide the answers he was seeking.
  
  The time period when he began investigations into different religions was shaken up by new ideas, but if he was at all inspired by the occult, his studies would have led to the development of an organization like the Theosophical Society, not the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.
  
  Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) was born in what is now now Ukrainia. She would be forty-four years old before creating the Society for which she is best remembered, but her most important achievements still lay ahead of her.

  Her teachings were instrumental to the creation of the Nazi Party and it's Darwinian drive to annihilate the "race polluters" and restore the Aryans with their "pure" religion of fire, sword, and swastika to their previous glory.

  In 1877--two years after starting the Theosophical Society: she would publish Isis Unveiled, an energetic blend of Eastern religion and mysticism, European mythology and Egyptian occultism, who rambunctious style would pave the way for her even more ambitious The Secret Doctrine in 1888. Some authors have written that the popularity of Blavatsky's writings in the late nineteenth century was evidence of an anti-positivist reaction among the middle classes to the effect that science was having on religious belief. In other words, science was going to far toward "proving" the errors of faith that the average person--suddenly up the existential creek without a paddle or prayer book--embraced the quasi-scientific approach toward religion represented in The Secret Doctrine.
  
  Darwin had published The Origin of Species in 1859 and this was followed by the Descent of Man in 1871; both books offered evolution as the means by which humans were created, as opposed to the Biblical account found in Genesis. The effect of the theory of evolution on religion was as great then as it is now; the controversy over Darwinism caused many people to question the existence of God, the possibility of redemption, life after death, etc. People were startled to discover that Biblical myths were at odds with scientific theories, and thus began to doubt everything they ever believed. They found themselves spiritually--and, perhaps, morally--adrift.
  
  Blavatsky provided a much-appreciated antidote to Darwin even as she was brazenly appropriating (and reversing) his theory of evolution. As bizarre as here theories appear today, they were actually quite brilliant for her time, for they enabled intelligent and educated men and women to maintain deep spiritual beliefs while simultaneously acknowledging the inroads made by scientific research into areas previously considered beyond the domain of mere human knowledge. Blavatsky outline a map of evolution that went far beyond Darwin to include vanished races from time immemorial through the present imperfect race of humans, and continuing on for races far into the future. Based on an idiosyncratic selection of various Asian scripture--including a few she made up herself-- The Secret Doctrine's message would later be picked up by the German occultists, who welcomed the pseudo-scientific prose of its author as the answer to a dream. The smug and condescending attitude of scientists and their devotees toward the "unscientific" had proved contagious among many in the newly created middle class, and mystics began to satisfy the requirements of science in what are patently unscientific (we may say "nonscientific") pursuits. Modernism in general was seen as being largely an urban, sophisticated, intellectual (hence "Jewish") phenomenon, and this included science, technology, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism. The only wholesome lifestyle was that of the peasant on his "land," and the naive beliefs of the people of the land, the pagans--with their sympathetic magic and worship of ancient gods in the form of such superstitious practices as fertility rites, the lighting of bonfires on particular days sacred to the old calendar, and the whole host of cultural traditions that can be discovered by consulting Fraziers The Golden Bough--were set up in opposition to "science," with its suspect lack of human warmth and its cold indifference to the "gods".
  
  Science in its hubris was treading dangerously close to the territory claimed by religion (the orign of life, the creation of the universe, even the existence of God), and in order to get there it would have to dance a jig all over the occult "sciences." Science still smarted from the religious furors caused by Galileo and Copernicus; so rather than mount an all-out attack on God, it was a lot safer to conduct a rearguard action and go after the ghosts.
  
  But then along came Blavatsky, who took new scientific attitudes as they were popularly understood and gave them a mystical twist. Taking here cur from Darwin, she popularized the notion of a spiritual struggle between various "races", and of the inherent superiority of the "Aryan" race, hypothetically the latest in the line of spiritual evolution. Blavatsky would borrow heavily from carefully chosen scientific authors in fields as diverse as archeology and astronomy to bolster her arguments for the existence of Atlantis, extraterrestrial (or super-terrestrial) life- forms, the creation of animals by humans (as opposed to the Darwinian line of succession), etc.
  
  It should be remembered that Blavatsky's works--notably Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine--appear to be the result of prodigious scholarship and were extremely convincing in their day. The rationale behind many later Nazi projects can be traced back--through the writings of Von List, Von Sebettendorff, and Von Liebenfels--to ideas first popularized by Blavatsky. A caste system of races, the superiority of the Aryans (a white race with its origins in the Himalayas), an "initiated" version of astrology and astronomy, the cosmic truths coded within pagan myths ... all of these and more can be found in the ideology of its Dark Creature, the SS. It was, after all, Blavatsky who pointed out the supreme occult significance of the swastika. And it was a follower of Blavatsky who was instrumental in introducing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to a Western European community eager for a scapegoat. [Levenda doesn't say here who the Blavatsky follower that was responsible for introducing the Protocols to the Nazi Party Inner Circle is. It was the Estonia/Russia born Alfred Rosenberg later to be known as the "Philospher" of the Party, author of the mystical Myth of the Twentieth Century which rivaled Mein Kampf in its importance on Nazi Dogma. Rosenberg later was Publisher of the Party's Official Newspaper and Reichminister for the conquered Soviet Eastern Territories, as well as one of the principal defendants at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials].
  
  Unholy Alliance
  
  A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult
  Peter Levenda
  Avon Books, 1995
• 
  104

  Ezekiel 29:12 - Prophecy of the Desolation of Egypt for 40 years

  by VM44 in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  ezekiel 29:12. new international version(1984).

  i will make the land of egypt desolate among devastated lands, and her cities will lie desolate forty years among ruined cities.

  and i will disperse the egyptians among the nations and scatter them through the countries.. new living translation(2007).

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  alice.in.wonderland

  Bohm, it is your choice. Astrology (an occult science) likely influenced Babylonian astronomical tables. The fulfillment of Bible prophecy clears up imperfect history and confirms the accuracy of dates Bible prophecy is based on.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy#Astrology
  
  The Almagest is the only surviving comprehensive ancient treatise on astronomy. Babylonian astronomers had developed arithmetical techniques for calculating astronomical phenomena; Greek astronomers such as Hipparchus had produced geometric models for calculating celestial motions. Ptolemy, however, claimed to have derived his geometrical models from selected astronomical observations by his predecessors spanning more than 800 years, though astronomers have for centuries suspected that his models' parameters were adopted independently of observations.
  
  Ptolemy's treatise on astrology, known in Greek as both the Apotelesmatika ("Astrological Outcomes" or "Effects") and "Tetrabiblios" ("Four Books"), and in Latin as the Quadripartitum ("Four books"), was the most popular astrological work of antiquity and also had great influence in the Islamic world and the medieval Latin West. It was first translated from Arabic into Latin by Plato of Tivoli (Tiburtinus), while he was in Spain (FA Robbins, 1940; Thorndike 1923). The Tetrabiblos is an extensive and continually reprinted treatise on the ancient principles of horoscopic astrology in four books (Greek tetra means "four", biblos is "book"). That it did not quite attain the unrivaled status of the Almagest was perhaps because it did not cover some popular areas of the subject, particularly electional astrology (interpreting astrological charts for a particular moment to determine the outcome of a course of action to be initiated at that time), and medical astrology, which were later adoptions.

  Egypt’s 40-Year Desolation: Only the 607 date allows for the full 40-years of Egypt's desolation by Nebuchadnezzar. Whereas the 587 date makes it impossible. Read this chapter...
  
  What will you accept? The chronology of secular historians who mould the Bible to fit their chronology, making inspired prophecies fail? Or will you accept the complete and harmonious Biblical chronology, which gives us a time-line without contradictions, showing the total fulfillment of every prophecy Jehovah gave us? Will you judge the accuracy of secular chronology against the occasions where it agrees with the Bible, or will you only judge the Bible correct if the secular evidence happens to agree with it?
• 
  69

  The God Delusion

  by alice.in.wonderland in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_god_delusion.

  the god delusion is a 2006 bestselling non-fiction book by british biologist richard dawkins, professorial fellow of new college, oxford, and inaugural holder of the charles simonyi chair for the public understanding of science at the university of oxford.. .

  in the god delusion, dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.

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  alice.in.wonderland

  "Actually JWs are mentioned. He makes specific mention of the Creation book as an example of just how badly written Christian books are when discussing evolution.

  Your arguments in this and your last thread about other religions being so much worse then the Watchtower is pointless. Why compare JWs with Catholics from 1000 years ago in the dark ages. Compare them to religions that started during the same period with the same scientific understandings, such as Seventh Day Adventists and Christadelphians and other Pacifist religions. There is little difference. The Watchtower is just a product of the times they started. The only way it will continue for future generations is if they change what they are so as to be relevant in the future. "

  I'll allow Dawkins to speak on Catholicism if my perspective is pointless. The Catholic Church does have a strong science division in this day and age but the crimes against humanity are still rife within the church.
  
  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7094310.ece
  
  Richard Dawkins calls for arrest of Pope Benedict XVI
  
  RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.
  
  Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

  The Creation book was written in (1985). Here's a couple of threads I launched investigating biological evolution:
  
  Feel free to challenge theistic evolution or the integrity of what I've said.

  The Language of God

  600 million years of vertebrate evolution and no transitional species?