Good list, SIAM. Impressive collection of wacky beliefs. I'll add another: if a female leads a group in prayer or bible discussion, she must cover her head, not neccessarily a baseball cap but any makeshift chapeau will do, like a piece of tissue or a dish rag.
unshackled
JoinedPosts by unshackled
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10
As Jehovah's Witnesses we Believe......... to sum it all up
by stuckinamovement inthat 99.9% of the worlds population is evil and will soon be destroyed by jehovah.
the governing body made up of 7 senior men in brooklyn new york are the divinely appointed spokesmen for god on earth today.. if you dont obey the governing bodys instructions and doctrines, you will die a violent death at armageddon.. that jesus is the mediator between god and man for only 11,000 people on earth today and some 133,000 others already in heaven.
the rest of mankind has to follow those 11,000 represented by the governing body to receive the benefits of the ransom.. christ invisibly returned to rule the earth in 1914 and satan was thrown to the earth at the same time.
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Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a fact - R. Dawkins
by unshackled inthe washington post published this richard dawkins response to perry's evolution is "just a theory" comment.
refers to him as an "uneducated ignoramus" and doesn't spare the republican party much either.... http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/attention-governor-perry-evolution-is-a-fact/2011/08/23/giqauifuyj_blog.html.
q. texas governor and gop candidate rick perry, at a campaign event this week, told a boy that evolution is just a theory with gaps and that in texas they teach both creationism and evolution.
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unshackled
The Washington Post published this Richard Dawkins response to Perry's evolution is "just a theory" comment. Refers to him as an "uneducated ignoramus" and doesn't spare the Republican party much either...
Q. Texas governor and GOP candidate Rick Perry, at a campaign event this week, told a boy that evolution is ”just a theory” with “gaps” and that in Texas they teach “both creationism and evolution.” Perry later added “God is how we got here.” According to a 2009 Gallup study, only 38 percent of Americans say they believe in evolution. If a majority of Americans are skeptical or unsure about evolution, should schools teach it as a mere “theory”? Why is evolution so threatening to religion?
A. There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.
Any other organization -- a big corporation, say, or a university, or a learned society - -when seeking a new leader, will go to immense trouble over the choice. The CVs of candidates and their portfolios of relevant experience are meticulously scrutinized, their publications are read by a learned committee, references are taken up and scrupulously discussed, the candidates are subjected to rigorous interviews and vetting procedures. Mistakes are still made, but not through lack of serious effort.
The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.
A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.
Darwin’s idea is arguably the most powerful ever to occur to a human mind. The power of a scientific theory may be measured as a ratio: the number of facts that it explains divided by the number of assumptions it needs to postulate in order to do the explaining. A theory that assumes most of what it is trying to explain is a bad theory. That is why the creationist or ‘intelligent design’ theory is such a rotten theory.
What any theory of life needs to explain is functional complexity. Complexity can be measured as statistical improbability, and living things are statistically improbable in a very particular direction: the direction of functional efficiency. The body of a bird is not just a prodigiously complicated machine, with its trillions of cells - each one in itself a marvel of miniaturized complexity - all conspiring together to make muscle or bone, kidney or brain. Its interlocking parts also conspire to make it good for something - in the case of most birds, good for flying. An aero-engineer is struck dumb with admiration for the bird as flying machine: its feathered flight-surfaces and ailerons sensitively adjusted in real time by the on-board computer which is the brain; the breast muscles, which are the engines, the ligaments, tendons and lightweight bony struts all exactly suited to the task. And the whole machine is immensely improbable in the sense that, if you randomly shook up the parts over and over again, never in a million years would they fall into the right shape to fly like a swallow, soar like a vulture, or ride the oceanic up-draughts like a wandering albatross. Any theory of life has to explain how the laws of physics can give rise to a complex flying machine like a bird or a bat or a pterosaur, a complex swimming machine like a tarpon or a dolphin, a complex burrowing machine like a mole, a complex climbing machine like a monkey, or a complex thinking machine like a person.
Darwin explained all of this with one brilliantly simple idea - natural selection, driving gradual evolution over immensities of geological time. His is a good theory because of the huge ratio of what it explains (all the complexity of life) divided by what it needs to assume (simply the nonrandom survival of hereditary information through many generations). The rival theory to explain the functional complexity of life - creationism - is about as bad a theory as has ever been proposed. What it postulates (an intelligent designer) is even more complex, even more statistically improbable than what it explains. In fact it is such a bad theory it doesn’t deserve to be called a theory at all, and it certainly doesn’t deserve to be taught alongside evolution in science classes.
The simplicity of Darwin’s idea, then, is a virtue for three reasons. First, and most important, it is the signature of its immense power as a theory, when compared with the mass of disparate facts that it explains - everything about life including our own existence. Second, it makes it easy for children to understand (in addition to the obvious virtue of being true!), which means that it could be taught in the early years of school. And finally, it makes it extremely beautiful, one of the most beautiful ideas anyone ever had as well as arguably the most powerful. To die in ignorance of its elegance, and power to explain our own existence, is a tragic loss, comparable to dying without ever having experienced great music, great literature, or a beautiful sunset.
There are many reasons to vote against Rick Perry. His fatuous stance on the teaching of evolution in schools is perhaps not the first reason that springs to mind. But maybe it is the most telling litmus test of the other reasons, and it seems to apply not just to him but, lamentably, to all the likely contenders for the Republican nomination. The ‘evolution question’ deserves a prominent place in the list of questions put to candidates in interviews and public debates during the course of the coming election.
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I am so sad to pass this news along to you about our Dear Sacrificial Loon
by BabaYaga ini just heard from his brother that he has passed.
several of you know that he has been fighting cancer for a while now.. oh, sac!
i am so very sorry you have left this world... rest in peace, joy, and light... your fight, suffering, and fears are put to rest.. strength and love to all who love you.. .
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unshackled
My condolences to his loved ones. Far too young...
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Wouldn't the predators on the ark have eaten everything by the time the 40 days was over?
by highdose inlet say noah did manage to get all the species into the ark... about half of them would have been predators and the other half natural prey.. are we going to belive that they went without eating for 40 days and nights?
or the ridiculous theory as the wt would have it that noah fed them nice tasty bales of straw which they happily munched on?.
and even if one of these two exhuses were true, when the animals were let out of the ark into a world now deverstated by a flood, then wouldn't they have continued eating eachother???
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unshackled
They'd have to store enough water to last for a YEAR for both themselves and all the animals. The water storage issue alone creates serious problems, much less the food.
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Why So Many Young People Are Leaving The Watchtower
by Jeremy C ini have been giving a lot of thought to the young people who are leaving the watchtower organization in recent years.
last night, i was reading the thread posted by jwfacts a while back in which he provided some statistics and graphs showing the rapidly declining growth in the watchtower.
one factor that was discussed at length was the high number of young people who do not stay in the organization.
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unshackled
Excellent post, Jeremy C. Now I'm wondering what other gems I've missed in your other 400 posts.
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The concept of God is fading away
by fade_away inif you guys look at my first post, you'll notice i said "i still believe in god" even after losing my faith in the wt.
well, it's been 4 months since i wrote that and now i'm not so sure i still believe.
in fact i'm mostly convinced he doesn't exist.
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unshackled
I'll echo these excellent suggestions already made: The God Delusion and Greatest Show on Earth by R. Dawkins, Sagan's Demon-Haunted World....also check out god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens.
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How do JW's explain the shifting continants?
by highdose init has been established that all the continants used to be joined together and indeed are still moving.. scotland is part of cananda and the mountians are still getting higher as is the himalayas.. england is moving back towards france, the isle of wight is going to join up with the mainland and then eventually france when they all join up again.. africa is splitting in two gradually and i think its the maldives that are sinking back into the sea?.
now as far as i'm aware... the jw's explain this by saying that the continants first spilt apart due to the flood.
but we have seen how if theres an earthquake, which dosn't move the earth too much, it causes huge tidal waves ( can't spell tunsiarmy) .
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unshackled
Thought this was an interesting video....animates the how our current continents formed over millions of years. Also shows what they will be like 100 million years from now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGcDed4xVD4&NR=1&feature=fvwp
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Wouldn't the predators on the ark have eaten everything by the time the 40 days was over?
by highdose inlet say noah did manage to get all the species into the ark... about half of them would have been predators and the other half natural prey.. are we going to belive that they went without eating for 40 days and nights?
or the ridiculous theory as the wt would have it that noah fed them nice tasty bales of straw which they happily munched on?.
and even if one of these two exhuses were true, when the animals were let out of the ark into a world now deverstated by a flood, then wouldn't they have continued eating eachother???
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What is the oldest car you have owned?
by moshe inhere is mine- a 1947 chrysler windsor club coupe.
i overhauled the engine under a big oak tree- push button starter- flat head 6cyl engine- a carry over from ww2 technology.
a real tube radio, which after i fixed, could pick up am stations over 500 miles away- seats like an over stuffed sofa.
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unshackled
LOL White Dove...I'll give you some company...1975 Ford Gran Torino, 4 door. Similar story, in the family many years, passed down to me when I was 19. Drove it for a couple years...great years. This thing sat in -35 celsius (-31 F) for a week and started up just fine, without the block heater plugged in.
Here's the beaut, but she had a blue top...
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Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World
by SweetBabyCheezits infull pdf online.... for anyone not familiar, this is a book that contrasts science and pseudoscience/superstition.
it's gold.. .
http://www.philosophy.thecastsite.com/readings/godwantsyoudead/demonhauntedworld.pdf.
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unshackled
BTTT for Cheez and Carl.
And damn...where did you dig up that baby pic of Tony Clifton?
