I think their mere existence is ridiculous. But then this is a ridiculous world.
Hmm. A contender.
Thanks, V. I'm on your page.
1) i think it's ridiculous to tell anyone when and how to use something they paid for ( computers and internet service ).
2) i think it's ridiculous to tell married couples how to act in the bedroom.
3) i think it's ridiculous to tell people what kinda cars they should buy ( 4 door for fieldservice ).
I think their mere existence is ridiculous. But then this is a ridiculous world.
Hmm. A contender.
Thanks, V. I'm on your page.
1) i think it's ridiculous to tell anyone when and how to use something they paid for ( computers and internet service ).
2) i think it's ridiculous to tell married couples how to act in the bedroom.
3) i think it's ridiculous to tell people what kinda cars they should buy ( 4 door for fieldservice ).
I think it's ridiculous that each person has to touch the glass and plate, including the speaker, and that the servers who have already handled the crackers and wine think they have to then sit down and pass it amongst themselves. Seriously, guys, just take a swig before you put it back on the table. So ridiculous.
I've not had the appreciation before that the annual partakers ceremony was so ritual. I'd like to hear more about it.
I think it's ridiculous to be told that because a couple of human beings decided to have a naughty nibble all their off spring for thousands of years would be cursed.
Hard to beat that one. Best of thread, imo. I might have added in the talking snake, too, if I thought of it. Good one.
1) i think it's ridiculous to tell anyone when and how to use something they paid for ( computers and internet service ).
2) i think it's ridiculous to tell married couples how to act in the bedroom.
3) i think it's ridiculous to tell people what kinda cars they should buy ( 4 door for fieldservice ).
...to be told to listen to Kingdumb Maladies in your spare time because it supposedly makes you more "spiritualy minded".
Are you being serious, V? My wife plays them all the time in her car, and the first and only time I listened to a few of them I thought (without knowing they were Watchtower) they were crap composition. The stuff will rot your brain if you let it, it's that bad. It must be that it makes you "vacuously minded"?
1) i think it's ridiculous to tell anyone when and how to use something they paid for ( computers and internet service ).
2) i think it's ridiculous to tell married couples how to act in the bedroom.
3) i think it's ridiculous to tell people what kinda cars they should buy ( 4 door for fieldservice ).
to believe that humankind is only 6,000 years old
to believe in Noah's Ark, when any competent engineer will tell you after examining the materials and dimensions specified in Genesis that it would break in two, when any geology student can explain to you why there has never been nor ever could be a global flood, when any biologist can tell you why the geographic distribution of species alone means it's just a fairy tale
to sacrifice your children to the blood idol
to consider the people in the KH as family while turning your back on your own
to shelter pedophiles
to condemn people to grow old and childless while waiting for Armageddon
(I could be at this all day)
a few months ago i had a part in the service meeting about evolution.
it was based on the reasoning book's entire section on the topic.
my conscience bothered me because it was the scientific method and science in general that led me to doubt my beliefs in the first place.
You have a PM, FrankWTower.
so this weekend my wife had a major grand mal seizure for the first time in her life.
she was rushed to the er.
a few hours later while i was at her side she had another major one.. it was the scariest moment in my life.
No great loss there.
rather an improvement, actually.
a few months ago i had a part in the service meeting about evolution.
it was based on the reasoning book's entire section on the topic.
my conscience bothered me because it was the scientific method and science in general that led me to doubt my beliefs in the first place.
It is impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of the problem that Darwin and Wallace solved. I could mention the anatomy, cellular structure, biochemistry and behaviour of literally any living organism by example. But the most striking feats of apparent design are those picked out - for obvious reasons - by creationist authors, and it is with gentle irony that I derive mine from a creationist book. Life - How Did It Get Here?, with no named author but published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in sixteen languages and eleven million copies, is obviously a firm favourite because no fewer than six of those eleven million copies have been sent to me as unsolicited gifts by well-wishers from around the world.
Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed work, we find the sponge known as Venus' Flower Basket (Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David Attenborough, no less: 'When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as Venus' Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice? We do not know.' The Watchtower authors lose no time in adding their own punchline: 'But one thing we do know: Chance is not the likely designer.' No indeed, chance is not the likely designer. That is one thing on which we can all agree. The statistical improbability of phenomena such as Euplectella's skeleton is the central problem that any theory of life must solve. The greater the statistical improbability, the less plausible is chance as a solution: that is what improbable means. But the candidate solutions to the riddle of improbability are not, as is falsely implied, design and chance. They are design and natural selection. Chance is not a solution, given the high levels of improbability we see in living organisms, and no sane biologist ever suggested that it was. Design is not a real solution either, as we shall see later; but for the moment I want to continue demonstrating the problem that any theory of life must solve: the problem of how to escape from chance.
Turning Watchtower's page, we find the wonderful plant known as Dutchman's Pipe (Aristolochia trilobata), all of whose parts seem elegantly designed to trap insects, cover them with pollen and send them on their way to another Dutchman's Pipe. The intricate elegance of the flower moves Watchtower to ask: 'Did all of this happen by chance? Or did it happen by intelligent design?' Once again, no of course it didn't happen by chance. Once again, intelligent design is not the proper alternative to chance. Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.
Turn another Watchtower page for an eloquent account of the giant redwood (Sequoiadendron giganteum), a tree for which I have a special affection because I have one in my garden - a mere baby, scarcely more than a century old, but still the tallest tree in the neighbourhood. 'A puny man, standing at a sequoia's base, can only gaze upward in silent awe at its massive grandeur. Does it make sense to believe that the shaping of this majestic giant and of the tiny seed that packages it was not by design?' Yet again, if you think the only alternative to design is chance then, no, it does not make sense. But again the authors omit all mention of the real alternative, natural selection, either because they genuinely don't understand it or because they don't want to.
The process by which plants, whether tiny pimpernels or massive wellingtonias, acquire the energy to build themselves is photosynthesis. Watchtower again: ' "There are about seventy separate chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis," one biologist said. "It is truly a miraculous event." Green plants have been called nature's "factories" - beautiful, quiet, nonpolluting, producing oxygen, recycling water and feeding the world. Did they just happen by chance? Is that truly believable?' No, it is not believable; but the repetition of example after example gets us nowhere. Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science's answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer? Chance and design both fail as solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it. Natural selection is a real solution. It is the only workable solution that has ever been suggested. And it is not only a workable solution, it is a solution of stunning elegance and power.
What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, where chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improbable events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation is very very improbable indeed, improbable enough to be far beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form the subjects of the creationist's wearisomely recycled argument. The creationist completely misses the point, because he (women should for once not mind being excluded by the pronoun) insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event. He doesn't understand the power of accumulation.
In Climbing Mount Improbable, I expressed the point in a parable. One side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but on the other side is a gentle slope to the summit. On the summit sits a complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagellar motor. The absurd notion that such complexity could spontaneously self-assemble is symbolized by leaping from the foot of the cliff to the top in one bound. Evolution, by contrast, goes around the back of the mountain and creeps up the gentle slope to the summit: easy! The principle of climbing the gentle slope as opposed to leaping up the precipice is so simple, one is tempted to marvel that it took so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene and discover it. By the time he did, nearly three centuries had elapsed since Newton's annus mirabilis, although his achievement seems, on the face of it, harder than Darwin's.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006)
how would you respond to the assertion that 7.2 million members of the jehovah's witness religion are not under any sort of mind control?.
the argument being that every one is responsible for their own actions and cannot blame the indoctrinator for what he says and does.
how could they possibly be under mind control?.
Hey, SBC, I'm noticing a familiar pattern.
Good night.
so this weekend my wife had a major grand mal seizure for the first time in her life.
she was rushed to the er.
a few hours later while i was at her side she had another major one.. it was the scariest moment in my life.
This place is screwed up.
so this weekend my wife had a major grand mal seizure for the first time in her life.
she was rushed to the er.
a few hours later while i was at her side she had another major one.. it was the scariest moment in my life.
I think the money thing is a reference to Yiziman.
Ok, thanks, garyneal. The thread grew gangbusters while I was away. It looks like BD has bailed from being called out by others. The little JWN soap opera continues.