The last man of individual power was Frederick Franz, but he didn't reach the absolute power levels of Russell, Rutherford and Knorr. He would have been the heir apparent to Knorr had there not been a shift from the absolute power of the President to power being shared by a Governing Body. This happened in 1976. Franz was just another GB member but he was acknowledged as the Society's wisest bible scholar and the most influential member of the GB. He was also the longest surviving member of the GB who had been around in 1914 and who had met Russell. Anyway, the president (Don Adams) really doesn't answer to anyone and vice versa. He's purely an administrator.
Nickolas
JoinedPosts by Nickolas
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Funerals of past WTBTS presidents -
by james_woods inok, i thought of this last night because i remembered there have been numerous threads about how mysterious j.f.rutherfords funeral arrangements were - only four people or so did the ceremony (sort of in secrecy) and nobody to this day knows what happened to the body or where he is buried.. but it occurred to me that i was an active witness when knorr died, and just left shortly before franz died - and i know nothing about the funeral of either of them.... have no idea what they did for jaracz, or even for russell as well.
well, edit to say that i have seen the russell gravestone and pyramid shrine when i was in pittsburg pa for congregation servant's school in 1970.. does anybody know the inside information on these - where they took place, was it by invitation only, what did they do, etc.
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WTS Quotes on Evolution
by sizemik inthe official wts website has a short article entitled .
is evolution compatible with the bible?.
http://www.watchtower.org/e/20080101a/article_01.htm.
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Nickolas
I found Dawkins' commentary on Watchtower wisdom to be particularly enlightening:
"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 olve. 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 oves 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 an, 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 his 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 lternative. 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 egresses 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. "(The God Delusion)
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Do You Think It Is Wrong To Stereotype?
by minimus ini know we are supposed to be politically correct but i don't always feel that this is warranted.. i do think that certain things might be generally true and could be viewed as stereotyping.
for example, if i see a young person driving a car very slowly, i might think that they are texting and driving (or else are asian).
now that might not have sounded proper, but i do think it's generally true, from my experience driving in the city.. if i see a "butchy" looking woman, i generally assume the woman is gay.
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Nickolas
Yes.
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Another Video attempt - my introduction
by cantleave inhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwaj_gbr-uc.
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Nickolas
Good stuff. Always interesting to put a face and a voice to JWNer.
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The Watchtower, Christianity and Cultism
by Nickolas inif you want to upset a jehovah's witness, refer to the watchtower as a sect.
if you really want to upset a jehovah's witness, refer to the watchtower as a cult.
that's pretty much a conversation stopper.. the watchtower denigrates the rest of christianity.
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Nickolas
The thing is that, in the end, it is still OUR CHOICE, Our WILL, that decides if we do those things or not.
In the absense of coercion and extortion, yes. Otherwise the exercise of free will becomes moot.
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Funerals of past WTBTS presidents -
by james_woods inok, i thought of this last night because i remembered there have been numerous threads about how mysterious j.f.rutherfords funeral arrangements were - only four people or so did the ceremony (sort of in secrecy) and nobody to this day knows what happened to the body or where he is buried.. but it occurred to me that i was an active witness when knorr died, and just left shortly before franz died - and i know nothing about the funeral of either of them.... have no idea what they did for jaracz, or even for russell as well.
well, edit to say that i have seen the russell gravestone and pyramid shrine when i was in pittsburg pa for congregation servant's school in 1970.. does anybody know the inside information on these - where they took place, was it by invitation only, what did they do, etc.
?.
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Nickolas
Hope this conveys at least my opinion on your question.
Yes, well done, actually, as is james_woods' response. It wasn't a loaded question, btw. Quite often the significance of things about which I know nothing about eludes me.
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Why do Americans still dislike atheists?
by behemot inby gregory paul and phil zuckerman (washington post).
long after blacks and jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of americans just dont like much: atheists.
those who dont believe in god are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry.
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Nickolas
Dawkins is rather an evangelical atheist. He tells people that something is so and doesn't allow the validity of an alternative point of view.
Can you site specific examples of the above assertion, Charliklo? A direct quote or two?
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Funerals of past WTBTS presidents -
by james_woods inok, i thought of this last night because i remembered there have been numerous threads about how mysterious j.f.rutherfords funeral arrangements were - only four people or so did the ceremony (sort of in secrecy) and nobody to this day knows what happened to the body or where he is buried.. but it occurred to me that i was an active witness when knorr died, and just left shortly before franz died - and i know nothing about the funeral of either of them.... have no idea what they did for jaracz, or even for russell as well.
well, edit to say that i have seen the russell gravestone and pyramid shrine when i was in pittsburg pa for congregation servant's school in 1970.. does anybody know the inside information on these - where they took place, was it by invitation only, what did they do, etc.
?.
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Nickolas
Why is this important?
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The Watchtower, Christianity and Cultism
by Nickolas inif you want to upset a jehovah's witness, refer to the watchtower as a sect.
if you really want to upset a jehovah's witness, refer to the watchtower as a cult.
that's pretty much a conversation stopper.. the watchtower denigrates the rest of christianity.
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Nickolas
yes, MS, wouldn't it be nice if Simon could incorporate some sort of filter to keep the chaff out of the conversation? Then again, that would impede free speech, so I suppose it's best to keep things as they are. He will have to leave it up to the individual participant to filter stuff out on his/her own. I have many conversations with a number of very intelligent theists in here and I respect and even admire their qualities but those who use rhetoric in conversation, whether theist or atheist, don't impress me much.
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The Generation(s) That Wasted Their Lives
by undercover ingrowing up as a jw, you see the world differently than most everyone else.
you see the world as something that is going to end very soon.
all that we know will be gone by the time we're adults.. when we were young, we were living in the last days and were expecting armageddon before we grew old.
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Nickolas
All kidding aside this is a pretty sad story. Lives lost to the Watchtower. When my father was at the end of his life in the nursing home I met and talked to a lot of old people waiting to die. They judge themselves. They look back over their 80 or 90 years and they rejoice and they regret. What they regret are the things they did that caused harm to others, even if it happened 75 years ago, and they regret the things they never did. My dad ended up in the locked wing because of dementia. I was told by the staff there that there are two basic kinds of dementia. There's organic dementia, like Alzheimer's Disease, and there's psychological dementia brought about by an inability to cope. If any of those Generations saw the truth about the Watchtower in their final years, you can bet it was absolutely devastating to them.