Nickolas

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Posts by Nickolas

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  91

  Awake! November 2011 - correct cover

  by processor in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  there was an error on the latest awake!

  cover.

  here is the correct version.. .

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  Nickolas

  Allow me to bring the thread back on topic after having hijacked it (my apologies, I got carried away). A simple lesson in genetics and natural selection. You are half your mother and half your father, or one quarter of each of your grandparents. But you are not a perfectly consistent blend of their genes. If you were, you'd be like mixing blue paint with red paint and you would be purple. But then everyone would be purple and look exactly the same. No. We don't all look exactly the same because our blends of genes are different. Now lets say for argument's sake that the evolution of man goes back a few million years - yes, I realise this is a stretch for some folks, but humour me - and take a picture of a woman, and then her daughter, and then the daughter of the daughter and so on for 5 million generations. Do you think the first picture will resemble the last? It will not, because there will be a constant change in the blends of genes, constantly influenced by the natural environments in which they are passed on. Do you think you'd notice much of a difference across a several generations in sequence? You would not. Think about this for a moment. See if you can catch a glimpse of what really happened.
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  91

  Awake! November 2011 - correct cover

  by processor in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  there was an error on the latest awake!

  cover.

  here is the correct version.. .

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  Nickolas

  Classic cognitive dissonance, poopsiecakes. I can't believe that people still buy into the Ark story without believing in magic too.
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  91

  Awake! November 2011 - correct cover

  by processor in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  there was an error on the latest awake!

  cover.

  here is the correct version.. .

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Nickolas

  Nikolas - The one important piece of data that anti-flood folks generally leave out is that if God can make the universe, and if he can make bears that hibernate for months at a time, why couldn't all the animals simply hibernate or fall into a suspended animation during the voyage?

  If God can make the universe (and, by the way, install all of its immutable laws and then violate them at will) and could make all the animals go into hybernation (you do realise that hybernation of a large animal only decreases the rate of consumption of its muscle and fat reserves, don't you) then why wouldn't he just create a miracle to rid the world of evil without going to all the trouble of killing all those innocent children and animal life? He'd also have to work a double miracle with hybernation. A hybernating bear over the course of a typical 90 day hybernation period will consume 22.5% of its body mass. In extreme cases when winters are atypically long, say 120 days, he will lose up to 30% of his body mass and be much weakened on emergence. Almost double that for the time the ark was supposedly afloat and the animals would not survive. Maybe if God installed suspendended animation cryonics on the ark? C'mon.
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  91

  Awake! November 2011 - correct cover

  by processor in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  there was an error on the latest awake!

  cover.

  here is the correct version.. .

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Nickolas

  again, let me point out that the ark wasnt made for travel, it was meant to just float on the water, and since it was the rain which lifted the ark i bet it was gradual,

  Are you being seriously dense, or is this a joke? It is sometimes hard to tell in here when someone is deliberately yanking your chain by pretending to be brainwashed. Do you think that the earth completely covered in water spinning at 1674 kmph at the equator with air masses being continuously heated by the sun on one side and cooled through thermal radiation on the other is going to be like a millpond? That's what it would take, along with a completely gradual rise in water for the EMPTY ark to survive just long enough to collapse under its own unstructured weight. Listen to this again, the structure is impossible from an engineering standpoint. It could be built, but it would not under any circumstances float for very long.

  and talking about the food issue , please know that this was meant to be done for just a period of time, its different from having to work at the zoo which is permanent.

  Permanent and part time employment? Even if you took the 1500 people who are required to run the San Diego zoo (which again has on its premises only a tiny fraction of all the species on earth) and divide it by the standard 4.2 (you are familiar with business employment ratios, I trust) you still get 357 people working around the clock. Did any of those 8 people on the ark get to sleep? And how did they operate at roughly 45 times capacity for those 190 days?

  perhaps you forget that all they did back then was farming(sherperds and famers) so they pretty much were knowledgeable about taking care of and feeding animals.

  My jaw is a little slack at the moment. Forgive me. Let's do a little math, assuming this was a building built on land. It is impossible for me to imagine it floating on the water, because I know it couldn't. The elephants alone (even assuming the species later split into the separate African and Indian species and further into their six subspecies after the Flood) would consume approximately 800 kilograms of vegetation per day, times 190 days that is 152 metric tonnes that would have to be stored. 152 metric tonnes of vegetation (let's use hay just to be conservative, although I don't know if an elephant could survive on hay as opposed to broadleaved vegetation) at 112 kg/cubic metre would take up 1,357 cubic meters of space on the ark. The elephants also need bedding, (let's use straw at a tenth of the consumption of food) bringing storage space required to about 1,500 cubic meters. At 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high! and allowing a conservative 10% for structural members that yields a net cargo space of 38, 700 cubic meters. The elephants also need a little room in which to move around and bed down - you just can't have these animals packed in like sardines - and you have to give them a place in which to shit. Elephants do that, too. They eat a lot and they shit a lot. Let's say they'll need a modest 10 square meters, cubed to the 4.1 meter average ceiling height of the ark (45 feet high divided by 3 times 90%) represents another 41 cubic meters. Let's round it off to 1,540 cubic meters or 4% of the entire real estate of the ark. And that's just for the elephants. Then you have all the thousands of other huge animals in the world, who also eat and shit and sleep. Too small. The Ark is TOO SMALL.

  Wake up.
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  86

  Sleeping with the enemy

  by Nickolas in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i have been wondering of late about the extent to which jwn's minions (one of whom i am beginning to see myself to some extent) differentiate the machine from its parts.

  what i mean is, what degree of separation is discerned between the watchtower bible and tract society and its individual members?.

  henry milner, who is a polical scientist at the university of montreal, posits that those who rely heavily on the internet for their information ultimately become dogmatic.

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  Nickolas

  The lull so soon? Hmm.

  I ask myself what is the difference for me, personally, between living in harmony with a Jehovah's Witness and living in harmony with, say, a muslim? I have problems with the muslim religion, too, because some of its leaders are radical and call for horrible things to happen to infidels (of which, I am happy to say, I am one). Groups of men in the name of Allah hijacking jetliners and flying them into buildings. That sort of thing. But why should I have a problem having a friendly relationship with a rank and file muslim? He doesn't care if I'm atheist, does he? Or am I fooling myself because all muslims are rotten to the core and will slit your throat at the first opportunity? I'm being sarcastic, for which I apologise just a little. If he treats me like a person and I treat him like a person we will get along just fine (at least they do on Little Mosque on the Prairie, so I understand). To think that he or anyone who practices his particular flavour of religion is incapable of that kind of interaction is a form of religious bigotry, isn't it? Or is the context qualified? What if I had been badly treated by muslims in my past? What if my muslim friends betrayed our friendship and turned their backs on me? Would I be more disposed to disliking all muslims because I think they're all the same? Maybe I would.

  I don't think I need to stretch out the parallel analogy.
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  91

  Awake! November 2011 - correct cover

  by processor in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  there was an error on the latest awake!

  cover.

  here is the correct version.. .

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  Nickolas

  I dont know how difficult it is to grasp this, i mean if you looked at it from a science point of view, from the creation of the ark to the time and how how the waters drained back its all POSSIBLE. Science only proves God and an intelligent creator.

  Oh, my, you actually are convinced that it's true. That, my boy, is called cognitive dissonance. Have you ever taken any engineering? Mine is pretty rusty now. I've been out of it for years. Same goes for my natural sciences. Once I rose into management I lost all that good stuff because I didn't use it. But I can still tell you the ark as described in Genesis suffers from two major deficiencies. It's too big and it's too small. The structure as described, even unloaded, would break up in the smallest of seas. Any competent naval engineer would tell you that. Load it and it will break up even faster. For a structure that size to float and support a load it would have to be constructed of rivetted and welded steel members for strength and then clad in heavy rivetted sheet steel for rigidity. No matter how well you built it, a wooden structure would not work. And it's too small because it could not possibly hold all the species it had to hold in order for them to be around today. I can cite the numbers for you but you can look them up yourself if you're really interested in verifying what you believe. And then you've got to figure in all the food and effort required to feed all those animals, some of which eat up to 450 kg of vegetation per day, all the while getting rid of all their shit for 190 days - and all this done by 8 people? Do you know how many people it takes to run the San Diego zoo? It is something like 1,500, and they have a tiny representative fraction of the earth's animals on site. Give your head a shake.
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  10

  The evolution of the WT tyrant...

  by Aussie Oz in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  musing the other day...this is my take on the evolution of the watchtower.. once upon a time, i am sure old charles really was a believer...i reckon he probably still was when he died in his toga too, although perhaps somewhat befuddled that his cherished predictions were as successful as 'father' miller's were.

  and by then he seemed to have inadvertantly started a sort of non organized organization that he could hide the $$ that came his way as a sort of bonus from the lord.. perhaps rutherford, i should say,''rogueford'', was a believer too at some point.

  but some time after russel booted him out of bethel his inner killer instinct surfaced...waiting for the old man to pop his clogs.

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  Nickolas

  the Cadillacs to out Capone Capone.

  I believe the distinction is that Al Capone had one of the few V16 Cadillacs built in 1930 while Judge Rutherford had two. Interesting comparison between Capone and Rutherford here: http://www.dannyhaszard.com/capone_rutherford.htm

  With the death of Franz the next president was...who? I have no idea off the cuff as i am sure most JWs have no idea either! And it doesn't even matter.

  After Franz the president's position became a tokenhead, irrelevant. The position had no clout in the organisation whatsoever. Nobodies. It was an embarassing postion to have for anyone with the tiniest shred of ambition. That's why nobody knows who they are.

  The sands of time are shifting though, on all giant corporations and the watchtower is not alone.

  Having been an executive management position in a large multinational before I retired a few years back, I can tell you Oz with confidence that corporations the size and profitability of The Watchtower have enormous resources at their disposal for legal matters. Some of them if they have something to hide might stop at nothing. Lawsuits are pursued ruthlessly. Legal hired guns like medical experts and forensic accountants find everything they can to discredit the plaintiff and the corporate lawyers and extra lawyers they've brought in through retainer drag things out long enough that it often becomes financially untenable for the plaintiff to continue. Sort of like a mutual seige that slowly and painfully drains money out of the corporation and the one suing the corporation and into the lawyers' pockets. The side with the deepest pockets wins. Seems to me it usually takes getting government involved to bring down the bad boys.

  Ah, but what a beautiful ego trip for all those men. All those material indulgences? They're nice from time to time but it's not the money that drives them. It is all about power. Power over the very lives of people that turns people like these men on. They'll burn the corporation down before they let it lose a decisive battle.

  I enjoyed that very much, Oz. Thank you.
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  67

  We recognize when posters are drinking....but I have a delicate query...

  by Glander in

  1. social
  2. physical

  it is pretty obvious when some posters get most....animated?

  it is always later in the day, cocktail hour, especially weekends.

  but my question is this:.

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  Nickolas

  We change from day to day. Male or female. Doesn't matter. There is as much consistency in change as there is in stasis. I almost blush to have to point out that Farkel's comments are not as transparent as they seem.

  Time for bed. Good night, all.
• 
  91

  Awake! November 2011 - correct cover

  by processor in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  there was an error on the latest awake!

  cover.

  here is the correct version.. .

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Nickolas

  Let me know what flaws you find in the Bible, i am always open to truth and facts and the bible has never been proven wrong.

  Oh, my goodness. Where to begin? Hold that thought, ozbrad. If you can hold onto it while you earnestly seek out truth and facts you will be enlightened and you will be emancipated. If what you have just said is true then your world and how you see it is about to change.

  But if I may suggest a place to start at random, look deeply into The Flood. Here's a pretty good thread to read to begin with:

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/213394/1/the-global-Noahic-flood-is-truth

  it suprises me that people are quickly to judge without any investigation.

  Then investigate!

  Welcome aboard!
• 
  86

  Sleeping with the enemy

  by Nickolas in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i have been wondering of late about the extent to which jwn's minions (one of whom i am beginning to see myself to some extent) differentiate the machine from its parts.

  what i mean is, what degree of separation is discerned between the watchtower bible and tract society and its individual members?.

  henry milner, who is a polical scientist at the university of montreal, posits that those who rely heavily on the internet for their information ultimately become dogmatic.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Nickolas

  It is all about paradigms, sab. We all have them, many of them, and it is only when they shift that we see things differently, until they shift again.