Posts by Nickolas

328

A few Dawkins quotes to think about.

by AK - Jeff in

jw
friends

"faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.

faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.".

"my last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of september 11th 2001, followed by the "national day of prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous martin luther king impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.".

Nickolas

This dear one, having assisted in healing a few others (including someone with some form of cancer), approached and told the young man, "I want to help you. I can heal you, if you have faith and want me to." The young man's response? "No thank you; I don't want to be healed. I LIKE me... just the way I am."

I would have reacted the same way, Shelby, but I might have silently added, "now get away from me, you fruitcake."

I truly hope it wasn't that I offended, dear Nick

Absolutely not, dear lady. I took offense to something you said months and months ago, but I realised soon after I was jumping to a wrong conclusion. I just didn't have words to respond. Still don't.

The question is: Does love itself evolve or is it just something we uncovered. Is it a force of nature that existed before us (like gravity) or is it a construct of the conscious mind?

My wife and I are bird lovers. We have two feeders in our back yard and we keep them full year-round. We have cardinals, gold and red finches, bluejays, grossbeaks, sparrows, nuthatches, doves, grackles, black birds, etc. etc. constantly in the bushes and trees that surround us. A sharp-shinned hawk has taken notice and every once in awhile it sits in our big walnut tree and waits. Last week it nailed a mourning dove, leaving only a pile of feathers on the lawn. The doves are into their second brood. Since last week, the mate of the hawk's victim has perched itself on a limb overhanging the pile of feathers just looking and waiting. It is still there as I type this. Is that love? Grief, perhaps? It's something, to be sure, but what?

328

A few Dawkins quotes to think about.

by AK - Jeff in

jw
friends

"faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.

faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.".

"my last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of september 11th 2001, followed by the "national day of prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous martin luther king impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.".

Nickolas

ancient man had love in bucketloads for his own tribe, the suffering of which he could not tolerate, particularly if it could be alleviated by conquering and destroying those who were not his own and taking what they had for what was perceived to be a greater good. It is the way it was, and the way it still is.

29

Why can't you ask questions?

by ihadnoidea in

i know that some will disagree on this, and say you can ask questions.

yet, i ask you to honestly think what would happen if you openly started asking questions on jw doctrine or evolution.

likely you would be made to feel like i did below if you started asking these questions to other jws.. .

Nickolas

I was a Watchtower bible student for almost two years. The thing that catalysed my departure was the angry reaction I got from my teacher when I didn't want to do the question/answer schtick at the end of the lesson, preferring to ask my own questions, in this case about what really happened (didn't happen) the previous year, 1975. The light went on. I made for the exit.

328

A few Dawkins quotes to think about.

by AK - Jeff in

jw
friends

"faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.

faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.".

"my last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of september 11th 2001, followed by the "national day of prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous martin luther king impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.".

Nickolas

Suffering bothers us because it is part of our evolved mechanism of procreation and survival, which includes an emotion we have labeled "love". Did god give us love or did we as a species develop it on our own? An answer in a question might be, if we did not have love, would we have been so successful as a species? Yes, there's a great deal of the opposite number in our makeup, too, but no infant survived into adolescence, childhood and adulthood because his mother despised him.

328

A few Dawkins quotes to think about.

by AK - Jeff in

jw
friends

"faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.

faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.".

"my last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of september 11th 2001, followed by the "national day of prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous martin luther king impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.".

Nickolas

I admire his faith in atheism

I see the old chestnut that atheism = faith is alive and well. I think you have a pretty good grasp on what atheism really is, but there are still a few blanks you need to fill in.

Vox Day, as you realise, is a play on the Latin "Vox Dei" which of course means "The Voice of God". Just a little pretentious, don't you think?

Sam was the guy that said if he could eliminate religion or rape, he would eliminate religion, that was him right?

Not that I have read, but I trust your memory. I don't agree with everything anyone says. If he said this, he's got a screw loose, but the rest of his intelligence machine seems to tick over rather well.

29

Why can't you ask questions?

by ihadnoidea in

i know that some will disagree on this, and say you can ask questions.

yet, i ask you to honestly think what would happen if you openly started asking questions on jw doctrine or evolution.

likely you would be made to feel like i did below if you started asking these questions to other jws.. .

Nickolas

A great gem provided by poster Room215 in a recent thread entitled "undercover apostates":

As Cervantes said "I can live with questions I can't answer, but not with those I can't ask (or, put another way, "answers I can't question").

328

A few Dawkins quotes to think about.

by AK - Jeff in

jw
friends

"faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.

faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.".

"my last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of september 11th 2001, followed by the "national day of prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous martin luther king impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.".

Nickolas

Because we KNOW the difference between what IS and what OUGHT to be, but why do we know that?

Not knowledge, Paul, wish thinking.

328

A few Dawkins quotes to think about.

by AK - Jeff in

jw
friends

"faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.

faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.".

"my last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of september 11th 2001, followed by the "national day of prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous martin luther king impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.".

Nickolas

Yes, I understand from a previous conversation that you are not his biggest fan.

328

A few Dawkins quotes to think about.

by AK - Jeff in

jw
friends

"faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.

faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.".

"my last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of september 11th 2001, followed by the "national day of prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous martin luther king impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.".

Nickolas

Thank you, Paul, for illustrating my previous post so well.

328

A few Dawkins quotes to think about.

by AK - Jeff in

jw
friends

"faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.

faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.".

"my last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of september 11th 2001, followed by the "national day of prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous martin luther king impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.".

Nickolas

Let's throw in a couple of apropos Sam Harris quotes to spice things up:

"Is THE difference between good and evil just a matter of what any particular group of human beings says it is ? Consider that one of the greatest sources of amusement in sixteenth-century Paris was cat burning. At the midsummer's fair an impresario would gather dozens of cats in a net, hoist them high into the air from a special stage, and then, to everyone's delight, lower the whole writhing bundle onto a bonfire. The assembled spectators "shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized. Most of us would recoil from such a spectacle today. But would we be right to do so? Can we say that there are ethical truths of which all avid torturers of cats are ignorant?"

and I particularly like this one:

"This is the point at which our notions about mind and matter directly influence our notions of right and wrong. We should recall that the practice of vivisection was given new life by certain missteps in the philosophy of mind—when Descartes, in thrall to both Christian dogma and mechanistic physics, declared that all nonhuman animals were mere automata, devoid of souls and therefore insensible to pain. One of his contemporaries observed the immediate consequences of this view:

'The scientists administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed the poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them to see the circulation of blood, which was a great subject of controversy.'

Cognitive chauvinism of this sort has not merely been a problem for animals. The doubt, on the part of Spanish explorers, about whether or not South American Indians had "souls" surely contributed to the callousness with which they treated them during their conquest of the New World. Admittedly, it is difficult to say just how far down the phylogenic tree our ethical responsibilities run. Our intuitions about the consciousness of other animals are driven by a variety of factors, many of which probably have no bearing upon whether or not they are conscious. For instance, creatures that lack facial expressiveness—or faces at all—are more difficult to include within the circle of our moral concern. It seems that until we more fully understand the relationship between brains and minds, our judgments about the possible scope of animal suffering will remain relatively blind and relatively dogmatic."