Dissent has always been a problem for the Christian Church and all its sub-brands.
fulltimestudent
JoinedPosts by fulltimestudent
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Elder Mentioning an "Apostate Problem"
by Simon Templar ini bumped into a sister that i have known for at least 40 years or so.
we were catching up.
she and her husband have been in the truth for decades.
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A Country where no-one under 25 believes the biblical creation story.
by fulltimestudent inno icelanders under the age of 25 believe the creation story that god was responsible for creating the universe, a new poll claims.the poll, commissioned by the icelandic ethical humanist association, claims that 93.9 per cent in the under 25 category responded that the universe was created by the big bang.
just over 6 per cent responded with ‘don’t know’ or ‘other’.
none of the respondents, however, believed that the universe had been created by god.
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fulltimestudent
Well, why would they?
No Icelanders under the age of 25 believe the creation story that God was responsible for creating the universe, a new poll claims.
The poll, commissioned by the Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association, claims that 93.9 per cent in the under 25 category responded that the universe was created by the Big Bang. Just over 6 per cent responded with ‘don’t know’ or ‘other’. None of the respondents, however, believed that the universe had been created by God.
The Iceland Magazine, which reported the findings, added that the poll showed younger people and inhabitants of Reykjavík were the least religious. It added: “80.6 per cent of those older than 55 identified as Christian and only 11.8 per cent said they were atheists. At the same time 40.5 per cent of people who were 25 years or younger said they were atheists, and only 42 per cent said they were Christian. -
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I can't let go of this obsession...
by juandefiero ini really want to let go of the exjw obsession.
but i can't.
i keep coming here and other sites several times a day.i want to shout from the rooftops to my family and friends and say, "it's all a lie!
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fulltimestudent
juandefiero : I really want to let go of the exJW obsession. But I can't. I keep coming here and other sites several times a day. I want to shout from the rooftops to my family and friends and say, "IT'S ALL A LIE!" But, they won't listen. Their cult personalities shut down and they don't give your point of view the consideration a friend or family deserves.
Does it matter? Christianity promotes obsessiveness. The attitude pervades many individual Christians (particularly those from extremist sects like the JWs), the Churches that they belong to and even Christian nations. (the West is always trying to make non-Christian nations conform to their standards)
Eastern Buddhism has a line of thinking called wu wei. "doing something without effort." It may help you to just relax about what other people do with their lives.
Wish to hell I'd knew about it before I wasted my life trying to get people to do what I thought they should do.
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New Converts: When Does It Start?
by Cold Steel injohnny normal is watching television one day when he hears a knock at the door.
answering it he sees two jehovah's witnesses clutching bibles; and one a brief case.
over the next few months things are going well.
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fulltimestudent
Haha! Cold Steel
Johnny Normal is watching television one day when he hears a knock at the door. ... Any examples anyone can share?
Yeah! I've heard of some.
These blokes were working one day, and a guy comes past and says:
"Come, follow me, and I will send you out to fish for people."
So they left their work and went off with him and became itinerant preachers, living rather lousy lives and in the end they got executed for their troubles.
Should the bloke that told them to do that, have done so?
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Evidence of Human Activity in Northern Siberia 45,000 years ago.
by fulltimestudent inthis information makes the biblical dating of human origins a sad joke.
quote: " when they dated the remains, the researchers got another surprise: the mammoth died 45,000 years ago.
that means that humans lived in the arctic more than 10,000 years earlier than scientists believed, according to a new study.
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fulltimestudent
Makemeanunbeliever : Oh boy here we go again. Another clueless do gooder evolutionist wanna be.
No one can prove or disprove a creator or no creator. Pick the one you want and stop wasting your time and ours.I seem to have upset you. Sorry about that! But why do you feel I MUST believe in a creator?
To be bluntly honest I really don't care very much, whether you believe or unbelieve (or, even whether you want to be a faithful JW).
But for some curious reason I find myself wanting to talk about this with you, perhaps you may like to listen.
I need to talk a bit about myself first - so you know where I'm coming from,
I used to be a faithful JW, from about the age of 17. At that time Jesus became my model, I tried very hard to become a footstep follower of him (1 Peter 1:21). I'm not sure that I was a very good at that, but I tried very, very hard. IF I could not exactly accept all the things the WT said, I had the ability to park them in a corner of my brain and wait. And, I think that's likely why I spent near 40 years as a JW. But the last 10 years of that, particularly after 1975, that particualr corner of my mind got a bit crowded.
Having read the bits about 1975 in Freddy Franz's 1966 opus (Life Everlasting in the Freedom of the Sons of God) I knew that Freddy had a few escape clauses planted there. I'd even told my wife not to be surprised if the big A did not come in 1975, in spite of the WTS/GB doing such a big "rah, rah, rah-Stay alive in 75" job in the preceding years. So that crowded corner of my mind started to ferment and by the end of the 80's I'm just a lump of sh*t in the minds of my former loving brothers and sisters, and therefore chucked out onto the garbage dump.
And that made life complicated, my former wife came from a "zealous" family - and you can guess the rest. I decided not to make it even more confusing for my kids, so just gave my wife everything (a nearly paid for house, a car, etc) and walked away from the mess I'd created by refusing to ask questions. (Yeah! and I'd even known that 'faith' is based on knowledge and knowledge comes from getting answers to questions).
OK - enough about me. But you surely understand that if the Bible is the word and work of God, that it must stand up to scrutiny. Does it? I can no longer accept that it does. The OT of Bible is just a collection of documents that some (and quite possibly not all ) Jewish people thought explained things from a viewpoint that they valued. The same for the NT when Emperor Constantine sat the bishops down at the Council of Nicaea and forced them to think about the unity and beliefs of the church. When they finally got around to 'defining' truth and selecting the documents they valued most as 'special, or 'sacred,' a couple of hundred years had elapsed. What do you know about writings that are 200 years old? For example, William Miller?
The biblical documents therefore 'sees' things from the perspective of people living in Palestine. But note, it doesn't talk about lots of things. You'd never know from the biblical documents that Palestine was once part of the Egyptian Empire, would you? AND, have you ever read Genesis 10 and tried to understand how the families of Noah's sons became the ancestors of all humans?
"These are the clans of Noah’s sons, according to their lines of descent, within their nations. From these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood." (Genesis 10:32.NIV)
Does that really make sense to you? Some creationists set the date of the flood as 2348 BCE, a little over 4300 years ago.
I can demonstrate to you that by that time, there were millions of people living in East Asia. Chinese recorded history goes back about nearly 5000 years (The Chinese by the way have their own flood stories, because floods on the Yellow and Yangzi rivers have had an affect on their lives).
Not to mention the Siberian hunters mentioned in my posted overview. As Nelim, in a ;previous post, points out the remains of the mammoth shows clear evidence of human activity.
If that's true, somethings wrong with the biblical record. If it was recorded under divine instruction, then the divinity involved did not know a lot about human history.
If I had asked more questions when I was 17 I would have had better answers and therefore choices in my life. I've asked them now, but you express bitterness at my doing so. Why?
Would you like to respond?
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Evidence of Human Activity in Northern Siberia 45,000 years ago.
by fulltimestudent inthis information makes the biblical dating of human origins a sad joke.
quote: " when they dated the remains, the researchers got another surprise: the mammoth died 45,000 years ago.
that means that humans lived in the arctic more than 10,000 years earlier than scientists believed, according to a new study.
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fulltimestudent
This information makes the biblical dating of human origins a sad joke.
Quote: " When they dated the remains, the researchers got another surprise: The mammoth died 45,000 years ago. That means that humans lived in the Arctic more than 10,000 years earlier than scientists believed, according to a new study. The find suggests that even at this early stage, humans were traversing the most frigid parts of the globe and had the adaptive ability to migrate almost everywhere.
Most researchers had long thought that big-game hunters, who left a trail of stone tools around the Arctic 12,500 years ago, were the first to reach the Arctic Circle. These cold-adapted hunters apparently traversed Siberia and the Bering Straits at least 15,000 years ago (and new dates suggest humans may have been in the Americas as early as 18,500 years ago)."
and,
Quote: "he big surprise, though, is the age. Radiocarbon dates on the collagen from the mammoth’s tibia bone, as well as from hair and muscle tissue, produce a direct date of 45,000 years, the team reports online today in Science. This fits with dating of the layer of sediments above the carcass, which suggest it was older than 40,000 years. If correct, this means the mammoth was alive during the heyday of woolly mammoths 42,000 to 44,000 years ago when they roamed the vast open grasslands of the northern steppe of the Siberian Arctic ..."
From Science Journal
Link: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/grisly-find-suggests-humans-inhabited-arctic-45000-years-ago
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The Winter festival in Harbin - piks of this year's ice constructions.
by fulltimestudent in.
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fulltimestudent
prologos : wow, must be nice to live among millions of industrious people if you have the leisure to enjoy it.
Internal travel/tourism is being promoted by the government among other things, as a means to achieve an economy not focused on low-cost production. This year service industries reached a point of being about 50% of GDP. My guess is that the number of people in China who enjoy a life style equivalent to upper middle in the west is now about 400 million, with about another 300 million in lower middle. But there's another class of people, the well-off peasant-farmers, and (just be personal observation) I think that a lot of internal travel is undertaken by people in that group.
But even the so-called 'migrant-workers' travel. During this year's 'spring festival,' (Chinese New Year) next month, China Rail is planning for 380 million rail journeys of which about 60% will be on the new high speed trains (around 300 km/hr) I think all seats are already booked. Millions more journeys will be made by bus and personal cars and planes.
And I havn't even mentioned external travel. In 2015, there were 62 million outbound tourists from China. Japan was in first place as a destination, and South Korea in second place. Australia is aiming to win 2,000,000 annual visits by Chinese tourists by 2020. The World Tourism Organisation predicts that by 2020 there will be 100 million Chinese tourists travelling the world.
Warning: do NOT visit China during national holidays, as a westerner unused to big crowds, you will not enjoy the visit.
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Religious Belief, Fundamentalism and Intolerance - from the Oxford University Press Blog
by fulltimestudent ina brief overview of christian churches efforts to prevent their members hearing anything but church dogma.
the author does not mention our former loving brothers and sisters, who do all things out of love (haha), but we can see the same attitude at work.. quote: "the logic of intolerance has been remarkably consistent over many centuries, within different churches and cultures.
it can be used equally by those who read the hebrew bible, the new testament, or the koran.
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fulltimestudent
A brief overview of Christian churches efforts to prevent their members hearing anything but church dogma.
The author does not mention our former loving brothers and sisters, who do all things out of love (haha), but we can see the same attitude at work.
Quote: "The logic of intolerance has been remarkably consistent over many centuries, within different churches and cultures. It can be used equally by those who read the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Koran. St Thomas argued, in the thirteenth century, that the harm caused by heresy (the eternal punishment of apostates) was much greater than the harm inflicted on heretics (torture and the mere loss of life); therefore, the latter was preferable to the former. The common feature throughout this blight on humanity is the uncritical conviction that supports both what is believed—the sheer variety of which alone undermines its alleged certainty—and the political theory that justifies its enforcement on others."
Quote: " (some) are not restrained by the uncertainty of their convictions. For them, the Kalashnikov is the modern equivalent of burning at the stake.Quote:
The author, Desmond M. Clarke is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
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The Winter festival in Harbin - piks of this year's ice constructions.
by fulltimestudent in.
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Sick! "Stoning of Two Transgenders in Dortmund, Germany Prevented By Police In The Last Minute."
by park ave boy inthis is what europe is becoming?
my work colleague in germany sent my this article in an email and it is perhaps one of the most disturbing things i have heard yet.
i have been hearing about many of these recent homophobic and transphobic hate crimes taking place across europe but this one slipped through the cracks.
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fulltimestudent
blondie: It is not a European problem, but a worldwide problem. Gay people and others have been beaten and/or killed in the US and every country on earth.
Absolutely!
blondie: Mostly by men who seem to be afraid for their own masculinity, but that is just my gut feeling.
Or, solve their own confusion over their attraction to other males by violence. Scratch a homophobe and find same sex attraction under their skin.
It must also be acknowledged that Christianity has used violence against same sex attracted people and gender different people in an attempt to force their un-natural conformity to Christian rules. There are many, many examples of horrible incidents of gay-bashing in most western countries. The verbal gay-bashing by members of the JW/GB are just another example of the failure of Christianity.
And compare the other examples of bad behaviour (in Europe) to this Australian example. In supposedly 'civilised' Australia, during the recent Christian festival of Xmas,
"Every day of the festive period 74 women across Australia reached out to rape and domestic violence support services. Between December 21 and January 3, Rape and Domestic Violence Services Australia assisted 1043 individual clients across its three telephone services – a 32 per cent increase on the same period last year.
Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/74-women-a-day-sought-rape-and-domestic-violence-support-over-festive-break-20160116-gm79m9.html#ixzz3xRwuKOOXSo easy to excuse bad behaviour sometimes, isn't it?
