fulltimestudent

Joined

• started 752 topics
• posted 3,901 times   see topics posted on
• send a message

Posts by fulltimestudent

• 
  62

  ls homosexuality really normal?

  by atomant in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  l know animals do it but their animals.they dont live by a moral code.the thought of 2 men going for it is not normal.what are your thoughts?.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  fulltimestudent

  atomant : Fulltime student.l was born into the jw sect and my father was an elder but from a very young age l detested being dragged along to meetings against my will.l could see it was a false religion and full of hypocrites.l burnt the bible when l was 9.l never got baptized.Thank god for that,amen.

  
  

  So? Your actions do not suggest that you think rationally. Nor do your arguments on this thread.

  
  

  A few minutes on the internet, would have led you to the knowledge that, according to the UN 51% of Aids infections (globally) affect women. (Note 1).

  And btw, 2.8 million of people with Aids (again globally) are children, who were likely infected while in their mother's womb. (Note 2)

  
  

  Of course, these figures breakdown differently when considering the problem from a regional perspective.

  
  

  And note this overview from amfAR:

  In the United States
  Women account for one in five new HIV diagnoses and deaths caused by AIDS.
  The proportion of AIDS diagnoses reported among women has more than tripled since 1985.
  Approximately one in four people living with HIV infection in the U.S. are women.
  The vast majority of women diagnosed with HIV (86%) contracted the virus through heterosexual sex.
  African Americans constituted 63% of women diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 2013.
  African Americans and Hispanics represent 28% of all women in the U.S. but they account for 80% of HIV cases among women.
  African-American women have an HIV prevalence rate nearly three and a half times that of white women.
  Around the Globe
  Worldwide, women constitute more than half of all people living with HIV.
  For women in their reproductive years (ages 15–49), HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death.
  Women are at least twice more likely to acquire HIV from men during sexual intercourse than vice versa.
  A study in South Africa found that young women who experienced intimate partner violence were 50% more likely to have acquired HIV than women who had not experienced violence.
  In 2014, 73% of pregnant women living with HIV received effective antiretroviral medicines to prevent the transmission of HIV to their children.
  In sub-Saharan Africa, women constitute 58% of all people living with HIV.
  In 2014, almost 62% of all new HIV infections among adolescents occurred among adolescent girls.
  Sources: UNAIDS Report: How AIDS changed everything, 2015; UNAIDS 2014 Global

  (Note 3)

  Ignorance is no longer an excuse in this time. An old quote from Mark Twain:

  It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. Mark Twain

  
  Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/mouth.html

  Just check, review and question if you want to be taken seriously.

  
  

  
  

  Notes:

  1. http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/hiv-and-aids/facts-and-figures

  2. http://www.avert.org/global-hiv-and-aids-statistics

  3. http://www.amfar.org/about-hiv-and-aids/facts-and-stats/statistics--women-and-hiv-aids/

  
  

  
  

  
  
• 
  62

  ls homosexuality really normal?

  by atomant in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  l know animals do it but their animals.they dont live by a moral code.the thought of 2 men going for it is not normal.what are your thoughts?.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  fulltimestudent

  atomant : Cofty you asked -Unless god-botherers can show that consenting sex between two adult males or two adult females does real harm then they have nothing interesting to add to the conversation. Aids?

  
  

  Are you suggesting atomant, that 'Aids' (i.e. HIV infections ) is a disease that only infects men who have sex with men.?

  If you are making that suggestion, I can see why you became a JW.

  And, in that answer, you have demonstrated that you have given no thought to all the sexually transmitted diseases that afflict humans. Why did this ever-loving, kind hearted divinity that faith driven people like to imagine ever come up with the idea for and then create such horrible diseases?

  Got an answer?
• 
  16

  Will China's Giant New Radio Telescope be able to hear YHWH and JESUS conversing?

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  china has just switched on its 500 metre diameter radio telescope, nearly twice as large as the previous largest.

  among other things it is tasked to do, it will eventually be programmed to look for and analyse radio waves that may have a non-natural origin.. so will the scientists manning this facility eventually hear yhwh and jesus having a chat?.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvnj-vnsv4o.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  fulltimestudent

  Vidiot: fulltimestudent - "Will China's Giant New Radio Telescope be able to hear YHWH and JESUS conversing?"
  Ten bucks says if it did, they'd try to spin it as Jesus and Yahweh being "pro-communist".

  I'm not sure about that Vidiot, since the only thing 'communist' about the 'Chinese Communist Party' is the use of the word in the name.

  During the first 25 years of the PRC there were two main groupings in the CCP, one thought the best model for modernising China, was the Planned, Centralised economy advocated by Mao. The other group, vilified by Mao, as the 'capitalist roaders,' thought a mixture of state enterprises (the model Japan used to grow industrial might back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century) and private initiative would get better results. A crisis came during a period when the USA applied sanctions to China and Russia withdrew its aid, Mao tried a sort of 'village initiatives policy' in his 'Great Leap Forward' policy. It had some successes and many failures and as a result the CCP removed Mao from direct control of the economy. That's when, as a response to that, Mao set the 'Cultural Revolution' in process, again with some good results and some terrible results. After Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping, a pragmatic man, allowed private initiative to become the foundation for China's current success.

  Maybe, if the radio telescope picks up some YHWH/Jesus gossip, they'll claim they were saying,"Wow!!! Look at China go."
• 
  21

  "Explaining Your Beliefs About Homosexuality"

  by wizzstick in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  it's doing the rounds but i've not seen it before.. explaining your beliefs about homosexuality.

  there are three pages.

  here are my thoughts on each question on the pages:.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  fulltimestudent

  wizzstick: Your sexuality doesn't have a switch you can throw! It's like if God suddenly said that a man should only sleep with a man. What would the heterosexual population do? Could they suddenly create homosexual feelings? No you morons! You can take anger management classes but you can't change your sexual feelings, you can only spend your life trying to ignore them and getting psychologically damaged in the process.

  
  

  Only partly true, I think!

  1. There is a descriptive category called "institutional homosexuality." It describes the situation where large groups of a single sex are located together. Think shipping, particularly in times past. And also prisons. And to a lesser extent single sex boarding schools. For women, think of harems in the past.

  Humans are adaptable, and in these situations humans rise or open (grin) to the situation.

  2. Culture: The Anglosphere seems more restrictive sexually than say Europe. Back in the day, restricted by my JW acculturation, I had to visit France and Germany for business. So I arrived in Essen, had a brief rest and went out to see what Essen was like. I was shocked to go past two male couples engaged in heavy kissing. A few days later I arrived in Paris, took the Metro to the station close to the hotel I was booked into, and again. at the entrance to the station, there was a male couple engaged in kissing each other in a prolonged and fond farewell.

  Since we are all human, I suggest the difference was that they lived in a culture that was less hostile to my own (Aust.) culture.

  I am not arguing that there is no internalised preference, such as is posited for male to male sexuality, and in my studies of say Japanese cultures and their gender behaviour, I've noted periods in Japanese history when M2M sex was extremely common. Professor G. Leupp (Tufts University, USA) in his book "Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan," argues that M2M sex was 'normative' at that time. Even if you understood that 'normative' in that era meant that 50% of males could indulge in sex with another male without any qualms, a problem is posed as to why so many of those men could be attracted to another man, as well as to women, and in our contemporary Anglosphere only maybe 7-10% are so attracted.

  A famous Japanese author of the era, Ihara Saikaku, does note that there was a core group, that he identifies as, 'women-haters' that refused sex with women, and they possibly correspond to the 'gay' males of today. Even so, because of our (anglosphere) culture many men who are likely in the exclusively gay (M2M) group, get married and function to an extent as heterosexuals, usually with less than satisfied wives.

  Another era with a similar acceptance to Tokugawa Japan, was Athenian (and other Greek cities) society, in the fourth/fifth centuries BCE. In Plato's 'Symposium', he uses a meeting of the leading men in the city, at a drinking party, together with their boyfriends, discussing the meaning of love. To understand the full irony, you must know of course, that their wives were all at home looking after their kids.

  There are other societies, cultures and time periods when there were similar differences to our own culture.

  So maybe, to be "gay" you must have something that does control your sexual attraction, limiting it to the same sex.

  But aside from that, perhaps its as I've attempted to describe, the mass of heterosexuals may be able to accept a sexual relationship with someone of the same sex if it is culturally driven, and that's why the subject of the other "gay" thread, at the moment is really wrong in what he says about bisexuality.

  
  

  
  
• 
  18

  What were Jesus's 'Miracles' supposed to prove?

  by nicolaou in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  the healings, feeding the five thousand, walking on water, resurrecting the dead.

  none of it happened of course but let's take the bible literally and say that it did.. so?.

  didn't magic practicing priests perform 'miracles' in a contest with aaron?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  fulltimestudent

  slimboyfat : Many of the miracles have antecedents in the Old Testament and other literature. A large part of the function of miracles in the narrative is to show that Jesus is a prophet like Moses, Elijah, Isaiah and so on.

  Indeed, but don't stop there SBF. As we know the gospels were produced some two decades after the death of Jesus. Christianity was not just attempting to convince other Jews (or, converts to Judaism) but was also attempting to convince other peoples of Jesus' existence and power. To do that Jesus had to be portrayed as a miracle worker on par with the Greek-Roman traditions of divinity.
• 
  16

  Will China's Giant New Radio Telescope be able to hear YHWH and JESUS conversing?

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  china has just switched on its 500 metre diameter radio telescope, nearly twice as large as the previous largest.

  among other things it is tasked to do, it will eventually be programmed to look for and analyse radio waves that may have a non-natural origin.. so will the scientists manning this facility eventually hear yhwh and jesus having a chat?.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvnj-vnsv4o.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  fulltimestudent

  China has just switched on its 500 metre diameter radio telescope, nearly twice as large as the previous largest. Among other things it is tasked to do, it will eventually be programmed to look for and analyse radio waves that may have a non-natural origin.

  So will the scientists manning this facility eventually hear YHWH and JESUS having a chat?

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvNJ-VnSV4o

  and some of the construction details:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej5brYsdU6A
• 
  3

  The first Islamic Mosques in Australia

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  you may not recognise this little building as a mosque, but it was actually built as a place of worship by afghan camel train drivers brought to australia to service outback australia.

  its located in bourke nsw.. the first muslims of this type were brought to australia in 1860.according to hanifa deen's historical account:.

  quote: "on 9 june 1860, three ‘exotic-looking’ afghan camel men landed at port melbourne from karachi with twenty or so animals to participate in the (ultimately tragic) burke and wills expedition organised by the royal society of victoria.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  fulltimestudent

  Thanks Smiddy, for your kind thoughts. I guess, after some 8 years of focusing on Asian history, that I'm in the fortunate position of not only knowing the framework supporting Asian history (which is where all the main threads of contemporary religious history were initiated) but having some understanding of where I can find information.

  I understand you're thinking, (and Pauline's rather simplistic view of the world also). But (maybe unluckily for me) I am also in a position to understand other viewpoints. I don't want to appear to be nit-picking your post, so please understand that when I read something I can also think of information that validates or not the thought expressed.

  So let me make some comments:

  They, the early muslims were law abiding citizens that appreciated the country they were living in and living here peacefully .

  Yes, I can agree with those sentiments, and those early camel train drivers (brought here with governmental agreement) performed a useful service in opening up the outback. I've only just realised that in writing about them, that I have little idea of how they were treated by their "English to the bootstraps" contemporaries. Perhaps, considering white settler attitudes to Chinese miners in the goldfields, they may have not have been treated so well.

  But we may get some idea from what is known as the "the Battle of Broken Hill," perhaps the only time that at an enemy action has occurred on Australian soil.

  Writing in 'The Monthly,' (An Aussie journal) Nicholas Shakespeare describes his view of what happened on that sad day when WWI came to outback Australia.

  https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/november/1414760400/nicholas-shakespeare/outback-jihad

  To really appreciate the feelings of the two men involved you likely need to know something of the last years of the Ottoman Empire. If you'd like to understand that (and other events still influencing our world ) you could try to get hold of Pankaj Mishra's great book, "From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Re-making of Asia"). Mishra goes into the detail attendant to the efforts to modernise Islam and other sections of Asia)

  ------------------------
  
  
  
• 
  3

  The first Islamic Mosques in Australia

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  you may not recognise this little building as a mosque, but it was actually built as a place of worship by afghan camel train drivers brought to australia to service outback australia.

  its located in bourke nsw.. the first muslims of this type were brought to australia in 1860.according to hanifa deen's historical account:.

  quote: "on 9 june 1860, three ‘exotic-looking’ afghan camel men landed at port melbourne from karachi with twenty or so animals to participate in the (ultimately tragic) burke and wills expedition organised by the royal society of victoria.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  fulltimestudent

  All of the above of course, brings up the claim by newly elected Senator Pauline Hanson, that Australia is being swamped by Muslims.

  It is interesting to compare Pauline's One Nation party's share of the vote and the number of Muslims in Australia.

  In the 2011 census, 476,291 people were described as Muslim. (Out of 25 million approx. people in Australia. 61.1% described themselves as Christian, 22.9% said they had no religion. and Buddhists could count 2.5%. In that census, Muslims were the fourth largest group).

  In the recent (2016) election, Pauline's party 'One Nation,' polled 593,013 votes representing a percentage of 4.3%. not so different to the number of Muslims in Australia.

  The question of interest to other Australians is, what percentage are prepared to be terrorists?
• 
  3

  The first Islamic Mosques in Australia

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  you may not recognise this little building as a mosque, but it was actually built as a place of worship by afghan camel train drivers brought to australia to service outback australia.

  its located in bourke nsw.. the first muslims of this type were brought to australia in 1860.according to hanifa deen's historical account:.

  quote: "on 9 june 1860, three ‘exotic-looking’ afghan camel men landed at port melbourne from karachi with twenty or so animals to participate in the (ultimately tragic) burke and wills expedition organised by the royal society of victoria.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  fulltimestudent

  

  You may not recognise this little building as a mosque, but it was actually built as a place of worship by Afghan camel train drivers brought to Australia to service Outback Australia. Its located in Bourke NSW.

  The first Muslims of this type were brought to Australia in 1860.according to Hanifa Deen's historical account:

  Quote: "On 9 June 1860, three ‘exotic-looking’ Afghan camel men landed at Port Melbourne from Karachi with twenty or so animals to participate in the (ultimately tragic) Burke and Wills expedition organised by the Royal Society of Victoria. The ill-fated journey, however, proved the merit of camel over horse and bullock. Over the next ten years, British entrepreneurs imported significant numbers of camels with their handlers, and more animals were unloaded at Derby and Fremantle in Western Australia, Port Augusta in South Australia and Port Melbourne."

  ( Reference: http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/La-Trobe-Journal-89-Hanifa-Deen.pdf )

  The first mosques were basic utilitarian buildings as clearly indicated by this next image:

  

  The image shows a mosque at Maree (South Australia) in 1884. It could be the first mosque built in Australia, probably in the early 1860's.

  These building (and the builders) were not the first Islamic contacts with Australia,

  Australia's nearest neighbour, Indonesia, had gradually converted to Islam after Islam was brought into Indonesia by Sufi traders from Gujarat, India during the 13th century (CE) and by the 16th century, Islam had surpassed Hinduism and Buddhism as the dominant religion of the peoples in the Indonesian island chain.

  By the early 18th century, Muslim Macassan traders from Indonesia were visiting the N.W. coast of Australia. Local indigenous art and language attests to their visits. If they built places of prayer or mosques, nothing has survived.

  What I've quoted here comes from an academic study by Sam Bowker, a lecturer at Charles Sturt University.

  The full essay was posted in 'The Conversation'

  You can access it at: http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-australian-mosque-65101?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20September%2023%202016%20-%205655&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20September%2023%202016%20-%205655+CID_0fd9ae7608de675efc856f0fa3af9746&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=Friday%20essay%20the%20Australian%20Mosque
• 
  8

  What were two Chinese doing in Roman London?

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  in the ancient world, people moved around much more than we may have expected, (think of paul's reported journeys and those of his supporters), but the identification of two skeletons in a roman era burial ground, as chinese has surprised historians.. the uk bbc reports: .

  dr rebecca redfern, curator of human osteology at the museum of london, told bbc radio 4's the world at one, the find was "the first time in roman britain we've identified people with asian ancestry" and it was "absolutely phenomenal".. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37452287.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  fulltimestudent

  Hey, BluesBrother, that's an excellent observation:

  "It kind of puts an end to the WT claim that the "Good News" was preached throughout all the then known world, i e The Mediterranean area in Paul's day..."

  The Romans and the Han Empire, definitely knew of each other's existence. The JW claim is of course typical of ideas formed by relatively uneducated people. And, of course, (as an aside) YHWH if he exists, must know all of the humans on the earth. So why???? inspire Paul to write to the Colossian Christians:

  "This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant." (Colossians 1:23 NIV)

  Plainly it was a lie!

  ---------------------------