God is indeed monstrous and Jehovah is even worse...
Half banana
JoinedPosts by Half banana
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21
Stephen Fry says everything I believe in two minutes
by cofty in"it is perfectly apparent that god is monstrous, utterly monstrous, and deserves no respect whatsoever.
the moment you banish him, your life become purer, simpler, cleaner; more worth living in my opinion.".
....
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WT were correct about snakes with legs all along!!
by Splash in.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/6187320/snake-with-foot-found-in-china.html.
what does this tells us about evolution?.
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Half banana
I agree with UtR, this looks like a photo of a dead snake which, from the shape of its middle has swallowed a lizard and subsequently had the skin punctured so that a leg could protrude.
Darwin was charged with the questions like, “If animals are evolving why there are no transitional species today?” Creationists including JWs continue to ask it. An answer is skinks. They are found in the tropics in many different species and shapes. Some come legless like snakes, some with rudimentary legs and the common Australian type is a regular four legged reptile.
The book of Genesis however has every evidence of being an imaginative explanatory tale embroidering ancient myths.
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Have there been any existing cultural group made up of rationalists with neither a religion or a mythology?
by James Mixon indisbelief is the default position, no one is born having a belief.
beliefs are.
acquired through culture and education, we all know that.
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Half banana
How about the (mainly) French 'philosophes' and encyclopaedists at the time of the Enlightenment, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, David Hume etc? An intellectual community of anti-clerical rationalists...highly influential and vastly important in the the progress of of ideas. Although at a remove of two hundred and forty years, the world at large has hardly caught up with them. Just think of the billions still ensnared by credulous trust in the Bible and other "holy" books.
The light shed by these men has not yet reached into the deep pit in which JWs exist.
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How do the JW's get around this scripture??
by Crazyguy inhebrews 9:27new international version (niv).
27 just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, .
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Half banana
What evidence is there that the second phrase of the sentence has any truth in it? ie."after that to face judgement". Certainly all men die, there has never been an exception to this rule but "judgement"...evidence please? -
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WTS reform - is it possible?
by LoveUniHateExams inin threads concerning islam i've consistently argued for reforming the religion.
it unfortunately has pre-enlightenment doctrines and practices, or at least there exists pre-enlightenment interpretation of koranic scripture that support such doctrines and practices.
in a lesser way, and on a lesser scale, the wts too is pre-enlightenment in a sense.
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Half banana
The harder edged and less benign the cult is, the more ardent the followers are. Reform in the WTorg is of course done frequently... but only on one condition. “Will this reform or new light keep the sacred cash cow working?” This is the question the GB ask. If going soft and not shunning, "use blood" etc kept the money coming in, then those reforms will take place.
What the WT org does is little different to which all irrational and ‘holy belief’ organisations do and that is they supply existential hope and ‘religious certainty’ for those addicted to it. They supply it and their clients buy it.
I just wish my children didn’t...
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The WT's biggest deception?
by BU2B init just dawned on me that one of if not the most deceptive thing that the wt convinces the members of is that the truth does not stand up to investigation.
they teach that lies trump truth.
the reality of course is something entirely different.
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Half banana
BU2B, I sympathise having been in your situation with wife remaining in the Borg. In my case, the marriage broke down and wifey became a totally committed, obsessive JW and began taking the emblems. Oh dear! It was the worst time in my life. So tread carefully and keep her on your side mentally and emotionally because if you give signs of leaving the org without her, she could turn to it for consolation as it was in my experience.
I chose to stay in the home for about five years after the breakdown because my children were young and I didn’t want them growing up with a missing father. It was hard as hell and two of my three kids have remained JWs even after the traumatic family events.
As to the demanding question the biggest deception of the Watchtower: I think the impression they give that they exclusively have a hot line with god is perhaps the biggest deception. Their track record disproves they have not. One hundred and thirty five years of divinely privileged insight, as from a metaphorical watchtower, is a catastrophic lie...they have never got one prediction right!
How are you managing at the moment?
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'Tracing All Things With Accuracy' - How the Watchtower Society's Writing Department never makes a mistake
by jwleaks infrom the 2011 yearbook of jehovah's witnesses.. source: 'tracing all things with accuracy'.
tracing all things with accuracy.
jesus said that the faithful slave would be discreet in giving the domestics their food at the proper time.
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Half banana
There is possibly some good to come out of this. It is as if the WT is graduating from the junior school and has begun to think about the responsibilities of writing accurate information. This false pride in being correct is childish and trite since it is the basic requirement of a writer to convey accurate information from reliable and ideally from primary (first hand) sources.
Projecting this trend forward, perhaps for the first time the org, by doing proper research, is going to realise how the “holy” acts in the Bible are just pagan folk tales dressed up as fact.
Wakey wakey Watchtower!
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End times madness?
by erbie inmy wife's parents who are pretty obsessed with the watchtower religion are going on holiday more than they are at home these days and spending money like it is something evil to be got rid of.
i have not been to a meeting in a long time but after reading the thread on hysteria by campaign of hate and the whole tv broadcasting thing i got to wondering if they really are ramping up the 'sense of urgency'.
many on here are better informed than me so i'd be interested to hear whether this is a common thing..
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Half banana
The Bible students were only a new name on a continuum of Adventist belief. There was no evidence of any divine intervention at the emergence of Russell’s attempts to fix a date for the return of JC. His contribution was a cunning one, he said: “It did happen after all, just as the Adventists predicted; that in 1874 he did come... but invisibly”. Snake oil never worked better than this! For on this exquisitely unprovable statement, the whole wretched edifice of the Watchtower and subsequently Jehovah’s Witnesses was built. Fudging and moving the dates as time proved them to be entirely false...thus setting a template for Watchtower tactics and morality.
The Adventists too were part of a longer experience of human imaginings. Not just 1844, the year of " the great disappointment" and 1799 etc. The “end of the world” has forever been a part of human culture. The oldest reference I have found goes back to Mesopotamia;
“According to Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts (1979), an Assyrian clay tablet dating to approximately 2800 BC was unearthed bearing the words "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common." This is one of the earliest examples of the perception of moral decay in society being interpreted as a sign of the imminent end.”
This innate idea leads me to think that our being aware of our own mortality is just another way of saying that “It is all going to end”. Sublimating perhaps the idea that we individually die and projecting that onto the world?
Whatever the psychology, the WTBTS like all doomsday cults, feeds off this entrenched idea and rakes in the money. We have records of the society making a million Dollars in the early days and one hundred and forty years later they are making tax-free billions.
One significant change that we can observe is how they will present their credentials to any potential new punter that they have God’s special attention. Formerly they deceitfully pointed to 1914 and conflated it with World War 1 as if that were their prediction by God's hand. On this basis they then falsely predicted “the end” before the demise of the generation which saw 1914. With the pathetic “overlapping generations” cop-out this must now be seen as a farce. But we should not underestimate or ever forget the tragedy of countless millions of lives misspent and sacrificed in pursuing Watchtower deceptions.
Doomsday merchants rely on the grim ignorance of both their members and the public, their history shows that they can and do earn prodigiously from "ramping up the urgency" and perpetual disappointment... but now we have universal information...how long can they last?
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WT's subtle attack on Wikipedia!
by Wonderment indid anyone notice this wt's subtle attack on wikipedia?
they wrote (from the 2011 yearbook of jehovah's witnesses, pp.
9-10. source: 'tracing all things with accuracy'):.
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Half banana
"The Writing Department follows the pattern of ‘tracing all things with accuracy.’
It’s rich coming from the WT org to correctly deny Wikipedia the status of authority. Indeed as useful as that source of information is, it consists of contributions from people who know a lot on a particular subject and therefore Wikipedia cannot be authoritative at the academic level. (It often lacks peer review and criticism).
But but but! Wikipedia is far more reliable as a treasury of knowledge than the Watchtower could ever be. Apart from the usual religious platitudes on behaviour, I would go as far to say that the Watchtower has never said anything useful!
The WTBTS consistently fail to attribute the source references in their literature. This may seem a small point but it is vital in the world of academic truthfulness...knowledge is not absolutist like 'religious certainty' is. Knowledge and understanding are part of an on-going intellectual dialogue, a concept alien to a publishing company which spouts unprovable garbage as being holy truth!
They crib hard-won information from secular experts and scientists and then misquote by cherry picking phrases or sentences which appear to fit their own propaganda.
The Watchtower promotes fetishist attachment to the Bible as did their ‘grandparent’ the Catholic Church sixteen and a half centuries beforehand.
The Watchtower is a pure tool of uncritical, one -sided and partisan indoctrination.
It is produced to enslave its followers and deliberately limit their world view, just in case they stumble on accurate information which will discredit or expose the cult for what it really is.
“Tracing all things with accuracy”? Dire hypocrisy! -
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Biblical scholar claims to have found the oldest known Gospel — inside a mummy mask
by opusdei1972 init would only add evidences for what many scholars on textual criticism affirm, namely, that mark was the earlier gospel, and that it was most probably written after or around 70 a.c.. .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/01/20/biblical-scholar-says-hes-found-the-oldest-known-gospel-inside-a-mummy-mask/.
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Half banana
The slur of paganism was not in use by Christians in the first century when the gospels were supposedly written. Most of those who the Romans would have called “followers of Christ cults”at that time would have been pagans. The word pagan has the most literal translation meaning ‘villagers’ (pagus in Latin=village) in the sense that they would not naturally have been educated, our best equivalent would be ‘rustic’. The term came to be used disparagingly by Roman Christianity in the fourth century to distance their state sponsored, urban and therefore sophisticated, high status religion, from the uneducated country dwellers.
The irony is that the Gospels and consequently the Christian church was indeed informed almost entirely by pagan folk tales and superstitions. It was the Roman Church that made sure that the rustic origins were concealed and that attention was drawn to the magic properties of holy saints and other types of miraculous charlatanry to keep the masses in awe and contributing to the funds.
If I’ve appeared to digress, it is to say that the news information on the Mark texts has to be carefully examined without reference to the received traditions of hopelessly biased Bible scholars. The real evaluation will be made by historians and textual scholars.