Half banana

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Posts by Half banana

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  13

  Exposing the Core Premise of JW False Teaching

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  poison is at work in any argument with jehovah's witnesses.

  this poison has little to do with the beauty of watchtower logic or the tasty morsels of jw reasoning.. the poison is odorless and tasteless and it has absorbed into their core premise: scripture interpretation directed by jehovah.. if you buy into the core premise (somebody possesses a divinely granted access to an infallible source of truth) you are already dead in the water.. that is the deal breaker.

  false premises lead always to false conclusions.. stop right here.. the core misrepresentation of christianity solely rests in accepting the bible as the inerrant word of almighty god.

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  Half banana

  Dweather; "the Bible says that the word of God would be preserved". Such a statement is characteristic with the craft of the scribe who is compelled to do the work of his master. Manuscript copies are fundamentally flawed in their ability to clinically transmit the text of the original writer.

  The very reason why so many stories were concocted to plead the fidelity of copyists is because it was impossible to keep texts free from alteration with the human instinct to modify one with personal or sectarian biases.

  One would be naive to imagine that there is an original Bible other than the first compilation of selected texts sacralised by the Roman Catholic bishops in the fourth century. Much of which was then recently syncretized or adapted to conform to the imperial demands for an orthodoxy of belief in the Roman world. This was, after all, the very meaning of catholic, i.e. a universal all encompassing belief system, which later emperors enforced on pain of death.

  "Knowledge is power" but it has always been the powerful who determine what the knowledge should be.
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  13

  Exposing the Core Premise of JW False Teaching

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  poison is at work in any argument with jehovah's witnesses.

  this poison has little to do with the beauty of watchtower logic or the tasty morsels of jw reasoning.. the poison is odorless and tasteless and it has absorbed into their core premise: scripture interpretation directed by jehovah.. if you buy into the core premise (somebody possesses a divinely granted access to an infallible source of truth) you are already dead in the water.. that is the deal breaker.

  false premises lead always to false conclusions.. stop right here.. the core misrepresentation of christianity solely rests in accepting the bible as the inerrant word of almighty god.

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  Half banana

  What is written here in this post is from God.

  You have to be pretty stupid to believe such and yet that is the level of intellectual acceptance used as the final proof of the Bible in the minds of those who have come under its spell.

  Terry I like the way you are seeking a definitive illustration for the pitfall for those hungering for a divine answer to everything; the tasteless and odourless mind poison, the false premise that the Bible is inerrant and interpreted by Jehovah.

  There is so much harm which comes from basing one’s life on any false premise and one of the worst is trusting a dodgy cult who claim a monopoly in Bible interpretation on God’s behalf.

  Life can be hard, not all people are up to the challenge of coping with the real world without a lot of help.

  Seeing the market opportunity, JWs peddle a comprehensive account of how existential worries can be overcome; firstly by the assumption that there is a God then the assumption of faith in the Bible as God’s revealed word and third the assumption that the only true interpreters are the governing body of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Assumptions built on false premises only confuse people and make them more dependent on others, they do not cure their original problems.

  All of these religious premises promoted by the Watchtower without sound evidence are so far removed from logical thought that it is not surprising the gb condemn serious education.
  

  The new JW is egged on by other victims and having swallowed the poison, is promised a smiley life in a Valium haze which ignores common sense, logic, having to think or work hard. The crunch comes when trying to shake off the JW drug. (To start with many try milder brands with fewer side effects to wean themselves off the habit).
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  77

  North Korea threatening to bomb Guam...

  by mikeflood in

  1. social
  2. current

  crazy kim again....could happen?

  thoughts?.

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  Half banana

  Outlaw, it would only rhyme if Guam was pronounced Gwom!.............at least in the UK
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  7

  How appealing is this?

  by Half banana in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  would you join a religion which says everyone who is not a member will be killed by god?.

  would you join a religion which you know that statistically if you stay in it long enough, there is a high chance that it will split your family apart?.

  would you join a religion which demands that you preach to your neighbours that they are soon going to die if they don’t believe your message?.

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  Half banana

  Would you join a religion which says everyone who is not a member will be killed by God?

  Would you join a religion which you know that statistically if you stay in it long enough, there is a high chance that it will split your family apart?

  Would you join a religion which demands that you preach to your neighbours that they are soon going to die if they don’t believe your message?

  Would you join a religion which actively discourages education and thinking analytically? Or one which promotes faith and obedience to a group of cult leaders who have no credentials in anything, only a very long track record in failed promises?

  Does the prospect of living in a utopia controlled by these seven governors of the religion appeal to you? Men who assert that their religion is the only one chosen by God in 1919, a subject with no basis in any fact. Also with the beliefs held back then, if you believed them now, would bizarrely disqualify you from membership today!

  How would you view a religion which prohibits examining scholarly information and only permit research from its own hopelessly biased publications?

  How about the prospect of being a member of a group who will punish you if you change your mind or try to leave it, even if those who shun you are your own children or your own parents or family?

  Would the idea of eventually losing your gender identity appeal to you?

  Would you join a religion which promotes the Iron Age politics of a primitive tribe in the Levant as the best guide for modern living?

  Would you?
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  2

  The Time To Be Happy Is NOW!

  by pale.emperor in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  a video that i wish i'd seen before i was baptized.

  i think you'll all get something out of this:.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvz0mmf6nw4.

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  Half banana

  Quite right Pale, humanistic values are realistic, based on what is--

  not on ethereal hopes stumped up by the collective imagination to avoid the hard truth about mortality.
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  77

  North Korea threatening to bomb Guam...

  by mikeflood in

  1. social
  2. current

  crazy kim again....could happen?

  thoughts?.

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  Half banana

  Trump is just taking the bait and making matters worse, he could after all turn to diplomacy instead.

  Kim Jong Un is different, he is so thrilled and confident now that he has developed a giant phallic firework to frighten the neighbours. He is like the Watchtower leaders; the more terrifying the rhetoric, the stronger and more god-like they will appear to their fearful subjects. Kim and the gb are both saying "Armageddon is imminent" so keep united behind us and we will save you!
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  21

  Jehovah's Witnesses and the Picnic Extinction

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  jehovah’s witnesses and the picnic extinction.

  (“those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end…”).

  it was another world back then; another time and another place.. you had to have been there to have any sense of it--as a young, impressionable jehovah’s witness under the watchtower presidency of nathan h. knorr--social gatherings (backyard bbq’s, swimming parties) among the ‘friends’ consisted of having a great time at a get together or a picnic.

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  Half banana

  Terry, I like your 180 degree turn on oral sex! I concur that the hormones boiled away under the veneer of religious devotion but from a UK perspective I never heard of or actually knew of chaperones in the sixties (which was fortunate for advancing my education in the matter of the opposite sex!) Perhaps it had been mentioned by the org, but nobody of my acquaintance practiced having chaperones back then. USA was different?
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  22

  How smart were the ancients?

  by Coded Logic in

  1. social
  2. current

  growing up as a jw, i always thought the ancients were scientific morons who knew next to nothing.

  ashamedly, i used to run around citing isaiah 40:22 as proof of the bible's 'divine authorship' because it talked about "the circle of the earth".

  as though this were somehow an unknowable before spaceflight.

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  Half banana

  Yes Anonymous some did think this was possible but the thing was they did not enforce their ideas, they were pluralistic. They welcomed and benefited from new concepts and ideas from the whole known world of that time and that is why they made progress in science and philosophy. They did not tend to get bogged down in sacred beliefs or absolutist doctrines. With the advantage of hindsight we can see what they could not-- but the ethos was to have open minds and build on what was known to be true.

  By contrast the forced suicide of Socrates and the murder of Archimedes by invading Romans is evidence of the permanent cruelty which pervaded the thinking of the holders of power in the classical world.
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  7

  Islamic Countries are Like the Slow Kid in Class

  by cofty in

  1. social
  2. current

  according to the council on foreign relations’ global conflict tracker, now that there is peace in colombia, there remain only six civil wars in the world.

  five of those are in islamic nations.

  similarly, all four of the current sectarian wars involve islamic groups, and all five of the ongoing transnational terrorism conflicts involve militant islamic groups.

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  Half banana

  Cofty the statistics you provide are an indictment against the wisdom of religious belief.

  Faith in one's own partisan beliefs does not help people outside of your own sect but worst of all, to conflate rulership with religion as in a theocracy and demand all must submit, is historically the most bloodthirsty type of governance-- as Islam is demonstrating to the world.
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  22

  How smart were the ancients?

  by Coded Logic in

  1. social
  2. current

  growing up as a jw, i always thought the ancients were scientific morons who knew next to nothing.

  ashamedly, i used to run around citing isaiah 40:22 as proof of the bible's 'divine authorship' because it talked about "the circle of the earth".

  as though this were somehow an unknowable before spaceflight.

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  Half banana

  Let's not get too euphoric about the ancients! Whilst there were some clever people around most lived in a world of appeasing gods, avoiding curses, magic happenings, patriotism for their city and ruthless revenge. It was only some of the philosophers who recognized that a spirit world was just superstition.

  Life was precarious; if you held an office of power there was a good chance of being murdered. If poor; your unsanitary life meant you lived with parasites and disease and there were few means of avoiding the plagues which visited the ancient world. The form of democracy invented by the Greeks was only for the elite, and slavery was the means of getting things done.

  One enormous contribution of the ancient Greeks to the modern world was due to their inquisitiveness. By this they seeded that vital spark of real progress in civilization; to analyse things critically. That meant to view something objectively, to question what a thing is and why it is and not fall back on superstition or priests or what tradition had taught.

  Have we all caught up with them in this?