Posts by Half banana

8

The first known graffiti making fun of Christians

by fulltimestudent in

what was the graffiti artist intending when he/she scratched this cartoon like drawing on the wall of a building that served as a training school for imperial guards and personal attendants in the imperial palace area of rome.

it is known as the alexamenos graffito.. .

our interest may focus on the crucified figure, but as a tracing of the drawing makes a little clearer - there's another figure of interest, a young male whose gestures indicate that he's praying, and the crudely written text says: .

Half banana

It is really important to know that any early secular references to "christians" cannot be attributed to a particular cult or temple let alone one of the the Jesus cults. Early christianity was lumped with what was later perjoratively called paganism by the Romans since their beliefs overlapped as did the types of worship including prayer with arms extended. Early Christian graves for example are rarely distinguishable from pagans since they used the same symbols such as crucifixion, the shepherd carrying a lamb etc.

The same graffito as you show Fulltimestudent is presented in Gandy and Freke's The Jesus mysteries, Element, 2003. Here it is given a date between 193 to 235CE with the text suggesting a pagan initiate of the mysteries looks on at the crucifixion of a donkey headed man. "This represents his lower 'animal' nature, which he has put to death...so he may be spiritually resurrected".

I recall a horse-headed Roman god which was apparently mocked by contemporaries for its ludicrous looks, I wonder if this had any connection with the image in question?

13

4 Generations of the Royal Family

by pixel in

4 generations of the royal family.

excuse me, i'm one of jw's, i only see one overlap generation of the royal family.

.

Half banana

By heck! Just goes to show how being a JW distorts perception.

21

Interesting statement regarding "this generation"

by InChristAlone in

jw
friends

i keep up with allexperts.com, and i noticed an interesting question to "brother rando".

his statement surprised me, and i am wondering if i missed some new light along the way.. question:.

"hello bro rando.

Half banana

Trying to reconcile what the Bible says with reality is impossible.

Jesus unequivocally said there would be those who would not taste death in his generation before the coming of the kingdom in power. (Mark 9,1) Jesus got it wrong. The Bible is wrong.

If you want a happy life don't be misled by two thousand year old Christ-cult rhetoric.

The moral is don't believe the Bible is inspired and instead base your life on factual things... stop building castles in the air.

475

What is the alternative to JW?

by Formerbrother in

i mean this with all due respect, i would like to hear from genuine people who think jw have it wrong and then what is the truth?.

im not talking about silly little quibbles here and there.. is jehovah real?

the the bible is word?

Half banana

Former brother are you serious in your quest?

The JW organisation does not care for its young ones at all. It cares not a fig for the terrible mental state of sexually abused young victims in its midst.

All it cares about is numbers. Numbers of Dollars in the bank, numbers of hours preached and numbers of dim-witted slavish followers. I know because I also am a former brother.

The children of JW parents are social outcasts, stifled in their self expression, suppressed in their understanding, stunted in their development to the point of losing their identity as individuals and can only cope with life within the prison boundaries of JW thinking. The governing body are reprehensible for this outrage not the poor and helpless victims; the rank and file JWs.

You don’t really want an alternative do you? Would you rather be kicked in the teeth by a Jehovah’s Witness boot more than any other deluded religion?

Let me just give you a clue: the Watchtower organisation has never got anything right that is worthwhile knowing in all of its 137 year history. It repeatedly changes its doctrines and regularly makes stupid false prophecies without ever learning from its mistakes... What does this tell you?

42

Evolution is a Fact #10 - Non-Coding DNA

by cofty in

every cell in your body contains a big book of how to build another you.. although it's approximately 3 billion letters long only a small fraction of it contains instructions on making humans.. imagine trying to use a workshop manual but it reads like somebody messed up at the publishers.

there are a few paragraphs of meaningful text followed by pages of gibberish, another page or so of useful instructions then 9 more of random words.

some of it looks like copies of original text but full of typing errors.

Half banana

There is not much rhyme or reason in the size of a genome. The human with 3.1 billion base pairs is seven and a half times more than the puffer fish, Fugu rubripes (of crazy Japanese dining fame) which has 400 million base pairs.

As you mention Cofty, the interesting bit is that much of the of human DNA code is duplicated and we seem happy to drag around so much redundant coding without effect or biological stress. It bears the evidence of evolved biology and not the work of an idealized perfect creator. Scientists hoped to find uses for the duplications but the greater interest these days is in epigenetic factors i.e the circumstances or environment of gene transmission.

The puffer fish expresses most of all its genes which, having a backbone, makes it a useful organism to use in researching evolutionary change. A bit like the genetecists old favourite, the fruit fly Drosofila, which has just four large chromosomes.

How about the loblolly pine, Pinus taeda which has seven times the size of the human genome with 21 billion bases? The smallest known genome belongs to is a symbiont bacterium living inside a bug which has just a paltry160 thousand base pairs.

It looks like chance at work here in the arbitrariness of genome size and the randomness of duplication, but by getting to know a bit about DNA one can only marvel at Mother Nature’s refined methods.

Fisherman might I suggest you are confusing your assertions with the philosophical notion of Karl Popper who pointed out that the only useful information was that which could be falsified. Facts are good because they can be falsified! But you must show the evidence...

Science proceeds by disproving things as well as predicting and testing by experiment. You could falsify evolution and biological data, they are real things; hence we are dealing with factual evidence however if you falsify data as a scientist you will be dismissed and disgraced.

On the other hand you cannot falsify God's love anymore than you can prove or disprove God since there is no data on him... and therefore he/she/ it is a factual irrelevancy.

150

Start A Butterfly Garden!

by Bonsai in

jw
friends

time to take a break from debating religion.

take in a breath of fresh air and be healed by the wonders of nature around you.. how many of you have a garden?

how many have a nice flower patch to go with your vegetable garden?

Half banana

Thanks for info Kaik, your problem sounds like it’s related to getting the rhodo established. (Neither bone dry nor waterlogged during the winter?) The chaste tree is uncommon here but will grow. I love Prague and the beautiful countryside in Bohemia. I have walked in the Sudeten lands and in places with names which are very forgettable if you don’t speak the language! I remember seeing large blue gentians in the mountains flowering at the feet of the red-berried mountain ash.

Xanthippe, don’t forget to put your borage leaves in a jug of Pimms in the summer. It’s unusual to have cucumber flavoured leaves.

Where do you live Talesin, looks like you enjoy (or is it endure) a cold winter?

It is interesting to see the differences in climate from the posts in far-flung places. Here in UK (I’m in Oxfordshire, central south England) for the first time ever I’ve had to mow the grass twice during the winter; at the end of December and end of February...unprecedented! The daffs began flowering here in early Feb and have continued through to April.

I managed to persuade a specimen of the florist’s Jasmine, the tender Chinese species Jasminum polyanthum to survive through the previous winter outdoors and last December it was ten feet ten feet tall and full of flower. Although I then wrapped it up well we had two successive nights of hard frost in Feb this year, which browned off many of the evergreen leaves...but it hasn’t died. The fragrance is delicious. I also managed to over-winter a large canna lily, alias ’Indian shot’ by putting it in my garden shed and protecting it from frost... just little things which keep us gardeners happy!

150

Start A Butterfly Garden!

by Bonsai in

jw
friends

time to take a break from debating religion.

take in a breath of fresh air and be healed by the wonders of nature around you.. how many of you have a garden?

how many have a nice flower patch to go with your vegetable garden?

Half banana

I meant Czech not Czeck

24

The Jehovah’s Witness bagged themselves a Big One when they got Professor Raj Kalaria, to speak about his belief

by Watchtower-Free in

uk scientist helps christian cult to promote creationism.

the jehovah’s witness bagged themselves a big one when they got professor raj kalaria, above, to speak about his belief in creationism in a new video posted online by the cult.. keralia is currently a deputy director of the newcastle centre for brain ageing and vitality, newcastle, and a professor of neuropathology at newcastle university, uk.. when ex-jehovah’s witness lloyd evans, who runs jwsurvey, discovered that an april 2016 jw broadcasting episode featured keralia, he decided to:.

reach out to newcastle university to find out whether it endorses the academic’s stance on evolution, and found myself in a rather frustrating email exchange with helen rae, the media relations manager at the university’s faculty of medical sciences .. after much to-ing and fro-ing, an official statement was finally forthcoming ….

Half banana

Yes Bohm, the facts as scientists have shown demonstrates an evolving human brain evidenced from the endocasts (moulds taken from inside crainia) of our pre-human forebears. Bi-pedalism allowed for development of the human head. With cunning and manual dexterity being a part of the evolving human pedigree the brain expansion took place filling out the face and removing by degrees the eyebrow ridges and the cranial ridge (strongly in evidence in gorillas). There is no directional pattern towards humanity since other genera split off and still exist like gorillas and orangs.

Where in this scientifically recorded development did god intervene and make a "complex human brain". He didn't...the guy at Newcastle Raj Kalaria is not to be believed.

A professorial chair is normally given to those individuals who know authoritatively and broadly about things...not to believers because of their beliefs.

24

The Jehovah’s Witness bagged themselves a Big One when they got Professor Raj Kalaria, to speak about his belief

by Watchtower-Free in

uk scientist helps christian cult to promote creationism.

the jehovah’s witness bagged themselves a big one when they got professor raj kalaria, above, to speak about his belief in creationism in a new video posted online by the cult.. keralia is currently a deputy director of the newcastle centre for brain ageing and vitality, newcastle, and a professor of neuropathology at newcastle university, uk.. when ex-jehovah’s witness lloyd evans, who runs jwsurvey, discovered that an april 2016 jw broadcasting episode featured keralia, he decided to:.

reach out to newcastle university to find out whether it endorses the academic’s stance on evolution, and found myself in a rather frustrating email exchange with helen rae, the media relations manager at the university’s faculty of medical sciences .. after much to-ing and fro-ing, an official statement was finally forthcoming ….

Half banana

It sounds to me that this man is not a very objective scientist to draw this conclusion:

"after reading the Bible, (I) decided that there could only be One True God, and this was the one that created things as complex as the human brain."

He decided on the basis of reading the Bible (which was polytheistic in its early texts) that there must be one god and not myriads. Where does he supply evidence for monotheism? Does it follow that the human brain was created by this one god? Not at all, it is just a belief.

In other words it is merely his opinion since he gives no solid basis for it. For example, the notion that a god exists is the same premise for all believers and yet it has to be agreed there is no concrete evidence for god and equally no evidence that he does not exist. This balance does not make a god more likely. Unless evidence could be found no one should proceed on the basis of belief. If he uses mere belief in his professional life of old age related care he would be dismissed.

It is here where the friction lies and the JW org takes advantage of it; where a scientist gives personal opinions which are sanctioned as acceptable only on the basis of his or her academic status.

Fortunately the scientific world attracts fewer believers these days but those who are can be pounced on for theist quotes.

150

Start A Butterfly Garden!

by Bonsai in

jw
friends

time to take a break from debating religion.

take in a breath of fresh air and be healed by the wonders of nature around you.. how many of you have a garden?

how many have a nice flower patch to go with your vegetable garden?

Half banana

Kaik, I'm curious as to where you live, is it the Czeck Republic? The reason I ask is because crepe myrtles don't flourish well in the UK because they need a lot of strong sunlight to flower. If your mountain laurel has died and rhododendron is not doing well; is your soil acid enough?