Half banana

Joined

• started 79 topics
• posted 3,096 times   see topics posted on
• send a message

Posts by Half banana

• 
  77

  North Korea threatening to bomb Guam...

  by mikeflood in

  1. social
  2. current

  crazy kim again....could happen?

  thoughts?.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Half banana

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

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  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?
• 
  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.

  1. 
  2. 
• 

  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.
• 
  77

  North Korea threatening to bomb Guam...

  by mikeflood in

  1. social
  2. current

  crazy kim again....could happen?

  thoughts?.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  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!
• 
  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.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  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?
• 
  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.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  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.
• 
  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.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  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.
• 
  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.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  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?
• 
  34

  Really struggling to go on

  by Isambard Crater in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  so, so much has happened in my life over the years and continues to happen, but i won't go into the details as it would take a long time.. i don't really know why, but i returned to "the truth" 15 years ago.

  in 2012 when the tv broadcasting station launched, i started to develop doubts.

  the australian royal commission and other scandals made me angrier, and i now don't believe most of the core teachings.. the only reason i show up at 5 or 6 meetings each month is to keep in contact with my parents and a few other family members.. but it's killing me, literally.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Half banana

  First of all cyber hugs to you Isambard Crater. The cult leaders deliberately make it so very difficult to leave.

  The issue you are discussing is your mental health and all is not lost. The first thing is to recognize just how important it is that you now have the knowledge that

  1/ JWs are not all they are cracked up to be

  2/ there is a real and good world outside of the JW org and in fact you have already found friends who are not religious zombies-- and that is a very good start.

  The problem lies with your parents with their brainwashed thinking and their relationship with you.

  Since the most important thing is your own well-being and not that of your parents however much you love them, may I suggest that you only do the things which give you back YOUR freedom to live the life YOU choose. This is not selfish, it is your birthright which the JW organisation has stolen from you.

  Stop going to the meetings-- they only prolong the agony.

  Tell your parents that you love them but not the JW organisation.

  It's not all hopeless, many if not most of us here have been through it and we'll support you!
• 
  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.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Half banana

  I think the threshold was literacy. There must have been a big divide between the illiterate rural poor (known originally as pagans) and the city dwelling literate citizens. Even if you were a slave you could advance in the Roman world once you had gained your freedom and could read and write and learn the wisdom from earlier generations of writers.

  Within the privileged group of the well educated, there were the few who excelled and had extraordinary insights into the physical universe and its workings not the least of these was the genius Archimedes. There is a small museum in modern Olympia devoted to his inventions--his achievements are astonishing.

  The Antikithera device is really all the evidence needed to tell us that the ancients were highly accomplished astronomers, geometers and mathematicians and precision metal workers to boot.

  As a detail of the scientific approach for achieving accuracy, the designer built into this astronomical calculating device a mechanism to allow for the eccentricity of the orbit of the moon! This tiny fact alone places their understanding at an early modern level of consciousness yet must have been known for a minimum of twenty one centuries. Yet the Antikithera device looks to me (I saw it in Athens this year) like it was already a highly refined and miniaturised machine which had been developed from much older mechanisms, analogous for example to the development of a chronometer from the cathedral clock. This would then put back the understanding of astronomy, geometry and gear making to an even more distant past.