Posts by Half banana

12

Sin and death - how does it make sense to ANY believer of ANY religion?

by BourneIdentity in

since adam and eve’s fall, we are all sinners.

it’s what we do, there is no way to change it, sinning is a daily part of life.

there are major sins, but most of us commit minor ones everyday in words, thoughts or deeds.

Half banana

In an attempt to answer of how to make sense of sin, the first thing is to realise that all religion is fantasy, it is not the product of evidence but of the human imagination.

Sin is like being told you have a specific illness that only one known doctor can cure and his agents are everywhere directing your life and making demands on you to conform to his wishes. Once you believe you have sin, they (the religions) are your masters, you have lost freewill!

"Sin entered into the world through our first parents." This is completely untrue, we were never perfect in the first place, we do not originate from two individuals but from millions of antecedents and ultimately from different species of humans, and there is no such thing as a perfect/imperfect division of life -- except in religion. So the remedy for the Genesis fable is to create another one, through the sacrifice of a 'perfect' man. It takes no deep thinking to be able to understand the attractive myth which is in religious terms, that belief in Jesus means getting rid of sin.

The human creation story is so clearly a fable that any intelligent person can see that it's not worth believing since a large part of humanity lived before the time of the would- be Adam and Eve. Even their names Adam = man and Eve = mother of all, puts the story into the fable category because it is one of the ways of determining what a fable is; if the characters names have literal meanings relevant to the story....and not forgetting talking snakes.

Sin must rank as the least helpful concept in developing sound reasoning and a mature response to life's problems.

9

100 Dead, but God is Merciful

by Ultimate Axiom in

a plane with 99 people on board has crashed into a populated area of karachi, but at least two of the passengers survive.

one of them is reported as saying, “god has been merciful”.

what kind of mercy was shown to the other 100 or more that died?.

Half banana

In certain oriental religions, it is just a cultural reflex to claim everything is god's doing --no brain use necessary, it just trips off the tongue. But woe betide you if you were to challenge the blind injustice of your favourite god.

27

CO zoom visit this week

by nowwhat? in

he reinterated the end time events.

destruction of babylon the great, proclamation of peace and security, then our hailstorm message and finally armageddon.

we all can go into detail what a load of 💩 this is but here is the kicker.

Half banana

Thanks for this information Nowhat. I would like to deal with just the first part of this false JW prophecy.

If the GB are trying to keep the true believers working for them, they need a prophecy which at least looks like it could actually come about soon! Not so the fall of Babylon the Great.

The idea of the destruction of non-JW religion, alias "The world Empire of false Religion" is a profound JW myth quoting apocalyptic rants -- but also a forlorn hope.

Sorry GB but you are barking up the wrong tree, I don't think you realise that "religion" is simply is not going to "fall" or fail -- it is just part of your propaganda, your sausage machine rhetoric to rally the troops with Bible quotes with meaningless content. There is no such animal as "false religion," it's just a JW buzz word.

The harmful JW cult might be banned -- but there is no imminent announcement to the effect that religion is to be banned, it is far too ingrained in nearly all societies at every level to disentangle it. At best, organisational religion will continue to lose power, and fade as society advances in education, medicine, compassion and critical thinking etc.

Religious belief is so bound up with the instinctive comfort that bereaved people want, that this understandable conceit of cheating death, will not itself die any moment soon. Religious comfort is profoundly bound up with humanity so that it will not be banned.

The governing body of Jehovah's Witnesses demonstrate that they don't have the wit to realise this mistake so they are left wedded to their ancient Biblical war cries, knowing that they work as recruiting tools.

The Watchtower's list of end times events is so hackneyed, unrealistic, out of date and unbelievable, it is just to indoctrinate by repetition to create action by fear and promises. The legacy is a membership of ever hopeful "true believers" who will never learn that all JW prophecy is completely false and sadly all individuals will continue to die, having wasted their lives on a worthless organisation, never to receive their promised rewards.

27

CO zoom visit this week

by nowwhat? in

he reinterated the end time events.

destruction of babylon the great, proclamation of peace and security, then our hailstorm message and finally armageddon.

we all can go into detail what a load of 💩 this is but here is the kicker.

Half banana

Thanks for this information Nowhat. I would like to deal with just the first part of this false JW prophecy, the "Fall of "Babylon the Great".

If the GB are trying to keep the true believers working for them, they need a prophecy which looks like it could actually soon come about. The idea of the destruction of non-JW religion, alias "The world Empire of false Religion" is a profound JW myth -- but also a forlorn hope.

Sorry GB but you are barking up the wrong tree, I don't think you realise that "religion" is simply is not going to "fall" or fail -- it is just part of your propaganda, your sausage machine rhetoric to rally the troops but with meaningless content. There is no such animal as "false religion," it's just a JW buzz word.

What they ignore about religion is the underlying comfort of a myth used from time immemorial to soften the inevitable blow of mortality -- which is not going away.

The harmful JW cult might be banned but there is not coming soon any announcement to the effect that religion is to be banned, it is far too ingrained in nearly all societies at every level to disentangle it. At best, organisational religion will continue to lose power, and fade as society advances in education, medicine, compassion and critical thinking etc.

Religious belief is so bound up with the instinctive comfort that bereaved people want, that this understandable conceit of cheating death, will not itself die any moment soon. Religious comfort is profoundly bound up with humanity so that it will not be banned.

The governing body of Jehovah's Witnesses demonstrate that they don't have the wit to realise this mistake so they are left wedded to their ancient Biblical war cries, knowing that as a recruiting tool they work.

The Watchtower's list of end times events is so hackneyed, unrealistic, out of date and unbelievable, it is just to indoctrinate by repetition. The legacy is a membership of ever hopeful "true believers" who will never learn that all JW prophecy is completely false and sadly all individuals will continue to die, never to receive their promised rewards.

26

Jephthah's Daughter

by Sea Breeze in

i have noticed that the foolishness of jephthah's vow to sacrifice his daughter gets bandied around a lot as somehow approved of by god.

i never could understand how people could come to this conclusion.

if i wrote about something terrible that my son had done, that doesn't mean that i am for that thing.

Half banana

Stories including those which later became sacralised in the Bible were all written by humans, there cannot possibly be evidence that it was otherwise.

The plot line of a story reflects and reveals a society and its values. From reading ancient literature and plays today, we are conscious even now of reacting to the high drama of moral dilemmas, they give the tale its interest and the reason for our emotional engagement. No doubt the silly story of a man who promises his god a sacrifice of the first person who comes to greet him, was a literary chestnut from early times. Only a reckless idiot/murderer would think literally of doing this but set in the context of child sacrifice familiar to the readers (or more likely presented to the audience as a play) it would make for a gripping presentation.

The Hebrews were part of the Canaanite culture, their language originated with the Phoenicians and its alphabet is shared with early Hebrew and Samaritan. The Israelites also inherited religious cues and values from them.The Phoenicians were famous for their tophets or places for child sacrifice and the inhabitants of the Levant as with many of the those dwelling on the Mediterranean coast, followed the same practice.

Biblical accounts do naturally reflect the great shifts in religious horizons and as the Hebrews learned from their Egyptian overlords they adopted a form of montheism (actually henotheism) centering on YHVH who was one of the the sons of the Phoenician's God El. Much of the ranting and threats by Jehovah in the OT is about this new concept namely exclusively worshipping only one of the many gods. It was to put an end to polytheism. The story of the human sacrifice of Abraham's son Isaac originally had Isaac killed but the "new light" was that no longer is human sacrifice a good idea, so in the retelling of the ancient story, the one included in the sacred texts, Isaac is spared and the message is that animal sacrifices will do the job.

14

Kingdom Hall Scheduler

by Thetruthhurts in

i'm sure there's already topics on this but i couldn't find one so i'm starting my own.

is the kingdom hall scheduling program new?

is this where they are entering all of the members data now?

Half banana

Possibly they're moving into market information on 8 million consumers with the idea of doing mass communication media when the religious part of the organisation fails.....

7

Could Boris "save the NHS & lives" by BANNING Covid 19?

by BoogerMan in

obviously not, but he could do so by banning an even greater killer - tobacco.

smoking has been identified as the single greatest cause of preventable illness and premature death in all 4 nations of the u.k. .

annually, in scotland approximately 10,000 die, in wales, 5000, and in n.i.

Half banana

I have noticed three entrenched things which exist contrary to logic and which are rooted in hard to shift, socio-historical precedents: private handgun ownership, religious belief and tobacco use.

15

People in England were easiy convinced to believe....

by BoogerMan in

....that a mass killer was roaming their streets.

.

now theyre struggling to believe the grim reaper is not so grim and it's safe to go outside again.. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-52669441.

Half banana

I agree that the excess deaths figure is alarming. An elderly relative in a care home in the midlands (with no excess deaths), mentioned to me that in his neighbouring care home for those with dementia and with one hundred occupants, at the last count 18 had died. Eight of them within 36 hours around the middle of last month. Since most of the staff have had to be isolated it puts enormous stress on the remaining few. Crisis times for the bereaved and those at the work-face of the pandemic.

17

1 Corinthians 15:26

by Doug Mason in

you will die.

i will die.

those who have gone before us, the great and the small, the powerful and the weak, have shared the common fate of dying.

Half banana

In the past people never woke up to this reality that death is the end of us. Or does everyone see a death as a child and wonders, "Is that it?" Then we find a religion?

Religion explained away this hard fact, softening the blow and by doing so it gained massive support. How religions have prospered from this human conceit that we live after we die?

19

Ancient Hebrews Got Away With So Much

by Tim207 in

why wasn’t judah punished for sleeping withtamar?

even though she had the legal right to an offspring by his family he still thought he was sleeping with a prostitute.

if it is wrong to even think of having relations with a woman similar to the “sin” of watching pornography why wouldn’t what judah did be wrong?

Half banana

You have to remember that the Bible is mainly fiction. Moses, Abraham Isaac and Jacob did not exist, they are fiction.The twelve tribes did not exist, Most of Genesis is complete fiction. The Exodus is fiction. The conquering of Canaan is fiction. The early kings are fiction, historical kings begin with Hezekiah but the Bible's accounts of historical people are not necessarily true even then.

The mistake is to imagine that the Bible is the infallible word of God. It is not, it's just a story book.