Rabbit, my condolences for the passing of your mom. I honestly don't know what I would do if I faced that situation in which my mother decided against a blood transfusion... I would want to keep her, but I also feel a duty to respect her choice, no matter how wrong I think it is. If I overstepped it, I know I would loose her anyways.
Knowsnothing
JoinedPosts by Knowsnothing
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16
untitled
by Rabbit in"saturday, september 22, 2012 12:36 pm pdttoddler dies after battle with kidney disease.
tvnz sat, 22 sep 2012 11:42 am pdt.
a jehovah'switness toddler, whose organ transplant became the centre of a court case, has died.".
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16
untitled
by Rabbit in"saturday, september 22, 2012 12:36 pm pdttoddler dies after battle with kidney disease.
tvnz sat, 22 sep 2012 11:42 am pdt.
a jehovah'switness toddler, whose organ transplant became the centre of a court case, has died.".
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Knowsnothing
Don't beat yourself up man. We all were fooled.
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76
Atheist Book of Bible Stories
by crystlew123 inok so i dl'd this book.
and i immediatly began reading it.
i am about 50 pdf pages into it.
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Knowsnothing
Hey Sulla. Sorry I took so long to get back to you. I've been busy.
I think it bothers you to hear anybody who is religious speak this way about scripture, but it is really an off-the-shelf version of Catholic and Jewish
thinking.
What is the official version then? I went out with a girl that was extremely Catholic. She believed Catholic Mass should go back to be read in Latin, with the priest not facing the crowd. Pre-Tridentine Mass.
Can you tell me more about your specific interpretation?
But didn't Jesus address this question? He said, "You were allowed to divorce because y'all were knuckleheads, but I tell you now that marriage is a lifetime proposition.
Jesus said a lot of things. "Just as in the days of Noah"..... er herm.......
Again, convinient to site the words that support your position.
To say you don't care how the Jews intended their books to be read, or that you don't care what the Catholics were trying to do by collecting this group
of books and not some other group is simply a declaration that you don't intend to read the work honestly.
Re: schismatic history. Which official source again? Pharisees? Saducees? Pope yoo-hoo, Church Fathers, Pius IV.....?
Let's cut to the chase. The Resurrection? I don't believe it happened. What "manner of reading it" can make such an event any more or less true? That's the heart of all Christian doctrine. No resurrection.... no nothing.
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Believing in God - Challenge
by jgnat ini invite king solomon and anyone else that is interested, to discuss if believing in god may be helpful.
i am not restricting the discussion to the biblical god.
i'm ready to look if this belief may be helpful both from a societal and from an individual point of view.
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Knowsnothing
...which is better? ...comprehension of God or free and individual thought?
Should this be rephrased as, "obedience to Jehovah or free and individual thought"?
You do believe that Jehovah is the Sovereign, right Elephant?
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76
Atheist Book of Bible Stories
by crystlew123 inok so i dl'd this book.
and i immediatly began reading it.
i am about 50 pdf pages into it.
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Knowsnothing
You ever read MacBeth? The Iliad? Even the ghastly parts are wonderful because they tell us the truth about ourselves. I mean, even the awful stories
are amazing, for the most part.
The problem is that I have a hard time distinguishing the reality from the myth in the Bible, especially in passages where it claims Jehovah spoke or gave a command. Sometimes, his commands were brutal. I can just give an example on Jehovah regulating slavery. This is problematic for you. You reject that part because it suits you, or rather interpret it to be that the Israelites made that part up, Jehovah didn't say that at all. Well then, which part do you hold true, and most importantly, why? The Illiad and other works of fiction are, on the other hand, just that. So again, this all boils down to your preference for rejecting some parts of the Bible, yet allowing others to be literal. How convinient.
Orthodox teaching is that Jesus is God and that, after his death, he was raised transformed, but still human. So, that makes him a Jew. Still.
I'm sorry, but I could care less about orthodox teaching. Just like I don't believe "might makes right", I don't believe "tradition makes true".
Reality? Yeah, we are primordial soup that got struck by lightening or whatever and, you know, boom! That's great and all, but I'm not sure that tells
us something more important about us than either of those creation myths. In the same way, The Iliad is more true than any history of whatever war
happened during the time.
It tells us our origins, which are far more profound than any myth you can imagine, by virtue of it being true. Truth cares not for our fancies.
Well, I think the JW / fundamentalist approach to scripture is a catastrophe for reasons that are probably the same ones you have. But, look, any reading of, say, the gospels simply must not allow itself to be amazed to find that the synoptics and John disagree on the day of the Last Supper. We Catholics put the NT together and we did it knowing very well that there are differences in the gospel acounts. I guess the fact that John and Peter (Mark) remember it differently must not be what we mean when we say both works are inspired.
Same with the OT. Jews have been reading it for a very long time now -- they know there are different traditions expressed in it. They have left them in because the importance of the Jewish scriptures is not diminished by that fact. Not to them, anyway. If you find that the presence of more than a single tradition in some of these stories makes you think less of those scriptures, well, you must not be viewing them in the same way Jews are. I guess you have that right, but that ain't the way the people who wrote / edited those works viewed them. So, yeah, you'd be doing it wrong.
Again, I could care less how they are "supposed to be viewed", whether by Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or whatever "authority". At the very heart of it all, something like Christ's resurrection must be a physical, or rather literal, event that happened, otherwise it's all untrue. The genealogy presented at the beginning of Matthew and Luke go all the way back to Adam. I know there are people that existed beyond any possible Adam. In other words, no matter how I feel about it, no matter how I connect with my pet belief and with others, it still doesn't make it true. Something to ponder upon.
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Believing in God - Challenge
by jgnat ini invite king solomon and anyone else that is interested, to discuss if believing in god may be helpful.
i am not restricting the discussion to the biblical god.
i'm ready to look if this belief may be helpful both from a societal and from an individual point of view.
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Knowsnothing
So, we end up with you can believe what ever you want to, so long as you are balanced.
Believing in God - QED
I think one problem with this type of question, is which God? If God exists, which we don't know, which conceptualization of him is real? Can any of our "hypotheses" come close? What if I believe in the vengeful Jehovah? How is that supposed to confort me? How do I know he is real?
If we can't even define what or who God is, what exactly does believing in God mean?
God=?
jgnat, a more personal question, if you don't mind. What does believing in God do for you? How would you describe the God you believe in?
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Everything is going bad.
by Decided ini just went up to see my friend who was in a care center.
i went in his room and he was dead, i had to call the nurse who said she was with him 15 minutes before.
i was in walmart the day before and saw an old school mate who's mother was a jw and he said he had cancer and had two years to live according to the doctor.
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Knowsnothing
Decided... My sympathies.
Can you still work? Tell us a bit more backround, if you wish. You also choose to PM me if you like, I will listen.
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Finally! -- Why the WTS Discourages Higher Education
by Recovery ini'm sure many of you have been wondering why the wts has stuck to it's adamant viewpoint of higher education.
let's settle it once and for all.
this will prove conclusively why it's in young people's best interests to avoid higher education.. candace conti has inspired hundreds, perhaps thousands of young girls across america to successfully take on the wts.
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Knowsnothing
I'll ask again, as others have asked, what does your rant about Candice Conti winning have anything to do with higher education? Your title is misleading; I was hoping you would address why the WTS really discourages higher education.
What exactly is so "evil" about higher education? Do you realize complex societies require specialization? Do you think the computer you're typing on came from reading the Awake! or WT?
If you are interested in looking at a balanced debate, why not try here?
Our AnnOMaly kicked Dream_Weaver's butt. Recovery, what exactly are you concerned with here, legal liability your Org has to endure, or the protection of children?
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76
Atheist Book of Bible Stories
by crystlew123 inok so i dl'd this book.
and i immediatly began reading it.
i am about 50 pdf pages into it.
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Knowsnothing
The OT stories are important and special because they are a) extraordinarily good and b) because they are Jewish. -Sulla
a.) In what sense are they extraordinarily good? Surely you've read the awful parts as well?
b.) The OT stories are good because they are Jewish, and God is a Jew.... I'm not quite sure I follow.
The quality of the stories is grasped through the larger themes. Foe example: The Jewish creation myth has man being formed from God's own breath and in his own image. This is interesting because so many other stories insist that men are made from dragon blood or something. Those other stories also seem true in some way, but the Jewish approach leads us to a different place, doesn't it? - Sulla
At the end of the day, the myth is one and the same. I'm trying real hard to understand how you reconcile the myth with the reality.
The, of course, you have this preposterous claim that the eschatological figure winds up getting murdered and raised, and that this fixes everything. That's where it gets interesting.
Oh, indeed, very interesting.
My question though is, what exactly from the Bible do you consider to be concrete truth, concrete reality? I don't know what better way to ask. I can understand seeking "spirituality", "meaning in existence", connecting in some seemingly profound way with the past, etc.
What I don't understand is religion claiming to possess truth, and then having you claim that as a Catholic, you alone are reading the Bible the "right way".
In the words of Pontius Pilate, "What is truth"?
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A question for Athiests
by EndofMysteries ini really do not understand how any can be athiests from thinking real hard about it.
how can you think everything on this earth just happened?.
from my understanding, to be athiest, this is pretty much how it goes.
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Knowsnothing
How can you think everything on this earth just happened?
To add to this, there are process that allow one to look back into time. For example, you question can be phrased, "Was Earth "just" created with Mount Everest?" If you follow the processes that lead to this, you would be lead to the conclusion Mt. Everest wasn't always there, even though it appears so grand and immutable. The fact is, the accumulation of millions of years of geological processes produced Mt. Everest.
If you take your time to investigate a little bit of science, especially things like geology, star formations, etc., you begin to gain a grasp on the fact that things really don't "just happen". The accumulation of time and forces of nature can lead to incredibly complex stuff.