Wow guys, thanks a ton! I didn't expect to get so many PMs, and I never new you were a nuclear physicist too, Outlaw! I think we've just about got it licked! Energy independence here we come!
JonathanH
JoinedPosts by JonathanH
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Suggestions from serving elders lurking here
by mankkeli inthis thread is directed at elders who are still serving but lurking here.. 1) how do you handle personal confessions being made to you?..
2) how do you manouvever other elders on jc without destroying victims lifes.
3) how do you handle reports of wrongdoing, how have you balanced the situation in such a way that the accused is not affected although known by someone else.. please i will appreciate a pm for a response and only from those who are still serving as elders but mentally out.
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Suggestions from serving elders lurking here
by mankkeli inthis thread is directed at elders who are still serving but lurking here.. 1) how do you handle personal confessions being made to you?..
2) how do you manouvever other elders on jc without destroying victims lifes.
3) how do you handle reports of wrongdoing, how have you balanced the situation in such a way that the accused is not affected although known by someone else.. please i will appreciate a pm for a response and only from those who are still serving as elders but mentally out.
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JonathanH
Hey everybody, give me your suggestions for creating cold fusion. Just PM them sense they can't be put up here, and please only legitimate ones.
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Suggestions from serving elders lurking here
by mankkeli inthis thread is directed at elders who are still serving but lurking here.. 1) how do you handle personal confessions being made to you?..
2) how do you manouvever other elders on jc without destroying victims lifes.
3) how do you handle reports of wrongdoing, how have you balanced the situation in such a way that the accused is not affected although known by someone else.. please i will appreciate a pm for a response and only from those who are still serving as elders but mentally out.
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JonathanH
lol.
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JonathanH
I find that awesome. I've been wanting a picture search engine for a long time, I'm glad somebody finally found a way to make one.
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A holistic approach to human civilization, opposed to the blame game. It's not conservatives or liberals.
by JonathanH inreading political threads on this site (and really any site for that matter) is incredibly frustrating.
namely because they all boil down to the same argument.
who is it that is fucking society over?
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JonathanH
lol. My group will win in the end, and we will be better off once you're gone.
I would like to address a possible complaint of this view. That it is depressingly fatalistic. That we are just machines that are going to act in our self interest whether we want to or not. I think fatalistic may be an apt description, but not depressing. We used to think that prosperity was as simple as getting on the good side of capricious but obviously beneficent gods, while avoiding the wicked ones. Storms wouldn't harm us, crops would grow, we would be strong and our kids healthy if only we cultivated the correct traits and beseeched the proper gods. Turned out this was all bunk, and really we were just slaves to a cold indifferent planet. It didn't matter what dance you did, the rain wasn't falling and there wasn't anything you could do about it. But knowing this allows us to work with a cold indifferent nature, learn to actually protect our selves from it, understand why it works the way it does, and use it to benefit ourselves.
I think human nature is the same way. It may not be as simple as just saying "well as long as we aren't a bunch of dirty hippies, or greedy fat cats, then society will work out." That may turn out to be a load of bollocks (I'd be willing to bet it is), and that what is really driving society isn't social devils and backroom organizations but natural forces and logical causality. And knowing that we may be able to find real solutions to massive economic and social problems. Find ways to protect ourselves as a species against the our own nature, and use it to our advantage. But as long as we build and burn these twisted effigies claiming that they are the problem, we will continually fall victim to forces we refuse to look at.
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A holistic approach to human civilization, opposed to the blame game. It's not conservatives or liberals.
by JonathanH inreading political threads on this site (and really any site for that matter) is incredibly frustrating.
namely because they all boil down to the same argument.
who is it that is fucking society over?
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JonathanH
Reading political threads on this site (and really any site for that matter) is incredibly frustrating. Namely because they all boil down to the same argument. Who is it that is fucking society over? The answer is always simple. It's the other guy, and they are doing it because they have a laundry list of character flaws. Not only is this frustrating, it is also unproductive and largely untrue. There is an old saying that goes "if you think the other side is crazy, you don't understand the other side." If we are to believe the rhetoric found on the topics here and in other political threads, the Occupy Wallstreet movement is nothing but a bunch of lazy hippies smoking crack and punching horses before they have gratuitous liberal sex on beds of food stamps in the middle of the street. Also corporations are run by men that starve children for fun, feed on the poor, and run secret societies where they plot the mass sterilization of humanity. This is not a realistic view of the situation.
The fact of the matter is that our society as a whole is massive. Unbelievably massive. We are seven BILLION people spread out across the globe, we are diverse multicultural, multifaceted and have built a remarkable machine called civilization that we don't even come close to fully understanding. The world is too big for a relatively small group of people to move, and we can't predict markets, wars, politics, religious movements, or cultural movements. But we are certain that the other guys are fucking it up, whoever they might be.
When I look out at our economic problems, our social problems, our inability to reconcile cultural or political differences, I don't see Scrooge picking the pockets of poor people, while the young 'uns use their ipads to complain on their blogs about getting fired from their job at MacDonalds. I see a complex web of biology, psychology, and culture.
Believe it or not, we are not the first generation to have income disparities and be angry at the wealthy. In fact that happens time and time again through out history. Wealth always rises to the top, some of it may trickle down depending on the economic system, but those at the top always get a bit more and then a bit more. All of our economic systems boil down to us being biologically hardwired to make sure we have a little bit more than our neighbor. Not because we're evil, but because it's instinct. If you gave a generous person a million dollars and told him to be charitable, 99 out of a 100 people would come out the other side with a nice car, a new home and a a few people slightly less starving than there were previously. And they would think "that's strange, I really tried to be charitable, I don't know what happened." And then they would probably blame somebody else. We can't help but have wealth pool up at the top, and we also can't help being pissed off at those at the top, which is also part of our psychology. We resent those in a better position than ourselves, especially those that we don't feel deserve it (and they almost never do). Which leads to an endless cycle of history, people start relatively equal, a group gets a bit wealthier, uses that wealth to procure more wealth, eventually they have way more than everybody else, and then everybody else burns the rich people's homes to the ground to let the cycle begin again. It's not because the rich were evil, alot of them are probably very nice people. It's not because the people on bottom are all lazy bums, alot of them are very hard working. It's because we are humans and it's what we do, and have always done. You can dress it up in modern political terms, but it's the same story.
We are also not the first generation to have culture wars. Our entire history has been nothing but one huge culture war. Who's religion is right, who's country best embodies the best of human virtues, who's sports team is the most awesome. That is because we as humans are hardwired to be tribal, to create lines in the sand, divide up who is with who, and then crush the competition. Religious crusades, political strife,even school cliques all boil down to this one simple truth. We identify with a group, and we want our group to win over everyone elses because we believe it's better (obviously it must be better, because why else would we be a part of it?). It's not because muslims are evil, or because socialists are stupid, or gays are gross. It's because we group together with those similar to us, and then when we have that group, we want it to succeed at any cost over every other group. And this is repeated ad naseum through history. Making sure everyone is on the same page, either "re-adjusting" those that aren't, or ousting them from the group, and if the split becomes big enough, the attempted destruction of the other group. It's what we do. You can modernize that too however you want, and believe absolutely that we could all get along if we just got rid of group X, but once you do then the remaining group Y would just divide itself and the cycle would begin anew.
I think much of the machine of society can be boiled down to this: We want our group to succeed over other groups, and we want everyone in our group to be well off but not as well off as us. And out of this simple truth a myriad of both amazing and tragic things come about. It's not because of hippies, it's not because of fat cats, it's not because of atheists, it's not because of christian conservatives, or atheist liberals. It's because of intrinsic logical forces larger than any individual or group of individuals acting in a massive complex machine. We invented all sorts of deities to explain why the sun circles the earth, why it rains, why the seasons change, why the tides come in and out, why we live and die. And like wise we invent fictional caricatures of social forces to explain why markets rise and fall, political factions come into and fall out of power, why wars happen, why there is greed and sloth and apathy. But just like with the deities of old, the answer turned out to be far more complex, and less capricious natural answers to why it rains and why the sun rises. As it turns out it wasn't because "Ra" the sun god lived and died and was resurrected every day. And likewise it's not because the "entitlement generation" is lazy and self absorbed that unemployment is high, and it's not because "christians are ignorant" that education is poor. We had to let go of our old superstitions to start to really understand the forces of the universe and make them work for us rather than against us. And likewise we have to let go of these ignorant false caricatures of social devils that we blame for our misfortunes before we can begin to really understand humanity and make our massive civilization work for us, rather than against us.
So please please please stop posting videos of people punching horses, or getting arrested for pulling money out of banks. It makes us all look like jack asses, or at the least like primitive people blaming the drought on somebody pissing off the rain god. Start looking at the big picture, and stop assuming that all of our problems are the result of people not being a part of your obviously superior group.
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The REAL atheist meaning of life . . .
by nicolaou inthere isn't one and that's a really good thing.
let me illustrate;.
you are an artist, you pick up a new canvas and place it on your easel.
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JonathanH
To insiniuate there there are no rules for living our life, well...that leads us to very dangerous grounds.
This is faulty reasoning. What grounds it leads to are moot, truth has no bias for whether it is beneficial or not. Too often people reason that such and such can't be true, because that would mean something unpleasant about reality is also true.
You know what? Maybe there isn't a good reason not to murder and rape beyond we decide not to for any number of reasons. Does that scare you? It should. But that's why we have to grow the fuck up and stop waiting for sky daddy to tell us what to do, and how to do it, and hope he saves us real soon. We are on our own, which is why we have to act like adults. Civilization has to grow up and take responsibility for itself, instead of constantly passing the buck to some absentee mystical father figure. All the horrors that went down, we did it and we might do it again. But all the virtues and great things we did, that was us too, and we CAN do something noble instead. Not because magic jesus rain sprinkles down invisibly into our brains and makes us do nice things, but because we decide to do it. Not because sky daddy will be sad if we don't or he will beat us if we disobey, but because we can, and we chose to.
Reality might very well be both horrifying and disappointing, but if it is, it's only because WE decided it would be that way.
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The general atheist meaning of life
by mankkeli ini have posted this on another forum where i mentor on spirituality and i am posting here again.. when things like spirituality are no longer present in one's life, they may or may not stop looking for meaning.
meaning is an essential part of human psychology, though some feel the need for it less than others, and even a few seemingly don't at all.
there also seems to be a trend that occurs: in the lack of a meaning of life, the brain tries to find one, because it sees a purpose for everything.. .
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JonathanH
So you're claiming your story is now, that you are finnish, went to a norwegian college, where you earned a PhD in something vague from a mysterious person, while never publishing anything, then mentored finnish evolutionary biologists, all while being a witness, becoming an elder, and leading a congregation while secretly arranging apostate get togethers across europe, while publishing various books that no one can find, while also acting as a spiritual guru to theologians and lay people, as well as teaching sociologists about cults and cult behaviors. Someone get this person banned, this is a serious forum for ex witnesses, trolls should not be allowed here and we shouldn't tolerate such.
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The general atheist meaning of life
by mankkeli ini have posted this on another forum where i mentor on spirituality and i am posting here again.. when things like spirituality are no longer present in one's life, they may or may not stop looking for meaning.
meaning is an essential part of human psychology, though some feel the need for it less than others, and even a few seemingly don't at all.
there also seems to be a trend that occurs: in the lack of a meaning of life, the brain tries to find one, because it sees a purpose for everything.. .
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JonathanH
And that article is about punctuated equilibrium in evolution. So you're also an evolutionary biologist now? Why isn't this person banned yet? Who is the administrator around here?
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The general atheist meaning of life
by mankkeli ini have posted this on another forum where i mentor on spirituality and i am posting here again.. when things like spirituality are no longer present in one's life, they may or may not stop looking for meaning.
meaning is an essential part of human psychology, though some feel the need for it less than others, and even a few seemingly don't at all.
there also seems to be a trend that occurs: in the lack of a meaning of life, the brain tries to find one, because it sees a purpose for everything.. .
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JonathanH
You can find his message board posts everywhere, but not his name or any of his publications, or even the names of his publications. Lots of message board posts though. Lots.