JonathanH

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Posts by JonathanH

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  220

  If you don't know what's wrong it can't be fixed

  by N.drew in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  that is what i heard last night at my yoga class.

  she said for something to be fixed first it must become known what needs fixing.

  it is true for the physical, but also for the spiritual i believe.

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  JonathanH

  And another thing, hasn't anybody read Hume on miracles? I encourage it.
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  220

  If you don't know what's wrong it can't be fixed

  by N.drew in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  that is what i heard last night at my yoga class.

  she said for something to be fixed first it must become known what needs fixing.

  it is true for the physical, but also for the spiritual i believe.

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  JonathanH

  http://www.livescience.com/2483-mysterious-phoenix-lights-ufo-hoax.html

  thirty seconds on google makes quick work of the pheonix lights. If you want to see the supernatural, it's all around you, but skepticism makes all the ghosts and goblins disappear into thin air.

  Plus, just a nit picky thing. Aliens aren't supernatural. If they exist, they would just be using natural science. It's like the joke goes, alternative medicine that works is called medicine, and confirmed instances of the supernatural is called natural.

  Edit:The above link is for the 2008 pheonix lights, the 1997 one was explained shortly there after as being a set of flares dropped by military aircraft doing excercises, but you know the UFO crowd. It's government lies.

  Here is a snippet from the wikipedia page. What's amazing is that this took all of two minutes to investigate all of these sightings and see if there was an alternative explanation other than "Supernatural!! Unexplainable!"

  the second event was the set of nine lights appearing to "hover" over the city of Phoenix at around 10 pm. The second event has been more thoroughly covered by the media, due in part to the numerous video images taken of the lights. This was also observed by numerous people who may have thought they were seeing the same lights as those reported earlier.

  The U.S. Air Force explained the second event as slow-falling, long-burning LUU-2B/B illumination flares dropped by a flight of four A-10 Warthog aircraft on a training exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range at Luke Air Force Base. According to this explanation, the flares would have been visible in Phoenix and appeared to hover due to rising heat from the burning flares creating a "balloon" effect on their parachutes, which slowed the descent. [ 19 ] The lights then appeared to wink out as they fell behind the Sierra Estrella, a mountain range to the southwest of Phoenix.

  A Maryland Air National Guard pilot, Lt. Col. Ed Jones, responding to a March 2007 media query, confirmed that he had flown one of the aircraft in the formation that dropped flares on the night in question. [ 19 ] The squadron to which he belonged was in fact at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona on a training exercise at the time and flew training sorties to the Barry Goldwater Range on the night in question, according to the Maryland Air National Guard. A history of the Maryland Air National Guard published in 2000 asserted that the squadron, the 104th Fighter Squadron, was responsible for the incident. [ 20 ] The first reports that members of the Maryland Air National Guard were responsible for the incident were published in The Arizona Republic newspaper in July 1997. [ 21 ]

  Military flares [ 22 ] [ 23 ] such as these can be seen from hundreds of miles given ideal environmental conditions. Later comparisons with known military flare drops were reported on local television stations, showing similarities between the known military flare drops and the Phoenix Lights. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] An analysis of the luminosity of LUU-2B/B illumination flares, the type which would have been in use by A-10 aircraft at the time, determined that the luminosity of such flares at a range of approximately 50–70 miles would fall well within the range of the lights viewed from Phoenix. [ 17 ]
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  43

  Question for you atheists...

  by MrFreeze in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  or agnostics too.

  are you open about your beliefs (or lack thereof i should say)?

  when people talk about anything religious, do you mention that you don't believe in god?

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  JonathanH

  I do not, unless it is in company I am very comfortable with. I live in Kentucky and it is surprising and saddening how many good ordinary people, people that you would sit and have drinks or share a meal and some laughs with, will very suddenly start complaining about faggots or towel heads or beaners. I have any number of co-workers or class mates in college that are perfectly nice people, people I can joke around with, chat up, ect. But when they see a gay guy or a muslim or anybody that falls out of their social norms, they reveal that there is still significant prejudice in the south. If they openly have that much disdain for gays or people from other religions, and sometimes even ethnic groups, I can only assume "Atheist" fits into their wheelhouse of prejudices. The only people I have openly admitted to being an atheist to were a teacher from south africa, an agnostic class mate, an atheist class mate that brought it up first, and a professor who was Bahai. Generally though, I just don't reveal any information about my beliefs.
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  49

  MsGrowingGirl20 is no longer one of......

  by MsGrowingGirl20 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i am no longer one of jehovah's witnesses(well mentally that is)---however i am a christian...i recently started reading different translations from www.biblegateway.com...jesus is so different to how the jw's teach....and god...i mean, i still am learning and confused about certain things but i am in love with them.... it's obvious that the jw's are not an organization of god.i don't think god is working through an organization but through individuals...however i am going to speak to an elder tomorrow about my issues---all of them---and i'm going to tell him everything--what i've been reading,where i got it from---everything!!

  i'm not hiding anything!

  i have done no wrong....i just want to be a true christian and if they disfellowship me for seeking answers then this is not where i need to be.

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  JonathanH

  Good for you, prepare for the worst, then for the best, because you'll be free.
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  7

  The Long Island RR Massacre - does it relate to Trevon Martin.

  by james_woods in

  1. social
  2. current

  i was just posting on the trevon thread when ironically i noticed that the tv was on id channel and the colin ferguson shooting of 25 commuter train passengers in 1993.. he was a black man who at first claimed "black rage" against whites, then later said he did not do it, etc.

  etc.. he fired his defense attorney, and then put on one of the most delusional shows in a capital murder trial ever seen.

  speaking in the third person, he actually put on a pretty good stage show for "the defendent".. one sad detail was that almost all of the surviving wounded passengers testified against him, and were then cross-examined by the madman who shot them in the first place.. he was, of course, found guilty of multiple homicides.

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  JonathanH

  It sucks being white, always having to put up with this discremination.
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  43

  Chronology of George Zimmerman

  by Terry in

  1. social
  2. current

  business insider put together some chronological bullet points highlighting the articles most important points:.

  zimmerman grew up in a mixed-race householdhe was an altar boy at his caltholic church from age 7-17he is bilingualafter he finished high school, he studied for and got an insurance licensein 2004, zimmerman and a black friend opened an allstate insurance office (which soon failed)zimmermans 2005 arrest for resisting arrest, violence, and battery of an officer occurred after he shoved an under-cover alcohol control agent at a bar when the agent was trying to arrest an underage friend of hiszimmerman married his wife, shellie, in 2007. they rented a house in twin lakes.

  twin lakes is about 50% white, 20% hispanic, and 20% black.in 2009, zimmerman enrolled in seminole state collegein the fall of 2009, a pit bull broke free twice and once cornered shellie in the zimmermans yard.

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  JonathanH

  If treyvon attacked zimmerman first (and I don't know that he did), why did he do it? If zimmerman goes completely free, then that it an admission that he did absolutely nothing wrong, and getting shot was Treyvon's own damn fault and he had it coming. I don't think Zimmerman is some ragin racist, but he was absolutely in the wrong for taking a gun and pursuing some random kid. If I knew some guy was following me, and I was un-armed, and I felt confident enough that he intended me harm, and I didn't know if he was armed or not, and was he bigger than me, I may very well try to pre-emptively attack him, because I'm fucked if he attacks first. Saying that this was all treyvon's fault and zimmerman doesn't deserve to be blamed at all for Treyvon's death isn't anymore balanced than saying Zimmerman is a black hating racist.

  Even with the timeline, doing anything more than calling the police is stupid and reckless action, and doesn't deserve to be called "self defense." Following people around at night, carrying a gun, is always a bad idea.
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  32

  Watchtower threatens to sue their own

  by blond-moment in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  examining the scriptures daily.

  interesting.

  .

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  JonathanH

  That's not very smart on their part. It seems like a pretty innocuous site, it doesn't editorialize or have a chat area, it was just a site where you could access the daily text online. The society's demand that it be taken down or they will sue the site owners didn't benefit them in any way. Because of that we've added a person or two more to our ranks, and the site owners may have planted some seeds of doubt in whatever reader base they may have had with their farewell parting shot. The society's legalistic ways are only going to hurt them going forward, and it's only going to hurt them in the industrialized nations that pay their bills. You can only clamp down so hard before the majority say "fuck you" and leave.
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  8

  Marvel and Dc heroes are so much better than Biblical heroes

  by Star tiger in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  who do the public believe in more fictional heroes or fictional heroes!.

  welcome your comments,.

  my personal favourite wolverine!.

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  JonathanH

  
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  71

  This is making the witness email rounds...Anyone believe them?

  by Botzwana in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  does jehovah know what is going on, and does he help?.

  (as told by bro.

  spangenberg, c.o.

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  JonathanH

  The first one makes me wonder why the big J man didn't save that one brother. I mean if he could make the bomb roll back, couldn't he just, you know, prevent the bomb from going off? God works in mysterious ways....And god struck some guy with lightning? Really god? That's your solution? Why not have him just lose the list? Or miraculously have the note say "nah ah ah, it's a secret!" Or just have the guy become a witness? But no, execution was the proper way to handle that.
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  186

  Questions From Thinkers

  by Perry in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  how do you explain david's graphic portrayal of jesus' death by crucifixion (psalm 22) 1000 years before christ lived?.

  how do you account for the odds (1 in 10 to the 157th power) that even just 48 (of 300) old testament prophecies were fulfilled in jesus christ?.

  in what sense was jesus a "good man" if he was lying in his claim to be god?.

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  JonathanH

  To repost Mr. Falcon

  To quote what Hitchens said to Hannity: "You strike me as someone who has read absolutely none of the arguments against your case."

  Alright Perry, here is my challenge to you. Take that first post of yours, and one by one answer every question from the standpoint of an atheist, answer it again from the standpoint of a liberal christian that doesn't take the bible as being the divine word of god but a set of myths man wrote to try to understand the divine, and then answer it one more time from the perspective of any eastern style religion such as Hinduism, or Buddhism.

  You ask these questions as if they are tough "gotcha" questions that everyone with a view different from your stumbles and fumbles and can't come up with an answer to, when the reality is answers to most of those have been around for hundreds or even thousands of years. What you need to do is think about those answers. If you don't know those answers then you need to find them. Otherwise you are just willfully ignorant, and there are few things worse in life than being willfully ignorant.

  My challenge above, I mean as a serious one. Repost your post, and respond to your own questions. Do so earnestly, not in some condoscending and snide way, but an earnest way. To be able to perform genuine analysis on something is to be able to look at it honestly from perspectives other than you own. Can you analyze your own questions? Or do you even want to?

  Repost your first post again, and one by one answer your own questions from a different perspective, and do so as if you were trying to convince us that the answers given are correct or plausible. If you can't do this, then you do not deserve to have this discussion with anyone here.