Posts by JonathanH

30

How to remain sane while being a hypocrite?

by Kensho in

as time goes on i find it a real challenge to keep my sanity while still in "the truth" especially after considering all the rsearch i have been doing about the org.

that i have been very active in for almost 4 decades.

i have managed to be removed as an elder while staying in good standing (prayers-reading,mic carring etc.

JonathanH

I couldn't. I lasted for all of a few months after I realized I had been raised to believe in a cult. And those months drove me crazy.

37

Why doesn't the Watchtower have official video responses to critical Youtube videos?

by sabastious in

youtube has the wonderful functionality of video responses.

i have seen jw members provide some responses and even then not very many.

why hasn't the watchtower utilized this functionality and offer offical responses to their accusers?.

JonathanH

You raise an interesting question. I mean the obvious aside that they would get their asses kicked if they tried, but from their perspective why wouldn't they? Interesting thought.

I fully believe that the GB or at least most of it's members are kool-aid drinkers themselves. They buy the shpeel they put forth. But one big thing I think is that this generation of the GB are no longer biblical scholars of any sort, they are watchtower scholars. They have no idea what the bible says in any scholarly way, they only know what the watchtower has been saying the bible says. Part of the WT line for the past several decades has been to not engage in debate, avoid it at all costs. Do not argue with somebody, if they want to argue forget it, move on. And I think at this point they don't care about the theological accuracy of what they believe, because they are kool-aid drinkers themselves and not biblical scholars. Just like the cult members they control, they don't believe it because it makes sense, they believe it because they think they are chosen. Whether or not what they believe is accurate or true is of secondary importance, so why bother arguing with people that are going to try and argue that what you're teaching isn't true? I think they've given themselves permission to ignore the world and focus only on keeping the flock obedient to them, which in their mind is what is actually important. Was it Fred Franz that said in court that it didn't matter if their prophecies were true, or their teachings were true, it only mattered that everybody followed him in lock step like a marching army? That's the governing body view now I think. It doesn't matter if they are right, it only matters that they are obeyed because they are chosen, and publicly debating wouldn't accomplish that goal. It's some pretty stout kool-aid.

73

Is it the only True religion?

by cupcakekourtney88 in

jw
friends

like the question is jehovah witness the true religion?

is all others false, what do yall think?.

i am confuse and just wanting to know others thoughts??

JonathanH

My apologies won't leave for thinking you were a witness. I must have subliminally picked that up from your name, and your attempt at defending the garden of eden story as sensical.

A united world of any peaceful belief system would make the world a great place, especially if you use the "no true scottsman" fallacy. It's not the christians that do bad things, it's the people pretending to be christians. True christians don't make the world a bad place. If you asked a muslim, or a hindu or a jew you would get the same answer. It's not muslims that are making the middle east chaotic. It's people pretending to be muslims. True muslims are peace loving, and selfless. Works with political ideoligies too. True communism would make the world a great place, and if a communist regime does poorly, it's not true communism. That's the thing about idealism, any ideal will work as long as it's ideal.

"I reject your model because it precludes free will. If there is no free will then all is fore-ordained and pointless; not to mention unscriptural."

And that's where reason breaks down. You reject my model because you don't like the conclusion. Dismissing a logical model that demonstrates a flaw with a belief system on the grounds that it doesn't agree with he belief system is to put the cart before the horse, to make a postulate an axiom and then use it to gauge any proofs or disproofs for that postulate is circular. My brother was the same way. He couldn't find a logical or reasonable way to make the bible make sense, to justify genocide, to reconcile pre-meditated mass murder with the ideal being of love, of fairy tales of giant boats and floods, but didn't want to live in a world where there was no omnipotent being that embodied love. And so he continued to believe the witnesses. Dealing with the conclusion wasn't something he could do.

You said scientists are people too, and look for proofs of their pet theories. This is known as confirmation bias, something the scientific method was developed to correct for. Confirmation bias is when you pay special attention to things that confirm what you believe, but ignore or toss out things that contradict what you believe. Such as rejecting a model, not because you can show how it's wrong, but because it doesn't agree with what you believe already.

Also, it's not that I believe that there are infinite universes, what I was talking about in Briane Greene's book was IF the universe was infinite, which was merely for illustrative purposes. For the purposes of the theology I was discussing an infinite number of universes is unneccessary because infinite time is required for what god proposes to do.

77

On Human Evolution

by TD in

jw
friends

it's a subject that comes up fairly often here (understandably) and very strong opinions are expressed.

much of the discussion seems to be counterproductive.. i'd like to propose a different approach.

we all know what each other's conclusions are (or at least we should by now).

JonathanH

This is essentially a tactic I took with my brother, to which he had no reply but to nod his head and say "interesting" which is just code for "my witness training is kicking in and I'm actively not thinking about this anymore."

I asked him what is the dog part of the dog genome? He accepts that we can manipulate a dog's genes through selective breeding as evidenced by the fact that from wolves we have bred miniature poodles and Mastiffs. But what part of the gene would have to change before you no longer accepted it as a dog? Where is the "dog" gene that seperates it's kind from other kinds?

Of course the answer to that is obvious to those that took any courses in biology or genetics. There isn't one. A species diverges (or rather a speciation event occurs) not because some essential part of their gene changes, but because a large enough portion of their genes have changed that they can't succesffully produce offspring anymore, and due to sexual selection, they probably wouldn't try to anyway.

But taxonomy while having a function in biology, is from a pragmatic standpoint just a human invention to catagorize things we see a relationship in. If you travelled back in time five thousand years and showed somebody a french bulldog, do you really think they would make the connection that this thing is in fact of the same "kind" (whatever that means) as the vicious pack hunters that they were gradually bred from? Or would they think that this snorting, short, stocky, boxy shaped animal is just another wierd creature that they've never seen before? There is no such thing as "kind", there is no "dog gene" that makes a dog a dog, and not some other animal that is part of a different "kind". We mistake taxanomy which is simply catagorizing things that are similar (and today they are catagorized by evolutionary and genetic lineages, and not simple morphological similarity as ancient people would've done), as concrete lines seperating one thing from another. They are not. Life is just blending shades of grey.

17

Free College Lectures

by Justitia Themis in

jw
friends

i know there are many people on this discussion board who love learning, so i thought i would share this link i received from my undergrad university.. it will take you to a series of lectures at the school that were videotaped, and some look quite interesting.

best of all, you can watch them for free.

http://uwtv.org/video/series.aspx?id=1549959929.

JonathanH

http://www.youtube.com/education?b=400

Youtube has an entire section of their site dedicated to compliling university lectures.

I also would like to list http://www.khanacademy.org/ for it's amazing suite of teaching tools and lectures. Right now it focuses mainly on math but with some other series on biology, economics, and cosmology. It's a fantastic resource for people that love learning, especially if they need to bone up on some trigonometry or more advanced algebra.

One of the biggest crimes the society commits against it's members is stunting their curiosity by telling them they already have all the answers they need, that academics is a waste of time, and much of it a product of satan. Curiosity sustains us.

73

Is it the only True religion?

by cupcakekourtney88 in

jw
friends

like the question is jehovah witness the true religion?

is all others false, what do yall think?.

i am confuse and just wanting to know others thoughts??

JonathanH

My apologies for being belittling but I am used to dealing with a religion that specifically instructs it's members to hate me "as david hated god's enemies", are openly willing to call me a fool seeing as how "There is no god so says the fool", and openly insist that I must not have a shred of morality sense I do not ascribe the bible's insane version of morality or human's very selective version of what the bible says morality is. My post that I copied was in response to a witness insisting that everyone here is an enemy of god that is going to be killed very very soon, and that we deserve it. Rabidness begets rabidness.

And you simply avoided answering anything by insisting that my statistical model is flawed. Even if it is my point still stands that god was already aware of the occurance because the probability favors it heavily, if not determines it inevitable. But as for my model, in Briane Green's newest book "hidden realities" in which he's discussing alternate realities in the face of a possibly infinite universe he points out what the actual finite number of possible particle configurations there are in our visible universe. It's something in the magnitude of ten to the tenth to the one hundred and twenty second (which is to say, take a 1, put 122 zeroes behind it, now take that number and put that many zeroes behind a 1, and that's the number of possible configurations) and that's how many different particle configurations there are in our part of the universe. If the universe is infinitely stretching out beyond what we can see, that means that every possible configuration exists somewhere, by definition they would have to. But if you don't need infinite space if you have infinite time, anything that is possible will happen given an infinite period of time, if it doesn't happen then by definition it's not possible. That doesn't mean a tree will sprout puppies given enough time, it might who know how trees would evolve given an infinite period of time, but the point is if it didn't sprout puppies given eternity, then it is not possible for it to sprout puppies.

If somebody has the ability to disobey god, and it's possible for them to do so, they will. It may take five hundred trillion years, but it would happen. If it didn't, then it couldn't be said to be possible. To say something is possible is to say that there is a chance of it happening, whatever probability that may be, it does have a certain probability of occuring. Given a long enough time line the probability of any event no matter how infinitesimal it may be becomes 1. If it does not occur then it cannot be said to have a chance of occuring, it had a zero probability of occuring. God had to know that mankind was going to disobey him. Which means his plan from the beginning was eventually to simply kill anything that disagreed with him, which is to say his form of free will was an illusion. Anything that chooses to disobey ceases to exist, which is to say nobody exists that disobeys him, meaning it is impossible for there to exist someone disobeying him. At least when his "plan" is complete.

But then there is the other things I brought up. Why is mass genocide preferable to a peaceful cultural victory? Wouldn't Pacifism, medicine, advanced agriculture, math and philosophy set his nation apart more than mass murder of civilians and children like every other barbaric ancient nation did? Is mass murder of dissenters ever a "good" solution, or merely a dictator's pragmatic solution?

Or how about the claim that god-beings are beyond comprehension or understanding, or criticism and how that makes any religious belief moot especially once they introduce deceptive god-beings? How could you ever show a religion to be true if there is a super intelligent creature out their that is actively attempting to deceive you? Any religion could be part of his trap, and you couldn't use reason or emotion to prove one over the other seeing as how he could easily trick you manipulating those very things. If reason and understanding are off the table, then Jehovah's Witnesses could be a trap to mislead set up by some devil, and you'd never know it. Given that it makes mass murder and even more arbitrary punishment.

To simply dismiss those as straw men is an attempt to avoid answering the questions, and neither of those had anything to do with statistics.

19

Skeptic/Major Physicist Validates 'Cold Fusion'

by metatron in

jw
friends

http://pesn.com/2011/04/07/9501805_rossi_cold_fusion_validated_by_swedish_skeptics_society/.

the bone head media keep ignoring a continuing story that could change the world profoundly!

economics, politics, environmentalism, the middle east...... everything!.

JonathanH

If there is money to be made by it, then it won't be ignored. If no business is willing to make trillions off of it, then it doesn't work. Capitalism will make sure that engineering that works better than what we have will be used.

73

Is it the only True religion?

by cupcakekourtney88 in

jw
friends

like the question is jehovah witness the true religion?

is all others false, what do yall think?.

i am confuse and just wanting to know others thoughts??

JonathanH

Actually, I'll just quote my other post, Won'tleave. More thorough.

"Alright, kjw53, let's play this game of god's philosophy. First, we'll just assume for the sake of argument that Eden is literal, the whole thing with the snake and apple, and ect was literal. We'll take your belief at face value and get all socratic on them, we'll dissect them and follow them to their conclusions.

So you have god, he has given "free will" to humans to choose whether or not they will obey him. For reasons that aren't important for the moment they choose not to. God says "ok, that's fine. I will let you do that for a time to show you how much you do need me." First of all this conflict was inevitable. If man was meant to live forever and he had two choices, infinite time+finite choices=every choice will be made. Given long enough somebody was going to say "Hey, what if I don't want to obey you?". That is simple logic that anyone with any background in math will tell you, so surely god was aware that at some point this question was going to come up. So he had to have had a plan before he even made mankind, lest he be a pretty dim god without even a collegiate level of understanding probability and statistics. So you have a god knowing for a fact that he would be disobeyed, what is his plan? Repeatedly tell everyone how awesome he is and murder everyone that disagrees. Infinite time, wisdom and justice and this is the genius plan that is hatched?

Now let's think about that for a second. It's inevitable that people will decide not to obey him, or disagree with him. Given that a statistical portion of the population will do so for certain, why is his method of dealing with this to kill them all in armaggeddon, or the genocides of the old testament? If you are a loving god that knows each individual in the womb before they are even born, numbering the hairs on the heads of every person, why is murderous intent the default punishment for an action that is certain to happen based on the design you gave them? No better more just or fair plan could be hatched?

How about this, just as a hypothetical that would work without the gross injustice of punishing people for doing that you deigned them to do. How about create a second planet far far away. Not as nice as his "perfect earth" but habitable. Earth was his crown jewel, and if you want to worship at his feet you can live on his crown jewel with the benefits of everlasting life and freedom from sin, but you have to obey him absolutely, you cannot in anyway question his ways, disagree or disobey. But if you want freedom to know good and bad, as inevitably some will, you can live somewhere else away from god's people never to influence them or interact with them in anyway. You can have whatever world of war, famine and death and whatever your sin brings, it's your choice. Now this would be a far more just answer because he knows that a majority of people will want to live free rather than under him, and to kill them for a choice he designed them to be able to make is absurdist. It's like telling an early american slave that they aren't really slaves because they have the freedom to go where ever they want but you will shoot them in the head if they don't want to go to the cotton field and pick you some damn cotton.

Now I know your thought ending platitude of a response to all of this "You can't question god's ways, because he is perfect and god and you are just a lowly human!" But let's think about that for a second. That can be used to justify anything anyone who claims supernaturalhood does. We can't say that the muslim version of god (Allah) is wrong either. Anything he tells his people to do, you cannot question because he is allah and you are but a pitiful human. Same goes for Vishnu, zeuss and yes, even Satan. It justifies anything any god does, because you can't call it into question. Really it is a plead of ignorance, which is just a means of excusing yourself from having to think about anything. Which sounds perfectly sane and great to you, but think about if somebody else does it. Say you want to reason at the door with a bible study who is muslim, and you can't because anything you say is from the pitiful perspective of a speck of dust, and your feeble imperfect attempts at interpreting god's word and the muslim knows that Allah is perfect and it isn't for you to question his ways. It's an inpenatrable way of thinking, or rather not thinking. (To add to this, it also means any body of any religion can say that you have been tricked by the devil. I mean after all the devil is waaaay smarter than you, how would you know if he had tricked you? I mean you think he tricked everybody but you. Combining epistimilogical nihilism with such certainty is a contradiction of terms.)

(back on topic) But let's think about that from God's perspective. You want to convince people that you are the icon of love, justice, wisdom, and power and your method of doing that is to act in a completely obtuse way so that any human being willing to think about his actions and draw parallels to their own experiences will simply say "WTF?" and spend 2000 years of theology and philosophy trying to explain why it's ok for him to murder children by the tens of thousands who didn't even know they were doing anything wrong (think egypt), or commit mass genocide and murder his own people for what appear to be completely bizarre and capricious reasons. Wouldn't it make more sense to act in such a way that everyone on the planet paying attention can say "Wow, that is clearly a beacon of justice and wisdom. I am in awe of how wise his decisions are!" Or would you make a law that a rape victim has to marry her rapist as long as he can afford to pay a bride price (Deuteronomy 22:28-39), and then let humans scratch their heads for thousands of years before shrugging their shoulders and saying "I guess so? I mean he's god." No you would expect that a god of wisdom that understands his creation will make sure that he at least doesn't act in a self defeating way, that is to say act in a way that makes it appear that he is the opposite of what he describes himself to be. (for instance, instead of having the israelites commit mass murder time and time again in order to take land from countries that were there minding their own business, how about having his people terraform a nice piece of desert, and give them advanced mathematics and penicillin, you know, something that would set them apart from the other violent, racist hordes killing for their gods?)

But now let's jump ahead to the new system. He has now murdered billions of people for an action he knew they would take, not because he peeked into the future, but because it's simple logic, and not only has he killed everyone that disagreed with him, pretty much the entire planet disagreed with him, and mind you he didn't hold an open court with humanity so that we could debate the merits of infanticide and some of the murkier aspects of mass murder of your own creation, but rather simply said "today is the day that I kill everyone that didn't care much for those magazines that I did not personally have a hand in, but gave tacit approval of by not really saying or doing anything, but still if you read between the lines it was pretty clear (to some anyway) that I was ok with that particular brand of magazine that was being passed out door to door by a non descript group", so yeah he just up and kills everyone without so much as a chance for them to question the merits of being killed, or if that's the right thing to do, and satan was released after a thousand years to give more fodder to god for decisions he knew that a statistical portion would make, and now the survivors of his second world wide murder spree are having picnics in a petting zoo for all eternity with the unpleasant memories of the previous system gone, erased by god....with free will to obey god or not. But what did we say in the beginning about eternity+binary choices? That's right, sooner or later somebody is going to choose option "B", and what happens next? God kills them for not choosing option "A". So now you are on a plantation with a dictator saying "You have free will, but if you don't want to have a picnic in the petting zoo, I will shoot you in the head." Which means it is now literally impossible to for someone to choose "B", because choice "B" immediately results in termination, lack of existence. A person cannot be said to have chosen "B" because that person does not exist. Which means you can only obey, you can only choose option "A" there is no longer a binary choice, there is no choice.

His big solution in the end was just to elimate free will. Create happy automatons who don't even remember a time when there was free will.

Yeah, great theology. Air tight, makes perfect sense. Good luck with that.

73

Is it the only True religion?

by cupcakekourtney88 in

jw
friends

like the question is jehovah witness the true religion?

is all others false, what do yall think?.

i am confuse and just wanting to know others thoughts??

JonathanH

Your god is a bath mathematician "won'tleave". You would think something that wise would've taken a course in statistics and probability at some point. Given an infinite amount of time and a finite number of choices, every choice will be made (no matter how unlikely that choice may be). If Adam and Eve were to live forever, and they had two choices, obey or disobey, sooner or later they would disobey. God had to know going in that Adam and Even would inevitably reject him, and so would any other being that exists. But If you have an infinite amount of time and something does not occur, then it is not possible for it to occur. So if a human that lived forever never rejected god, then that person could not be said to have free will. God doesn't have to peer into the future in order to realize the inevitibility of his design.

I already wrote about this in length in another topic, the JW there did nothing to try and refute it. I'll give you a crack at some theology. The thinking may do you some good.

25

Belief does not define character

by Nickolas in

jw
friends

have you ever wondered how there could be so many pedophiles and other miscreants who are jehovah's witnesses, who claim to be the chosen people of god and who profess and honour christian morals?

you could ask the same question of the roman catholic clergy and the staff of protestant run orphanages.

the vast majority of jehovah's witnesses, catholic priests and protestant orphanage staff are not miscreants, but they share something in common with their despicable bretheren and that is they believe the same thing.

JonathanH

I agree. I prefer to be more of a consequentialist, that is to say I care less about what people think than what they do. Which is not without it's faults, because the conventional wisdom is that people act on their beliefs, "out of the heart's abundance the mouth speaks" or something to that effect. But i think much of what people believe they believe out of inexperience, ignorance, or convenience, and wouldn't necessarily act on the things they claim to believe.

For example a Catholic or JW can claim to believe that children should be protected, and fornication is wrong but there will be those that act in such a way so as to disobey both of their beliefs and molest a child. But the opposite side of that is there are millions of JWs that say that their child shouldn't get a blood transfusion because it would anger god, but if their child's life were on the line what percentage of them do you think would say "give them the transfusion, and I will deal with the consequences"? I don't have hard data for that, but my faith in humanity leads me to believe that there would be a significant portion willing to save their child's life than perform child sacrifice.

We would all like to say we know how would behave in a given situation based on our convictions and beliefs, but many of our convictions are held because they have not been tested, and even if we still hold them, to err is human. It takes strength, wisdom and determination to act in a way that is consistent with what we hold to be our convictions. Which is why I think action is a far better metric when determining character than merely what one holds to be true in one's mind.

But even then I think temporality must be taken into consideration. I don't think judgement of a person is ever possible. It would be easy for me for instance to judge my family for shunning me, or my friends for doing so. It is such an ignorant, unloving and insane action, what person in their right mind could do that? I could judge them as either being insane or despicable. But no more so than I was only a few years ago. I would've done the same in their position at a different time in my life. And who is to say that in a few years they won't will look back and regret their actions, just as I have done? So what am I to do? Grade on a curve, using myself as the metric? Judge them favorably during the period of time in which we were both shunning people, judge them harshly now, and then favorably later if they turn around? Or Judge us both harshly in hindsight, keep judging them harshly, and let myself off the hook since I have see the error of my ways? But perhaps in five years I will judge myself now harshly, and realize that based on things I'm doing now without even realizing it I am being hypocritical for judging them. From what standard do I have to speak ill of others? I can only live and let live, hoping that I am conscientious enough to realize what I am doing.

To that end, I just try to take people at face value. Keep company with those that I enjoy, and avoid those that hurt (be it by design, or accident). Attempt to avoid causing harm, and help when possible. That's all that can be done.