This is not unusual for strong believers in most religions.
Jesus referred to people who stray as lost sheep.
The apostle John called those that stray - Antichrist.
scotoma
JoinedPosts by scotoma
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71
My mom and dad told me that I'm an apostate and that they want to 'limit their association' with me!!!
by Joliette ina series of events led up to an arugment with my parents last night.
my mom and dad told me that they found my videos that i was doing on youtube, and they told me that i was an apostate.
they said that they would help me if it was an emergency, but other then that, they didnt want anything to do with me.
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Is Field Service really a Commandment?
by Quarterback inheard something strange last week.
a speaker in the congregation said that you must preach.
he stated that this is a commandment.
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scotoma
Quarterback:
That's not what that scripture (James 3:1) applies to. James (or whoever wrote that) is really promoting the development of a clergy class. He's saying that you shouldn't have a dozen overseers in a congregation.
This scripture is similar: 2Tim 4:3 "in accord with their own desires, they will accumulate teachers for themselves to have their ears tickled."
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How Will The WTS Society Look In The Year 2030? How Will They Explain Why The Generation Is Now 116 Years Old?
by AvocadoJake inimagine you are here in the year 2030 and nothing has happened?
how will field service be carried out?
will meetings still be at kingdom halls or will halls be used via skype?
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scotoma
It is hard enough to imagine what the world in general will look like in 18 years.
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Elderelite where is audio from zone meeting that you promise ...
by obarac inyou promise us audio from zone meeting.
you change your mind?.
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scotoma
Nothing of importance was said.
Just a bunch of doctored statistics based on the fallacy of confusing "increase" with "rate of increase".
They always say the numbers are accelerating.
Acceleration does not mean moving fast or growing or getting larger. It is a derivative of rate of speed over time.
Adding more and more people every year must be looked at as a percentage.
If JW's add 200,000 members every year it is roughly a 3% increase. It is a large number? Compared to what? Oh yeah 7,000,000.
It's just like interest on a bank account will keep adding larger sums each year even though the interest doesn't change.
Acceleration means an increase in the percentage of increase over time.
In reality JW's have been DE-celerating. It is almost possible to predict a time when they will steadily lose more members than they can add until they virtually disappear.
They mistakenly apply the scripture Isaiah 60:22 "I myself Jehovah shall speed it up in its own time" to this process.
All of these pep meetings are built around this fallacy. Number of Kingdom Halls built, New Assembly Halls, Number of Bibles printed etc.
What I've heard about the zone meeting is just warmed over annual corporate meeting.
Selected ones are invited to "reward" the Diamond Distributors.
My point is don't even bother posting it.
Just give a summary of what was NEW or DIFFERENT.
Save us some time.
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scotoma
Religion is a necessary stage in cultural evolution. It functions as a placeholder. It is a natural outgrowth of clan morality that allows humans to form large groups with a lot of specialization. The next step is for society to understand evolution and use it as a tool. But to do that they have to move away from religion and nationalism. It would be nice if humans could get rid of religion and nationalism gradually. But it is more likely that it will be a catastrophic change midwifed by nuclear war.
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Liberal Christians and Conservative Christians---The Inescapable Quandries
by mankkeli init seems to me that whether you are a liberal christian (for purposes of this discussion, one who believes that the bible isn't the inerrant word of god) or a conservative christian (for purposes of this discussion one who believes that the bible is the inerrant word of god), you have quandries that make your faiths untenable.
interestingly, these quandries are based on logical premises that each group of christians maintain, premises which are reasonable.. .
the christian who believes that the bible is inerrant has the logical premise that a god who wanted man to know him and understand his commands would give him a book that accurately reflects his nature and commands.
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scotoma
Tec: When I speak of science I am referring to evidence based information. The claim for some omnipotent/omnicient everlasting "person" can never be proven because there is no way you can be sure the "person" you are researching is the one that knows everything and can do anything.
If there were a devil and he made the claim that he was the almighty all-knowing God would it be possibile for him to perofrm powerful demonstrations of that fact? Even God couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was the top God and that there isn't another more powerful god.
It is scientifically possible to believe in evolved organisms arranged in a hierarchy of knowledge, intelligence, technology. You can get there by evolution just as we got here by evolution. So it is conceivable that there MAY be sentient beings that feel an affinity toward our species. Of course this is science fiction which consist of scenarios that at least have a scientific base.
Everything in the bible is pre-scientific. Those ideas didn't change the human condition for thousands (actually hundreds of thousands) of year. The scientific era has just barely begun and has allowed billions of people to live a better longer healthier life. The parts of the world that are locked in the prescientific religious mode suffer the most.
I still assert that at best Jesus is an abstraction at this point in time. There is no evidence outside the loosely collected writings of a cultish offshoot of Judaism.
However, if you abandon the "magic" of Jesus you might even conceive of him as an alien inplant to move humans past the destructive idea of nationalism. The most important message that Jesus seems to have left is that his Kingdom was the Sky Kingdom and was no part of this world. Unfortunately, the only ones who seem to have really made an effort to be free of nationalism is Jehovah's Witnesses.
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Liberal Christians and Conservative Christians---The Inescapable Quandries
by mankkeli init seems to me that whether you are a liberal christian (for purposes of this discussion, one who believes that the bible isn't the inerrant word of god) or a conservative christian (for purposes of this discussion one who believes that the bible is the inerrant word of god), you have quandries that make your faiths untenable.
interestingly, these quandries are based on logical premises that each group of christians maintain, premises which are reasonable.. .
the christian who believes that the bible is inerrant has the logical premise that a god who wanted man to know him and understand his commands would give him a book that accurately reflects his nature and commands.
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scotoma
Tec:
Unfortunately, your whole concept of Christ is simply an archetype of "good". There is no proof of what Christ actually said. Islam looks at Mohammed as the "good". You are primarily a Christian because you were raised in Christendom.
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Liberal Christians and Conservative Christians---The Inescapable Quandries
by mankkeli init seems to me that whether you are a liberal christian (for purposes of this discussion, one who believes that the bible isn't the inerrant word of god) or a conservative christian (for purposes of this discussion one who believes that the bible is the inerrant word of god), you have quandries that make your faiths untenable.
interestingly, these quandries are based on logical premises that each group of christians maintain, premises which are reasonable.. .
the christian who believes that the bible is inerrant has the logical premise that a god who wanted man to know him and understand his commands would give him a book that accurately reflects his nature and commands.
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scotoma
Tammy,
There is no way a human could possibly determine if some entity had achieved all-knowing without being all knowing themselves. And if an all-knowing (omniscient) entity needed to investigate another entity to determine if it were all-knowing then it wouldn't really be all knowing since it didn't know whether the entity it was investigating was all-knowing.
Therefore, the only thing scientists could determine is if an entity had super human knowledge.
It's kind of like systems used to predict stock prices. They work until they don't.
The fact that humans have been suffering horrendously throughout history suggests that at best those super human watchers that may be looking over mankind can't really do much to change things.
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Liberal Christians and Conservative Christians---The Inescapable Quandries
by mankkeli init seems to me that whether you are a liberal christian (for purposes of this discussion, one who believes that the bible isn't the inerrant word of god) or a conservative christian (for purposes of this discussion one who believes that the bible is the inerrant word of god), you have quandries that make your faiths untenable.
interestingly, these quandries are based on logical premises that each group of christians maintain, premises which are reasonable.. .
the christian who believes that the bible is inerrant has the logical premise that a god who wanted man to know him and understand his commands would give him a book that accurately reflects his nature and commands.
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scotoma
Another quandry is to believe that some of the Bible is true and some of it is false. You then have to sort out several problems.
What are your criteria for saying something is truth?
Why would an omnipotent and omniscient being mix truth and lie together thus confounding a simple understanding of his intentions?
The Bible appears to be such a mix.
Or do you achieve the greatest coherence by believing that this "being" is quasipotent and quasiscient.
If this is the case we are not talking about God as western man imagines but something higher by some degree than humans.
Might there be such beings? Science would agree that there is a greater probability of advanced beings in the multiverse than there is of God.
If there are such beings it would explain how there could be a "revered" collection of stories, history, prophecy, that would form a "medium" for the propagation of certain "memes" that might organize humans for growth and survival with a minimum interference in their natural cultural evolution.
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JW leadership vacuum - explained!
by sir82 injw leadership shows an appalling lack of creativty and originality.. -- meeting attendance down across the board?
let's keep the same 1940's format anyway!.
-- missionaries quitting their assignments?
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scotoma
I had a conversation with Karl Klein once when he was visiting my parents.
He was presiding over the governeing body at the time.
Out of the clear blue he came out with this statement "there are no more giants".
Of course he wanted someone to ask him what he meant, so I obliged.
He said, "There was Russell, Rutheford and Knorr. But now things are run by a governing body."
I didn't know where he was going with this so I asked "who killed off the giants". I was trying to get him to talk about the coup d tat that took place.
Then he said about himself (which is what he really wanted to talk about) "Right now I have the most important positions on earth - presiding over the governing body. But somehow it doesn't feel that important."
That was how everyone felt after power was removed from single individuals and split up among committees. A committe leader has to defer to consensus.
Russell was a wealthy freaky weirdo. Rutheford was a creepy woman hating pleasure seeking alcoholic. Knorr looked and acted like Lee Iacocca. They all were wrong but they were at least able to provide leadership. They are still wrong but leaderless. They want to tack but they have no rudder.