Posts by snare&racket

28

I Am Celebrating 6 Months' Sobriety Today

by agonus in

jw
friends

yay for me!.

please take a minute to visit my blog and leave your comments: benpogge.blogspot.com.

have a good one!.

snare&racket

Congratulations, firstly for being so open and accepting your battles and secondly for reaching 6 months.

Kudos to you x

43

this photograph from a news site is a succinct summary of a life in wt's hands....... look at their faces, it says it all.. also, note the watchtower pr machine in action, explaining that it brings 4 million dollars to the location.

(10,000 x 400 dollars) clearly a watchtower statistic, where is the care and interest for members who are struggling so much, with new videos encouraging less career activity, less work commitments, at an all time economic low for our generation.. http://www.standard-freeholder.com/2014/06/15/thousands-attend-watchtower-convention-in-cornwall.

father: "i'm a wt 'yes' man and proud of it!

snare&racket

Magwitch, we come from all areas of the globe from a multitude of cultures and backgrounds, but how potent the truth about 'the truth' is, when you canso accurately surmise all of our experiences in one pithy paragraph.

Well done, perfect. x

Those words are so true and so powerful, they really are the indicators of how lucky we are to be out of that vicious, life draining cult cycle.

Halleluthor!

40

Take a moment and look at it an entirely different way . . .

by Terry in

a transcendant being resides as a glob of cellular matter in a woman's body for nine months stitching together a human without the dna of a male human being.. the being is squeezed out of the vaginal canal of his host/mother and has to poop and piss on himself for a couple of years.

what is wrong with this picture?.

the consciousness of the fetus would be what, then?.

snare&racket

We have no problem being materialistic in our thinking with regard to animals...

They are born, they gain consciousness with life, limited by their physical faculties, then they die and cease to exist.

Only a human would ask 'Where was my mind before I existed!'

It is a GREAT question, because the question says more about us than the answer does. The answer also helps reality feel less severe and frightening. I was born in 1980, I fear death as much as I fear the year 1979.

10

Any Change In Your Donations Since Tithing Arrangement?

by jw07 in

has anyone who handles accounts noticed a change in the amount of donations coming in since the new tithing arrangement?

at my hall the number of usual donations are currently at around 1/4 of what they usually are for the past 2 weeks!

time for another local needs part on donations.

snare&racket

I never, ever donated any cash. I was a skint pioneer, bit aside from that part of me always felt like I didn't want to be duped, despite giving my youth away, dumb sod, I was super hesitant about donating.....I remember equating donations with a flashing thought of... 'if this is a con...'

I guess in truth I probably put in £20 max over my 24 ish years in the JW's. Thousands of pounds of work hours though.

I am very interested to see if this new arrangement spikes these feelings in others. BTW is this in operation in the UK yet?

25

JW Kids Who Lack Sincerity: Are You In The Flipping Truth Or Not?

by Apognophos in

did any of you know a jw youth who didn't seem to really even try to be sincere about the "truth"?

not someone who led a double life while pretending to be a goody-goody jw.

i mean the kind of kid who went to the meetings and did field service while making minimal effort at maintaining a pretense of being a true believer?.

snare&racket

The give away was the kingdom melodies, those kids NEVER sang a line lol.

Whilst sister 89yrs old imagines gods throne and its angels listening to her dodgy key of 'C', those kids knew it was bullshit, they were so EMBARASSED by the singing because they knew it was nothing more than kingdom hall karaoke.

I looked down on these kids at one time too, I used to think the same as you Apog. But then aged 24 (beyond my teeenage tantrums) I stopped doing talks, didn't want to do ministry, stopped singing, , stopped saying amen, went to my last assembly and felt like an alien...... I simply didn't believe it anymore, it all seemed so fake, so embarassing and I wanted no part of it no matter the consequence.

These kids were not bad human beings, they were not even bad kids. Bad kids don't rebel by having bedhair or not sing church hymns, bad kids shoot people, mug old ladies or deal drugs, bad kids joy ride in cars and hurt people. Let's keep it in context, they wore flashy cloathes and had their head down going door to door and at WORST said shit when you said sugar. I bet the kids you aree thinking of never even swore publicly...

Context....... Real world, Watchtower world....

As for the JW's that did all the answering up, field service, talks all whilst drinking, clubbing and messing around..... this is easily 9/10 JW teens. Even in bethel, it was all about poker, getting drunk on vodka and going to the salsa bar in Picadilly Circus for some dirty dancing.

89

99.9% Of a People Who Believe In Evolution Don't Understand It.

by Space Madness in

jw
friends

i never believed in evolution as i thought it didn't make sense and that what was proposed was simply impossible.

how could an environment alter an organism's dna?

as we can see however, bacteria cannot become resistance to antibiotics.

snare&racket

....and if you truly felt that Apog, you would pick up on the bucket of irony that is the scientific iliteracy that led to this thread being made.

Great Teacher.....then how come that textbook caused no misconception for me and everyone else that have taken the effort to read up on these topics? It is equivelant to being ignorant of rocket science, opening a textbook of rocket science to chapter 9 and complaining that the third paragraph doesn't make sense! Start with page 1 and you won't have misconceptions! This is basic schooling, a great teacher would know this.

Let me give another example....

Darwin Said "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree."

If you were looking to undermine and not understand, that sentence alone would suffice your effort and interest. However in context of his whole statement he then went on to say....

"Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."

Now your comment Grreag Teacher is equievelant of blaming Darwin not the reader, for having read the first quote out of context. If you think a textbook caused a misconception, but to everyone else it made sense, maybe there is a clue to the issue right under your nose....or right behind it.

89

99.9% Of a People Who Believe In Evolution Don't Understand It.

by Space Madness in

jw
friends

i never believed in evolution as i thought it didn't make sense and that what was proposed was simply impossible.

how could an environment alter an organism's dna?

as we can see however, bacteria cannot become resistance to antibiotics.

snare&racket

But apog, if you understood evolution you would know that response, be it mechanical or via thought is not how evolution works.

I said 'intent' because that was the context of SM argument. But if we change it to mechanical, it is still wrong if you have a basic understanding of evolution. The antibiotics do NOTHING to contribute to the formation of the RANDOM mutation.

The antibiotics are relevant to the natural selection of that mutation, because the antibiotic use is now a factor in the enviroment. To explain, Natural selection is a term that came from Darwin seeing human selective breeding on farms, mate two fat pigs and you get very fat piglets. Natural selection just means the enviroment, nature itself, does the selecting, instead of the farmer. So the antibiotic use is an alteration in the enviroment that makes the randomly mutated genes a useful thing, or a useless thing.

The important point the 'textbook' is making is that..... in no way is the DNA responding to the enviroment i.e. antibiotic use.

Imagine if I made a computer program to randomly type out letters continuously on a screen. Now, unbeknown to the computer program, everytime it randomly forms a word whilst randomly outputting letters, I will note down the word formed and keep a list of all the words made.Any words formed by the computer are formed at random still, they are in no way responding to me looking for them to exist.

Do you see the analogy?

25

JW Kids Who Lack Sincerity: Are You In The Flipping Truth Or Not?

by Apognophos in

did any of you know a jw youth who didn't seem to really even try to be sincere about the "truth"?

not someone who led a double life while pretending to be a goody-goody jw.

i mean the kind of kid who went to the meetings and did field service while making minimal effort at maintaining a pretense of being a true believer?.

snare&racket

The rules used to be very clear, you could not progress in the cong if you have an unbeliever in the house. You couldn't even have a book study at your house if that was the case.

Those kids were kicked out of their homes as soon as the parents could so...... it is disgusting. Those kids HAD to go to meetings, HAD to begrudgingly go door to door. It was that or be homeless and lose your family and friends.

It is amazing that so many left so young. I spend my life with 22 year old doctors that still have a bedroom at home and go home on weekends for mums sunday lunch. In Watchtower land, getting booted on to the street aged 16 or 17 happened without a blink of an eye.

It always intrigued me how many JW kids left aged 16 if they had a non believing parent who lived elsewhere. Basically, if there is a choice, by far most left.

snare

p.s. for those that bring up them not knowing doctrine and wanting to break the rules , those kids weren't bad humans, they didn't drive illegally, do heroine, murder or steal. This is important.....because there was no REAL laws being broken, they knew which laws were legitimate (civil law) and which weren't (watchtower law). Again, they were just smarter than you and me. As for doctines, give them a break, I know elders in bethel who were clueless on doctrine, why should a 16 yr old know such garbage when they don't believe it? Again, they were smarter than us.

89

99.9% Of a People Who Believe In Evolution Don't Understand It.

by Space Madness in

jw
friends

i never believed in evolution as i thought it didn't make sense and that what was proposed was simply impossible.

how could an environment alter an organism's dna?

as we can see however, bacteria cannot become resistance to antibiotics.

snare&racket

and this on a thread claiming 99.9% of evolutionary believers don't understand it....

Come on Apog, we have chatted enough, you are not dumb. This is an embarrassingly iironic, ignorant thread.

The solution isn't excusing the ignorance and ignoring the very untruthful thread title, it is education.

89

99.9% Of a People Who Believe In Evolution Don't Understand It.

by Space Madness in

jw
friends

i never believed in evolution as i thought it didn't make sense and that what was proposed was simply impossible.

how could an environment alter an organism's dna?

as we can see however, bacteria cannot become resistance to antibiotics.

snare&racket

I understand the issue, but the text is 100% correct. There is NO RESPONSE to the antibiotics, response implies intelligence or intent.

the irony is SM started by saying he didn't accept evolution because 'bacteria can't think' . He then uses as evidence a quote that says it is a misconception to believe bacteria RESPOND or find a resistance due to a NEED to find one.

It is 100% random, that is all the quote is saying.

But a basic science 101 explianation of evolution would have made this clear to someone interested in evolution. To assume it is a legitimate mistake is to assume it is ok to go from no knowlege of evolution and then to read that paragraph on the mechanism of evolution.

SM needs to start with the basics, so as to not trip themselves up like this. It is not a slam down or intentionally offensive statement to say 'go get some books'... it is a sincere answer to thr problem, the ONLY answer. My bedside is piled high with books.

There is no shortcut.

I must admit and I know I should not assume, but it appears to me SM is seeking to undermine not understand. As I said, if they really wanted to know they would read evolution 101 and had they done, the paragraph they quoted WOULD HAVE made sense to them.