Well, former Catholics aren't former JWs, as a general matter, are they? So how would that matter to the testable hypothesis I outlined?
Or are you just talking about something else entirely?
Posts by Sulla
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306I Believe Catholicism And Its Trappings Are Silly, Strange & Weird!!!
by minimus inmy italian friend loves going to the "feasts" that occur in italy, boston or nyc.
these feasts feature a "saint" with dollar bills pinned around her and they parade the saint in a long procession and chant "viva (whomever)".
they are quite serious about this and are proud to talk about the past generations of observers who appreciated the events.
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52
Is going from the JWs to another Religion just a "Rebound?"
by braincleaned in*a rebound is the need to fill a void with something we partly had confort in; whether in romance or faith.... .
i posted the following in another thread, and i welcome your feedback - especially if you disagree with my logic.
"as per one of my notes, my biggest fear is my, our, natural tendency for confirmation bias.
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Sulla
But EP, you are genuinely stupid. I'm not making that up, ok? I mean, it is possible to disagree and everybody says things that are a little out there sometimes, but you really don't have anything in your head but a bunch of mushy hate. You're a hater, plain and simple, who doesn't have any of the tools necessary to do anything except spew stupid hate.
I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. I mean, the logical fallacy thing makes me feel bad for you since you clearly don't have a clue about how to apply that. You hope that you can grab it and maybe it will fit the situation but, really, it just exposes your deficiencies -- mentally speaking, I mean. I feel bad for you; crippled by a crazy religion that de-emphasized education, you leave it and can't tell the difference between the crazy shit you keep believing and the crazy shit you don't want to believe any more.
I'd like to help you, really. But breaking down the old JW habits of thinking you have every possible answer to every possible question with your simple little rules is a long, hard row to hoe. I don't think you're there yet.
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306
I Believe Catholicism And Its Trappings Are Silly, Strange & Weird!!!
by minimus inmy italian friend loves going to the "feasts" that occur in italy, boston or nyc.
these feasts feature a "saint" with dollar bills pinned around her and they parade the saint in a long procession and chant "viva (whomever)".
they are quite serious about this and are proud to talk about the past generations of observers who appreciated the events.
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Sulla
NC, I don't necessarily think you just too the JWs word for antipathy for Catholics. It does seem to be an interesting exception to the process by which nearly everything else they taught has been rejected. So many xJWs still hold that anti-Catholicism -- that's interesting to me. Could be, stopped clocks are right twice a day, etc.
Or, it could be the general idea I have been suggesting here for a while now: Jw-ism is a thing that tends to attract certain personality types. When people leave the JWs, they don't change their personality; they remain who they always have been. I don't view that as a controversial idea, everyone has their own stories about how difficult it is to stop thinking like a JW -- down to things like their vocabulary.
If JW-ism tends to attract anti-religious, utopian, Manichean types, then you would expect to find certain political and religious viewpoints to obtain whether these are JWs or xJWs. Certainly, you could expect to find antipathy toward the Church, which is religious, anti-utopian, anti-Manichean.
Of course, in any population of sufficient size, you'd expect to find considerable variation in these attitudes. But at least they are testable hypotheses: we could do a test to find whether anti-Catholic attitudes are more deeply felt among XJWs than among the population at large and correlate them with the attitudes toward Catholics among current JWs.
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52
Is going from the JWs to another Religion just a "Rebound?"
by braincleaned in*a rebound is the need to fill a void with something we partly had confort in; whether in romance or faith.... .
i posted the following in another thread, and i welcome your feedback - especially if you disagree with my logic.
"as per one of my notes, my biggest fear is my, our, natural tendency for confirmation bias.
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Sulla
I guess you are right in one sense sulla, there was an oral tradition before the written tradition. Gods the world over were still created by this mythological process.
Indeed so, Diest. But I think the reason humans have a mythological process is because of this experience of the transcendent. We sense the transcendent, we take steps to unite with it through ritual and sacrifice, we create myths to capture what we think we can about it, we write it up.
But a criticism of the last stage of this process -- that it is not scientifically or strictly historically accurate -- is precisely to miss the point. We don't get pissy with Gilgamesh, say, for being preposterous when it says Gilgamesh and Enkidu walked for a thousand miles in a day. That criticism would be out of place.
Entirely Possible, there is not much point in engaging your comment: there is so much remedial work to do with you just to bring you to a point where you can make a coherent point that I doubt we could ever really get a payoff. For example, you have clearly come across a list of logical fallacies in Wikipedia or someplace. You don't understand them, it seems, but I really don't have an inclination to help you fix the many gaps in your understanding.
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306
I Believe Catholicism And Its Trappings Are Silly, Strange & Weird!!!
by minimus inmy italian friend loves going to the "feasts" that occur in italy, boston or nyc.
these feasts feature a "saint" with dollar bills pinned around her and they parade the saint in a long procession and chant "viva (whomever)".
they are quite serious about this and are proud to talk about the past generations of observers who appreciated the events.
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Sulla
NC, given that the JWs lied about every other damn thing they ever told you, does it make their criticism of Catholicism more or less likely to be accurate? So, they pull 607 out of their ass, but that bit about corruption by the Catholics is spot-on?
First collorary to the Sullan hypothesis: people who are prone to antipathy toward religion join the JWs in higher-than-average rates.
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52
Is going from the JWs to another Religion just a "Rebound?"
by braincleaned in*a rebound is the need to fill a void with something we partly had confort in; whether in romance or faith.... .
i posted the following in another thread, and i welcome your feedback - especially if you disagree with my logic.
"as per one of my notes, my biggest fear is my, our, natural tendency for confirmation bias.
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Sulla
Sulla without the bible there is no proof of a Christian god vs. a Muslim god vs. a Zoroastrian god. Out of the scripture (egg) hatches the god (chicken). There is nothing in nature that says 'Well I am an inerrant sinner and I need a ransom sacrifice to save me." All of that has to be taught to someone. We are all born with a desire to understand the world around us, but we are not born with the knowledge of a Christian god or any other god. That’s why 2/3 of the world is not Christian.
Diest, I disaggree with the idea that God is the result of scripture. You have it precisely backward, I say! Quite!
It is more historical to observe that the practice of religion is prior to any sort of scrpture. Abraham perceives God and acts: the writing comes hundreds of years later. This is true for the old religions, too (what we call paganism). They perceive the transcendent and respond to it. Stories are what come later, as part of the attempt to remember what happened. Same thing is true for Christians: the gospels come after the encounter with the risen Christ and as the religion (the practice of specifically Christian rites) spreads beyond the ability of the oral tradition to keep up. That's the way religion works -- with some mostly late and mostly American exceptions like JW-ism and Mormonism, for example.
And, there is nothing but the natural perception that mankind is broken and in need of salvation. Sacrifice is ubiquitous for this reason: we are wrong with the transcendent and we need to get right; the way we get right is through suffering and pain, even vicarious suffering. This may sound familiar...
This is my consistent issue with most monotheists. If someone who was not primed with the thoughts that it could be true, then most people will not be swayed by religion. Take someone that has never met a Christian or read about them by age 30. Then explain that god wrote down prophesy about Jerusalem falling in 70CE. Then tell them that the oldest bible manuscript we have is from 150CE. What would that prove? That people could write down things after the fact.
The practice of religion is damn near universal. What does seem to be part of human nature is this encounter with the transcendent. You want to get into the specific claims of religion as if those are prior to this perception: they are not.
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306
I Believe Catholicism And Its Trappings Are Silly, Strange & Weird!!!
by minimus inmy italian friend loves going to the "feasts" that occur in italy, boston or nyc.
these feasts feature a "saint" with dollar bills pinned around her and they parade the saint in a long procession and chant "viva (whomever)".
they are quite serious about this and are proud to talk about the past generations of observers who appreciated the events.
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Sulla
Diest, giving more support to the Sullan hypothesis: JW-ism is more closely related to atheism than Christianity.
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306
I Believe Catholicism And Its Trappings Are Silly, Strange & Weird!!!
by minimus inmy italian friend loves going to the "feasts" that occur in italy, boston or nyc.
these feasts feature a "saint" with dollar bills pinned around her and they parade the saint in a long procession and chant "viva (whomever)".
they are quite serious about this and are proud to talk about the past generations of observers who appreciated the events.
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Sulla
It's because we understand a liturgy: you have a whole lotta intermediate steps until the payoff; best to make the intermediate steps worthwhile. Catholics are all wait, wait, wait, boom!
Just sayin'.
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52
Is going from the JWs to another Religion just a "Rebound?"
by braincleaned in*a rebound is the need to fill a void with something we partly had confort in; whether in romance or faith.... .
i posted the following in another thread, and i welcome your feedback - especially if you disagree with my logic.
"as per one of my notes, my biggest fear is my, our, natural tendency for confirmation bias.
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Sulla
Am I not being clear? Of course any thought precedes written record. How does that make the Bible any more coherent with logic and reason?
I contend that the spiritual and moral matters in the Bible are no more relevant than its medical, scientific mumbo jumbo. I think my OP is very clear.No, you were clear. Perhaps you don't understand your argument. Belief in the Christian God doesn't come from sciptures and the scriptures (with some exceptions) are not theological works. So, as I said, you've got your cart and horses all helter skelter.
Sulla: " Finally: consider the (very remote) possibility that you are not quite as awesome as you think."
This is my constant concern. This is why I fight confirmation bias. I was a christian minister for over 4 decades -- beleive me, it was damn hard to let go. I lost my family for just being coherant with my conscience.I suspect you mean to say you were a JW for 4 decades. That is more nearly the opposite of being a Christian. The bad habits picked up as a JW are hard to let go, for sure. One particularly bad habit is the idea that you are just so amazing and insightful and everyone else who thinks differently is stupid.
Very difficult to let go of. As we can see.
In time, the more I know, the more questions I raise. I will never have all the answers, but I try hard to understand the questions the best I can.
Hmm. You seem to think you've got it pretty well sorted.
How ironic that someone who thinks the Unvierse was created with them in mind would dare hint on me being the conceited one. LOL!
How could anyone dare hint you think too much of yourself, indeed? But, as I try to point out, this is typical half-educated, JW-leftover bullshit, I'm afraid. I mean, you've just made a pretty uneducated comment here and you are entirely unaware of it. I can help: in the Christian understanding, the knowledge that God created all things with humans in mind should make humans
a) less humble
b) more humble
I think you got this question wrong the first time.
As for morality, the simple fact that we have only recently considered slavery a bad thing proves how far we have come to the Abrahamic god's filthy immorality. Just like all the other myths, he ended up proven man-made with human bad traits. (This goes for Jesus who fully supports the Law in Matt. 5.)
Ah. I see you disregarded that parts where I suggested a) s uppose that this experience of the transcendent happens to people who very like us in some ways and very unlike us in other ways and b) consider the (very remote) possibility that you are not quite as awesome as you think. Really, people should listen to me more. It's like I'm talking to myself.
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Evolution of languages
by oldlightnewshite inhere's an interesting tidbit from the yahoo website, about the evolution of languages, all threading from a common ancestor about 8,000 years ago.
could be a good thing to talk about to help family members realise ttatt...... tower of babel my arse.. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/english-language-began-turkey-180502182.html.
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Sulla
Aren't most JW counters uninformed? Great visuals!