It's totally socialist, but great anyway.
Posts by Sulla
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18I just watched "It's a wonderful life" for the first time....
by Cagefighter incagefighter has been a little down in the dumps as usual around the holidays, short days, lack of clear family status and plans for the pagan rituals like everyone else.
i have also been struggling with my belief or lack of in god and god letting idiots with guns run around while he does nothing for children dying of cancer hasn't helped either.
you can say, i have been in a extreme rationalists state of mind.. last week for my small group from church (the umc equivelent of the book study in jw land) we just decided to pop this little movie in the dvd player and light up the fire place.
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12
Please say it's not mine
by Sulla inwashington post has this interesting paragraph this morning:.
it was elbow-to-elbow people crying, wasik said.
people were screaming, please say its not mine, please say its not mine.
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Sulla
Perhaps it is natural, nancy drew, and perhaps you and I both might say or think that. But that doesn't take away the idea that having such a thought really is wishing evil on someone else. If you and I are in a room and a fireman says, "One of your houses, Sulla and nancy drew, has burned to the ground," then when I say, "I hope it's not mine," I really am saying that I hope it is yours.
To see why I say that, consider an alternative statement or sentiment: "Oh no!" That is, "I wish this weren't happening at all," is quite different from, "Given that this has happened, I hope it happens to you and not me."
Do we understand or excuse the sentiment? Probably. Winston Smith, in 1984, certainly doesn't seem to attract opprobrium for his betrayal of Julia: it is what happens to people who face the worst thing ever. But our understanding of his actions or, by extension, the actions of those in that firehouse the other day, doesn't change the nature of what they did. Between themselves and the worst thing ever, they wished to impose someone else.
Not all of them said it, we don't know if all of them thought it; probably not, since reactions vary between people in situations of impossible stress. Nobody can say whether he would have said or wished the same. I don't think there was anything about that hour in the firehouse that was not completely true.
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Perfectly incorrect statements
by Sulla innoted a couple comments recently that seemed reasonable, but are really these nearly perfect examples of exactly untrue statements.
curious.
people harkening for an idealized past: one of the roots of totalitarianism.. any basic thinking on some of the totalitarian revolutions gives this game away: they always say they are fighting the past, that they are innovators, which is why they need to be totalitarian.
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Sulla
Noted a couple comments recently that seemed reasonable, but are really these nearly perfect examples of exactly untrue statements. Curious. Here's one:
People harkening for an idealized past: one of the roots of totalitarianism.
Any basic thinking on some of the totalitarian revolutions gives this game away: they always say they are fighting the past, that they are innovators, which is why they need to be totalitarian. Soviet Russia is an obvious example, the French Revolution another, the Khmer Rouge, etc. Even Henry VIII saw himself as fighting his way forward over against forces of the past.
It's a strange process that drives people to say this sort of thing.
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12
Please say it's not mine
by Sulla inwashington post has this interesting paragraph this morning:.
it was elbow-to-elbow people crying, wasik said.
people were screaming, please say its not mine, please say its not mine.
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Sulla
So was Winston Smith's, designs, and he viewed it as a betrayal.
As I recall it, the nature of the betrayal had to do with willing her to be interposed between him and the rats. Don't do it to me, do it to this particular person, instead. I can't help but wonder if that is what we saw outside the firehouse: Some of the parents there -- and nobody knew which ones -- were going to experience the worst thing ever. If you say, "Tell me it is not my child," are you making the same statement?
I shouldn't have to explain -- but this is JWN -- that the entire point is that we don't hold Winston responsible because of the nature of Room 101: it's the worst thing in the world. Or, maybe we hold him responsible but know that everyone else does the same thing.
On the other hand, not everyone outside the firehouse said it.
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12
Please say it's not mine
by Sulla inwashington post has this interesting paragraph this morning:.
it was elbow-to-elbow people crying, wasik said.
people were screaming, please say its not mine, please say its not mine.
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Sulla
Washington Post has this interesting paragraph this morning:
“It was elbow-to-elbow people crying,” Wasik said. “No one could tell you where to go. People were screaming, ‘Please say it’s not mine, please say it’s not mine.’ ”
Speaking of the scene at the firehouse where parents were waiting for their children. I'm reminded of the scene in 1984 where Winston Smith finally breaks. They find the thing he cannot bear and threaten him with it; he responds with almost the exact words these parents used yesterday -- Not to me, do it to her!
These parents aren't directly substituting other dead children for their own in their thoughts, not directly wishing the pain on other parents of other small children. But it feels close. And there they were, outside that firehouse where the worst thing in the world was happening. And what some of them said was, "Do it to someone else." I'm not sure what to make of that.
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49
Lest we forget the religious right's view of today's tragedy....
by EntirelyPossible ina. douchebag.. http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/huckabee-schools-place-of-carnage-because-we-systematically.
former arkansas governor mike huckabee attributed the mass shooting at sandy hook elementary school in part to restrictions on school prayer and religious materials in the classroom.
"we ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed god from our schools," huckabee said on fox news, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in newtown, ct that morning.
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Sulla
I suspect that you will find most people, when faced with a rage they cannot understand, are prone to fall back to familiar tropes: we are a Godless nation, we are a gun-loving nation, etc., as if these are either solutions or explanations. I think I am not particularly surprised by Huckabee and do not really expect much more from a politician with a TV show. Neither am I surprised by the dialogue level I see here on this board. Not sure why we single jolly ol' Huckabee out for bad treatment: looks to be par for the course.
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26
Redhorsewoman from DriveslikeJehu
by Antioch inhi redhorsewoman,.
i doubt you still log on here but i wanted to try.
i just wanted to thank you for arguing with me all those years ago on beliefnet.
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Sulla
DrivesLikeJehu, after all that on Touchstone... Well, shut my damn mouth.
I think JW apologetics is a spent force. I think the main result from the last decade of the experiment was pretty simple: the JWs really got their clocks cleaned. Not every discussion on every point, of course. But there's a cuulative finally defining where, exactly, the disagreements are between JWs and Christians (or anybody else, I guess). I think, ultimately, the smartest JW apologists wind up with a sort of idea that all the prophetic stuff doesn't really matter -- what matters is the Unitarian/pacifist teachings that are given form by virtue of being in a single church. All the rest of it -- the broken families, the ritual humiliation of field service, the pointlessness of WT study -- is a cost that is (or is not) sufficiently high to throw the whole thing away.
But it was the guys on Touchstone who made me begin reading the primary sources and such academic work as I have. But then, the Lord works in mysterious ways.
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46
new thinking after reading Collosians
by Honeybucket ini read the book of collosians and now im really not sure whether the trinity concept is completely false.
maybe i need to read non-jw bible to make my decision.
even the nwt seemed to support the jesus was a manifestation of god to help mankind.
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Sulla
I think what you will find is that, even if one ultimately disagrees with the doctrine as it came to be defined, the person of Jesus is clearly much more nearly transcendent in the NT than the Jws would have you believe. That is, the centrality of the person of Jesus in NT writing is such that he required an entirely new religion. To listen to the JWs, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason why the Christians had to break with the Jews.
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28
Ransom paid. But still you gotta suffer!
by punkofnice inwith my recent rise to atheistic agnosticism(?
) i pondered this:.
if the death of jesus paid the ultimate price.....then why didn't it all end there and then and everyone got to heaven or walk into paradise with a panda?.
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Sulla
Come on now, punkofnice. You can't indict Christianity because the JW version doesn't make sense. In JW-land, of course, Jesus came to settle the cosmic bet. Your question makes sense from this weird perspective, but that is not the orthodox and ancient teaching. JW-ism is, here again, nothing at all like Christianity. So pointing out errors in JW-ism is not the same thing as pointing out errors in Christianity.
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74
HELP! I've stepped in it now... mast head change - JW response!
by NeverKnew inhe's asking if i've read the first page of the new watchtower.. says page 8 admits and exposes the society's mistaken expectations.. says that both mags have been adjusted to reflect the understanding of generation.
asking if it is my position that witnesses have made claims to be inspired prophets.... and saying if it is, maybe *we* can consider together some examples in the bible of others who have had wrong expectations and have gone ahead of god's timetable and see how god handled that..
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Sulla
He's pointing this out to me....
The apostles and other early Christian disciples had certain wrong expectations, but the Bible does not classify them with the "false prophets."-SeeLuke 19:ll; John 21: 22, 23; Acts 1:6, 7.
Yes, but in the intervening couple thousand years the Christians learned from the error and began taking seriously those parts of Jesus' discussions about the End where he says not to get all worked up about the timeline. The JWs, in blissful ignorance of this basic insight, manage to make a rookie mistake.