Moxy

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Posts by Moxy

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  54

  JW's and Chronic Fatigue Syndrone!

  by cornish in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  chronic fatigue syndrone, m e, yuppie flu.

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  i dont know if anyone else has noticed the alarming number of jws who claim to suffer from chronic fatigue syndrone,i mean hear in cornwall there tend to be several sufferers in every congregation,outside the jws out of the many people i know i dont know anyone,although there are obviosly many outside the jws who suffer this illness,percentage wise it seems that jws have a much,much larger occorance of the illness.. for example my brother in law has not worked and been living on invalidity benefits for more than 10 years since his mid twenties,his brother is also in the same boat, an m.e sufferer.. i wonder if anyone has looked into this a bit more?

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  Moxy

  lisa: do you mean 'hypochondriac?'

  from my fairly amateurish perspective, i dont think there's really such a thing as 'just in your head.' i think everyone recognizes the mind-body link mentioned earlier. a more meaningful division of disease is genetic and environmental. the fact the environmental causes here may involve culture and religion more than purely physical factors doesnt make a lick of difference as far as the bodys concerned. i believe ive read that the hormonal reactions in the body can be indistinguishable for emotional and physical stresses.

  if you can establish a higher incidence of some ailment in a given sample, you can determine that there is SOME kind of environmental cause in common. i believe thats whats happening here--an harmful religious environment--but that it is also nearly impossible to find truly objective evidence for it.

  mox
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  5

  **FREETHINKING, HONESTY and WTBS

  by MacHislopp in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  recently i came across an.

  interesting study/research article and i .

  would like to share with you the following :.

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  Moxy

  the irony is that a witness reading these points would nod at each, 'yes. yes. yes. yes. thats me! not afraid to question common views in the search for Truth.' musing that if only the people at the doors were more free-thinking like that, the service would be more productive.

  mox
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  16

  Is Jesus God....a trinity/triune question.

  by serenaj92 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  ok, jesus refers to god as his father.

  jesus also refers to himself as god saying they are one.

  john 14 can i have some other opinions on this.

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  Moxy

  did someone say menage-a-trois?

  oh, sorry. never mind.

  mox
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  35

  Anyone into on-line games?

  by wannahelp in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hey,.

  how about we get together and play some on-line games?.

  yahoo has great card games.. or how about some chess.. .

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  Moxy

  lol. text-based starcraft... its just not.. QUITE the same.
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  8

  Bible Contradiction: Passing God's Test

  by JosephAlward in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  the bible contradicts itself in the matter of god's omniscience.

  the author of deuteronomy says that god has to perform a test to learn if one of his chosen people love him: .

  why would an all-knowing god have to perform a test to learn something?

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  Moxy

  i like the 'all' essay here.

  i have to chuckle at the mark verse with its blanket statement that obviously cannot be taken too far without running into other problems.

  i enjoy determinism arguments, but just dont have the energy for them right now. something about the intellectual vacancy of the WTs 'selective foreknowledge' teaching tends to leave me emotionally taxed after too much contemplation.
  does the deuteronomy verse describe god wanting to know what a person feels right now or what a person will do based on what he feels? and is there really a difference? is the expression 'god is testing you' causative or passive? (this type of thinking comes up often in WT exegesis. i dont actually know if its used as often outside of WT.) these are just some of the tangled roads down which i see this argument going.

  i wonder now if a much better contradictory verse to deuteronomy 13, taking a different tack altogeter, isnt the oft-used james 1:13 'When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone.' certainly deception is an 'evil' thing, isnt it?

  in the end, im sure we'd both agree that this 'test' verse is classic, self-serving D-style literature: 'anything anyone says to you that disagrees with the priesthood is wrong by definition.' and should probably be viewed as such before (or while) embarking on long philosophical discussions about its ramifications as doctrine.

  mox
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  8

  Bible Contradiction: Passing God's Test

  by JosephAlward in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  the bible contradicts itself in the matter of god's omniscience.

  the author of deuteronomy says that god has to perform a test to learn if one of his chosen people love him: .

  why would an all-knowing god have to perform a test to learn something?

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  Moxy

  i like your points regarding the deuteronomy passage. (btw, i hope you realize im more or less playing devils advocate with you here.) i agree that the wording here does indeed appear to remove the possibility of the 'test' being simply for the sake of man.

  regarding the verses in john, i dont think the essay is well served by implicitly opening up trinitarian issues. (let alone the nasty logical conundrum of trying to have TWO independant and self-willed entities, BOTH possessing absolute foreknowledge.) introducing issues with all the theological baggage that the trinity brings with it detracts from the main point.
  both verses in john are reporting the speech of jesus' disciples and neither is in the context of revealing doctrine. even apologists usually agree that bible writers tend to throw around unqualified absolute terms like 'all the world' and 'every man' a little loosely. i find the context of both of these verses to be a little too colloquial to clearly dismiss a less than absolute meaning to the word 'all.' i would imagine the nature of the contradiction would be best explained with a clear and corresponding passage to deuteronomy. one verse in effect saying 'i know what everyone will do' and the other 'hang on, i want to see what you will do.' my first choice would have been isa 46:10, 'I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.' others might come to mind on further research.

  it also seems difficult to present this essay without directly dealing with the issue of foreknowledge and determinism. since this is one of the most intractably difficult questions of theology, loaded down with volumes of extra-biblical commentary, i would imagine you would try not to introduce any more of the topic than absolutely nessecary to support the conclusion. i will likewise carefully avoid treading down that dark and twisted road in this context.

  mox
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  29

  some 2001 year figures reported on wol

  by expatbrit in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  not sure of the accuracy: http://www.witnessesonline.com/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/witnessesonline/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=5&t=000129

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  Moxy

  i updated the chart on the previous page now that we have the more meaningful 'avg pub' count. drops werent as bad as they looked, only slightly worse than last year, which is still very bad.

  my 'psychohistory' prediction of 5,896,260 was too high by only about 0.2% - i blame the unpredictable rise of The Mule, a.k.a simon.

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/forum/thread.asp?id=11365&site=3
  mox
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  35

  Anyone into on-line games?

  by wannahelp in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hey,.

  how about we get together and play some on-line games?.

  yahoo has great card games.. or how about some chess.. .

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  Moxy

  i play a lot of online bridge. usually at pogo. anyone into that who wants to partner up sometime?

  mox
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  16

  Mining the CD for Gold...Read this!

  by slipnslidemaster in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  note this gem from the 1999 january kingdom ministry:.

  make good use of older books.

  1 man has stored away millions of old books in libraries in every corner of the earth.

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  Moxy

  note that the sentence is 'they contain scriptural truth' making no inference about how much truth or about 'containing' anything untrue.

  mox
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  32

  This Generation will not pass away?

  by Pureheart in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hello folks,.

  please dissect this one for me.. *** w97 5/1 29 questions from readers ***.

  questions from readers.

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  Moxy

  HOW MANY YEARS PASSED BETWEEN NAPOLEON'S DEATH AND THE INVENTION OF THE FIRST AIRPLANE/ATOM BOMB?

  WAS IT NOT, IN FACT, HUNDREDS OF YEARS?

  actually no it wasnt. french revolution was 1789-1815. kittyhawk was 1903 and manhattan project was 1942. so the span isnt really 'hundreds' of years. but anyways, that isnt really the point they are trying to make here.

  as i see it, they would like the reader to look at the simple statement, 'The soldiers of Napoléon’s generation knew nothing about airplanes and atom bombs' and decide exactly what it sounds like the author of the statement meant. would one need to find out when napoleon's birth and death were in order to understand exactly what the author meant? they say 'no' and i agree. this statement refers to a general time period and a short one at that. fine.

  first thing, i dont know how much value we are supposed to get out of looking at equivalent english uses of 'generation' to understand the greek use of 'genea' but lets just ignore that for the moment. the problem with this analogy is the sentence lends itself to vague time descriptions because the statement is not time based. knowledge is a gradual thing. knowledge of aircraft, for example, predated kittyhawk strictly speaking. but even after the wright brothers historic flight, it wasnt really known by soldiers until WWI. so the very statement that 'airplanes werent known' does not require the reader to make time judgements, any more than you could point to a date on the calender when airplanes became 'known.'

  if the statement were changed to an event based one, as i mentioned earlier, to read something like 'the people of napoleon's generation would live to see the effects of the french revolution in the american civil war.' or even more pointedly, 'would not pass way before seeing...' the tenor of the sentence changes to a specific time-based one and the reader IS required to make a judgement about which years napoleon belonged to and how long a lifespan is. if it were impossible for a person to live to see both napoleon and the american civil war, then my statement is false.

  the naploeon analogy as used by the wt attempts to make the word 'generation' sound like a general vague description by using it in a general vague sentence, rather than in the very specific sentence that jesus did.

  thats my take on it anyway.

  mox