Sea Breeze

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Posts by Sea Breeze

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  8

  Would Zinaida Portnova Have Made a Good XJW Activist?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  meet 17 year old zinaida portnova:.

  she killed over a hundred nazis in a food poisoning incident.

  from wikipedia:.

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  Sea Breeze

  I'm curious as to what people think: If the GB members all fell victum to a horrible food poisoning incident, do you think the organization could survive as is, or would it take the occasion to change some of the harsher policies ??
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  47

  Solar Eclipse - How Common is It?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  of the 213 moons in our solar system, only ours provides a total solar eclipse.. coincidence?.

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  Sea Breeze

  Logic is neither happenstance nor design. It's a human construct.

  @TonusOH

  Or really, then why is logic across cultures, languages and time periods always the same if it is a human construct as you say?
  
  Why isn't it different in different geographic locations, or on different planets? Anything should be possible in a chance universe right?

  Why should numbers work the same here as opposed to differently in another galaxy? In my opinion, It only makles sense if this is all the product of a mind, but certainly not the mind of just any man.

  
  
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  47

  Solar Eclipse - How Common is It?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  of the 213 moons in our solar system, only ours provides a total solar eclipse.. coincidence?.

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  Sea Breeze

  Whether it's a coincidence or not, what difference does it make?

  I think it makes a lot of difference in our world view. If it's not designed and we are just globs of chemicals making random chemical reactions, then that affects all kinds of things, not the least of which is how can we even trust logic, if it also is a product of happenstance. But if logic is designed like the universe, then we have a basis of how we can know anything.

  Barrow & Tipler, in their standard treatment, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, admit that "there exist a number of unlikely coincidences between numbers of enormous magnitude that are, superficially, completely independent; moreover, these coincidences appear essential to the existence of carbon-based observers in the Universe."

  
  - there is the same number of electrons as protons to a standard deviation of one in ten to the thirty-seventh power, that is, 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (37 zeros)

  - the 1-to-1 electron to proton ratio throughout the universe yields our electrically neutral universe. In other words, the electron and the massively greater proton have exactly equivalent opposite charges

  Reasoning that the universe isn't designed because its here and wouldn't self exist if it was different is about as satisfying as a doctor saying that the reason your child is sick is because he's not doing well.

  That kind of thinking is well outside of popular atheist thinkers:

  
  

  Stephen Hawking: "The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted..."
  
  British astrophysicist Paul Davies wrote, "There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the universe is in several respects 'fine-tuned' for life. ...carbon, and the properties of objects such as stable long-lived stars, depend rather sensitively on the values of certain physical parameters... it is fine-tuned for the essential building blocks and environments that life requires."
  
  
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  47

  Solar Eclipse - How Common is It?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  of the 213 moons in our solar system, only ours provides a total solar eclipse.. coincidence?.

  1. 
  2. 
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  Sea Breeze

  We all have biases Cofty based on our opinions. There is no way to escape that, so chill out. You are not an elder anymore where mental midgets quake in fear at the sound of your voice.
  
  Can you give me a plausible reason why light should behave both as waves and particles when nothing blew up into everything in your worldview?
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  47

  Solar Eclipse - How Common is It?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  of the 213 moons in our solar system, only ours provides a total solar eclipse.. coincidence?.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Sea Breeze

  The way light behaves is very interesting and looks like a a set up for observation.

  Our eyes pick up on photon particles. But, photons behave like waves while in transit. Upon observation, the wave function immediately collapses into photon particles that our eyes can detect and then the brain can interpret. Why?

  Light travels effeciently as centric waves. What happens when you cast a stone in a pond? It makes centric waves and the waves reach every bank of the pond.

  But, if light travelled as particles, then the farther away you are from something the less chance you have of picking up the photons on eye receptors.

  Think of a shotgun blast of birdshot where the BB's are likened to photons.

  
  

  If light were only particles, when looking at distant starlight, one photon might land in Europe and next one in New York..... very low density making distant light impossible to detect. The wave function of light in transit solves this problem and it certainly looks like it was designed to solve for the purpose of observation.
  
  Here's a quote from Richard Dawkins: "Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose."

  I think Richard Dawkins appears to have a prior commitment to atheism regardless of facts. After I left Watchtower, I found myself oddly without a prior commitment to hardly anything. I've gotten used to it now. But, it was quite exhilarating at first.
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  47

  Solar Eclipse - How Common is It?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  of the 213 moons in our solar system, only ours provides a total solar eclipse.. coincidence?.

  1. 
  2. 
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• 

  Sea Breeze

  If the universe were different, then the universe would not be the same.

  That's deep.
  
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  8

  Would Zinaida Portnova Have Made a Good XJW Activist?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  meet 17 year old zinaida portnova:.

  she killed over a hundred nazis in a food poisoning incident.

  from wikipedia:.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
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  Sea Breeze

  Indeed she was. They probably wouldn't want her working in food service at WT head quarters.
• 
  8

  Would Zinaida Portnova Have Made a Good XJW Activist?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  meet 17 year old zinaida portnova:.

  she killed over a hundred nazis in a food poisoning incident.

  from wikipedia:.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Sea Breeze

  Meet 17 year old Zinaida Portnova:

  
  

  She killed over a hundred Nazis in a food poisoning incident.

  From Wikipedia:

  In 1943, Portnova became employed as a kitchen aide in Obol. In August, she poisoned the food meant for the Nazi garrison stationed there. Immediately falling suspect, she said she was innocent and ate some of the food in front of the Nazis to prove it was not poisoned; after she did not fall ill immediately, they released her. Portnova became sick afterwards, vomiting heavily but eventually recovering from the poison after drinking much whey.
  
  After she did not return to work, the Germans realized she had been the culprit and started searching for her. To avoid the Germans, she became a scout of the partisan unit named after Kliment Voroshilov.[2] In a letter sent to her parents back in besieged Leningrad that month, she wrote that she is "in a partisan detachment. Together with you, we beat the Nazi occupiers".[Note 1][1] In October 1943, Portnova joined the VLKSM.[2]

  In December 1943 or January 1944, Portnova was sent back to Obol to infiltrate the garrison, discover the reason for the recent Young Avengers failures,[1] then locate and contact the remaining members. She was quickly captured. Reports of her escape vary. One is that, during Gestapo interrogation in the village of Goriany, she took the investigator's pistol off the table, then shot and killed him. When two German soldiers entered after hearing the gunshots, she shot them as well. She then attempted to escape the compound and ran into the woods, where she was caught near the banks of a river.[3]

  Another version is that the Gestapo interrogator, in a fit of rage, threw his pistol to the table after threatening to shoot her. Taking the pistol, Portnova shot him. Escaping through the door, she shot a guard in the corridor, then another in the courtyard. After the pistol misfired when Portnova attempted to shoot a guard blocking her access to the street, she was captured.[1]

  After being recaptured, Portnova was tortured, possibly for information.[1] She was later driven into the forest and executed[3] or killed during torture on 15 January 1944.[1]
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  47

  Solar Eclipse - How Common is It?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  of the 213 moons in our solar system, only ours provides a total solar eclipse.. coincidence?.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Sea Breeze

  Of the 8 planets in our solar system, only Venus has retrograde rotation.

  @Jeffro: Wrong. Uranus has one too.

  I'm curious as to what the typical atheist response is to the goldilocks universe (where everything is juuuust right) that we find ourself in?

  For example, the current Astronomer Royal for the British Crown is Martin Rees. He has stated that if any of the 6 values listed below were different, our universe [and us] couldn't exist:
  
  

  Rees’s six numbers are:

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  (1)The number of spatial dimensions we live in – 3

  (2) The relative strength of the electrostatic to the gravitational force between two protons – This is a very large number approximately 10 to the 36th power.

  (3) The fraction of mass converted to energy when hydrogen is fused to form helium – approximately 0.007.

  (4) The average matter density of the Universe, rather than being expressed in kilogrammes per cubic metre, it is expressed in units where the critical density (10 to the 26th power of kilogrammes per cubic metre) is equal to one – approximately 0.32.

  (5) The average dark energy density of the Universe, also expressed in units where the critical density is equal to one – 0.68.

  (6) The final number is a measure of how tightly bound the large clusters and supercluster of galaxies are. On the scale used in Rees’s book it has the value 10 to the -5th power.

  
  

  Are the fine tuning charactericts of the universe and the total eclipse of the sun, (and the monthly perfect total eclipse of the moon) that we see; are they examples of intentionality?
  
  @SBF

  materialists have got their head in the sand with regard to the evidence of fine tuning of the universe and its implications.

  Agree. Materialism has not been a support for atheism for quite some time now.
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  48

  What's the Worst Advice You Heard of an Elder Giving Someone?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i believe an an elder told someone who's daughter (14 yo) became sexually active with a 26 year old in the neighborhood, that maybe they should get married.

  so, they did... with parental consent.

  he turned out to be a ex-convict who shot his first wife in the face with a shotgun.

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  Sea Breeze

  @ RonW

  He offered me hand to hand combat on a quick build over something unknown to me that had upset him...I accepted.

  Who won?