Not only did we have easy-to-forge paper badges in Alaska, but we only got them for the DC so even legitimate attendants at the CA and SA would either reuse their DC attendant badges or print off their own little homemade badges just so they could wear their little "attendant" title.
I Want to Believe
JoinedPosts by I Want to Believe
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10
Thieves will not inherit the Kingdom of God.
by Paralipomenon inbut they sure can avoid getting bored to death by it.. i was going through some old memory boxes i found this:.
i picked it up while i was still considered a good witness and knew enough to hang onto it.
later when i was trying to fade, i would show up a bit late to the convention and pin this on.. it's amazing what you can get away with having one of these pinned to your suit.. i would show up at lunch, say hello to the people in my congregation and they always asked where i was sitting.
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44
How Christian thinking was corrupted by Paul's clever explanations
by Terry inwhen modern writers, thinkers, believers in christianity talk about their religion they are almost always depending on saul of tarsus (paul) rather than.
jesus.. there is a good reason for this.
paul wrote letters.
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I Want to Believe
Nice write-up. I enjoy how you break things down and reason instead of just putting out huge blocks of text. Paul's takeover of Christianity was one of the first things I noticed when I started reading and reasoning on my own.
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I Want to Believe
ninja_matty69: "How do they factor in whether 5000 years is really 6 rings in every 5 years as oppose to 6 rings every 6 years? This can put you out by 1000 years. What if its two rings every year?."
Well, I'm sure there's a way (I'm not a dendrochronologist so I don't want to speak out of turn, but they do have very sophisticated equipment and techniques; it is a science, after all, not a backyard hobby as you seem to think) but here's how they know that they didn't miss that many:
C-14 dating independantly comes to the same date range on that wood. So if you wonder how many double-ring years might have been missed, the C-14 will give you that margin of error.
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18
MOTD from <diety of choice>
by EntirelyPossible inwe have so many hearing the voice of jesus on the forum i thought i would start a thread for everyone to be able to share what they head from jesus or any other diety they hear from.
i'll kick it off.
i heard several messages to share today already.... "man the weapons console, mr. chekov".
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I Want to Believe
My diety communicates through dreams (how else would you explain these visions during my sleep?!) and his/her lastest divine message has something to do with not being prepared for a wedding, and not wearing pants or something. And it was 11 years ago, but people were dressed like the '70s. I think my diety must've drunk dialed this one, 'cause it didn't make much sense.
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I Want to Believe
ninja_matty69: "One must have a great deal of faith to beleive these tree men with pre-conceived notions of what they believe have accurately compared hundreds of different trees with thousands of lines."
Oh, I think I see the problem; you have a pre-conceived notion that scientists are lazy and biased. Such a pessimist
And you also seem to think hundreds and thousands are big, daunting numbers. They're not.
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I Want to Believe
@ninja_matty69, you try to bring out difficulties in dendrochronology, but your "reasons" why it shouldn't be trusted are laughable.
" imagine counting several thousands pieces of very very thin paper (sometimes several times thinner than paper remember) all bunched together." Yeah, that's fairly easy to imagine; easier, in fact, than imagining 2 million pixels on an HDTV being counted 60-240 times every second. Computers are amazing aren't they?
"They no doubt have to check hundreds of tree remains." Yes, they do. And they do just that.
"but find links all the way back to 2500 bc is going to be very difficult." It is difficult; that's why professionals spend years and years doing it. Thanks for acknowledging their hard work.
"Not only this but they have to be from the region in question. Its no good comparing a tree sample from egypt with one from england. completely different climates will lead to completly different tree rings." Right again. That's what they do.
"Firstly multiple tree rings can occur in wet years. So now you've managed to match your super thin lines with dozens of other trees and your sure mind that you have not made a mistake (after all one half a milimeter ring is totally different from another half a milimeter ring) have you factored this in?" Yes, they do factor that in.
Did you even bother to read about the subject? Here, let's consult wikipedia real quick:
"Trees from the same region will tend to develop the same patterns of ring widths for a given period. These patterns can be compared and matched ring for ring with trees growing in the same geographical zone and under similar climatic conditions. Following these tree-ring patterns from living trees back through time, chronologies can be built up, both for entire regions, and for sub-regions of the world. Thus wood from ancient structures can be matched to known chronologies (a technique called cross-dating) and the age of the wood determined precisely. Cross-dating was originally done by visual inspection, until computers were harnessed to do the statistical matching.
To eliminate individual variations in tree ring growth, dendrochronologists take the smoothed average of the tree ring widths of multiple tree samples to build up a ring history. This process is termed replication. A tree ring history whose beginning and end dates are not known is called a floating chronology. It can be anchored by cross-matching a section against another chronology (tree ring history) whose dates are known. Fully anchored chronologies which extend back more than 11,000 years exist for river oak trees from South Germany (from the Main and Rhine rivers) and pine from Northern Ireland. [1] [4] [5] Furthermore, the mutual consistency of these two independent dendrochronological sequences has been confirmed by comparing their radiocarbon and dendrochronological ages. [6] Another fully anchored chronology which extends back 8500 years exists for the bristlecone pine in the Southwest US (White Mountains of California). [7] In 2004 a new calibration curveINTCAL04 was internationally ratified for calibrated dates back to 26,000 Before Present (BP) based on an agreed worldwide data set of trees and marine sediments. [8] The part of the new calibration curves that relies on tree-ring evidence (IntCal04) dates back to 12,410 calendar (cal) yr B.P. Beyond that and back to 14,700 cal yr B.P., IntCal04 is mainly constructed from 14C dates of foraminiferas from Venezuela's Cariaco basin that are corrected for a constant reservoir age of 405 years. [9]
Your final "point" is irrelevant, because they don't use dendrochronology to confirm building dates, they use it to cross-referrence C-14 samples of the wood itself. Regardless of when the wood was used to build something, they can check how old it is.
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49
Would You Listen To A Prayer From A JW And Say Amen If They Said A Prayer In Your Presence?
by minimus inmy mom has had visits from various jws and they have asked her if they could say a prayer before they left.
i respectfully listened to the prayers while i was visiting and might silently say amen if i felt the prayer was appropriate for my mom.. i'm just curious, how would you handle this type of situation?.
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I Want to Believe
Now days, when with my parents before meals, I bow out of respect but keep my eyes open and keep silent. When first starting to wake up I would say a seperate prayer and end it at the exact same time so that my amen was merely agreeing with myself.
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28
Describe your life now in one sentence...
by MsGrowingGirl20 incan you?
please make it interesting!
!.
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I Want to Believe
Out of the darkness, I'm now free and enlightened, with unlimited options for the rest of my life.
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16
The effects and repercussions of a cyber attack on WTBTS
by Soldier77 inthis is pure speculation on my part and i hope to get some others to join in sharing their thoughts on this topic.. with the recent push by "mother" to rely heavily on their site jw.org, correspondance to elder bodies, publication downloads, library access, imagine the impact an attack to their site could produce to the organization.. here we have the gb jumping on the bandwagon, late as usual, but still trying to grasp the internet, and saying that it's "okay" to use the internet, and when you do, please go to our site.
so you have a lot of people that may have been die hard, anti-internet because it's from the devil, now saying, okay, lets get a computer, get internet service and hop online..... that's where all hell breaks loose.
they log on the great world wide web and type in the "officially backed" website.... and bam!
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I Want to Believe
Ha, that would be perfect! Make them question everything and they won't be able to stop. People would be able to neutrally evaluate the content of the articles and make independant value judgments -- then the GB will have to admit that the ridiculous stuff that didn't make any sense was all "true."
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The effects and repercussions of a cyber attack on WTBTS
by Soldier77 inthis is pure speculation on my part and i hope to get some others to join in sharing their thoughts on this topic.. with the recent push by "mother" to rely heavily on their site jw.org, correspondance to elder bodies, publication downloads, library access, imagine the impact an attack to their site could produce to the organization.. here we have the gb jumping on the bandwagon, late as usual, but still trying to grasp the internet, and saying that it's "okay" to use the internet, and when you do, please go to our site.
so you have a lot of people that may have been die hard, anti-internet because it's from the devil, now saying, okay, lets get a computer, get internet service and hop online..... that's where all hell breaks loose.
they log on the great world wide web and type in the "officially backed" website.... and bam!
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I Want to Believe
Sir82 is right; subtle would probably work better. Imagine if, instead of hacking a redirect away from jw.org, the download magazine links were simply replaced with new "improved" magazines -- again, staying subtle, with only a few key articles changed/added to/or created. It could even go several issues before anybody even noticed, but seeds could be planted.