Dr. Jekyll times 9

by lastmanstanding in

what does it look like when an “apostate” stands up at the kingdumb hall and tells it like it is?.

watch the opening scene of the original, black and white, dr. jekyll & mr hyde 1932. it tells the whole story,,,.

pseudoxristos

This may not be the right video, but it's kind of funny:

https://youtu.be/uN4Di8DEPf8

40

What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right

by pseudoxristos in

jw
friends

my first thought when seeing this headline was; "how could trump be right?

" even though i am registered as a republican, i don't really care for trump.

after reading the article, i still don't care for trump, but i had never considered many of the points brought out by the article.. january 17, 2018. what i learned in the peace corps in africa: trump is right.

pseudoxristos

I'm sure that it isn't representative of the whole of Africa. I think that it probably only represents one of the worst countries in Africa and that it would be unfair to suggest that this attitude and level of corruption can only be found in Africa.There are a number of things about the article that strike me as narrow minded and the republican sound bites that are thrown in at the end are pretty obvious.

40

What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right

by pseudoxristos in

jw
friends

my first thought when seeing this headline was; "how could trump be right?

" even though i am registered as a republican, i don't really care for trump.

after reading the article, i still don't care for trump, but i had never considered many of the points brought out by the article.. january 17, 2018. what i learned in the peace corps in africa: trump is right.

pseudoxristos

My first thought when seeing this headline was; "how could Trump be right?" Even though I am registered as a Republican, I don't really care for Trump. After reading the article, I still don't care for Trump, but I had never considered many of the points brought out by the article.

January 17, 2018

What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right

By Karin McQuillan

Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a community center in a rural town. Life was placid, with no danger, except to your health. That danger was considerable, because it was, in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, "a fecalized environment."

In plain English: s--- is everywhere. People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your food, the water. He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water. Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country. Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism.

Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame Cathedral. The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his head not to see.

I have seen. I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant things are not true.

Senegal was not a hellhole. Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms. But they are not our terms. The excrement is the least of it. Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.

As a twenty-one-year-old starting out in the Peace Corps, I loved Senegal. In fact, I was euphoric. I quickly made friends and had an adopted family. I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man. People were open, willing to share their lives and, after they knew you, their innermost thoughts.

The longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us. The truths we hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese. How could they be? Their reality is totally different. You can't understand anything in Senegal using American terms.

Take something as basic as family. Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins. All the men in one generation were called "father." Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives. Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty. (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.) Sex, I was told, did not include kissing. Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas. Fidelity was not a thing. Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.

What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death. Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives. Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.

Yet family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown. The value system was the exact opposite. You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives. There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system. They fail.

We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa. The kleptocracy extends through the whole society. My town had a medical clinic donated by international agencies. The medicine was stolen by the medical workers and sold to the local store. If you were sick and didn't have money, drop dead. That was normal.

So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father's Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn't bathing him, I wasn't surprised. It was familiar.

In Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom. Go to the post office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp. After paying the bribe, you still didn't know it if it would be mailed or thrown out. That was normal.

One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic. One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides – who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working – collapsed to the ground. They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking. She lay there in the dirt. Callousness to the sick was normal.

Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's not. It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.

We think the Protestant work ethic is universal. It's not. My town was full of young men doing nothing. They were waiting for a government job. There was no private enterprise. Private business was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world bureaucratic kleptocracy. It is also incompatible with Senegalese insistence on taking care of relatives.

All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians. If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he'd go to another country. The reason? Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for free, and you would have to say yes. End of your business. You are not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives. The result: Everyone has nothing.

The more I worked there and visited government officials doing absolutely nothing, the more I realized that no one in Senegal had the idea that a job means work. A job is something given to you by a relative. It provides the place where you steal everything to give back to your family.

I couldn't wait to get home. So why would I want to bring Africa here? Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on our shores with a visa.

For the rest of my life, I enjoyed the greatest gift of the Peace Corps: I love and treasure America more than ever. I take seriously my responsibility to defend our culture and our country and pass on the American heritage to the next generation.

African problems are made worse by our aid efforts. Senegal is full of smart, capable people. They will eventually solve their own country's problems. They will do it on their terms, not ours. The solution is not to bring Africans here.

We are lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third-world immigration by the hundred million with chain migration. They tell us we must end America as a white, Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation – to prove we are not racist. I don't need to prove a thing. Leftists want open borders because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate America. They want to destroy America as we know it.

As President Trump asked, why would we do that?

We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in. I was happy to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor Senegalese. I am not willing to donate my country.

14

Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History

by pseudoxristos in

jw
friends

i found the following article to be a nice contrast to the jw's gloomy point of view.. why 2017 was the best year in human history.

we all know that the world is going to hell.

given the rising risk of nuclear war with north korea, the paralysis in congress, warfare in yemen and syria, atrocities in myanmar and a president who may be going cuckoo, you might think 2017 was the worst year ever.. but you’d be wrong.

pseudoxristos

I found the following article to be a nice contrast to the JW's gloomy point of view.

Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History

We all know that the world is going to hell. Given the rising risk of nuclear war with North Korea, the paralysis in Congress, warfare in Yemen and Syria, atrocities in Myanmar and a president who may be going cuckoo, you might think 2017 was the worst year ever.

But you’d be wrong. In fact, 2017 was probably the very best year in the long history of humanity.

A smaller share of the world’s people were hungry, impoverished or illiterate than at any time before. A smaller proportion of children died than ever before. The proportion disfigured by leprosy, blinded by diseases like trachoma or suffering from other ailments also fell.

We need some perspective as we watch the circus in Washington, hands over our mouths in horror. We journalists focus on bad news — we cover planes that crash, not those that take off — but the backdrop of global progress may be the most important development in our lifetime.

Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than about $2 a day) goes down by 217,000, according to calculations by Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs a website called Our World in Data. Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity. And 300,000 more gain access to clean drinking water.

Readers often assume that because I cover war, poverty and human rights abuses, I must be gloomy, an Eeyore with a pen. But I’m actually upbeat, because I’ve witnessed transformational change.

As recently as the 1960s, a majority of humans had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. Now fewer than 15 percent are illiterate, and fewer than 10 percent live in extreme poverty. In another 15 years, illiteracy and extreme poverty will be mostly gone. After thousands of generations, they are pretty much disappearing on our watch.

Just since 1990, the lives of more than 100 million children have been saved by vaccinations, diarrhea treatment, breast-feeding promotion and other simple steps.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor, explores the gains in a terrific book due out next month, “Enlightenment Now,” in which he recounts the progress across a broad array of metrics, from health to wars, the environment to happiness, equal rights to quality of life. “Intellectuals hate progress,” he writes, referring to the reluctance to acknowledge gains, and I know it feels uncomfortable to highlight progress at a time of global threats. But this pessimism is counterproductive and simply empowers the forces of backwardness.

President Trump rode this gloom to the White House. The idea “Make America Great Again” professes a nostalgia for a lost Eden. But really? If that was, say, the 1950s, the U.S. also had segregation, polio and bans on interracial marriage, gay sex and birth control. Most of the world lived under dictatorships, two-thirds of parents had a child die before age 5, and it was a time of nuclear standoffs, of pea soup smog, of frequent wars, of stifling limits on women and of the worst famine in history.

What moment in history would you prefer to live in?

F. Scott Fitzgerald said the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time. I suggest these: The world is registering important progress, but it also faces mortal threats. The first belief should empower us to act on the second.

Granted, this column may feel weird to you. Those of us in the columny gig are always bemoaning this or that, and now I’m saying that life is great? That’s because most of the time, quite rightly, we focus on things going wrong. But it’s also important to step back periodically. Professor Roser notes that there was never a headline saying, “The Industrial Revolution Is Happening,” even though that was the most important news of the last 250 years.

I had a visit the other day from Sultana, a young Afghan woman from the Taliban heartland. She had been forced to drop out of elementary school. But her home had internet, so she taught herself English, then algebra and calculus with the help of the Khan Academy, Coursera and EdX websites. Without leaving her house, she moved on to physics and string theory, wrestled with Kant and read The New York Times on the side, and began emailing a distinguished American astrophysicist, Lawrence M. Krauss.

I wrote about Sultana in 2016, and with the help of Professor Krauss and my readers, she is now studying at Arizona State University, taking graduate classes. She’s a reminder of the aphorism that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. The meaning of global progress is that such talent increasingly can flourish.

So, sure, the world is a dangerous mess; I worry in particular about the risk of a war with North Korea. But I also believe in stepping back once a year or so to take note of genuine progress — just as, a year ago, I wrote that 2016 had been the best year in the history of the world, and a year from now I hope to offer similar good news about 2018. The most important thing happening right now is not a Trump tweet, but children’s lives saved and major gains in health, education and human welfare.

Every other day this year, I promise to tear my hair and weep and scream in outrage at all the things going wrong. But today, let’s not miss what’s going right.

22

Millions Then Living Did Not Survive

by Fred Franztone in

jw
friends

it's almost 2018, almost 100 years since 'judge' rutherford confidently prophesied that 'millions now living will never die!'..

so how many of those millions are left?

well, since it was 100 years ago, all we need to do is find out how many people of age 100 and above are currently living.

pseudoxristos

"Millions now living in overlapping generations will never die!"

48

Adam and the Dinosaurs

by The Real Edward Gentry in

jw
friends

here is a fascinating subject.

according to the bible , one of adam's first assignments was to name all the animals including the sea creatures and dinosaurs of course.

we don't know how long this took but, as all witnesses know, the time period is crucial in working out the timing of armageddon).

pseudoxristos

Apparently, according to Ken Ham, the dinosaurs survived the flood only to later become extinct, or perhaps they still survive deep in some unexplored area of earth. For a good laugh, read the following:

https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/when-did-dinosaurs-live/what-really-happened-to-the-dinosaurs/

So God had Noah save the dinosaurs from the flood and then allowed them to die off later because conditions on earth after the flood were too harsh for their survival. I'm beginning to think that Ken Ham is really an atheist mocking Christians with this ridiculous nonsense.

10

Anyone remember LP album circa 68 with Awake on back cover?

by cabasilas in

jw
friends

i have a memory of some rock artist of the 60s placing a pic of herself and some guy in bed and her reading an awake magazine on the back cover.

it could have been "is time running out for mankind" or something like that.

anyone remember?

pseudoxristos

Image result for album cover with awake magazine

19

Debating a Christian at work.

by pseudoxristos in

a christian at work has been after me for more than a year to go to his church and be saved.

i like the guy and consider him a friend and have been politely trying to avoid the subject.

i have recently decided that enough is enough and i told him i would discuss religion with him.

pseudoxristos

Today, I finally started the discussion with my friend on Genesis chapter 1. As I expected, we were only able to cover the first 5 or so verses in over 2 hours of discussion (with some interruptions).

I tried to get him to read information from some of the sub-headings in the Wikipedia article:

Genesis creation narrative

I got the impression that he really didn't wanted to bother with it, but want to start the discussion instead.

(The following is extremely condensed and paraphrased. I hope that I accurately portray his thoughts)

Previously he had told me that the Bible states in Gen 1:1-5 that On the first day, God created the Heavens (universe) and earth (without form), then light.

Basically, I tried to establish the idea that Gen 1:1-2 was not part of the Creation account and it acted more like an introduction. Each of the creative days follow a textual formula where God commands an action, followed by the occurrence of that action, followed by the phrase "...then it was evening and morning, the xth day".

He claimed that every creative day ended with the phrase "...then it was evening and morning, the xth day" and it included all of the previous actions not included from the previous day, so he didn't see a problem with including Gen1:1-2 with Gen1:3-5. I pointed out that it would be more consistent to view each creative day starting with "And God said ..." and ending with "...then it was evening then morning". I think he finally saw the point and conceded that it didn't really matter and we moved on to Gen 1:3-5.

Surprisingly, he chose to argue that God did indeed create light on the first day even though the sun was not created until the 4th day. He chose to believe that God was able to illuminated the sky (since he is the creator, and not bound by his creation) even though the sun was not created until day 4.

I argued that I thought that was inconsistent and he was using the "God did it argument".

I brought up my idea that the ancient Hebrews may have not necessarily felt that the illumination of the atmosphere was tied to the sun and if the account was viewed in this manner, it made more sense. At one point I asked him if the source of illumination of the sky was the same on day five as it was for day one. He indicated that by day 4 the sun would have taken over and illuminated the sky.

Eventually I suggested that we agree to disagree, even though overall we kind of agreed that light was present without the sun, we just varied on the details. He still insisted that his view was consistent.

I'm pretty sure that I've really done nothing to persuade him to see my point of view and it will likely take a long long time to get to that point. I am a little irritated that he seems to think that we can go over one or two minor issues and I should be persuaded to become a Christian.

19

Debating a Christian at work.

by pseudoxristos in

a christian at work has been after me for more than a year to go to his church and be saved.

i like the guy and consider him a friend and have been politely trying to avoid the subject.

i have recently decided that enough is enough and i told him i would discuss religion with him.

pseudoxristos

scratchme,

All good questions. I sometimes wonder, why I'm even bothering to debate him. I don't really think that I will be able to convince him that his beliefs are not consistent with reality. He seems to be the one to always want to talk about it and save my soul. In a way, I'm wondering if his world view is the result of his upbringing as a Christian and maybe his lack of knowledge in some areas. Maybe I'm just curious about what makes him tick. He is obviously very intelligent. I'm just amazed at how different his world view is from mine.

He believes that a shoulder problem he had in the past was "faith healed" (although it flared up again recently). So his personal experience with religion will probably have a big influence on facts or logic I try to present.

jp1692,

Good idea. I had thought about getting him an inexpensive "flat earth" book to try and contrast some of his illogical beliefs with more illogical beliefs.

19

Debating a Christian at work.

by pseudoxristos in

a christian at work has been after me for more than a year to go to his church and be saved.

i like the guy and consider him a friend and have been politely trying to avoid the subject.

i have recently decided that enough is enough and i told him i would discuss religion with him.

pseudoxristos

Thanks for all the responses, good info and links. I enjoyed the videos.

We had a small discussion today concerning "demon possession". I had mentioned that I didn't find the Creation account credible because of the talking animals mentioned within it. So, now we have to go through the idea that "demonic possession" is real.

I'm afraid that as some have suggested, we won't really get very far in the discussion of Genesis because rationality doesn't seem to be very high on the list.

pseudoxristos

Posts by pseudoxristos

What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right