Xanthippe

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Posts by Xanthippe

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  41

  How did you feel making your first post here?

  by cognac in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i was scared sh*tless.

  i stayed home from work for four days scared to go out of my house thinking god would strike me down by lightening if was wrong with my thoughts... i couldn't sleep at all.... but i had to take that first step... as scary as it was....

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  Xanthippe

  I wasn't afraid of the cult finding out because I left a long time ago so I suppose my nervousness came from the usual feeling of joining a new group of people. I noticed that some people think they are the fount of all knowledge and a few were quite aggressive. Others were very welcoming and kind. The usual cross section of people you find in any group I suppose.
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  11

  My cat is a microcosmic allagoric example of the struggle of leaving the cults

  by thecrushed in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  here is a little story for you.

  i have a cat that has always been a little feral and doesn't get along with the other cats socially.

  one of my cats decided he was going to bully this poor guy and worry him sick.

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  Xanthippe

  The Crushed I get you - it was hell leaving the cult. I was a nervous woman made pathetic by stress and that male dominated society, never allowed to be myself. Always ill. I am unrecognizable now. I book holidays and get on planes by myself. Put electrical equipment together by myself. I'm the bread -winner and I pay the bills and that tiny shivering person has gone. The transition was hell but I am never going back. Who was that woman?
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  277

  How Modern Christianity has failed Christians

  by Christ Alone in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  i've recently been thinking about our culture and how christianity in our western culture has failed to keep up with advancements in science.

  ) churches have let reason sink into the intellectual closet of fundamentalism.

  "feel good" churches seem to be the norm today.

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  Xanthippe

  Christ Alone, why are you claiming Save the Children has something to do with religion? It was founded by Eglantyne Jebb and her sister Dorothy Buxton. Eglantyne was an activist for starving children in Europe during World War 1 and Dorothy was married to a politician. The background is activist, fund-raising and political as far as I know.
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  7

  Elder friends of mine everything I tell them is like "Spam"...programmed to shut down!!

  by Witness 007 in

  1. jw
  2. experiences
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  Xanthippe

  Yes it always reminds me of Scarlet O'hara in Gone with the Wind - 'I wont think about that today I'll think about that tomorrow'.
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  8

  British Friends: please comment on home energy tariffs

  by compound complex in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/household-bills/9775877/winter-energy-bills-will-reach-530-a-quarter.html.

  how is this affecting you?

  i'm not sure how it compares to the us dollar.

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  Xanthippe

  Just had my statement CoCo and my direct debit energy bill is going up to £101 per month this year. Hopefully we will get a much better Summer this year and it will go down again - not holding out much hope though
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  125

  CRAPPING DEAD DINOSAUR MEAT....and the religious implications...

  by Terry in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  before man....before the adam/eve saga.......how would you explain the nature of life on earth in terms of sin?

  millions of years passed before man and sin.

  (let that sink in a few seconds.........).

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  Xanthippe

  From Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H., 1850. The quotation comes in Canto 56 (it is a very long poem) and refers to man:

  Who trusted God was love indeed
  And love Creation's final law
  Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
  With ravine, shriek'd against his creed
  
  'Tooth and claw' was already in use as a phrase denoting wild nature by Tennyson's day; for example, this piece from The Hagerstown Mail, March 1837:

  "Hereupon, the beasts, enraged at the humbug, fell upon him tooth and claw."
  
  A.H.H. was Tennyson's friend Arthur Henry Hallam and the poet used the elegy to pose questions about the apparent conflict between love as the basis of the Christian religion and the callousness of nature. If nature is purposeless and heartless, how can we believe in creation's final law? But, as a Christian, how could he not?

  The wide-ranging poem didn't attempt to provide an answer, but did become part of the debate over the major scientific and theological concern of Victorian thinkers - Charles Darwin's theories on natural selection, as expressed in The Origin of Species, 1859.

  www.phrases.org.uk
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  14

  Do we need to know? Are we trapped in the thought?

  by cyberjesus in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  when i learned ttatt i fell in deep depression.

  after i came out of the depression i started to look for the right religion.. i wanted desperately to find the "truth" .

  i was confused since many top xjw went different paths.

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  Xanthippe

  I only came on here because a JW friend got in touch after 23 years of me being out and I didn't know why. Still don't but I will continue writing and maybe I will find out. It could be any of the doctrinal changes or something else entirely. Meanwhile I have got rather hooked on this site.

  Cyber, I do get bored with the endless God versus atheism threads and as you say find discussing it a waste of time. I wont change anyone so why try. Also I understand why people hate superstition because of what we have all been through becuase of being forced to accept ancient mythology and no-one wants to be tricked again. I totaslly get that. Sometimes though rabid rationalism bores me too. Look at these comments in yesterday's Guardian about the Large Hadron Collider

  "Unlike supersymmetry or the Higgs, there's no theory of antimatter that we can test," says Tara Shears, a physicist who works on the LHCb detector. "We don't know why antimatter behaves a little differently to normal matter, but perhaps that difference can be explained by a deeper underlying theory of particle physics, which includes new physics that we haven't found yet." ...

  "What you'd expect is that as you reach the right energy, you suddenly see inside the extra dimensions, and gravity becomes big and strong instead of feeble and weak," says Parker. The sudden extra pull of gravity would cause particles to scatter far more inside the machine, giving scientists a clear signal that extra dimensions were real.

  Extra dimensions may separate us from realms of space we are completely oblivious to. "There could be a whole universe full of galaxies and stars and civilisations and newspapers that we didn't know about," says Parker. "That would be a big deal."

  I find that when physicists write about what we know of reality and what we don't know they are very humble.
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  16

  How Was Your First Day of the New Year?

  by cognac in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i have a sick kid.

  how was your day?

  any new year resolutions?.

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  Xanthippe

  I went for a lovely walk in the countryside Cognac, very muddy, fell over. Beautiful sunshine though

  Hope your child gets better soon.
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  68

  Being Agnostic is depressing me....

  by SkyGreen in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  for those that dont know my story, basically i "woke up the ttatt" about a year ago, started fading, then went back, now fading again because i just cant stomach it anymore.

  my husband is very supportive, although he's still "in" for now, and trying to be regular with meetings and witnessing, he can see my point of view now, and often notices things in the wt or other publications that are "off".

  the fading thing is hard, sometimes i want to da, but because of the upheaval it would cause my family, im waiting a little while - i guess hoping that my husband will be on the same page at some point, so that we can support eachother.

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  Xanthippe

  'Love thy neighbour and all that? I truly believe that if more people actually lived by those basic principles, the world would be a better place. However, the bible is so old, we cant be sure of it being 100% authentic really can we?'

  Totally agree with you Sky lets look after our family, friends and neighbours. If everyone did just that it would be a great world. As for the bible it is too old to be sure of and far too old to live our lives by, I agree. If we don't know all the answers yet, why worry, we know a lot more than our grandparents did and we are learning all the time. Don't let uncertainty get you down. It is not so bad when you get used to it. I actually love it now. True freedom, the freedom to think whatever we like.
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  19

  The Algorithmic Origins of Life (Davies, Walker)

  by breakfast of champions in

  1. social
  2. current

  for your perusal: the algorithmic origins of life .

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  Xanthippe

  BOC, thanks I spent a really enjoyable afternoon studying this. Just some highlights that got me thinking :-

  Explaining the chemical substate of life and claiming it as a solution to life's origin is like pointing to silicon and copper as an explanation to the goings-on inside a computer.

  ...The real challenge of life's origin is thus to explain how instructional information control systems emerge naturally and spontaneously from mere molecular dynamics.

  ...Von Nuemann appended a ''supervisory unit'' to his automata whose task is to supervise which of these two roles the blueprint must play at a given time thereby ensuring that the blueprint is treated both as an algorithm to be read-out and as a structure to be copied, depending on the context.

  ...To be functional over generations, a complete self-replicating automaton must therefore consist of three components : a UC (universal constructor), an (instructional) blueprint, and a supervisory unit.

  ...From the insights provided by molecular biology over the last 50 years, we can now identify that all life funcions in a manner akin to von Neumann automaton where DNA provides a (partial) algorithm, ribosomes act as the core of the universal constructor and DNA polymerases, (along with a suite of other molecular machinery) play the role of supervisory unit.

  ...The algorithm itslef is therefore highly delocalized, distributrd inextricably throughout the very physical system it encodes. Moreover, although the ribosomes provide a rough approximation for a universal constructor, universal constructionin living cells requires a host of distributed mechanisms for reproducing an entire cell.

  ...Clearly in an organism the algorithm cannot be decomposed and stored in simple sequential digital form to be read out by an appropriate machine in the manner envisioned by Turing and von Neumann for their devices.

  ...Schrodinger postulated the genetic material must be some sort of aperiodic crystal.