I don't think I'll ever understand why these people who just give up on life and snap choose random targets for their killings. You would think they would go after the people who made them miserable in the first place.
Rainbow_Troll
JoinedPosts by Rainbow_Troll
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9
Facebook Murderer Dead
by snowbird ingood!.
evil bastard!.
can't link, but quick thinking and acting on the part of mcdonald's employees led to his demise.. sylvia.
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38
If we are further away from perfection, why are we more moral?
by stuckinarut2 inas we know, witnesses teach that adam and eve were perfect and then committed the first act of sin and rebellion.. they in turn were cursed,and we all declined as their offspring.
humans supposedly lived shorter and shorter lives, and became more imperfect and sinful.. the further away in time humans go then, they should be getting worse.
so why is it then that as a society, humans have actually improved in so many ways?.
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Rainbow_Troll
But is it , though?
Many people can imagine better worlds than this. We all do it and novelists make a living off of it. But can you honestly imagine a world that is worse than this one? Some people might point to worlds like Mars or Venus and conclude that those worlds are considerably worse than ours. But Mars and Venus are incapable of supporting life and without life there is no suffering; hence, if anything, they are actually somewhat better than Earth.
Our world is actually as bad as it possibly can be. If it were any worse - if we were a little farther or closer to the sun, for example - humanity would either go extinct or it would commit mass suicide because life wouldn't be worth living.
If you want to imagine some sort of Hell-world like you catch glimpses of in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Hellraiser you have to remember that these worlds, admittedly worse than our own, are inhabited by demons who are much hardier than humans and might even feel perfectly at home there.
Humans could not survive in a world worse than this one, hence, from an anthropocentric point of view (and all value judgments of 'better' and 'worse' are ultimately relative to the one who is evaluating) Earth is the worst planet in the universe to live on.
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Being homosexual in a JW house hold
by Jean ini could not find a topic about this if there is one ooops.
it is hard to speak with my mother or any other witnesses about this, their response is "its ok to be gay just don't ever 'act out.
acting out = being with someone even if its a healthy consensual legal relationship between two adults its still wrong.
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Rainbow_Troll
Too bad you already admitted to being gay. Homosexuality wasn't unheard of in my congregation, but it was impossible to prove unless one of the participants felt guilty enough to repent before the elders.
In my experience, most people believe what they want to believe. Your mother wants to believe you are straight, so convince her your homosexuality was just a phase or demonic possession or whatever. Then you can find someone inside (or possibly outside) your congregation to have sex with.
It won't be hard. And if you are a teenage boy, you could easily find even straight boys to have sex with you. The GB's prohibition on teenage dating ensures that just about every young male in any given congregation is bi-curious and willing to experiment.
Have fun.
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38
If we are further away from perfection, why are we more moral?
by stuckinarut2 inas we know, witnesses teach that adam and eve were perfect and then committed the first act of sin and rebellion.. they in turn were cursed,and we all declined as their offspring.
humans supposedly lived shorter and shorter lives, and became more imperfect and sinful.. the further away in time humans go then, they should be getting worse.
so why is it then that as a society, humans have actually improved in so many ways?.
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Rainbow_Troll
Diogenesister: But could your Aunt programme a computer? Did she understand the influence of historical, contemporary and cultural factors in the development of photographic artwork, a thorough knowledge of the sciences - Particles, Quantum Phenomena and Electricity. - understand the periodic table?Biological sciences, sociology? Economics? It's not fair, of course, to have expected your Aunt to know any of these things given *when* she went to school. But that's my point. Kids now have so much more *to* know.
You make a good point. It takes much more to be considered an educated person in 2017 than it did in 1936 and schools may be perfectly justified in scrapping Greek to make way for BASIC. The problem I see is more and more being scrapped without anything to replace it. Between the ages of 5 and 17 I attended six different public schools and not one of them taught computer programming, photography, quantum physics or the periodic table. Was I just extraordinarily unlucky or do my experiences reflect a general trend in American public education? And while it is true that knowledge on these subjects is more available than it's ever been, my fear is that unless children are exposed to these subjects in schools, they are unlikely to be motivated to study them on their own even when the information is literally at their fingertips (online).
Even worse, schools may actually discourage independent study by forcing students to attend when their time could be better spent in the library or learning online. A few years back my state actually eliminated science and math from its High School proficiency test. The reason: most students could not get a passing score with these on the test. Lots of people were upset about it, but who could really argue that demanding proficiency in these arcane subjects was only making it harder for most students to graduate? Most of them will never use these skills in adulthood anyways; so why bother?
And yes, many of them do study Miltons ' Paradise Lost' or go to a theological seminary and study the Bible. Probably far more do these things than did back then.
Unless the kids in question are attending a Catholic school, that is very unlikely. Between the religious right and the PC liberals, most literature has been eliminated from the public curriculum. Milton would be too religious (which would piss off the liberals) while fundy parents would be aghast at Mark Twain' swearing, his liberal use of the word 'nigger' and the way he encourages juvenile delinquency. What's left? I don't blame most kids for being illiterate. The 'literature' I was exposed to in school would not have encouraged me to learn how to read and write. If you doubt what I have said, I would like you to compare your own child's literature book with an old fashioned McGuffey reader (which you can download online for free). Notice that the McGuffey reader has quotations from the King James Bible, William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Dryden, Dickens, Horace, and many other good poets and writers. Does your child's literature book contain the work of even a single author of note? I rest my case.
steve2: This is pretty much the JW view, despite the virtual eradication of a host of childhood diseases that once threatened children's wellbeing and mortality (whooping cough, polio, measles, chicken pox, etc).
Most of those were eliminated in the early 20th century by philanthropic physicians. Now that all the cancer and AIDS research is carried out by greedy universities and corporations who have absolutely nothing to gain by finding a cure (but a lot to loose in both funding and treatments), don't expect any more diseases to be eliminated in the near future.
Besides, many diseases in the West nowadays are those of older age (cancer, heart disease, stroke) and, if anything, show the increased longevity of men and women in modern societies.
I talked to an acquaintance the other day whose son in law dropped dead over the weekend from an anerism. He was 20 years old. Children are dying of cancer. These diseases used to be associated with old age, but not anymore and I strongly suspect that environmental pollution is playing a big part in it.
And let's not forget how common it was in the past for women to die in childbirth - and often their babies with them; infant mortality was once very high and was one of the reasons larger families were prized. With improvement in lifestyles and health, infant mortality is now at its lowest level in recorded history
Well, you've got me there. The only come back I can think of is that these lucky infants may not be so grateful in a few years when they realize what a terrible world they have been born into.
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38
If we are further away from perfection, why are we more moral?
by stuckinarut2 inas we know, witnesses teach that adam and eve were perfect and then committed the first act of sin and rebellion.. they in turn were cursed,and we all declined as their offspring.
humans supposedly lived shorter and shorter lives, and became more imperfect and sinful.. the further away in time humans go then, they should be getting worse.
so why is it then that as a society, humans have actually improved in so many ways?.
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Rainbow_Troll
RT, I can't reconcile an increase in disease today with my perception of the past?
Homo sapiens is a young species and while having begun to turn towards organising ourselves for the betterment of all, we remain for the time being at the level of raw recruits working out how to do it. This difficulty is not surprising since no other species has attempted a conscious democratic governance. Brute force was the only rule available.
Religion worked as a political unifier in the past especially when all societies were rigidly class layered but the time for blind faith in the numinous world is rapidly declining. Our species is only just setting out on a real star treck although we've hardly got off our own planet, yet surely, the technology does seem to be pointing in Roddenberry's direction?
If we take the typical life of a human in his or her development as a pattern; It seems to me that humans in the 21st century are collectively at the stage of teenagers still trying out the world, with some more grown up than others. Human society/societies have made progress and religion with faith in holy magic is no longer a beacon for the future.
The next stage toward maturity: will it be built on the foundations set up by the "philosophes" of the 19th century Enlightenment?Mankind isn't evolving in any but the strictest scientific sense. We're degenerating physically, intellectually and spiritually. What you call adolescence, I call senility. I don't want to die, but I don't want to live to see the end either.
There have always been plagues and diseases and the lack of sanitation in ancient cities (excluding technologically advanced ones like Rome) no doubt made it even worse. But on the whole, I believe most human beings were much healthier than they are now. For starters, before the industrial revolution, the natural environment was relatively pristine. I'm a strict vegetarian more for health than out of empathy for fish and mollusks. Back then you could eat all the seafood you liked without worrying about mercury, BPAs and radiation from the Fukushima disaster.
The diet itself was also much healthier. Most people ate a lot of grains and vegetables with small amounts of meat. Despite what paleos and vegans will say, all the evidence I am aware of points to this as being the ideal diet for homo sapiens. I don't think obesity and high cholesterol was a problem for the majority of humanity until recently.
Finally, there's drugs. Alcohol was sometimes abused, but it was much rarer than today. Other drugs like opiates and psychedelics had strictly medicinal and religious uses - not like today at all. Humans today are swiftly being poisoned by the drug epidemic. Even people like me who don't indulge in anything stronger than a cup of tea are getting it into their systems just by being around addicts. Since meth started being smoked in my residence, I've developed a cough and frequent headaches. People who unwittingly buy meth houses get sick.
Intellectually, we've become worse as well. Science has demonstrated conclusively that the mind and brain are intimately connected. Toxins like mercury and fluoride have been absolutely proven, beyond any doubt, to lower the measurable intelligence of those who are exposed to them.
Literacy has increased among the general population, but only in the narrowest sense of that word. Not too long ago 'literacy' meant more than simply being able to read and understand a job application. Literate people could read something like Milton's Paradise Lost and not only understand all the words, but recognize Milton's allusions to Greek mythology and the Bible. Hell, most literate people even a hundred years ago could read the Iliad and parts of the Bible in their original language: Greek. My great aunt, who grew up poor in rural Arkansas during the great depression, could read and speak Latin fluently!
Regarding Star Trek. Yes, we are starting to develop technology reminiscent of what is seen on the show. The mp3 and digital music in general was directly inspired by an episode of TNG in which Data has the computer playing several symphonies at once. But it isn't the technology that makes Star Trek such an inspiring vision of the future; it's the people. The humans on Star Trek are nothing like 21st century humans. They are driven neither by hedonism nor greed, but by a need for self-actualization. They strive to be better tomorrow than they were yesterday. They have abundant supplies of everything they need, but their economy (at least what we see of it) seems to be driven by the needs and desires of the consumers rather than the greed of the producers to sell more products by creating an artificial demand where there was none before.
Most humans today seem to be born with a hole in their souls that can never be filled. The successful ones try fill that hole with top of the line products like cars, electronics and nice homes while the loosers fill it with junk food and drugs; but it's all the same. The entire focus of human activity has changed from one of collective spiritual salvation (whether the destination be Nirvana, Paradise or Heaven) to individual material acquisition. In the middle ages, indigents and wastrels were considered a blessing from God because they gave the more fortunate the opportunity to exercise charity. Most people were actually glad to give money to a bum because they thought it would earn them brownie points with God. Now that's all changed. Protestants see the poor as guilty of some sin, since in their theology wealth is a sign of God's favor! And atheists? Those poor bums are just loosers in the darwinian struggle for survival, so don't encourage them! And yes, I know that there are plenty of protestants and atheists who do give, I'm one of them, but helping the less fortunate does not really follow from either philosophy. It's more or less tacked on.
How ironic that the ethos of the European dark ages, in spite of all its ignorance and superstition, was much closer to the Star Trek ethos than that of our present 'enlightened', technological society. The true Enlightenment of philosophers like Descartes, Leibniz, Locke and Hume never really happened except among a small intellectual elite. If their ideals ever were to become popular, we would indeed have Star Trek. But until that happens, I often wonder if the old Catholic Christian ethos would be better than what is dominating our society at present.
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Even if it's not the truth, it's still the best way to live
by Simon inhow many times did you hear that gem?
it often went along with "the truth is a protection" which is their way of saying "living a moral life is good for you ... and you can't do that without us".. but think about what people are really saying.
i think the real message is "i know it's not the truth, but i chose to follow it anyway".. it seems like a pre-emptive argument because they know they can't defend it as "the truth" so instead they switch to defending it as a lifestyle.. of course any kind of lifestyle that has a decent moral ingredient to it, respect for law and order, discipline etc... probably increases people's chances of doing better in life, but they don't have a monopoly on it.. so just remember, next time you hear someone saying "even if it's not the truth" what they are really admitting is that they already know it isn't..
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Rainbow_Troll
"At least he provides food, shelter, and clothing, you could be homeless living on the street."
How thoughtful of him. Of course, if he didn't keep you around he would have had to take his chances with finding a young prostitute to sate his desires and risk being arrested. But no, how gratuitously selfless of him to provide for someone whose very existence he was directly responsible for and who was never consulted over whether they wanted to be born at all.
Ah, nothing like a parent's love for their child, is there?
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How long has it been since you have seen your family?
by Christian Gutierrez inhowdy guys!
so how long has it been since you have seen your jw family or friends?
or do you even care to have them in your life anymore?
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Rainbow_Troll
I see my mom fairly often. I'm ashamed to say I haven't seen my JW friends in the flesh for about 15 years now; though I continue to stalk them using Facebook and other social media,
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Cirencester Congregation UK: My story
by erbie indear all,.
i have been a member here for some years although mostly in the background.
many of you have bravely shared your own experiences and i am very grateful for that but i have never been open about my own experience.. nevertheless, i would be very grateful to those of you who would now take the time to read about my own personal journey from the jw religion and the circumstances that caused me to abandon that way of life and how i landed up where i am.
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Rainbow_Troll
I have never been able to understand why infidelity is so damaging to a marriage, but I'm sorry you had to go through that. Though it sounds to me like maybe she just needed an excuse to cheat and would have done it in any case. That she cheated with so many men suggests that it had nothing to do with you; she's just incapable of a sustained monogamous relationship. I strongly suspect that wasn't her first fling with her cousin, as in my experience those types of relationships start early in life when they happen at all.
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22,000 years of arctic ice cores melt, and wash the YHWH/JESUS concept down the sewer
by fulltimestudent inthe full story, as told in the uk guardian can be found at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/16/arctic-ice-cores-melt-university-alberta-canada.
and briefly it tells of an equipment failure at a storage facility for ice cores that had been extracted from the polar ice cap in various locations.. but note, that the layers of ice evident in the cores covered a period of 22,000 years.
and from the christian/jw perspective, that's impossible, for the bible story of the flood (verified by jesus and sundry other biblical writers) maintains that 4000+ years ago, the ice caps would have melted during the period when the earth was covered by the divinely caused deluge.
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Rainbow_Troll
What scriptural justification is there for concluding that the world is six thousand years old anyways? Are Creationists just summing up the recorded lifetimes of everyone from Adam to Jesus? They do know there are huge gaps, don't they?
The Bible is, even at its best, merely a history of God's alleged dealings with Abraham and his descendents. The Adam and Eve story is obviously an allegory: there are and never were talking snakes or trees of knowledge or life. Not even the Jews, who invented the story, take it literally!
I don't understand why this is even an issue. I'm not a Christian, but if I were I wouldn't have any problem reconciling the Bible with an old Earth. There is just no reason to believe it's only been here for six thousand years.
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38
If we are further away from perfection, why are we more moral?
by stuckinarut2 inas we know, witnesses teach that adam and eve were perfect and then committed the first act of sin and rebellion.. they in turn were cursed,and we all declined as their offspring.
humans supposedly lived shorter and shorter lives, and became more imperfect and sinful.. the further away in time humans go then, they should be getting worse.
so why is it then that as a society, humans have actually improved in so many ways?.
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Rainbow_Troll
From the utilitarian viewpoint of nineteenth century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, we are doing better. Today in the Western World more people have more pleasure and less pain and live longer with a greater sense of wellbeing than ever before.
I'm not so sure. While there is certainly much to be said for modern medicine, even this benefit has been compensated by an increase in disease. We spend more time working than our medieval counterparts did. We are certainly more free than them, but much of the choices we are given are rather trivial. The only way I could have possibly been happy back then would have been as a monk or priest, but I believe if I were I would have been much happier than I am now.
I used to look towards the future for hope; now I look back to the past for my inspiration. I will always be an incorrigible Star Trek fan; but don't see anything resembling Gene Roddenberry's dream looming in our future. What I see is much closer to Brave New World and it's unfolding before my eyes.