Rainbow_Troll

Joined

• started 20 topics
• posted 463 times   see topics posted on
• send a message

Posts by Rainbow_Troll

• 
  19

  Craziest thing you ever did during intermission at a Circuit Assembly

  by Esse quam videri in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  1970 - there was a local drag strip a few miles away from the hall rented for the circuit assembly.

  i was 18 , tim o. was 16 and wayne d. was 18. wayne had a 1955 chevy 4 door, 6 cylinder and fresh paint job.

  tim had his dad'ss 1965 chevy half ton.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Rainbow_Troll

  I broke into parked cars, stole picnic baskets, and lured bored JW girls behind the bushes.
• 
  80

  The Fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity

  by ILoveTTATT2 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  ever since i came out of the witnesses, i've become very political.. i've heard lots of arguments back and forth for many things.. in the u.s. there is the argument that it is "racist" to want to deny entry to muslims.

  while there is freedom of religion, there is also the very valid concern of maintaining democracy and a justice system that is based on modern values.we as exjw's constantly quote the pew center for statistics on jw's such as: they are last place in the us for members of a religion that go to university, and second-last for poverty levels of members of a religion.

  we accept those statistics and mention them as proof of how damaging the jw's are.now, let's use the same center for some very scary statistics on islam:http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/22/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Rainbow_Troll

  Yesu, you make a fair point.

  While Qur'anists continue to identify as Muslim, other Muslims consider them heretics and they are heavily persecuted in Muslim countries (a Quranist blogger got imprisoned in Cairo not so long ago).

  I guess I see the Qur'anist vs. Orthodox debate as similar to the Catholic vs. Protestant debate. When Luther challanged the traditions of the Catholic Church I am sure many no longer considered him Christian and if his revolt had failed there would be no such thing as a Christianity divorced from Catholicism. But Luther succeeded. Thousands of common people listened to him and intellectuals like John Calvin used their learning to build upon his dissent. Now we have millions of people who utterly reject the Pope and many of the traditions of the Catholic church; and yet these people consider themselves to be Christians. Is the pope going to tell them they're not?

  If Qur'anism is able to take the Muslim world by storm the way Protestantism took the Christian world, I think we could have hundreds of thousands of Qur'anists who yet consider themselves Muslim and are recognized as such by the non-muslims as well. Whether or not this ever happens is an open question, but if liberal Muslims want to justify their unwillingness to live under sharia law, this is the only option I see for them.

  Diogenesister13 hours ago
  Rainbow _Troll Can you tell us anymore about these " satanic verses"? About these daughters of Allah please?

  Records of pre-Islamic religion are sketchy at best and some Muslims will even deny the Satanic verses incident ever happened; but here is what I know:

  Allah, the Muslim God is actually a contraction of Al-Ilah or "the god". Al-Ilah was the creator deity of the pre-Islamic polytheists of Mecca and he had daughter goddesses who were also worshiped there. Most Muslims will vehemently deny what I have just said, for obvious reasons, but so what? Anyways, in comes Muhammad with his gospel of one God. "Al-Ilah", he says, "is the only true God and I am his prophet!". The priests and merchants of Mecca are indignant and for good reason: Mecca was a popular holy site and they made a lot of money from the chumps who would make pilgrimage there to worship the gods of the Kabba. Threats are made on Muhammad's life (though they can't be carried out due to tribal politics). He and his followers are persecuted without mercy. The stress gets to the prophet so he tries to compromise with his opponents. All this time he had been uttering revelations which would eventually become the Qur'an and now he utters a new revelation that you won't find in any version of the Qur'an extent. He says:

  "Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-‘Uzzá and Manāt, the third, the other? These are the exalted gharāniq, whose intercession is hoped for."

  Muhammad's enemies are appeased by this rather equivocal sentence but Muhammad is racked with guilt. He's no charlatan. He really believes that he is receiving revelations from Allah and this wasn't one of them. He soon retracts his new 'revelation' and the persecution of Muslims resumes. End of story.
• 
  80

  The Fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity

  by ILoveTTATT2 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  ever since i came out of the witnesses, i've become very political.. i've heard lots of arguments back and forth for many things.. in the u.s. there is the argument that it is "racist" to want to deny entry to muslims.

  while there is freedom of religion, there is also the very valid concern of maintaining democracy and a justice system that is based on modern values.we as exjw's constantly quote the pew center for statistics on jw's such as: they are last place in the us for members of a religion that go to university, and second-last for poverty levels of members of a religion.

  we accept those statistics and mention them as proof of how damaging the jw's are.now, let's use the same center for some very scary statistics on islam:http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/22/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Rainbow_Troll

  Rainbow, about the Quranists, this is really controversial. You say, they return to the Quran alone. This makes them non-muslims, because Muslims need to follow the prophet Mohammed.
  

  All of this presumes that the hadith are accurate records of Muhammad's words and deeds. But how could they be? They were compiled about 250 years after he died. We all know how quickly stories mutate and words get distorted. Imagine what could happen in 250 years!

  But more importantly, as you pointed out, much of the hadith directly contradicts the Qur'an. The Qur'an is supposed to be the word of God, while the hadith are only the words of a man named Muhammad (maybe). If one conflicts with the other, which should a true Muslim obey? If a muslim chooses to disobey God and follow a man instead, then how can he call himself a Muslim?

  Muhammad himself once uttered some 'satanic verses' which acknowledged the existence of "Allah's" daughter goddesses Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Manat. Should Muslims become polytheists? In one hadith (I can't recall where) he catches some other muslims recording his words on parchment and forces them to burn the parchment, telling them that the Qur'an is all they need.

  The entire orthodox sunni position contradicts itself. They claim to be strict monotheists, but they worship a man who has been dead for over 1400 years. Yet another way in which they are just like the Christians.
• 
  20

  A serious question for any who believe in any God of any religion who think God is interested in humans.

  by smiddy in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  the world health organization states that in the year 2015 ,5.9 million children died under the age of 5 years of age.. in 2010 the death rate for children under the age of 5 years of age was 7.6 million.

  thats over 13 million in just 2 years .

  i dont think you need to be a rocket scientist to conclude that since mankind has been on the earth for however long you want to believe and i`m just going on a conservative estimate of 6000 years by the above figures i quoted their would be billions of children under 5 yearsof age that would have died.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Rainbow_Troll

  There are many answers to this theodicy question, not one of which I have found satisfying.

  I think the best option is to simply reject the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent creator deity. Between that absurdity and atheism there are some plausible alternatives:

  Polytheism: There are many gods, so good, some bad, most are indifferent. The good ones can prevent evil some of the time but not all of the time for the simple reason that their power is finite and they cannot be everywhere at once. This is what most people believed until Christianity and Islam came along.

  Dualism: There is a good God of light, love, and life who created the cosmos and gave it life. Unfortunately, there is an equally potent god of darknessn malevolence, and destruction who lives for the sole purpose of destroying or defacing the creator's work. Historical examples of this system include Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism.

  Platonism: The world is imperfect because its creator is, at best, a flawed, incompetent architect who botched it. Everything here is an imperfect copy of a perfect archetype or idea. There is a better world and a superior God (or gods) outside of this universe but he isn't going to rescue us. What we have to do is improve ourselves by purifying our souls of evil and earthly desires while contemplating exalted subjects like philosophy and mathematics and living an ethical life. The idea seems to originate with Socrates who passed it on to Plato and then to the neo-platonists like Plotinus and Iamblichus. Eventually the gnostics got a hold of it and identified the (now evil) creator god with Jehovah.
• 
  21

  Serpent in the Garden of Eden is not Satan

  by anointed1 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  many interpret serpent in the garden of eden as the satan hence miss the whole point because satan himself does not exist.

  he is a fictional character [for example, in the temptation account, satan is shown as reflecting the erroneous belief of ancient time that shape of earth is flat, thus taking jesus to the top of “a very high mountain” and showed him “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.” (mathew 4:8, 9) the fact that jesus did not correct the mistaken view of satan shows the account of temptation is allegorical.

  further, jesus knew that satan was only a personification of evil (mathew 16:23; john 6:70) and categorically declared that “all evil thoughts proceed from one’s heart,” not from satan.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Rainbow_Troll

  I can't see how any of these stories were ever meant to be taken as anything more than allegories. "Fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil"; how could that not be an allegory?

  If you gave fundies a copy of Aesop's Fables, a few generations later you would have people who believed that lower animals could speak and reason. They would believe all the stories, while totally failing to grasp the morals behind them.
• 
  49

  Infinity versus nothing

  by Fisherman in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  some people like to believe in something others believe in nothing; so in what location did the substance that expanded into the time/space universe exist before the big bang?

  where did the energy that caused the big band come from?

  how did the substance that became the big bang change from being inert and sterile and come to life to having the properties and drive that it does?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Rainbow_Troll

  If something always existed then that something always had properties and drive. If nothing always existed then that nothing is really something.
  

  I am NOT a credentialed physicist, so take everything I am about to say with a big mountain of salt, but this is my take on it:

  'Nothing' is a very misleading word that I really wish physicists and cosmologists would stop using. What they really seem to be describing is not some ontological absence of anything at all, but a mathematical 'nothing' or zero. Despite what your teacher may have told you, zero is NOT nothing. In fact, zero is everything! Zero is the sum of infinity. If you add all the positive integers to all the negative ones what do you get? They cancel out to zero!

  As for your other questions? I'm clueless. Some physicists have speculated that the impetus and substance came from another universe, but that is just an ad hoc hypothesis that pushes the question back ad infinitum.

  To be honest, I'm one of those crackpots whose very skeptical of Big Bang cosmology. If the universe is expanding, I haven't seen it. All we have for it is the word of folks who get paid to come up with theories, form conjectures, and push numbers around all day. There are several rival theories, like Plasma Cosmology and Null Physics, which do their best to explain Hubble's Law in the context of either an eternal, beginingless cosmos or a much older one. When so many intelligent people disagree on this subject, it tells you how little evidence we truly have to go on.
• 
  80

  The Fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity

  by ILoveTTATT2 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  ever since i came out of the witnesses, i've become very political.. i've heard lots of arguments back and forth for many things.. in the u.s. there is the argument that it is "racist" to want to deny entry to muslims.

  while there is freedom of religion, there is also the very valid concern of maintaining democracy and a justice system that is based on modern values.we as exjw's constantly quote the pew center for statistics on jw's such as: they are last place in the us for members of a religion that go to university, and second-last for poverty levels of members of a religion.

  we accept those statistics and mention them as proof of how damaging the jw's are.now, let's use the same center for some very scary statistics on islam:http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/22/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Rainbow_Troll

  ILoveTTATT2:
  More importantly, IT HAS AN OUT. It doesn't HAVE to follow the Mosaic Law, which is absolutely horrible and at par with the Koran, or possibly worse. Islam doesn't have an "out", unless you consider the interpreters of the law, similar to Jews. Most interpreters of the Jews are extremely liberal, whereas the interpreters of the Muslims aren't.

  You make an important point here. The ethics of the Koran are almost totally at odds with the ethics of Jesus. Liberal Christians have the sermon on the mount to fall back in while liberal Muslims have little else than a few of the softer verses of the Koran.
  
  It should be noted, however, that Sharia Law is based mainly on the Sunnah (alleged words and deeds of Muhammad collected over a century after his death) and not the Koran. To use just a single example: the Koran says an adulter(ess) should be flogged, while the sunnah says she should be executed. The problem is most muslims place the Sunnah OVER the Koran in cases of jurisprudence.
  
  The reason this is important is because there has recently been a movement, usually dubbed 'Quaranist', within sunni Islam to trash the Sunnah and return to the Koran alone. Though I would rather just see both books trashed, I think we should do all we can to aid and abbet the Quranists. An Islam based on the Koran would at least respect the right of other religions to exist and it would end the death penalty for every offense save murder.

  Quranism could be the 'out' that liberal muslims need to support their ideology and coexist with secular western democracy.
• 
  80

  The Fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity

  by ILoveTTATT2 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  ever since i came out of the witnesses, i've become very political.. i've heard lots of arguments back and forth for many things.. in the u.s. there is the argument that it is "racist" to want to deny entry to muslims.

  while there is freedom of religion, there is also the very valid concern of maintaining democracy and a justice system that is based on modern values.we as exjw's constantly quote the pew center for statistics on jw's such as: they are last place in the us for members of a religion that go to university, and second-last for poverty levels of members of a religion.

  we accept those statistics and mention them as proof of how damaging the jw's are.now, let's use the same center for some very scary statistics on islam:http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/22/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Rainbow_Troll

  Perry 3 hours ago
  The founding fathers of the USA who were virtually all Christians

  I'm glad that you used the qualifier "virtually", but I'd still like you to be more specific. Who of the founding fathers was Christian? I know that George Washington was an Anglican, but he was also a Freemason, which I think disqualifies him from being a Christian in all but name. It's true that many of them spoke of God and divine providence, but they could just as well have been speaking of a deist or spinozean God as a Christian one.
  

  It seeks a state religion through Sharia Law. From its beginning, it spread by violent conquest. By contrast Christianity took down the most powerful military machine the world had ever known - Rome: without a single sword being drawn. The two systems couldn't be more different.

  Islam spread largely by the sword - that's beyond dispute - but how can you say that the history of Christianity is different? I will grant that the founders of Christianity (Jesus and Paul) were paragons of nonviolence, as were the early Christians; but as soon as Emperor Constantine made it the official religion of the Roman empire, the Bible was replaced with the sword.

  With the exception of Britain and Ireland, the Roman Church used a combination of war and economic embargoes to pound the population of Northern Europe into servitude. King Charlemagne alone 'converted' tens of thousands, killing anyone who preferred to worship the gods of their ancestors. Why did the vikings start carrying out raids against Britain and Ireland? Because the pope had forbidden Christians to trade with heathens!
  

  I guess you could always argue that the Roman Church does not represent the true spirit of Christianity (and I would agree) but the fact is that the doctrines and policies of that church have influenced every denomination that came after it. Hell, even the Bible that every Protestant denomination uses was compiled and cannonized by the cardinals of Rome! Sola scriptura? If Luther was really serious about questioning church authority, he should have started with their right to determine which books are inspired and which are not.
• 
  80

  The Fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity

  by ILoveTTATT2 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  ever since i came out of the witnesses, i've become very political.. i've heard lots of arguments back and forth for many things.. in the u.s. there is the argument that it is "racist" to want to deny entry to muslims.

  while there is freedom of religion, there is also the very valid concern of maintaining democracy and a justice system that is based on modern values.we as exjw's constantly quote the pew center for statistics on jw's such as: they are last place in the us for members of a religion that go to university, and second-last for poverty levels of members of a religion.

  we accept those statistics and mention them as proof of how damaging the jw's are.now, let's use the same center for some very scary statistics on islam:http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/22/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Rainbow_Troll

  I don't think there is any important difference between fundamentalist muslims and fundamentalist Christians. The only reason they seem different is because most of the nations in which Christianity is the dominant religion have separation of church and state, whereas most muslim countries (Turkey being the only exception I am aware of) are theocracies.

  Also, the majority of Sunni muslims these days are either Wahabist or strongly influenced by that ideology. Wahabism was a movement founded in the early 18th century by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an (in my opinion) mentally unbalanced fanatic who was probably a pawn of British intelligence, who used him and his insane ideology to destroy the islamic world. Wahabism proports to purify Islam of all 'innovations' that it acquired after Muhammad, but all it really does is strip islam of everything humane, everything beautiful, everything that makes it a tolerable way of life.

  So yes, basically I agree that modern Islam is a serious threat to western enlightenment values like democracy, reason, science, and religious liberty.

  But I think these values are equally threatened by fundamentalist Christianity. As far as I'm concerned there is no difference between radical muslims and Fundamentalists, except that the muslims are far more forthright in their declared goals and what methods they are willing to use in order to attain them.

  
  
• 
  33

  Has anyone else seen this video on JW Broadcasting?

  by NikL in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  so i was checking out the website to see what the february broadcast was all about before i watched it with my jw wife.. on the front page was this video.... https://tv.jw.org/#en/video/vodbible/pub-jwbai_201607_1_video.

  i watched it and pretended i had never been a jw.. if you pretend you don't understand their particular language it makes for a interesting (if not vague) watch.. btw i've seen several of the actors before.

  jw version of movie stars?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Rainbow_Troll

  Fortunately you woke up in time. My mom didn't have me until she was 40 and I'm pretty sure it was an accident. I didn't really date in my teens, but I had female friends and was punished accordingly. Even after I turned 18 my mom forbade me to "bring home girlfriends" as ling as I lived under her roof. If I ever do fet married I will not invite her to the wedding, for she did everything in her power to prevent me from finding someone.

  Bottom line is that the WT knows that it can gain more converts through proselytizing than it can through reproduction. Children are huge financial burden on parents and take a lot of time out of one's day... time and money that could be better spent in the door-to-door ministry.

  Fortunately you woke up in time. My mom didn't have me until she was 40 and I'm pretty sure it was an accident. I didn't really date in my teens, but I had female friends and was punished accordingly (though not by my mother). Any girl who was seen even associating with a boy was labled a 'whore' in my school. Even after I turned 18, my mom forbade me to "bring home girlfriends" as long as I lived under her roof.

  Bottom line is that the WT knows that it can gain more converts through proselytizing than it can through reproduction. Children are a huge financial burden on parents and take a lot of time out of one's day... time and money that could be better spent in the door-to-door ministry.