My nose is so big that back in elementary school some kids would call me 'dirty jew'. That never made any sense to me, since every Jew I have met has been clean and fastidious. Maybe they were just calling me dirty, even though I wore clean clothes and bathed every day. Who knows?
Rainbow_Troll
JoinedPosts by Rainbow_Troll
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13
I have a big nose...
by The Rebel insurprisingly whilst hating being born with this over large nose, women have fallen in love with my nose.
so with regards to look and charm, what i hated about my physical attributes, many women have found attractive.
anyway i just wanted to say what we find unattractive about ourselfs, doesn't necessarily mean others do.
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If you had to choose
by dothemath inif you had to choose to belong to 1 religion, i was curious as to what any on the forum would pick.. i realize most here are likely atheist (i would have to say i'm agnostic), but if any would like to share their opinion, and maybe why?.
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Rainbow_Troll
I would be a Satanist; specifically Anticosmic Satanism.
Anticosmic Satanism is really Gnosticism given a Satanic makeover. Basically: the creator God (or Demiurge) is evil; he's a fallen deity who created this world to be a prison. We were once beings of pure, uncreated fire whom the Demiurge trapped into bodies of clay. Lucifer is an emissary of El Acher (the 'Other God'), an aspect of the divine that did NOT fall along with the creator God. He wants to liberate us from our clay prisons and eventually destroy God and his abberent creation so we can all return to acosmic freedom. There are some things about this form of Satanism that creep me out: they are very anti-life; they abhor procreation and worship death. But I guess that logically follows if you accept their premise.
But it's all myth. There is no creator God to hate, nor is there some other God out there who is going to save us. Life is an accident and life's vicious circle will only end when the sun finally goes nova and burns earth's biosphere to ash.
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JW's And Their Education Level
by Yesu Kristo Bwana Wangu ini was thinking about this.... in my congregation, i was literally the only one with universitary education, out of a cong from around 110 people.... and we're very close to a very big university, which makes it even weirder.. on the other hand... sooo many here with their own business, mostly small cleaning businesses.
cleaning windows, or cleaning somewhere else... painters.... all have jobs that do not require any education level, cos they never had a decent education.. how is the composition of the jw people/congs that you know about?.
how many painters... cleaners... compared to people with jobs that require higher education?.
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Rainbow_Troll
There was one man in my cong who repaired and built computers for a living; but he was a convert. He was a funny man since though he was very pious, he had no problem with pirating software. He even offered to give me some, but I said no.
Everyone else cleaned, did construction or lived off welfare... though maybe that says more about the place I lived than the cong. There were no colleges, not even a little community college, and not many white collar jobs either.
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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
Why are we more moral ? Because we dont commit incest and havent done so for thousands of years
LOL! Who's "we"? I've known plenty of people who have committed incest, are committing incest or very much want to commit it. I'd commit it myself if my female relatives weren't so ugly, old or dead.
I know, I know... what you probably meant to say was most people would at least express disapproval of the act in public. But I ask you, how many of those hypocrites go home to mess around with their siblings, cousins, children and parents? And ditto on murder, rape and genocide.
Could it be that we humans have only become more hypocritical and judgmental over the centuries? Hardly an improvement.
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Watchtower Society Fails In Unconditional Love
by pale.emperor inwas watching an episode of the young pope yesterday (really enjoyed the series), at at the end there it dealt with the theme of "unconditional love".
it made me think of the love i have for people i know.. i looked up the wikipedia intro of unconditional love and it reads:.
unconditional love is known as affection without any limitations or love without conditions.
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Rainbow_Troll
Unconditional love is one of those platitudes that people give lots of lip service to, but secretly disdain. Love without any conditions is too easy to take for granted, which is why it is so rarely returned and those who profess it are held in such contempt by their beloved. It's really more like a chronic disease than an emotion.
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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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Rainbow_Troll
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.
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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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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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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.