the watchtower and awake have been listed as the most popular magazines.the figures are astonishing.
i am not sure whether it is based on reality or not.. source: https://tingtopten.com/2020/01/top-10-most-popular-magazines-in-the-world/.
i have seen the link on many social media networks.
punk: https://tingtopten.com/disclaimer/
It's a standard disclaimer: anything you read here may or may not be accurate, it's not our fault, etc.
So, when someone makes a "most popular" list and populates it with magazines listed by circulation... I'm more suspicious of some of the other magazines on that list. Game Informer is the third-most popular magazine? Color me skeptical.
no subtlety here, it's going to be obvious where i'm going with this.
please consider the following scenario.. you're seated on a railway platform bench waiting for your train.
a high speed intercity is about to hurtle through without stopping when you see a small child running to the platforms edge!
Sea Breeze: So far on this thread, I have tried to establish that atheists take for granted a number of things that can only be attributed to the God of the Bible.
The problem is, you haven't established them. You have asserted them. Or you have drawn inferences from a book that also only makes assertions. In every other facet of your life, you reject this approach as facile and dishonest. But on the most profound issue you can face, you fall back on presuppositions and false dichotomy.
I have expressed before, that I do not deny the possibility of a god existing. I am certain it isn't the one you think it is, or any kind of being that would be concerned with our well being. The universe supports this approach quite nicely, aside from the usual problem that no one can seem to find this being, or even detect its influence.
Your god is not the personification of love, at least not love as humans recognize it. He is not a consistent actor, to use your term. We can logically arrive at the conclusion that this being will eventually damn all of creation over the course of eternity. He is given to anger, jealousy, and brutal action taken precipitously. He acts, curiously enough, like a human being. And his rules and attitude reflect the people who existed when these books were written. Logic tells me that these men created god, and not the other way around.
I know you can't demonstrate god without relying on presupposition and gap-filling. I did that myself for many years and ultimately found it unsatisfying. I'd rather accept that there are things I don't know (and probably won't know) than to try to defend something that I can't explain. I don't have to make a choice between your god and a "chance universe", because those aren't the only two choices. And while it's fairly straightforward to show how your god doesn't make sense, I cannot demonstrate how a "chance universe" does or does not produce creatures of reason. Why would I presume to defend either approach?
yes, there’s a post on reddit.
it says that after a zoom meeting a request was made to baptized publishers to give $20 apiece to fix this elder’s car.. while this sounds highly irregular to me and not necessarily approved by the religion, i am not at all surprised at the nerve.
this, unfortunately, seems to be the direction that things are going there!
That's sad. Where I grew up, if someone had a need like that, they just had to let people know they were in a tough spot and there would be brothers and sisters offering help of all kinds. I don't recall any announcements asking for donations for a person's problems. It was a pretty tight-knit group with some fantastic people who took care of each other. To hear some of the experiences people had elsewhere is cringe-inducing. But I guess we all knew peope like that, too.
last time i was really active on here i just found out ttbtt.. i was 28 at the time and now im 33. a lot has gone on but im finally able to live my life.
have my own apartment, steady job, a dog.
a big event that recently happened was a little of a year and a half ago my jw mom passed away.. i hadn't talked to her in over a year prior and i almost didn't go see her before she did.
Jayk: Is there any way to salvage or save our relationship?
Work on yourself and build a life that you are happy with and can be proud of. Then, give them time. It is, in my mind, the only thing that can salvage your relationship with them (or allow you to create a new and better one). And if they never get over the poison that infects your relationship with them, you've got your own life and can live it with a clear conscience.
original reddit post (removed).
If someone joined because they saw his money-grab video, then they signed up to help him out of a financial crunch, not because they felt his content was worth the money. As others have said, you can only go to that well so many times before it dries up completely.
Patreon does show creators how many people signed up and left in any given time period (with the standard options of 30 days, 6 months, 1 year, and all-time). But I doubt they make those numbers public (and overall, it's much better that they do not).
no subtlety here, it's going to be obvious where i'm going with this.
please consider the following scenario.. you're seated on a railway platform bench waiting for your train.
a high speed intercity is about to hurtle through without stopping when you see a small child running to the platforms edge!
Sea Breeze: If, out of our own free-will we ask God to give us the new nature he promises, one that cannot sin
It doesn't matter if we want it or not, either way we are not the same person afterwards. You yourself describe this as our nature. If we change that, we change an integral part of ourselves, don't we?
Sea Breeze: The removal of the sin nature doesn't make sin impossible or render us incapable of independent thought or action.
But, you said above that the new nature is one that cannot sin. Indeed, this raises the question of how this sinful nature works: Did Adam and Eve have this nature? Did Satan? Did the angels who later joined him? If not having a sinful nature means we can still sin, what is the difference in having or not having it? If not, why would god burden humanity with it?
Sea Breeze: This is the primary purpose of man - to love God
A being of incomprehensible power creates a massive universe so that the can put humans on a vanishingly tiny speck, whose primary purpose is to love him. This does not personify love, it personifies narcissism. How can I have value in this context, where I am created primarily to provide something that god could do without? And where, no matter how much I love him, a misstep might lead to eternal suffering?
Sea Breeze: So, you think that the origin of morality is a convention?
I don't know what the origin of morality might have been. It's development has been a process, which continues now and will probably continue for a long time yet.
Sea Breeze: The problem is that the atheist cannot account for it with his stated worldview. It violates his own presuppositions of chaos, happenstance, copying mistakes and chemical accidents.
I did not become an atheist because I decided that there was an alternative. I was trying to prove god because I was sure he existed and I wanted a way to convince others. I realized I could not do so without presuppositions, which meant I didn't really know if he was real. My worldview changed relatively little after I realized I did not believe in god. Most of the refining was in understanding that being an atheist meant that I rejected those models or concepts of god that I could not make sense of.
The atheist worldview consists of one point: I am not convinced that your god exists. That's it. That's all. Some people will express more doubt, and at the other end are the diehards who insist that god isn't even possible. What they share is only that one point. Maybe there are some who have decided that it's all chance and chemical accidents. I don't know enough to say. You imply that the only alternative to god is an impossible scenario. Perhaps you are right. I know only that the god you describe is even less likely than chance and chemical accidents.
I didn't replace my resuppositions when I stopped believing in god. I dropped them. That means I have to admit that I don't have some of the answers, and I can't allow myself to cheat by making them up. But it also means I am not satisfied with accepting a starting point that I cannot determine is true.
no subtlety here, it's going to be obvious where i'm going with this.
please consider the following scenario.. you're seated on a railway platform bench waiting for your train.
a high speed intercity is about to hurtle through without stopping when you see a small child running to the platforms edge!
Sea Breeze: When a person abandons the rights to himself and 'dies" to himself for Christ, he immediaetly becomes an adopted member of God's family
This doesn't change the dynamic. As you note, we break god's rules all the time, and we have absolutely no way to recover from this on our own merits. Even those who want nothing more than to serve god as perfectly and purely as they can, fail constantly. Humanity is inherently incapable of following god's rules and commands.
The only way to avoid this would be to have our free will stripped away, to become someone -or something- that we are not. So, I will either spend eternity incapable of independent thought/action, or I will spend eternity suffering because I invariably broke a rule or crossed a line. The belief appears to be that god won't act this way, but that approach isn't logical. That's not who god is.
Sea Breeze: How do you arrive at universal correct reasoning in a chance universe?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "universal correct reasoning." You mean a moral code that everyone, everywhere, will agree with? Assuming such a thing is possible, you get there by trial and error. You experience things, you learn, you adjust. Over and over and over.
This is why so many old religious texts seem out of touch with modern times. They reflect the state of human moral reasoning of their time. Time goes on, we gain more experience and learn more, we update our moral guidelines, and the cycle continues.
Sea Breeze: You are standing on Christian ground when you appeal to reason.
This was the problem I ran into, when I was trying to make a case for god. Once I stopped relying on presuppositions, I had no basis for anything I believed. Stating that god is real, or that reason is impossible without god, allowed me to skip past the difficult parts and demand that others disprove or account for something that I did not prove or demonstrate in the first place.
The thing is, even if we grant the presupposition, we now have the ability to reason. And that means we can make determinations about moral behavior without having those rules imposed on us without explanation. I don't have to 'get my own reason.' Using the god-given ability to reason allows me to remove god from the moral equation. If god's own gift allows me to set him aside, then perhaps that is what god wanted all along?
original reddit post (removed).
slimboyfat: Making money on YouTube is probably a (relatively) transitory phenomenon.
I agree. Trusting that YouTube revenue will keep coming in for any extended period of time is very risky. Not only because tastes change and the landscape for video content can change, but companies like YT have an unpleasant habit of changing the rules on monetization, and those tend to work in favor of the company and not the content creator.
Patreon itself may be gone in twenty years, but I think the subscriber model for direct support of a content creator will still exist. However, it requires a steady stream of content produced on a regular schedule, and Evans seems to be struggling with this at present. He was able to become a big fish in the very small exJW pond. But the atheist 'pond' is vastly larger and more competitive, and the less we say about his singing and comedic abilities, the better.
no subtlety here, it's going to be obvious where i'm going with this.
please consider the following scenario.. you're seated on a railway platform bench waiting for your train.
a high speed intercity is about to hurtle through without stopping when you see a small child running to the platforms edge!
Sea Breeze: Because of this, we are under a sentence of death. We are not God's children. He has absolutly zero obligation to any of us for anything good at all. Your next breath is a kindness from the Lord.
This is the part that worries me. Even if I was loyal and obedient and dedicated to god and his will, I am still in this position. It is, as you note, only due to god's willingness to overlook this that I have any hope of an eternal future. But not a happy one, because even at that point, I am still in that position of deserving nothing from god but death. God's position is absolute. Nothing he or I do can change that.
And we know, from his actions in the book that he inspired, that he is given to abrupt action taken in anger, or 'justice' delivered in a thoroughly brutal fashion. I cannot expect that this would change, as he has lived an eternity and this is who he is. I don't want to spend an eternity wondering when the other shoe will drop, when I live within reach of such a dangerous person.
Sea Breeze: Atheists just can't come up with a plausible explanation of how they got it.
I mentioned this in another discussion. If we can reason out why actions are moral or immoral, no god is necessary. For example, if you were asked to explain why murder is wrong, would your only explanation be "because god says it is"? You wouldn't have any other way to explain why murder is wrong? Or theft? Or deception? Do you view these actions as neutral in the absence of god's moral pronouncement?
original reddit post (removed).
LMsA: The Patreon spike being unsustainable argument has been supported by three straight 20+ drops since the begging stunt happened in April.
Maybe it shouldn't, but that still amazes me. His support is so fickle, you wonder why some of those supporters bothered at all. He said he needed additional subscribers, but it looks like they offered the equivalent of a one-time donation. Did they not understand what he was asking for? Or are more of the long-term supporters leaving as they finally discover who he really is? How many of them left because of the dropoff in quantity/quality?
30+ gone after everything that has happened the past few months? That's a bad sign. For him, anyway...
