i work for a mental health unit with 2 police officers we deal with people who have drug and mental health issues.
at times over the last 10 years we have "taken down" some large drug affected men, mainly "ice" these days which is epidemic here, and let me tell you even with three of us it is a huge struggle.
sometimes back up is needed or mace spray which is aweful stuff!
It seems that some people interpreted my comment as saying that cops are always justified in using their guns, and some interpreted it as saying cops should have their guns taken away. Just pointing that out because I think it's interesting.
I was trying to say that cops need a weapon that stops someone non-lethally, as effectively as a gun, but that is more capable than a taser. Unless there are repeat-firing tasers that I'm not aware of, you only get one chance when firing the taser.
probably a dumb question, but what is the proper way to write "...in jehovah's witness literature.
"...in jehovah's witness' literature.".
"...in the literature of jehovah's witnesses.".
Out of the first three, #2 seems most correct, "...in Jehovah's Witnesses' literature", but #1 is also correct because it applies the name of the religion as a noun adjunct to "literature". #3 is not correct unless you wrote "in a Jehovah's Witness' literature" to refer to the literature owned by a certain Witness, as "Witness'" means "that belonging to a Witness".
Sometimes it's best to avoid grammatical entanglements and rephrase the sentence, as you have done with #4.
chris tann,.
in your earlier post you seemed to be under the impression that genesis and science were somehow compatible .
however, the truth is the two are not reconcilable at all.
I keep debating whether I should be spending my time on this argument. I think that my hypothesis, which I advanced in a casual, agnostic way as just one possibility, was perfectly reasonable and there is no profit for you or me in discussing this at the fine level at which you are trying to parse it. But okay, this is how I've been using these two words:
Complexity - The amount of information in a certain volume.
Information - Any set of values that can be read from some arrangement of material.
How are you defining information? The amount of information most certainly can and does change, otherwise, no one would ever learn anything.
You're simply using a more specific definition of information than I am. It only takes a glance at a few different reference works to see that "information" does not have one authoritative definition. You're defining information as "something meaningful to humans". I'm simply defining it as any set of values. Your definition of information is basically "knowledge encoded as data", and mine does not include "knowledge" as a requirement for something containing information.
If you want some citation of a work that agrees with my definition, then we can simply look at the lede of the "Information" article from Wikipedia, which supports both of our definitions (mine is underlined): "Information (shortened as info or info.) is that which informs, i.e. that from which data and knowledge can be derived (as data represents values attributed to parameters, and knowledge signifies understanding of real things or abstract concepts). As it regards data, the information's existence is not necessarily coupled to an observer (it exists beyond an event horizon, for example), while in the case of knowledge, information requires a cognitive observer. At its most fundamental, information is any propagation of cause and effect within a system."
Now, we've zigzagged all over the place in trying to discuss various analogies, but let's try to keep this limited to the actual topic. No analogy is perfect, so if you delve deeply enough into the subject of computer engineering you can probably find a flaw in my analogy, but that will only detract from the validity of my analogy, not the validity of my original proposition.
I also feel that I failed to complete my original thought because I was trying to get there in steps and the conversation was derailed into nitpicking -- so let me recap and then finish my thought:
1. My initial statement was that "creator+universe" is not necessarily more complex than just "universe". In order to lead you all towards understanding why I would say this, I then suggested that the creator could be "thinking us up". After all, if there is a creator, then it has some sort of mind. It might have decided to think about a universe that develops life. We could be those very thoughts, in its mind.
2. If so, then the total complexity of the scenario is not much greater than the complexity of a universe that developed on its own. Once again, the reason I say this is that a brain has constant complexity on the physical level regardless of what it is being used for. If this creator's intelligence is anything like ours, then before us, he had to have been thinking about something else. Regardless of what subject occupied his mind, the scenario was already as complex as when he thought up the universe, just as a brain filled with random thoughts is as complex as a brain focused on one large task like imagining the flow of logic in a computer program one is designing.
3. The next step in my argument was going to be that, if the creator is using any part of himself to produce the universe, then the complexity is the same -- whether he uses his brain or a portion of his body to construct the universe. The amount of information that he would be dedicating to the universe would be the same whether it came from what we would consider to be its mind or its body (its "active force", to borrow a JWism). It seems that most people assume that a creator would build the universe with new material that it summoned into existence, but this ought to be impossible. It's more logical to imagine that it must use a part of itself.
So if I previously made statements which were more vague than this, I apologize, but this was my intended statement from the beginning.
Mind you, I am not claiming some mystical knowledge of the universe. There is no reason that I think the above proposal has to be true. I consider it equally likely that we are here by accident. I'm sort of taken aback by the determination with which you are attacking this simple idea, and didn't think I would have to spend so much time stating the obvious in order to defend what was only a whimsical suggestion intended to point to other possibilities besides our being here by accident.
As I stated earlier, I consider our existence absurd no matter what, as it's absurd that an intelligent creator could arise from nothing and then make a universe, and it's absurd that intelligent humans could arise from nothing and develop The Sims™.
Same as with the iPads, then. Disinterest turns to technolust as soon as the GB bestows their blessing on some technology.
I guess this means you can look forward to having GBTV in your house from now on. I'm sorry.
i work for a mental health unit with 2 police officers we deal with people who have drug and mental health issues.
at times over the last 10 years we have "taken down" some large drug affected men, mainly "ice" these days which is epidemic here, and let me tell you even with three of us it is a huge struggle.
sometimes back up is needed or mace spray which is aweful stuff!
I appreciate your perspective, Witness 007, and feel the same way. I support law and order despite the occasional abusive officer. When I imagine what it's like to be a lone officer responding to a crime, and not knowing if I'm going to find someone with a weapon, someone hostile, etc., I wonder how anyone can do this job.
Sadly, when a gun is made available to a cop, they are naturally going to use it, because it would be foolish not to defend themselves from someone who may want to kill them. I would like to see a non-lethal gun (maybe just an improved taser) replace the sidearms that U.S. cops carry currently.
long story short i was raised in this cult (but was never baptized) my mother is die hard jdub, i didnt take this "faith" seriously until i was 26, but i had always gone to meeting, was enrolled in the theocratic school and was mediocre in service.
at 26 i made the conscious decision to make this religion my own.
i red the bible cover to cover and used cross reference from the watchtower and other religious sites,with the end goal to get baptized.
This list is really more of 10 Things That (Supposedly) Make Jehovah's Witnesses Unique. Even if all 10 points were truly unique, that would not make them automatically correct. There are a good number of arguments against these points individually, to be found around the forum.
long story short i was raised in this cult (but was never baptized) my mother is die hard jdub, i didnt take this "faith" seriously until i was 26, but i had always gone to meeting, was enrolled in the theocratic school and was mediocre in service.
at 26 i made the conscious decision to make this religion my own.
i red the bible cover to cover and used cross reference from the watchtower and other religious sites,with the end goal to get baptized.
Having technical problems? You had my rapt attention until the story cut off :-) You can edit your post for another 15 minutes if need be.
i just happend to wonder if the current issue had any hidden goodies.
imagine my delight!.
a gold star to the first person to correctly identify the image!.
That is why ‘accidents’, hidden images, things the artist didn’t really intend to put in their images end up in there at times.
It's a nice-sounding theory, but you forgot to include any citations to, you know, anything scientific.
I challenge any one of you to disprove the existence of hidden images in advertising.
Surely the burden of proof is on you to provide actual examples of these hidden images!
It's pointing out the inconsistency of English spelling vs. pronunciation. Gallagher actually has a bit on this that I really enjoyed as a kid.
during heated debates people - who are normaly quite rational - often start employing bad reasoning.
it's important that when we're emotionaly invested in a topic we don't let our feelings destroy our ability to put forth valid arguments.
the best way to bring people to our side of a debate is by using good logic.
Yes, that was my experience too, Vidiot. When I realized that the Society's arguments against evolution were specious, it led me to research the topic more fully. Unfortunately I allowed creationist sites to lead me astray. I think I still wanted to believe in creationism, so I let their arguments hold more sway with me than they deserved.
That being said, the conclusion of my research was that I saw both sides of the issue as being equally likely, rather than deciding firmly on creationism. So it definitely was the beginning of a mental move away from the "truth", especially because I had to rely on non-Watchtower arguments to support my position once I had seen how little the Society's writers knew about evolution and how little interest they had in representing it fairly (Ken Ham makes those guys look bad, and that's saying a lot).
I spent some time yesterday going through a couple of threads and I realized that there was no way that either a free exchange of thought or a fair an unbiased discussion could continue. It was kind of dis heartening because I wanted to jump in but I then realized that it would be like walking in front of a moving train.
I would just suggest that people are this way everywhere. How many people have you seen discussing Ferguson rationally outside of this board? Five percent? So why should this forum be an exception to human emotionality? I don't actually know which discussions you're referring to, and you might not mean any of the more politically-charged ones, but in those cases at least, I'm not surprised when people cannot temper their emotions. It's sadly just humans being humans.
Personally I don't even read those topics, much less participate. Once someone responds rudely to one's post, it's hard to remain calm and not retaliate, so I prefer to avoid emotionally-charged topics altogether (though sometimes I get caught in a topic that turns emotional, and it gets to me too). It's also true that there is probably more pent-up anger among the users here than on an average forum, just because of our experiences. See this topic for a very telling insight into the board's mindset, as an example: http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/experiences/284727/1/I-loathe-authority
That being said, sometimes it's fun to jump in front of (imaginary) trains It can't actually hurt you. Why not just dive in and offer your opinion? Expressing oneself freely is a nice change of pace from being a Witness, and especially from being at Bethel, right? Odds are, a few members will appreciate what you have to say. Sometimes it takes one person to speak up first; then they find that others chime in to support them. And even if the discussion goes south, don't worry; people generally don't seem to remember who said what a month later.
