So, uh, ReligiousQuest, you should be aware that this is a forum populated 99% by former or non-believing Witnesses. You're not going to get many people willing to advocate for the religion. You'll probably get honest answers to your questions, albeit with a heavy tinge of bitterness, but if you're looking for active, believing Witnesses then you will have a hard time finding them there.
Apognophos
JoinedPosts by Apognophos
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15
A Religious Quest
by ReligiousQuest inmy name is louie and i'm seeking some help regarding a paper i need to write for a class.
it is meant to be an individual study project regarding a faith that is different from your own and intrigues you.
what i am asking is for someone who is willing to answer 10-15 questions regarding their faith.
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Why is it wrong for Christians to celebrate Christmas?
by james_woods inthis was inspired by terry's thread.... it is something that raises many questions about the jw belief system.. .
for one thing - the bible certainly explains all the details of the christ birth.
it certainly does not tell people to avoid celebrating it with feasts, customs, etc.
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Apognophos
The Great Disappointment only disappointed his fellow nutjobs. The rest of the maybe-yes, maybe-no followers simply went back to church!
So what?
So, even though Miller's computations were DEAD WRONG (proving himself a False Prophet) enough nut-jobs hung around for a second disappointment.
And a 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc.
[...]
Miller begat the 2nd Advent sect.
The 2nd Advent sect begat the Bible Students.
I was just reading some old Watchtower material (1800s, I think) that actually claimed that 1844 was part of the Bible's numerological timeline too, that is, you could derive it from Bible numbers just like with 1914. Even though 1844 was called a "great disappointment" in the article, it stated that the divine purpose of 1844 was to get people paying attention and looking for the correct time of the end.
I wonder if people here have seen this quote or I should post it. It's interesting because they were using the "eager mistake that served a purpose" rationale even back then, and for someone who wasn't even a part of Russell's movement!
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DINOSAURS - What do Jehovah's Witnesses Believe?
by Bloody Hotdogs! inas part of my deconversion catharsis, i have been building a(nother) website to highlight some of the more ridiculous jw beliefs.
im a looong way from done, but i wanted some early feedback on one article: dinosaurs.
http://www.jwbeliefs.com/dinosaurs/.
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Apognophos
Not that I expect you to go through that much trouble
Naw, it doesn't take long to make a list as I'm reading through an article. I won't do them all at once though :-) But keep an eye out for PMs in the days to come.
I do want to touch on the subject of the length of the creative days, because I see that you are putting a lot of emphasis on it. On the Dinosaurs page you say flat-out that the days are believed to be 7,000 years long, but on the Creative Days page you acknowledge that the Society is currently being vague about the length. Are they simply trying to hide their 7,000-year stance?
It's been suggested by someone here that when they say "thousands of years" in more recent writings, they are trying to avoid stumbling the older JWs who remember 7000-year days, while not directly contradicting the "millions of years" stated by science (after all, millions are thousands of thousands).
So we can't really nail them down as believing in 7000-year days when they won't come out and say it anymore. That's why I think I'd recommend not leaning so heavily on that point. If the last time they said "7,000" was in 1980, then they have not said it in the lifetime of young JWs, and if a JW doesn't think this is what their beliefs say, they will feel that all your arguments which are based on 7000 years are invalid criticism.
P.S.: I have a feeling you're going to get in trouble for the use of Society art, but it's your decision whether to worry about that.
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DINOSAURS - What do Jehovah's Witnesses Believe?
by Bloody Hotdogs! inas part of my deconversion catharsis, i have been building a(nother) website to highlight some of the more ridiculous jw beliefs.
im a looong way from done, but i wanted some early feedback on one article: dinosaurs.
http://www.jwbeliefs.com/dinosaurs/.
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Apognophos
Tell me why are the stones bogus?
1. One red flag is that they are depicting the sort of "ABC" dinosaurs that we all learned about as kids -- tyrannosaurs, brontosaurs, triceratops, and stegosaurs, which is awfully convenient. It's a cornucopia of dinosaurs packed into one little space.
2. They are a bit too "orthodox" -- one would expect some surprises in their appearance since we really only know the skeletal structure and can guess at musculature. There is no indication of feathers or cartilage structures that we don't know about today but it's theorized might have existed. Also, the T-rex is standing upright, which is a discredited posture. They had a massive tail that was used to counter-balance them as they bent over parallel to the ground.
3. They lived in two totally different eras, the Cretaceous and the Jurassic, about 90 millions years apart. One would have to have very good reason to call into question the dating methods used to determine this.
4. A massive conspiracy theory would be required to prevent people from having heard about these.
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DINOSAURS - What do Jehovah's Witnesses Believe?
by Bloody Hotdogs! inas part of my deconversion catharsis, i have been building a(nother) website to highlight some of the more ridiculous jw beliefs.
im a looong way from done, but i wanted some early feedback on one article: dinosaurs.
http://www.jwbeliefs.com/dinosaurs/.
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Apognophos
Hotdogs, I like your site. You've put a lot of care into writing these pages. I don't see any clear errors yet in your statements on JW doctrine. I do, however, notice a number of typos, some of which will trip up the reader. Would you be interested in seeing a list of typos for each page, in order to fix those?
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DINOSAURS - What do Jehovah's Witnesses Believe?
by Bloody Hotdogs! inas part of my deconversion catharsis, i have been building a(nother) website to highlight some of the more ridiculous jw beliefs.
im a looong way from done, but i wanted some early feedback on one article: dinosaurs.
http://www.jwbeliefs.com/dinosaurs/.
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Apognophos
Me have drawn pictures on stones with them.
I don't really know what that sentence means, but if you're saying those stones are authentic ancient drawings, then I'm sorry, they're totally bogus.
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Taking the Bible "too" literally
by Coded Logic ini once heard it said that the only people who care about what the bible says are the village priest and the village atheist.
it seems to me most believers only care about "god's word" in very general terms and think it's all up to interpitation (religion a la carte ).. it the watchtower especially good at making agnostics and atheists because of their fundamentalism or is this true of many ex-religious groups?.
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Apognophos
Yes, well said, PSacramento. If someone is trying to reconcile scientific knowledge with the Genesis account, they are not reading the account literally at all. When people study the Bible in an academic setting and learn the original languages, they read the Bible literally. People who only read the Bible with a filter over their eyes that was installed by their upbringing are not actually reading the Bible literally, even if they say they are.
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Spiritually Dead Children
by suavojr inthis is a gem... charles sinutko had great skills at parenting.
you can download from here, http://da.getmyip.com/.
the pale horse of death had just ridden again.
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Apognophos
Wow, that's a heaping helping of guilt, isn't it?
You hear stories of the mafia on how these lads grew up in the mafia, did all sorts of awful things but they never wanted mother to know, or father....why? They cared for their mother and father. We have children who go out and do things and just fling it in our face and not even care.....either like it or don’t like it. Do you feel that’s a good boy, that’s a good girl?
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Some of you boys here, you sons, you can hardly know how you’ve cut your mother to the heart by your apathy, your indifference, your lack of excitement over the truth, how her nights have been sleepless over you because you have not loved her God. You should be able to tell; just look at her sunken eyes and her fleeting youth. And daughters, can you not know the stabbing pain in the heart of your father who once viewed you as a beautiful and untarnished virgin and hoping you are going to stay the same?
Parents are always inclined to worry about their kids out there in the big wide world; many already have trouble accepting that their kids are going to grow up and lose their innocence. A talk like this just makes it worse.
Also, how dare these kids think for themselves and lead their own lives unashamed? Granted, some JW kids do simply rebel for the sake of rebelling, but Sunutko was not exactly giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. He paints everyone with the same broad brush.
I think what bothers me is that, if the kids know they have good reasons to leave, they won't be bothered to hear something like this, but it makes the burden on the parents far worse. How many parents of children who left must have been in tears throughout the talk?
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Billion + believe in Satan. Should all schools be mandated to teach Creationism?
by Gnostic Bishop inbillion + believe in satan.
should all schools be mandated to teach creationism?.
we must save our children from foolish belief in the supernatural.. .
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Apognophos
I don't know, I think this could serve as a kind of innoculation if they taught the Bible story besides other culture's creation myths. Otherwise what happens is that (as all of us born-ins experienced) we are taught one set of things at home and then the teachers tell us another set of things, and where they conflict, we accept what our parents taught us.
I remember feeling like my elementary school science teacher was my enemy because she taught evolution. Maybe if they had acknowledged and discussed religious beliefs in school I wouldn't have felt like it was school/science vs. home/religion and would have been able to see how other religions had similar stories to the Bible.
However, one big problem is that the creation story, actually "stories", found in Genesis are not told accurately, but have been been touched up and modernized to accomodate our modern view of the universe. So if they teach the modern version of the story and compare it to stories from ancient cultures like Babylon which have not carried down to this day, those stories will look primitive and the Genesis account will seem more credible.
If the Genesis accounts were taught accurately, as I've discussed in places like this and this, it would not only be in line with the scholarship but it would give kids an alternate view of what their Christian parents were feeding them which would probably help them see how the Bible's primitive stories are subject to re-interpretation.
However I can't imagine Christian parents allowing this kind of education in school because it would seem like an attack on their faith. Teachers are going to have to just continue to encourage critical thinking without actually telling students what it is they need to be critical about.
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Creationist Should Dismiss Genesis Quickly
by Coded Logic inchris 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.
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Apognophos
How could a creator have zero complexity yet create something with complexity?
I already suggested in this thread (a few times) that the creator used himself as material for the universe, either by thinking it up (simulating the universe in his "brain") or reconfiguring his "body" to serve as the universe. This is just a fanciful notion that I don't put any faith in, but it would explain how the universe could be created without an increase in complexity, or at least a significant one.
A created creator? A non-first cause?
Did you not read the rest of my sentence? "It could be that the formation of a creator according to the laws of a different universe was much more likely than the formation of intelligent life on earth". Yes, I am suggesting a creator ex nihilo. My point is that this could be much more likely than we realize if we knew the starting conditions before the creator came about. This is currently unknowable.
Evolution doesn't choose and is never done.
These superficial objections are very tiresome, as well as predictable. Obviously I don't mean that evolution can "choose" something consciously. Are you seriously suggesting that scientists don't personify nature when they write about evolution? If you don't think so, shall I dig up some examples from Dawkins et al. for you to read? If you do think so, do you write to them complaining about their terminology, or am I the sole focal point of your attention for some lucky reason?
And I was clearly not referring to the results of evolution as "done". I was referring to a particular point of view, which is why I said "when its 'creations' are looked at as finished products". People do this all the time when they criticize things like the roundabout nerve in the giraffe's neck or anything else that could have been designed better. They are criticizing the result of a process that had a good reason to happen that way because it developed in logical steps through successive prior organisms.
The point I am making, and which risks getting lost in pedantry, is that the concept of a god, when looked at as a finished product, seems complex, but that doesn't mean it couldn't come about through a simple process, step by step, and possibly one that was more likely than the process which produced intelligence on Earth.
Personally I am dubious that intelligence is so unlikely; it feels to me like it might be a natural result of the same tendency towards complexity that produced the first cell, but that's just a feeling I have without any scientific backup. So instead I am pointing to statements made by some scientists about the unlikelihood of our existence and suggesting that if we knew how the (proposed) creator developed, it could be that the creator is relatively more likely than we are.