Posts by Apognophos

7

Conspiracy Theorist groups similar to the Watchtower

by enigma1863 in

i was watching a you tube video on charlie veitch and i could not help but see the parallels with his experience with truthers and the ex jw experience with the watchtower.

what do you think?:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uyzitc_90.

.

Apognophos

Thanks, this is interesting. At 15:00 he is talking about how he really thought that he was supposed to be following wherever the evidence led him, but when he changed sides, everyone from the conspiracy side hated him and thought he'd been "compromised" by the powers that be. Then he says the 9/11 conspiracists calling themselves a "truth movement" is as much of a joke as a religion calling itself a truth movement.

I think that some of us genuinely felt that being "in the truth" meant that we would always follow the evidence to make sure it was the truth. And for a while, the best information we had seen indicated that JWs had the truth. But when we learned evidence that contradicted the "truth" and adjusted our views, we were surprised to find that other JWs did not understand what we were doing, or want to listen to us.

I specifically know one JW elder who has indicated that he thinks reading certain material would cause him to "fall out of the truth", so he deliberately doesn't read it. Now, I like him -- he's a kind man, and very smart -- but what can I say in the face of brazen intellectual dishonesty like that? These just aren't people I can associate myself with anymore.

36

Site issues: Dec 27 Update

by Simon in

here's the current status:.

performance improvements have been made to make things slicker.. the "remember me" issue should now be fixed.. sign-in captcha can be affected by ad-blockers so consider disabling those.. sign-in email is case-sensitive - until i update this consider using your forum username instead.. ie stalls on "queued for processing" when posting a topic or reply but the post has been made (just navigate to active or refresh the topic if replying).. i will be working through issues today and contacting anyone who had sign-in issues to check if they still have problems.. many thanks again for your patience while we work through these teething problems..

Apognophos

I can probably make the timeago include a mouseover with the specific date/time.

Yes, I'd like to see this too. I've already tried mousing over that text to see if the date pops up :-) That being said, I'm not convinced that "five years ago" is more helpful than just saying "2009/11/29", especially because I find the date-rounding code on this site to be counter-intuitive (seems that it will say "four years ago" up to 4 years, 364 days in the past, before it flips over to "five" the next day, and minutes seem to get rounded to "an hour" at the 45 minute mark).

7

Forum shuns me!

by stillin in

the forum has signed me off twice.

glad i got the sign in thing worked out!

also, my pm alert says there is mail for me but there isn't.. simon, are you down under?

Apognophos

There is an official thread for reporting issues. In it, I brought up the negative unread PM counts and Simon said he will run a script to fix the problem. Don't bother trying to read/send PMs to fix it unless he says otherwise.

22

Christmas Beliefs!

by J-DUBBED in

do jehova wingnuts believe jesus birthday isn't dec 25?

or do they just plain and simple not believe in any birthday?.

Apognophos

Yeah, wow, that's news to me too.

7

JW Doctor mis-Illustrates a Blood Doctrine

by Marvin Shilmer in

jw
friends

today i added a new article to my blog addressing an article written by a jw medical doctor in a regional medical journal.

it's part of an initiative giving attention to how licensed medical professionals among jws have dealt with the blood transfusion subject.

what they say, how they say it, and what they don't say are all very telling.

Apognophos

Interesting, Marvin, though this admission only makes them consistent with their revocation of the ban on organ transplants. When they lifted the ban (or disapproving stance, at least) on transplants in 1980 they wrote that, contrary to what they stated in 1967, an organ transplant could not be considered nourishment in the manner of food because the organ was taking the place of the previous one that failed, and eventually was incorporated into the body and replaced cell by cell over time. This same argument would naturally hold true for blood as well, and it seems that the Society has decided to acknowledge that. But it's surprising that they would do so since this reasoning is supposed to be the link between the Jewish stance on eating blood and the JW stance on not taking blood!

180

Please post new forum feedback or questions here

by Simon in

well, the switchover happened - there were a couple of things i had to fix which meant the posting was disabled for longer than i planned but it's now enabled and some people have already posted.. if you have any questions about the new format or suggestions on how to improve it, please post them here.. if you are having trouble signing in or posting then you'll need to email me instead.. many thanks to everyone for their patience during the changeover !.

Apognophos

Have to make a separate post for an issue I just noticed. I see you added a quote-style button to the main toolbar, which is great. Unfortunately I cannot get the style to "turn off" in the way that it used to work on the old forum. Normally I could click the button again and it would remove the styling from the line I was on, and I could continue typing in the plain style after that point. The new button doesn't seem to work that way. All new lines created after invoking the quote style will get the quote style applied to them, and selecting the quote-style text and hitting the quote-style button doesn't undo the style.

180

Please post new forum feedback or questions here

by Simon in

well, the switchover happened - there were a couple of things i had to fix which meant the posting was disabled for longer than i planned but it's now enabled and some people have already posted.. if you have any questions about the new format or suggestions on how to improve it, please post them here.. if you are having trouble signing in or posting then you'll need to email me instead.. many thanks to everyone for their patience during the changeover !.

Apognophos

Many thanks, Simon, for correcting the forum text that I mentioned earlier, it makes me happy that I could contribute in some way. I just wanted to let you know that you missed one line:

Discuss anything Jehovah Witness, JW.org or WatchTower society related

is missing the "'s", and there's a couple capitalization issues. My suggestion would be:

Discuss anything Jehovah's Witness, JW.org or Watchtower Society related

21

Did you know about the organ transplant ban when you were a believer?

by Apognophos in

back when i was learning ttatt, i was shocked to read on jwfacts about the organ transplant ban from 1967 to 1980. this was a large piece of evidence for me that the society could not be god's organization.

growing up as an earnest witness, and living near the headquarters, i knew a lot of the organization's embarrassing history, and it didn't faze me, but i'd never heard of this ban before, and it shocked me.

it's gotten me wondering why no one i know ever talks about it, when it must have affected many witnesses during that time (or were they getting transplants on the sly?

Apognophos

I don't think that's too condemning of you, NVR2L8, or at least none of us can throw the first stone. Those of us who came after the organ transplant ban still agreed with the blood transfusion ban because we trusted the Society's interpretation of scripture. It's the same as that.

Where it gets interesting is that the Society removed the ban on organ transplants and knocked down their previous reasoning on why it was wrong. I think it's more interesting to ask, not what JWs thought of the ban, but of the lifting of the ban. But I've learned that not everyone was even aware that the Society's stance had changed.

13

New Forum Layout

by Awake at last in

i suffer from depression and have also been diagnosed with asperger's syndrome, so it is not surprising that about 20 minutes ago i was feeling very depressed about the new look of my favourite ex jw forum, that is, this one.

i have been living under a rock obviously because i had no idea any change was about to happen.. now i am beginning to understand how it works, everything is ok or soon will be.

i like the like button and have already used it once.. now you understand why i left the borg.

Apognophos

Yes, having a dedicated quote-style button in the toolbar would be nice.

180

Please post new forum feedback or questions here

by Simon in

well, the switchover happened - there were a couple of things i had to fix which meant the posting was disabled for longer than i planned but it's now enabled and some people have already posted.. if you have any questions about the new format or suggestions on how to improve it, please post them here.. if you are having trouble signing in or posting then you'll need to email me instead.. many thanks to everyone for their patience during the changeover !.

Apognophos

A couple issues here:

I had written "see towards the end of this thread", and then double-clicked "this" and clicked the Insert Link button. When the link was inserted, it moved the word "this" to a new line :-\

Second problem: The posting process hung at the step shown in this screenshot, but when I checked the thread in another tab, the post had actually been made. Edit: This post also fell victim to the "Hung on 'Queued for processing'" bug.

Third issue:

When I went to use "text-dragging", where you hold down the mouse button on selected text and then drag it to move it, the post window converts to a "Drop image" mode and I cannot re-position the text. You can see the word "this" in the middle of being dragged through space here.

This is on Firefox on a Mac.