Nice compilation, thanks EoM. The lack of charitable works is one of the things that started to bug me about the religion some time around my late teens.
Apognophos
JoinedPosts by Apognophos
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7
WT application of James 1:27 - looking after widows and orphans
by EndofMysteries insince the bible is clear on helping widows and orphans, needy, poor, etc, it's interesting to see how the wt twists these scriptures to make their followers feel they are following it when they really aren't.
because it costs money to really help those and the wt wants the money themselves.. here are some wt quotes directly on fulfilling this obligation of james 1:27 -.
help elderly get to the meetings -.
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15
Sexually repressed and frustrated Jws....
by stuckinarut2 ini wonder how many jws are sexually frustrated due to the repressive views of the org?.
im sure that there are millions of messed up witnesses who have been severely damaged due to the teachings and guilt that the org places on all members.. now, i'm not encouraging a reckless lifestyle, but i'm sure so many more problems are experienced by witnesses just because of the suppressed and guilt laden attitudes the org has perpetuated!
they can even be open in their marriages!.
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Apognophos
It's not surprising if women in the org. have more sexual hang-ups than the men. Our society has a lopsided attitude towards the expression of sexuality by each gender. When was the last time you heard a guy called anything like "slutty" or "loose"? The religion just piles more guilt on top of that because any young couple that wants to date feels like it has half the adults in the congregation breathing down their neck, watching their every move. It's infantilizing and it nhibits sexual development (and I think it suppresses all ego development in general, which is part of what keeps JWs drone-like).
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New Awake! Dealing With Mental Illness
by runForever incontains a list of 9 practical steps except they forgot one: 10. do not become a jehovah's witness.. .
1. follow the treatment prescribed.
by qualified mental-health.
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Apognophos
There's an interesting article W 88 10/15 dealing with mental illnesses...
That was the JW demon-mania of the '80s for ya.
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20
The Awake Faithful and Discreet Slave July 15, 1960 WT
by berrygerry ingreat stuff.. .
overwhelming credentials.
25 does the faithful and discreet slave class have any more credentials?
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Apognophos
The Society was saying that these are all of the places that the F&DS is found in Scripture, so it's Okay™, you can Trust™ them as your spiritual leaders.
Amusing side note: the preamble to the list also uses "anointed remnant" to refer to the F&DS, so I don't know which of these scriptures apply to which group now that they are separate (or one is within the other).
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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
Complexity - The amount of information in a certain volume.
It seems that the dictionary definition is simply "having many parts". I could have played it safe and used such a definition. The reason why I proposed this alternate definition is that I wanted to encourage you guys to think about the information conveyed by parts. In other words, a modern car engine has more parts (I assume) than a car engine from 1900. The same-sized engine block therefore contains more information in a modern car.
You can accuse me of making up my own definitions, but I don't believe I'm actually doing that. I'm simply rephrasing the existing definition, which seemed slanted towards describing physical objects. I believe that the original definition works for my argument too, however.
To restate my assertion one more time using the precise dictionary definition of the word, "A brain does not increase in 'the number of parts it has' when it is thinking about something complex." I find this statement to be a poor representation of what I was trying to say, but it is indisputably true nonetheless.
On the subject of information, I have to retract my statement. I wasn't thinking clearly about what I know about information theory and noise vs. information. It's not really true that a network with random values has the same amount of information as a network that is storing something useful like a phone book. I don't know why I said that, I guess I need to get more sleep.
That being said, I don't really think this affects my suggestion. It was my feeling from the beginning that it was not necessary to argue the definitions of these terms. My point was that a creator is not adding considerable complexity to the scenario if the universe is essentially replacing an existing, equally-complex part of the creator. This is a very simple point that shouldn't require arguments over words because the terms are self-defining in that statement. The only objection to this idea that I can think of is that it pushes back the development of our universe's complexity to a "god universe" where this god evolved naturally, then made us deliberately. See below.
It is your problem since you are proposing it. Also, you aren't commenting on probablity, but simply arguing from incredulity.
I'm not arguing that the "something from nothing" hypothesis is incredible (as in, "unbelievable"), but simply pointing out that it's arrogant of humans to think they really have already, at this primitive stage of science, worked out the answer to how the universe got here. We don't know nearly enough to say that such a scientific idea is probable, only that it's possible, let alone do we know enough to say that the idea of a creator is less possible.
This forum is for discussion and not for conducting scientific research or even debating academically, so I feel totally justified in stating my personal opinions here regardless of whether they are currently testable. You are free to deride these ideas, of course. It doesn't really bother me because I know that you guys have allergic reactions to anything that smacks of mystical thinking.
I generally agree with you on that count, but I thought I would bring up an alternative viewpoint as a basic philosophical exercise. In hindsight I wish I never spoke up, since I really didn't want to spend hours defending a viewpoint that I'm not strongly attached to.
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The Awake Faithful and Discreet Slave July 15, 1960 WT
by berrygerry ingreat stuff.. .
overwhelming credentials.
25 does the faithful and discreet slave class have any more credentials?
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Apognophos
Some of the credentials sound like the credits for minor characters in a weird movie, like "Man clothed in linen". Anyway, this is truly the height of antitype madness. We have Fred Franz to thank for this insanity.
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9
Went to a non-Witness memorial service
by CaptainSchmideo inthis was a service at a southern baptist church for the father of a teacher at my son's school.
we had developed a friendship with her over the past few years, and i had met her father, knew about his terminal illness, and i wanted to pay my respects.. i have to tell you, it was a better show than the average jw "ceremony".first, lots of personal tributes about the man they were memorializing.
uplifting stories, funny stories, serious stories, describing a real life individual that many in that room knew and were going to dearly miss.. lots of singing!
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Apognophos
I only recognized the acronym because "SST: Death Flight" is one of the greatest movies ever
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28
Be effective or people will die
by Odrade inmy husband and i have been out of the org for quite some time, but still find that old ideas and values come up and bite us on the ass.. lately, i've been plagued by an increase in the frequency and severity of my nightmares (which have always been an issue,) so i've begun to dream journal.
in just a few days, this realization cropped up.
i can't save people.. i've been blogging again recently.
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Apognophos
I think I never worried about this particular issue because I never in my life believed that God was going to destroy all non-Witnesses. I never even considered the possibility. It was "obvious" to me that God would not destroy people unless they were really wicked. I suppose it was a form of cognitive dissonance, since that's not what I was supposed to believe.
That being said, the religion has affected each of us in different ways according to our personalities and our upbringing. For instance, some parents probably harped on the "bloodguilt" thing while others were obsessed with demons and others were bigger on the subject of sex-shaming. In some cases we may have been inherently sensitive in one of those areas to begin with. So thse two factors determined in which area we developed our particular neurosis.
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Society claims Bible creation account is unlike pagan myths, clearly doesn't read any scholarly work
by Apognophos inso, during the service meeting this week, they were showing a few pages on the web site that we could share with an interested one (using the projection screen in the hall), and i sat up a little in my seat when i read this part of the page "do science and the bible agree?
" (er, or "does science agree with the bible?
", depending on which place you look for the title):.
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Apognophos
So, during the service meeting this week, they were showing a few pages on the web site that we could share with an interested one (using the projection screen in the Hall), and I sat up a little in my seat when I read this part of the page "Do Science and the Bible Agree?" (or "Does Science Agree with the Bible?", depending on which place you look for the title):
The universe had a beginning. (Genesis 1:1) In contrast, many ancient myths describe the universe, not as being created, but as being organized from existing chaos. The Babylonians believed that the gods that gave birth to the universe came from two oceans. Other legends say that the universe came from a giant egg.
Someone could run down the whole page and rebut the other points too, but I don't have that kind of time, and I wanted to share a lesser-known fact (among non-scholars) about the creation account that starts in chapter 1. I don't see that Leolaia ever covered this subject, which is surprising, but perhaps I missed it. She did cover a related subject in depth, which I will be linking to below. My goal here is just to briefly sum up the scholarly opinion on this account.
First, here's the Cliff's Notes version of what I'm going to talk about: Contrary to the Society's claim that Genesis is unlike those dirty heathen myths about the world coming from a chaos without any beginning, in fact that is exactly what Genesis chapter 1 describes. It does not describe a "universe with a beginning", as they say it does, but instead shows us God setting a pre-existing chaos in order.
The huge mistake that a modern reader makes, aided and abetted by his Bible, is thinking that Genesis 1:1 refers to the creation of the universe and the planet Earth. This concept is what's called creatio ex nihilo, "creation from nothing". But if 1:1 were really referring to the creation of outer space and the planet Earth, then light could not just be getting started in 1:3 -- because clearly the stars, such as our Sun, would have been made in 1:1.
But if we interpret "the earth" to literally just mean "the solid ground we stand on", and "the heavens" as "the sky", things begin to make more sense, in terms of both the chronological order of the account and what we would expect to read if this story was simply a product of ancient man, and not of a divine revelation.
It's important to know that Genesis 1:1 doesn't actually say "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", as Bibles traditionally render it. The word for "beginning" here is not a noun intended to stand alone, but rather to modify a verb, like "create". A better translation is found in Young's Literal: "In the beginning of God’s preparing the heavens and the earth --". This verse is describing the beginning of an act, not the beginning of the universe. This is crucial to understanding what the ancient writer really meant.
(Before I continue, I want to point out that our NWT used to read this way: "In [the] beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The use of brackets was the Society's way of acknowledging the fact that the Hebrew didn't seem to be talking about a Beginning Of The Universe, but simply the beginning of God's actions upon the watery deep. The revised NWT has removed the brackets, leaving the traditional inaccurate rendering "In the beginning...".)
So, why does this matter? Because Genesis 1:1 does not have God creating anything. Rather it is saying, loosely, "This is the beginning of the story of creation", which begins in 1:2. And verse 2 clarifies that the "earth" at this time is actually still a formless waste; it is only named "earth" after it is separated from the waters and dried out, in verse 10. Anyway, in verse 3, God creates light, and in verse 6, he creates a division in the watery deep, but notice that he didn't make the waters -- they were already there. He just parted them in order to reveal dry land*. The God depicted here is one who conquers chaos, not one who can make matter from nothing, which is a concept that would simply not have made sense to ancient man.
The story of Genesis 1 in fact closely parallels other stories from the Ancient Near East, including the Babylonian Enuma Elish. If you really want the proof for the assertions in this post, Leolaia details the scholarly evidence here. Once you realize how close this story is to the stories of the neighboring cultures, you can see why I was surprised that the Society would directly mention the Babylonian creation account as something that supposedly differs from the Jewish account in Genesis 1. In fact it's more likely that the Hebrew people inherited the myth from Babylon or maybe Egypt.
*If this sounds familiar, it's because the Crossing of the Red Sea was intended to harken back to this account.
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Went to a non-Witness memorial service
by CaptainSchmideo inthis was a service at a southern baptist church for the father of a teacher at my son's school.
we had developed a friendship with her over the past few years, and i had met her father, knew about his terminal illness, and i wanted to pay my respects.. i have to tell you, it was a better show than the average jw "ceremony".first, lots of personal tributes about the man they were memorializing.
uplifting stories, funny stories, serious stories, describing a real life individual that many in that room knew and were going to dearly miss.. lots of singing!
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