TD

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Posts by TD

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  30

  Tempers A Flare at "Quick Builds"

  by orangefatcat in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  have any of you noticed that when "quick built", kh.

  were being done that many tempers flared amongst brothers.

  some were vicious and cruel and rude.

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  TD

  Without trying to defend a grouch, it's certainly got to be frustrating for those Witnesses with skills in the construction trades at quick builds.
  
  A project manager for a large commercial contractor (e.g. Duke/Fluor Daniel, Bechtel etc.) is a fairly educated individual. He or she has gone to college, and studied a lot of different things including chemistry, physics, calculus at least though differential equations, construction and contract law and structural engineering and/or mechanical engineering. Most earn a degree in one of the latter two fields. (Which is why the television series, "The Apprentice" is such a joke)
  
  However this means nothing in the Witness world. Hours spent in the field ministry are far more important than real qualifications for the job at hand. Qualified individuals most cope not only with the incompetence of most of the local elders, they ususally have to cope with the fact that they are running the show.
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  72

  Judge orders removal of "evolution disclaimer" stickers in Georgia, USA

  by seattleniceguy in

  1. social
  2. current

  thank goodness, a judge with some sense!.

  http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2005/01/13/national1134est0530.dtl.

  here's a quote:but the judge disagreed: "while evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.

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  TD

  Hi Euphemism,

  You said:

  I would argue that the motives of the proponents are irrelevant.

  I agree to a point. While Alan, you, myself or anyone else may freely speculate on the motives of the Cobb County School Board, the Court confined itself to the three-prong test of Lemon vs. Kurtzman.

  In most Establishment Clause cases involving challenges to statutes or school board policies there is a stated purpose for the statute or policy. Motivation therefore can become an issue in light of stated purpose where such exists. (e.g. If the stated purpose of the sticker had been to promote creationism, motivation would certainly have been an issue regardless of how neutrally worded the sticker itself was.)

  In this case, the Cobb County School Board had the legal foresight to let the sticker stand on it's own with no explicit statement of purpose and the court therefore found that it passed the purpose prong of the Lemon analysis insofar as it served at least two secular purposes.

  Where the sticker failed, was not in purpose but in effect. "The effects prong asks whether the statement at issue in fact conveys a message of endorsement or disapproval of religion to an informed, reasonable observer."

  In this case, an informed, reasonable observer would be aware of the lengthy debate between advocates of evolution and proponents of creation over whether evolution should be taught as a "fact" or a "theory." With that in mind, pandering to the popular, colloquial meaning of the term "theory" effectually disavows the endorsement of evolution as a scientific theory. The court therefore held that the effect was the impermissible advancement of a religious message.

  Therefore while stating that, "Evolution is a theory, not a fact" might have been appropriate in other contexts, (e.g. An elective course on origin theories) it was inappropriate in this particular context because it reflected an exact alignment with those Cobb County citizens who had voiced opposition to the teaching of evolution for religious reasons.
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  72

  Judge orders removal of "evolution disclaimer" stickers in Georgia, USA

  by seattleniceguy in

  1. social
  2. current

  thank goodness, a judge with some sense!.

  http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2005/01/13/national1134est0530.dtl.

  here's a quote:but the judge disagreed: "while evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.

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  TD

  The driving force behind population change is selecitve pressure. This can take many forms and be precipitated by any number of things.
  
  For example, all organisms required varying amounts of space. The range of a species must therefore expand in direct proportion to its population. In other words, a succesful species with an expanding population will constantly be migrating at the periphery of its range.
  
  Gradual migrations to different locales and environments exerts selective pressure. Creatures in a temperate zone face different survival challenges than do creatures in a polar zone. In this regard, there are plenty of living examples of linear and ring speciation brought about by the sheer range a population expanded to.
  
  The question of why single celled life was not "content" to stay as such is a good one, but it would be a mistake to assume that microbes lead solitary lives. Although it's true that some species exist in a free-living "planktonic" state, many others can and do colonize and would not survive any other way.
  
  There are plenty of examples today of bacterial colonies consisting of several kinds of interdependent bacterial species. These colonies are called biofilms and they are all around us. (Tooth decay is caused by a biofilm) The heavy green, yellow or orange slime that forms on rocks in a sluggish stream is a biofilm. A common example given in text books is a colony consisting of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, P. fluorescens and Klebsiella pneumoniae
  
  It's not really that large of a leap from biofilms to microbial mats and other more advanced forms of algae
  
  At any rate it would also be a mistake to assume that early life was analogous to single celled life as we know it today. Single celled life as we know it today has been facing and overcoming selective pressures for as long or longer as any other form of life around. Each and every succesful species has moved into and adapted to a "niche."
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  72

  Judge orders removal of "evolution disclaimer" stickers in Georgia, USA

  by seattleniceguy in

  1. social
  2. current

  thank goodness, a judge with some sense!.

  http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2005/01/13/national1134est0530.dtl.

  here's a quote:but the judge disagreed: "while evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.

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  TD

  Hi CJW,

  Darwinian evolution starts with the special theory which simply posits that small changes combine to produce speciation events. Even most creationists hardly bother to argue with this anymore. Some will even go so far as to acknowledge that creatures like the bear, raccon and dog had a common ancestor for example.

  Out of this springs the general theory which proposes that the special theory is responsible for all the diversity of life on earth. This is where many people start to have problems, especially when they try to gulp down the whole camal at once. It leads to questions like; "Tell me how a protozoan could have evolved into a mammal!" or "Tell be how a fish and orange could be related!"

  At this point we're no longer dealing with evolutionary therory in its pure form, we're dealing with it's larger implications. I think that usually when people ask these questions, they have a specific issue in mind and aren't really asking for a dissertation they probably realize would take hundreds of pages and would better be obtained from a library than an internet forum. The popular notion that evolution can even be represented as a series of improvements from simple cells, through more complex life forms and ultimately to humans is a misconception in and of itself.
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  72

  Judge orders removal of "evolution disclaimer" stickers in Georgia, USA

  by seattleniceguy in

  1. social
  2. current

  thank goodness, a judge with some sense!.

  http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2005/01/13/national1134est0530.dtl.

  here's a quote:but the judge disagreed: "while evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.

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  TD

  As long as we're dealing with puppies, consider divergence within the dog family. Family Canidae is composed of 34 species divided into 14 different genera. Even based upon external morphology alone, it is obvious that all are related.

  For example:

  Coyote (Canis lantrans)

  Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes)

  Maned Wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus)

  Despite the fact that they are related by ancestry, they have diverged to the point where they're no longer really "puppies." The second two examples, the Red Fox and Maned Wolf don't even have the same number of chromosomes as the domestic dog resulting in what is probably true reproductive isolation.
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  72

  Judge orders removal of "evolution disclaimer" stickers in Georgia, USA

  by seattleniceguy in

  1. social
  2. current

  thank goodness, a judge with some sense!.

  http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2005/01/13/national1134est0530.dtl.

  here's a quote:but the judge disagreed: "while evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.

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  TD

  CJW:

  I agree completely - but would consider this adaptation - not evolution. And in this case you are talking of a completed product - a puppy. MY TROUBLE is that I can't get through the part of evolution which gets me to a completed puppy.

  I don't have a stong opinion on the origin of life myself, but as long as we're dealing with existing life, isn't inheritable adaptation the very essence of evolution?

  Life does change over time. In isolated breeding groups, this divergence continues until you have very different animal populations.

  You don't have to go back very far at all in geological time to reach a point where the majority of mammals we are familiar with today didn't exist. Here in North American we had mastodons, American camals, glyptodonts, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, beavers the size of black bears and short-faced bears bigger than Mini Coopers.
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  8

  The generation that saw the generation of 1914!

  by Gill in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i have been today hotly debating with my jw parents about the 1914 'problem' and how the generation that saw the signs will soon be dead and gone and 'then what you gonna do!

  ' said i all smug like.

  i was then informed that 'the generation that will by no means pass away' now meant all of those that were born during the lifetime of those who saw the beginning of the signs in 1914!.

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  TD

  This is a little harder for Witnesses to explain away:

  The Witness doctrine of the great crowd is inseparably tied to to a chronological understanding of the "generation."

  Remember that in Witness theology, the great crowd come out of (survive) the great tribulation. Therefore you have to at least live to see the great tribulation to even be a prospective member of the great crowd.

  Notice how clearly this idea has come through in the Witnesses own publications:

  "Especially beginning in 1935, when the identity of the "great multitude," or "great crowd," was clearly understood, large numbers of these began to manifest themselves....God?s infallible Word depicts this group as ?coming out of the great tribulation,? being survivors of it, living right on into God?s New Order without ever having to die. (Revelation 7:9, 10, 14; John 11:26) The early members of this group are now in their 60?s or 70?s or older. Jehovah did not allow the ingathering of this group to begin too soon. The "great crowd," including many of the earliest members thereof, will survive into the "new earth." (Survival, 1984 p. 185)

  The Witnesses regularly point to 1935 as a milestone in their history. Thousands of people stood up and Rutherford exclaimed, "Behold the great multitude."

  However they are rapidly reaching the point where it will be apparent to even the most brain-dead that they identified this group "too early."
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  11

  How to handle dubs [stupid lack of] reasoning

  by AlmostAtheist in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  when i discussed birthdays with my ms father-in-law, i brought up how eye-makeup has pagan roots, is only mentioned twice in the bible, and both times it is associated with someone wicked guilty of murder.

  in every way, it is identical to birthdays, yet it isn't condemned.

  he said, "we're not talking about make-up, we're talking about birthdays.".

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  TD

  Nobody to date has summed it up better than Orwell:

  "The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.

  It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
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  19

  Fortress Kingdom Halls

  by Gill in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  a new kingdom hall has just been built very close to where we live.

  it is taking on the appearance of fort knox now, much like some other khs near us.

  the high fences with nasty sharp bits are just going up and there are floodlights on at night.

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  TD

  Wow, I've never seen anything like that at a KH. Doesn't exactly sound inviting to potential converts.
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  4

  Chart of the ages.....sort of

  by undercover in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i put together a chart trying to figure out the lineage of the wts from the millerites.

  i'll try to post it(notice the word "try") to see what some of you experts on the history of the wts think about it.. .

  (if this doesn't work, somebody send me a message and tell me how to go about it or i can email it to someone who can make it work.

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  TD

  I wanna see! I wanna see!

  Right now, the link is pointing to your local hard drive, which (luckily for you) is not accessible from the 'net. You need to upload the picture to a webhost first