Shit Gumby - tricked me again with a stale link (I thought it seemed a familiar read
I should have recognised it as an old thread ..
unclebruce
JoinedPosts by unclebruce
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58
Did Jesus have a BEGGINING?
by gumby inin a thread called" can any jw answer this" by jerome, alan f had stated that the term.
everlasting to everlasting applied only to the god of israel.
he could find no scripture in which this term applied to jesus.. i found some good info.
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58
Did Jesus have a BEGGINING?
by gumby inin a thread called" can any jw answer this" by jerome, alan f had stated that the term.
everlasting to everlasting applied only to the god of israel.
he could find no scripture in which this term applied to jesus.. i found some good info.
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unclebruce
all religious figures are gradually deified by their followers. the person of jesus fits the model perfectly. the general order is: pauline epistles -> synpotic gospels -> john's gospel -> post-apostolic fathers -> nicea.
pauline epistles: jesus is holy from resurrection. his earthly life is of no significance whatsoever, no hint of pre-human existence. (note that not all the epistles traditionally attributed to paul are actually pauline.)
synoptic gospels: jesus is holy during life. can be futher divided between mark and the later matthew/luke. mark has jesus holy from baptism. pre-baptism life of no significance. matthew/luke has jesus holy from birth, no pre-human existence mentioned.
johns gospel: holy from 'the beginning.' deification hinted at but unclear.
post-apostolic: further refinement of deity teaching, but controversial.
nicea: codified as doctrine.
it fits so perfectly, that i had to literally smack myself in the head that i hadnt seen it during my time as a witness. but i am baffled that so many trinitarians in this day and age seem unable to perceive it. not all believers of the trinity doctrine are so blinded by faith. some admit that the teaching was gradual just as it appears, that the earliest writers did not understand it but that god revealed it gradually to the church as time went on. this at least makes some kind of consistent sense. i reserve my strongest bafflement for the mental capabalities of those who think the trinity is taught thruout the entire modern bible.
mox
Spot on Moxy,
Jesus lived as a man, worked as a rabbii and died as a messiah in the traditional Jewish manner. He was conveniently raised and rebadged by Paul and his groupies for well documented political and religious reasons.
unclebruce.
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146
Extra training ... so you know that shooting babies is WRONG ?!?
by Simon inhow dumb and pathetic.. no extra training should be necessary for even slightly trained and disciplined soldiers.
i guess it is for some of the rabble that the us call "troops" though.. of course the real problem is not just those on the ground that have committed the latest attrocity.
it is the chain of command that tried to cover it up and all the way up to the president who sanctions bombing of civilian targets with nothing more than rumour for "intelligence".. from now on america, you are on your own.
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unclebruce
g'day Josie,
Silence is a great default mode that comes naturally to some, the rest of us need to work on our poker face
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Saturday District Convention notes: Don't research JW's online!!!!
by truthseeker inwith two thirds of my sentence complete, i am almost ready for parole.. there was some unbelievable stuff said today - i think there must be some sort of hallucinogenic gas coming through the ac, because no one batted an eyelid over what was said from the platform.. as usual, i will highlight the main talks.. .
saturday.
"deliver us from the wicked one and from every sort of lawlessness" - matt 6:13, titus 2:14. .
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unclebruce
Thankyou Truthseeker
Internet use by active JW's has been severely restricted by it's being branded as a culturally unacceptable medium for those 'strong in the truth'. One of the main targets of the WBTS seems to be those casual users who surf the net at work. Once connecte to the net, many JWs must find the temptation to search JW related words irresistable. I have JW relatives who are quite happy to admit having a computer but are quick to add "but I'm not connected to the internet".
I'd be interested to hear feedback about the anti-net policy as expressed at congregational level. unclebruce
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Extra training ... so you know that shooting babies is WRONG ?!?
by Simon inhow dumb and pathetic.. no extra training should be necessary for even slightly trained and disciplined soldiers.
i guess it is for some of the rabble that the us call "troops" though.. of course the real problem is not just those on the ground that have committed the latest attrocity.
it is the chain of command that tried to cover it up and all the way up to the president who sanctions bombing of civilian targets with nothing more than rumour for "intelligence".. from now on america, you are on your own.
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unclebruce
JWD GOD Simon said:
Todays study topic is the word "you". Everyone will be expected to write a 1,000 word essay on it.
Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it. What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. At least one thing that would have gotten you in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it that the earth moves.
After you've enjoyed an erotic romp in the hay with the vicars daughter you'd best not be caught asking "did the earth move for you darling?"
Americans are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas: convention has less hold over them than it does us normal people.
The Conformist Test
Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are much of what you just think is whatever you're told.
The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.
Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn't do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.
If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.
Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud.
Trouble
What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for.
Of course, we're not just looking for things you can't say. We're looking for things you can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things you get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of your insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.
Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb works well. A lot of the statements people got in trouble for seem harmless now. So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today. Do we have no Galileos? Not likely.
To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but might it also be true?
HeresyThis won't get you all the answers, though. What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How can you find these too?
Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate", "unbecomming", "mischevious" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.
LabelsSo another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label "sexist", for example and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?
Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think.
In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.
Time and Space
If you could look into the future it would be obvious which of our taboos they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do something almost as good: we can look into the past. Another way for you to figure out what we're getting wrong is to look at what used to be acceptable and is now unthinkable.
Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion. The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines.
You may imagine that you are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems. People in past times were much like you. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people like you could believe.
So here is another source of interesting heresies. Compare present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true?
You don't have to look into the past to find big differences. In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and what isn't. So you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against ours as well. (The best way to do that is to visit them in a little Turkey of Chinatown near you.)
You might find contradictory taboos. In one culture it might seem shocking to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. But I think usually the shock is on one side. In one culture x is ok, and in another it's considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that's shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one.
I suspect the only taboos that are more than taboos are the ones that are universal, or nearly so. Murder for example. But any idea that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a good candidate for something we're mistaken about.
For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. So odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.
PrigsOf course, if they have time machines in the future they'll probably have a separate reference manual just for JWD. This has always been a fussy place, a forum of i dotters and t crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same conversation. And that suggests another way to find taboos. Look for prigs, and see what's inside their heads.
Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give them of the world is not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds, but sanitized as well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to think.
MechanismI can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say: to look at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own time.
Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary fashions are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone imitates the whim of some influential person. The fashion for broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth century Europe began because Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot. The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to.
The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas.
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle.
So if you want to figure out what you can't say on JWD, look at the machinery of posting fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? .
This technique won't find us all the things you can't say. I can think of some that aren't the result of any recent struggle. Many of our taboos are rooted deep in the past. But this approach, combined with the preceding four, will turn up a good number of unthinkable ideas.
Why
Some would ask, why would you want to do this? Why deliberately go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?
You do it, first of all, for the same reason you did look under rocks as a kid: plain curiosity. And be especially curious about anything that's forbidden. See and decide for yourself.
Second, you do it because you don't like the idea of being mistaken. If, like other eras, we believe things that will later seem ridiculous, you want to know what they are so that you at least, can avoid believing them.
Third, you do it because it's good for your brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.
Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural selection, for example. It's so simple. Why didn't anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.
In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able to question assumptions. The m.o. of scientists, or at least of the good ones, is precisely that: look for places where conventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart the cracks and see what's underneath. That's where new theories come from.
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks.
Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. So here we witness Simon pissing into the wind of conventional wisdom. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress.
Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.
CautionWhen you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.
Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.
The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking "improper thoughts". I think it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.
When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be "i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto." Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking. This was wise advice. Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. But I think the difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of degree. Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction.
I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics [12], or that pro-Israel groups are "compiling dossiers" on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses, or about people being held without trial, part of me wants to say, "All right, you bastards, bring it on." The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd spend the rest of your days arguing with fluffposters (those who write reams of crap like this paper Simon assigned us).
The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends online you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing your online friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.
Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you don't agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but not to be too specific about what you disagree with. Zealots will try to draw you out, but you don't have to answer them. If they try to force you to treat a question on their terms by asking "are you with us or against us?" you can always just answer "neither".
Better still, answer "I haven't decided." A lot of the questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. There is no prize for getting the answer quickly.
If the anti-yellowists seem to be getting out of hand and you want to fight back, there are ways to do it without getting yourself accused of being a yellowist. Like skirmishers in an ancient army, you want to avoid directly engaging the main body of the enemy's troops. Better to harass them with arrows from a distance.
One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion. The spread of the term "political correctness" meant the beginning of the end of political correctness, because it enabled one to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of any of the specific heresies it sought to suppress.
Another way for you to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, "The Crucible," about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller's metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the committee are often described as a "witch-hunt."
Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in kind to jokes. They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink.Hey you bossman - Is that a thousand words yet?! I'm bust'n to water the horse
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Vote on my avatar!
by spoils_useful_habits invote on my avatar, if the 'nays' have it, i'll take it down......if the 'yays' have it i'll keep it.
i'll tabulate the votes after a day or so.
thanx.
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unclebruce
mmmm not into strong women?
How about the linux penguin on his day off:
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Vote on my avatar!
by spoils_useful_habits invote on my avatar, if the 'nays' have it, i'll take it down......if the 'yays' have it i'll keep it.
i'll tabulate the votes after a day or so.
thanx.
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unclebruce
I prefer something with more kick:
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Should I make a stink about this or not?
by merfi ini've been working at the same hospital since 1991. a jw chick is hired this past january.
the hospital friends have been and are my support system as well as my 'team'.. a nurse friend played stupid last week and talked to the jw girl.
the jw asked her what religion she was.
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unclebruce
I'm with gumby and Jesus. Have a private chat to the woman
I once threatened to sue a fellow JW for defamation and that put the rumour mill in reverse quicker than pluck a duck
best wishes, unc
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Extra training ... so you know that shooting babies is WRONG ?!?
by Simon inhow dumb and pathetic.. no extra training should be necessary for even slightly trained and disciplined soldiers.
i guess it is for some of the rabble that the us call "troops" though.. of course the real problem is not just those on the ground that have committed the latest attrocity.
it is the chain of command that tried to cover it up and all the way up to the president who sanctions bombing of civilian targets with nothing more than rumour for "intelligence".. from now on america, you are on your own.
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unclebruce
Americans seeing the world through the glass darkly:
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unclebruce
Moi assui.
I see lunas on the bottle
Vote 1
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