I agree that the purpose of the Noachian law was to cause humans to respect life, both human and animal. Therefore, the Noachian Law forbade the murder of humans and also forbade eating the blood of animals killed for food. Most certainly Christians are not under the Mosaic law, however, there is no good reason to believe they are not still under the Noachian Law. In fact, the Apostolic Decree at Acts 15:28-29 appears to be a reaffirmation of the Noachian law. Christians were not to commit murder or eat the blood of animals killed for food. I agree that taking a blood transfusion is not the same as eating blood.
Warren
JoinedPosts by Warren
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BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS Twisting a life-affirming law into death
by Terry inturning a life affirming rule into a death-dealing policy is an amazing accomplishment.
we can thank the watchtower society for a mindset which makes this possible.. i've gone into great detail before about the watchtower blood policy itself.
it is a blatant and deliberate publicity stunt which takes the rather simple prohibitions of the laws of noah for gentiles on murder .
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BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS Twisting a life-affirming law into death
by Terry inturning a life affirming rule into a death-dealing policy is an amazing accomplishment.
we can thank the watchtower society for a mindset which makes this possible.. i've gone into great detail before about the watchtower blood policy itself.
it is a blatant and deliberate publicity stunt which takes the rather simple prohibitions of the laws of noah for gentiles on murder .
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Warren
But, James - I'm only questioning the claim that some on this thread have made, namely, that God's law to Noah concerning blood was nothing more than a prohibition against murder. It's clear to me that Genesis 9:4 was a prohibition against eating the blood of animals killed for food. You are are reading more into my previous post than was there.
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BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS Twisting a life-affirming law into death
by Terry inturning a life affirming rule into a death-dealing policy is an amazing accomplishment.
we can thank the watchtower society for a mindset which makes this possible.. i've gone into great detail before about the watchtower blood policy itself.
it is a blatant and deliberate publicity stunt which takes the rather simple prohibitions of the laws of noah for gentiles on murder .
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Warren
Doesn't God's law to Noah clearly state at Genesis 9:4 not to eat the blood of animals killed for food? I don't see the basis for concluding that the admonition to abstain from blood was only a prohibition against murder.
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BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS Twisting a life-affirming law into death
by Terry inturning a life affirming rule into a death-dealing policy is an amazing accomplishment.
we can thank the watchtower society for a mindset which makes this possible.. i've gone into great detail before about the watchtower blood policy itself.
it is a blatant and deliberate publicity stunt which takes the rather simple prohibitions of the laws of noah for gentiles on murder .
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Warren
Khufu: "I marvel that it took me years as a witness before I realized that simple truth. It shows to what extend I had surrendered my thinking abilities to the WTS."
Same here. I still can't believe that for 30 years I was deceived into accepting that a blood transfusion was the same as eating blood. I saw the light when my doctor pointed out an obvious fact. He told me that if the human body treated blood like food then we would all be dead because our bodies would quickly consume all the blood flowing through our veins. So simple. Why didn't I see that before?
My doctor also told me that if transfusing blood were the same as eating blood then a starving person’s life could be saved with blood transfusions. But, guess what? If all you give a starving person is blood transfusions he will die of starvation. Conversely
, a person that lost a lot of blood could not replace that blood by eating it. Eaten blood would be digested as food and would never reach the blood stream in the form of blood. -
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BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS Twisting a life-affirming law into death
by Terry inturning a life affirming rule into a death-dealing policy is an amazing accomplishment.
we can thank the watchtower society for a mindset which makes this possible.. i've gone into great detail before about the watchtower blood policy itself.
it is a blatant and deliberate publicity stunt which takes the rather simple prohibitions of the laws of noah for gentiles on murder .
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Warren
Hi Superhooper,
I have a question for you. There is a pint of blood sitting on the table. You are told to abstain from it.
You then proceed to take it and put it into a machine that fractionates it into several different components. You then proceed to inject each of these components into your veins one at a time until the entire volume is gone. Have you abstained from the blood as you were told?
When JW's get through taking all the approved fractions from a pint of blood do you know what it left? Nothing! So it simply isn't true that JW's abstain from blood. Another point I would like to make is that the diseases that can be transmitted via blood transfusions can also be transmitted through the blood fractions that JW's are allowed to take. Thus, it isn't true that the Watchtower Society's blood policy protects JW's from diseases found in blood. In fact, many JW hemophiliacs have died from Aids that they got from taking the Watchtower approved blood fraction known as clotting factor VIII. By the way, each batch of factor VIII is made from plasma that is pooled from as many as 2,500 blood donors. Although JW's can take from the donated blood supply they are forbidden from contributing to it.
JW's are allowed to have the blood that comes out of them during an operation sucked up and transfused back into them via a cell saver machine.Why isn't this considered eating blood? Also, it might interest you to know that the Watchtower Society approves of procedure wherein a pint of blood in removed, sent to a lab to be treated chemically or with radiation and then transfused back into the patient. This can take up to a day or two and is acceptable as long as it is considered part of an ongoing treatment. Why isn't this considered eating blood? Even though JW's can have a portion of their blood removed for a day or two and put back into them, they are forbidden from depositing their blood to be used for an operation a fews weeks later. Evidently it's okay to eat blood that is a day or two old but not a few weeks old. I wonder what the scriptural basis is for this policy?
Of course, taking a blood transfusion is not the same as eating blood. Blood was created to flow through our veins doing what blood does. God didn't intend for blood to be consummed as food, however, when blood is transfused, the host's body doesn't consume it as food. Transfused blood carries on the exact same function in the new host that it did in the donor's veins. So what exactly is objectionable here? What is wrong with blood functioning as blood was intended to function?
"Each time the prohibition of blood is mentioned in the Scriptures it is in connection with taking it as food, and so it is as a nutrient that we are concerned with in its being forbidden." w58 9/15 575
Warren
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My (censured) open letter to the Governing Body
by Khufu inhi everyone, below is a copy of my letter to the governing body that i had published on the internet in october 2004. i was threatened with disfellowshipping for that publication.
you may read the full story on my previous thread: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/7/115231/1.ashx
philip (khufu)
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Warren
The Society replied to Khufu:
"However, the 'faithful and discreet slave' feels that it would be gross disrespect for Jehovah's
command to 'abstain from blood' if a Christian abstained from the blood of dead animals or humans while partaking of the blood of living things.-Acts 15:20, 28, 29."But JW's don't abstain from the blood of dead animals in the sense of not eating any blood whatsoever. JW's eat blood eveytime they consume meat. In it's historical context "abstaining from blood" means to drain the blood from an animal killed for food before eating it. Even when drained an animal carcass may still retain 50% of its blood. Obviously God doesn't require that we totally abstain from eating blood or we would have to be vegetarians. I find it interesting that the Jews use a koshering process in order to drain as much blood from an animal as possible but JW's are under no such requirement. Over a lifetime the average Jew eats much less blood than the average JW.
It is important to note that Jehovah himself provided the unbled flesh of unslaughtered animals specifically for purposes of eating. God allowed the Israelites to provide "alien residents" and "foreigners" with unbled meat for food as long as the animal was not killed by humans but had been found dead. These animals had died of themselves, probably due to age, disease or accident -- Deut. 14:21
Because "alien residents" and "foreigners" were bound by the Noachian Law, God's provision of giving or selling them unbled animals to eat could not have violated the Noachian Law. Jehovah wouldn't encourage people to violate his law. It is therefore logical to conclude that the Noachian Law applied only to the blood of animals killed for food.
Had Jehovah established some sort of moral imperative that the substance of blood is sacred then He would not have unilaterally provided it to the very ones He still viewed as under the Noachian Decree. God's providing the unbled meat of unslaughtered animals as food to non-Israelites is sure proof that He does not hold the substance of blood as sacred. It is life that is sacred.
The Noachian Law, applies only to blood obtained by a person's killing a creature. Since the Apostolic Decree is based on the Noachian Law it does not provide any grounds for prohibiting blood transfusions, because donated blood is not obtained by killing humans or animals. Early Christians refused to partake of blood that had been obtained by killing or by assault. However, early Christians never refused to accept medical uses of donor blood that had been generously provided by live and uncoerced donors because such technology was not available at that time.
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Evolution on PBS
by patio34 inthere is a great series airing on pbs re: evolution.
it's informative, up-to-date, and entertaining.
it's on in my area all sunday afternoon (it's 8 hours altogether).
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Warren
Opponents of ID continue to equate ID theory with supernatural processes and this is just plain wrong. I think part of the problem is that some creationists are using intelligent design as part of their apologetic program for proving that the God of the Bible exists, nevertheless, ID as a theory presupposes neither a supernatural creator nor miracles. ID is a tool used in an investigation that endeavors to determine if some aspects of biotic reality are better explained by reference to a seeing watchmaker rather than a blind watchmaker. A seeing watchmaker need not be a supernatural agent and may be endowed with nothing more than human-like intelligence. Intelligent Design is theologically minimalist. It detects intelligence without speculating about the supernatural. Biochemist Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity," physicist David Bohm's "active information," mathematician Marcel Schtzenberger's "functional complexity," and William Dembski's "complex specified information" are alternate routes to the same reality.
It is the empirical detectability of intelligent causes that renders Intelligent Design a fully scientific theory, and distinguishes it from the design arguments of philosophers, or what has traditionally been called "natural theology."
ID looks for patterns of data from life that can best be interpreted as traces of bioengineering. It may not be perfect. It promises no certain knowledge. But it does employ reasonable constraints to generate focus and testable hypotheses. And that is all that matters.
Finally, ID is premised not on a quest for certainty or an attempt to convert all scientists to its methodology. ID is for those whose thinking lies somewhere between those who think the case for design is obvious and true and those who think it is non-existent. ID is for those who don't buy into the notion that we need to show abiogenesis/evolution is impossible before introducing design (as the anti-design folks believe). ID is for those who recognize that if design occurred sometime in the distant past, there would likely be no independent evidence of the designer apart from the properties of the designed thing, which in themselves, are always open to re-interpretation without a designer. ID is for those who seriously *suspect* design for whatever reason.
For instance, I suspect design for many reasons none of which are based on Biblical text. Here are a few: the need to employ teleological concepts and language to understand biology (but not other areas of science); the encoded information in DNA being likened to a software code according to many scientists, the growing appreciation that the cell is far more like a factory of organized molecular machines than a soup; the growing intractability of abiogenesis in light of new knowledge; and the manner in which so much of early life looks front-loaded with information such that its evolution since looks mostly like the shuffling and tinkering of pre-existing endowments. For some people, such reasons may be sufficient to conclude design. For me, such reasons only impart a strong suspicion of design. ID enables one to build on this strong suspicion by looking for the specific traces of design and to use design to generate further coherency.
ID is thus not a generic method to distinguish design from non-design. It is a method that scores things to allow one to either strengthen or weaken their suspicions as regards to the thing in question.
Richard Dawkins begins his book The Blind Watchmaker with the observation that "biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." I agree, therefore I work with the assumption that if something looks designed, it probably is unless there is good reason to think otherwise and if something looks evolved, it probably is unless there is good reason to think otherwise. And the exciting by-product of this approach is the generation of testable hypotheses that have the ability to increase general knowledge about the world. Knowledge that we could never find using a methodology that rejects design. But in the anti-ID'ers perceptual field, things that look evolved and things that look designed are all the products of evolution. Period. Of course they are going to complain about ID.
As I see it, something that exhibits machine-like complexity is likely to be the product of design unless there is good reason to think otherwise. This is because we know of thousands of machines whose origin is *known* to be from design.
Since opening the black box of the cell, many things have turned out to look strangely machine-like. So machine-like, I view them as literal machines and there is no good argument against this perception. This, of course, is to be expected from a design event and design proponents have a long history of likening living things to machines. This was also NOT expected from the viewpoint that excluded design, as has been documented with the observations of leading scientific figures. More importantly, however, is that this ID/machine paradigm is a fruitful guide to research.
Now the common objection to this is that human artifacts are not biological or biochemical systems. But those that make this objection must be unaware of all the biotechnology that has arisen on this planet in the last few decades.
I think the biological machines that make up the core of life are sufficiently analogous to man-made machines to make an ID inference. We know they are at least analogous enough that the president of the National Academy of Sciences (Bruce Alberts) has proposed that biologists begin to learn from engineers to understand biology. I therefore, see no problem with treating life as carbon-based nanotechnology.
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Is evolution a fact or theory?
by sleepy inis evolution a fact or a theory?.
i suppose it depends on what you mean.. evolution in the sense of change from one generation to the next seams to be fact.. is well observed that offspring from a given creature will differ from the parent in different ways and thus after many generation can come to be quite different.. also that the genes of a creature can be affected by radiation from the sun and be alter in a novel way producing new and unique features in its offspring ( as long as the mutation is in the sperm or the egg).. that we came about via changes in the genes that eventually created a very different creature than that existed many generations ago , is that a fact?.
this requires that not only that there are changes between generation but also that these changes could be directed by different environments to such a degree that only certain specialised features could survive and reproduce offspring whilst other creatures have died out and only remain in fossilised form.. what evidence is there that such environments can and have existed?
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Warren
Rem>>Not sure I understood what you meant on that last post. I'm also not sure why you mentioned Abiogenesis when we've been discussing Evolution all this time. Evolution and Abiogenesis are completely separate theories. One does not rely upon the other.
Sorry. Let me clarify. My main argument is not against evolution per se but againt the supposed mechanism behind evolution, the blind watchmaker.
My position includes a tentative inference to ID behind the original cells that were deposited on this earth. I don't rule out further instances of intelligent intervention, but I have not really looked into things such as the origin of multicellularity, body plans, etc. An ID inference for the origin of life, however, allows me to think about evolution in a different light. That is, if indeed life was designed, there is no a priori reason to exclude ID as a possible mechanism behind some later aspect of evolution. Once the ID genie is out of the bottle the privileged status of the blind watchmaker in evolution no longer exists. The blind watchmaker explanation must now compete against intelligent watchmaker models - that is the significance of ID behind the OOL.
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Is evolution a fact or theory?
by sleepy inis evolution a fact or a theory?.
i suppose it depends on what you mean.. evolution in the sense of change from one generation to the next seams to be fact.. is well observed that offspring from a given creature will differ from the parent in different ways and thus after many generation can come to be quite different.. also that the genes of a creature can be affected by radiation from the sun and be alter in a novel way producing new and unique features in its offspring ( as long as the mutation is in the sperm or the egg).. that we came about via changes in the genes that eventually created a very different creature than that existed many generations ago , is that a fact?.
this requires that not only that there are changes between generation but also that these changes could be directed by different environments to such a degree that only certain specialised features could survive and reproduce offspring whilst other creatures have died out and only remain in fossilised form.. what evidence is there that such environments can and have existed?
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Warren
Deleted
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Is evolution a fact or theory?
by sleepy inis evolution a fact or a theory?.
i suppose it depends on what you mean.. evolution in the sense of change from one generation to the next seams to be fact.. is well observed that offspring from a given creature will differ from the parent in different ways and thus after many generation can come to be quite different.. also that the genes of a creature can be affected by radiation from the sun and be alter in a novel way producing new and unique features in its offspring ( as long as the mutation is in the sperm or the egg).. that we came about via changes in the genes that eventually created a very different creature than that existed many generations ago , is that a fact?.
this requires that not only that there are changes between generation but also that these changes could be directed by different environments to such a degree that only certain specialised features could survive and reproduce offspring whilst other creatures have died out and only remain in fossilised form.. what evidence is there that such environments can and have existed?
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Warren
Rem>>History has shown the god of the gaps hypothesis to always be wrong in the face of natural explanations. My educated guess is that ID will just be another footnote in the evolution debate. <<
People like Rem will always be able to claim that the rejection of abiogenesis is premature. They would be making the exact same claim even if life was truly designed. Even if life was designed, they would be claiming such an inference is a "designer-of-the-gaps" approach. Since they would be making these very claims even if ID was behind the origin of life, their claims are rendered meaningless.
As for the issue of evidence, when Rem claims there is no evidence for ID he is speaking from within the confines of his non-teleological world view. From such a position, all evidence must point to a non-teleological cause. If it doesn't, then it becomes "no evidence". That is, a non-teleologist has only two options - evidence for a non-teleological cause or the unknown. Thus, it is common for non-teleologists to interpret the fact that there is no evidence for their positions to mean we are dealing with the unknown. This also explains why it is that when non-teleologists are asked what type of data they would consider evidence for ID, they inevitably retreat into the realm where they demand certain proofs of ID. They are so indebted to their world view that it is not possible for them to tolerate an ID inference because it is only an inference. They need proof and certainty. But only with an ID explanation. They will tolerate all kinds of speculation when advocating blind watchmaking.
What about Occam's razor? Scientists don't accept naturalistic abiogenesis because of the evidence. Such a belief is not tied to evidence. Thus, we can see the double standard in play as non-teleologists embrace extraordinary claims without any evidence, yet demand (while pounding the podium) proof of ID.
Do scientists accept naturalistic abiogenesis as a working assumption because to them it's the most parsimonious explanation? No, scientists accept naturalistic abiogenesis because the game rules of science preclude any hint of teleology. Is Rem working from the faulty assumption that science is about coming up with the best possible explanation?
As for the issue of parsimony, it is really a matter of opinion (i.e., scientists have conducted no objective parsimony analysis/study such that the results unequivocally exclude ID).
Personally, I find ID to more parsimonious when explaining the origin of life, especially when we consider all the data.