"theism" here means "belief in a god" or "the worldview that an intelligent designer created the universe and life.
" ("god" here means a being with a mind who initiated and/or wound-up the universe, and designed life on earth)the most common claim that i see atheists making on twitter, is that "no evidence" exists in support of belief in a god.this post will remove any excuse atheists have for claiming "no evidence exists" in support of an initiator.
atheists can still reject this evidence as "weak," but they cannot truthfully say it does not exist.now, it is true that we do not have "observable, repeatable, falsifiable, empirical, scientific" evidence conclusively proving that an initiator exists, but we do have many lines of philisophical, experiential, and logical evidence.and... here... we... go:1:) many leading scientists, including stephen hawking, say that the space-time-matter universe had a beginning at the singularity/big bang.
Cofty/Outlaw
If anyone I debate this topic with has yet to learn that:
1. agnosticism is about knowledge
2. atheism is about belief
3. knowledge is a subset of belief
then I find all conversations about the topic are futile
Cofty, it seems Outlaw is rather jealous of your former elder status.
the difficulty of finding a marriage mate is well known for sisters.
but i would say it's hard for brothers also.
i was talking to a jw last night.
Plenty of hot chicks in my congregation. Plenty.
the wonders of facebook have accidently made my paths cross with the sister of this particular elder who served in my circuit (london) for many years and would have probably been made an elder at the very beginning of the arrangment in the early 1970's he knew my father very well, spoke at ca's visting speaker etc, and was a member of the hlc, he resigned a few years ago, he was a real hard core make no bones about it and would have been one of the very last you's expect to step down and leave, just goes to show..
I resigned as an elder in 2012, served for 14 years. Just as a reminder to JWN folks.
hey!
i'm new here, and i'm posting from chile, anyone else?
i bet we have some lurkers from here too, hope you register :).
I got FB friends in Chile, does that count?
it's been 12 years since i first read ray franz's books and the scales came off my eyes.
by that time i was in my forties.. since 2002 i went back to school and have worked with 3 very professional organizations.
but my biological clock is ticking away and while my peers are looking forward to retirement, i am only beginning.
Homegirl I'm with ya.
By the time I woke up, three years ago. I had 22 years of full time service under my belt, 6.5 of which were Bethel years.
I don't think occasional sadness about mis-spent decades is abnormal. We must just make sure that our golden years aren't spent watching wheel of fortune and hanging out at bingo parlors.
honestly, do you??
and if you do, isn't that hypocritical!.
Idioms exist! Jesus Tap Dancing Christ!
before anyone gives me the "bears/wood" similarities, this is a post based on insidethekh's reply on the mormon v jw thread.
(http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/beliefs/287545/1/who-is-copying-who-jws-or-mormons) i like to see wt friendly posts on here as some of the wt bashing displays the same logical fallacies as levelled against the wts and it's followers so it's good to consider reasoned debate.. on the one hand i think itkh makes a fair point if you compare the worldwide success of mormons v jws but there is an overall context to the preaching work that is completely ignored by those fully "in" and has been a major factor in my move from being an active witness to one on the cusp of getting out.
from a statistical point of view there are great headline numbers presented by the wts but if you put them in the context of the number of witnesses, conversation ratios, ratio of new witnesses to birth rates, numbers that must be leaving, growth differentials across the globe, penetration in muslim nations and so on then these numbers become meaningless.
365,000 babies were born every day in 1997.
Since humans have a life cycle and some sort of age of accountability, preaching worldwide to a growing/dying changing population makes no sense.
Everyone would need to stop breeding and stop dying for the worldwide message campaign to ever really matter. When that happens, we'll talk.
i know this is going to come up in a conversation shortly, how would you respond to this?
i've had it said to me before, specifically about health, one week wine/eggs/milk/axle grease is good for you, next week it's not..
I hate the way computers are always changing, getting smaller, faster, and more powerful. Really sucks.
it occoured to me that so many people in the world in general, have now become tech dependant.. so in my view this has interfered with a childs ability to make freinds simply from initial contact.. people fear each other right off the bat, and are suspicious, rather than the other way around, becasue of the things that go on.
even among those who cliam to be true christains.. there also is a huge amount of people of all ages, who have no clue how to date.. dating websites have flurished, ans has social sites like this one, .
but they are an inaccurate means in my opinion, because not all people on these sites can be trusted.. how do we interpret whats being inplied when text cannot express emotion?.
I arrange social events and meet new people via technology. I'm at the point where I need new friends, and it is helping me.
i've been learning a lot more about the universe, galaxies, planet formations, etc.
it's amazing how stars are constantly recycled, they form from gathering all the dust/gas/mass around them, the heat and pressure as the mass gets larger, producing stronger gravity, and depending on it's makeup creates fusion, turning into a star, then when it dies, it turns into a supernova, explodes, and sends it's matter out there for other stars to form,etc.
now galaxies do the same thing, and supposedly in many billons of years many galaxies will have eaten others, and if blackholes or something pulling in all the stars and mass is at the centers of these galaxies, then eventually everything would turn into one huge mass.
We can crank time back theoretically to our universe's singularity, once we are at that point, we can't crank iit back any further. Maybe some day we will, until then, I definitely won't be inserting supernaturual explanations into the mix.
