Posts by Leolaia

some people say the supreme being is male, some say it is female.. some call it goddess, some call it god.. of course this all pre-supposes one exists in the first place, but that aside, what do you think?

does god have a gender, what is that gender and what do you call it god or goddess?.

for me, i don't think god has a gender, if one exists.

Leolaia

If you define God as "all things," then by definition God would encompass both genders. However, since gender itself is a cultural, arbitrary division that glosses over a far more complex pattern of social variability, and if there is no division in God and if God should not be limited by human categories, then gender would also be irrelevant when it comes to God. Of course, it all depends on how you characterize God.

9

The dream of the New Order - in Donkey Language

by donkey in

jw
friends

a donkey understands the new order when it is explained practically as follows: .

one sheet.

one carrot.

Leolaia

So....the wts refers to the "New World" and to the "New Order"....but how bout the "New World Order"??? I guess it would go along with NGO status ;)

33

Do you really know what you believe?

by Leolaia in

there is a thought-provoking article on religion in the latest issue of skeptical inquirer.

i thought i'd share this quote which bears on jw issues in an interesting way:.

"do people know what their religious concepts are?

Leolaia

I read a psychology article once that likened consciousness with a computer's operating system. It's a simulation of what goes on inside the computer that has the veneer of reality but reveals none of the complex processes involved.

22

Is there a collection of all these creatively re-titled Watchtower covers?

by somebodylovesme in

jw
friends

i showed my husband one that's in my topic (in adult & heated debate) and he laughed sooooo hard.

he was wondering if there are more posted anywhere.

i don't even know how to search for that on the site.

Leolaia

(With apologies to Wallflower)

33

Do you really know what you believe?

by Leolaia in

there is a thought-provoking article on religion in the latest issue of skeptical inquirer.

i thought i'd share this quote which bears on jw issues in an interesting way:.

"do people know what their religious concepts are?

Leolaia

Carmel.....I think you might like this article because it tries to explain, from a scientific point of view, the reason why religion exists and why belief is so universal throughout humanity. The article argues that it is not a phenominal lapse of reason, a defect in the human mind that makes people superstitious, but rather a psychological mechanism that is activated when people deal with concrete situations (i.e. this crop, that disease, this new birth, this dead body, etc.) with uncertain causes and posits a variety of agents in direct interaction of people that cause uncertain events, and belief in imagined agents does not suspend ordinary mechanisms of belief formation. It is the same process involved in the formation of conspiracy theories, scapegoating an innocent group of people for a particular tragedy, and juries convicting an innocent person for murder when the evidence does not warrant a conviction -- in all these cases, people would imagine a person they can see and deal with as the cause of a tragic event than unseen social/natural factors. This tallies with what Narkissos said, about the need for belief in a personal god as a protective deity. The most interesting claim in the article is that most religious beliefs, when deconstructed to their most basic level, represent semantic violations of assumptions relating to broad natural categories like (1) person, (2) living thing, (3) man-made object. A spirit is a kind of person, a magic wand a special kind of artifact, a taking tree a special kind of plant. Such notions comtine special features that violate some default expectations for the domain with expectations held by default as true of the entire demain. So the concept of a ghost combines (1) socially transmitted information about a physically counterintuitive person (disembodied, can go through walls, etc.), with (2) basic inferences based by generalizing the person concept (the ghost perceives what happens, reacts on the basis of such perceptions, etc.). These combinations of explicit violations and tacit (unconscious) inferences constitute a memory optimum -- they are much more salient and are easier recalled than usual situations but also superior to oddities that are not generalizable. With that in mind, let me quote more of the article that discusses the social nature of religious belief:

"Religious concepts do not change people's moral intuitions but frame these intuitions in terms that make them easier to think about. For instance, in most human groups supernatural agents are thought to be interested parties in people's interactions. Given this assumption, having the intuition that an action is wrong becomes having the expectation that a personalized agent disapproves of it. The social consequences of the latter way of representing the situation are much clearer to the agent, as they are handled by specialized mental systems for social interaction. This notion of gods and spirits as interested parties is far more salient in people's moral inferences than the notion of these ordinary people as moral agents or exemplars.

"In the same way, the use of supernatural or religious explanations for misfortune may be a byproduct of a far more general tendency to see all salient occurences in terms of social interaction. The ancestors can make you sick or ruin your plantations; God sends people various plagues. On the positive side, gods and spirits are also represented as protectors, guarantors of good crops, social harmony, etc. But why are supernatural agents construed as having such causal powers?

"One of the most widespread explanations of mishaps and disorders, the world over, is in terms of witchcraft, the suspicion that some people (generally in the community) perform magical tricks to 'steal' other people's health, good fortune, or material goods. Concepts of witches are among the most widespread supernatural concepts. In some places there are explicit accusations and the alleged witches must either prove their innocence or perform some special rituals to pay for their transgression. In most places the suspicion is a matter of gossip and rarely comes out in the open. You do not really need to have actual witches around to have very firm beliefs about the existence and powers of witches. Witchcraft is important because it seems to provide an 'explanation' for all sorts of events: many cases of illness or other misfortune are spontaneously interpreted as evidence for the witches' actions. Witchfraft beliefs are only one manifestation of a phenomenon that is found in many human groups, the interpretation of misfortune as the consequence of envy.

"For occurrences that largely escape control, people focus on the supernatural agents' feelings and intentions. The ancestors were angry, the gods demanded a sacrifice, or the god is just cruel or playful. But there is more to that. The way these reasons are expressed is, in a great majority of cases, supported by our social exchange institutions. People focus on an agent's reasons for causing them harm, but note that these 'reasons' always have to do with people's interaction with the agents in question. People refused to follow God's orders; they polluted a house against the ancestors' prescriptions; they had more wealth or good fortune than their God-decreed fate allocated them; and so on. All this supports what anthropologists have been saying for a long time on the basis of evidence gathered in most various cultural environments: Misfortune is generally interpreted in social terms.

"A variety of mental systems, functionally specialized for the treatment of particular non-religious domains of information, are activated by religious notions or norms, in such a way that these notions and norms become highly salient, easy to acquire, easy to remember and communicate, as well as intuitively plausible. The lesson of the cognitive study of religion is that religion is rather natural in the sense that it consists of by-products of normal mental functioning. Religious thought activates cognitive capacities that developed to handle non-religious information. In this sense, religion is very similar to music and very different from language. Every normal human being acquires a natural language and that language is extraordinarily similar to that of the surrounding group. It seems plausible that our capacity for language acquisition is an adaptation. By contrast, though all human beings can effortlessly recognize music and religious concepts, there are profound individual differences in the extent to which they enjoy music or adhere to religious concepts. The fact that some religious notions have been found in every human group does not mean that all human beings are naturally religious. In this sense, religion is vastly more natural than the 'sleep of reason' argument would suggest. People do not adhere to concepts of invisible ghosts or ancestors or spirits because they suspend ordinary cognitive resources, but rather because they use these cognitive resources in a context for which they were not designed in the first place. But this is not in any way unusual or special to the circumstance of religion. To some extent, the situation is similar to domains where science has clearly demonstrated the limits or falsity of our common intuitions. We now know that solid objects are largely made up of empty space, that our minds are only billions of neurons firing in ordered ways, that some physical processes can go backwards in time, that species do not have an eternal essence, that gravitation is a curvature of space-time. Yet even scientists go through their daily lives with an intuitive commitment to solid objects being full of matter, to people having non-physical minds, to time being irreversible, to cats being essentially different from dogs, and to objects falling down because they are heavy. Cognitive short-cuts are basic to normal mental functioning.

22

Armagedon, still looking like a dummie.

by PinTail in

i was raised a witness for fifty years to watch world events, now i am aproching my retirement years and still no armagedon.

where is it?

Leolaia

You missed it. In ten years, you're gonna learn via "new light" that it happened invisibly way back in 1914 and we've really been living in the 1,000 year reign but it's just taken an awfully long time to round up all the demons fluttering about. I mean, how long does Christ have to sit enthroned as king waiting for the 1,000 year reign to begin??? You would logically think a king's reign starts when he is enthroned, huh?

33

Do you really know what you believe?

by Leolaia in

there is a thought-provoking article on religion in the latest issue of skeptical inquirer.

i thought i'd share this quote which bears on jw issues in an interesting way:.

"do people know what their religious concepts are?

Leolaia

Exactly. And you make a good point....unless a Witness was born in the trooth and totally isolated from the wider culture, it is hard for the witness to really, deep down, disassociate their thinking process from such deeply ingrained concepts as a soul or internal selfhood that unique to you. It's not like the witnesses have their own radically different worldview that causes them to see the world in a FUNDAMENTALLY different way from those in the wider society. I'm not talking about conscious beliefs but such subconscious things like how to perceive time and space in the natural world, whether one has a concept of a self or has identity without selfhood, etc. I bet witnesses generally would claim they don't believe in an immortal soul and would regurgitate the Watchtower teaching on the resurrection (i.e. cloned recreation), but would still talk about themselves getting resurrected as if continuity and a restoration of self was involved in the resurrection.

33

Do you really know what you believe?

by Leolaia in

there is a thought-provoking article on religion in the latest issue of skeptical inquirer.

i thought i'd share this quote which bears on jw issues in an interesting way:.

"do people know what their religious concepts are?

Leolaia

There is a thought-provoking article on religion in the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer. I thought I'd share this quote which bears on JW issues in an interesting way:

"Do people know what their religious concepts are? This may seem an absurd question in the psychology of religion, whose true answer is probably in the negative. In most domains of mental activity, only a small part of what goes on in our brains is accessible to conscious inspection. For instance, we constantly produce grammatical sentences in our native tongue with impeccable pronunciation, often without any idea how this is done. Or we perceive the world around us as made up of three-dimensional objects, but we are certainly not aware of the ways in which our visual cortex transforms two retinal images into this rick imrpession of solid objects out there. The same goes for all our concepts and norms. We have some notion of what they are, but we certainly do not have full access to the way our minds create and sustain them. Most of the relevant mental machinery that sustains religious concepts is not consciously accessible.

"People's explicitly held, consciously accessible beliefs, as in other domains of cognition, only represent a fragment of the relevant processes. Indeed, experimental tests show that people's actual religious concepts often diverge from what they believe they believe. This is why theologies, explicit dogmas, scholarly interpretations of religion cannot be taken as a reliable description of either the contents or the causes of people's beliefs. For instance, psychologist Justin Barrett showed that Christians' concept of God was much more complex than the believers themselves assumed. Most Christians would describe their notion of God in terms of transcendence and extraordinary physical and mental characteristics. God is everywhere, attends to everything at the same time. However, subtle experimental tasks reveal that, when they are not reflecting upon their own beliefs, these same people use another concept of God, as a human-like agent with a particular viewpoint, a particular position and serial attention. God considers one problem and then another. Now that concept is mostly tacit. It drives people's thoughts about particular events, episodes of interaction with God, but it is not accessible to people as 'their belief'. In other words, people do not believe what they believe they believe."

By itself this is really interesting because we rarely question whether we really think about beliefs the same way we talk about them. But I thought this is interesting too from a JW point of view. The Society demands so much on the flock to accept their contradictory and incoherent doctrine unquestionably, and most consciously put on a veneer of doctrinal unity, but what is really going on in all those little minds? I'm sure many have no clue what certain obscure, arbitrary doctrines are supposed to be, while other doctrines are privately rejected in favor of "personal understandings" that make much more sense to the believer. I never could, for instance, reconcile the teaching on the resurrection with the teaching on the soul, and so I privately made up my own doctrine to harmonize things in my mind. But what the article points out is that even what we think we believe, even if we consciously try to reconcile things in our mind, can contradict the real beliefs hidden in our assumptions. So for instance, many JWs say they don't believe in an immortal soul, I bet these same people can subtly reveal in similar experimental tasks that their beliefs about selfhood and their resurrection in a paradise earth presuppose an unstated belief of continuity of self which the explicit doctrine denies. I was consciously aware of this problem myself (from age 7!), and so I tried to rationalize it by believing that my life force (spirit) goes back to God for safekeeping and he creates a new body in the resurrection and restores the spirit. I wonder how many witnesses are not consciously aware of the problem but in their thinking processes presuppose a state of affairs that actually contradicts what they describe themselves as believing.