i am skipping the details on how we got to this point.
conversation was calmed and pleasant and while i know she is not the most educated person (she can hardly read), its hard to justify it by saying is a matter of ignorance.
it is definitely something inside her that triggers on that very moment.. me: i don't know where all the money is going.
It's like you were having two separate conversations!
Sometimes people with trouble in logical/mathematical thinking truly can't follow a line of thought in an argument. They get stuck on extraneous details.
She just couldn't focus on the per diem cost and then compare it in a rent vs. own scenario.
But, she sure did home in on the Society's message: donate, donate, donate!
back in the day, when my family moved to a new congregation, i fell head over heels with a young sister who was an elder's daughter.
it wasn't long before we were talking about marriage and i was contemplating buying her an engagement ring.
my parents were not happy at all.
it's to their credit that many modern christians prefer the jesus of the gospels to the god of the old testament.. ot god is an embarrassment.
i am not going to list his multitude of moral crimes here but my personal favourite is his brilliant idea that a girl who is raped must marry her rapist.
it's not his biggest crime but it demonstrates a disregard for human feelings that is beyond the comprehension of every moral person.
it's to their credit that many modern christians prefer the jesus of the gospels to the god of the old testament.. ot god is an embarrassment.
i am not going to list his multitude of moral crimes here but my personal favourite is his brilliant idea that a girl who is raped must marry her rapist.
it's not his biggest crime but it demonstrates a disregard for human feelings that is beyond the comprehension of every moral person.
it's to their credit that many modern christians prefer the jesus of the gospels to the god of the old testament.. ot god is an embarrassment.
i am not going to list his multitude of moral crimes here but my personal favourite is his brilliant idea that a girl who is raped must marry her rapist.
it's not his biggest crime but it demonstrates a disregard for human feelings that is beyond the comprehension of every moral person.
i found this very interesting article by t. m. luhrmann in todays edition of the new york times (i've highlighted a few parts i 've found most interesting):.
it seems weird to deny them.. and yet a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures.
people process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set.
Eden, I looked at the study regarding supernatual reasoning increasing with age.
I wonder, though, if this might be a cohort effect wherein these beliefs are more common among those of an earlier generation?
In that case, it might represent a way of thinking that has since become "modernized," which would explain why younger people were less likely to ascribe supernatual explanations to natural phenomena.
This, in contrast to the idea that age represents longer and thus more mature reasoning.
it's to their credit that many modern christians prefer the jesus of the gospels to the god of the old testament.. ot god is an embarrassment.
i am not going to list his multitude of moral crimes here but my personal favourite is his brilliant idea that a girl who is raped must marry her rapist.
it's not his biggest crime but it demonstrates a disregard for human feelings that is beyond the comprehension of every moral person.
Cofty, sorry. I didn't mean to derail your thread. I definitely understand what you are saying.
I tend to get in trouble when I start thinking about others' thought processes on a subject, metacognition, if you will.
Christians, including JWs, seem to not see Jesus so much as a Jew who can be best understood through Jewish thought and more as the founder of the religion of Christianity and then retroactively apply their Christian understanding of him to the god Yahweh of the old testament. This seems especially easy to do with trinitarian thought that equates Jesus with the OT god.
I totally agree with you, Cofty, I'm just indulging in some attempts to understand what and how others understand the same subject. However, this usually is unproductive, at the least off topic, and so I apologize if I derailed the thread.
it's to their credit that many modern christians prefer the jesus of the gospels to the god of the old testament.. ot god is an embarrassment.
i am not going to list his multitude of moral crimes here but my personal favourite is his brilliant idea that a girl who is raped must marry her rapist.
it's not his biggest crime but it demonstrates a disregard for human feelings that is beyond the comprehension of every moral person.
I have incomplete thoughts on this subject, but I find Caleb's entry into the discussion interesting.
I feel like I need to ask, "Is the bible a fundamentally Jewish or Christian document? Does the answer to that question affect our understanding, not only of individual events in bible, but the larger "message," for lack of a better word?
back in the day, when my family moved to a new congregation, i fell head over heels with a young sister who was an elder's daughter.
it wasn't long before we were talking about marriage and i was contemplating buying her an engagement ring.
my parents were not happy at all.
I don't remember this being a thing 20 years ago. It's horrifying to think that anybody who asks can just be shown your record card.
This religion really has a privacy problem.
born in cambridge, ma to a liberal couple that escaped the conservative south, my parents raised me better than to become a jehovahs witness.
funny thing was they got mixed up in it first.. while that is a story for another time, i myself had to go along as the third of five children in my family.
dads job transferred him to texas and my mom worked fulltime herself, but eventually we found ourselves drinking the kool-aid of ambiguity intolerance and full-fledge belief that the bible was literal fact and that salvation was found only by those who were smart enough to enter the confines of the watchtower.. its weird how many people claim they fear children raised by two gay parents will grow up to be gay.
Caleb, that idea of god I can actually understand.
The whole idea that you have to actively accept Jesus' gift of everlasting life never cut it with me intellectually even when I was flirting with mainstream Christianity while my son was young. God should be able to give forgiveness without any "sinful" human's participation in the process if he truly were all powerful.
I have a similar story about having a high IQ, understanding that I was being taught some things that made no sense by the adults around me, but not being exactly able to put my finger on it due to lack of higher education. Though I have been able to get a degree, I still feel resentful that I was taught rubbish and believed it through my teenage years. If having intelligence is part of your identity, being fooled feels like a personal failing, even though I know, intellectually, that I was a child and I'm not responsible for what I was taught to believe back then.
