Another one that came to mind is that the average distance between all planets in the universe is increasing with the expansion of the universe, of which the speed is also increasing. If they believe God does everything for a reason then the message would seem to be clear that he doesn’t want humans to populate other planets. Of course this doesn’t affect local clusters but the finite life span of stars would still apply.
Seraphim23
JoinedPosts by Seraphim23
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Suffering and Universal Sovereignty
by Trapped in JW land injust heard the special talk about why god allows suffering.
ugh... can't believe i used to believe this crap.
what do you all think of the universal sovereignty issue?
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Suffering and Universal Sovereignty
by Trapped in JW land injust heard the special talk about why god allows suffering.
ugh... can't believe i used to believe this crap.
what do you all think of the universal sovereignty issue?
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Seraphim23
A response could be, against the idea of human habitation of the other planets, that if such a thing was intended by God, why then did he create the laws of physics to make such a thing so insurmountable? Why did he limit the top possible speed of travel to be so inadequate for travel throughout the universe? Why are the stars created to only have a finite life span? And so on!
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Suffering and Universal Sovereignty
by Trapped in JW land injust heard the special talk about why god allows suffering.
ugh... can't believe i used to believe this crap.
what do you all think of the universal sovereignty issue?
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Seraphim23
As a believer in a God I don’t buy into the idea that the problem of evil dictates that God cannot exist, however I do think the universal sovereignty issue doesn’t compute. The WT seems to reject the possibility of life on other planets because of the universal sovereignty teaching of theirs. However the more planets are found, and ones like earth, the more this conflicts with other doctrines they seem to have!
The doctrine is a subtle one, in which God doesn’t make anything unless it has a purpose. It’s one of the reasons why they don’t agree with homosexuality, abortion, evolution, the appendix having no function and so on. More precisely it is a doctrine about the perceived creation order of something/anything found in nature and whether it goes against or for its perceived purpose as judged by the idea of direct intelligence via design and/or the object in nature’s structure, as perceived by our intelligence.
So the question to ask a JW in regard to this is why is there the scale and creation order of the universe with its myriads of earth like planets? These can’t all be for the purpose of only one planet to support life, and so for this doctrine to hold up it means there will have to be other intelligent life out there. If true this creates a conflict with the universal sovereignty doctrine, because such an issue would have to be settled on other planets as well.
I point this out because it is but one argument that can be used on a JW to show its inadequacy by using their other doctrines.
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Hello believers... Do you still believe in prophecies?
by suavojr indefinition for the word prophecy:.
noun [plural prophecies.].
1. the foretelling or prediction of what is to come.. 2. something that is declared by a prophet, especially a divinely inspired prediction, instruction, or exhortation.. 3. a divinely inspired utterance or revelation: oracular prophecies.. .
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Seraphim23
While religious people argue over religious prophesies and others ridicule their foolishness over thousands of years of dud interpretations a real and far more interesting phenomena gets overlooked that seems to be cross cultural and cross religious and this is the phenomena of precognitive dreams. These do occur and are often not explicable via statistical analysis or other methods in the attempt to explain them away. It’s a shame to me this is the case but I though id draw attention to it anyway.
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A silly thought on freewill...
by new hope and happiness inthis was mythought on " freewill" and made me think...i need " air" to breath..so how was i born with freewill?.
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Seraphim23
Might be so but imposible to prove.
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A silly thought on freewill...
by new hope and happiness inthis was mythought on " freewill" and made me think...i need " air" to breath..so how was i born with freewill?.
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Seraphim23
I remember a bible passage I thought was wise because it asked the question: `what do you have that you did not receive?` This seems to apply to everything including personality and all the choices that come as a result of one instead of another. No one chose their personality.
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A silly thought on freewill...
by new hope and happiness inthis was mythought on " freewill" and made me think...i need " air" to breath..so how was i born with freewill?.
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Seraphim23
Free will is also linked in with the phenomena of consciousness, as if beyond the level of the logical algorithmic mind and the animal instinctive brain there exist a witness to all of it. Does this witness actively alter what these other parts do, or is it so intimately integrated in the experience that it merely mistakenly thinks it does but is in fact a backseat driver with no power. Is there any way to tell?
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Same sex marriage legalised in the UK at midnight tonight!!!
by DuvanMuvan intitle pretty much explains it all.
lots of people are getting married at midnight tonight.. what do you guys think?
maybe if anyone gets called on by a jw this weekend you can ask them what they think about it.. im just glad because it shows that religion doesn't define our conscience, that basic human decency can prevail over time and hopefully, these types of gradual but big changes will be present in the wts too in the future .
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Seraphim23
JustHuman14 I think you may be mistaking transsexuals for homosexuals. These are not the same thing. However there is undoubtedly an advantage to having a certain percentage of homosexuals in a group of humans when it comes to survival.
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Seraphim23
I feel it would cause a contradiction in either trust, honesty, or intellectual understanding to nail down what belief is as part of a formal scientific understanding because science itself relies on trust in order for it work anyway. If belief is the placebo effect but belief also underlies science, then one can’t root out the other. One can’t be separated from the other in such a way as to meet the objective criteria the scientific process demands for everything else. They are co dependant things. Even for someone to say they know something is not really true. In reality they trust in the results of something. The possibility always exists that they have been fooled in some way. However trust is vital to avoid becoming completely paranoid. Trust is intimately linked with belief because they are more of less the same things.
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Seraphim23
I suspect that all science will be able to do is work out how to use the effect as opposed to explaining how it works.
I don’t know if this thought has occurred to anyone but in avoiding the deceptive activation of the placebo effect by telling someone that they are actually being given a placebo to treat whatever, it sheds no light on the cause of the placebo effect because in essence the belief is in the placebo effect itself in such instances, rather than the mistaken belief in a dummy pill the patient thinks is real but isn’t. All it seems to suggest is that belief itself is having an effect, as opposed to the correlates of what belief is in terms on brain actively or chemistry of the brain. The effect works when directed to a tablet because the belief is that the tablet will work, or in the case of a tablet they know doesn’t work if told it is a sugar pill, but the belief shifts to the unknown cause of a real effect called the placebo effect and this also works. The tablet simply becomes a ritual to activate belief itself, which gets called the placebo effect in such instances.
It begs the question of what this effect is because if belief itself were shown to be a simple chemical effect or process of the brain then where is the belief! How can belief be reduced to a mere causal chain or process itself? One could of course come to believe that belief is only a physical thing or a process of the brain, but this belief would render the belief in belief as having power by itself null and void. If this is the case then why does belief work even if the subject knows the pill is a dummy sugar pill? See the problem? It’s a subtle one but I suspect the effect points to something much deeper going on.