Island Man
JoinedPosts by Island Man
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2
The one where the JW Died!
by Thisismein1972 inhttps://youtu.be/q6b77gm8xxi.
all will be revealed..
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Island Man
So will the funeral be at the kingdom hall? -
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Juan Gabriel died.
by ILoveTTATT2 infor the world, michael jackson's death was the death of an insanely well known person.. in latin america, juan gabriel was like our michael jackson, he was that well known.. generations of people all over latin america knew his songs.
you heard his songs when you broke up with someone and went to the bar, you heard his songs in karaoke, you heard his songs every saturday when your grandma played music loudly and she only had the one cassette and it was his.... i hadn't cried for the death of an artist before, but today i did.. there are sooo many memories, both good and bad, in mine and hundreds of millions of people, in which he was a part.. mexico and all of latin america is in pain right now.. may he rest in peace..
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Island Man
"In Latin America, Juan Gabriel was like our Michael Jackson, he was that well known."
No he wasn't. I have never heard of him. If he was Latin America's Michael Jackson then the whole world would have heard of him just as the whole world heard of Michael Jackson.
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Self-righteous Watchtower vs the pagan-inspired New Testament.
by Island Man inwatchtower refuses to translate stauros as cross despite having no evidence to refute the long-standing ancient belief that jesus died on a cross; and in spite of evidence that the romans were in fact using crosses in executions by jesus' day.
they shun the word simply because of the use of crosses in ancient pagan religions.. watchtower refuses to refer to their places of worship with the word church because of the word's supposed pagan origin or past usage to refer to pagan places of worship.. now contrast watchtower's self-righteous attitude of avoiding the use of all words having pagan religious usages, with the new testament verse of 2 peter 2:4:.
certainly god did not refrain from punishing the angels who sinned, but threw them into tarʹta·rus, putting them in chains of dense darkness to be reserved for judgment.. tartarus is a word that had rich pagan mythological meaning when it was written in the nt.
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Island Man
I look forward to your threads, Tenacious.
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23
Are GB accountable for deaths for changing policy ?
by Chook inexample blood factions, organ transplants.
suicide from disfellowshipping , breaking up family's with old oral sex policy.
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Island Man
Yes, they are morally accountable and in a more enlightened world, they would be legally accountable.
When you indoctrinate someone form birth to believe that you speak for God, and that loyalty and obedience to your teachings exclusively is equivalent to loyalty and obedience to God, and that such loyalty and obedience are vital for their eternal salvation, and you then teach that person that God requires them to reject certain life saving medical treatments and the person obeys and dies - there is no way to extricate yourself from moral responsibility for the person's death. You psychologically manipulated the person into killing themself.
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59
Can you prove that our entire universe and existence is not a computer simulation?
by EndofMysteries inif you were a computer programmer and you were to create a simulated automated world, that would constantly evolve and self run after initial designs.
first you would have to code the rules, laws, and core elements of this world.
while this is being coded, the program is not run yet, so none of it exists.
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Island Man
No, I can't prove that our entire universe and existence is not a computer simulation. I am also willing to bet that you can't prove that it is. Where does that leave us?
One of the most pitiful excuses for believing an extraordinary claim is the suggestion that the claim cannot be disproved. When a claim is said to be unfalsifiable, that is not a commendation of the claim as being true. It is an indictment of the claim as being unverifiable and useless.
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Self-righteous Watchtower vs the pagan-inspired New Testament.
by Island Man inwatchtower refuses to translate stauros as cross despite having no evidence to refute the long-standing ancient belief that jesus died on a cross; and in spite of evidence that the romans were in fact using crosses in executions by jesus' day.
they shun the word simply because of the use of crosses in ancient pagan religions.. watchtower refuses to refer to their places of worship with the word church because of the word's supposed pagan origin or past usage to refer to pagan places of worship.. now contrast watchtower's self-righteous attitude of avoiding the use of all words having pagan religious usages, with the new testament verse of 2 peter 2:4:.
certainly god did not refrain from punishing the angels who sinned, but threw them into tarʹta·rus, putting them in chains of dense darkness to be reserved for judgment.. tartarus is a word that had rich pagan mythological meaning when it was written in the nt.
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Island Man
Watchtower refuses to translate stauros as cross despite having no evidence to refute the long-standing ancient belief that Jesus died on a cross; and in spite of evidence that the Romans were in fact using crosses in executions by Jesus' day. They shun the word simply because of the use of crosses in ancient pagan religions.
Watchtower refuses to refer to their places of worship with the word church because of the word's supposed pagan origin or past usage to refer to pagan places of worship.
Now contrast Watchtower's self-righteous attitude of avoiding the use of all words having pagan religious usages, with the New Testament verse of 2 Peter 2:4:
Certainly God did not refrain from punishing the angels who sinned, but threw them into Tarʹta·rus, putting them in chains of dense darkness to be reserved for judgment.
Tartarus is a word that had rich pagan mythological meaning when it was written in the NT. The holy, righteous, inspired NT writer chose to use a word that has pagan religious meaning to refer to where God imprisoned the rebellious angels. But wait, there is more. The pagan meaning and usage of Tartarus - an underworld prison of darkness for rebellious gods - also harmonizes perfectly with it's usage in 2 Peter 2:4 in such a manner as to give credence to the pagan myth! Watchtower tries desperately and very transparently, to deny this very obvious and inconvenient fact, when explaining the use of word in this verse.
Doesn't it seem rather strange that the holy and righteous, pagan-shunning (as Watchtower would have us believe), Christian NT writer would choose such a false-religious word in such a manner as to give credence to a pagan myth?
Doesn't it seem rather strange and very revealing that the inspired bible writers are doing exactly what JWs today self-righteously shun as mixing pure worship with false worship?
This bible text exposes the utter self-righteousness of Jehovah's Witnesses in their shunning of the use of words like church and cross.
But it doesn't end there. We also have multiple uses of the pagan word hades which was regarded as the afterlife underworld of the dead where they continued living after death. So the word hades used in the NT has deep associations with the pagan notion of immortality of the soul and an automatic afterlife in the spirit realm. And yet, quite unlike JWs today, the writers of the NT had no puritanical hang-ups about using that word in their writings. Thus the NT reveals the utter self-righteousness of JWs in the way they stigmatize words based on past pagan usage - in a way that the inspired bible writers never did.
And there is more yet! The belief that Jesus was miraculously conceived of a virgin is not prophesied anywhere in the OT. But several pagan myths pre-dating christianity speak of demigods being born of a virgin. Yes, this idea that Jesus was born of a virgin is likely a pagan concept borrowed from other religions of the day.
I think these are good points to mention to JWs when they start with their self-righteous spiel about avoiding pagan influences in teaching and worship and to help them to see that the NT itself - and therefore Christianity - is polluted with pagan influences.
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31
Latest Metal Detecting Find
by cofty innow the harvest is underway up north i can get out for a walk with the metal detector in the evening.
i am lucky to live on a historic rural estate and i have permission from the landowner to detect.. this is a coin that popped up last night.
it was only about 2 inches deep and had been tumbling around in the plough soil for the last 750 years.. it is a silver penny of king henry iii.
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Island Man
Wow! The head of the coin actually looks like something you would expect to see carved on a Mayan, Aztec or Inca ruin. lol.
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The problem of sex (or why I'm not an atheist)
by EdenOne inas i write this under the shadow of the walls of saint jorge's castle in lisbon, two very bored jws are standing just five metres away from me with a literature cart .... in my journey away from jwism i accepted evolution as a fact.
i also became anti-religion, agnostic and apatheist.
and, while i lean towards the persuasion of the atheist arguments, there are a few reasons that make it difficult for me to completely discard the notion of an intelligent origin of life.
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Island Man
The origin of sexual reproduction:
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The problem of sex (or why I'm not an atheist)
by EdenOne inas i write this under the shadow of the walls of saint jorge's castle in lisbon, two very bored jws are standing just five metres away from me with a literature cart .... in my journey away from jwism i accepted evolution as a fact.
i also became anti-religion, agnostic and apatheist.
and, while i lean towards the persuasion of the atheist arguments, there are a few reasons that make it difficult for me to completely discard the notion of an intelligent origin of life.
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Island Man
Sexual reproduction fosters greater genetic diversity in the population. Asexual reproduction tends to be cloning with a lot less diversity. Greater genetic diversity means there's less likelihood that all members of the population would die out in a disease outbreak; less likelihood that all animals would lack the traits needed to survive if the environment changed. So genetic diversity provides a survival and therefore a reproductive advantage to species. Natural selection selects those species for survival while those who reproduce only asexually are prone to dying out unless they have some other survival advantage that counterbalances their disadvantage.
A good way to illustrate this is to think of a diversified economy verses an economy based on one or very few productive sectors. The diversified economy is more robust because if a disaster affects one sector it only affects a small percentage of the economy. But an economy based on only one productive sector is destroyed if that one sector is affected by a disaster.
I don't trust what intelligent design advocates have to say about evolution. They always see problems with evolution based on their prior commitment to creationism; their use of fallacious thinking; selective, out of context quotes and outright lies and deceptions. Watchtower does not have a monopoly when it comes to distorting the facts about evolution.
I skimmed through the article. Nothing about it jumps out at me and says: "aha! sexual reproduction could not have come about without an intelligent designer". Instead the whole article is nothing more than the tired old argument from ignorance fallacy. Not yet having a natural explanation for some biological phenomenon does not mean one will never be found in future and it does not mean that a convoluted explanation involving a magic man in the sky automatically becomes the most viable explanation. One thing that did strike me about the article is the fact that it quotes old sources. Look at the dates of the sources in the end-notes at the end of the article. They're mostly from the 1970's to the 1990's. This leads me to ask the question: what are scientists today, in 2016, saying about the "problem" of explaining the origin of sexual reproduction.
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Beards mentioned again in magazine!
by neat blue dog inaaaaaand .
.. it offers absolutely nothing new.. from questions from readers in the december 2016 study edition watchtower:.
"is it proper for a brother todayto have a beard?in some cultures, a neat beardmay be acceptable and may notdetract from the kingdom mes-sage.
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Island Man
You know, in ancient Jewish culture is was not considered appropriate for men to converse with women in public. It was also considered as sinful, treacherous behavior for a faithful Jew to dine with tax collectors. But Jesus didn't let these societal prejudices stop him from publicly conversing with a Samaritan woman and dining with tax collectors.
So when Watchtower appeals to local "worldly" view of beards to determine whether or not they should be allowed, are they really following Jesus' example? Aren't they actually being a part of the world by upholding and conforming to, unjust "worldly" stereotypes and prejudices? Shouldn't they be demonstrating that they're no part of the world by refusing to conform to "worldly" prejudices against beards?
They are blind and foolish hypocrites.