just a few questions from a newbie.
answer one or as many as you want.
1. why cleaners?
Outsider,
As mentioned, Dubs often clean houses, etc. for a living because they are discouraged from seeking higher education, they bought into the lie that they will soon be living in paradise, etc. As a result, JWs are the religion with the lowest education and family income. As for leaving, yes, nearly 2/3 leave. It would no doubt be much higher if they got rid of the shunning policy. The best research on this comes from the Pew Foundation:
i was raised as a witness and am very thankful that i am out.
having said that, i think my upbringing produced positive qualities in me.
do you believe that anything positive came from your being a witness?
personally i have the same viewpoint of darwin, when he said : " the safest conclusion seems to me to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect".
i'm not trying to convince anyone about the existence or non existence of god.. rather, i encourage everyone to keep seeking.
keep searching for the truth that makes the most sense to them.. darwin is the grand father of evolution, and his findings and life work, did not make of him an atheist.
OTWO,
Great picture; great T shirt. As I've noted before, I try not to "believe' in anything. The only thing necessary to believe is to feel. The sooner we can all evolve to live an evidence based life the better we - and the planet - will be for it.
personally i have the same viewpoint of darwin, when he said : " the safest conclusion seems to me to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect".
i'm not trying to convince anyone about the existence or non existence of god.. rather, i encourage everyone to keep seeking.
keep searching for the truth that makes the most sense to them.. darwin is the grand father of evolution, and his findings and life work, did not make of him an atheist.
"Is there any way we could just start a new forum that couldn’t be accessed without a second membership to just deal with Evolution, Darwin, Dawkins etc etc." - Clambake
CB,
Change the channel. Don't click on it. Ignore it. It won't go away if you do, but by doing so it will spare you unnecessary anguish and spare the rest of us having to wade through your whiney ass responses. Win/Win.
This is how I watch cable news whenever I'm someplace that has it. I typically don't - not because I don't like the news, but because I can't stand the commercials. Every single one of them is about some old person whose body isn't working. They can't get an erection (ED), can't breathe (COPD), can't stop peeing in their pants, they've fallen and they can't get up or some other condition most typically caused by their life choices. I watch something else so that I won't be a whiney ass. Like you.
The only thing that exceeds your whiney-assedness is your lack of self control.
so said my pops one morning.
we were visiting my sister in eastern tennessee and the night before after everyone else went to bed pops was watching tv when all of a sudden and completely on it's own the tv changed to the tonight show, holy smokes!!
must be demons cause pops didn't change it!
i was browsing through stuff on jw.org recently and ran across some expressions that really grate on my nerves: loyal love, loving-care, and loving-kindness, as in: "please exercise loving-kindness toward your servant.
" who talks like that?
they must be relics of the fred franz era.
attention can be drawn to both the age of these skeletal remains and the conclusions that can be drawn.. .
skeletons dating to 10,000 years ago, bearing marks of a violent death and possibly bondage, provides fresh evidence that prehistoric hunter-gatherers did not necessarily live in bonhomie.
disturbingly, two of the 12 people found by lake turkana, kenya were not marked by signs of violence but seem to have died with their hands bound, a team of archaeologists reported in nature on wednesday.. we know prehistoric humans were armed to the teeth, but it's an open question against whom they wielded their stone knives and spears – animals, or each other.
LUHE,
I have an immediate and passionate response to anyone who uses loaded language in order to control the evidence, the argument and people. Geesh, I wonder where that came from?
Trying to control the argument, the facts and people by manipulating the evidence around words such as 'war' and 'massacre' is symptomatic of what cults do (oh, THAT"S where I got it). Rousseau's views were not much more than a philosophy driven by White Euro Guilt. There wasn't evidence in the 1700s to really support it. The WEG lives on. Pinker cuts through the BS (Imagine why I would like that) and makes it clear that state sponsored warfare obviously wasn't around before states were invented, but it was a lot more dangerous being human before states came into existence.
State sponsored war occurs far too often and is bloody beyond comprehension, but the day to day existence of those within the state is such that few of us will ever be faced with a life or death struggle, much less on a day to day basis, just to survive.
Pinker rightly pointed out the mountains of evidence (skulls, bones with knife/axe wounds) that show up in a very disproportionate manner within the hunter gatherer fossil record. To 'ignore' that evidence because it doesn't nicely fit into preconceived and misguided ideals built on political correctness and guilt and routinely managed and massaged by predetermined, loaded, words and skewed results isn't science.
the scientific method begins with a faith statement called a hypothesis, and then goes on to look for evidence, for or against support of the faith statement.. secular materialists often change their ideas on exactly how things have made themselves, but never whether they did.. the manifesto for this self imposed mental ban seems to be summed up by geneticist richard lewontin:.
‘our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.
we take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.. it is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Saintbertholdt,
Outstanding analysis. And damned funny! Alligator also tastes like chicken, and their parentage goes back millions of years as well. So which came first, the chicken or the alligator? Nobody ever says chicken tastes like alligators.
attention can be drawn to both the age of these skeletal remains and the conclusions that can be drawn.. .
skeletons dating to 10,000 years ago, bearing marks of a violent death and possibly bondage, provides fresh evidence that prehistoric hunter-gatherers did not necessarily live in bonhomie.
disturbingly, two of the 12 people found by lake turkana, kenya were not marked by signs of violence but seem to have died with their hands bound, a team of archaeologists reported in nature on wednesday.. we know prehistoric humans were armed to the teeth, but it's an open question against whom they wielded their stone knives and spears – animals, or each other.
FTS,
Ms. Mirazon appears to be - or have been - in the 'anthropologists of peace" camp where they believe hunter/gatherers were noble and egalitarian. This camp seems to have had its genesis from the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed Native Americans and other pre-state people as peaceful "noble savages". This camp is driven to ignore the facts and cloud the issue by using words such as war and massacre; they romanticize the hunter/gatherers as being more pure and ethical and it was only the white male farmer dudes who started ruining everything by planting corn, drawing imaginary lines around their farms and states, and waging war - or something to that effect.
Many scientists believe this is a politically correct view not based on actual evidence. Pinker states that this camp ignores the cumulative causalities of battles (not insignificant), the murderous raiding that some stateless human societies engage in, killing of non-combatants, and the other violent activities. Pinker states that the "quantitative body counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with ax marks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own."
According to Pinker, the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes "got it right" when he called pre-state life a "war of all against all."
im new here, so go easy with me!
just wanted to know if any one has any idea's or personal experience in regard to drug and alcohol abuse in former jw's.
all the one's i know have just lost the plot when it comes drugs and alcohol, especially drug use.
"Wholesome inspired living dictates that alcohol be avoided because it causes damage"? WTF? Really Fink?
That's a manipulative debating tactic called Argument From Intimidation. It isn't a fact nor supported by science or "wholesome inspired living."
You are an excellent poster most of the time. However, you have a pattern of making definitive statements devoid of evidence on matters for which you have had problems managing.
Alcohol is the second such area I've noted. The science suggests moderate alcohol provides several health benefits, and abstainers, in many studies, have no better if not worse health than moderate drinkers. The research is not conclusive, but it is voluminous.
At the moment the data does not support your manipulative dogmatism on the subject.
And I'm assuming you have data that proves a 'probability" of alcohol or drug abuse by those leaving the Dark Tower? Please reference the data for all of us to review. Anecdotal or personal observation or experience doesn't count as data btw.
