how many have become atheist after leaving the organization?
I became an atheist a few years after leaving the organization. It was only after I started to READ that I began to have doubts. The more I read, the more sense it made that the universe had a natural origin and not a supernatural one.
CyrusThePersian
Small Town Atheist
this has been an interesting week.
early in the week my wife started corresponding with one of her old friends.
he is no longer a witness and while i'm not sure what the catalyst was they started talking about why he left the witnesses.
Hi Paralipomenon's wife!!!
Come out, Come out, wherever you are!!
CyrusThePersian
i've just finished reading letter to a christian nation - a challenge to faith by sam harris.
i really learned a lot from this gem, particularly regarding the power the christian right has over science in the usa and how it has stopped the most vital research to alleviate human suffering - stem cell research!
i am here talking about embryonic stem cells, which entails their destruction after three days, and not stem cells taken from a donor's blood or bone, which is the treatment i am to undergo.. on pages 28-32 harris gives sound arguments why such research should go ahead - and i agree with him.
Do you believe religion makes you a better person? Some people seem to require that their lives be dictated by some invisible sky-being who tells them how to live their lives (as interpreted of course, by the various preists, ministers and shamans who claim to speak in his name) so in that sense, for those people religion makes them better persons.
Is God truly a god of love? Don't make me laugh. The god who inhabits the Bible is mean, jealous ("and proud of it"- according to Richard Dawkins) and a murderer who required the human sacrifice of his son before he would deign to forgive "sins." Where's the love?
Should condoms be given to poor African nations to prevent the spread of AIDS? Sure, but will they use them? Or will their priests or religious leaders tell them not to bother?
Is evolution truly responsible for our being here? Sure seems to be. All of the evidence I've seen, from fossils to biology to social evolution, all seem to point that way.
Are atheists evil? Some are evil, like Stalin. Some are good like Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Clarence Darrow, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr....
Thanks for the heads up about the book, Letter to a Christian Nation - A Challenge to Faith , I'll definitely put it on my list!
CyrusThePersian
you are the product of a wondrous living universe!.
.
Carl Sagan said "We are the universe coming to know itself"
We sometimes think that the universe is "out there" somewhere in the inky black depths of space but that's not true. The fact is the universe is all around us. We are made of the same stuff that everythng else is made of. Accidental? I don't know. The universe is full of "accidents" that make for new and wondrous things .Stars and even whole galaxies collide. Black holes form. Stars explode in giant supernovae which manufacture in their intense reactions all the heavy elements we use each day like gold, silver and the like.
Here on earth, 65 million years ago a comet or meteor "accidently" may have hit the earth, killing off the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of mammals, of which man is one.
Sigmund Freud once quipped,"There are no accidents" He may be right! The series of events that have shaped our universe the way we know it today have made it a strange and wonderful place and us a strange and wonderful lifeform!
CyrusThePersian
i think it's pretty simple.
jws will never completely die out.
because there are always going to be people who stay in a rut, don't like to adjust, are lazy.
I think that eventually the Jehovah's Witnesses will fade away or change radically. The reason is that they are an apocalyptic cult. They believe that the end of the world is upon us. So, like any apocalyptic group, what will they do when the end never comes and time just keeps ticking away?
An apocalyptic religion has two options, change or die. The early Christians changed. Thhey went from believing that the end would come within the lifetime of Jesus' generation in the first century to focusing on personal redemption and salvation by the third century. Likewise the Seventh-Day Adventists also changed their theology to de-emphasize their end-time predictions.
What about Jehovah's Witnesses? So far, they've shown a strong reluctance to change. That could work against them in that when the end that's "just around the corner" never quite gets here people start getting tired. What they were once enthusiastic for now becomes a hassle. So they quit. Maybe not in a dramatic way, but in little ways-like encouraging their kids to go to college, or taking that new job, or otherwise living their lives and putting 'the end of the world' on the back burner.
Time will tell what the Witnesses do, but they have to do something...if they want to survive.
CyrusThePersian
though many millions are still under the spell of ignorance-inducing belief-systems, have you personally noted people in your day-to-day to be less and less involved in religion?.
that's been my experience.
it gives me great hope about the future of humanity.
I live in the southern US, so the churches around here are still bulging at the seams. However, the other day at work we were talking about Islamic fundamentalism and its ties to terrorism, when one of the women (herself a fundy, no less!) said that too strict an interpretation of any holy book, even the Bible, leads to hatred of others who are different. I then pointed out that most of the time religion is the only difference between some cultures and that if if you got rid of religion most people would have little to fight about, at least until they could find something else they didn't like about each other!
Believe it or not, these southern Christians agreed!
It does give one some hope for the future.
Babylon the Grape may fall yet!
CyrusThePersian
when i was jw, i didn't know any vegetarians.
they had the teaching that god had allowed us to eat animals, so we just eat animals.
no questions asked.. just recently i started to consider being vegetarian.
I've been a vegetarian for two years now. While it was a little weird to put soy milk on my breakfast cereal at first, I do feel a lot better. As I get older I find that I can't eat like I used to without facing some rather dire consequences.
Being a veggie is not for everybody but give it a try, you might like it!
CyrusThePersian
this is a fun question that i like to pose in social settings.
regardless of who your significant other is, i've found that people have a definite preference for hair color.
what i found even more interesting is that people usually preferred a hair color different than their own.
Recently in a magazine I read was an article that seemed to back this up. It offered that we are sexually attracted to people that are genetically different than us, the reasoning for it is that we see the difference and know that potential offspring would have a better chance at stronger genetics.
Believe it or not, this is not a new idea.Over a hundred years ago philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer made the observation that opposites are often attracted to one another and speculated that it was an instinctive reaction in humans in order to offset perceived deficiencies in themselves when they have children.
That said, I like blondes, lusty blondes with big.....
Ok I won't say any more.
CyrusThePersian
i've been starting to read the apocryphal books (just for the heck of it and pure academia), you know, those books that were deemed unsuitable to be considered as part of the bible canon by the religous bureaucrats back in 317 c.e.
at the council of nicea (constantinople).
i think the bible and the apocryphal books are probably a bunch of crap, but can someone school me on them?
I love the book of 1 Enoch!
Hi nvr!
Jude liked it too!- Jude:14
Makes you wonder how Jude made it into the canon and 1 Enoch did not.
CyrusThePersian
from someone who attended:.
there was a big elders meeting in columbia sc on saturday june 9.. around 240 congregations, 2000+ elders.. the society wants to build a brand new assembly hall in columbia, sc, to handle the huge influx of jws moving to the us southeast from up north.. they expect to have it done in 34 months (finished by april 2010).
total cost estimated to be approximately $8 - 9 million.. they want to have the whole thing paid for by the time the building is done - no long term loans.. they "strongly suggested" that each of the 240 congregations commit to supporting "their share" of the expense.
My daughter told me that the Society tried the same thing in Memphis TN about two years ago but failed. They were unable to raise the necessary funds to build a new Assembly Hall (can't squeeze blood from a turnip, or 9,000,000 bucks from a janitor) so they used the money that they were able to scrape up (about a million)to remodel their existing Assembly Hall.
CyrusThePersian
