Posts by adamah

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

adamah

Eden One said-

The Tsunami was not act of God. It was simply a natural calamity.

I think the terminology "Act of God" applied to an event like the Tsunamy is loaded language.

Holy Hades, Eden. You cannot simply redefine terms on-the-fly that have been in use long before you or I were born, simply because they personally make you feel uncomfortable.

Insurers consider all natural events such as hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc as "acts of God".

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/act+of+God

Act of God

An event that directly and exclusively results from the occurrence of natural causes that could not have been prevented by the exercise of foresight or caution; an inevitable accident.

There's that legendary avoidance of truth observed in many believers, who are quite unable to accept facts which they don't want to exist (ironically which is much like the concept of God not wanting to see the results of 'natural evil' by looking the other way when it behooves Him not to see it; in fact, it's getting hard to tell where EdenOne ends and his God concept begins, since the dividing lines are so blurred).

Fact is, Hebrews actually saw ALL events that occurred as 'acts of God', and it didn't phase them one bit, e.g.

Exodus 21:12-14 (part of the so-called "Covenant Code") still reflects this common ancient belief:

He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death. However, if he did not lie in wait, but God delivered him into his hand, then I will appoint for you a place where he may flee (Note: referring to the city of refuge). But if a man acts with premeditation against his neighbor, to kill him by treachery, you shall take him from My altar, that he may die.

The situation depicted is manslaughter, where a freak accident occurred and resulted in the unintentional death of the victim. Jews had no problem chalking up such chance episodes as "acts of God" (which is what the phrase "God delivered him into his hand" implies), thinking that God's will was being carried out in some mysterious and unknown manner to humans that the mere mortals were not smart enough to understand. However, the death was part of God's plan, somehow.

HOWEVER, that doesn't mean everyone just blamed it on God and left it at that, as if alleviating both the victim and the unintentional killer of all guilt and blame with God taking the blame. Instead, the thinking was that God used both the victim AND the killer for some unknown reason, but God would NEVER use righteous individuals for such purposes; hence anyone who was involved in a manslaughter incident was immediately suspect and somehow flawed. The killer had to stay within a 'city of refuge' and remained ineligible to play certain roles in Jewish society afterwards. Hence even accidental deaths were chalked up to 'moral evil', although the root cause of the immoral action was unknown.

The OT is oddly silent on the issue of natural disasters ('natural evil'), which isn't so surprising: all natural disasters in ancient times were considered as punishment for some 'moral evil' (eg the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the threatened distruction of Ninevah, etc), and hence all resulted from judgment by God.

Of course, the big break-thru in theodicy is found in the book of Job, which allowed for bad things to happen to good people for seemingly no reason at all, since God works in mysterious ways. And with that, all possible causes were staked out as territory on the game board, and ancient priests simply picked whichever explanation seemed to fit the occasion.

But Jews who lived in 500 BC would likely look at you like you had a hole in your head if you described the concept of 'natural evil' to them, since the concept is completely anachronistic to their Worldview and understanding, using concepts which emerged into human thinking a millenia later, after scientific methods revealed how the World actually operates (eg plate tectonics, the germ theory of disease, etc). So to overlay the thoughts found in ancient writings, written long before anyone knew any better, onto modern understanding via science, is foolishly absurd.

Adam

15

Religion is a insurance for death.

by jam in

jw
friends

i heard this last night.

profound..

adamah

It's not profound, and it's not novel (it's a concept over 400 years old), but simply a modern rephrasing of Pascal's wager, which has been soundly denounced and refuted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

Adam

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

adamah

EdenOne said- Every theodicy that a believer may come up with will be always met with contempt by an atheist, for he has no intellectual respect for the theist.

Not for those who choose to talk nonsense, and expect to be given respect for their ability to offer puffery and fast-talking in lieu of demonstrating a respect for logic.

Fact is, Paul was correct in running from the marketplace of Athens in defeat, since the book of Acts records his failed attempts to debate the Greek philosophers of his day with weak-sauce arguments that got him laughed at, written off as a fool. Hence why Xians are told that such torment is persecution which reinforces their faith, and need to rely on FAITH (belief WITHOUT evidence, and even belief in the face of evidence to the contrary). It's exactly why the Bible pooh-poohs the foolish logic of secular mortals, and writes off the challenges as doing battle in the name of the Lord, Jesus.

Faith is an appeal to dogmatism, the belief-preserving strategy of covering one's ears with one's hands, and refusing to hear concepts which challenge one's cherished beliefs. It's a pretty slick self-reinforcing belief system, but it IS a psychological system of manipulation designed for shallow thinkers who are content NOT to think, since it's really hard and uncomfortable to consider that one may have been hoodwinked.

Cofty and many others had to moral courage to consider the uncomfortable question of WHAT IF everything I've believed up 'til now IS wrong, and you can too.... You wouldn't be the first, and you'd hardly be a genius for doing so since many figure it out when they're kids.

EdenOne said- I find it usually a waste of time to debate with those who don't respect my intelligence but demand that I am in awe of theirs in turn. That's utterly unstimulating and boring. Since faith isn't an item for the atheist, any argument that depends on faith will ultimately fail to convince the atheist. And that's ok. We don't have to agree in order that we may live peacefully with each other. Yet, my hope is better than your void.

Actually, if I were more cynical and unethical, I'd actually BE following in the family tradition of manipulating and profiting from the faith of others: I come from a long line of pastors and theologians (one who was president of a seminary college in the Midwest), and broke from family tradition by openly professing my atheism (and my brother is an elder in the JW).

Granted, my ancestors may have a good excuse for their ignorance (due to having lived in the past, when scientific knowledge wasn't AS readily available as it is now via the internet), but I'm certainly not proud of a familial tradition of a profession that's only one step removed from running a three-card Monte scam on some boardwalk, fleecing the suckers out of their money. And sure, those scammers might justify their actions by claiming they're only giving their marks the hope and dreams of winning, no one foreced them to play, they were greedy, etc, but it's no different from excusing religions by temporarily giving their marks hope of an eternal afterlife while taking their tithes in this life.

Adam

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

adamah

Eden One said-

If you refuse to accept God's hope and you find no comfort in it, and choose to evangelize the believers about the absolute void that you believe that evidence supports, it's all good and dandy. Don't expect to partake in that hope, though. Don't mock the hope that others have, for it's better to find comfort in hope than to live without it.

That's simply another teleological (ends-based) ethical argument, making the questionable-assertion that belief in God is valuable since it gives believers hope (questionable since it also causes anxiety, and in this case, deprives them of ancient wisdom that might've saved their lives of only missionaries hadn't told them the Hebrew God would be unhappy if they didn't abandon the teachings of their ancestors).

BTW, you REALLY need to take a basic logic course at your local community college, if you don't know what a teleological argument is.

Soooo, where does REALITY fit into your decision tree, Eden One? Does it even register to you as a somewhat important factor to ask whether God exists or not, in the first place?

Adam

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

adamah

EdenOne said-

Adam, God can't be a product of MY imagination. I'm a terrible chess player, and I can't predict even two moves ahead.

And your failed attempts at theodicy (eg your "God uses selective knowledge" thingie) makes that admission very likely, such that I'm truly inclined to believe you DO suck at chess. Such self-delusional thinking only works as long as you cautiously avoid any logical challenge that only topples your apple cart.

Hence why I said a few pages ago that it's advised to try to topple your OWN concepts before publicly sharing them with others, since otherwise you're only fooling those who are pre-disposed to swallow such illogical nonsense, i.e. those who likewise forget to exercise even a moment's independent skeptical thinking of their own before accepting the ideas of others.

Not that it's a thing to do: you're really no different from the Pope, the GB, priests, etc, who get financial rewards and ego-gratification from prancing about and acting like they're God's prophets on Earth. It's the oldest game in the (Holy) Book, but you just happen to be really bad at it.

Adam

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

adamah

EdenOne said-

Cofty, let me go back to what I said previously. God CAN know everything if he chooses to become familiar with such thing.

Derp.

Your selective pre-cog capability concept is a plot element from Frank Herbert's novel Dune, where the protagonist could examine multiple time-lines and see all the multiple outcomes of various actions he took BEFORE he selected an action to take.

The problem is, how does God decide to know something BEFORE he knows it?

OR, maybe God knows all the possible outcomes in the future, but then decides to self-inflict a memory-destroying concussion to cause selective amnesia?

IN that case, it's still a FAIL, since God would have to make a conscious decision to willfully suppress knowledge of the tsunami, and then claim He didn't know it.

Just admit it, EdenOne: you're engaging in deep dippity thinking, and you believe in a God who possesses many contradictory and mutually-exclusive traits, and it really doesn't bother you. In fact, in that regard, your God is an awful lot like <wait for it....> YOU?

You'd think that should be a MAJOR HINT that your God is a product of your own mind, as all God conceptions are the result of believer's individual willingness and desire to make Gods in THEIR image.

Adam

38

Utah man goes on hunger strike to the death to protest same-sex marriages

by adamah in

you can't make up this kind of religious nut-job fanaticism:.

http://www.4utah.com/story/utah-man-fasting-to-stop-same-sex-marriages/d/story/k9sjvlgmmeuberqg9aeobq.

although in retrospect, it's no more extreme than those jws who die refusing blood.... adam.

adamah

Hope Trestin ate a REALLY big meal before starting his hunger strike, since according to the article, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on an expedited basis (i.e. within a few weeks), so the injunction order blocking gay marriage is temporary until the Court can review the case and issue their ruling on the Constitutionity of the law. I'm guessing Trestin will use the injunction as an excuse to at least eat a light snack.

(Oh, his whole "I'm taking vitamins" thing is so hypocritical AND ignorant of the principles of human physiology, since vitamins don't do jack when you're not getting ANY caloric intake. Think of vitamins as analogous to 5 quarts of motor oil in an engine, when gasoline (caloric intake) is obviously required to keep the engine running; the motor can run with only 2 quarts of motor oil in the crankcase, but not without gas.)

Adam

31

Where else is there to go?

by snare&racket in

jw
friends

when i left the jw's, close friends and some elders discussed my desicion with me,without fail they all concluded the same thing.... "but where else is there to go?!".

at the time, the question just confused me, i could not see why it confused me or the very telling nature of such a comment.

i never thought that once.. firstly, this indicates that many jw's remain jw's simply because of this tunnel vision perspective... everything in their periphery is valueless, but the wt on which they focus is everthing.

adamah

I always think of the example of a large elephant bull which is raised from birth being confined by a strong steel chain. As it grows, it learns that it's useless to test the strength of the chain, since it won't budge. Eventually the animal grows into an adult, and can be confined by only using a thin rope which it could break easily, if only it hadn't given up even trying when the animal was young.

JWs also emotionally retard their members by relying on the scriptures in the ancient Bible which contains Simon Peter's similar emotionally-hamstrung plea of, "But Lord, where else would we go?" To say the Bible gives the members 'strength' is part of the topsy-turvy World of Xianity.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

adamah

Gladiator said-

According to the bible, angels are messengers, and Jehovah has myriads of them. Did he send one with a message that could have prevented the needless death of a quarter of a million innocent men, women and children in the tsunami on 26th Dec 2004. We all agree that the answer, sadly, is NO.

AND

Except for one thing - some Christians, who are alive today report that one of god’s sons, Jesus, regularly talks to them; often about trivial matters.

Which leads to another possible apologetic:

Lacking the power to stop the tsunami, God tried to send a warning message to everyone's cell phones, but Jesus was hogging up all the Heavenly bandwidth to educate some of God's chosen privileged children about his secret recipe for resurrection (mixing baby's teeth with "living waters"), so God only got an "insufficient bandwidth" error message and his e-mail returned as "not sent"; hence God couldn't warn the 250k victims about the "killing waters" headed for them.

Adam

33

Candace Conti - Preparing For The Appeal

by Joe Grundy in

no doubt, wtbts ny will appeal this to the best of their ability, and they have almost unlimited financial resources behind them.. i wish i was in a position to fund candace through the appeal, but i'm not, nor i am cognisant with california law or the general fedaral law in us.. but i was a police officer in the uk for 30 years, 10 of that as a commander of a fraud squad, member of the national working group on fraud, europol, etc.

i did spend some time in the us working with fbi on a joint case.. my point is this.

i've read through some of the court papers including depositions and the one that stuck in my mind was the dep taken from the witness who worked in bethel and was asked about 'collated data' re child abusers.

adamah

It's going on now: it takes over a year to complete.