launch an investigation on jehovahs witnesses religious policy that violates human rights and abuses religious freedom.
link.
Yeah, I noticed a few familiar names on the petition site which were 'outed' (listing their name and city/State), and whether it was intentional or their desired result is beyond me. It seems obvious to say, but anyone trying to fly 'under the radar' to pull off a successful fade should be aware of the risks of being 'outed' against their will, and should proceed with caution....
Adam
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.
Caliber said- Here are two acceptable objections in a court of law with regard to questioning a witness:
1) A witness may only testify to facts that are within his or her personal knowledge.
(Evid. Code, § 403.) Objection:Lacks Personal Knowledge
2) An attorney cannot ask the witness to answer a question for which he or she lacks
foundation.
(Evid. Code, § 400, et seq.)
Caliber, that's a step in the right direction, since you're looking at the standards of evidence used in modern judicial systems.
So in the principle you cite, why are you qualified to serve as a witness and testify on the existence of God, since you (along with every other believer) lacks foundation and personal knowledge on the question?
Caliber, you then quoted Isaiah 55:8-9:
New International Version (NIV)
8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord .
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts
However, the Bible contradicts that whole "God is ineffable" claim (esp when it comes to MORAL issues), since the entire story of the Garden of Eden is based on the plotline that mankind stole the "wisdom of the Gods" from Jehovah, when the first pair disobeyed God to eat the wisdom-bestowing fruit (where wisdom is the 'fuel' needed to make moral decisions).
God later admitted in Genesis 4 that mankind HAD in fact "become like Gods, knowing good from evil" and hence had attained moral equivalence with God; Jehovah had to block their access to the Tree of Life in order to prevent humans from gaining immortality, the only remaining difference between humans and spirit beings, per the Genesis account.
In fact, Jehovah verifies that mankind possesses morality in order to make judgments on fellow humans on matters of life and death, since capital punishment was delegated to mankind after the Flood; God even gave humanity a little pep-talk in Genesis 9 when He delegated Divine authority to humans, reminding mankind that man was made in "His image" i.e. possessing traits of logic similar to Gods.
Hence God felt we possessed morality sufficient to judge our fellow humans after the Flood, and we've a long history of developing the moral codes we follow today (including prohibiting actions that the God of the Bible endorsed, eg slavery).
Adam
peace to you!.
this thread is about false things (some) atheists think theists believe.
this is not a thread about false things that atheists think about theists.
TEC said- I was a kid, Adamah.
Hate to break the news to you TEC, but you still display child-like thinking (65% of children have an imaginary friend as a stage of their early childhood social development).
Most of us tired of our tiny imaginary friends as a child, when one day we woke up and outgrew the need, or simply forgot about our 'old friends' with the passage of time when we learned to make the leap of dealing with reality, AKA making friends with other humans, which is much messier in real-life.
http://www.aboutourkids.org/articles/when_your_child039s_new_friend_imaginary
Others persist in imaginary friends throughout their lives, and even engage in piling fantasies upon fantasies to justify their reliance on imaginary friends. They react to challenges to their imaginary friends as if they're being personally attacked, since deep-down they understand they ARE being attacked; they know their friends don't exist, and realize what game they're actually playing is only in their minds.
Worse though, you defy the very authority figure you claim to love by making up your own theology 'on the fly', which most believers do to create Divine beings in THEIR image. Everyone played the game, at some point: that's why those who continue to play it into adulthood are so annoying to those of us for whom the fascination of the game passed long ago (and which isn't harmless, which should be obvious to anyone reading on an ex-JW board).
Paul displays the signs of a classic defense-mechanism (i.e. denial of even having a problem, where denial protects such self-delusional beliefs), when he claimed to be over childish thinking in 1 Cor 13:11:
When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.
Go ahead, TEC, and telling yourself you're over all childish thinking, when deep down you really know it's not true. You can throw in a dash of that legendary Xian persecution complex, if the denial doesn't do the trick. Then, if all else fails, you can just put it out of your mind, and use cognitive suppression and chalk it up as a positive, done in the name of protecting your faith....
TEC said- Maybe you should have read that warning before you hit submit.
You don't actually believe that I would post that image without scrutinizing what I wrote, making sure it was logically and factually air-tight before I posted?
Anyway, that counter is (yet another) variation of a theme of your favorite argument, the "Tu Quoque" ("but you do it, too!) defense. Did you say that as if to prove my point that you engage in childlike reasoning at times?
TEC, you do have the capability to grow your critical thinking skills, since you often show the ability; however, it's going to take HARD EFFORT on your part to continue to grow (and not just get better at exercising your imagination, which is a valuable skill only for writers of fiction (which includes theologians)).
You'd really do yourself a favor in this life by learning the principles of logic and contemporary rhetoric, eg:
http://books.google.com/books/about/Logic_and_Contemporary_Rhetoric_The_Use.html?id=_IIVhDlcCy4C
(There's even a preview of the book available on that page, so you can try before you buy.)
Adam
peace to you!.
this thread is about false things (some) atheists think theists believe.
this is not a thread about false things that atheists think about theists.
TEC said-
Ah... Gmork. Thank you. I remember watching it as a kid and struggling to wrap my head around this 'great nothing' also.
Holy Hades, what is the incessant fascination that some people have with paradoxes, thought-stopping literary devices that are NOT 'deep' or 'philosophical' or 'hard to grasp', but only give the perpetuator of these trite sayings the appearance of being wise, when they're merely showing how they are able to withstand incredible levels of internally-contradictory logic that would kill a 'normal' human, and promise that you can, too, if you only work hard enough at it?
There's no mystery to be resolved in paradoxes, since many combine the extremes from both ends of the spectrum with each other, eg "cold-heat" (i.e. temperature extremes). However, that hard-to-wrap-one's-mind-around concept already has a term to decribe it: 'lukewarm'.
In the example TEC cited above ('great nothing' as if describing the state of non-existence), the controlling portion is the word, NOTHING, and nothingness prevails (great or insignificant as it may be, since the mind that is non-existent won't be able to make value assessments like 'great').
People forget that simply because a grammatically-correct statement can be constructed that follows all the rules of proper English, that doesn't mean it HAS to make any kind of logical sense! I can say ANYTHING ( eg "I saw a bowl of fruit salad driving a car down the road yesterday!") but it doesn't mean the statement is logical, much less TRUE. Such statements can be dismissed out of hand as completely absurd and ludicrious, as they're so completely contradictory to ALL past experiences of human life that to accept them as true would require appealing to believer's liberal use of faith.
Besides, are all the truly-relevant and potentially-answerable questions (eg investigating the ACTUAL cause of death in humans?!?) just too boring for flighty minds to engage in, so they feel entitled to engage in pointless discussions of trying to excuse even MORE ignorant conceptions by making up MORE stuff which wasn't even part of the old 2,500 yr story?
Wouldn't it be nice if all internet browsers were required to display a built-in warning like this:
Adam
peace to you!.
this thread is about false things (some) atheists think theists believe.
this is not a thread about false things that atheists think about theists.
Someone's been watching too much Ingmar Bergman (Seventh Seal):
EDIT: LOL, BOTR. Same thought....
(I was thinking of 7th Seal, but I think the movie you're thinking of is Wild Strawberries?)
http://gawker.com/americas-first-openly-pastafarian-politician-sworn-int-1496554452.
isn't diversity wonderful?.
metatron.
jwfacts said-
It is hardly a prophecy, Perry. There have always been atheists, as shown in Psalms.
Of course, it's no fun now, since the believers cannot burn us athiests at the stake for our blasphemous and heretical talk, constantly demanding proof for the existence of God(s). It's not fun anymore, like in the 'good ol' days' when believers could just burn the gnostics and pagan witches, and send them on an one-way mission to find out (or not to find out, if the atheists were correct).
Keep your chin up Perry, as you might try claiming that such restrictions placed by the secular authorities represent an infringement on your Constitutionally-guaranteed right to practice your religion in the manner of your choice!
Bob said- Thank you. That's the funniest thing I've read on this forum for a long time.
Thanks; and the best part is, it's completely true, as Apostle Paul was the victim of ID theft, but believers simply choose to ignore the evidence, since the epistle of 2nd Peter serves very useful purposes for their ends (namely, to clarify some problematic elements of the OT story of Lot AND Noah).
I wrote two articles on the topic on my blog:
http://awgue.weebly.com/genesis-vs-2nd-peter-noah-didnt-preach-bupkis.html
Adam
i do not think god is a'morphic.
god is not human, so hence he does not possess human characteristics, to know god better and to understand him better i study science.
there has been a new discovery of strange signals picked up from black holes and distant supernovae suggest there's more to space-time than einstein believed.
Earnest, let's review what anthropomorphism (noun) means, shall we?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism, or personification, is attribution of human form or other characteristics to anything other than a human being. Examples include depicting deities with human form and ascribing human emotions or motives to forces of nature, such as hurricanes or earthquakes.
Note that anthromorphism is a NOUN (a concept), whereas anthropomorphic/anthropomorphize are adjectives that describe the ACT of ascribing human traits to non-human things (usually by writers).
So when Kate said:
"do you think if God existed, he is Anthropomorphic".
We're already in nonsense land, since it's a malformed and ambiguous sentence that likely reveals she doesn't really know what the term even means (believers tend to do that kind of thing ALOT, like when believers say, "God is LOVE", without so much as blinking, since love is a TRAIT, and beings aren't traits; they possess traits. It's also a personification, but a rather sloppy use of it).
It's an even sillier question to ask, primarily because the authors of the Bible (both OT and NT) engaged in full-tilt anthropomorphism of God, having Him talk, rest, create with His hands, walk in the garden, smite, turn his back on Moses, has a face, show human emotions (anger, love, regret), etc.
So why is God anthromorphized in the Bible? Simple: to make Him more relatable, and the author(s) of Genesis give themselves poetic license to do so early on by claiming that God made humans "in His image" (which actually allowed them to creating a depiction of God in THEIR image, when there in fact WERE many inanimate objects that were worshipped as Gods around and similarly anthropomorphized, eg Egyptians worshipped the Sun and Moon, but ascribed them with thoughts and emotions).
Then you say this:
Earnest said-If God does not exist then there can be no discussion as to whether he is anthropomorphic. So I made it clear in my post that for the sake of the discussion I was ignoring the argument whether God exists or not.
See, we're already in trouble, since do you mean God ascribes human traits to non-human entities, too? You used the noun, so what does that even mean?
But if you meant it as an adjective (which I suspect, with God being the SUBJECT who is anthropomorphized by us), then sorry, that's simply not true.
God's existence or non-existence has absolutely NO bearing on whether God can be 'anthromorphized' (or even should be, which is likely what Kate meant), since existant beings (eg the cat that lives in my neighborhood) and non-existant beings (eg animal characters portrayed in a fairy tale, or the wind in a fictional work) alike can be anthromorphized. Again, any non-human entity or force can be personified.
BTW, the Bible of course anthropomorphizes God throughout, but then flip-flops by later claiming (in Isaiah) that God is "mysterious" and "unknowable"; His ways "are ineffable".
Well, which is it? Is God a mystery, uncomprehensible since He is so above us, or does he share human traits such that we can relate and understand his motives, desires, etc? Heck, God supposedly gave us a Holy Book to educate humanity of his Divine Will for us! Why would God write a Bible, if only to NOT communicate?
The whole "God is ineffable" claim is an example of deepity, and used as a "get out of jail free" card by believers, AKA a thought-stopper. It falls into the category of giving someone the royal kiss-off, telling someone that you COULD explain something to them, but they're simply too stupid to understand it. It's a non-response.
Earnest said- You do not address the points I raised about anthropomorphism but ask "what the hell this 'spirit' thing is". Any good dictionary will tell you that 'spirit' (as a noun) refers to a supernatural being, which means it pertains to a force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.
Ohh, lookie there: another deepity (AKA a thought-stopper), with 'spirit' being beyond all known laws of nature, and incomprehensible by us stoopid (sic) humans.
Earnest said- Essentially my position is this. For the sake of the discussion I assume God exists because that's what Kate said. So either he has not revealed himself and we (humans) invested him with the qualities attributed to him in the Bible. Or else he has "revealed" himself and in that case I am saying he has explained himself in human terms but really he is quite beyond our comprehension. Jewish kabbalists and Christian gnostics dabbled in this but while we may be in his image we can only see him through a glass, darkly.
Yeah, that's a long string of highly-questionable assumptions and fantastic assumptions that rely on deep dippity-doo, and I'm not interested in wading into that mess right now, since when you cite Kabbalic mysticism and gnostic beliefs to back your point, you're well beyond my allowable daily-allowable dose of deep deepity.
Adam
in a recent meeting with elders, an argument was used to the effect that jehovah has always [= throughout history] used, or operated through, an organization; therefore, the wts must be that organization today, since god must be using one.
naturally, i know what arguments i've used to counter that argument.
but i'm interested in hearing yours.
Aurelius said- If I lived in the 18th century (or any century between the 2nd and 19th) was 'conscious of my spiritual need' and wanted to worship God 'in spirit and truth'.. which organisation should I have joined in order to get spiritually fed? (remember the wheat was still amongst the weeds).
If you lived anytime before the Age of Enlightenment (which is when the concept of someone choosing their religion emerged), you'd choose whatever the prevailing religion in your area was that your family attended. In other words, you WOULDN'T have a choice.
So if you lived in England, you'd likely be a Catholic (or Protestant). If you lived in Japan in the 14th Century, you'd likely be a Shintoist; in China, you'd likely be a Taoist or Buddhist (depending on which was prevailing at the time, due to the whims of the Emperor), and if in India, you'd likely be a Hinduist, etc.
Idea being, the whole idea of people being able to choose their own religion after comparison shopping is a fairly-modern concept, and it's generally a mistake to project that kind of thinking onto other cultures/times, since it doesn't always hold true (eg Socrates was put to death in 400 BC for not believing in the Gods of the Greek State, since the Gods were seen as supporting the land, and saying they didn't exist was traitorous).
Aurelius said- Which specific organization was God using during this time?
Eh, being that I'm an atheist, do you really need me to tell you my answer (that all religion is a snare and racket, designed to control people and fleece the flock)?
Adam
spinning off from another thread, have jesus' teachings been less than universally helpful to mankind?
how do we measure if a particular philosophy is helpful or harmful?.
i am going to use the "universal morals" listed here.
Jgnat said- One could say that Windows was pirated ideas from better minds, and I heard a compelling argument that Bob Dylan's lyrics were borrowed. Not original perhaps; human wisdom repeats itself on reoccurring themes.
Except you're forgetting that believers actually think Jesus walked on water, resurrected the dead, and is the one who will judge them on the ultimate fate of their eternal souls. They think Jesus is God's son.
As such, the words, wisdom, and thoughts of Jesus should be heads and shoulders above anything said before and since, and not reflect the ancient Worldview and contain basic scientific errors which point not to God's glory, but to the sentiments and thoughts of a Jewish male who lived in 30CE who was strongly influenced by his own culture (i.e. prior rabbinical thought and sayings, some coming from the oral traditions which later were recorded in the Talmud). Many Xians haven't even read the OT, and hence don't even realize when he was often quoting principles found in the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible).
Jgnat said- The sustaining power of Jesus' message I think, must be the time and place of the message. Before Jesus, Kings were gods. Afterwards, separation of church and state. Eventually this morphed in to personal faith and representative government.
Even after Jesus, Emperors were still considered Gods. It wasn't until Xianity was adopted as the official State religion of the Roman Empire that the situation started to change, and largely due to the smart move of outsourcing the deity role to an iconic image who couldn't reveal his mortal traits by growing old and dying: it's pretty-much impossible for someone who's already been dead for 300 yrs to slip up and reveal their mortal nature (perhaps by having a case of diarrhea)!
I doubt many historians would agree with that assessment of Jesus' influence on the development of representative government; when it comes to Judaism, separation of church and State began long before Jesus walked the Earth (i.e. after the independent Jewish Nation ceased to exist, circa 600 BCE after military defeat by Babylonians). So except for rare periods (eg the period of the Hasmonean Dynasty), Jews were allowed to keep their religious practices intact, but had to use the laws of their overlords (whether Persian, Greek, Roman, etc) when it came to adminstering civil/criminal justice. All the stipulations of stoning etc found in Mosaic Law were often actually just theoretical discussions, only, since the law of the land prevailed (in rare cases, the Jews were allowed to exercise limited form of self-rule, but with severe restrictions placed on the cases, i.e. no death penalty administered, which is why the whole shunning practice emerged since the Jews weren't allowed to stone their own members to death).
Jesus set the cause of separation of church and state back, what, 1,500 years, since it took that long AFTER Jesus and Xianity were adopted by the Holy Roman Empire as the official State religion for the principle of separation of church and State to reemerge; and not without much effort, conflict, and bloodshed, where in the interim monarchies ruled by the concept of a Divine right to rule.
King James separated from the Papal authority in Rome by declaring himself head of the Church of England, but still that was obviously a mix of State and religion. We have to wait until the 17th Century and Age of Enlightenment for John Locke to coin the term, and for America to be founded.
So, as much as it is painful to accept, Xianity actually set the cause of separation BACK, since Judaism would've likely lingered as a blip on the radar had an off-shoot cult not morphed into Xianity we see today. But to credit Jesus with ENCOURAGING separation of church and State (or tolerance, or even basic human rights, when Jesus didn't denounce slavery but endorsed it, etc) is a bit much....
Adam
can anyone spot the basic problem with the question asked on the cover of la weekly, for an article on alien encounters?.
.
adam.
Oh, BTW, if anyone wants to read the article, the magazine is available here (article starts on pg 12):
http://digitalissue.laweekly.com/publication/?i=186568
Adam
