Posts by Abaddon

4

Experience about Bro. Nelson (Prince)

by NikL in

jw
friends

i just got this story in an e mail.. i don't know if i should laugh or gag.. anyway, this sort of falls into urban legend territory.. read and see what i mean.... .

this past sunday (rainy and dreary) at our 3:30 p.m. meeting in bowie, a .

brother took the microphone and gave his name as "brother graham".

Abaddon

Poor Prince... he gets hit by a cultist whilst grieving for a lost child, and, as many would do in such circumstances, gets pulled in.

116

WHAT ABOUT THE STUMBLING BLOCKS?

by You Know in

the underlying assumption of the apostasy is that if the watchtower falls short to a significant degree then it cannot be jehovahs organization.

thats why apostates are hopeful that if enough fault can be found with the organization and brought to the attention of the faithful, then they too will accept the conclusion that jehovahs witnesses are not who we say we are.

unquestionably, many have been stumbled over a multitude of stumbling blocks.

Abaddon

Farkel; More doubleplus scarey each time I read it!

116

WHAT ABOUT THE STUMBLING BLOCKS?

by You Know in

the underlying assumption of the apostasy is that if the watchtower falls short to a significant degree then it cannot be jehovahs organization.

thats why apostates are hopeful that if enough fault can be found with the organization and brought to the attention of the faithful, then they too will accept the conclusion that jehovahs witnesses are not who we say we are.

unquestionably, many have been stumbled over a multitude of stumbling blocks.

Abaddon

I accidentally posted this whilst I was writing it, thus a truncated version of this appeared before.

Mad Rambling Bob is a wonder. Either he is a natural, or there is a well-thumbed copy of 1984 in his home. Considering he is, by most Witnesses' definition, and by the Governing Body's definition, an apostate, far more so than most of us, he at the same time manages to sound like he's a poster boy for the Writing Department. He can cope with levels of cognitive dissonance that would make most peoples' eyes bleed. Whatever, let's look at some pass notes for 1984 from http://www.givemenotes.com/literature/1984notes01.html

The Party members were brainwashed into believing anything that the Party told them to believe. This was achieved through doublethink. They believed what the Party told them even though they knew that the opposite of what was being told to them was true as well.

If we take expatbrits excellent suggestion of doing a find and replace of certain words (for Mad Rambling Bob's original post) to this, and sub Jehovah's Witnesses for Party members, and Organisation for Party, we start getting somewhere.

The result of the use of doublethink on Party members caused their quality of life to decrease. The Party lied to them, telling them that the quality of life was increasing, even though they knew it was decreasing. Although they knew the truth, they were forced to believe what the Party told them

Again, do the sub and see the 'Truth'.

Party members could not possess memories

Or are actively discouraged from having them... my mum insists that the Society were never down on Higher Education!

Could not trust anybody in fear that they would report you to the Thought Police and have you vaporized (p65). This held true within families as well.

Sub Elders for Thought Police and disfellowshipped for vaporised and the parrallels are there again...

The Party told its members to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears

Yup, the 'Assured expectation of things not yet beheld'. It's been going on for millenia, good to know Mad Rambling Bob is keeping the tradition going.

Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics that people today [were better off] than the filthy people of fifty years ago

This is clever, as they do this both ways... "how much better off Jehovah's people are" (quote statistic) AND "oooo, look at the state the world is in" (quote statistic). Nice.

They are constantly under the watch of the Thought Police.

Again, Thought Police = Elder...

Most interestingly, one is compelled to think of the appendix to the novel 1984, as the whole use of language and implicit ideology is so derivative of the principles of Newspeak, doublethink, blackwhite, you can't help but wonder if some proofs of the novel went astray in Brooklyn... except they were already at it by then...

Please note the bolded section.

Excerpt from
"The Principles of Newspeak"
An appendix to 1984
Written by : George Orwell in 1948
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles of the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist, It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile, it gained ground steadily, all party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of Newspeak dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the dictionary, that we are concerned here.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.
To give a single example - The word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary, and the C vocabulary. It would be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.
The A vocabulary. The A vocabulary consisted of words needed for the business of everyday life --- For such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one's clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words that we already possess -- words like hit, run, dog, tree, sugar, house, field -- but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary, their number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined. All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them. So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.
The grammar of Newspeak has two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and noun form, when of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word thought, for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by think, which did duty for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was involved here; in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and a verb of kindred meanings were not etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for example, no such word as cut, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verb knife. Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix -ful to the noun verb, and adverbs by adding -wise. Thus, for example, speedful meant "rapid" and speedwise meant "quickly." Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as good, strong, big, black, soft, were retained, but their total number was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived at by adding -ful to a noun-verb. None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a few already ending in -wise; the -wise termination was invariable. the word well, for example, was replaced by goodwise.
In addition, any word -- this again applied in principle to every word in the language -- could be negative by adding the affix un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant "warm" while pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively, "very cold" and "superlatively cold". It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ante-, post-, up-, down-, etc. By such methods it was possible to bring about an enormous diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word good, there was no need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well --indeed better-- expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by Unlight, or light by undark, according to preference.
The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity. Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned below, all inflections followed the same rules. Thus in all verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in -ed. The preterite of steal was stealed, the preterite of think was thinked, and so on throughout the language, all such forms as swam, gave, brought, spoke, taken, etc., being abolished. All plurals were made by adding -s or -es as the case might be. The plurals of man, ox, life, were mans, oxes, lifes. Comparison of adjectives was invariably made by adding -er, -est (good, gooder, goodest), irregular forms and the more, most formation being suppressed.
The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except that whom had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the shall, should tenses had been dropped, all their uses being covered by will and would. There were also certain irregularities in word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech. A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word: occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained. But this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion with the B vocabulary. Why so great an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in this essay.
The B vocabulary.
The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.
Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases they couId be translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.
The B words were in all cases compound words.
They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take a single example: the word goodthink, meaning, very roughly, 'orthodoxy', or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, 'to think in an orthodox manner'. This inflected as follows: noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past participle, goodthinked; present participle, goodthinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker.
The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their derivation. In the word crimethink (thoughtcrime), for instance, the think came second, whereas in thinkpol (Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word police had lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficuIty in securing euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of Minitrue, Minipax, and Miniluv were, respectively, Minitruthful, Minipeaceful, and Minilovely, simply because -trueful,-paxful, and -loveful were slightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.
Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a Times leading article as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: 'Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.' But this is not an adequate translation. To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by Ingsoc. And in addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word oldthink, which was inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.
* Compound words such as speakwrite, were of course to be found in the A vocabulary, but these were merely convenient abbreviations and had no special ideologcal colour.
As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by goodsex -- that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was sexcrime. In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.
No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as joycamp (forced-labour camp) or Minipax (Ministry of Peace, i. e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses. Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation 'good' when applied to the Party and 'bad' when applied to its enemies. But in addition there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideological colour not from their meaning, but from their structure.
So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called Recdep, the Fiction Department was called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department was called Teledep, and so on. This was not done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Inprecorr, Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.
The words Communist International, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth. This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable.
In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker's mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words -- goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others -- were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.
So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ' to quack like a duck'. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when The Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.
The C vocabulary.
The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political speech. Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for 'Science', any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.
From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy.
It would have been possible, for example, to say Big Brother is ungood. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so. One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. For example, All mans are equal was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which All men are redhaired is a possible Oldspeak sentence.
It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth-i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or strength. The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word equal. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings. In practice it was not difficult for any person well grounded in doublethink to avoid doing this, but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have vaished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of 'politically equal', or that free had once meant 'intellectually free', than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced -- its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.
When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox(goodthinkful would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government. . .
It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.
A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature -- indispensable technical manuals, and the like -- that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.
George Orwell

As NWA once said... "Don't don't don't, don't believe the hype!"

This poor sod is a linguistic charalatan. Given a different background, he'd use his skills to be an apologetic for whatever nasty little subculture he was in. Facts, wrongs or right have nothing to do with it. It's just psychological manipulation.

But don't be angry with Mad Rambling Bob. Pity him. He's wasting his life; an outcast from his own kind, a cult of one, a figure of fun in the community he should recognise and accept as his own.

No matter how often he says it, you know you know is just a street corner pharasee, calling down evil upon the heads of the passers by, when the only evil he can really inflict upon anyone is spittle stains if you get too close.

Come on in Bob, the water is doubleplusgood, you must be doubleplussad in your ownlife commiting all those thought crimes the thinkpol would vaporise you for. Under the doubleplusgood duckspeak you are just a Prole like us.

21

ARK eologists

by refiners fire in

here in australia a war has been going on for years in the media and in the courts.. the combatants:.

professor ian plimer, professor of geology at melbourne university.. and the "creation science foundation" run by a. a. snelling and carl wieland.. these men have sued and brawled with each other for years.. plimer wrote a book, a few years ago called.

"telling lies for god", a large portion of which discussed, and debunked, the possibility of noahs ark having been a literal boat.. still, what plimer calls "arkeologists"stage regular forays into turkey, looking for noahs ark on the mythical mount "ararat".. plimer says of these "arkeologists":.

Abaddon

Is there some magic search engine used by Fundamental Creationists and Flood Apologists, that directs them to any conversation about creation, evolution or the flood?

It's amasing how they pop up, almost never having been seen before, and disappear, normally to never be seen much again. It must be a conspiracy... watch out atheits! The theists are revolting.

Dear hooberus, humour aside, you are obviously entitled to your own opinion.

I suggest you do some research; www.icr.org is a site I am very familiar with. The refutations of scientific arguementation they make on that site are very weak, and unless they are keeping the good stuff for the books so people can pay money to know god is right (whoops, a little cynical there), I am very unimpressed with the standard of 'proof' offered by them. Feel free to post specific examples, it's ages since we had a good flood de-bunking.

Have a look at this; http://www.flood-myth.com/

Perhaps the REAL story of the flood, copied and distorted for the Bible?

And spend some time here;

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html

And here's a review of the book you cited;

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/woodmorappe-review.html

Woodmorappe's book is an impressive attempt to defend the concept of a global flood in which the entire land biosphere was saved by the ark. One of the characteristics of anything Woodmorappe writes is an extensive bibliography and this book is no exception. The book is well documented, having an estimated 1400 references. This makes the book an excellent bibliographic source, for entré to the literature of any issue as one is reading it. The book lacks an index which is a serious impediment to the usefulness of the book for further study and research. One of the best things is that there are few issues concerning the Ark which are not addressed. Because of this, anyone with a serious interest in the ark and its problems, or a student of the creationist movement should obtain a copy.
Woodmorappe attacks the problems of the ark in a systematic fashion. He begins by calculating how many animals were on the ark. Woodmorappe uses the genera as the equivalent of the created kind. Taking one pair from each genera,living and fossil, he lists 7428 mammals, 4602 birds and 3724 reptiles on the ark. This totals to 15,754 animals on the ark. Amphibians and invertebrates like terrestrial snails are not on the ark. He spends very little space describing how these animals could have survived out in the turbulent flood waters.
Woodmorappe continues through the topics of living space, food and water requirements, waste removal, heating and ventilation, the gathering of the animals, manpower needed for the care of the animals and on to post flood problems such as the re-migration and the re-development of genetic diversity. Woodmorappe does a good job of addressing all the issues. But many of his solutions are less than satisfying.
Woodmorappe attempts to solve the feeding and care problems by comparing the ark to modern mass production farming methods. But there is no justification given to approaching the problem in this fashion. It is not clear that solutions applicable to the care of 8,000 hogs, requiring the same food, water and space, can be applied to 8,000 different animals each requiring a different set of food, water and environmental conditions. Every care and feeding problem is attacked by this approach. And yet he suggests that some of the snakes can be coaxed into eating inert food by stuffing snake skins with meat. He notes that pandas can survive on diets lacking bamboo, but a check of the references shows that the replacement diet is more time-consuming to create than bamboo. This type of feeding is precisely why so many have wondered whether Noah and company had sufficient time to feed thousands of animals.
When it comes to care on the ark, Woodmorappe enlists the aid of the animals themselves. According to Woodmorappe, prior to the flood, Noah had kept a menagerie and trained the animals to defecate and urinate on command into buckets. They were also trained to leave their pens for exercise and return to their cages on command. Snakes and bats were trained to take inert food. Birds were trained to take sugar water from pots. This, of course, makes Noah the greatest animal trainer in history. How much time Noah and his hired hands required to train 16,000 animals is almost incalculable.
Noah is also turned into a breeder par excellence. During the time of the menagerie, Noah was engaged in modern breeding in order to "maximize the heterozygosity of the recessive alleles" to avoid inbreeding depression after the flood (p. 194). If hibernation was a desirable trait, Noah was able to breed strains of animals which were more likely to hibernate (p. 133). He was able to acclimatize reptiles to the temperatures they would find on the ark ( p. 124) and breed a pair of Koalas who would accept dried Eucalyptus leaves. This type of solution is appealed to so often, it begins to take on the appearance of an ad hoc explanation.
Many of the solutions are of the nature of a "could be, might be". He suggests that the seeds of some plants were buried and then eroded back to the surface in order for them to survive the flood. He writes:
"The absence of light and the anoxic conditions of burial must have facilitated the dormancy of seeds until unearthed by late-Flood and post-Flood erosive events. Furthermore, the absence of oxygen tends to greatly prolong the viability of seeds which are viable only for short periods of time under normal subaerial conditions. Had carbon dioxide percolated through some of the Flood-deposited sediments, it must have also imposed a narcotic effect on many seeds, including at least some that would not otherwise have survived prolonged burial in a viable condition. For instance, the rubber plant (Hevea braziliensis) is notorious for the short period of viability of its seeds under normative conditions. Yet when narcotized by carbon dioxide, the seeds can survive in a viable state for at least several weeks and, if present in sufficient numbers, a few individual seeds out of a great number of initially buried may have survived the Flood year." p. 156.
Since CO2 is normally associated with volcanism and high thermal gradients, an explanation of where the CO2 came from would seem to be in order. None is given.
There are some serious drawbacks to the book. First, as noted in the disclaimer, Woodmorappe resorts to lots of name calling when he does not like an adversary's argument. Plimer is called Moore's "parrot" (p. 21), echo (p. 37). Moore is called "naive"; is accused of having "fantasies" and displaying "ignorance." Opponents "imagine" their arguments. All this name calling is a distraction from Woodmorappe's points.
Several arguments are not self-consistent. An example is the following:
"After raising some transparently absurd problems of snails and earthworms (animals not on the Ark) migrating to the Ark, Morton (1995, p. 69) then dusts off the old chestnut about the slow-moving sloth needing practically forever to reach the Ark from South America." (p. 60)
Thus one is left assuming that earthworms are not on the ark. But earlier in the book, Woodmorappe had appealed to earthworms as the agent for decomposing and handling solid waste (p. 34-35). And later, he says that snails were on the ark for food (p. 101). Inconsistencies like this abound throughout the book.
Another example of inconsistencies is on page 202 where in his discussion of the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) he says that the DRB1 locus has 106 known alleles. Five pages later, he says it is 44.
Many of the arguments depend upon mathematical calculations which are not displayed, either in footnotes or appendices. This leaves the mathematically oriented reader wondering if the mathematics was correct. He claims that calculations show ark animals produced between 6 and 12 tons of airborne moisture. None of the assumptions are displayed to allow the reader to evaluate such a claim. Calculations of the heat production by animals in the ark are claimed to show that there is no problem with this issue, but the lack of calculations force the reader to depend upon the author for the validity of that statement.
Woodmorappe's tables are confusing, and abridged and because of this it is difficult to check out the mathematical accuracy of his arguments. For instance, in Table 1 he divides the animals on the ark into 8 weight divisions for each class: reptiles, birds and mammals. Thus one would think that there are 24 categories (3 X 8). Table 2 lists the same data for 25 orders, then abridges the remaining 61 land vertebrate orders (which means 61 categories). One can not figure out why this table is published. By the time the reader gets to table 4, which calculates the amount of food required to feed the animals for 371 days, Woodmorappe, giving only a reference, uses a totally unexplained equation (and we discover that there are 32 categories of animals. But these 32 categories are not explained and why there are now more than 24 categories, is also unexplained). Table 5, which calculates drinking water requirements, adds to the confusion by citing only 27 categories of animals which drink water. Either three categories don't eat food or five don't drink water.
Woodmorappe states (p. 27) that the urine could be drained overboard by gravity. He does not tell how this is possible from the lowest floor level which was below the water line. At one point he suggests that the animals could be trained to urinate and defecate upon command while someone holds a bucket behind the animal. Assuming that this can be accomplished for the largest quarter of the animals and that they need to be serviced three times per day, each person must service 125 animals per hour, 2 animals a minute. What a fun job that must have been.
Woodmorappe's treatment of the heat generated up by the animals is quite unworkable. He claims that reptiles give off no heat. This is not true. Their metabolism, while slower than mammals and birds does indeed give off heat. He uses units no physicist would approve of -- Kg heat-producing biomass per cubic meter. If he gives a definition of how much heat is generated by such a unit, I have been unable to find it. Thus, it is impossible to verify his assertion that the animals would not overheat the ark. He relies on wind entering the upper level to cool and ventilate the ark. His calculation is merely wind speed times the window area. But anyone who has ever performed a fluid flow calculation will know that you can not calculate the problem in this fashion. Hydrodynamic equations must be used and friction taken into account. His method for calculating air flow is far too simple.
Woodmorappe claims that the animals respire 6 to 12 tons of airborne water vapor each day. He implies that the inside of the ark would have low humidity (another inconsistency). He writes:
"Morton (1995, p. 71) has embellished Moore's argument with the totally baseless charge that the Ark must have been 'anything but dry' inside. Of course, in order to preserve grain, it is necessary not only to dry it, but also to prevent moisture from seeping back into it. Even if Morton (1995) were correct about the wetness of the interior of the Ark, it need not have doomed the feedstuffs and seeds to ruin, as the materials could have been stored in water-tight containers." (p. 92)
Woodmorappe forgets that during the first 40 days and nights, when he opens the windows to ventilate the ark, he opens it onto a world which is raining. Rain only occurs when the relative humidity is 100%. Thus, the fact that 6-12 tons of water were exhaled into the already saturated air inside of the ark, requires that 6 to 12 tons of water per day during the 40 days of rain would condense onto the walls of the ark. Since this condensation would drip to the bottom floor. Without the water being pumped overboard, this would represent a puddle of water on the floor of the ark 7 centimeters (3 inches) deep. The Ark, even under Woodmorappe's scenario, would have been "anything but dry".
Animals outside of the ark were supposed to have survived in pockets of floodwater suitable to their requirements (whatever those requirements were). He appeals to gradual acclimatization of amphibians and fish to the salinity of the flood waters. But exactly how a global flood was able to gradually occur is unexplained. He has plankton be buried and then re-excavated to survive the flood.
To my suggestion that the carnivores when released, would start eating the few survivors of the Flood, Woodmorappe suggests that large numbers of carcasses which had been buried early in the flood were re-excavated and used as food for the carnivores. This would allow the prey species enough time to replenish their numbers. He cites several studies of carnivores eating carrion, but none citing cases of carnivores eating year-old carcasses.
The most interesting post-ark problem Woodmorappe discusses concerns the genetic diversity. Unfortunately, Woodmorappe appeals to a period of rapid mutation after the flood to restore genetic diversity. Very little justification for this is given. Having rejected the accepted rates of molecular clocks Woodmorappe is forced to talk about "mutator genes" which cause mutations, radioactivity and the mutagenic effects of a stressful environment (citing a creationist source). He refers to a "burst of mutations among Noah's immediate post-Flood descendants". This appeal to phenomenon with no apparent cause occurs far too frequently.
To his credit, Woodmorappe is the first creationist I know of to actually discuss the pseudogene problem. His attempted solution depends upon an article by Carlton (1995) which says that a retrovirus can turn a normal gene into a pseudogene. However, he does not explain why processed pseudogenes are found at the same locations in chimp, gorilla, gibbon and man but not on other species.
Some of the stranger claims of the book:
On page 43 and p. 93 he claims that hydroponic vegetables can be grown in total darkness on the lowest level of the ark.
On page 44 he claims "I now consider non-biological sources of flameless illumination. There are many references to 'luminous gems' in ancient literature, along with an apocryphal account of luminous pearls being used on the Ark."
On page 188 he writes: "Furthermore, a single pair of founders most definitely can have the same genetic diversity as fifty founders, and without any miraculous or unusual procedures."

Hope this is of use

One thing; I think you are correct regarding whales and sea-water.

As far as I am aware, Cetaceans (sp?) don't have the problem with the change of osmotic pressure between sea-water and fresh-water rendering their gills inoperable, as they don't have 'em. Gills I mean. There might be some long-term problems, as obviously they ingest water in other ways, but it certainly wouldn't be as quick as dropping a goldfish in salty water.

People make mistakes on both sides of the debate; it's seeing through these and sifting out bad arguements from good ones that helpd us find our way.

Regardless of errors regarding Whales made by the quoted author, the points Refiner was making regarding structure and speciation is very reasonable, and unless you ascribe to the 'maqgic wand' school ("God made it so"), are very hard to explain.

5

Yes, the Taleban are Gay (!!)

by metatron in

jw
friends

in the los angeles times, april, 3, 2002 edition, there is an.

article "kandahar's lightly veiled homosexual habits".. apparently, the intense restrictions on women (you don't even see.

their faces or ankles) causes countless afghan men to turn to.

Abaddon

If you look at the history of the area, this practise is centuries old. There's several instances where cultures with strict social taboos surrounding sex have virtually institutionalised homosexuality, such as the Pushtuns.

One Papuan or Australian aboriginal tribe belived young men had to be fed the sperm of the elders of the tribe so they could father children when they were adults.

14

Another reason NOT to live behind the Baptists...

by Princess in

jw
friends

i hate the baptist church behind our house.

they are loud and obnoxious in the summer.

their youth group meets on tuesday evenings and more than once my husband has had to go over and ask them to be quiet.

Abaddon

Saint Satan; "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. You might like it."

Surely you mean "if you can't join them, beat 'em. You might like it."?

Hell, THEY might like it...

(humour, nothing to do with Baptists being kinky or otherwise)

25

Should US/UK hit Iraq???

by ISP in

jw
friends

wondered what the consensus was.

here in the uk, blair seems set to support bush in hitting iraq but there is not wholesale support in the uk.

there is some dissent in other countries.

Abaddon

It is quite arguable that Sadam should have been removed during the Gulf War. He is not a nice man. But there was not the political will to do anything other than impose sanctions which have probably effected the people of Iraq more than the rulers, which is not exactly fair in a non-democratic society who can't really choose their rulers.

But he wasn't. Now, if the "War Against Terrorism" continues on a purely reflex basis, the risk is that we will have achieved Bin Laden's objectives, of creating a West vs. Islam war.

The Islamic countries look at Israel, and see exactly how fair the West is. If a comparatively quiet Iraq gets attacked for alleged (and quite possible) scheming, whilst Israel and the Palestinians are at war, then the radicals will have all the proof they need to convince many Muslims who are quite moderate in their outlook.

Yeah, roll into Iraq under a UN banner and sort out democratic elections, but sort out the problem in Palestine first.

The fact that it is not really an issue of religion at all (the West would and have made deals with anyone they thought gave them some strategic advantage) is now irrelevant. Such political bias has been shown towards Israel when compared to surrounding Arab lands that to people in those lands, it is all to easy for them to see it as religiously motivated bias.

49

Any ExJW kids out there?

by Bubbles in

jw
friends

i am 7 years old and would like to make some friends with any ex jw kids out there.. i like music, dancing, movies (just saw clockstoppers, it was awesome), books.

we are about to move and i made a house out of the boxes!

my mom says i should be an engineer when i grow up because i can make lots of neat things with the boxes!.

Abaddon

Dear Bubbles,

I dearly wish that I could introduce you to my daughters, but they are not xJW's... at least not yet. It would cause lots of problems if I did - I'm sure you and they would get along just fine, but their mum would probably have the raving hebeygeebies if she found out. I don't know what the raving hebeygeebies are, but I had a teacher in school when I was your age who always threatened to have them if we didn't behave, and have always thought they sounded pretty bad.

They are growing up with their mum, my ex-wife. I see them regulary - I'm actually going to see them this weekend (about a thousand mile round journey), but their mum is still taking them to meetings whenever she goes.

Obviously, they are my kids, so I think they are the smartest in the world, even though you sound very clever. My youngest daugheter is a couple of years older than you, her sister is twelve. When the youngest one was your age she said something I thought was great.

Her sister was asking me why I didn't believe any more. I try not to say things that will cause arguements with my ex-wife when they get repeated to her, so I wasn't really giving a proper reply, so the younger one said "I know why Daddy doesn't believe any longer, he doesn't believe because he thinks it is silly".

She must have come up with that herself, as I'd never said anything like that to her.

My oldest daughter loves reading. You could strap her in a roller coaster at night with a box of matches and she'd read as long as she still had matches to see by.

Simon's right about the Narnia books. They are brilliant... I think 'Prince Caspian' and the 'Voyage of the Dawn Treader' are my favourates; the last one is 'The Final Battle' or something like that; it's a bit silly really. There's a new Harry Potter book due this year, isn't there?.

I hope as they grow up they will get the chance to decide if they want to be xJW's too. Maybe one day you'll have a couple of English pen pals!

All the best

Abaddon (my real name is Gyles... like the guy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (if you watch that yet!)).

18

Are we religiously intolerant?

by Sirona in

we are always pointing out the flaws of the jw religion.

does this make us intolerant of the religious beliefs of others?

where do you draw the line?.

Abaddon

Obviously individuals are individuals and religions are another.

One should not automatically hold one responsible for the actions of the other.

For example, what's the POINT being mad with an individual cultist? They're in a CULT. They are not responsible for their actions. High Control Group. You know. You've been there.

If someone is being an asshole as an individual ANYWAY, and would still be an asshole (or whatever) if they were worshipers of the great Oz, then it's quite reasonable to get pissed off with the individual.

But, if they are just being a good little cultist reacting to the buttons we push, just because it's not that particular individual's fault, doesn't mean we can take the cultist shit they dish out.

We shouldn't react at times. And sometimes we do, even when we should just, er, turn the other cheek or something.

And we are over sensitive to religious intolerance. We are intolerant of it. Which is horrible, doing what we hate.

51

'Experiences' in Gay Nightclubs, Part One!

by SYN in

subject shoulda tipped you people off!.

couple of weeks back, i was busy winding up my evening at a gay nightclub near my home in johannesburg, when across the room i notice this drop-dead-gorgeous woman sitting there with her obviously gay friend.

so i stare at her a bit, get some eye-contact going, and i reckoned i was making some decent progress!

Abaddon

Gay clubs can be great fun...

... they can also be confusing if you are straight...

You see a cutie... she's dancing with a guy... is he gay? Is she gay? If he's gay is she straight? Is she just wearing your standard combats, boots, vest, wallet on chain, crop hair look 'cause she like it, or to say something.

Sod it, I'll have another drink...

I did have one funnt experience at one club - just an ordinary club.

I met this girl I knew vaugely called Claire, who was quite cute, and got chatting. She introduced me to this delectable girl called Mel. On and off through the night I was chatting away with them, always seperately, getting on like a house on fire, and wondering "Oh, shit, what do I do?"

This was solved rather neatly by Mel near the end of the... she said "I need a snog, I'm going to the loo's". I, surprised, said "Snog who?". "My girlfriend, Claire", she replied.

Wonderful. Spent the entire night chatting up the two halfs of a gay couple - and it wasn't just a fob off, as although they both went both ways, at the time they were together.

Since then I have got slightly less clueless, thank god.