by Terry 63 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Carmel,
My grandfather hated starlings, cause he said that very thing! They destroy the other birds' eggs, and take their nests!
I always felt that his hatred was illogical and ill-founded ,,, hello! there are lots of predators in nature ... and wow, there is nothing like a huge cloud of them flying across the sky at migration times ... they quite blot out the sun.
tal
('specially loves birds and all flying things)
(hmm, wondering what the Midwich Cuckoo will have to say about this!!! )
I give his last post five stars for both ambition and verbosity.
To answer your question specifically: Men need not have identical understandings to be men. No. To be men they must mightily strive to reach for the heavens with a sharpness of eye and quickness of thought to appraise the means by which miracles can be wrought by dint of sheer keeness of observation, calculations and cunning.
I suppose the opening sentence attempted to answer my question specifically...sort of. But now it is in the context of what makes men men.
Was it the Cuckoo or English Starling?
Were it the English it would be Starling silver!
T
I suppose the opening sentence attempted to answer my question specifically...sort of. But now it is in the context of what makes men men.
It was late and I was in touch with my feminine side, I guess
T
No matter what road we take they all end up in the same place, death. No matter what we do or think this is the reality of life. We may have many years or a few, but in the end we are gone, where we go is the biggest question that mankind has pondered as a whole and the cuckoo has filled man's brain with eggs since his beginning.
Ken P.
Terry:
That is why we need a hose to wash out our brains from all the garbage learned.
Now that's a good brainwashing.
it all sounds nice on paper but in the end all we have are our experiences and our beliefs about them and our uncanny ability to pretend otherwise.
I agree with your reasoning Terry. Most people who have been brought up as Jehovah’s Witnesses and left at the cost of their loved ones will have had to start again and rethink their life philosophy and every prejudice and idea that they have accepted.
But if it were possible to strip away all illusion and conditioning from our minds we would still come down to core person who is uniquely us. This is the person we were born as, which made us different to our brothers and sisters. The reason we responded differently to others as little children was because our emotional makeup and very nature was different, I believe we go through life accepting and rejecting eggs depending on whether they suit us or our needs at any given time. As our needs change we throw them out.
This process may be sub-conscious to start with but as we mature we become aware that it is actually deliberate. We deliberately accept cuckoo eggs into our brains because we prefer the reality we have created to a totally logical reality. It is the nature of most humans to be illogical. I causes both pleasure and pain but as human are illogical it is the reality they choose.
You see Terry - your logical approach to life is not just due to your life’s experience and the disappointment you have suffered due to allowing the wrong eggs into your brain. It is your fundamental nature, due to the type if brain you have, to approach things the way you do. Someone with your type of mind and intelligence will blame themselves and try to compensate for their mistakes by adopting an extreme stance when it comes to ideas or beliefs.
trevor
I am enjoying your defense of this premise, and playing the Devil's advocate.
Tal, are you by any chance a Libra?
But if it were possible to strip away all illusion and conditioning from our minds we would still come down to core person who is uniquely
This is IDENTITY and it is our nature to BE what we are; I couldn't agree more.
The question has always floated around behavioral science as to what leeway, what room we have within our core nature to modify ourselves.
I step back and look at the seemingly infinite varieties of life and think that variance is always possible.
Take myself as an example.
I was born into a family in which I had no fatherly influence. My grandparents reared me and my mother was around but not 100% "there", if you know what I mean.
Not one person in that family had even graduated from high school. Yet, they were interested in things on a deeper level. I caught early on that intelligence was admirable and that culture consisted of the things you surrounded your life with.
I was painfully shy and withdrawn with zero self-confidence. But, I admired outgoing people and tried to study how they did it. I loved school and never willingly missed a day of it. When I turned 13 or 14 I started reading the dictionary and learning new vocabulary words. I set my goal as 16 per day! (An outrageous amount, I'll grant you.) I paid my friends a quarter for any vocabulary word they could bring me that I didn't already know.
I wrote all the time. Mostly parody and poetry. I discovered I had a natural ability for portraiture and I became an artist. I chose friends who loved ideas. My closest friends challenged me and criticised my errors and set the bar high. We were competitive.
Had I not met a friend who was a religiously inclined person I doubt I'd have been religious. This friend, Johnny, kept challenging me. I knew nothing about the bible and I resented that he knew an incredible amount of background to history and scripture. It pricked my interest.
Being a JW involved hundreds of details. I was attracted to that. I also liked that they would train you to speak in front of a group of people. I learned to meet strangers and speak with them with authority. I learned to be comfortable in mixed companies of people. I learned to ignore my shyness in approaching the door of a stranger and speaking to them at their front door.
I mention all of this for a reason. Had I been from a different family who had the money to give me lessons, instructions, tutoring and encourage college education I'd likely have be SOMEBODY.
Instead, the course I took frittered away my natural abilities by defusing them into worthless activities of a religious nature that got me nowhere.
After I left the religion I concentrated on learning and playing music and creating a career (albeit a small one). I stayed in the art business until recently and now I sell books in the daytime and do my music at night. In between I write. (Often it is here I reassess my life).
WHAT IS MY NATURE has found ways of expressing itself. My opinion is that within that framework, that genetic template I had many wonderful avenues of expression that might have been more empowering and fulfilling (and enriching). But, I went down the path I did and that is that.
I am far more reflective of the nature of my choices now. I still pay the price for my weak ones.
We can become something other than what we have become. I'm pretty convinced of that. But, we have to crank up the power on our RATIONAL MIND to do it. We must avoid the snares of diseased IDEAS.
Terry
