i think i need a time out.
i feel like whatever contributions i may make to this board are being outweighed by the emotional upheaval participating is causing me.
i've been taking things way too personally lately, letting posters i don't know and don't particularly care about, hurt my feelings badly.
Hey Odrade,
Just wanted to say I always look forward to your posts and appreciate your presence here. You were one of the first people to PM me when I joined the board, so I've always looked at your avatar with a special feeling of kinship. I hope your time away gets you where you need to be, and I hope we'll hear from you again soon.
Best wishes.
SNG
i saw that the aclu in pennsylvania was suing a school district for mandating that "intelligent design" be taught along side evolution?
what is intelligent design?
is it the new creationism?
Hello Swan,
ID really is just Creationism in a shiny new wrapper, as you say. It's not science because it doesn't propose any testable hypotheses. The ID camp just wants teachers to suggest that some sort of God-person had a hand (What kind of hand? They aren't willing to say or propose any experiments to find out.) in some sort of mechanism that somehow put together the universe we now see. How incredibly helpful. Also, they want to put stickers in books saying that evolution is "only a theory" (as contrasted with...?).
ID has nothing to teach! Can you imagine the tests?
Q. Describe some of the mechanism(s) by which the present diversity of life may have come to be.
A. An intelligent Creator made it happen.
Q. Briefly describe the principles of Natural Selection.
A. Darwinian rubbish. God made all the aminals.
SNG
well, it's been one year since i first came to this lovely board, and i have to say, it's been a lot of good times.
thanks to everyone for keeping the homefires lit.. it was also encouraging to see so many new ones.
i'm happy to report that for the 2004 jwd service year (ends dec 14), we had spectacular growth.
Well, it's been one year since I first came to this lovely board, and I have to say, it's been a lot of good times. Thanks to everyone for keeping the homefires lit.
It was also encouraging to see so many new ones. I'm happy to report that for the 2004 JWD service year (ends Dec 14), we had spectacular growth. My member number is 11210, and the most recent new member who I've seen post has a member number of 16089. Since member numbers are assigned sequentially, this means that in the past year 4879 new members have joined, for an average of 406 per month. That's more than one congregation every week! Percentage-wise, it represents a 46% increase over our previous peak members. May a general commitment to education and free information that is transforming the world continue to bless seekers of truth!
My cat sends his warm greetings.
SNG
http://abcnews.go.com/us/wirestory?id=315976
article i read today..... .
famous atheist now believes in god .
The guy is basically saying, "The universe is too complicated. There must be a God."
But that's a cop-out. Humans have been apt for a very long time to say, "I don't understand it. Therefore, God must have done it."
If there is lack of convincing evidence regarding the way the universe came to be, it is important to recognize that that fact, in itself, can become proof of nothing else. To illustrate how lack of information never can become positive proof, consider the following two sentences:
No one knows how much money Joe has. Therefore, Joe is poor.
Obviously, the conclusion is a non sequiter. The fact is that we have no information regarding Joe's financial status. The only conclusion we can draw from this is that we had need to get some better facts if we want to have anything to say on the subject.
When a person, "We don't know how something as complex [/beautiful/awesome/sexy/etc] as the universe could possibly have come to exist without an intelligent creator," that conclusion does not become proof of a creator at all. It only becomes proof of the ignorance of the speaker.
SNG
open minds, free minds, free speech, free discussion of the latest crap from the tower (like the "new light" on "this generation").
anyway, i plan on reading a lot of your posts and rejoicing with you that you've begun to see things as they are.. .
i found this really mind blowing essay called jehovah unmasked.
Hello Jebediah, and welcome to the board!
If you're looking for fascinating reading, when I first got out, I found the articles on www.beyondjw.com to be very interesting as well.
Looking forward to seeing you around!
SNG
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hmm.... http://www.freakypixel.com/service_year.
http://www.cpfsoftware.com
They also fixed their little Greenland mistake! Glad to help 'em out!
LOL. See, apostates aren't so bad after all. I could suggest better counter-apostate measures for them, too. I mean, for Pete's sake, if you're going to be paranoid and try to selectively refuse to deliver content, at least create an IP blacklist or something. That's what Jesus would do, after all.
SNG
(Imagining Jesus sitting in a Starbucks, kicking back with a laptop and a tall caramel machiato, listening to his iPod while coding revisions to the watchtower.org site, and counting his time. Looks like J-dawg is getting pioneer hours this month!)
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hmm.... http://www.freakypixel.com/service_year.
http://www.cpfsoftware.com
Holy crap! How did they know I was an apostate! It must have been the demons. Er, wait a minute...but that would mean...that the Witness site was demonized. Hmm. Or maybe the authors just wrote to the DemonAPI (cool people always pronounce this "dappy"). You know, they just check CurrentUser.HasActiveConnectionToEvilUnderworld and don't deliver the page in that case.
Funny thing is, I wonder how many times they had to visit our site and then go directly to their own site to test that their little apostate filter was working?
SNG
this is something that has been tossed around for some time, but something occurred to me: if ancient humans did have advanced technology, such as space travel, we would know about it.
the reason i say we would know about it is because they would most certainly have left objects in orbit around earth.
yes, the low-orbit objects would have eventually fallen back due to the drag of the upper atmosphere.
I agree with Six. Technology means tools. When we have successful tools, we use them to build more and better tools, and so on and so forth.
dh: It sounds like the sum of your evidence is in maps that seem to match the shapes of now-ice-covered continents. This is certainly interesting to me, but I want to know where the physical evidence of this advanced civilization is. You don't get to be an advanced civilization without leaving behind some serious artifacts. Do you expect to find extensive ruins under the ice in Antartica? (I have to admit, that would be pretty freakin' awesome.)
SNG
this is something that has been tossed around for some time, but something occurred to me: if ancient humans did have advanced technology, such as space travel, we would know about it.
the reason i say we would know about it is because they would most certainly have left objects in orbit around earth.
yes, the low-orbit objects would have eventually fallen back due to the drag of the upper atmosphere.
I would certainly think we would have some kind of concrete evidence if there were any ancient cultures that were very advanced. To become very technologically advanced requires a large infrastructure of learning institutions, written records detailing the technologies, strong communication mechanisms, etc. All of these things would leave a footprint.
For example, if humans were to go extinct right now, future anthropologists would have no trouble determining the extent of our technological advancement. Every household contains evidence of advanced communications technologies, transport technologies, household chore aids, medicines, written records and reference materials, construction techniques, and more. Just finding one house would yield incredible amounts of information about our technological state. Now imagine unearthing a city library!
As far as I know, the only "evidence" we have that ancient civilizations may have been advanced are stories which are maybe-kinda-sorta corroborated by other stories. That doesn't really cut it for me. Technology leaves traces.
SNG
from the official news site for jws (http://www.jw-media.org/newsroom/index.htm?content=/region/europe/france/english/releases/religious_freedom/fra_e041006.htm) .
notice the highlight, i wonder why this factoid was included??.
french high court confirms 60-percent confiscatory tax measure on religious donations.
Euph,
I agree - the numbers seemed a little low. Especially compared to the $1 billion reported recently by Brooklyn HQ, a number disproportionately higher that we would expect just scaling for publishers. There appear to be two possibilities to account for this:
SNG
