this is a real conversation i had with a jw friend last night.
several times previously he claimed to be a certified genius, having supposedly passed the mensa test.... .
me: so what do you think about jws condoning the idea that dinosaurs could have lived with humans?.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%E2%80%93Scott_South_Pole_Station
"The new station included a modular design, to accommodate an increasing station population, and an adjustable elevation,
in order to prevent the station from being buried in snow. In a
location where about 20 centimetres (8 in) of snow accumulates every
year without ever thawing,[7][8] the building's rounded corners and edges help reduce snow drifts."
the great crowd, the other sheep will live forever on planet earth.. years will move from centuries, millennia, and millions of years to billions of years.
after 4 billion years, the sky will fill as their milky way galaxy and its neighbouring andomeda galaxy collide, with amazing changes in gravitational forces.
what an amazing sight!.
That reminds me of Joshua where God made the sun stand still in the sky. If I am capable of reading Bible correctly, the sun stood still for an entire day. If you do a deep zoom out from bible land, you see that the spinning sphere of the massive earth has a substantial rotational energy. To replicate Joshua's experience, you could:
1. Cause only the crust to stand still with respect to the sun. The consequences would be instantaneous earthquakes in one place after another and tearing of the crust as the planet continued to rotate beneath the crust.
2. Cause the crust and some upper portion of the magma to stand still. The consequences would be.... that would require a lot of energy, at the least.
3. Cause the entire earth, from crust down to the core, to stand still. The consequences would be that this requires 2.138×1029 J to be dissipated instantly, and Joshua would lose his hydrodynamic core dynamo which sets up the earth's protective magnetic field. So 24 hours of Israelites fighting under incoming Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR) and other high energy particles would increase their chance of cancer.
the great crowd, the other sheep will live forever on planet earth.. years will move from centuries, millennia, and millions of years to billions of years.
after 4 billion years, the sky will fill as their milky way galaxy and its neighbouring andomeda galaxy collide, with amazing changes in gravitational forces.
what an amazing sight!.
Village Idiot, nice to see some authoritative astronomical knowledge. Another consequence of grand spiral galaxy mergers will be enhanced star formation from shocked gas clouds, and that means enhanced supernovae.
I think we learned of the HR diagram and Main Sequence in 10th grade science class. I and my JW friend at the time would rationalize that Jehovah could easily remove helium ash from the core of the sun in timely fashion such that it would simply keep p-p burning its hydrogen inventory without consequences.
We failed to imagine that the sun would decrease in total mass, and therefore in total luminosity, and therefore move down the Main Sequence, so that the orbital radius for liquid water would decrease. I do know for a fact that TWS once mentioned that since the earth had such a fine-tuned radiative energy balance, or, deviate by 1% and the planet freezes or boils, then this must be evidence of Divine Creation. (Creation book?) Total cart before horse.
.
.
since so many athiests in this thread, and since i'm going to college, i was curious if what i would learn in biology would change my thoughts and show that life clearly and easily spontaneously happened.
just looking up the origins of dna or rna there is nothing conclusive.
for example, scientists today are able to manipulate life.
actually, just one musing.. there are a number of scriptures that wtbts uses to support their doctrine of everlasting life on paradise earth.
the vast majority come from the hebrew scriptures.
using just one verse, i believe i can disprove this doctrine quite soundly.. the verse is john 6:68.. simon peter answered him: lord, whom shall we go away to?
i just need to vent.
i want to scream from the rooftops right now.
life is hard enough when you battle blood cancer but is an unnecessary evil put upon good people by this evil cult.
Class action lawsuit.
so many witnesses lost the opportunity to pursue higher education in their youths.
perhaps it took decades for many here to leave and now feel it is too late.
degree you will also earn multiple certifications from other agencies:.
NewYork44M "I finished my doctorate at 50 and am now teaching as a tenured track professor. It is NEVER too late."
An excellent data point. How long did the doctorate take? Can you trace an influence between non-academic life experience and getting tenure so quickly?
people stay jehovah's witnesses for several reasons.
the foremost is because they are taught that they could cheat death and not have to die or even better yet not have to get old.
the second is they can see their dead relatives again , who have a direct pass to paradise, and that we must obey to get there to see them in the resurrection.
What might be useful to questioning cult members is some web server showing every last image of this type that can be collated and curated by knowledgeable persons, placing it in its year of release, its original publication, perhaps later publications. There's got to be 40 or so years now of this kind of image. Plenty of quality color images since the 4 color presses. You could get a lot of good statistical data from such an ensemble.
Just as a prediction: Do the houses / places of residence in the image reveal the latent deferred materialism of the cult member consumer, with arguable resolution in terms of average residential square footage of median incomes of that year, architectural vogue. Quantifiable things. How does the depiction of diversity change over time? Can you identify intrusions of realism as a function of time?
would it be fair to say many of the posts on jwn are in essence about this?.
if we could better understand what worked for us, would we be better able to help others?.
where do basic human needs ("met" by the cult) end, and where does addiction start?.
Well, more power to you on this line of inquiry.
I never felt addiction to the social and financial and creature comforts, being a child or young adult, that came with remaining in good stead with family and in-cult friends. that was not addiction. That was just meeting a mammalian need within the constraints of the compulsive prison.
So this argument goes as, you're addicted to Oxygen, how did you get over it. You're addicted to liquid water and iron and minerals and nutrients and how did you break the habit. You're addicted to Maslow's needs of maintaining body temperature and skin safety through use of clothing and shelter and how did you finally put a stop to this destructive disorder.
More power to you in this line of inquiry. You MAY uncover something insightful about cult science, cult engineering, cult formation, cult propagation in general.
