I went to a couple of the Mormon Zoom meetings in the pandemic but I couldn’t stick it. The same with the Iglesias Ni Cristo. I kind of wish I had stuck it out because I would be interested to know how they dealt with the lockdowns and so on.
slimboyfat
JoinedPosts by slimboyfat
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95
slimboyfat joins the Mormons!
by slimboyfat ini know that some people on the board have experience of being mormons, so i would be interested in your feedback.
at church this afternoon it was an uncanny experience.
in the past i've read a lot about mormons, so i thought i was prepared in general for what it would be like.
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Dropoff joins the Mormons for a day!
by dropoffyourkeylee inpretended to be a mormon for a day so as to visit their holy site hill cumorah.
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photos of some signage and monument of angel moroni giving a revelation to joseph smith:.
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slimboyfat
Dropoffyourkeylee you’re not doing it right!
https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/5088760412766208/slimboyfat-joins-mormons
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slimboyfat
What’s it used for now? Brickwork looks newer than the age of the building. I’m no architect for sure.
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Is WT Teachig on Hell Biblical?
by Sea Breeze ini guess you could say jesus was the first christian, since he was the christ.
and as the first christian, jesus spoke more about hell that any other biblical figure.
but, he is also the figure that said that he didn't come to condemn the world, but to save it.
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slimboyfat
Charles Taze Russell was known as the man who turned a hose on hell. Watch Tower has been putting the smack down on hellfire since the 1870s, before it was even fashionable.
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It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars
by Newly Enlightened inoriginal reddit post (removed).
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slimboyfat
His channel seems to be on a downward spiral barely getting 2K views for some of his videos now.
One of the latest snorefests is titled “The Israelites Didn’t Worship As Most Assume”. This guy isn’t winning any awards for his snappy headlines that’s for sure. Even if the interviewee isn’t boring you have to wade through piles of LE to get to any non-boring parts - again an interview where you wonder whether the interviewee knows LE’s backstory or not.
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What would you change?
by ExBethelitenowPIMA ini’m agnostic so maybe the universe started by chance or by design.. if it was by design (hypothetically) and the bible is the designers word, and jws seem to be the closest to it, then what would be the largest things you would change?.
here are a few ideas.
-do away with the governing body thinking they are gods only channel.
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slimboyfat
I agree with the suggested changes personally, if I was in charge, in terms of stopping shunning, making health and education choices freely and so on. But on the other hand, if God exists, and if JWs are the closest to the truth then it seems to be a necessary part of that setup that Jehovah is in charge and it’s not for me or others to make changes we would like to see. The Bible is full of examples of people who thought they could do it their own way, such as Korah, Dathan and Abiram, and Ananias and Sapphira picking and choosing what they would obey and it didn’t turn out well for them.
On a more mundane level, just in terms of management, not doctrine, if I was in charge a few things I would definitely do: reinstitute the congregation book studies in people’s homes, reintroduce Yearbooks, reintroduce book releases at the conventions, encourage people to use physical Bibles rather than tablets, reintroduce food at the conventions, organise large international assemblies again, reintroduce the “written review”, focus back on door to door ministry rather than carts, encourage more informal gatherings in congregations, reintroduce full length Watchtower and Awake! magazines with topical, properly researched articles, focus more on deep study at the meetings, allow longer comments at the meetings, allow more time for comments at the meetings, slow down the pace of the meetings so not every speaking is rushing to finish his part, get elders to do proper shepherding visits regularly, restore local control of finances to congregations, stop all the consolidation and build more Kingdom Halls closer to people, allow more smaller congregations in smaller areas. That’s all I can think off the top of my head. If the GB want more ideas they know where to reach me.
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83
Do You Think Trump Is Done?
by minimus incertain forces appear to be trying to make sure donald trump never runs for president again.
some republicans are clearly abandoning trump and of course the democratic press has been saying trump is done!
is trump’s goose cooked?
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slimboyfat
There are plenty of circumstances where someone can be guilty of a crime in fact, even if their intent is not proven. That doesn't make them innocent, it simply means any subsequent punishment for their guilt is reduced, to take account of the lack of (proof of) intent.
Sure there are, but apparently this particular crime requires intent to subvert the Democratic process. Have you watched the video by Dershowitz? If Trump believed the election was corrupt then his actions were intended to uphold the process.
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83
Do You Think Trump Is Done?
by minimus incertain forces appear to be trying to make sure donald trump never runs for president again.
some republicans are clearly abandoning trump and of course the democratic press has been saying trump is done!
is trump’s goose cooked?
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slimboyfat
I follow Dershowitz’s logic, if Trump sincerely believed the election was stolen then his attempt to overturn the result was not a crime. Or even if there’s a reasonable doubt that he sincerely believed it, then it’s not a crime,
I think he probably did believe it, lots of people did. It’s a very hard thing to prove otherwise. Are the prosecution mind readers?
Also the statements from Biden that the Attorney General should prosecute are pretty damning that he interfered in the process, another fatal weakness for the prosecution.
Convicting a former president in these circumstances seems like a dangerous mistake, but so many dangerous mistakes are being made these days that it is probably what will happen.
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Do You Think Trump Is Done?
by minimus incertain forces appear to be trying to make sure donald trump never runs for president again.
some republicans are clearly abandoning trump and of course the democratic press has been saying trump is done!
is trump’s goose cooked?
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slimboyfat
Trump is small scale corruption compared with the mess that is policy toward Ukraine, profiteering arms manufacturers, politicians who promote a war agenda in return for bribes, sadism and abuse among wealthily elites and so on. If only there was a way of elevating honourable, intelligent and competent people to the levers of power then almost everyone on the planet would be better off. (Not the 0.1% who benefit from our corrupt system, but everyone else) As it is we have a system that functions almost the complete opposite. Trump is a clown but he’s far from the most malevolent person or malign agent to have attained high office, or to wield power without actually being in office.
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Is AI going to change the world?
by Reasonfirst inhad lunch with a friend, whose a lecturer in the accounting dept.
of one of australia's best universities.
he told me he expects to lose his job at some point in the next 5 years, as the accounting dept, will disappear, as all accounting will be done by ai programs, so why teach it.. if his fears are correct, that means that any profession that involves the mind, may one day face the same future.
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slimboyfat
Thanks TD, it certainly looked like an improvement, but not knowing anything about “bulge” I didn’t know. These models are only going to get better, plus there seems to be a knack to using them. For example, quirky as it may seem, many report that asking the AI to identify mistakes in their own answers will significantly improve the resulting output.
Thinking further about your example about driverless cars being able to handle the road but being flummoxed by the hand gestures of other drivers, a few things occur to me. First of all, if this is presented as an example of a domain that is ultimately indecipherable to AI, then I think that is very unlikely. A few years ago there was real debate about whether AI would ever be able to distinguish a cat from a dog. Some said the task was simply too complicated and AI would not manage it for many decades to come, if ever. Yet that barrier was overcome very swiftly, and now AI cannot only distinguish cats from dogs, it can identify many thousands of species that no single human can identify. It can distinguish human individuals from their faces or parts of their faces, and much, much more, far beyond the capability of humans. In a few short years we’ve gone from AI that can’t tell a cat from a dog to AI that is much better at identifying at categorising objects in general from visual input than any human.
Therefore, the fact that driverless cars can’t seem to understand human hand gestures is probably simply indicative of the fact that the models have not yet been pointed in that direction. If AI is set the task of analysing a large dataset of hand gestures then it will very rapidly become better than humans at identifying and responding effectively to hand gestures. Plus other physical/visual cues that humans are aware of, such as a car slowing down, speeding, peeking out, hesitating, and everything else, plus sounds and smells and so on. None of these inputs are inherently beyond the capability of AI to categorise and respond to effectively. It’s just a matter of turning the attention of AI in that direction in the first place.
Aha, you might say, there you have it! AI doesn’t even know what to look for unless a human first tells it what to do! That’s true to some extent, but the range of abilities and level of abstraction becomes ever wider, so that humans can give more and more general instructions, and the details can be worked out by AI.
In other words, each time the risk is narrowly defined and effectively completed, humans can step outside the defined area of analysis and ask the AI to move up to the next level of abstraction. In other words you begin by instructing AI to deal with specific situations, but the better it becomes the more general the instructions can be. Starting from telling AI in driverless cars not to collide with other objects, using the rules of the road, then taking into consideration the actions and visual cues of other drivers, all the way up to the point where the AI can be asked to identify all the relevant factors impacting safety in moving vehicles and to optimise for all the relevant factors it identifies.
It can then be asked to analyse its own results recursively in order to identify any safety factors that had been neglected. It can then be instructed to address those factors it identifies in an endless loop, until what you arrive at is a system that copes with all relevant aspects of safely and handles them better than human drivers. This process will probably be very quick because all the gains in knowledge by AI systems can be shared across the network and once learned are never forgotten.