Are we really so petty here that we'll down-vote someone for making a joke?
I swear some of you, though you may have left the religion, are still very much stuck in the stuffy, humourless mindset of the JWs. Perhaps you ought to just do us all a favour and rejoin.
thought you might like to know that during a visit to london yesterday, the jw's were conspicuous by their complete absence.
admittedly it was a tuesday in february, but myself and my ex jw friend thought we would see at least one or two trolleys in their usual haunts, but nothing.
we checked out the area around westminster station where we have talked to jws before, but there was no sign.
I live in London and I see them all the time. You just have to go to the wrong places.
I turned it down, the hours wouldn't have suited me.
i helped, unfortunately, many people to become baptized jws.
recently, over the last few years, i saw many of my students who were still “ in the truth “ lament that i was no longer associating or active in the faith.. i do feel bad that i did such a good job that most of them still are in the cult.. are your teachers still around or did they wise up and leave the lord’s organization?
?.
I was born and raised, both of my parents are still alive. I left the religion in my late teens, about 15 years ago. My parents are still inside
how much longer until more people believe the earth is flat then there are jws?
with these youtube channels using propaganda and the bible i believe over a million people now believe the earth is flat.
it maybe not much longer.
do you support socialism?
is it something that you would want in your country?.
I'm sure they're all very wealthy and great examples of why free market capitalism works. At least they would be if free market capitalism even existed, which it doesn't, its just as unstable a concept as hard socialism.
I'm all for a free market, with safeguards in place which allow all people to work and trade freely of course, in other words not so free as to allow monopolies. I want a mixed economy with a combination of capitalism (if only to avoid upsetting those who fetishise it) and social welfare in place to make sure that those who aren't as fortunate or as well-endowed with business acumen are well taken care of.
Universal healthcare for instance makes sense in so many ways, here in the UK I would be dead were it not for the NHS, literally. I've had medical issues that would render me poison to insurers, to whom money is more important than life. The fact that Americans spend more money per capita on healthcare than any country with nationalised healthcare discredits their system right out of the gate.
threads about this have been made before, but none have been made for a few years.
i was very much on the fence with this one, i never really cared.
but i became curious recently, having had a few interactions with street preachers.
Well now..
do you support socialism?
is it something that you would want in your country?.
Discussion:
Socialism bad.
Social safety nets not so bad.
Lazy people bad.
Not all people on welfare are lazy.
They are too!
threads about this have been made before, but none have been made for a few years.
i was very much on the fence with this one, i never really cared.
but i became curious recently, having had a few interactions with street preachers.
Did L. Ron Hubbard really exist? Probably doesn't matter........what's true is true, what is not is not.
Be it a scienrology pamphlet or the book of Acts, what matters is what's true in the document, not whether the characters within them existed or not.
If you could find out with certainty that a man called Ieshua/Jesus existed at that time, in that place, with those teachings..... would it matter at all as to what is true?
Well yes, but then we'll just end up in a 'does anything really matter' spiral, if we follow that to its conclusion.
Among the words attributed to Jesus — whether he said them or not — are some brilliant insights, some facile platitudes and some dangerous dogma.
And of course many of those brilliant insights weren't exactly original.
threads about this have been made before, but none have been made for a few years.
i was very much on the fence with this one, i never really cared.
but i became curious recently, having had a few interactions with street preachers.
I'm not questioning the historicity of anybody. I'm saying that all of your reasons to doubt the reality behind the Jesus of the gospels could equally be said about many other characters from history.
You said in your OP that your thoughts are 'Based on the limited research I've conducted over the past few days'. I agree it is an interesting topic but I think you should dig a lot deeper.
The best case for a historical Jesus is probably made by Bart Ehrman. The best and most recent case for a mythical Jesus is made by Richard Carrier.
No I know you weren't seriously questioning the historicity of anyone. You were suggesting that if we accept that Jesus never existed then perhaps we ought to accept that many others with similarly flimsy supporting evidence never existed. And I would agree actually, perhaps Alexander the Great never existed, I'm open to the possibility. But I don't care so much, because the question of his existence isn't quite the hot topic of Jesus's existence. Do you get me? I wasn't raised by Alexander's witnesses.
On the other hand however, I'm not sure that 'well if Jesus never existed then maybe no one did' (intentional exaggeration btw!) is such a good argument. It doesn't speak to the historicity of Jesus to concede that the historicity of many other historical figures is equally shaky, quite the opposite. It speaks to the limitations of historical scholarship in general.
I will dig deeper, there's no reason not to. I was simply checking in with where I'm currently at.
And lastly I have to say it doesn't give me much confidence in the idea of a mythical Jesus to hear that its best proponent is Richard Carrier. Mind you, I don't ultimately have a real horse in the race, as an atheist. Whether Jesus existed or not, he certainly wasn't the messiah.
