Posts by TonusOH

117

14 kids dead and one teacher at Texas school shooting.

by jojorabbit in

another shooting, this time 14 kids dead more wounded and a teacher dead.

i am all for the second amendment and this does not change my mind.

but i do hate this kind of thing, makes my stomach turn.

TonusOH

Comparisons between gun deaths and traffic accidents is ridiculous. Transport is an essential human need.

My point is that we make this calculus every day, and accept risk where we find it useful, even though the cost is staggering. I drive a car. I have never owned a gun, and probably never will. I have reduced the risk that I will be shot by some percentage, but I still take my health/life in my hands almost every day by getting behind the wheel of a car. I also have a set of knives, and any number of other conveniences that introduce a level of risk that I accept, because they make my life easier or better or more pleasant.

We cannot pretend that we don't take risks --and accept a very high price-- for the sake of convenience and for a better life for those who don't pay that price. We draw the line at guns (and rightfully so, in my mind) because they have moved in the opposite direction, where they are no longer the essential need that cars are today. But we do so only because we can give them up without sacrificing convenience. We seek to do so for practical and pragmatic --but not moral-- reasons.

32

Date of Adam's "Creation?

by Slidin Fast in

how do jws resolve these conflicting facts.. 1. no matter how you spin it, bible chronology calculates to circa 4000 bc for adam's creation.

i followed the trail many years ago and that's what it adds up to.. 2. the most cursory investigation of any branch of relevant science puts man's habitation on the earth as hugely earlier than that.

it's now so well-proved that anyone disputing it is guilty of wilful ignorance.

TonusOH

Counting back to Adam doesn't seem all that straightforward, or there would be a definitive scale, or at least an agreed-upon range. Perhaps the latter exists? After all, we are relying on the Bible for all of the dates and ages, unless there are other sources that are being consulted.

I mean, if God wanted mankind to know the date of the creation of the first man, He could have made that much clearer in Genesis. That would've had the additional benefit of giving the whole world a basis for a starting calendar year. January 1, 1 would be the year humanity came into existence. I think it's a pretty good starting point.

(I know, I know... he wouldn't have named it January. Maybe he could have improved on the names of months, too!)

117

14 kids dead and one teacher at Texas school shooting.

by jojorabbit in

another shooting, this time 14 kids dead more wounded and a teacher dead.

i am all for the second amendment and this does not change my mind.

but i do hate this kind of thing, makes my stomach turn.

TonusOH

We do have quite a few federal and state laws that make it more difficult to purchase guns and which limit the types of guns you can own, as well as limiting the size of magazines for automatic weapons. And those actually work quite well, as long as we are talking about purchasing weapons legally.

Illegal gun sales are the reason that many of our cities suffer from disproportionately high numbers of shootings, in spite of having the strictest gun control laws. We have had as much success stemming the tide of illegal guns into the country as we have had in stopping drugs from being brought across our borders in massive amounts. A big nation with wide borders and lax border security (due, in part, to peaceful relations with our neighbors for so long) is going to have a difficult time keeping contraband from streaming in.

I do want to point out, again, that many parts of the country are quite safe and have very low crime rates, regardless of the levels of gun ownership. The issues that lead to shootings of any kind have less to do with the availability of guns and more to do with socioeconomic conditions, which are kept in a volatile state because it's politically expedient to do so.

117

14 kids dead and one teacher at Texas school shooting.

by jojorabbit in

another shooting, this time 14 kids dead more wounded and a teacher dead.

i am all for the second amendment and this does not change my mind.

but i do hate this kind of thing, makes my stomach turn.

TonusOH

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was much more concerned about gun violence when I lived in a progressive city with very strict laws and very low legal gun ownership. Today, I live in a city where guns are common and relatively easy to buy, and it's not difficult to get a concealed-carry permit, which means you can hide the gun you have on you. I am not concerned about gun crime. To be honest, I'm not concerned about any other type of crime- it's the kind of place where people don't lock up their homes and even leave their cars unlocked when they go shopping.

How much does gun control have to do with it? Not much, is my guess. Where I live now has a much lower population density than where I used to live. Household incomes are higher. Those two factors are likely to have the largest impact, much greater than how many people are armed. The US has badly mismanaged its large cities for decades, and created a vicious cycle where the problems are used as a pretext to demand more money and more control. Since the corruption and mismanagement isn't addressed, things just get worse, and the reaction is to demand more money and more control.

The gun control debate is a political one, being used in a tug-of-war where people are left to their own devices in service of an agenda. We won't get rid of guns, and we refuse to take any steps to make people safer, by tackling the real issues and trying steps that can work on a smaller scale.

540

Simple Question Re 1914

by Slidin Fast in

wt claims that satan was thrown out of heaven in october 1914 precipitating ww!

and the end times.

a small problem with that is ww1 started on july 28th 1914 whilst satan was still in heaven picking his nose.. how did we not see this and waste years of precious life?

TonusOH

Renfrew then notes that an assassination “inspired a world which had hardly heard of the murdered prince to go to war over his death without knowing why.”

Perhaps he should have asked an historian about the issues in Europe and Russia at that point in time? I guess it wasn't as easy to check this stuff in 1979, but today you can Google "causes of WW1" and there is no shortage of explanations for what led to the conflict. I doubt you'll find many references to "the birth of god's kingdom in the heavens."

32

Can you list the positive points of being a JW as against the negative points of being a JW in your experience ?

by smiddy3 in

i was a twenty y/old when i converted to the jw religion and was a problem drinker and i was a chain smoker .when i was baptized at a circuit assembly a year later , my conversion and change in lifestyle was given as an example of the effectiveness of incidental witnessing to the audience.. so i can point to the 2 positives becoming a jw .. 1.i gave up smoking.

2.i gave up drinking for a while ,but because i still had association with my wife`s and my family who were not jw`s ,i learnt to control my social drinking when i started again.. and i have been a responsible drinker ever since ,even though i left the religion 29 years ago.. the negative points of being a jw in my 32 years of being one ?

are far too great to list here .. love to hear your thoughts..

TonusOH

I am grateful for the forces that shaped me, because I'm pretty happy with how my life has turned out. I don't feel bitter about my time as a JW, or for being raised as one, because in the end I got out and I'm in a good place.

My comment was just to show that the things I got from my time in the JWs are not unique. I have to recognize that I might have been better off without the self-imposed isolation from society that I was expected to practice (and did, fairly effectively). While I don't have to dwell on who I might have been, I think it can be useful to recognize the potential damage done, even if it's just to be thankful for what I avoided becoming.

32

Can you list the positive points of being a JW as against the negative points of being a JW in your experience ?

by smiddy3 in

i was a twenty y/old when i converted to the jw religion and was a problem drinker and i was a chain smoker .when i was baptized at a circuit assembly a year later , my conversion and change in lifestyle was given as an example of the effectiveness of incidental witnessing to the audience.. so i can point to the 2 positives becoming a jw .. 1.i gave up smoking.

2.i gave up drinking for a while ,but because i still had association with my wife`s and my family who were not jw`s ,i learnt to control my social drinking when i started again.. and i have been a responsible drinker ever since ,even though i left the religion 29 years ago.. the negative points of being a jw in my 32 years of being one ?

are far too great to list here .. love to hear your thoughts..

TonusOH

I think that the JWs feel that any participation in the political process implies that they trust it to solve humanity's problems, which would imply that they lack faith in God. I think that view is nonsense. But it lets them erect an additional wall between themselves and "the world." Cults thrive when they can find ways to keep outsiders at bay, and this is an effective way to do that.

117

14 kids dead and one teacher at Texas school shooting.

by jojorabbit in

another shooting, this time 14 kids dead more wounded and a teacher dead.

i am all for the second amendment and this does not change my mind.

but i do hate this kind of thing, makes my stomach turn.

TonusOH

I haven't lived or spent much time outside of the US. I lived for many years in a densely-populated east-coast city with very strict gun control laws and very little legal ownership, and now I live in a relatively sparsely-populated city in the midwest which allows gun ownership and concealed carry. I feel far safer in the latter. And the only time I was ever threatened with a gun was in the former.

Don't get me wrong, I'd be perfectly fine if we did not have guns. I have never fired one (aside from a BB pistol) and would not own any, as I would worry about accidental discharges harming or killing someone. But I am also aware that it won't happen. I believe that the bigger issue here is that we do not punish illegal ownership as harshly as we should, while also not realizing how legal ownership can -counterintuitive as it may seem- make a community safer.

117

14 kids dead and one teacher at Texas school shooting.

by jojorabbit in

another shooting, this time 14 kids dead more wounded and a teacher dead.

i am all for the second amendment and this does not change my mind.

but i do hate this kind of thing, makes my stomach turn.

TonusOH

We aren't going to get rid of guns. The 2nd Amendment isn't going anywhere and gun ownership is very high here. We have regulated legal firearms every way we can. I doubt that we will ever really even attempt to get rid of gun ownership in the US. We should increase the penalties for illegal gun ownership dramatically as one step.

Then we can ask ourselves why so many shootings occur in schools. I think a major reason is that there are no armed guards or police allowed at the schools. Go to a school with a loaded gun, and you're the only armed person there. You are able to shoot at teachers and children until either an unarmed person risks their life to stop you, or someone with a gun arrives to stop you. The latter happened in this case, after 21 people were shot, 19 fatally.

As for societal acceptance of the dangers of gun ownership- many of us drive cars, even though we know that hundreds of thousands of people die every year in auto accidents, with millions more injured, some seriously. We drive anyway. We also keep working to make cars safer and drivers smarter and more responsible. We could eliminate auto deaths by getting rid of cars, but we have come to accept a death toll far higher than that from guns because we cannot see our way to doing that.

There are no perfect solutions. If you can get rid of guns, get rid of them and enjoy a safer society. If you can't, keep working to make society safer in other ways. Trying to score political points every time someone massacres a bunch of innocent people doesn't make anyone safer.

31

How is the 'Cost of Living Crisis' affecting you?

by nicolaou in

here in the uk we've recently had the price cap on household energy bills raised by around £800 and there'll be another similar raise this autumn.. food prices are up, petrol is around £1.82 per litre - that's $10.37 per gallon for our american friends - and inflation is currently running at 9%.

business are being hit as ordinary folk prioritise their spending.

young folks are effectively priced out of the housing market and wage rises are not keeping pace.. mrs nic' and i are fortunate in that we're both in secure employment and with the kids moved out and mortgage paid off our outgoings are thankfully low.

TonusOH

The result is a shortage. If the price is held low enough, it might force producers to operate at a loss, which basically means they will stop producing.

Exactly. Many (most?) shortages are caused by a shortage of materials. In other words, you just can't point at manufacturers and demand that they produce more. And if you force them to keep prices artificially low, they may not be able to afford the materials they need when those become available. That is how a situation of scarcity can last longer than it should-- when people with political intentions step in and try to solve problems that they do not understand, they usually make things worse.

The US has the capability to produce more oil than we need; possibly more than any other nation on the planet. We are deliberately limiting ourselves because some politicians and activists think that, if you put a nation under enough adverse pressure, it will invent a magical form of energy that solves all of our energy and climate issues. If you cannot distinguish between real life and a comic book, you probably should not be running a nation.