Thanks for the post
startingover
JoinedPosts by startingover
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11
Why they MUST treat DFd and DAd the way they do
by Mad Sweeney inseveral decades ago a researcher named solomon asch conducted an experiment on conformity to determine the conditions under which individuals will deny their own senses in order to conform with a group.
if you view the video clip, you will notice in the first two scenarios presented that those who conform tend to do so for one of two reasons: one, they doubt their own judgement in the face of unanimous opposition or two, they still believe they are right but conform in order to avoid conflict within the group.. the key to total shunning of dfd and dad individuals, as well as constant pressure to avoid "bad associations" is based not only in the conformity behaviors mentioned above but due to what asch discovered in the third scenario presented in the video, when the test subject has a single confederate who agrees with him.
the key to conformity within a group is unanimity.
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Proof: Jehovah's Witness beliefs are based on a FALSE PREMISE
by Terry indid you know there are no numbers in the bible at all?.
that's right.. oh, except the book of numbers (which is rather counter-intuitive) which contains no numbers itself.. what am i talking about?.
consider this startling fact:.
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startingover
Great topic Terry! Reminds me of the following which was written by Runningman. Even numbers did exist as we know them today, with the facts laid out below, how can any of it be taken seriously.
THE NUMBERS OF THE BOOK
Every now and then, I run into someone who believes that every word in the Bible is literally true. If the Bible says that men lived for 900 years, and that 5 linear miles of water fell on the earth, then it must have happened. There is really no way to prove that these events did not happen, since by definition, a “miracle” is something extra-ordinary.
However, sometimes the Bible writers slipped up. When they told a story, nothing but superlatives would do. More than anything else, the numbers that are tossed around in the bible show this to be true. Apparently, mathematics was not their strong point, because on numerous occasions, the bible writers made statements that simply could not have happened.
So, basically, this chapter is sort of an accountants-eye view of the Bible.
SOLOMON, AND THE ISRAELITE ABATTOIR
King Solomon was a very devout man. He also liked to do things in big ways. Take, for example, the sacrifice that he offered up during a festival:
“Then the King and all the people offered sacrifice before the LORD. King Solomon offered as a sacrifice twenty-two thousand oxen and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep.” - 2 Chronicles 7:4,5
Now, let’s pause for a moment and let these numbers sink in. According to verse 9, this festival lasted seven days. That means that one animal was killed every 4.3 seconds, day and night, for a week.
Let’s look at it another way. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, an adult sheep would weigh between 80 and 400 pounds. Let’s take an average size of 200 pounds. Oxen come it at around 900 pounds. This means that Solomon slaughtered 43.8 million pounds of animals.
This would be a pretty big pile of animal. If the animal carcasses were stacked, with no wasted space, it would make a pile of 3.9 million cubic feet, or, a pile 5 feet high, covering 18 acres.
And what did he do with this meat? Well according to verse 7, he tried to put it on the alter, along with a cereal grain offering.
“For there he offered the burnt offering and the fat of the peace offerings, because the bronze alter Solomon had made could not hold the burnt offering and the cereal offering and the fat.” - 2 Chronicles 7:7
Talk about an understatement. I could picture Solomon, looking at that mountain of meat, and saying to his attendant, “Gee, do you think that’s too much to put on the alter?”
The sheer volume of meat involved is enough to convince anyone that this passage is grossly exaggerated. I will not even attempt to calculate the economic impact of this slaughter on a relatively poor group of desert farmers.
THE MAGNIFICENT TEMPLE
Solomon’s temple was a lot smaller than most people picture it. 1 Kings 6:2 tells us that it was 60 cubits long, 20 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. In a rare example of biblical precision, 2 Chronicles 3:3 gives exactly the same measurements. A cubit is 17.5 inches, so the temple would have been 87.5’ x 29’, and about 4 stories high. It would total 2,552 square feet in area. To put this in perspective, it would be less than twice the size of my house, but four stories high. This number is very important, so keep it in mind.
The total temple area was larger than simply the “house of the LORD”. There was a courtyard, a palace, and other buildings. However, as we will soon see, the contents and value are out by at least a factor of a thousand, so, a few extra buildings are hardly significant.
The Gold and Silver
“With great pains I have provided for the house of the LORD, a hundred thousand talents of gold, a million talents of silver, and bronze and iron without weighing, for there is so much of it; timber and stone, too, I have provided.” - 1 Chronicles 22:14
Since 1 talent = 75.5 pounds, this means that 7.55 million pounds of gold and 75.5 million pounds of silver went into the temple - a total of 83.05 million pounds of precious metal. Now, remember the size of the temple. To get this much gold and silver into the temple, there must have been 32,543 pounds of it per square foot. The priest must have had to crawl over the heaps of gold to get to the alter.
Here’s another interesting tidbit. One cubic foot of silver weighs 628.4 pounds. This means that the silver of the temple occupied 120,146 cubic feet. The total gross size of the temple was only 111,650 cubic feet. Therefore, if the silver of the temple was formed into a solid block, it would be bigger than the temple itself - never mind the gold, iron, bronze, timber, and stone.
In addition to the gold and silver, there was apparently so much bronze and iron that it could not even be weighed. Since the gold and silver weighed in at 83 million pounds, that means that the bronze and iron must have weighed considerably more (I will assume that it was double). We are now looking at somewhere in the range of 100,000 pounds of metal per square foot of the temple. That is the equivalent weight of 40 full size cars per square foot. And we haven’t even gotten to the rock and timber, yet.
The gold and silver equates to a dollar value of $54 Billion today. Even given the inflated population figures of Israel that are recorded in the Bible, it still means that every man, woman, and child in the nation contributed almost $20,000, or 40 pounds of gold and silver. In all likelihood, the population of Israel was only about 1/10 of the Biblical figures, so the contribution per person would have been approximately 10 times higher. And, of course, we have not costed the iron, bronze, rock, timber, and labour. Not bad for a group of poor desert farmers.
The Labour Force
“King Solomon raised a levy of forced labour out of all Israel; and the levy numbered thirty thousand men. And he sent them to Lebanon, ten thousand a month in relays; they would be a month in Lebanon and two months at home; Adoniram was in charge of the levy. Solomon also had seventy thousand burden bearers and eighty thousand hewers of stone in the hill country, besides Solomon’s three thousand three hundred chief officers who were over the work, who had charge of the people who carried on the work.” - 1 Kings 5:13-16
By my count, this comes to 183,300 persons who worked on this temple. To put this in perspective, it took 1,283,000 man-years to build the temple, or 503 man-years to build each square foot it.
If I apply this rate of construction to my living room, which is 20’ x 12’, it would take over 120,000 man years to build it. To put it yet another way, if a construction team of 100 persons (which is too big to function on such a small job) worked on building my living room, it would take them 1,200 years to build it.
If 183,000 people really worked for seven years to build a 2,552 square foot temple, they must have worked at a snail’s pace. Their progress could only be measured at the molecular level.
The lumber
According to the above quote, 10,000 labourers brought lumber from Lebanon at a time. There were a total of 30,000 labourers rotating on three shifts. Assuming that each labourer brought back 100 pounds of lumber on each trip, that means that one million pounds of lumber arrived at the temple every month. Don’t forget that the temple was only 2,552 square feet, and it was already piled with gold, silver, bronze, and iron.
That’s almost 400 pounds of lumber per square foot, coming in every month. Every year, the equivalent of 240 semi-trailer loads would have arrived. Where did they put it all?
The staff
When the temple was finished and put into operation, staff was required. King David outlined the staffing requirements:
“’Twenty four thousand of these,’ David said, ‘shall have charge of the work in the house of the LORD, six thousand shall be officers and judges, four thousand gatekeepers, and four thousand shall offer praises to the LORD with the instruments which I have made for praise.” - 1 Chronicles 23:4,5
So, 24,000 persons were to work in the house of the Lord. This must have been a pretty slack job. Based on the size of the temple and courtyard, and considering that access to certain parts of the temple was restricted to the priests and high priest, there couldn’t possibly be room for more than about 100 people at a time. This means that each Levite would have worked for only about one day per year. Where can I apply?
The total contents
Wow, this must have been some building. Consider what was inside its walls:
Ÿ 6,260 cubic feet of gold
Ÿ 120,146 cubic feet of silver
Ÿ 338,000 cubic feet of iron (minimum estimate)
Ÿ 321,000 cubic feet of bronze (minimum estimate)
Ÿ 600,000 cubic feet of Lebanese Cedar arrived every year
Ÿ untold quantities of stone, brick, and local timbers
Ÿ 24,000 staff (not necessarily simultaneous)
Ÿ Assorted fixtures, the Ark of the Covenant, etc.
All of this was inside a building with a total volume of only 111,650 cubic feet. And, don’t forget that buildings are essentially hollow. Again, all I can say is, “Wow”.
HOLY QUAIL!
An unusual account is recorded in Numbers 11. It begins with the Israelites short of food, and looking for a little meat:
“Therefore the LORD will give you meat, and you shall eat. You shall not eat one day, or two days, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, but a whole month, until it comes out at your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you.” - Numbers 11:18-20
So, God sends them a little meat:
“And there went forth a wind from the LORD, and it brought quails from the sea, and let them fall beside the camp, about a day’s journey on this side, and a day’s journey on the other side, round about the camp, and about two cubits above the face of the earth.” - Numbers 11:31
Now, let’s calculate just how many quail are involved, here. Most bible dictionaries consider a day’s journey to be approximately 20 miles. So, a circle with a radius of 20 miles would have an area of 1,256 sq. miles. The quail filled this area to a depth of 2 cubits, or 35 inches.
This makes 102 billion cubic feet of quail. The quail is a fairly small bird, averaging one pound in weight, and 13 inches in height. Based on this size, each quail would occupy 0.72 cubit feet. Therefore, God must have blessed the Israelites with approximately 142 billion quail. That’s over 47,000 quail for every Israelite. It must have been like an early version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Now, I’m not sure of the world population of quail, however, the current world population of chickens is only 30 Billion. Chickens likely outnumber quail by at least 100 to 1, since chickens are commonly raised in huge commercial quantities in our modern, crowded earth. So, when the Israelites asked God for a little meat, little did they suspect that he would respond with over 500 times the entire world population of quail.
Before I finish with the quail, I must point out the end result of the meat harvest.
“While the meat was yet between their teeth, before it was consumed, the anger of the LORD was kindled against the people, and the LORD smote the people with a very great plague.” - Numbers 11:33
I thought God said that they would get to eat the quail for a whole month.
JUST HOW BIG WAS NINEVAH?
“So Jonah arose and went to Ninevah, according to the word of the LORD. Now, Ninevah was an exceedingly great city, three days journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey.” - Jonah 3:3,4
A day’s journey in ancient times was approximately 20 miles, so, Ninevah would have been 60 miles in diameter. It would have occupied 2,826 square miles.That’s one big city.
Let’s make a few comparisons. New York City occupies only 304 square miles. In that area, 7,322,564 people are housed. This gives a population density of 24,000 people per square mile. By contrast, I live in a small city of 195,000, which occupies 42 square miles, for a density of 4,600.
Most ancient cities were fairly dense, due to the logistical difficulties in feeding, watering, and cleaning up after large numbers of people before the age of mass transportation systems, not to mention the cost of building the city walls. For example, ancient Pompeii had a population of 20,000, inside walls with a circumference of 2 miles, for a density of 62,500 persons per square mile. If Ninevah had an average density of 50,000 people per square mile, it must have had a population of 141,300,000.
Since New York is considered to be a “great city” by most standards, Ninevah must have been stupendous. It was 9 times larger than New York in land area, and 19 times larger in population.
But wait, the bible gives us the population of Ninevah:
“And should not I pity Ninevah, that great city in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” - Jonah 4:11
One hundred and twenty thousand persons, spread over 2,826 square miles is only 42 persons per square mile - that’s 15 acres per person, or 60 acres for a family of four. That’s not a city.
Realistically, we could expect Ninevah to have a walled circumference ofapproximately seven miles, assuming that the population figures are accurate. Interestingly, archeologists have found walls that likely were Ninevah, and they were about seven miles around.
So, Ninevah was not a three day journey in breadth, unless Jonah was a really slow walker. So slow, in fact, that he could have gotten a job working on the temple.
THE REALLY BIG WALL
“And the rest fled into the city of Aphek; and the wall fell upon twenty-seven thousand men that were left.” 1 Kings 20:30
That must have been a pretty big wall. To calculate the precise way that this happened, we must first of all calculate the size of Aphek.
The above discussion outlined the sizes of various walled cities. Ninevah, a “great city”, had a circumference of about seven miles. Pompeii ’s was about two miles. Aphek is barely mentioned in the Bible, and is never referred to as being great, so we can assume that it was likely much smaller than either of these two cities. That would give it a circumference of less than two miles. Let’s use 1.5 miles for this discussion. This size would be on the upper limit of what would be reasonable.
If these men were standing against the wall, shoulder to shoulder, they would each occupy about two linear feet. That means that there would need to be seven concentric circles of men, standing against the wall when it fell. The entire wall must have fallen simultaneously, with none of the men getting out of the way, or shielding themselves. As well, the wall must have fallen outward in all places, as if there had been a great explosion.
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Anniversary of our being egged by JWS, decide to show you all the letter we sent to 200 JW families!!! Enjoy!!
by Lady Liberty ini hope this letter finds you and your loved ones both happy and well.
one day, before the summer assembly, my parents informed me that they had serious doubts.
i just wanted it to go away, and for things to be the way they used to be.
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startingover
Great letter!
As was mentioned though by God_Delusion, why does a person with your research abilities stop where you did. I did the same thing you did, however I continued on... you've just scratched the surface.
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IT'S OFFICIAL - New Elder's Manual by end of 2010
by sir82 inper a "top secret, confidential, burn this after you read it" letter to all boes, dated march 2, 2010, but not read in our congregation until this past week:.
new "kingdom ministry" school for all elders and ministerial servants, to be held (in the us anyway) between november 2010 and january 2011.. 6 hours of jaw dropping tedium instruction for ms, 9 for elders.
ms session to be held on a sunday, elders on friday and saturday.. the "super secret surprise", for elders only: a new textbook will be released to be studied at this "school".
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startingover
I know of one difference, the new one will be paperback.
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Faith for Bozos - Redux
by Farkel inthese people are called "true believers.
god is by nature "good.
" if god kills, it is "good.
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startingover
Where did this post disappear to for 4 days? God must have done it.
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what was one thing you wanted to buy that you never could
by rockmehardplace ini always wanted a boat, but was told that if i had one i would never make another meeting.
guess i should go get a boat now..
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startingover
This may seem wierd to some, but this thread reminded me that I have never been able to set goals in my life. I attribute that to coming of age with 1975 looming on the horizon.
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The 100th Monkey
by startingover inthe 100th monkeythe japanese monkey, macaca fuscata, had been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years.. in 1952, on the island of koshima, scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand.
the monkey liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant.. an 18-month-old female named imo found she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream.
she taught this trick to her mother.
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startingover
Black Sheep, that is amazing to me! I guess cows aren't quite a smart as sheep. To be honest, I've been bad mouthing sheep and their mentality (which has everything to do with my JW life) but now I have a whole new respect for them.
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The 100th Monkey
by startingover inthe 100th monkeythe japanese monkey, macaca fuscata, had been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years.. in 1952, on the island of koshima, scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand.
the monkey liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant.. an 18-month-old female named imo found she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream.
she taught this trick to her mother.
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startingover
So Fluke, is what you were told different from the video? I am well familiar with cattle guards, as we call them in the US and your post about a sheep "rolling" across one caught my attention. Here they have discovered that cattle are not capable of discerning a real grated "fence" from just lines painted on a road. They seem to work the same.
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Bouncing checks in JEHOVAH'S NAME
by Terry in1.they call themselves witnesses but they've never seen him.
jehovah.. 2. they call their religion the truth but it keeps changing.. 3. they are the only true religion.
even back when they taught things they now don't believe!.
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startingover
AMEN TERRY! AMEN! Excuse the amen, you know what I mean.
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Metaphors
by startingover inevery year, english teachers from across the usa can .
submit their collections of actual analogies and .
metaphors found in high school essays.
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startingover
Every year, English teachers from across the USA can
submit their collections of actual analogies and
metaphors found in high school essays.
These excerpts are published each year to the
amusement of teachers across the country. Here are
last year's winners.
1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and
breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without
Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from
experience, like a guy who went blind because he
looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes
with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country
speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking
at a solar eclipse without one of those
boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli,
and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that
sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever. (My favorite)
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had
disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as
a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly
surcharge-free ATM machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond
exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. Instead of 7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair
after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed
lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. Traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. At a speed of 35 mph.
15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob
informant, and she was the East River.
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long,
it had rusted shut.
19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil.
But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you
get from not eating for a while.
22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical
lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually
lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and
extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a
fire hydrant.
24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.