AlanF

Obviously you can't answer any of my challenges. You're dishonest to the core and too incompetent to say anything about science.

Anna said: Yes, Ms. too-naive-for-her-own-good. Some are, some are not. Watchtower writers are past masters at manipulating the JW community with smooth words that are deliberately ambiguous, or say one thing but mean another. Again you're far too naive. At the time I had not been an active JW for at least 15 years. One loses the bad mental conditioning after awhile. He was quite good at deciphering the ambiguities of WTS instructions. He and his wife were very well respected, and entertained GB members. At the time he had been a JW for 60 years, so he knew what he was talking about. Oftentimes the Society designs its instructions with a subtly hidden message that astute JWs are supposed to pick up on. You forget the most important thing: since out of one side of its mouth the GB claims to admit that it is fallible, then its Bible interpretations are open to questioning. If a dissenting JW has figured out the truth of some Bible teaching, finds it at odds with Watchtower teaching, and lets it be known to others, then who is "causing division"? The one teaching the Bible, or the one teaching the commands of men? Remember that God is not directing these fallible men of the GB. They're right there in black and white. Go back and read what you posted from the Watchtower. Still missing the point. You're approaching Orwellian crimestop here.

No. Most JWs do that, not all. You yourself are quite selective in your worship of Mommy Watchtower, just as the Watchtower Society is selective in what it chooses to believe in the Bible.

But you continue to miss the crucial point: the anointed are not supposed to get together and discuss spiritual things.

You don't even know your current Watchtowers! LOL!

Anna said: That's true of a surprising large fraction of seemingly righteous JWs. You just proved 4Jah2me's point. A long time ago a prominent elder explained to me that negative suggestions from the Society are not merely suggestions, but commands from God not to do something. That's what language like "they would be working against the holy spirit" means. Where have you been?

The hypocrisy and doublethink are just breathtaking!

You're asking questions impossible for JWs to answer without exposing the contradictions inherent in their worship of the Governing Body, i.e., their equating its words with God's words. They get to the heart of whether JW elders are actually appointed by holy spirit, or merely in the self-deceiving sense that the Pope is appointed by holy spirit.

Crimestop at work yet again.

TrueTomHarley engages in his usual gross, transparent hypocrisy. Having posted a very long 'article' to which I responded in part, he said: This is not only gross hypocrisy, but a fine example of Orwellian doublethink. Below are a couple of excerpts from an article I wrote around 1992: "Thinking Ability and the Watchtower Society": https://critiquesonthewatchtower.org/old-articles/2006/02/thinking-ability-and-watchtower.html First excerpt:: https://critiquesonthewatchtower.org/old-articles/2006/02/thinking-ability-and-watchtower.html#geo << George Orwell's View An excellent description of the tyranny of authority carried to an extreme, and of the mental gyrations required of its subjects, was given by George Orwell in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (Remember "Big Brother is watching you"?). He described a totalitarian society called Ingsoc (from 'English Socialism') in which a supreme state had imposed a kind of theocracy on the populace -- in effect, had created a "Kingdom of Heaven on earth." The novel was intended as a serious warning about what could happen if certain totalitarian trends that Orwell saw developing during and shortly after World War II were allowed free rein. The supreme group at the head of the state was the Party. In order to insure that everyone thought along Party lines, the Party carefully altered facts to suit its present situation, and rigorously trained people to go along with it. Orwell wrote: Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. [Part 3, Ch. II; p. 252 hardcover; p. 205 paperback] In order to ensure that whatever the Party held to be truth was rigorously followed, a thought process called doublethink was enforced. Doublethink, as Orwell conceives it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "is a vast system of mental cheating": Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is indispensably necessary. [Part 2, Ch. IX; p. 215-6 hardcover; p. 176-7 paperback] >> Second excerpt: https://critiquesonthewatchtower.org/old-articles/2006/02/thinking-ability-and-watchtower.html#geo << In practice, whenever clear errors in organizational teachings or policies are pointed out to Witnesses, they will either refuse to acknowledge them or deny their importance. They deny it even to themselves, to avoid an intolerable internal conflict between what they know deep down to be the truth and what they have been taught. The denial is automatic and almost unconscious, because they have been trained this way from their earliest experience with the Watchtower Society. The process is strongly reminiscent of another kind of mental gymnastic George Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite, and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever. .... The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. [Part 2, Ch. IX; pp. 212-13 hardcover; pp. 174-5 paperback] >> Naturally, TrueTomHarley and a few others, applying doublethink and crimestop, will pretend not to understand this material.

Srecko Sostar said: That's right, and is according to standard English word usage. "Jehovah's Witnesses" is a proper noun, a name. "Jehovah's witnesses" is a generic group claiming to be witnesses for Jehovah, which of course, any group can do. Exactly! This is completely lost on braindead JWs who think they're serving Jehovah rather than the Watchtower Society.

Wow! TrueTomHarley, aka Vic Vomidog, here quotes himself several times, after mistakenly taking me to task for quoting myself. Of course, he had simply misread my post. A process like that has been going on a lot longer. Until some time in the 1960s DF'ings were announced with something like "so and so has been disfellowshipped for fornication". At some point, I don't remember exactly when, that was changed to "for conduct unbecoming a Christian". At least one lawsuit was brought for libel or whatever, resulting in simply "has been disfellowshipped", to avoid liability for defamation. But that's exactly what it is. Such conduct is precisely what pegs the JWs as a "high control group". I.e., a cult. It is rarely necessary. It is also more than a bit arbitrary. I've seen cases where one judicial committee decided to disfellowship, and upon appeal another reversed it. Occasionally the Society itself is called in to resolve the matter. In theory, yes. In practice, it's often simply a punishment visited upon someone by corrupt elders, or even corrupt Watchtower officials. The "well-being of the congregation" is entirely subjective. Many JWs have quit and disappeared into the woodwork, only to find years later that some corrupt elder from his old congregation--even a decade later--has tracked him down and initiated DF'ing action. Something like this happened with my wife, so don't tell it doesn't happen. It can't. But the Society is completely hypocritical about this. It has a specific policy that if someone quietly becomes inactive, elders should leave him alone. This is usually the case, but not always. There is always the chance that corrupt elders will actively pursue the person and try to DF him. Such a person has no chance that an appeal will reverse the DF'ing. And often his relationship with still-JW relatives is permanently ruined. To be consistent, the Society would have to have a policy where someone simply leaving the cult would be officially designated as "no longer one of Jehovah's Witnesses" and shunned accordingly. But that is even more cultish than the present policy is, and the Society knows it. A policy of "you cannot leave without dire consequences" would result in massive lawsuits, being a Mafiaesque policy. Those scriptures are grossly misapplied. 1 Corinthians 5:11 has Paul telling people to avoid mixing in company with "anyone called a brother" who violates certain moral standards. But if someone leaves the cult and fails to do the various normal JW activities, JWs no longer view him as a brother, and so, following the Bible's words, such a person should logically no longer be subject to congregational ostracism. Nonsense. It is the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, through its various subsidiary corporations, that directs congregation members. If this Society changed its corporate policies on DF'ing and all manner of other things, all congregations would follow--on pain of DF'ing for "ignoring Lordship" or something like that. Ah, a better statement of "the Watchtower Society's words are the same as God's words" can hardly be found. As the May 1, 1957 Watchtower said (p.274): << If we are to walk in the light of truth we must recognize not only Jehovah God as our Father but his organization as our mother. >> That's all pretense. Every JW knows, on some level, that even if he can demonstrate from the Bible that some Watchtower teaching or policy is unscriptural, he must follow the Watchtower Society, on pain of disfellowshipping. The Society's direct violation of Jesus' commands in Luke 21:7-8 proves it. As I told a Watchtower official 20 years ago, if the Society cleaned up its act with regard to three things--blood, child abuse and disfellowshippiing--almost all opposition would dry up. There's virtually no chance of that, and opposition will continue. That would be a good thing, especially in view of the Society's policy of encouraging very young people to join the JW cult. A young person baptized at 10 years of age should not be held to adult standards of conduct, nor be disfellowshipped--not for any reason. Such a young person had no real understanding, on an adult level, of what baptism means--an explicit and apparently legally binding joining of the JW cult. Totally and self-servingly wrong. The gross brainwashing characteristic of JWs means that they only think they're obeying God rather than men. But the fact that when the Watchtower Society tells them to believe something the opposite of what they had believed, or to act in an opposite manner, proves that it is the Society, not the Bible, that controls their minds. Yes, we're having coffee together. Some do, some do. So what? [ Irrelevant ramblings deleted ] My experience was quite the opposite. By age 24, in 1975, I was not the least interested in being a "servant" of any kind. Nevertheless, I was appointed as a Ministerial Servant. How? One Thursday evening, during the Service Meeting, and without ever having told me, the Presiding Overseer announced, "Alan has been appointed ..." I was quite angry but held my peace, and began duties as the Accounts Servant. I swallowed my resentment. But I was painfully aware that, contrary to Watchtower teaching, I had NOT been appointed by holy spirit. In fact, it was that breach of my free will that helped me understand the Society's deception on "appointment by holy spirit". I saw plenty of exceptions to that rule. So as usual, TTH/Vic, you don't know what you're talking about. You're much like what God did in the Bible story of "Balaam's Ass".

Arauna completely missed the boat again: Arauna had claimed that mutations in humans over a long period of time would have resulted in their extinction by now. Therefore humans must have existed for a short time, presumably the 6,000 years allowed by the Watchtower Society. I gave the above comment as part of a proof that her reasoning was unsound. Rather than dealing with my entire disproof, Arauna sidestepped all of it with the irrelevancies below, most of which I've chopped out since they have nothing to do with our discussion. So once again, Arauna, if your reasoning is correct--that humans that originated 4-6 million years ago would have gone extinct by now due to excessive accumulation of mutations--how do you explain the fact that the cat sub-family that has existed for some 5 million years still exists?

Well well. Arauna, you're finally beginning to engage on an adult level. You still have a long way to go. Of course, as usual you've ignored at least 90% of my arguments and comments. Arauna said: Yet you read creationist books like Berlinsky's, and no books on evolution by proper scientists. That's easy to tell because you can't name one you've read. I ask again: What are the names of the 'scientific' magazines you've read? Lack of an answer will tell me either that you don't read such, or you're embarrassed to name them. Nonsense. Whatever you read, any claims about a younger earth came from young-earth creationists. No scientific magazine "pointed to a younger earth" as a result of that discovery. Only young-earth creationist publications do that. You disagree? Then name the magazine that "pointed to a younger earth". You seem to think that the earth is much younger than science has shown. Hopefully you're aware that the Watchtower Society agrees that the earth is 4.6 billion years old, and that life is some 3.5+ billion years old, and that macroscopic life has been around for some 600 million years. While the Society doesn't explicitly admit the antiquity of life, the arguments given on page 23 of the 2010 brochure The Origin of Life assume it. Do you disagree with science and the Watchtower Society on the antiquity of life? You're talking about the 2000 discovery of a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus and the subsequent analysis of some bone fragments by paleontologist Mary Schweitzer. Note that Schweitzer is a devout Christian, but not a young-earth creationist, and she accepts evolution. She soundly rejects the YEC claim of a 6,000 year old earth and accepts that her T-Rex bone is 68 million years old. Schweitzer presented papers in 2005 and 2007 stating that she and her team found bits of protein, blood cells and blood vessels in a very degraded state inside some of the T-Rex bones. Some of the links below say that no other scientists have been able to duplicate Schweitzer's work, which at a minimum casts doubt on whether she found anything of significance. Remember that duplication of results by other scientists is a firm requirement for any claims to be accepted. Remember the "cold fusion" fiasco? And of course, it almost goes without saying that extraordinary claims like Schweitzer's require extraordinary levels of confirmation. Critics point out that if Schweitzer's work cannot be duplicated, it's likely that there was contamination of some sort. Some links below say that Schweitzer's work has been at least partly duplicated by other scientists. The jury is still out. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur-shocker-115306469/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Higby_Schweitzer http://christadelphianevolution.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-young-earth-creationists-distorted.html https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/i-don-t-care-what-they-say-about-me-paleontologist-stares-down-critics-her-hunt https://www.livescience.com/41537-t-rex-soft-tissue.html As far as I'm concerned, if soft tissue really has been found, great! Yet another set of facts useful to figure out how life has developed. But this in no way indicates "a younger earth". Ah, so you're sufficiently qualified in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, geology and paleontology to make such an evaluation. I think not. I doubt you've ever seen a dinosaur bone at all. Centrifuges are not required to make blood clump. Ever hear of clotting? Ever hear of post-death pooling? There are many clumping mechanisms. No one said that anything like that happened. Your imagination is running wild. You seem to think that Dawkins originated this idea. He did not. It has been a talking point of critics of creationism for a long time. Here's Dawkins' video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1a1Ek-HD0&feature=youtu.be Of course, you've completely buggered what Dawkins said, most likely having merely parroted what creationist critics have said and then misunderstood even that. As an American I immediately spotted the fact that you don't even know what nerve Dawkins was talking about. All you've managed to say is "the nerve" without specifying which nerve. In the video Dawkins was clear: he was talking about the recurrent laryngeal nerve. Your creationist sources have mixed that up with the vagus nerve. Here are links that clarify what each does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagus_nerve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470179/ The mammalian vagus nerves, with right and left halves, descend from the brain, down through the neck, and into the chest cavity. Shortly after leaving the base of the skull, the left and right superior laryngeal nerves branch off and go directly to the larynx. As the vagus nerves descend further, various small nerves branch off. Near the heart the left and right recurrent laryngeal nerves branch off. The left branch loops around the aorta and back up to the larynx. The right branch loops around the right subclavian artery and back up to the larynx. Both branches give rise to small nerves at various points. Note clearly that the superior (upper) laryngeal nerves branch off from the vagus nerves just below the base of the skull, close to the larynx, providing a very short path from brain to larynx. But the lower laryngeal nerves take a tortuous path all the way down to the heart, and back up again. This is especially so in the giraffe, where the extra length amounts to some 4.6 meters. The fact that the upper laryngeal nerves go directly to the larynx proves that there is no engineering reason why the lower laryngeal nerves could not take the same direct path. And that any small nerves that branch off along the way could not better branch off from the vagus nerves without taking the tortuous loop around the heart vessels. Dawkins' team's dissection of the giraffe neck graphically shows that the nerve length of 4.6 meters as opposed to the 5 centimeters it could have been proves that either the Supreme Engineer is a lousy or lazy Engineer, or that Evolution is the Engineer. In other words, Intelligent Design is not evident in the 'design' of the path of the giraffe's laryngeal nerves. Given all this, we note your buggered creationist description: The laryngeal nerves have nothing to do with the heart. The heart can be served by the vagus nerves without having the recurrent laryngeal nerves come near it. The pressure feedback is not supplied by the laryngeal nerves but by the vagus nerves. Your argument is simply wrong. The circuitous route of the laryngeal nerves is far better explained by gradual evolution of the nerve path from early fish-like ancestors. As shown by embryological studies, the vagus nerve in fish is equivalent to that of mammals. In fishy ancestors the nerve went from the brain past the heart and immediately to the gills. As creatures evolved, and the gills gradually transformed into other organs, the tiny steps of evolution required miniscule changes in embryological development. With tiny steps all along the way, there was nothing to influence development to require a complete rewiring of the vagus/laryngeal system. Evolution has no foresight but makes do with what is immediately available. This is why all creatures so far examined, from fish on down, have essentially the same vagus nerve structure. Is your Supreme Engineer so limited that he cannot created something with better design? On the other hand, a competent Engineer creating the giraffe 'kind' from scratch, or modifying it from some sort of ancestor, would have no such limitations. He could apply good engineering principles and create the nerve system with optimal path lengths from scratch. See this link for another look. Plenty more such can be found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1a1Ek-HD0&feature=youtu.be At this point I know very well that you will either mostly ignore all of the above, or come up with some transparently ridiculous rationalization that any competent engineer would laugh at. Completely wrong. The brain and eye developed together. Again you're parroting a standard creationist talking point. In between what? Yet again you have no idea what you're talking about. In the earth's history there have been many "ice ages". The most recent is actually a series of cooling and warming periods lumped into the term "The Ice Age" and which began about 2.5 million years ago. The most recent in the latest period began cooling about 100,000 years ago and warmed beginning roughly 20,000 years ago. We are living in the most recent interglacial period. Which "ice age" are you talking about?

TTH continues the Dunning-Kruger routine.

As usual, so far off topic it's not even wrong.

Arauna once again punted on most everything with which I challenged her. I'm commenting on what little remained. So? You already said you don't read most of the papers. And you still can't name a single paper about science that you've read. We already know that you don't even read the pseudoscience papers that a few creationists produce because they don't produce papers about real science, and I'm certain you don't get even them in your mailbox. And it's quite obvious that you've never read a book on evolution by a proper, recognized and competent scientist. Creationist books like Berlinksy's are NOT science books. I suggest Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters by paleontologist Donald Prothero. It contains much debunking of nonsense like Berlinsky and the DI have published. Of course, being a real science book, we know you'll avoid reading it like the plague. There are plenty of other good, solid books. Such a transparent hypocrite! You demand an answer from me that, with a little online research, you can find the answer to yourself. Yet you refuse to answer my unique challenges and questions to you. Wrong. You are a liar. I posed my challenge to disprove my logic that the Bible God does not exist well before you posted your Intelligent Design claptrap. I posed my challenge this past Tuesday, but you posted your silly question only yesterday. Compare: https://www.theworldnewsmedia.org/forums/topic/85859-all-eight-governing-body-of-jehovahs-witnesses-members-are-now-individually-named-on-two-new-york-child-victims-act-case-documents/page/14/#comments https://www.theworldnewsmedia.org/forums/topic/85859-all-eight-governing-body-of-jehovahs-witnesses-members-are-now-individually-named-on-two-new-york-child-victims-act-case-documents/page/35/#comments Since you're too lazy to do your own research, I've done some for you. While you've parroted the creationist talking point about hitting the jackpot, you obviously don't understand the math or the overall concepts behind it. First, the many hypotheses about Abiogeneis do not claim that a living cell or even large molecule came about in one fell swoop as your creationist sources assume, but rather, that by a long series of gradually accumulating structures that built upon previously existing structures, which were sorted by the filter of natural selection, a viable structure emerged. Richard Dawkins explained all this in his 1996 book Climbing Mount Improbable, which of course you have not read. Second, the Theory of Evolution posits no sudden jumps from simple or even no structures, to complex structures. So your creationist argument is a straw man. It has been debunked as such for decades. Third, although creationists propose simpleminded probability arguments like yours, the fact is that no one knows enough to make accurate calculations. It would take full knowledge of how atoms and molecules work that is far beyond anything known today. In the following link, "Can Probability Theory Be Used To Refute Evolution?", a professional mathematician explains why arguments such as you've parroted are totally wrongheaded: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/can_probability_theory_be_used_to_refute_evolution_part_one/ As for your "third postulation", I already showed why it is nonsense. You dishonestly cut out my explanation in your reply here. My theory? LOL! That's a scientific finding. Do you disagree with it? On what basis? The fact is that natural selection weeds out the bad mutations; at least, it did until the advent of modern medicine. Wrong as usual. It's heart disease: https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death Yet another creationist talking point that has been debunked dozens of times. The cat sub-family that includes lions, tigers, jaguars, leopards, etc. has existed at least five million years. Obviously they have not gone extinct. How do you explain that? What about the hundreds of obviously human or human-like fossils that have been found and dated to various times up to 4-6 million years ago? Or do you tell yourself they don't exist? Are you aware that virtually all people outside Africa have bits of DNA from Neanderthals and/or Denisovans? Neanderthals seem to have developed from Homo erectus by half a million years ago, modern humans from unknown roots by 300,000 years ago in Africa. Eventually the two met in Europe and hybridized. Do you not accept that DNA evidence and the dating of the fossils? On what basis? Oh yeah, you have your creationist sources. You're so incompetent! The question about Berlinsky's motives was with regard to the hypocrisy of his claim to be a secular, non-religious Jew as opposed to his hypocritically joining the conservative Christian Discovery Institute which requires a statement of faith in God and Jesus Christ. Yet another instance of dishonest sidestepping.

I said I would not reply to Arauna further, but I'm a sinner, and Arauna's response is so ludicrous that I'm going to sin. Summaries are not science articles. Apparently you're not astute enough to know that. And of course, you can't or won't name any of the "science magazines" you claim to read. You obviously have no idea what "OCD" is. You know that it has negative connotations, so like a clumsy child trying to wield a 20-kilo mace, you swing it at your intellectural superiors. Apparently you're jealous of anyone who can bore down into the details of written material. I've run across many like that over the years. Much like TrueTomHarley, who never manages a coherent set of comments, but always resorts to ad hominems and sidesteps, and generally misses the mark. Your comment to which I replied as above was so abysmally ignorant that it would be pearls before swine trying to educate you. Ah, yes, David Berlinsky. A creationist charlatan if ever there was one. See below. Pure Intelligent Design claptrap. You're so gullible due to confirmation bias that you don't realize that Berlinsky is a senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, and that as such he had to sign a committment to their philosophy and goals. As a conservative Christian organization, the DI's main goal is to force conservative Christianity on America, turning it into a theocracy ruled by Evangelical Christians. You don't believe me? Do some research. Berlinsky says he's a secular Jew. Most secular Jews are agnostics or atheists, and certainly not religious. Yet he's thrown in his lot with the ultra-conservative Christian Discovery Institute, showing that he's a hypocrite of the first order. As for his motives, who knows? There's that ignorant mace swinging again. Here are some comments about Berlinsky and book reviews of The Devil's Delusion: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/david-berlinski-makes-a-pompous-fool-of-himself-again-about-science-and-evolution/ https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/David_Berlinski This one contains a particularly good comment: << Eugenie Scott described Berlinski's arguments thus: “”The content of David Berlinski's article does not differ from more traditional creation-science material, though his tone is more genteel and his writing a lot more literate […] But true to the creation-science genre, his approach consists of constructing strawmen, then knocking them down with misinterpreted, faulty, or nonexistent data as well as carefully selected quotations from evolutionary scientists. >> On Eugenie Scott: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eugenie_Scott Another book review: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-berlinski/the-devils-delusion/ As for your claim that you answered my challenge proving that the Bible God does not exist, let me remind you of my response on page 19 of this thread. Of course, you never responded. << AlanF: ... proves unarguably that any postulated Creator is far from loving. A loving Creator, by definition, could not create a world in which the daily lot of so many life forms is to suffer a nature “red in tooth and claw”. Thus, either the God of the Bible is not loving, or he does not exist. Arauna: Only two? What about a third postulation..... that God is not the source of the problem but allows it to exist for a reason...... Your reasoning is occam's razor - very limited........ all that reading of Dawkins' junk is showing. AlanF: <<< As I predicted, no reasonable answer here. You have no actual reason that "nature red in tooth and claw" has existed for half a billion years. You believe that God created all life, so he must be the author of such a thing. How could God not be the source of a "nature red in tooth and claw"? My argument comes not from Dawkins but from a careful consideration of the Bible and scientific facts. Do you have any actual arguments? >>> >> Expanding on this a bit, your "third postulation" ignorantly conflates the "Adam and Eve sinning" scenario of supposedly 6,000 years ago with God's creating predatory life forms half a billion years ago. So are you claiming that God is not the source of predation? It certainly can't be old Satan since he didn't become bad old Satan until after Adam and Eve were created. Then who, aside from God, would be "the source of the problem" half a billion years ago? Of course, you'll still have no rational answer. Excuses, perhaps, but no answer.

I guarantee that one who poses that question to the Society will not get an answer. Most likely they'll sic the local elders on him.

Where does anyone get his picture of God other than the Bible? Since the Bible is the basis for all this, and it claims that God is loving, and 'Creation' says he is not, the Bible is wrong about God. Taking this to its logical conclusion, the Bible God does not exist.

Anna said: Satan created nothing. Where do you get that from? The Bible indicates that Satan became Satan only 6,000 years ago according to Watchtower chronology. How could he, as Satan, affect what God created half a billion years ago? When? You're forgetting that the predator/prey problem is at least half a billion years old. Are you proposing that the God/Satan controversy is not 6,000 years old, as the Watchtower Society claims, but half a billion? But various biblical statements are pretty clear that God considered eating meat, by humans or animals, bad from the beginning. This has long been Watchtower teaching. The Bible indicates this, as the Society argues, by God's giving vegetation but no meat to Adam and Eve. And after the Flood God explicitly allowed meat eating. And several scriptures indicate that at some future time the animals will all be at peace (cf. Isaiah 11:6). Most people today have a strong feeling of aversion when they see a leopard devouring an animal alive. Right? I call this the Eeeww! factor. Take a look at the videos below of leopards eating live warthogs and tell me you don't react with Eeeww!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhXUrFdWeoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4Id4OSe2to If a man had two sons and set them in a life and death contest, with one guaranteed to die, would you consider that loving? Especially if the dead son had no chance of a resurrection? Of course not. How is that different from God's setting predators against prey? Will all those dead animals be resurrected? What about all the pain and suffering? If your mother bit into a rabbit and ate it piece by bloody piece, would that have been loving? The Bible says that God gave the Israelites laws to protect animals from excessive cruelty. Isn't God's creating leopards to eat warthogs alive excessive cruelty? You're not thinking this through.

Arauna said: These are statements of facts based on your observed behavior and arguments. You keep repeating bad arguments, so I repeat the same answers. It's easy enough to figure out: No real science literature, only religious and creationist. Wrong. I already pointed out why your "3rd hypothesis" was nothing more than a skirting of my two basic statements, and had nothing to do with either of them. You continue to avoid answering. Hence, I will not reply to you further.

Arauna said: Which magazines? I'll bet you think that creationist rags are science magazines. Now let's watch Arauna again ignore my point and sidestep what actually happened in the Dawkins/Stein scenario. Wrong. The fossil record proves that evolution is a fact. Not the caricature of evolution given in Watchtower publications, but the real Theory of Evolution as stated by scientists. Of course, you know nothing of that real Theory because all you know is what you read in Watchtower and perhaps creationist publications. You obviously don't even know the difference between a scientific theory and a hypothesis. You don't even seem to understand that plenty of evolutionists are theistic evolutionists, which means that they accept the fact of evolution but believe that some god, often the Bible God, used evolution to create life, or tweaked life forms over 3.5 billion years in such a way that mimics fully naturalistic evolution. Ever heard of Tiktaalik? Look it up and tell me what you think about it. Intelligent Design proponents have all been shown to be charlatans and liars. Look up the 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania court case. Once again you fail to get the point: Ben Stein proposed that notion, and Richard Dawkins merely expounded on the logical necessities were that proposal the case. Completely clueless. That's straight out of creationist literature, except a little buggered. LOL! Dunning-Kruger yet again.

Arauna said: Ah yes: << I wonder what their non-existent God will do with sperm whales' proclivity to eat giant squid. And baleen whales' need to eat fish and krill. >> You don't think sperm whales eat squid and baleen whales eat fish and krill? Bingo! And they always have, and always will as long as they possess teeth and baleen and all manner of body structures explicitly adapted for predation. That was my point. Irrelevant to anything discussed here. Before what? I've seen the occasional video where say, a lioness adopts a baby antelope in the wild. So what? Mostly they eat them. Like rabbits? Only partly. They have built-in instincts such as the proclivity to chase running prey. And all manner of other predatory abilities that, using "intelligent design" concepts, could only exist by the Creator's design efforts. What about snakes? Constrictors do their thing right out of the egg. So do venomous snakes. Snake venom comes in two basic types: a nerve toxin and one that breaks down muscle tissue. Are you claiming those things are not the Design of your Creator God? How about spiders? Almost all are venomous and supreme hunters. Same goes for scorpions and lots of other critters. Design by a loving God? Or evolution? Picture a black mamba chasing a fleeing banana. Or a jumping spider going after a floating dandelion seed. A ridiculous argument. Cats do not have the ability to synthesize a particular amino acid necessary for survival. They must get it from their prey. No choice. Same kind of thing goes for plenty of other animals. So what? Lions and tigers are essentially the same animal, along with jaguars and others. Many animals, when raised together from infancy, change their behaviors and become friendly. I once saw a full grown tiger back down to a small female dog that had 'raised' the tiger from infancy. That's called imprinting, the same kind of thing that allows ducklings to imprint on people and act as if the humans were their mothers. The tiger viewed the dog as its mommy. You error here is in focusing on the exceptions rather than the rules.

Arauna said: First you answer all my questions you ignored. Where is the question in all that? There was never a debate. What you saw was an excerpt from Expelled where the charlatan Ben Stein posed leading questions to Dawkins, along the lines of: "If we pose the possibility of intelligent design, how do you think that would work?" Dawkins replied that, IF intelligent design occurred, it would have to have been by some intelligence that evolved somewhere other than Earth and then engineered life on Earth. He clearly stated that he considered this hypothetical scenario unlikely. Stein later misrepresented the entire exchange between himself and Dawkins, and so did most creationists such as those in the so-called Intelligent Design community, leaving a completely false impression in the minds of ignorant, biased people like you. Here is a representative video clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoncJBrrdQ8 A Wikipedia article describes Expelled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed Regarding Stein's interview with Dawkins, it states: << In Dawkins' interview, the director focused on Stein's question to Dawkins regarding a hypothetical scenario in which intelligent design could have occurred.[28] Dawkins responded that in the case of the "highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett)". He later described this as being similar to Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel's "semi tongue-in-cheek" example. >> Nonsense. Google "expelled dawkins aliens" and such, and you'll find hundreds of discussions debunking Stein's lies. The simple fact is that you do not have enough knowledge of evolution or any creation scenario to judge anything at all. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. As for my argument proving that the Bible God does not exist, let me put it in simple enough terms that even you should be able to understand: The Bible says that its creator "God is love" and that he knows what is going on with every creature. 'Creation' proves that whatever creator there might be, he is far from loving. Both things cannot be true. Therefore the Bible God does not exist. If you ignore this again, there is no point talking to you about anything.