All Eight Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses members are now individually named on two New York Child Victims Act case documents

[TrueTomHarley]

44 minutes ago, AlanF said:

Yes, because that's the way conversations develop. Without making a roadmap, no one would be able to follow the development.

JTR has made this point, too. I try not to bring totally irrelevant ideas into thread. I confine myself to responding to fatheads that already have. Still, I confess that I sometimes think of starting a new thread, but I hold back because everyone is all hopped up at the old one and I think that they may not make the jump.

 

44 minutes ago, AlanF said:

Pascal's Wager is a fool's wager, because it assumes that God is too stupid to figure out if the bettor is sincere in his betting on God.

JWI may be unaware that Pascal checked into Gamblers Anonymous in his later years.

44 minutes ago, AlanF said:

That's why the Watchtower Society has set up so many charities to help mankind.

Since no end of organizations do set up such charities, and there are myriad government programs doing the same,  I see no harm in there being one to focus on what the Bible describes as the Christian’s main mission. Still, I never diss those things. They are undoubtedly good works that we are not doing, even if they do not solve the problem (and sometimes even serve to perpetuate it) I do not diss them.

(I am being a good boy, JWI. You should know this. Several of my group wanted to chime in—you should have heard the zinger Bob “Hammer” Urabi had up his sleeve, but I wouldn’t let him unfurl it. ....AllenSmith must have drove up with a pickup truck full of nukes to get tossed out because there seems little problem with anything less.

[AlanF]

James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

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I can see how a rudimentary eye might develop, but not one with multiple coordinated lens systems, an iris, to regulate light and exposure, etc, etc. and then there is the neural interface to the brain, etc., etc.

Obviously you've never carefully considered scientific discussions. Here's one to get you started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

You might also read Richard Dawkins' book Climbing Mount Improbable.

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And the ear, which has miniature bones that move, and is an electromechanical marvel.

True, and I suspect you don't know the half of it. A typical bat ear contains a mechanical bandpass filter that rolls off at some 800 decibels per octave. That's astonishing!

On the other hand, this earbone/eardrum system evolved over tens of millions of years, as shown by hundreds of fossils from the Triassic and Permian Periods. Early Triassic animals called Synapsids split into many families, one of which evolved into the earliest mammals. The early jaw was comprised of the dentary bone (carries the teeth) and three others. The entire jaw was involved in hearing, and one of the bones was connected to the eardrum. The arrangement gradually morphed, for reasons not understood, into an arrangement where in some animals there were two jaw joints side by side. In some lineages one of the jaw joints gradually disappeared over time, leaving the modern arrangement, where what were once parts of the old jaw now comprise the modern mammalian earbones. Sounds fantastic? It certainly does, but that's what hundreds of fossils show, as does embryology. See https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evograms_05

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That being said, which to me, who spent a lifetime designing things... all kinds of things ... before I retired, and recognize designed things when I see them,

Correction: you see things that you already know were designed by men like yourself, and which don't reproduce, and are not capable of self-assembly in contrast with simple biological molecules. You don't know that you've seen anything designed by some Supernatural Intelligence -- you mere believe it.

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I believe in ... based entirely on my own insight and experience, and observation ... in seeing in all life on Earth the directed hand of God.

When I was about five years old, I said: "Mommy! Please make the trees stop making the wind blow". Small children are extremely prone to seeing agency in things that move and in confusing cause and effect. Eventually they learn better.

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After much study and reflection, taking into account millions of tons of hard fossil evidence that cannot be ignored, I believe in "Punctuated Creation" over the past few billion years, where guided evolution and dramatic corrections took place , which if explained simply enough to a 3rd grader, by being simplified into the word "Evolution".

I don't disagree with that possibility. After all, we don't know enough to know for sure whether some kind of super-intelligence exists outside our ken. And many competent scientists have somewhat similar views.

However, as I've shown earlier in this thread, such a super-intelligence cannot be the God of the Bible, because the Bible combined with the fossil record proves that He cannot exist:

Bible says Creator God is loving; fossil record says 'Creator' is not loving. Can't have it both ways.

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The Humanoids that lived before the direct creation of Adam and Eve, did exist, and they did in fact "evolve", but had no spiritual component, or opportunity to live forever .... that we know about (!).

How do you know all that? Ever heard of the place in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe? It's a 12,000 year old archaeological site, perhaps a temple of sorts. Apparently it predates farming. In any case, it and hundreds of other ancient sites prove that modern humans, along with all manner of cultural stuff, have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. Grave goods of modern humans and Neanderthals strongly indicate 'spiritual beliefs' of some sort.

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If you have a better idea, I am "all ears", as mine is only an educated and thoughtful "best guess", with what I know.

What I've said above barely scratches the surface.

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EVERYTHING that took place before Satan rebelled against God about 6,000 years ago ..... was "good".

I beg to differ. Animals killing animals for food goes back 550 million years. Is that "good"?

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I do not have Polaroids.

.... and neither do you.

 

No, I have a digital SLR and a time machine.

[Patiently waiting for Truth]

3 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

No.

One reason I do not get worked up when Agent Jack or someone posts news of a JW  elder caught in an act of CSA is because, with even the most cursory bit of follow-up, it is seen how extraordinarily rare this is. With other organizations, religious or secular, it is the pattern. JWs, unlike any other group, are being penalized for CSA among renegade members.

Agent Jack posts news of a lawbreaker getting his just deserts, and who can get worked up over that? Not me. However, such deeds are extremely rare among JW elders.

It may be that there will be a penalty to pay for leaving the reporting of CSA to the digression of affected or knowledgeable parties—and then it turns out that many did not do so out of concern for not bringing reproach on God’s name. That is why it is such a good thing that it was made very clear in the May 2019 study article that the reporter does not bring the reproach—the abuser does.

https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/02/the-reproach-of-child-sexual-abuse-falls-on-the-abu.html

Time will tell how above matters regarding reporting lapses from elders will shake out. Possibly it will go down as a matter to JWs lasting shame. This is a strange world and one cannot know how things will end. Much like the police go after consumers of drugs because eliminating sellers and producers has proved impossible, so they do now with attempting to make more and more persons mandatory reporters of CSA, even where previous norms of confidentiality used to apply: doctor/patient, lawyer/client, clergy/penetant (on the supposition that these relationships cannot work without the expectation of confidentiality). Now it is all being examined and conduct legal and even expected at the time is being retroactively criminalized. Time will tell how it all turns out.

Still, despite modern efforts to criminalize the lesser “crime,” as it is being redefined because authorities have proven totally helpless in stamping out the former one, I still submit that there is a difference between the person who blows a person’s head off with a shot-gun and the person who came to know of it and, for whatever reason, did not report it.

(File that one away, JWI. Or maybe, given the heading of this thread, file everything else away in some category or other in you card catalog, and just keep this one.)

And just so @4Jah2me knows that I am not throwing up a smokescreen over Agent Jack’s topic...

Somewhere along the line, he asked breathlessly, ‘How will it all turn out?’

The answer that I did not give then but perhaps could have is, “Who knows?”

Maybe it will all be discarded at the highest level court, with opposers being made to pay all fees, and it will be a glorious victory for JW. Maybe the higher-ups named will be sent off to Atlanta again, and it will be a delayed victory for JW. For all I know, maybe Someone will perceive that as having had his eyeball touched, so that the delay will be no more than two seconds. I haven’t a clue.

I don’t weigh in on court things on a play by play basis until they are resolved. When that happens, I sometimes do, such as here regarding a big Montana case:

https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/01/is-it-time-for-jehovahs-witnesses-to-apologize-part-1.html

I avoid play by play because I am not a lawyer, and when commenting on courtroom proceedings, this is a very significant deficit. So I wait until afterwards. The most arcane and unexpected twists can come, and ones that have come can be undone, so that I avoid the subject until the dust settles. I don’t know the ways of the courtroom. I learned this lesson as a very young man, representing myself (which is what most people do) in small claims court. All hell broke loose when I went to hand the judge a document without first asking to “approach the bench”

(It is like young Timmy, who when the doctor asked, “What color is your stool?’ answered that it was white. He had never heard it called that before, but his Grab-a-Toy stool he used all the time.)

 

My comment you quoted was only to show @Arauna how over generalised her comments are. 

[TrueTomHarley]

2 hours ago, AlanF said:

The arrangement gradually morphed, for reasons not understood, into an arrangement where in some animals there were two jaw joints side by side.

Sometimes when I am discussing spiritual things with those slow to grasp or even resistant of them I find that I have backed myself into a corner.

Whenever that happens, I say, “For reasons not understood it is that way” and move on to prove my next point.

7 minutes ago, 4Jah2me said:

My comment you quoted was only to show @Arauna how over generalised her comments are. 

Maybe it was actually the comment of someone else. Someone way back in the thread accused me of throwing up a smokescreen to takeaway from the title of this thread. Maybe it was not you. Sorry

[AlanF]

I don't normally comment on politics, but . . .

James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

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    5 hours ago, AlanF said:

    Most of the time his opponents, as well as their groupies, were too ignorant and/or stubborn to admit it. Like you. LIke ever-Trumpers are about Trump's criminality.

Trump is GOOD at it,

 

At being a criminal. Yes indeed.

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and as far as I am concerned is the best President since Jackson.

Since Jackson killed thousands of my blood relatives, that's not hard to do.

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As far as I am concerned, he saved the Republic from the evil liberal swamp creatures, already.

I hope you're being facetious, since Trump filled "the swamp" with even more of his own.

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President Jimmy Carter was a fine, "christian" man, and a nuclear engineer, and a good carpenter building houses for the homeless ... and a tireless worker, even when exhausted, and my guess is absolutely honest .... .... but was a really crappy President.

I disagree. At least he wasn't an outright criminal.

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As far as Trump goes, politics is like playing poker ... You are there to cut the others' hearts out and eat them, or you should not be playing.

...that's what the job is.

 

I agree that that's what the job has turned into, especially under Trump, but it seems beyond questioning that if our wise founding fathers could have seen what's happening today, they'd have made drastic changes to the republic's founding documents.

I doubt that even the most criminal of politicians today would claim that 250 years has not resulted in massive corruption on all levels of government, especially where religion has stuck in its dirty fingers. And of course, most of the extremely wealthy.

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

Again ... the six blind men trying to discern what an elephant is.

Polaroids, or a digital SLR, and a time machine would not help any of them.

That's why Callahan had a sign over the bar in his saloon, "Time Travelers Strictly Cash".

 

And AlanF:

I am sure your blood relatives were merely noble savages who sat on their horses with tears in their eyes, rolling down their cheeks, as they looked out over the amber waves of grain, and the purple mountains majesty, and saw all the roadside litter.

.... gentle pacifists, each and every one, when the Indian Nations were not killing each other.

 

[AlanF]

TrueTomHarley said:

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    2 hours ago, AlanF said:

    The arrangement gradually morphed, for reasons not understood, into an arrangement where in some animals there were two jaw joints side by side.

Sometimes when I am discussing spiritual things with those slow to grasp or even resistant of them I find that I have backed myself into a corner.

Whenever that happens, I say, “For reasons not understood it is that way” and move on to prove my next point.

 

Somehow you seem to think (if what goes on inside your head can be called that) that's a rational response.

What's your point? As you so often do, you're comparing apples with oranges.

The fact is that a number of fossils over more than 10 million years show the two-joint arrangement, and since no one was there to observe, over several tens of millions of years, how and why changes occurred from one population of critters to another, no one can truly understand the how and why of the changes. Is that so hard for your little mind to understand?

Or perhaps you have a hypothesis about how and why the changes occurred that morphed the early synapsid jaw/ear arrangement into the final mammalian arrangement. Here, I'll help you:

Maybe the creator wanted to experiment with new structures in the jaw/ear of a few animals. Why he might do so is not understood. So he got hold of an embryo and tweaked the genes to make some tiny adjustments to the final jaw/ear structure. After a million years or so he did this with another critter, and another and another. After awhile, and several more rounds of genetic tweaking, there existed a bunch of somewhat different critters that were also different from the ones that the creator left alone. All along the way the creator let some groups of critters die out, so that as time progressed, there appeared in the fossil record a series of fossils that look exactly like evolution by natural selection of the original into the final jaw/ear arrangement.

Perhaps you can come up with a better scenario. But again, none will be holding their breaths.

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

Digital SLRs are easier to acquire than time machines ....

You apparently believe in "punctuated evolution", and I believe in "punctuated creation" FOR that evolution.

 

 

[AlanF]

James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

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And AlanF:

I am sure your blood relatives were merely noble savages who sat on their horses with tears in their eyes, rolling down their cheeks, as they looked out over the amber waves of grain, and the purple mountains majesty, and saw all the roadside litter.

 

I wouldn't know. I wasn't there with my time machine and DSLR.

Note that back in the 1830s, most of the roadside litter would have been dead bodies on the "trail of tears".

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Digital SLRs are easier to acquire than time machines ....

Don't I know it! I've tried many times at MicroCenter.

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You apparently believe in "punctuated evolution", and I believe in "punctuated creation" FOR that evolution.

Not really. I think you didn't understand what I said: I accept evolution -- I do not believe in it, because belief by definition is not based on evidence -- and I accept the evidence for "punctuated equilibrium", which is just a part of the whole Theory of Evolution. I understand your idea of "punctuated creation" quite well because I thought of it more than 30 years ago. But I can't accept it as more than a poorly founded speculation, since there is no evidence whatsoever for it. And I have no evidence to completely dismiss it. I've already proved that the Bible God is nonexistent, but accept that perhaps some other creator exists, for which I have yet to see any evidence. Note that "The Argument from Personal Incredulity" is also called "The Argument from Ignorance" and holds almost no water.

And while I'm at it, I'll state for the record that almost no religious apologists seem to understand what "atheism" means. While it can mean "belief that no gods exist", most of the time self-described atheists like me mean that "I do not believe in any gods". Do you understand the difference? It's a big difference, because it's not logically possible to know that no "gods" exist in the entire universe, but it's quite reasonable not to believe in any gods, just as it's reasonable not to believe in the Tooth Fairy without being able to prove that it doesn't exist. Remember that most religious people are atheists with respect to all gods but their own. Real atheists just go one god further.

For more on that, read Dawkins' The God Delusion, where he proposes a scale of belief from 1 to 7. Total belief in God rates a 1, total disbelief a 7. He and I claim to be about 6.5.

 

[TrueTomHarley]

1 hour ago, AlanF said:

Do you understand the difference? It's a big difference, because it's not logically possible to know that no "gods" exist in the entire universe, but it's quite reasonable not to believe in any gods, just as it's reasonable not to believe i

Captain Kirk, Picard, and his successors went to the very limits of the galaxy and never found any, though he did find some wannabes here and there. No gods at all out there, only coneheads and boneheads, courtesy of evolution, their behaviors determined by evolutionary psychology.

[AlanF]

43 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Captain Kirk, Picard, and his successors went to the very limits of the galaxy and never found any, though he did find some wannabes here and there. No gods at all out there, only coneheads and boneheads, courtesy of evolution, their behaviors determined by evolutionary psychology.

Yet another boneheaded comment from the reigning local champion of non-sequiturs.

[TrueTomHarley]

1 hour ago, AlanF said:

Yet another boneheaded comment from the reigning local champion of non-sequiturs.

Kirk discovered aliens that looked pretty much like me and you, though they were more polite than you. At most they had green skin. But there were some knockout babes among them, let me tell you, and Kirk made out with every one of them.

The boneheads took a few more thousand years of evolution to appear and were not to be found until Picard’s time. Later there appeared the Borg, who very much resemble those who oppose the Work today.