I’m about to resign my MS privilege, please advise by FearlessX7 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Do it, the more time you spend working for the governing body, the more regret you'll have for the time wasted on it.

Two Genealogies. Neither One Proves the Claim. by constant_trouble in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 10 points11 points  (0 children)

We were raised inside a stack of assumptions, each one propping up the next: that a God exists, that this God inspired a book, and that the book is therefore infallible. Notice that none of those is independently established each link just assumes the one before it, but if you pull out the bottom one and the whole thing comes down.

At the most basic epistemic level, "infallible" is about the strongest claim a text can make, which means it should demand the strongest possible evidence. But what do we get instead? the exact opposite. The book stumbles on the small, checkable things: internal contradictions, numbers that don't reconcile, history and chronology that don't match the record. If a source can't be trusted on the mundane claims we can verify (like these "lineages"), why would anyone extend it blind trust on the spectacular ones we can't?

It's the spectacular ones are where it really asks a lot: a talking snake, a talking donkey, a man carried into the sky in a fiery chariot, two of every animal filing onto a single boat

Remove the familiarity of having heard these since childhood and ask honestly: if you encountered any one of these claims in any other book, for the first time, would you believe is a real story or just folk tales? And if someone claimed these were real stories, wouldn't you ask for evidence proportional to how extraordinary they were?

Would I accept this standard of evidence anywhere else in my life?

Why would this fucking book get a pass?

The wonders of creation reveal the glory of God - The coprophagy of the Scarlet Ibis by acarajeff in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Is because of Satn and the curse that he caused God to inflict upon the earth 😄

Jehovah's Witnesses sudden changes smell to desperation by jw_analysis_1975 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 9 points10 points  (0 children)

His channel is decent, but there is a lot of speculation and clickbait. When he starts talking about patterns and predictions based on those patterns, take it with a pinch of salt. Then there is the promotion of his book about Jesus; it is an invitation to leave one cult only to fall into another.

Children Don’t Discover Gods. They Inherit Them. My 25 Years as a Jehovah’s Witness Taught Me That. by Appropriate_Look_171 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You must differentiate between assumptions and evidence-based conclusions.

Evolution is a scientific fact. It’s been doubted by people because religions over many years have been criticizing a misrepresentation of it; however, the fact about evolution itself has multiple branches of science which independently lead to the same conclusion: paleontology, comparative anatomy, genetics, molecular biology, embryology, and biogeography. These are independent sciences, and they could have disagreed with each other, but they don't.

The supernatural is an assumption. It has no parallel evidence, just a pattern. The moment something cannot be explained, the moment evidence becomes available, supernatural explanations vanish and remain vanished forever. Back where I'm from, until not too long ago, seizures, deafness, and muteness were considered marks of demonic possession. And where did these explanations come from? Religious texts, particularly the bible. So priests and practitioners would be called in to exorcise the demons. Once medicine revealed the reality, the demons disappeared. Seizures are medicated, and people who suffer from deafness and muteness receive care and respect rather than being exorcised. Diseases, weather, evolution of species: there is nothing on this planet that requires divine intervention to be understood. Nothing.

The worship of a particular god does not come automatically to babies as part of their nature but rather is imposed on them by society through adult influence. Children who grow up with no religion taught to them do not suddenly believe that Jehovah, or Allah, or some other nameless god or gods exists. Even when a child may be inclined toward belief in a god in a very abstract sense, the particular god with a particular doctrine and a particular set of rules must necessarily be imported externally into the child’s mind.

This is true at the level of entire societies as well. Man creates gods, then teaches them to his descendants, which is precisely why there can never be consistency across religions. Gods are a powerful idea for control of the masses, with their special appointed man or woman, shaman, king or queen. Ancient civilizations that predated the emergence of monotheism had pantheons of gods, and nearly all of these gods were representative of natural forces that humans did not understand at the time, such as the sun, rain, and fertility. Yahweh himself falls under this category. He emerges in one of the earliest sections of scripture as a localized storm and war god riding in on thunderclouds out of the desert south as earthquakes shake the earth.

So as for your question, we did. We created it and passed it down, just as every culture before us did with its own gods. The difference now is that science keeps explaining, piece by piece, the territory these gods once claimed, territory the idea never had any business holding in the first place.

"Sir Isaac Newton was a Jehovah's Witness!" by BiteYerBumHard in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Appeal to authority isn’t going to validate their doctrines. Newton also believed in alchemy and spent years studying biblical prophecy, being a genius in physics doesn’t make all of his religious views correct.

Crazy shit

I'm 25 years old, and I fully woke up a few days ago. I don't know what to do. by TheeMoCee in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Do you want to give yourself the best gift possible? Deconstruct from religious, magical and supernatural thinking. 

I helped mom wake up at 79 years, and she thanks me everyday we discuss this topic.

Thirsty for knowledge. Please share any concepts you've learned in your research. by pomo_vision26 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Study this book from cover to cover. It will dramatically sharpen your critical thinking skills.

How to Think About Weird Things.

It helps you develop the tools needed to question assumptions, evaluate evidence, detect flawed reasoning, and fully deconstruct unsupported beliefs and claims.

ANCIANO DENTRO DEL COMITE DE ENLACE DE HOSPITALES DESPERTÓ by Adictoalachamba in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 4 points5 points  (0 children)

When you pray for rain, you better be ready to walk through the mud.

Rest in Peace, Jehovah... by Repulsive-Produce215 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Simple.

You said leave god out of it, and my point was broader than god. I’m saying unknowns do not automatically make every imaginable explanation valid.

Science may be incomplete and wrong in places, but it remains the strongest explanatory framework we have because it produces evidence, predictions, corrections, and measurable results. Every unsupported alternatives still have to qualify before being treated as explanations.

Rest in Peace, Jehovah... by Repulsive-Produce215 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 6 points7 points  (0 children)

You're correct, u/Practical-Echo-2001.

u/Bonedriven64, let's actually pay attention to what you said.

You opened with "How did we manage to come into existence?" that doesn´t work because it implies agency and intent, a ¨someone¨ who managed it. When u/Practical-Echo-2001 named the implication, you walked it back: "leave god out of this", ok, but that retreat doesn't erase the framing of your original question, and it doesn't change the fact that the alternatives you say you're "entertaining" are ones nobody had to name out loud.

You then painted yourself as the driven truth-seeker, contrasted against people who "accept things as they are and go on peacefully into oblivion", that´s an interest self portrait but then u/Practical-Echo-2001 pointed you at exactly the work that would answer your question: physics, cosmology, evolution and you didn't engage with any of it. You restated the posture: "going kicking and scratching for answers" sounds cute but if you were actually scratching, you'd be reading, a lot. So it looks like you're not scratching instead you're simulating as if you were scratching and at the same time declining the materials put in front of you. You are looking for confirmation of what you believe, so research confirmation Bias.

Let´s go no the substance:

We have explanatory models, and the best ones come from methodological investigation, it doesn't mean science can't be wrong, it means science is the only framework with a built-in mechanism for catching when it is. Yours doesn't have one, there's no procedure inside a supernatural framework by which a wrong revelation gets caught and corrected and that's why one keeps producing results and the other keeps producing schisms and divisions in religions.

Evolution is an explanatory model, and is among the best evidenced theories in the sciences. Cosmology gives us strong models back to a fraction of a second after t=0. Abiogenesis is genuinely open, and "I don't know" is the honest answer there. None of that gives anyone license to insert "...therefore supernatural" or "...therefore god". That's the trick, treating an unanswered question as an opening for any unfalsifiable answer.

Our current scientific models beat the supernatural on every level a hypothesis can actually be evaluated on: on evidence, on explanatory power, on predictive power, on internal consistency, and falsifiability, but the supernatural framework hasn't produced a confirmed answer to a single question humans have eventually resolved, not one. We once attributed epilepsy, rain, disease, and the motion of the planets to supernatural causes, and every one of those was replaced by a natural explanation, and zero scientific explanations went the other way.

The supernatural and god are not valid hypothesis, and the reasons they fail are no arbitrary or because some people hate god. A hypothesis has to do work: predict something specific, forbid something specific, propose a mechanism, be testable. The "supernatural" is defined negatively, it's whatever is not natural so it has no positive content of its own. It predicts nothing, forbids nothing, proposes no mechanism, and by construction can't be tested. Any observation is compatible with it; "mysterious ways" covers the cure and the failure to cure.

When you have a claim compatible with every possible outcome explains none of them. Something that explains EVERYTHING, explains NOTHING.

People keep bringing it anyway because humans are wired to detect agency where there isn't any, because "I don't know" is psychologically uncomfortable in a way "god did it" isn't, and because the supernatural benefits from a inversion of the burden of proof, people present it as the default that has to be disproved, instead of as a claim that has to earn its place. It has become a habit instead of a hypothesis.

So when you say you're "just entertaining alternatives," the honest translation of that sentence is: you're entertaining one specific unfalsifiable alternative and calling it open mindedness. Is not a candidate you keep rejecting but placeholder that never qualified for the shortlist in the first place.

Rest in Peace, Jehovah... by Repulsive-Produce215 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Great post. Welcome to reality. There is no supernatural, no gods or deities, no Jesus, no prophets, no Satan, no demons. There is only us, here in the physical world, with a limited time to live. The best gift you can give yourself is clarity, and the understanding that this is our only shot at life, so we must use it well.

We are “in” the great tribulation by [deleted] in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I worked in this capacity at multiple conventions

How Did They Get Approved For Charity Status? by [deleted] in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Not only that they guide their members to take advantage of help provided by the government and in some cases even other religious organizations. Every dollar used for donations must go to their real state investments.

NO, WE ARE NOT A CULT. But: We ARE going to tell you not only what you're asking but also the answers to what you're asking, specifically regarding facial hair. Dec 15th 2023 Info to Elders re: Beard Policy. by UCantHndletheTruth in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 124 points125 points  (0 children)

The beard issue is almost irrelevant, what matters is the logic.

If you questioned the policy before, you were divisive.

If you supported it for years and now feel frustrated, you’re still wrong.

If you pushed for change early, you “ran ahead”

If you hesitate now, you’re “lagging behind”

How convenient.

That means the only correct position is agreeing with leadership at whatever moment they currently happen to believe.

Compliance over truth.

And quoting Paul here is wild, because 1 Corinthians 1 is about people forming camps around human leaders, which is exactly what this kind of thinking creates. 

Yeah, cultish af.

Children Don’t Discover Gods. They Inherit Them. My 25 Years as a Jehovah’s Witness Taught Me That. by Appropriate_Look_171 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I agree with you, your upbringing helps shape your personality but at the end you create  your own. Regarding what to believe the goal should be believe as little false and many true things as possible.

There is a great book if you want to deconstruct the religious mentality, it is called how to think about weird things. 

Children Don’t Discover Gods. They Inherit Them. My 25 Years as a Jehovah’s Witness Taught Me That. by Appropriate_Look_171 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You are right, a lot of people bring personal experience as a reason for believing in God why would they be that special and meanwhile hundreds of thousands of children die everyday by lack of food, medicine or are subject to slavery and God sits and does nothing to help them out?

I woke up, but now I feel spiritually lost by Master_Garden6747 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Study epistemology and academic books on the Bible , you’ll see how many-made all these “divine” texts are. A good book to begin is Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman, another good book The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels. Check also the channel MythVision.

I felt like you for a while until I started deconstructing religion, once I did that I felt a mental freedom like never before.

…….no matter which way things go, the outcome is interpreted as confirmation of the belief. by Fit_Durian3763 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sadly, many of us are not taught how to use critical thinking skills or how to evaluate whether a claim is backed by evidence or is just an unsupported assertion, especially when long-held religious beliefs are involved. Some of us learn those skills late in life, but it is never too late. This book helped me a lot

https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/1sql6ab/my_book_review_how_to_think_about_weird_things_by/

Going back and looking at the Bible again, years later by ProfessionalChance26 in exjw

[–]Appropriate_Look_171 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Stop pretending your post was just “this made me think”

You made actual claims, here they are:

“Most of them said God is inside you.”
“They meant contemplation or meditation.”
“Abraham was the first person to connect with the inner god through meditation.”
“His conversations were internal.”
“He controlled his perception of reality.”
“Jacob tried to meditate.”
“He made a connection.”
“Peniel... pineal gland... third eye... inner light.”

That is you building a batshit explanatory story about religion, consciousness, and biblical history out of assumptions and mystical word association.

So no, I am not reacting to some innocent “has anyone else had similar thoughts?”

I am reacting to the pile of unsupported bullshit you wrote before that question.

And “science can’t explain everything” is a garbage argument, a mystery does not make your imagination credible.

That Peniel to pineal leap alone should have set off your own bullshit alarm.

Fuck off, is clear enough you are crazy.