TrueTomHarley

56 minutes ago, AlanF said:

I've done so many times. Again you show you haven't the mental wherewithal to understand -- which is why you so well fit descriptions of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

I think you have not done so even once. All you have done is to assert you are smarter than anyone else.

7 minutes ago, AlanF said:

You still haven't enough mental horsepower to understand how well it applies to YOU.

Nor have you mustered up the effort to explain why you think it does.

On 1/2/2021 at 2:20 PM, AlanF said:

Naaaah. You already know you'd have a lot of trouble with such rocket-science.

Okay—I did watch it.

Sigh....it is the Child’s game of King of the Mountain played on an intellectual plane by Adult Children—to the same self-aggrandizing end and with the same pushing and shoving techniques.

14 hours ago, AlanF said:

Here's a good video for you. It's animated, so you should be able to understand it:

“Hi! Here’s a video that insults you! Please watch it. It only takes 10 minutes”

For crying out loud, Alan. If you don’t have a life, why should you assume that is true of everyone else?

Please contact your ally @Ann O'Maly, who counsels from the school guidebook. See if you can work on the point ‘Introduction that motivates.’ See if you can imitate her manner, while you’re at it. She makes points every bit as substantial as you without being personally nasty at every step.

Had you presented it in an adult way I might actually have taken a look at it.

2 hours ago, Ann O'Maly said:

Make sure that the features of your illustration really apply to the lesson you are teaching

That being the case, put down the violin and pick up the dentist’s drill.

9 hours ago, AlanF said:

You're just too dumb to understand.

You shouldn’t just dissolve into a mass of hurling insults, Alan. I actually take pleasure when you do that. It means I’ve “won” and like Cool Hand Luke you keep coming when you have nothing.

It’s like watching those old Donald Duck cartoons when a thoroughly frustrated Donald goes ballistic. I love that part.

You know, it started as a joke. Explaining a metaphor to Ann that any child would instantly understand, it reached the point of my posting a tree fallen across the road with the comment that it was blocking “Evolution Row.”

Of course, that was a reference to Desolation Row, and I afterwards posted the lines with that phrase.

Sometimes something gets in your head and you knock it around a bit and come up with something more. “Evolution” Row is actually not a bad interpretation of the song. Take this portion:

At midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders and then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles by insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row.

Anyone familiar with the Bible (as Dylan is—he did a stint as a born-again Christian. Listen to Slow Train Coming, for example, and you’ll see he is thoroughly familiar with scripture) will know who is “all the agents and the superhuman crew.”

At the darkest time, they round up everyone “who knows more than they do.” Well, nobody knows more than does the “superhuman crew,” so it must be a reference to those who think that they they know more than others, who think that are very smart indeed and that take great pleasure in parading their knowledge before everyone else, quick to disparage anyone in their path, ones who don’t suffer fools gladly—and a fool is anyone who disagrees with them.

Despite their self-heralded knowledge, they are “rounded up” and processed, as though in a “factory.” The knowledge that they take such pride in is nevertheless death-dealing, like a “heart attack machine strapped across their shoulders,” with “kerosene” thrown in for good measure. 

Despite their knowledge being death-dealing—settling for a few dozen years lifespan at best and then eternal blackness—nobody must escape this tripe. “Insurance men” see to it. Nobody will escape from Evolution Row. (Of course, Dylan actually wrote “to Desolation Row,” not “from,” but it was probably a typo.) Let us not forget that the evolution teaching (in its full measure— not counting the intelligent design variety) is desolation to the Bible based hope of living forever on a paradise earth.

Naw, I don’t really think Dylan had that in mind. Other stanzas don’t so readily lend themselves to that interpretation. But it’s not a bad interpretation all the same. Dylan often writes in a stream of consciousness and doesn’t necessarily have any underlying message. It’s like decrypting Kafka. The tone is distinct, but the underlying words can be taken any number of ways.

2 hours ago, AlanF said:

Yeah, he pulled a gun on the Writing Department.

Give it up, TTH. You're nowhere near as clever as you think.

You also didn’t answer my question, you blowhard.

If, as you say, the Watchtower dumped him the moment they learned he basically believes in evolution, only allowing for its “edge,” why did they publish their interview with him, in which he is quite open as to how he thinks?

2 hours ago, AlanF said:

You're nowhere near as clever as you think.

Fortunately, that is not a liability when speaking with you.

So far so good. Introduction pared from 7000 words to 4100. Chapter 1 from 6500 to 4800, with no harm done to the narrative. In fact, it is enhanced by being less obscured with what is superfluous.

17 minutes ago, Ann O'Maly said:

... which life then channels through and/or gets around.

A pure article of faith.

18 hours ago, AlanF said:

Ah, Behe. The Society used him as an authority until it figured out that Behe actually accepts evolution -- but a divinely guided sort

Did he force them to publish the interview, too, which plainly shows what he believes?

21 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Yes. It is a blockage on Evolution Row.

The only sound that's left after the ambulances go Is Cinderella sweeping up on Evolution Row

And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing, he's getting ready for the show He's going to the carnival tonight on Evolution Row

And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah's great rainbow She spends her time peeking into Evolution Row

You would not think to look at him, but he was famous long ago For playing the electric violin on Evolution Row

They all play on the penny whistles, you can hear them blow If you lean your head out far enough from Evolution Row

And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls, "Get outta here if you don't know" Casanova is just being punished for going to Evolution Row"

Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow And nobody has to think too much about Evolution Row

Right now, I can't read too good, don't send me no more letters no, Not unless you mail them from Evolution Row

5 minutes ago, Ann O'Maly said:

@TrueTomHarley, maybe the tree has an antitype? 

Yes. It is a blockage on Evolution Row.

20 minutes ago, Ann O'Maly said:

So, what does the rickety car represent, @TrueTomHarley? Is there an antitype in there somewhere? 

I ran it into a tree. This is what it represents:

and this one represents the “science” that has me celebrating my fixed glove box rattle:

14 minutes ago, Ann O'Maly said:

What, in your metaphor, was analogous to a living organism, @TrueTomHarley? You, the driver? What mutation did you spontaneously develop that caused you to lose control of the car? 🤪

Yes, in a living organism, the beneficial mutation is passed along to the next generation . But so are the hundreds of harmful ones. And the idea that the beneficial mutations successfully swim upstream against a torrent of harmful ones, like spawning salmon in the Chinook, is a sell that makes any religious claim of faith look like a square deal in comparison.

6 minutes ago, AlanF said:

Again descending into gibberish.

Don’t you have any sense of metaphor at all? Are you nothing more than an insulting tabulation machine....or a tabulating insult machine?

They don’t survive, is the point—just as the beneficial mutation (my solved rattle) does not survive the hundreds of deleterious mutations (my towed-away car).

21 minutes ago, Ann O'Maly said:

And many mutations are beneficial or harmless to the organism 

That may be, but when I drive my car into a tree, it hardly matters that I have solved the rattle behind the glovebox. Nor does the solved rattle somehow stop the car from being wrecked.

3 hours ago, Arauna said:

Science is now the God of this world..... unfortunately. Soon we will see a science or tech dictatorship take over the world with the "great reset" .... then you will experience the wonders of corrupt human knowledge and you whow ' your god' cannot save you

Science works tolerably well in areas such as physics and chemistry. It is on less firm ground when it goes into biology, largely because it is so easily coopted by those with monied interests (which its devotees never seem to notice).

When it veers into matters of origin it is also on less firm ground.

When it turns into social matters, the ground becomes like Jello. And when it expands into such things as evolutionary psychology, it becomes downright silly.

You'd almost think the responsible players of science would distance themselves from the upstarts, so as to preserve the overall reputation of the word. 

Walking the dog, who has more emotional maturity than Prince Charming, yesterday, I came across one of those placards that has become common in the U.S. recently, listing a few unrelated items of what "this household believes."

One item is that they 1.) believe in love, not hate. Another is that they 2.) believe that "science is true." Now, I have nothing against science so long as it does not present itself as the be-all and end-all, but it strikes me that these two items do not exactly dovetail. Love is more closely associated with spiritual things, in our case with the sayings of Jesus. Science is more closely associated with survival of the fittest, hardly a recipe for love. 

So along come the evolutionary psychologists who will spin some completely made-up and silly narrative on how love evolved because natural selection found that animals without love yawned with unconcern as predators were devouring their offspring, so they died out, and only the loving animals survived.

Fortunately, it is perfectly possible to be a scientist and not drink all the KoolAid. Many scientists believe in God.

28 minutes ago, AlanF said:

But it's still on the books. Therefore, it's still "present truth".

You’re a real piece of work, aren’t you? Of course it isn’t. 
 
If you got in trouble with any elders over this, it is because you carried on there as you do here. It has little to do with whatever question began the discussion.

11 minutes ago, AlanF said:

Nonsense. Tell us please: in what publication did the Society announce that it was abandoning

5 hours ago, AlanF said:

These topics are rarely discussed by JWs today,

You just answered your own question. Such things don’t have to be formally repealed since they were never law to begin with. If it hasn’t been mentioned in 50 years, it probably is not a big deal any more. 

Recall that the Awake interviewed Michael Behe, who accepts evolution in the main but simply argues that it has limits. They would not have done that if the two hated each others guts.

They point is that they are not dogmatic. They are open to things that does not trash God. They are not dogmatic. You are the dogmatic one—you who huff and puff your “righteous anger” to whoever does not yield to your bullying.

22 minutes ago, AlanF said:

You should call up Fred Franz on the earth-heaven phone and instruct him that the dozens of books and magazines that discussed them at length should never have been published.

Yeah, they changed those things.

They are very open about it. It is called the “light getting brighter” and/or “tacking.”

There is no mystery about such changes. They do it all the time. The only ones who go apoplectic about it are iconoclasts like you, furious with anyone who does not give due respect to mommy science.

14 minutes ago, Ann O'Maly said:

To be fair, 'The Genesis Flood' was written before the mechanics of crustal plate movement were fully known and published.

Since this is MY thread—JWI said so, though I’ve barely said a word on it—it’s appropriate for me to say that I don’t do floods—the cost/benefit ratio doesn’t work out.

https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2009/03/i-dont-do-floods.html

1 hour ago, JW Insider said:

As I move old posts into this new topic, the oldest ones will appear to the starter/owner of this topic, even though that person didn't create this topic.

Yeah, thanks a lot. How did I get to head this cat fight, other than to say on an unrelated topic that when science says “Jump!” you needn’t immediately respond with, “How high?”

Even 4Jah jumps in—he of the True Anointed expectation! There is no way he is an evolutionist, but here is thick as thieves with them! Why can’t he and Witness (one of his true anointed, I think, or at least she does) and Matthew 4-5784 join forces and combat Ann and Alan and leave us out of it?

2 hours ago, AlanF said:

These topics are rarely discussed by JWs today

That’s because they are Bible teachers. Let scientists be scientists and Bible teachers be Bible teachers. One way to deal with cognitive dissonance is to say that you don’t have to know everything. Another way is the say you don’t have to know it now. Some things clarify with time. “I know what I know” is enough, like Paul Simon says.

The clarifications sometimes come from us, as they did with the days of creation being “epochs” and “aeons.” Focus on attributes of the heart. For every saying of Jesus about the head, there are ten on the heart. That is the direction in which truth lies.

The Introduction to Dear Mr. P originally contained 7000 words. Now it is 5100.

A few of those deleted words may find their way into the Afterword, which has now become the Foreword.

....

Somebody should have told me the ebook was no good. Why didn’t someone tell me?

”Bob, give me your gun!” the Joker ordered, and the thug, faithful to the end, immediately forked it over.

Ah, rats.

In preparing the Dear Mr. Putin for print, I’ve come to think that it is not very good. I don’t like it. It was too much of a rush job. About 50% is good. But it is not integrated well. I am giving it a thorough shakedown before print. I’ll bet I can say everything I mean to say in 3/4 the words, maybe even 2/3.

Part of the problem is that the ebook doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a chronicler of events? The event are truly horrific, and they get worse by the day. Or is it a vehicle for me to witness to my faith as JW? It is both, actually, but these are not easily combined. Rather than each one buttressing the other, I think I have each one detracting from the other.

It is my first project of this magnitude. The text runs about 150K, and then there are a few hundred endnotes. I wanted to put together a complete history of events as they unfolded, as logged by international news sources, governments, and human rights groups—and the ebook does do that. It is the only such record, to my knowledge. But I wrote a great deal of it here on the WMNF as individual thread comments. Then I cooked up chapters and shook out all my comments until each fit into one of them, after which I too sloppily cobbled them together. It’s a crazy way to write a book.

I felt too much the sense of a reporter chasing a deadline, and now I almost don’t want to fix it, for the light tone I have throughout is at odds with the horrific twists the narrative has taken. But I also don’t want to put it into print as the mess that it is. I figure it will be two or three months to get it as I like, and then the new version will be both print and ebook. This book has caused me more trouble than my other 4 combined.

The revised ebook will remain free, for it is a labor of love. Of course, the print version will not be.

As to the horrific twists the narrative has taken, they are logged in this latest update from Chivchalov: 

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fcredo.press%2F234969

2 hours ago, Anna said:

but that the announcement could make it look like he was disfellowshipped because he did something bad. The days when a disfelliwshiping and dissasociation were announced as two separate things are gone

My understanding is that he wished an announcement to say: “4Jah is no longer with us, and he has released a statement explaining why” and that the elders seriously considered reading it before the congregation, but refrained only because the statement was longer than the rest of the meeting parts combined.