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What's funny - and sad - is hearing/reading a JW's thoughts and thinking: those poor, deluded souls think they know what's true.
Please feel free to spout forth your great wisdom of what is True, I am sure no one will be the least interested, but it will give you a sense of relief.
Please feel free to spout forth your great wisdom of what is True, I am sure no one will be the least interested, but it will give you a sense of relief.
JWs play the persecution card more than most. Just look at their literature's approach to the Holocaust: it's all about them. The difference is that JWs choose to be social outsiders (as opposed to the marginalized as a result of race, etc). They relish it.
Then they sue when governments expect them to be citizens like the rest of us.
It's difficult to "think bout it" when you haven't offered anything here.
It's customary when citing a source to actually CITE the source, rather than merely saying "(Secular reference)".
Documenting your Sources
In your lab reports you will typically use information from sources such as your textbook, lab manual, a reference book, and articles published in a science or engineering journal. When you use information from sources, you need to tell the readers where the information came from and where the readers can locate the sources. This is what citations and references are for.
A citation tells the readers where the information came from. In your writing, you cite or refer to the source of information.
A reference gives the readers details about the source so that they have a good understanding of what kind of source it is and could find the source themselves if necessary. The references are typically listed at the end of the lab report.
But even if you did provide a citation (which you did not), I highly doubt that a "Secular reference" would either discuss "Noah's time" or even suggest that "only eight humans survived" a flood for which absolutely no "Secular reference" has evidence for. This is how bad reasoning works:
State data, with a source ("In Noah's time it has been calculated that an average of 10 billion people were on the earth, with an extended possibility of 17 billion. Only eight humans survived. (Secular reference)")
Assume the existence of a Biblical Flood without providing the same quality of data (a so-called "Secular reference") to back it up, and then reach a conclusion that does not follow: a non sequitur fallacy ("Only eight humans survived[the Biblical Flood]")
Bad reasoning, which is typical of JW literature.
But we don't need a secular scholar to tell us that a world-wide flood never happened in Noah's time. Even religious scholars and commentators admit this, and to pick just one random example from what is even an older source:
That the biblical account [of the Flood] as a whole goes back ultimately to Mesopotamian sources is a fact that is freely acknowledged by most modern scholars....
...The ultimate inspiration for the Mesopotamian cycle of Flood narratives can only be a matter of guesswork at this time...
(E. A. Speiser - Genesis: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible Series (Doubleday: 1962), pp. 54-55)
ME: So that is it them, Mr Speiser has now revealed that he alone knows what happened, Isn't it wonderful we have such geniuses around to set it right.
Secular or religious sources - there is no evidence for a world-wide Flood, and what evidence we DO have for floods from the ancient Near East are minimal and localized at best. Just see one of the sprawling Flood threads in this very forum, or pick up virtually any non-JW religious commentary on Genesis that isn't 200 years old.
You have the ability to write all this very unimportant stuff but lack the ability to search the net to see if there is secular reference to population at the time of Noah? Curious concepts. But I guess it is good to air one's knowledge of lack of it , occasionally.
Coincidentally Mordant, I too am 59 years old. I was an impressionable 11 years old when this was written and I bought it hook, line and sinker because I loved my father, who was totally invested in the Witnesses and I believed that I loved God. As a result I left school at 16 to have a career preaching the Good News to worldly people to try to save hem.
I could have had a career as an archaeologist or an architect, a historian or a librarian... instead I was a window cleaner for most of my working life. I have no pension except the state one (UK), but I'm not bitter. It is what it is, except to say that the Watchtower Society are still putting out messages like this, as recently as 201:
"No doubt, school counselors sincerely believe that it is in your best interests to pursue higher education and to plan for a secular career. Yet, their confidence lies in a social and financial system that has no lasting future." Watchtower 2012 Jun 15 p.23
The statement from 1969 was untrue... bluntly put, a lie, and whether they want to dress it up as 'old truth' or misunderstanding, the fact is, it drastically altered my and many others futures and the fact that they continue to put out such irresponsible messages is what moves me to speak out against them.
That is so unfortunate and one can only guess at the limitations it has put on career choice for millions of kids.
My evangelical beliefs of origin was also apocalyptic, but with an emphasis on "no man knows the day nor the hour" of Christ's return and the end of days. I think we had accepted that since it was 2,000 years and counting, it could be tomorrow or a thousand more years hence, so no one was encouraged to act like the world was sure to end any year now and not plan to live out their full life. Besides, many felt that the end would not come until the gospel had been fully preached to the entire world. That was the impulse behind organizations like Wycliffe Bible Translators, to have a translation of the scriptures in the language of every native speaker on earth, which they felt was one of the prerequisites for the gospel to be considered fully disseminated. That task was and still is incomplete.
Still, we had some of the JW's aversion to higher education because it tended to turn our young people in a liberal if not secular if not unbelieving direction. Yet ... we understood that our kids could not compete in the workplace or be able to provide well for their families without higher education. So our hedge was to found organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ, to try to maintain religious faith on secular campuses, and to found church-affiliated colleges, often with an in loco parentis philosophy, where we could send the young with less concern about "worldly influences" and with more control over how education was "spun". As it turned out, this did not work all that well, the attrition rate for Christian youth in secular universities is still brutal, and running your own diploma mills is expensive and prone to difficulties, not least that to be state accredited you must for example teach evolution as accepted science.
As you can imagine, while our aversion to higher education and the professions was not as great or pervasive as the JWs, it still had a dampening influence, sending countless naive waifs out into the cold cruel world to collide with hard reality with results both hilarious and sad. Often we were under-socialized and didn't really know how to function, and that was before the rise of the Internet and social media.
I was fortunate to find ground-floor opportunities and low-hanging fruit in the information tech sector, during a brief window of time when one could succeed as an autodidact in that field. My parents neither encouraged nor discouraged me or my three older brothers to pursue higher education. Two of us didn't go to college, one went to a Baptist-run school and became a youth pastor, then an entrepreneur in Christian publishing; only one of us actually got a degree, in engineering, at the master's level.
So this is not unique to the JWs so much as it's particularly strident and egregious with them.
You have the ability to write all this very unimportant stuff but lack the ability to search the net to see if there is secular reference to population at the time of Noah? Curious concepts. But I guess it is good to air one's knowledge of lack of it , occasionally.
That's right, it's "unimportant" to be credible when you engage others in an online forum. It's "curious" when someone points out the proper way to cite a source.
The burden of proof is always with those making a claim. It's not other people's jobs to disprove something that has not been proven by the speaker.
And as I said previously, there are no "Secular references" to a Biblical Flood in which only 8 people survived. Convenient how the only content you got out of my post was how "curious" and "unimportant" it is to be accurate and credible.
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