Alec Holmes XJW

I'm an ex-Jehovah's Witness. I hope to live to see the end of the Watchtower's policy of protecting paedophiles over children.

[alecholmesxjw]

Watchtower continues crusade against higher education

The Watch Tower Society has long stigmatized higher education and dissuaded young Jehovah's Witnesses from a meaningful career as anything other than unpaid promoters of the organization. As far ba...

[alecholmesxjw]

Original Sin?

Adam and Eve sinned. They lost the paradise, mankind fell. Sin entered into the world. And now we're all born sinners, and need redemption. So Jesus comes, dies a horrible death just for that. Except mainstream Christianity does not believe that anymore. Not in just that anyway.

Mainstream Christianity which takes itself seriously today acknowledges that to ignore evolution and Charles Darwin's work--a man who belonged to the Church of England--is to risk looking stupid in the year 2014 Anno Domini. So they accept it, in fact, you'll find statements to the effect that 'evolution is totally compatible with our church's teachings'. What I still want to find is the creed which sets out in detail, whether or not Adam and Eve were literal hominids who received the first souls or if we should just not view their story as a literal account or something to explain the whole debacle.

Firstly, let's just for the sake of argument consider Genesis literal, even though we have mountains of evidence that totally and thoroughly disprove it as such. If Adam and Eve were the ones who sinned, then why do we have to pay for their sin? Wouldn't that be like going to jail because your parents were murderers? We didn't ask god to make us, so why the grudge against us?

Suppose you say evolution happened, but Adam and Eve were the first hominids to receive souls. Then, how is that compatible with evolution and mutation and genetics? It just isn't. And again, why do we have to pay for their sin?

Then we have the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who said Genesis is not literal. So if it is not literal, who were the first humans who sinned thus making us into sinners who need Jesus's sacrifice? And I must reiterate my question, why do we have to be held accountable for that?

Now, here is my view. For thousands of years, nothing challenged the theology of the Church as regards original sin. Then along comes Darwin and, oops, he discovers that Adam and Eve are no more plausible than the The Epic of Gilgamesh. Science gathers ever more evidence for evolution in the 155 years since. Christianity has a problem, how to justify the need for the redemption if we can't read Genesis literally? The solution: just don't. Just say we're sinners and we need Jesus and Genesis is a metaphor. Case closed. Well, if you can swallow that, it's up to you. To me, those books are spurious, they are man-made, not god-made, and they betray the scientific knowledge of the men who wrote them. Men made god in their image, not the other way round. There was no original sin, you are not a sinner, therefore, you don't need redemption, nor do you need scapegoat Jesus, who even if he was a real person, was not the son of god, or performed miracles.

The apostle Paul, or whoever wrote Corinthians, can be said to be writing prophetically, when he said: "But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." Indeed. Now let's get on with the business of living and have a healthy view of ourselves and our fellow primates, for fuck's sake.

[alecholmesxjw]

Iraqi women protest against proposed Islamic law in Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - About two dozen Iraqi women demonstrated on Saturday in Baghdad against a draft law approved by the Iraqi cabinet that would permit the marriage of nine-year-old girls and automatically

[alecholmesxjw]

Pope: Child abuse criticism unfair

Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of victims. For shame.

[alecholmesxjw]

The Red Cross on the Truth About Blood Transfusions

[alecholmesxjw]

Doublethink

The insidiousness of the mind control the governing body through the Watchtower holds over Jehovah's Witnesses was vividly illustrated to me personally when I briefly met my parents recently. In the absence of my sister, they related to me what happened when she had to go through an emergency operation weeks ago. Or glossed over the facts, I should say.

Firstly, the account of events my sister personally relayed to me on the phone did not match the one my parents gave me. And then I realized why and the conclusion was not surprising but revealing. They seemed to avoid points where I could ask them what had really happened or why they acted in the way they did.

My sister (who is a young adult) had wanted my father to call me to go visit her whilst she was at the hospital, he didn't. She told me the hospital staff "did not like it" when they were told she didn't take blood--she lost a lot of blood in the surgery. They didn't like it and told her she would be anaemic and would take much longer to recover, of course. My parents made no mention of this at all. Neither did they explain who spoke to hospital staff, just that my sister "saw" blood bags being taken to be used on her, told them she didn't take blood, and then they "had to" change procedure. In the middle of a surgery where the patient is losing a lot of blood? What about her blood card? I waited for that to come but nothing.

As obfuscating as this brief encounter was, it showed me how witnesses deploy doublethink as their Watchtower training prepares them for. Remember that Orwell coined the term in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where members of the party applied doublethink to be able to hold mutually contradictory beliefs without them causing cognitive dissonance. It was said to be the ability "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 as long as it is needed."

Whatever really happened, my parents knew if they told me they would be giving me ammunition to confront them with the ultimate question: What if the choice was between a blood transfusion and my sister's life? Would they, would she, offer her life in the Watchtower's altar if that was what it came to? These are questions every witness must ask themself. So in order to avoid these and other questions my parents suppressed uncomfortable details and tried to convince me of a sanitized version of events, presumably working to convince themselves of what they were saying so as to complete the doublethink.

Does anyone still have any doubts that witnesses are in no more control of their own minds than the brainwashed party members in Nineteen Eighty-Four? That they can be convicted of thoughtcrime, just for what they think, and be made to feel filthy, guilty, unworthy, hopeless sinners who without the Watchtower and the governing body would not be able to live? Then they should read Orwell and (freely) think again.

[imichaeldot-blog]

Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Christopher Hitchens (via michaeltheteacher)

[antifascistatheist]

Via https://www.facebook.com/bill.allyn.7 ..Here is our cunt of the day. .. http://www.thenation.com/blog/178588/maine-gop-lawmaker-regrets-suggesting-if-abortion-legal-rape-should-be-too

[alecholmesxjw]

Misery and mass bowing: the view from a North Korean tour bus

Restraints on foreign tourists fail to mask the hardship and mind control in country UN likened to Nazi Germany

If you think the international community has no business interfering with despotic governments, give some thought to what it must be like to live under them.

[smallswingshoes]

"Watch What This Make-Believe Girl Means To 1,000 Pedophiles"

Go sign their petition immediately.

I know my followers largely follow me for other stuff, but seriously, please watch this and reblog it.

This video is safe-for-work, but it might make your stomach churn.

If you haven’t already heard about this, get involved. This needs to happen.

Every country should employ this method to catch pedophiles. It works.

[thanoswife]

breaking news: obama is not real. obama is a fiction of our imaginations. this country is being run by our imaginary friend, barack obama

[girlkalashnikov]

One of the best twitter accounts out there

[teesadutta]

[girl-code-tips]

Girl Code.

[girlkalashnikov]

Been there

[heygloria]

"we don’t hate you for who you are, we are against the act" - religion about gay people

so basically, by all means be gay if you must. but like, don’t have gay sex. don’t kiss people of the same sex. go through life repressing who you are and without any sort of love because you don’t deserve to be treated as a human being.

that’s the logic? wow such moral, good people truly what god intended humans to be

[heygloria]

"we don’t hate you for who you are, we are against the act" - religion about gay people

so basically, by all means be gay if you must. but like, don’t have gay sex. don’t kiss people of the same sex. go through life repressing who you are and without any sort of love because you don’t deserve to be treated as a human being.

that’s the logic? wow such moral, good people truly what god intended humans to be

[stephen-fry-me-deactivated20160]

Paul Dirac

Paul Dirac of fermions , QED and the positron fame “I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can’t for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.”

One of the most sophisticated minds of the 20th Century (just look him up in Wikipedia and see how many equations and ideas bear his name) a Nobel Prize winner, and yet how simple direct and clear is his statement. It seems to me unanswerable.

[imichaeldot-blog]

[alecholmesxjw]

The Self-praising Slave: Governing Body tells pioneers to be like them

One of my final and most bizarre experiences as a Jehovah's Witness came in November 2011 when I attended my father's graduation ceremony for MTS (or "Bible School for Single Brothers," as it was b...