How did this cult start? Sorry, Google produced shit results.

ok off the top of my head

it's roots are in the advent movement of 1844 (new england states have produced more religious nuts than anywhere else) -the 'miller' movement.

pastor miller decided that according to the biblical prophesies jesus would return in 1844...



jesus didn't so he worked it out again...and still no christ.

some people realised it was nonsense, some didn't.

some went on to form the 'adventist' movement and some the 'bible students' or the 'millenium dawn'.

towards the end of the 19 century a bloke called Charles Taze Russell joined one of these group and wrote several incredibly boring books which earned him a group of followers.

these became known as the 'serious bible students' or 'zions watchtower group'

after russel died a bloke called judge rutherford took charge and the rest is well known. he started the organisatorial processes that still apply today.

if i remember he decreeded the name change to jehovahs witness back in the late 30's /earl y 40's.

anyway look up the names i've given you and get the full story.

if anyone notices any mistakes then i apologise ..its been a long time.

[This message has been edited by jackketch (edited 10-27-2004).]

here a link http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/mine/adv_fam.htm

Wow. That was educational. I'd always figured it started from a really strange acid trip or something.

I always wanted to start the Elvis's Witness - and anyone who had ever "witnessed" an Elvis sighting would like get in and all their sins would be forgiven. But then I realized I was really stoned and decided to do something smart, like finding my pants.

I thought they WITNESSED SOMETHING! :|:|:

I don't know how they started but i hope they all die of bubonic plague

The origin of the Universe is unknown -- it is the ultimate mystery of this whole story. The laws of physics which applied in the beginning are not clear, so it is hard to guess where it might have come from. There are several theories of how the Universe began.

We use the word Macrocosmos to mean "everything there is". We will see that the Cosmos and the Universe are just small parts of the Macrocosmos. So how could it have begun?

Perhaps it was created out of nothing. To us, used to the idea that energy cannot be created, this seems impossible, but even today we find two kinds of matter (matter and antimatter) being created together out of nothing in quantum fluctuations. What is more, gravitational energy is equal and opposite to the matter energy in a closed space. This means that starting from nothing gravity and matter might have separated to create the Macrocosmos.

The amounts of energy in the Macrocosmos were small. The inflation theory predicts the Universe began with only 25g of matter! However this matter was crammed into a very very tiny space, creating an extremely high energy density.

About 300 thousand years after the Big Bang, the Universe had cooled enough for electrons to be captured by protons and alpha particles to form atoms.

An electron is pulled towards a proton because their opposite electric charges attract each other. They stick together to form a totally new kind of object called an atom of hydrogen. In the same way two electrons were attracted to each alpha particle, which contained two protons, and were held close to it. The atom they made is called a helium atom.

Atoms are fantastic things. Around the outside of the atom the electron forms a large thin shell. Inside the atom is empty space, except for the tiny heavy proton at the center. An atom is like a football.

The electron in an atoms is like the skin of the football. Under this skin the atom is almost empty. At the center is something a football doesn't have. Held at the center by the electric force is the tiny proton. This is called the nucleus of the atom. The young Universe was full of hot atoms, moving around and bouncing off each other. They made a gas.

Once all the electrons were atoms trapped in atoms, the fog of the Universe cleared.

To get an idea of the size of atoms why not visit Soccearth?

A galaxy is an island of billions of stars, separated from other galaxies by a vast ocean of almost empty space. In this story we look at one particular galaxy (the Milky Way), since that is the one we know best, the one where we live. But we should not forget that, scattered far and wide across the Universe, there are billions of other galaxies, probably very similar to ours.

Galaxies are either spiral (about 70% of galaxies - similar to the Milky Way) or elliptical (about 30%). A few are other shapes. It is not clear how the different shapes arose. Spirals are probably more interesting than ellipticals, since stars are formed continuously in them. It is probably this which has allowed life to form in the spiral galaxy where we live.

After a while the stars formed in an open star cluster drift apart, probably pulled by the attraction of passing stars. Let's focus down on one star and see how it works.

A star (such as the Sun) is a ball of gas which has, at its heart, a nuclear fusion reactor. It is important to know something about how stars work, for several reasons.

One star, the Sun, is the source of almost all the energy used by living things, including humans. We could not survive without it.

If we could copy the Sun in a small and controlled way, we believe we could obtain a great deal of energy on Earth without creating a lot of pollution.

Stars are the places where large atoms are built. Past generations of stars formed the gas and dust from which the planets and life were made.

So stars play a key part in our story.

We have seen that a small red giant, up to 1.5 times the size of the Sun, turns into a white dwarf when it dies. Larger red giants, however, die in a more spectacular way.

Once the nuclear fuel is exhausted in a red giant, the core starts to cool and the internal pressure falls, leading to contraction. In large red giants this is a sudden and catastrophic event so that the star collapses. As the outer layers of the star fall they gain heat. This triggers nuclear fusion in these outer layers and they explode in a spectacular explosion called a supernova, becoming for a few days brighter than a whole galaxy.

With so much energy it is possible to fuse iron nuclei into even heavier ones such as uranium nuclei. As the star explodes it throws out the nuclei which it has made. On their way out they pick up electrons and become atoms. The helium, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, uranium and other heavy atoms made by the star are scattered back to dust in the disc of the galaxy. In this way the atoms made in one generation of stars are passed on to be used by the next.

So all the atoms in your body (except hydrogen) were made in a supernova 5 billion years or more ago.

What happens next depends on the size of the original star

Molecules are groups of atoms held together with covalent bonds. Molecules play a major part in this story.

The first molecules were formed in space. Some atoms which came out of a supernova were too light, and so moved too fast, to glue together with ionic bonds. They traveled out of the star until they were cool enough to attach to a dust grain. There these light atoms met and join together with a new type of bond called a covalent bond.

Molecules are the building blocks of life, made mostly of the atoms hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon.

The shell model of the atom explains what molecules can be formed by which atoms.

In molecular clouds in the Galaxy we can identify many of the molecules which life uses: methane, ammonia, water and formaldehyde have been identified. Amino acids, purines, and pyrimidines are possibly out there too, all forming on dust grains and eventually getting frozen into comets. This means that the raw materials of life are common in the Universe. Is life common too?

Planets are lumps of gas and rock held close to a star by the force of gravity. We live on planet Earth going round star Sun, along with eight other planets. Together these are called the solar system.

Because stars form in dark clouds of dust and molecules in open star clusters, it is difficult to watch them form. So the story of how planets formed which we have just given has not been confirmed by observation.

About 20 planets have been discovered near Sun-like stars, although they are hard to see. Looking for planets near a star is a bit like trying to watch a moth flying around a spotlight which is pointing at you -- you get dazzled by the light. See the article Giant Planets Orbiting Faraway Stars for an explanation of how they are found.

Since discs of gas and dust have been detected around some young stars, we guess that planets might be common. But none of the planets so far discovered are like our Solar System. Indeed these discoveries are challenging current theories of the origin of planets.