by jwfacts 89 Replies latest watchtower bible
"Make the most of your singleness"
Oh boy...I'm sure thats a good one. Because a bunch of twenty and thirty-somethings just love the fact that they spend all of their waking hours serving the WT corp and they have no life.
Oh, and they arent getting any action either. That has got to be a sure fire recipe for Prozac.
I guess I serve as a warning to the boys back in my old congregation. I'm a college graduate, and while it took me like, 6 years to leave the religion, I did it. Must've been college, right? Riiiight...
I like so many of the comments here--and how boneheaded so many of the Society's "personal experiences" are. I took one computer course in my first year of college, so I can say from personal experience that you CANNOT be a computer programmer without some kind of extra education. It is impossible. It's just too complicated a field. Sort of like the guy who gets offered a sports scholarship out of nowhere, somehow, without ever having played any football for any team? Yeah.
That is a new one. Bible School for Single Brothers. Way to elevate one group of brothers above the other. Guilting people for partaking in the so-called divine provision of marriage is like downing people for eating steak while eating a hamburger. People are struggling with so much trying to keep up with their rules and requirements and they do nothing but make you feel worse. No army can survive that without serious amounts of desertion, especially when incompetent leaders are in charge. No reward, only more pushing an already beaten-down flock. God, these people are idiots! I am so glad I don't have to put up with their crap anymore! I will drink to that!
--sd-7
Oh boy...I'm sure thats a good one. Because a bunch of twenty and thirty-somethings just love the fact that they spend all of their waking hours serving the WT corp and they have no life.
Oh, and they arent getting any action either. That has got to be a sure fire recipe for Prozac.
Or in my case, Paxil, and Xanax.........
The thing...there ARE jobs out there. Many more than you would expect, frankly. But what do all of them require? Yep. Advanced skills and education - the kind that many Americans don't have, let alone a JW. On the other hand, uneducated people are far more likely to accept some of the stuff they shovel out (can everyone say "overlapping generations"?)
This crap is so nauseating I can't read most of the posts. Hard to believe that they are STILL teaching people to live for today and not to worry about tomorrow, except for when the "end" comes. How many of us old timers know window washers, janitors, gardeners, cleaning ladies, etc, who are now in their 60s and 70s, and still trying to bend over or reach up without pain. My brother's 72 year old mother in law is still cleaning houses to augment her husband's pitiful income so they can just get by. I dropped out of college in my third year because 1975 was looming. What a loser was I. So naive, and I continued to be brain-washed for the next 25 years. If I hadn't gone to vocational school in the 80s and had remained in the cult, I would still be living in a studio apt somewhere with my eyes just glossed over, like so many I see today.
I am now happy and I know it. Oh, and live in a house on a hill with company and animals and god's green earth all around. These poor kids, oh my.
Why don't the Bethel lawyers and college grads return their diplomas? This is why I fled. My father threatened to pull me out of high school when he knew my heart was set on college. Fundamentally, I had more respect for my teachers and The New York Times than I did for the KH idiots. Why would be created with a quest for knowledge if it were so evil. And education is ok when it serves their tune. Look at female lawyers. College says we can compete on a level playing field based on merit. JW professionals know someone or sleep with someone. How revolting for a Witness to be educated in any case.
May I be that college might give someone the urge to pick up a Bible and to see what it truly sees? When I read consecutive verses I was shocked by the outright lies I was taught. The Bible, word of God vs. a sleazy, plastic flower nerdy types? Which should I choose?
My father threatened to pull me out of high school when he knew my heart was set on college.
Wow, that's outrageous.
-Sab
If I hadn't gone to vocational school in the 80s and had remained in the cult, I would still be living in a studio apt somewhere with my eyes just glossed over, like so many I see today.
Is it really that many?
-Sab
"...in Jesus' Time there was no higher education, the only higher education there was, was being able to read.... Education didnt create glory... "
Actually, CyberJesus, higher education was well-establishd in both the periods of classical Greece and Imperial Rome. Although it wasn't in quite the same form as it exists today, higher education was fairly common in "Jesus' " time...
From this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Ancient_Rome
"The first schools in Rome arose by the middle of the 4th century BC.[2] These schools were called ludi (singular: ludus), the name being derived from the Latin word for "play," and like modern play schools were concerned with the basic socialization and rudimentary education of young Roman children. In the second half of the 3rd century BC, an ex-slave named Spurius Carvilius is credited with opening the first fee-paying ludus[3] and thereby forging a teaching profession in ancient Rome. Nevertheless, organized education was relatively rare at this time, as we have very few primary sources or accounts of Roman educational process until the 2nd century BC. ..."
"At the height of the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire, the Roman educational system gradually found its final form. Formal schools were established, which served paying students (very little in the way of free public education as we know it can be found).[3] Normally, both boys and girls were educated, though not necessarily together. ..."
"Following various military conquests in the Greek East, Romans adapted a number of Greek educational precepts to their own fledgling system.[1] Roman students were taught (especially at the elementary level) in similar fashion to Greek students, sometimes by Greek slaves who had a penchant for education.[3] But differences between the Greek and Roman systems emerge at the highest tiers of education. Roman students that wished to pursue the highest levels of education went to Greece to study philosophy, as the Roman system developed to teach speech, law and gravitas. ..."
"In a system much like the one that predominates in the modern world, the Roman education system that developed arranged schools in tiers. The educator Quintilian recognized the importance of starting education as early as possible, noting that "memory ... not only exists even in small children, but is specially retentive at that age".[4] A Roman student would progress through schools just as a student today might go from primary school to secondary school, then to college, and finally university. Progression depended more on ability than age[3] with great emphasis being placed upon a student's ingenium or inborn "gift" for learning,[5] and a more tacit emphasis on a student's ability to afford high-level education. ..."
Also, from this website: http://www.roman-empire.net/society/society.html
"In the early days of the Roman republic, the education of children was completely in the hands of their parents.
Even as great and powerful men such as Cato the Elder or Aemilius Paulus took their time to personally teach their children basic skills like counting.
....
But with the growth of the empire in the third century BC the wealthier households gradually began to send their children to schools which employed educated Greek slaves as teachers.
Towards the end of the Roman republic, with the increased wealth of a part of Roman society education began to further improve, including also a form of higher education in subjects such as philosophy and oratory. The children of the wealthy went to primary school from about the age of seven. Such schools would usually be housed in a simple shop, with open access to the street. It would be run by one teacher and the children would sit on simple benches. Their day would begin early in the morning and last roughly the middle of the afternoon, with a break in between for lunch. They would learn basic things such as reading, writing and arithmetic. If this basic education was for both girls and boys, then at the age of twelve, education would stop for all girls and most boys.
Those boys who seemed most promising - and whose parents could afford more schooling - would now continue on being trained until they reached manhood and received their toga virilis. Their education now would largely center on Greek and Latin literature.
This level of education was by now far removed from the early republican Romans to whom the basic skills of reading, writing and counting seemed enough.
There seems to be little evidence that corporal punishment was any more frequent or severe than it was in many western schools well into the twentieth century.
The school year begun in March after the Quinquatrus, a holiday in honour of Minerva. There were holidays on festive days and every ninth day (nundinae). There is no proof for the existence of summer holidays, but historians assume that some such period will have existed.
The languages of Greece and Rome were taught in the school of the grammaticus (or in the case of rich households by a grammaticus visiting the house). Poetry was particularly studied, and some attention was given to the fundamentals of history, geography, physics and astronomy (at least such necessary to understand the poetic texts). It is in this function that the grammatici in Rome, who were largely Greek, decided much of the fate of Roman literature. For it was to a large extent their choices of texts which influenced the later taste and literary tradition of Rome. Texts, however refined, which were not read in schools and were therefore not in demand went out of circulation and did not survive
The use of Greek became widespread in the Roman world through such education, particularly in aristocratic families. Even plays were written which required from their audience that it understood at least some of it. Even many women of noble households, despite their inferior education, understood Greek.
Rhetoric, a subject hard to imagine being widespread at modern day schools, was introduced to Roman schools early on. It appeared to have originated in Sicily as early as the fifth century BC and was further developed by the Greeks of Athens and Asia Minor (Turkey).
Within rhetoric itself, there was three defined subjects; the pure art form itself, to be learned as any other art to broaden the mind of the individual; persuasion, the ability to win an audience over to one's point of view; and legal oratory, the ability to act as an effective speaker in a court of law.
If rhetoric was taught from the early days of the republic onwards, then by the first century AD there was special schools which could cater for the more advanced pupils.
The basic schools did introduce children into the traditional Roman faith, adding further to the moral values which children would be given at home. But the older boys would also be introduced into the basics of Greek philosophy. This led to the upper classes finding alternative, more sophisticated world views than merely old superstitions and the Roman state religion. And so Greek philosophy and art established itself at the very heart of Roman identity. And the wealthy were eager to expose their offspring to the sophistication of Greece. Cicero in his youth listened to lectures given by great Greek philosophers like Phaedrus the Epicurean and Philo of Larissa. Horace as a young man studied in Athens, being exposed to the various branches of Greek philosophy. ..."
It's interesting to note that the New Testament itself was written in Greek instead of Hebrew, which indicates that the Hebrews were following the example of their Roman overlords and educating their children in classical Greek... I have been told that some of "Jesus' " comments themselves are quotes from Greek philosophers - though I haven't had time to find which Greek philosophers "Jesus" was supposedly quoting...
Just throwing that out there... If the Watchtower Society was claiming [in that article...?] that the Jews of 1st century A.D. were not exposed to the concept of "higher education", then they're as wrong on that count as they are on the actual date of the destruction of Jerusalem...
Zid
One more thought on this. You are looking for a really smart lawyer so you go out and interview 2 lawyers. When you enter the first lawyers office you see all of his credentials and diploma on the wall of were he went to college. When you enter the second lawyers office all you see is a framed letter saying I have read the WT and Awake for 20 years so I am as smart as a lawyer. Which one you choose? Totally ADD
