2nd Day at Convention

by Jourles 4 Replies latest jw friends

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  Jourles

  Ok, not too much to report for today's session except for one part. Don't have my program in front of me but the part had another CO doing it and it had to do with apostates, Satan, and the media. Boy did he tear into the apostates and the media. When speaking about those two groups as a whole, I never heard so many negative terms being spewed forth from the platform at once ---

  Here is a quick rundown > Apostates: "wanting to draw true believers away to follow them","half-truths","lies","distortions","twisting of words","manuvering the media against God's organization", etc. etc. etc. The media: Just quote the above.

  He used a great illustration on how apostates get true believers to fall away by using trickery of speech. Here's how it went(paraphrasing): "If a piece of paper is white and snow is white the paper must be snow!" There was one other that he used which escapes my memory right now, but it was the same type of illustration. When speaking about the media, he described how inaccurate they are, how they often lie and are usually persuaded by apostates to work against the organization to spread lies. He went on for about 3-5 minutes just describing different scenarios about how they bring up blood transfusion issues, CHILD ABUSE accusations, court cases where one parent is a believer and the other is not and how children get in the middle due to religious conflicts. How the media calls us a cult, how we brainwash people, etc. He basically laid it all out, every topic that YOU fine folks accuse them of doing. He closed on the media bringing up how can we trust what they say when you see them lying within thier own ranks, "just a few weeks ago, in fact, it happened." He didn't say who was the liar, but I knew he was speaking about the writer from the NY Times. The way he worded it, witnesses can discount the ENTIRE media outlet because of that one individual. His tone of voice during his talk was pumped up. You know how it goes. The diehard witnesses that are gungho are the ones that get psyched up with that kind of talk and voice modulation leading to a thunderous applause at the end.

  One more day of hell. **I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.**
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  Aztec

  Hey Jourles, if you want to get out of that last day just email or pm me and I can help. Give me your phone number and I can find something more entertaining for you to be doing..hehe!

  ~Aztec
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  Country Girl

  They can logically conclude..(woops, sorry, they don't *do* logistics) then, that whenever the media has anything *good* to say about them, it's "lies, all lies"? That when the media reports on their troubles in Russia and France, it's just lies. Hmm..

  Country girl
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  blondie

  Yes, the WTS is selective. They only say the media is bad when they give bad reports about the WTS.

  4/22/95 Awake p. 28 Watching the World ***

  Television

  or Newspapers for Accurate News?

  In Australia, television news is slipping in credibility while newspapers are gaining. According to a media study published in The Australian, "television [has] largely sacrificed accuracy, reliability and fairness to its subject in pursuit of a ‘good story.’" For example, some TV news is enhanced by old file tapes to make a more sensational story. Of the 500 news stories analyzed, 260 used file footage, the study found. If a TV news report includes file tapes, people normally expect this to be acknowledged, but this is not always done. The report states: "Research by the Ray Morgan Research Centre . . . shows the number of people who believed television was the best medium for ‘accurate and reliable news’ fell by more than 12 percentage points, from a peak of 53.7 per cent in 1986 to 41.5 per cent" in 1993.

  10/8/98 Awake p. 28 Watching the World ***

  Abuse

  by Clergy in Africa

  "Clergy sex abuse cases are beginning to surface in Africa," reports the magazine Catholic International. To prevent such abuse, some Catholic bishops are recommending more rigorous screening and training of potential seminarians. Other areas of clerical misconduct that concern the African bishops include "misuse of alcohol, and involvement in activities that are unbecoming or alien to the priestly state and vocation, such as business or trade, politics." Why have these cases only recently come to light? "A freer press and a lessening of previous Church control over the mass media," answers Catholic International, adding that "initial attempts by some Church authorities in parts of Africa to prevent unflattering news . . . have failed."

  ***

  g90 8/22 p. 7 Can You Trust the News You Get? ***

  The Encyclopedia of Sociology (French) asserts: "Radio and television may very well . . . inculcate new ideas, encourage innovatory or troublemaking trends. Because of a taste for sensational news, such media boost them from the start and exaggerate their importance."

  If we do not want our values to be molded by the media, what can we do? We should follow the wise counsel found in the Bible.
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  Gopher

  This one's a classic:

  "wanting to draw true believers away to follow them"

  Unbelievers want true believers to "follow them"? How? Where? Is there a secret unified anti-JW organization to which people are being led?

  One of the criticisms of apostates that I had heard while a JW is that "the apostates just want to get you to leave the Witnesses. They don't direct you anywhere in particular, they just want to get you out of 'God's organization' ".

  So again, how do unbelievers want to draw true believers away to follow them? Nonsense.