http://wealthydebates.com/half-americans-cant-come-400/.
there are a number of such observations being recently made - such as a large number with debts subject to collection and people facing retirement with no savings.. i advise the wts to 'take the money and run'.
hard to see this situation getting better.. .
I can't remember the last time I had less than $400 in savings. Probably would've been just before college.
I've known a few people that probably fall into that category. You stop at a gas station, and they'll buy a bunch of random crap they don't need. They always have a new TV/phone/whatever, but the moment they get a flat tire, they're looking for a loan.
have you guys asked yourself that question?
what if the gb decided that "new light" revealed to them that disfellowshipping was wrong and they would do away with it for current dfd members as well...... .......16 years of my life.
would i welcome my family back?
Where I out and shunned as long as you've been, it wouldn't change a thing for me. I'm not sentimental, though, and I don't have too much trouble moving on from disloyal friends/family.
In my situation, where they to fully remove shunning* I'd have a conversation with my wife about it but I'd almost certainly DA myself immediately.
*By this I mean people who leave aren't shunned anyway, as is the case today with "spiritually weak" ones who aren't even DF'd. Realistically, even if they abollished DFing, the individual members would almost certainly continue to shun for a generation following.
had a discussion with my wife about kh/assembly hall builds and i told her i don't believe the watchtower society follow osha standards on there build sites.
she trumpted it up that the borg follows stringent pratices and there standards would be more strict.
i laughed and said....ya i don't think so.
Not entirely on topic, but I remember one of the JWstruggle interviews a while back where he talked to an ex-bethelite that said they bragged about not having to follow OSHA standards at bethel for one reason or another.
I haven't been on a lot of construction sites, but the safety does seem a little more lax on the KH builds than the construction sites that I have been on.
i thought about this after reading incognito's thread.
i was wondering if anyone here has any idea what the president of the wt actually does or if he truly has any real power, or if he is merely the gb puppet..
From what I've read from other folks on here, he has some power, but if the GB doesn't like what he's doing they can DF him, which would cause him to lose his position. So, in reality, they have the power to do whatever they want. Of course, if it's too obvious they're DFing him without grounds, that could cause enough of a scandal that they'd lose some membership, so they probably don't want to play that card if they don't need to.
been out since about 1999. i was surprised to just read that the current president (adams) is not on the governing body.
what happened there?.
obviously prior to that the president was in charge not just of the adminstration but also seemed to be heavily involved in defining doctrine.. the president seems to have really taken a back seat.. i know this must be old news, but just showed how much i am out of touch.
The "real reason" was probably that they couldn't find anyone sane enough amongst the annointed to actually handle the day-to-day operations. You don't have to be sane to make arbitrary decisions regarding "spiritual maters." I think a lot of the recent changes prove as much.
i think everyone here can agree that walking down the street, even in the middle of the street, is not cause for having a clip emptied in your ass......... i can understand how the black community would be outraged by the injustice of seeing another black man dead in the street at the hands of the police under mysterious circumstances....... i hope that i'm not succumbing to the attempts to assinate the already well impuned character of the dead man...... however.
i can't help but think that this could all have been avoided by exercising the proper discretion with fore-knowledge of the disadvantages people of color have when they are dealing with law enforcement in the united states.
it is not as if this disadvantage has only since recently came to light.
I get what you're saying, and while I don't know all the details of this case, I do know that incidents like this almost always come down to the fact that both parties made mistakes.
The difference, in my opinion, is that one party has training, ostensibly to help him resolve situations like this peacefully. That party also wears a badge that probably has something like "to serve and protect" written on it. While I have empathy for the fact that the police put themselves at risk to help the community, they knew the risk going in and still wanted the job. Not to mention the fact that the job isn't nearly as risky as most assume.
All this leaves me with the opinion that police officers should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us.
hey all, it's been a long time since i've posted anything here.
this may be of interest to some people, or not.
and i'm not sure if this has been announced in the congregations, even, because thankfully i have not attended any meetings in quite some time.
Sir82, you missed one important detail:
It will be easier to sell South Florida property when the time is right.
WTS business model for the 21st century:
-- Buy cheap land in undeveloped and/or undervalued area
-- Use volunteer labor to construct buildings which could later be used as office space / convention centers
-- Charge rent from the people who paid for the building in the first place, so they can use the buildings for a few years, as development of the surrounding area builds up
-- Sell the buildings at an astounding profit
-- Lather, rinse, repeat
the october kingdom ministry for the united states reported the 2014 memorial attendances for the us branch office that has subsequently been well discussed in a separate thread.
in that thread, a poster asserted that in some parts of europe the attendance had been higher than last year - but to date no source evidence has been provided.. so, have memorial attendances for other parts of the world been reported in any of the publications such as kingdom ministryyet?.
if so, could you direct me to the source(s).
Man, Japan is always ahead of the trends - declining since 2004!
today's talk was really somethin'.
so much so that i felt compelled to post this during the wt study.... i didn't pay attention to the theme, but where i to title the talk it would be "logical fallacy, scripture out of context, and phobia indoctrination: a case study in cult indoctrination.".
that's certainly a more honest title than whatever they gave, i'm sure.. it starts out by saying that sometimes people are skeptical about things they're told, and feel compelled to look for evidence of the claims.
No worries, Hairtrigger. You'd really have to make an effort to offend me. Plus, I really do feel dirty when I leave that place.
You're right though, it's quite amazing how classic indoctrination techniques can be passed on implicitly to the indoctrinated. I've known the speaker for a while, and he's a genuinely nice guy so I can't even ascribe evil intentions to him. At the same time, though, he could hardly have come up with a more effective attempt at phobia indoctrination to make everyone afraid of stepping out of line. I mean seriously, he equated (and, I might add, fairly convincingly if you don't know what he's doing) any action that was even a little outside the lines (i.e. listening to one song to see what all the fuss was about) to stepping outside a shelter into a tornado - i.e. certain death. Asking people to imagine dying, then asserting that would be the result of any "curiosity" about the world. Absolutely disgusting, and yet said by a genuinely friendly, kind man.
I don't know what goes on at those elder's schools, but I assume they don't explicitly teach the elders to use phobia indocrtination, so I guess they just subconsciously know what methods were used to indoctrinate them and they parrot it out, like you say. It's just crazy to see it in action like that. I guess that's just one more indirect way cults can control people, because if you don't watch it in action knowing what's goign on, it seems absolutely insane that those indoctrinated into the cult would just sort of stumble on the ideal indoctrination methods.
as of yet, no member of the jehovah's witness faith can defend their unique beliefs.
when the dust settles, it all comes down to blind faith in men's ever-changing ideas.
this "unique belief" was not a "true teaching of the bible.
Well I guess that makes one of us.
Great thread BTW.
