To us statements like this seem obviously ridiculous, but it's really quite clever. This is spoonfeeding the r/f the thought stoppers they'll need to keep themselves from seeing reality. It's pretty standard cult indoctrination - reframe all that is bad as evidence of evil Satan and all that is good is the result of god's love.
OneEyedJoe
JoinedPosts by OneEyedJoe
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Ridiculous statements in this weeks study article
by the truth is mine inmaybe it is just me but when i read this paragraph all i could do is shake my head and wonder how i used to buy into this crap and how people don't wonder what the hell the writers are thinking'.
"imagine what life would be like if god did not have love for mankind.
we merely have to look at the awful history of this world with its human rulerships under its unloving and wrathful god, satan the devil.
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There are some real beauties posted here!
by stillin inthis one is worth repeating.
it was buried in a thread and u've been thinking about it all day.. a quote from mark twain, one of my all-time heroes.. "it's easier to fool a man than it is to convince him that he has been fooled.".
isn't that the truth....
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OneEyedJoe
In the same vein, I love this Carl Sagan quote:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
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looks like the org. stopped all the "leaks"
by nowwhat? incedars site hasn't had anything new since september when the new mid week meeting was disclosed.
wonder if the moles were caught.
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OneEyedJoe
Maybe the new light got too bright and they're still waiting for their eyes to adjust.
There haven't been any changes since the midweek meeting got changed, so why would you expect to have gotten a leak of something?
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Are You Raising An Introvert?
by darth frosty inits not easy being an introvert in an extrovert worldespecially when youre a kid.
it is even more difficult if none of the adults in the kids life recognize that the child is an introvert.
this doesnt happen only when the childs parents are extroverts, but also with introverted parents who have never understood their own introverted nature.. .
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OneEyedJoe
You're the Mastermind! Wow, it sure is lonely at the top and being one of the rarest and most strategically capable introvert types! Masterminds, like you, know this all too well. Masterminds form just two percent of the population! It's no surprise that it's often a challenge for you to find like-minded individuals who are able to keep up with your relentless intellectualism and chess-like manoeuvring! Masterminds are imaginative yet decisive, ambitious yet private, amazingly curious, but they do not squander their energy. You are truly one of a kind!
Looks like the test is a slightly simplified myers briggs test. I think I recall the INTJ type being referred to as the mastermind as well.
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Infighting at the top?
by JeffT inwe've all been trying to decipher what is going on at the top of the watchtower organization.
clearly, the game's afoot, we just don't know what game we're playing.
item: the constant harping about money and donations.
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OneEyedJoe
There are many possibilities. Letts seems to live in a nest in cloud cuckoo land (mouth open and always expecting food). His deliberation reassuring the true believers that there is more evidence for the Kingdom having come in 1914 than there is for electricity or gravity might be a clue. His statement is fatally flawed and here is my point; that many of the GB must know it is.
To be fair, these were not necessarily Lett's words. At the convention I went to Losch said exactly the same thing when he gave the talk. Lett just happened to be the one that gave the talk that was recorded and distributed online.
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"I thought About You" Email
by BeautifulMind inhey everyone!!
i hope everyone is doing good today.
i don't share or comment often, but i'm in the mood to do that today.
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OneEyedJoe
In a weird way I hope I get an email like this at some point. My reply will be a point by point rebuttal/refutation.
I was never actively serving god. Perhaps no one in the congregation hurt me, but it was the systematic lies, deception and control of the governing body that caused me to leave. Assuming you believe their claims to speak directly for god, then yes it was Jehovah that offended me. Yes my life is happier and more meaningful since leaving. My dedication was the result of fraud, so I view it as null and void so there's nothing for me to live up to. When will his day come? It's been "soon" for over 100 years and every prediction (1914, 1925, 1940s, 1975, 2000, within a generation of 1914) for when it will come has failed. Why should I return to the organization that defrauded me for safety they don't provide from an event that only they claim is coming?
Maybe that's a little much but whatever. If they want to make assumptions about why someone's not in their cult anymore, they should be prepared to have those assumptions challenged. Obviously, though, this approach really only works if you're willing to let the cards fall where they may and get DFed.
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OneEyedJoe
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How far will they go?
by careful ini've been drawing back lately and looking at the big picture going on in the org, somewhat like slimboyfat has also been doing, but i am wondering about different possibilities.
so the current gb has modernized recently in various ways.
they have done a strong and sudden about-face regarding the electronic world, from viewing the whole thing suspiciously and condemning bros. use tablets from the platform to suddenly embracing them and causing the r&f to do so to such a degree that old ones are spending hundreds of dollars to buy devices that they have no clue how to use; they have heavily embraced this media for their message, very much like the churches have been doing for years, especially with their jw broadcasting and their caleb and sophia animations.
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OneEyedJoe
My question would be - how does allowing facial hair or being more flexible on dress help them? The modernization helps them by implementing new forms of indoctrination or cost cutting measures, but I don't see how becoming more flexible on other things really helps them directly. Perhaps a case could be made that they might think that the dress/grooming restriction is limiting new membership, but I sincerely doubt that is the case. None of the changes they've made have relaxed their control for no real gain.
I hope they do relax the dress/grooming restrictions, though, because that would be a big step towards the eventual dissolution of the cult, the way I see it. Those controls are a big part of the BITE model that they use to keep members indoctrinated, so if they were to relax things it might allow a few more to wake up and leave. With AMIII at the helm, though, it seems wildly unlikely that will happen.
Changes I see as being more likely is further downsizing, consolidation of KHs and congregations, and further cost cutting measures. Maybe something like allowing online preaching to count so that they can puff up their stats. Things that reduce their costs or liquidate assets are probably going to be the biggest and most likely changes we'll see, IMO.
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To me this seams like more than a coincidence ...
by Greybeard insorry if this has been discussed before.... for a few days now, this question has been going through my mind.
what was the date the governing body took the sole role of the faithful and discreet slave and how close was it to the end of the mayan calendar in december of 2012?
i looked it up on jwfactes.com and sure enough, checkout the date on this article:.
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OneEyedJoe
Sorry if this has been discussed before...
I think you're probably safe. There's not too many people that would make this particular assertion.
Furthermore, I don't think it even qualifies as a coincidence. The most popular date for the "end" (which it wasn't, really) of the mayan calendar is Dec. 21 2012, so I don't see how that very specific date relates to something that happened a month and a half prior. In addition to this, if you'd bothered to follow the link referenced on the jwfacts site you would've seen that the date refers not to when this change occurred but to when the article summarizing the annual meeting was published online. The change became official JW doctrine when it was announced at the annual meeting in October. So one event happened nearly 3 months prior to the other.
Given that nothing actually happened on Dec. 21 2012 makes your assertion of some connection all the more irrelevant.
I don't know why I'm bothering with this. I just always find it profoundly irritating when people try to make something out of nothing like this.
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Evolution is a Fact #2 - DNA Functional Redundancy
by cofty inin the first thread in this series we looked at how the same protein molecule can be assembled by many different sequences of amino acids.. we took the example of cytochrome c and saw that there are many times more possible sequences than atoms in the known universe.
however the sequences in humans and chimps are identical, and as we look at species less closely related to us by evolution the more differences we find.
this is very compelling evidence for common ancestry.. in this post we are going to look more closely at the dna code behind those amino acid sequences.. the "language" of dna is made up of just 4 "letters" - a,c,g and t.. sequences of letters are read off in groups of 3 called codons.. acggcctcgaatgccttc would be read as acg gcc tcg aat gcc ttc.
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OneEyedJoe
Thanks cofty. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't making things up, and it seemed my google-fu was off last night.