there is a thread that i'm really enjoying discussing the consolidation of congregations into existing kingdom halls.
i'm realizing that the only threads that have spoken of building were related to branch offices.
we know the wts's consolidations and reopening a are a shell game of sorts but i'm wondering... is anyone seeing an increase in kingdom halls in their part of the world?
The last one around my area that I'm aware of was built in 2002. My father-in-law was high up on the local RBC and used to be out working on something probably 2-3 weekends a month, but lately hasn't had any work. Even when he was busy, it was all remodels/replacements. Interestingly, his being less busy seems to have coincided pretty closely to them "forgiving" the loans.
In short, my answer to your question is "not here."
to myself it means to seek knowledge and understanding of are selves and the world in which we live.. unfortunately history has shown whenever one tries to connect to god and of his knowledge through men who say they themselves are connected to god through spiritual wifi ie.
gb members of the jehovah's witnesses for example, one usually ends up finding a accumulation of only man's acquired knowledge.
over thousands of years of trying to connect to a god(s) for help and answers, mankind has eventually relinquished himself to seeking answers through scientific investigative acquired knowledge of the world in which we live in.
God is an excuse to be lazy. Don't understand something? It's god. Someone doesn't have it as good as you? They must've pissed off god. Want to feel superior? Imagine that god approved of you. And on it goes.
if anyone had to guess, what do you think the average age of the community actually is?.
are more millennials actually waking up or is it pretty even amongst previous generations as well?
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I'm with QMI - I'm technically in the group but don't relate to a lot of things that are considered to be their hallmarks. I was always the youngest of every group I was a part of until very recently, so I think I grew up more as a young GenXer would've.
Aside from the culture that lends itself more to sites like reddit and facebook, I wonder if the lack of a strong millennial presence here might also be down to the fact that JWs in their early 20s seem to take the whole thing a lot less seriously than folks did in my day. The less seriously they take the cult while their in it, the less painful it'll be when they wake up to the lies. If they always regarded it as a social club and just slowly and naturally fade from it as they get older and develop normal friends outside the cult, it might not even occur to them to seek out an exJW group online when they realize they were raised in a cult.
That's even assuming that they're having the sort of waking up moment that most of us here relate to - for those that don't really take it seriously, maybe they just let it go and move on and just don't care enough about it to force it into a particular box of being "true" or "lies" instead they just put it in the box of "who cares" and live their lives. The obsessive disproving of doctrine and unraveling of all the deceptions and history of the cult may, in some ways, be somewhat specific to the older crowd that took things more seriously while they were in the cult.
disclaimer: my graduate degree is in business, not science so i'm writing as a layman in this field.
yes, i know that someone is going to say that evolution does not encompass this topic and should be sectioned off under abiogenesis.
i'm not trying to argue semantics here but it seems like a case of avoiding an uncomfortable subject.
Evolution advocates have commented almost 100% as predicted so this thread is a complete success.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions. I figured the only reason someone would start a thread like this while fully acknowledging the mistake you made in the OP was so that you could avoid actually having a thoughtful discussion of the topic while being able to tell yourself "I tried."
I'm glad my instincts were right and I didn't put a lot of effort into helping you educate yourself on the topic as I normally might've.
last night, during our "christian life and ministry" meeting, we had a session on local needs.
elder opened the talk with a disclaimer saying that this was a reminder (cited psalms about how david loved jehovahs reminders).
he reminded us of how bless we are of having our own local assembly hall.
The last assembly I went to we were quoted $11 per publisher as the rate the society had set.* So $10 per publisher on top of whatever was received at the assembly seems really high. It must vary from region to region - do you know what the supposed cost of the last assembly was and what the announced deficit was?
*I've posted about this on here before but it always cracks me up to think about. The man that gave the accounts report was from my former congregation and is well known for being a little "simple" to put it nicely. So he gets up to do the accounts report and announces that the society has seen fit to raise the per-publisher rate of our assembly that they use to determine the assembly's cost. Because they had raised the cost to $11 per publisher, and there where x publishers the cost we were expected to cover was y. The way he explained it, he made it clear as day that the "expenses" of the assembly had absolutely nothing to do with the actual cost of maintaining the building and turning on the lights, etc. I don't think this is typically common knowledge among JWs, and something tells me he won't be doing the accounts report again.
i was raised as a witness and am very thankful that i am out.
having said that, i think my upbringing produced positive qualities in me.
do you believe that anything positive came from your being a witness?
There were definitely some good aspects to being a JW, though they are few and far between. Was any of the good stuff something that I would be unlikely to have gotten had I not been raised in the cult? Absolutely not.
So yes, you could say there is some good to the JW cult, but that's buying a new car at full price and upon finding out that it doesn't run you say "well at least the heater works!"
have you heard that old chestnut?
i have.. typically it's the last resort when you have dismantled a jws beliefs and they have no way of defending them.
they know they are beat so they come out with that one.. its effectively an admission that you are right and they have no argument but they are still going to attend meetings because they like the social club.. what a lame way to defend your faith..
every cell in your body contains a big book of how to build another you.. although it's approximately 3 billion letters long only a small fraction of it contains instructions on making humans.. imagine trying to use a workshop manual but it reads like somebody messed up at the publishers.
there are a few paragraphs of meaningful text followed by pages of gibberish, another page or so of useful instructions then 9 more of random words.
some of it looks like copies of original text but full of typing errors.
There is.
Please, do share.
every cell in your body contains a big book of how to build another you.. although it's approximately 3 billion letters long only a small fraction of it contains instructions on making humans.. imagine trying to use a workshop manual but it reads like somebody messed up at the publishers.
there are a few paragraphs of meaningful text followed by pages of gibberish, another page or so of useful instructions then 9 more of random words.
some of it looks like copies of original text but full of typing errors.
There is no basis whatsoever to dispute that the earth is round (oval) It is an indisputable fact.
There is no basis whatsoever to dispute that all species on earth evolved from a common ancestor. It is an indisputable fact.
How am i doing?
In case you're having trouble with it, my point is that there is a preponderance of evidence that evolution is factually accurate. If you want to come in and declare it not to be a fact, then you'll need to present some sort of evidence to support your claim. Otherwise your claim can be dismissed as easily (and appropriately) as you dismissed my claim that the earth is flat.
Edit: Arg! Cofty beat me by a millisecond!
every cell in your body contains a big book of how to build another you.. although it's approximately 3 billion letters long only a small fraction of it contains instructions on making humans.. imagine trying to use a workshop manual but it reads like somebody messed up at the publishers.
there are a few paragraphs of meaningful text followed by pages of gibberish, another page or so of useful instructions then 9 more of random words.
some of it looks like copies of original text but full of typing errors.
Facts cannot be disputed. Since there is basis to dispute evolution, it is not a fact.
Facts cannot be disputed. Since there is basis to dispute that the earth is round, it is not a fact.
I can do it too!
