Posts by Balaamsass2

31

Why do ultra rich jehovahs witnesses get a free pass when it comes to being materialistic?

by hoser in

jw
friends

i know a couple of jws in my town that are both very wealthy.

one has upscale retail stores and owns a property development company.

the other has a large service company and owns a lot of real estate.

Balaamsass2

A smile, slap on the back and a generous "green handshake" solves many problems in Watchtower land.

46

Illegal immigrants in the organization?

by silent in

jw
friends

i had a thought today that might prove interesting.

i'm wondering if there are any illegal immigrants who are witnesses?

surely it would be a great position to be in as an illegal immigrant because you could play up your plight and prey on the sympathies of others within the congregation.

In a past California hall I attended we had about 70 English publishers. We shared our hall with two Spanish Congregations with about 300 publishers. The two Spanish halls shared 4 elders (the 4 attended attended 2 meetings back to back) reason...? So few spanish JWs were legal residents and could read, they could not form a second servant body.

7

Not on JW.ORG: Wall Street Journal : Can unhappy Jehovah's Witnesses demand return of donations to Watchtower Bible and Tract Society? Some thoughts.

by Balaamsass2 in

menu

markets dan's journal

live help

Balaamsass2

JOURNAL REPORTS

When Unhappy Donors Want Their Money Back

Disappointed Gift Givers Increasingly Are Asking For—and Getting—Refunds From Charities

ENLARGE A legal dispute over a 138-acre land gift that Elizabeth Banks made to Johns Hopkins University in 1989 was decided by a judge rather than a jury. NEWELL FAMILY By CHARLIE WELLS Dec. 14, 2014 11:50 p.m. ET 2 COMMENTS

For most people, giving money to charity feels great.

Asking for the money back is a whole different story.

Yet philanthropy experts say donors increasingly are doing just that: requesting “refunds” on gifts they feel have been misused, ignored, or spent in a way that strays from their original reason for giving.

“Donors are becoming savvier, [and] they are becoming more engaged in how their money is being used,” says Doug White, director of Columbia University’s fundraising-management graduate program.

The ease of accessing financial data on the Internet, as well as a string of high-profile court battles involving donors seeking refunds, are behind the shift, he and others say.

JOURNAL REPORT

Insights from The Experts
Read more at WSJ.com/WealthReport

MORE IN WEALTH MANAGEMENT

“Twenty years ago, there was just no information market for nonprofits,” says Chuck McLean, a vice president of research at GuideStar, which publishes data on charitable institutions. “Nonprofits would just tell you what they wanted to tell you. And that was that.”

As the changes continue to unfold, there are a few key points donors should keep in mind:

Gift Rules Can Vary

One of the main problems facing refund seekers is the conflicting—and often confusing—information available on how charitable gifts are regulated.

Historically, U.S. law has operated on the principle that “once a gift is given, it can’t be taken back,” says Robert Bennett, a professor of law at Northwestern University who teaches a course on contracts.

ENLARGE

These days, however, the thinking on gifts is in a transition period, says Winton Smith, a lawyer who works with charitable organizations to set up planned-giving programs. Some courts are beginning to give donors more power over their gifts after they’ve been given.

Still, charitable-gift enforcement varies by state; different courts have different rules on whether a donor has “standing,” or permission to bring a dispute before the court.

“About 30 states have the Uniform Trust Code, which authorizes donor standing to enforce a charitable trust,” says Robert Sitkoff, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies wills, trusts and estates. But “a New York court has gone further, recognizing donor standing to enforce other kinds of charitable gifts, too.”

Craft an Agreement

The best way to protect your right to a refund is to draft a charitable gift agreement before making the donation, Mr. Smith says.

In an ideal world, such an agreement would include a “gift over” clause permitting the donor to request a transfer of a misused or unused donation to a different charity, one willing to carry out the donor’s original intent. There is less awkwardness, confusion and ill will if you tell a charity to give the money to another charity, Mr. Smith says.

Such agreements should give donors the right to go to court to enforce the terms of the gift, he says.

They also should protect the donor’s right to a jury trial, says Tim Newell, a 56-year-old from Hunterdon County, N.J. who lost a legal battle when Maryland’s highest court declined in 2013 to take up a dispute involving Belward Farm, a 138-acre land gift his late aunt, Elizabeth Banks, made to Johns Hopkins University in 1989.

The dispute over development of the farm was decided by a judge rather than a jury, a legal strategy Mr. Newell now says was a mistake. “There isn’t a doubt in my mind we would be in a completely different position if we had gone before a jury,” he says.

Johns Hopkins says it is grateful to Ms. Banks and her relatives for their generosity and is abiding by its agreement with them. “We have lived up to, and will always live up to, our agreement with them,” spokesman Dennis O’Shea wrote in a statement.

Talk It Through

While detailed gift agreements are a good idea, they aren’t the only way to prevent or resolve disputes.

Many disagreements between a donor and institution can be settled by having a rational conversation, says Eileen Heisman, chief executive of National Philanthropic Trust. She recommends focusing on finding the root cause of the dispute.

“Ask yourself why you are having these dissatisfied thoughts,” she says. “Are they emotional or intellectual? Are they actually based on what the charity is doing, or is this a personnel issue?”

When having this conversation, keep in mind that the charity’s interests aren’t necessarily at odds with yours.

Charities have a strong interest in cooperating with their donors—at least while the donor is alive, says Harvard’s Dr. Sitkoff. Happy donors tend to do something charities love: keep giving them money.

Prepare for the Consequences

Taking back a donation can have unexpected consequences. The biggest is likely to pop up around tax time.

“If you get money back, it’s just counted as income and you pay income taxes on it,” says Jill Horwitz, a professor who teaches nonprofit law at the University of California at Los Angeles. “That essentially undoes the deduction that you got before.”

Whether this will be better or worse for an individual depends on his or her income-tax rate at the time the gift was made, and the rate when the gift was refunded. There is no adjustment made for a changed rate, says Dr. Horwitz.

Perhaps the most important thing to calculate is how taking back a gift might make you feel, says Ms. Heisman, of National Philanthropic Trust. “It all comes down to one question,” she says. “How do you want to be remembered?”

Mr. Wells is a news editor in New York. He can be reached at [email protected]

9

Sunday Washington Post: Gay Christians choosing celibacy emerge from the shadows.

by Balaamsass2 in

local.

gay christians choosing celibacy emerge from the shadows.

despite encountering criticism, the lgbt community is finding greater acceptance, even in religious circles.

Balaamsass2

Seemed common to me as kid. We had a lot of "confirmed Bachelors" in our 60s hall, Circuit and Bethel. Later they were called NPGs. At the time our family considered it almost like hair color.- A little "odd", but no big deal.

28

Brother Knorr's Cadillac and other secret perks

by tim hooper in

back when i was a wee lad, my dad told me that the brothers in brooklyn had voted to purchase a cadillac motor car for the sole use of the then president, nathan h knorr.

he'd got this information from the london bethel, him being a chum of the then branch overseer, pryce hughes and his pal ron drage.

religious leaders of non-profit sects are supposed to take a vow of poverty!.

Balaamsass2

In the 70s the GB had some late model giant boat-like top of the line GM cars. The one I got trips to hall in now and then was either a fully loaded 1974 Olds Delta 98 or 95 Buick Electra. Very comfy (red velor interior) but looked like an ugly Caddy. Beat the hell out of the subway.

9

Sunday Washington Post: Gay Christians choosing celibacy emerge from the shadows.

by Balaamsass2 in

local.

gay christians choosing celibacy emerge from the shadows.

despite encountering criticism, the lgbt community is finding greater acceptance, even in religious circles.

Balaamsass2

Local

Gay Christians choosing celibacy emerge from the shadows

Despite encountering criticism, the LGBT community is finding greater acceptance, even in religious circles

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google Plus Share via Email More Options Resize Text Print Article Comments 529
Josh Gonnerman and Eve Tushnet, both of Washington, are shown on Oct. 22 in the District. Gonnerman and Tushnet are gay and choosing the path of celibacy. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post) By Michelle Boorstein December 13 at 9:20 PM

When Eve Tushnet converted to Catholicism in 1998, she thought she might be the world’s first celibate Catholic lesbian.

Having grown up in a liberal, upper Northwest Washington home before moving on to Yale University, the then-19-year-old knew no other gay Catholics who embraced the church’s ban on sex outside heterosexual marriage. Her decision to abstain made her an outlier.

“Everyone I knew totally rejected it,” she said of the church’s teaching on gay sexuality.

Today, Tushnet is a leader in a small but growing movement of celibate gay Christians who find it easier than before to be out of the closet in their traditional churches because they’re celibate. She is busy speaking at conservative Christian conferences with other celibate Catholics and Protestants and is the most well-known of 20 bloggers who post onspiritualfriendship.org, a site for celibate gay and lesbian Christians that draws thousands of visitors each month.

Celibacy “allows you to give yourself more freely to God,” said Tushnet (rhymes with RUSH-net), a 36-year-old writer and resident of Petworth in the District. The focus of celibacy, she says, should be not on the absence of sex but on deepening friendships and other relationships, a lesson valuable even for people in heterosexual marriages.

When he came out in the mid-2000s, Josh Gonnerman says church leaders were not speaking about celibacy because they had “sort of thrown their lot in with the Republican Party.” (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

Celibate Christian LGBT people are stepping out into the open for the same reason LGBT people in general are: Society has become so much more accepting, including in religious circles. But among conservative Christians, efforts toward more acceptance have collided with the basic teaching that sex belongs only among married men and women. The celibacy movement helps reconcile those concerns.

However, they are also met with criticism from many quarters, including from other gays and lesbians who say celibacy is both untenable and a denial of equality.

“We’ve been told for so long that there’s something wrong with us,” said Arthur Fitzmaurice, resource director of the Catholic Association for Lesbian and Gay Ministry. Acceptance in exchange for celibacy “is not sufficient,” he said. “There’s a perception that [LGBT] people who choose celibacy are not living authentic lives.”

The reaction among church leaders themselves has been mixed, with some praising the celibacy movement as a valid way to be both gay and Christian. But others have returned to the central question of how far Christianity can go in embracing homosexuality — even if people abstain from sex.

Al Mohler, president of the flagship Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of the country’s most respected conservative evangelical leaders, said in an interview that there is “growing and widespread admiration” for Tushnet and others, including Wesley Hill, an evangelical scholar who founded the spiritualfriendship blog.

Given that LGBT people are coming out and “being welcomed,” he said, “it is now safe and necessary to discuss these things aloud in evangelical churches — and that’s hugely important.”

But echoing the ambivalence of some conservative Christians, Mohler said he believes that sexual orientation can change “by the power of the Gospel.” He said he is not comfortable with the way in which some celibate gay Christians proudly label themselves as gay or queer.

Eve Tushnet grew up in a liberal, upper Northwest D.C. home before moving on to Yale University. “Everyone I knew totally rejected it,” she says of the church’s teaching on gay sexuality. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

“Even if someone is struggling with same-sex attraction, I’d be concerned about reducing them to the word ‘gay,’ ” Mohler said.

Josh Gonnerman, 29, a theology PhD student at Catholic University, writes for the spiritualfriendship site and speaks easily about embracing his gayness. When he came out in the mid-2000s, Gonnerman says, church leaders weren’t speaking about celibacy because they had “sort of thrown their lot in with the Republican Party” and wouldn’t talk inclusively in any way about LGBT people. The LGBT group he and Tushnet are part of at Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, he said, has gone from more of a “support group” to something more upbeat that organizes social and spiritual activities for members — not all of whom accept church teaching on celibacy.

“There is this shift from the more negative to the more positive,” he said. “In the past, the Catholic approach was: ‘Oh, sucks for you’ [that you’re gay]. The emphasis was on the difficulty. Celibacy is being reimagined.”

Julie Rodgers was hired this fall to engage frankly with these topics. A lesbian, she is the first staffer charged with serving the gay and lesbian community in the chaplain’s office of Wheaton College, a highly prominent evangelical school in Illinois.

Raised in a conservative Southern Baptist home in Texas, Rodgers went through years of now-discredited “reparative therapy” — a practice purported to turn gay people straight that many conservative churches are abandoning. After deciding it was damaging, she embraced celibacy.

Rodgers avoids speaking too judgmentally but says she “can’t get behind” the idea that God would bless a same-sex relationship. She is focused, she said, on trying to heal injustices done to gay people by the church.

“Evangelicals are really trying to figure out what to do. There is a real panic about how to move forward. How do we think and talk about sexuality? We haven’t had a robust understanding around celibacy in the past,” she said. “We are trying to find a congruence between faith and spirituality that does not try to align with traditional marriage but does recognize that we can live without sex, but we can’t live without intimacy.”

But what does that intimacy look like, specifically?

The desire of these new celibacy advocates to emphasize the positive and to not have LGBT people defined by their sex lives has left what can look like a gaping hole: Virtual silence on the difficulty of not having sex. Or about sex in general. Many of the essays on the blog tend toward the academic, removed from physical human passions or desires.

Some say they are simply hesitant to speak or write publicly about topics, such as whether it’s okay to think about sex, or to masturbate, and whether they find celibacy difficult. Gay Christians considering or trying celibacy do sometimes discuss such things in private settings, Gonnerman says.

Tushnet, a writer, anticipates some of these questions in her memoir “Gay and Catholic,” which positions her as kind of a non-judgmental Dear Abby to the celibate LGBT set.

“How do I deal with crushes? In terms of physical affection, how far can you go?” she asks in a “Frequently Asked Questions” section in her book.

She urges people not to focus so much on the sex they can’t have and instead find other places to pursue intimacy, such as deeper friendships that could be seen as spouselike, co-living arrangements, public service and the arts as ways to express intimacy.

“I use the image of a kaleidoscope — the jewels inside are desires. If you turn it one way, it’s lesbianism. If you rearrange them, it can be community service or devotion to Mary,” she said during a recent interview.

But Tushnet knows her background makes it hard for her to identify with so many gay and lesbian people who experienced rejection and exclusion, having grown up in a nominally Jewish home in upper Northwest Washington, the daughter of two liberal law professors, and graduating from the liberal bastion of Yale. Before she became celibate, she had a positive experience in the mainstream gay community — something she thinks makes her a good envoy for celibacy.

“You can see love, solidarity and beauty in gay communities and still believe there is even more love and beauty in Christianity,” she says.

More typical is the experience of Charleigh Linde, 24, who said she was sick of “lying all the time” and came out last year to her community at the conservative evangelical megachurch McLean Bible, in Vienna, which she calls incredibly warm — “like family.” Her pastor told her she could remain as a leader of young adult ministry but only if she was celibate. Many at the church told her that they were praying for her to become straight, yet several of her McLean friends went with her last month to a conference called the Reformation Project, where hundreds of gay Christians trained at ways to promote what they see as full equality — not celibacy — at their conservative churches. These are people who aren’t comfortable with the liturgy or theology of liberal churches.

“Maybe it’s the service, or that they don’t put as much emphasis on the Bible. I wouldn’t want to go to a gay church because I don’t want that to be the focus. It’s about Jesus,” Linde said of affirming churches. The theology around celibacy doesn’t make sense to her either, and Linde now says she believes gay relationships are okay. She expects this will eventually force her to leave McLean. Yet she considers it progress that she remains — for now — in leadership as an openly gay person.

The Reformation Project was run by gay author Matthew Vines, whose recent popular book “God and the Gay Christian” was considered so dangerous by some conservative leaders that Mohler and others immediately penned a counter-argument book and made it available for free.

At the ground level are people like Lindsey and Sarah, a celibate lesbian couple who live in Northeast Washington. The women, who asked that their last names not be used for fear of harassment, write about their experience at aqueercalling.com. They hope to launch talks about intimacy and friendship — and not just the question of whether gay sex is a sin.

“It’s not that we don’t have moral convictions of our own, but we are tired of that conversation. We really wish people could look past the black and white thing,” Sarah said. “But since same-sex relationships are being talked about more openly, there’s more space to talk about celibacy — this is the ideal time to be having this conversation.”

Michelle Boorstein is the Post’s religion reporter, where she reports on the busy marketplace of American religion

36

Watchtower judges man on size of nose.!!

by avengers in

jw
friends

watch tower judges man on size of nose .

1921 "the size of the nose, as also the size of the eyes, is not without significance.

the small-nosed man cannot have a judicial mind, whatever his other excellencies may be.

Balaamsass2

I miss Watchtower quotes. It was a great site.

7

Not on JW.ORG: Jehovahs Witness leaves Bethel gets PHD, and becomes....Catholic..??

by Balaamsass2 in

intersting story and video : http://www.pagadiandiocese.org/2014/12/09/dr-jeffrey-schwehm-a-jehovahs-witness-who-became-a-catholic-the-journey-home/.

Balaamsass2

Not all that unusual anymore. A JW relative converted in the past. The ex Bethelite son of a Northern California RBC ex-Gilead "big-wig" became a Catholic. Thought it odd at the time, but JWs are getting closer and closer to their old nemisis every year with NU Light from the Popes of Brooklyn.

7

Not on JW.ORG: Jehovahs Witness leaves Bethel gets PHD, and becomes....Catholic..??

by Balaamsass2 in

intersting story and video : http://www.pagadiandiocese.org/2014/12/09/dr-jeffrey-schwehm-a-jehovahs-witness-who-became-a-catholic-the-journey-home/.

Balaamsass2

Intersting story and Video : http://www.pagadiandiocese.org/2014/12/09/dr-jeffrey-schwehm-a-jehovahs-witness-who-became-a-catholic-the-journey-home/

17

How to fade intelligently ?

by TheFadingAlbatros in

how to fade intelligently ?

tell me your secret and then i will tell you in due time my secret.

it's important when we have to face a manipulative cult with some members of our family trapped inside, yes it is important to know how to fade intelligently so that our jw family members are not going to shun us.

Balaamsass2

Just move or..... PRETEND to move. "looks like we "MAY" be moving (towns, congregations, states, etc....because o "work", "family", "climate", etc. We will be in the ______area the next couple of weeks looking around for a home. Disconect and change phone number to an unlisted one. For sale by owner sign out front (with unrealistic price). Everyone will assume you left and not even pester you. If you run into anyone at the store (and you didn't leave) simply ask about THEM (everyones favorite subject...then say...oopps got to run!! bye!!

If need be you can always say "things didn't pan out".

JWs don't care enough to try very hard looking for you. Elders simply need a plausable story to explain why you didn't turn in time.