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.
Balaamsass2
JoinedPosts by Balaamsass2
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28
Brother Knorr's Cadillac and other secret perks
by tim hooper inback 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!.
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9
Sunday Washington Post: Gay Christians choosing celibacy emerge from the shadows.
by Balaamsass2 inlocal.
gay christians choosing celibacy emerge from the shadows.
despite encountering criticism, the lgbt community is finding greater acceptance, even in religious circles.
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Balaamsass2
Gay Christians choosing celibacy emerge from the shadows
Despite encountering criticism, the LGBT community is finding greater acceptance, even in religious circles
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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 PMWhen 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 inwatch 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.
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Balaamsass2
I miss Watchtower quotes. It was a great site.
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Not on JW.ORG: Jehovahs Witness leaves Bethel gets PHD, and becomes....Catholic..??
by Balaamsass2 inintersting story and video : http://www.pagadiandiocese.org/2014/12/09/dr-jeffrey-schwehm-a-jehovahs-witness-who-became-a-catholic-the-journey-home/.
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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.
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Not on JW.ORG: Jehovahs Witness leaves Bethel gets PHD, and becomes....Catholic..??
by Balaamsass2 inintersting story and video : http://www.pagadiandiocese.org/2014/12/09/dr-jeffrey-schwehm-a-jehovahs-witness-who-became-a-catholic-the-journey-home/.
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How to fade intelligently ?
by TheFadingAlbatros inhow 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.
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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.
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Reinstatement - repentance - works - Can you explain how this is supposed to work?
by berrygerry innov 15, 2006 wt.
when requesting reinstatement, he should be able to give evidence that he has repented and is producing works that befit repentance.acts 26:20.. .
how possibly can someone "give evidence" or "produce works"?.
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Balaamsass2
Sloppy knows. What he says in a dated letter. If money is involved making payments helps. Apology letter/cards (save copies).
Tears. (A dash of pepper spray near your eyes).
On second thought......... WHY bother??
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Elders removed in Northern PA. Congregation
by ToesUp ina close family member just informed me what happened during their last c.o.
visit.
this occurred 3 months ago.
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Balaamsass2
I remember cases with the same phrase used by the C.O., for Elders who covered up for elder friends.
1: A popular Elder (PO)was not removed quickly for public spousal and child abuse. A Majority on the body let it continue for months.
2: Another case a popular Elder allowed his inactive child use of the Hall for a wedding. He and the body members who supported it were removed by the C.O.
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Sunday NY Times: How ISIS drives Muslims from Islam.
by Balaamsass2 in230 comments.
sundayreview | op-ed columnist.
how isis drives muslims from islam.
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Balaamsass2
230 COMMENTS
SundayReview | OP-ED COLUMNIST
How ISIS Drives Muslims From Islam
DEC. 6, 2014
Photo
Egyptians protest in Cairo last week. Young Muslims across the Arab world have also been speaking out online. Credit Amr Nabil/Associated Press Continue reading the main story Share This Page
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
THE Islamic State has visibly attracted young Muslims from all over the world to its violent movement to build a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. But here’s what’s less visible — the online backlash against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, by young Muslims declaring their opposition to rule by Islamic law, or Shariah, and even proudly avowing their atheism. Nadia Oweidat, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, who tracks how Arab youths use the Internet, says the phenomenon “is mushrooming — the brutality of the Islamic State is exacerbating the issue and even pushing some young Muslims away from Islam.”
Thomas L. Friedman
On Nov. 24, BBC.com published a piece on what was trending on Twitter. It began: “A growing social media conversation in Arabic is calling for the implementation of Shariah, or Islamic law, to be abandoned. Discussing religious law is a sensitive topic in many Muslim countries. But on Twitter, a hashtag which translates as ‘why we reject implementing Shariah’ has been used 5,000 times in 24 hours. The conversation is mainly taking place in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The debate is about whether religious law is suitable for the needs of Arab countries and modern legal systems. Dr. Alyaa Gad, an Egyptian doctor living in Switzerland, started the hashtag. ‘I have nothing against religion,’ she tells BBC Trending, but says she is against ‘using it as a political system.’ ”
The BBC added that “many others joined in the conversation, using the hashtag, listing reasons why Arabs and Muslims should abandon Shariah. ‘Because there’s not a single positive example of it bringing justice and equality,’ one man tweeted. ... A Saudi woman commented: ‘By adhering to Shariah we are adhering to inhumane laws. Saudi Arabia is saturated with the blood of those executed by Sharia.’ ”
Ismail Mohamed, an Egyptian on a mission to create freedom of conscience there, started a program called “Black Ducks” to offer a space where agnostic and atheist Arabs can speak freely about their right to choose what they believe and resist coercion and misogyny from religious authorities. He is part of a growing Arab Atheists Network. For Arab news written by Arabs that gets right in the face of autocrats and religious extremists also check outfreearabs.com.
Another voice getting attention is Brother Rachid, a Moroccan who createdhis own YouTube network to deliver his message of tolerance and to expose examples of intolerance within his former Muslim faith community. (He told me he’s converted to Christianity, preferring its “God of love.”)
In this recent segment on YouTube, which has been viewed 500,000 times, Brother Rachid addressed President Obama:
Continue reading the main story
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“Dear Mr. President, I must tell you that you are wrong about ISIL. You said ISIL speaks for no religion. I am a former Muslim. My dad is an imam. I have spent more than 20 years studying Islam. ... I can tell you with confidence that ISIL speaks for Islam. ... ISIL’s 10,000 members are all Muslims. ... They come from different countries and have one common denominator: Islam. They are following Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in every detail. ... They have called for a caliphate, which is a central doctrine in Sunni Islam.”
Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
He continued: “I ask you, Mr. President, to stop being politically correct — to call things by their names. ISIL, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al Shabab in Somalia, the Taliban, and their sister brand names, are all made in Islam. Unless the Muslim world deals with Islam and separates religion from state, we will never end this cycle. ... If Islam is not the problem, then why is it there are millions of Christians in the Middle East and yet none of them has ever blown up himself to become a martyr, even though they live under the same economic and political circumstances and even worse? ... Mr. President, if you really want to fight terrorism, then fight it at the roots. How many Saudi sheikhs are preaching hatred? How many Islamic channels are indoctrinating people and teaching them violence from the Quran and the hadith? ... How many Islamic schools are producing generations of teachers and students who believe in jihad and martyrdom and fighting the infidels?”
ISIS, by claiming to speak for all Muslims — and by promoting a puritanical form of Islam that takes present-day, Saudi-funded, madrassa indoctrination to its logical political conclusion — has blown the lid off some long simmering frustrations in the Arab Muslim world.
As an outsider, I can’t say how widespread this is. But clearly there is a significant group of Muslims who feel that their government-backed preachers and religious hierarchies have handed them a brand of Islam that does not speak to them. These same authorities have also denied them the critical thinking tools and religious space to imagine new interpretations. So a few, like Brother Rachid, leave Islam for a different faith and invite others to come along. And some seem to be quietly detaching from religion entirely — fed up with being patronized by politically correct Westerners telling them what Islam is not and with being tyrannized by self-appointed Islamist authoritarians telling them what Islam is. Now that the Internet has created free, safe, alternative spaces and platforms to discuss these issues, outside the mosques and government-owned media, this war of ideas is on
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Jehovahs Witness elder jailed for 12 years for multiple sexual offences against young girl
by AndersonsInfo inhttp://ukpaedos-exposed.com/2014/11/29/david-dennis-gunnislakeharrowbarrow/.
david dennis gunnislake/harrowbarrow.
29 saturday nov 2014. posted by author in cornwall.
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Balaamsass2
Thanks Barbara.
It is hard to get some local papers to cover these stories and the JW connection. Two local editors have told me to pound salt. A few JWs work at the paper.
Egyptians protest in Cairo last week. Young Muslims across the Arab world have also been speaking out online. 
