Well said. And it's a difficult idea for people to get their heads around.
The percentage of a population who believes a particular claim says nothing about the validity of that claim. The majority of people in antiquity used to believe that the Earth was flat - but that didn't mean the Earth was any less spherical back then. Only that Eratosthenes was one of very few people who was right (240 B.C).
for those of you that don't research this stuff i will give a little back story.
we all know about the moses exodus, but history and archeology didn't seem to confirm this event.
the only exodus out of egypt ever recorded was that of a group of asiatic tribes that had taken over egypt for a bit over 100 years called the hyksos and the followers of the pharaoh akhenaten who perpetuated a monotheistic idea of worshiping only one deity the aten.
So if we just ignore what is meant by "The Exodus" and redefine it to mean "any exodus" we can confirm it actually happened? Really?
The writer of the OP seems to be confused about what "The Exodus" is. Namely, 2 million Israelites who left Egypt by walking across floor of the Red Sea and then went off to wander in the desert for forty years under the guidance of the patriarch Moses.
Anything else is not "The Exodus". It may be the origins of the story of "The Exodus" or it may be completely unrelated. But either way it doesn't confirm the event. The linked article is a fascinating bit of speculation but - until such a time as we have good reasons to believe the Hyksos were the origins of story - the proposal is ". . . not only not right - it's not even wrong."
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/288811/science-stoppers
i think it was punkofnice who came up with the phrase, "apathy carts".
how apropos.. yesterday i encountered a car group of witnesses in my community as i was coming home from the gym.
actually, their van was blocking me from entering my driveway.
tornintwo's recent topic spurred me finally to post an idea i've been thinking about.
i don't see the gb as being financially greedy.
yes, they enjoy numerous perks like having their physical needs met by servants, jetting around the planet, living in a greater degree of comfort than fellow bethelites, getting frequent and sometimes expensive gifts from the r&f, etc.
I quite agree with the sentiment of this thread. While the GB are a million miles from humility - the one thing they are NOT is wealthy. They have nice accommodations and are well taken care of but they aren't burning through cash on themselves. They don't have private jets they fly around on, mansions they live in, or super expensive restaurants at which they eat.
Pinky rings and apple watches certainly don't send the right signal when they're telling children to give up their ice cream money. But those are middle class/upper middle class items. Not the hallmarks of millionaires fleecing the flock like some mega Pastors.
I think it's just a case that they made bad decisions combined with the fact it's hard times for organized religion. Not to mention that they ended up having to redo a lot or work at Warwick which has probably sent them soaring WAY over budget. I wouldn't be surprised if a considerable portion of that 700 million got burned tearing out their bad work, hiring actual contractors to redo the work, and a series of smaller projects they didn't initially intend to do (being able to drain the lake at the push of a button - seriously?)
You know the Desert God's Modus Operandi: Spare no expense!
Solomon built the temple and completed it. 15 He lined its interior walls with cedar boards, paneling them from the floor of the temple to the ceiling,and covered the floor of the temple with planks of juniper. 16 He partitioned off twenty cubits at the rear of the temple with cedar boards from floor to ceiling to form within the temple an inner sanctuary, the Most Holy Place.17 The main hall in front of this room was forty cubits[i] long. 18 The inside of the temple was cedar, carved with gourds and open flowers. Everything was cedar; no stone was to be seen.
19 He prepared the inner sanctuary within the temple to set the ark of the covenant of the Lord there. 20 The inner sanctuary was twenty cubits long, twenty wide and twenty high. He overlaid the inside with pure gold, and he also overlaid the altar of cedar. 21 Solomon covered the inside of the temple with pure gold, and he extended gold chains across the front of the inner sanctuary, which was overlaid with gold. 22 So he overlaid the whole interior with gold. He also overlaid with gold the altar that belonged to the inner sanctuary.
just wanna say.....im thankfull for y'all....n stuff
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Here's a good tactic for stopping any potential family fights at the table :)
absolutely disgusting!.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqzc2m8_mba.
I agree MuddyWaters, when I came across this I was seriously floored - every time I think the WT can't say or do anything more stupid they never fail to disappoint.
I should also note that larger cranial capacity doesn't necessarily correlate to higher levels of intelligence. This is because neural density and plasticity - not brain size - are the most important factors. For example, Neanderthals had an average cranial capacity of 1600 cm(3) much larger than modern humans who only come in around 1400 cm(3).
absolutely disgusting!.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqzc2m8_mba.
Absolutely disgusting!
(cnn) -- newly released photographs show what a damaged world trade center tower and its collapse looked like from a new york police department helicopter as it flew nearby on september 11, 2001, in new york.. the aerial photos were obtained by abc news after it filed a freedom of information act request last year with the national institute of standards and technology, which had collected the images for its investigation into the towers' collapse.. a couple of the images show one of the twin towers burning after a hijacked airplane had flown into it.
others show it collapsing, and the rest show the clouds of debris and dust spreading below after the towers crumbled.. each of the 12 images offers a rare look at what the devastation looked like from above.. .
http://www.cnn.com/2010/us/02/10/world.trade.center.aerial/index.html.
so i'm sure a good number of us saw the chart that i believe the poster splash put on another thread of figures since 1990 regarding how many baptized and % of increase each year .
i started analyzing it ( and i know some referred to it briefly on the other thread ) and guessing of reasons the % of increase didn't match the number of newly baptized.
and of course common sense tells us that either jw's leave the cult each year through death, fading into inactivity, or getting dfed.
I'm sorry but these numbers are entirely fallacious. You CANNOT get the number of people leaving simply by subtracting the number of baptisms by the number of publishers.
Why? Because baptised people are ALREADY counted as publishers. The number of people baptised says nothing about the number of new publishers. We would have to know the number of new publishers and then subtract that by the total number of publishers to figure out how many people are leaving. But we simply don't have those numbers.
For example, imagine if there were a year where a 100,000 people were baptised and not a single person left. What kind of growth in publishers would we expect to see?
Well, the answer is we wouldn't know. Because zero people could become new publishers and the number of people baptized could still be positive.
i saw this on ex jw reddit:"this may not be news to you but it was to me.
forgive me if this has already been posted before.
it came from a reliable source working on the warwick project.. wallkill bethel had broken ground and laid the foundation for a new recreation building.
