allpoweredup
JoinedPosts by allpoweredup
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"When Prophecy Fails" & "A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance" -- Festinger
by [email protected] inanother thread asks, "is it possible to reason with a typical jw?
" but a couple said, what i'm trying to say is you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
another unmentioned proverb says: one convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.. .
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allpoweredup
Those who think think no JWs can be convinced that their faith in the Gov. Body is wrong are mistaken.
JWs do listen and quit the Watchtower. Very few shift to Pentecostal, trinitarian, hellfire churches, but many do quit the Watchtower.
In the past about 1/4 returned eventually, but due to much more widespread information, especially on the internet, that percentage is also not as great.
Fewer and fewer members in Western nations means fewer and fewer dollars in hard cash. They have enormous holdings in real estate but the liquid in-the-hands cash is not so great.
Readers, cheer up. Keep educating and you will receive. The real truth does free.
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"Volunteer Ministers" - Background checks?
by Uzzah ini am very active as a volunteer with an international relief organziation.
a few weeks back i attended a volunteer management seminar hosted by this group.. even in times of disaster, any and all volunteers have to go through a screening process, including 2 interviews plus a police background check.
this is not a 'suggestion' but it was inferred that canadian law requires this to be done for any volunteer based organization when the volunteers would have direct access to the public or be put in a position of trust.. bethel proudly declares their force of volunteer ministers at the branch as well as calling publishers by the same name.
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allpoweredup
Since background checks have been required for decades to the common good, the allegation that a police state would result from requiring "ministers" going door-to-door to have them is bogus.
You with the mask. I notice you have run in and tried to dash cold water on other posted ideas for helping the children and others from Watchtower tyranny.
Uzzah, good idea, so keep pushing it ahead.
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allpoweredup
And a string alleging Ted Jaracz (Watchtower Gov Body bigshot) was accused of child molestation, that he and some others on the Gov Body don't want molestation and other interesting files opened because they are in them:
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/37522/1.ashx
He and they may be innocent or may not be, but in any case we can be sure there are high profile pedophiles hidden in the Watchtower Society who don't want their files aired!
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Food Vendors-US contrast to other countries
by CaptainSchmideo insorry to beat a dead horse, but i need to confirm this.... just had email conversation with a friend who is going to the manchester convention this weekend.. made a joke about not buying sticky buns from the street vendors, being a mortal sin and all.. she replied, "what's wrong with buying from the vendors?
we have been encouraged to buy from on-site concessions.
" then she had to leave before i could this clarified.. .
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allpoweredup
Yes, some things do differ from nation to nation.
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allpoweredup
BLASTS FROM THE PAST AND PRESENT #1
Please send helpful information, leads, ideas, documents etc. to silentlambs.org which is at
POB 311
Calvert City, KY 42029
3/11/2001
Trouble at the Watchtower
Stephen Bates
For decades the Jehovah?s Witnesses have condemned the United Nations as the Scarlet Beast of Revelation, but privately they were still affiliated to it. When he stumbled on their secret, the religious affairs correspondent of the Guardian uncovered a hornets? nest of recrimination amongst the faithful.
THE smiling middle-aged women who called at my door on a Saturday morning were most polite. They were from the Jehovah?s Witnesses, they said, and could they interest me in coming along to their Kingdom Hall? No, I said, in grave dereliction of my duty as a religious affairs correspondent, I attended another church. And they smiled again and we wished each other a cheery good morning.
Had I known what I know now I might have been a shade less polite, for not many days after that an email flickered on to my computer screen from a senior academic asking whether I knew of a strange little secret in his religious sect, the Witnesses. There was, he said, a glaring inconsistency between its extreme opposition to the United Nations and its private decision to affiliate to the United Nations as a non-governmental organisation.
Like most outsiders, I knew that the Witnesses ? there are 6 million worldwide, including 130,000 in Britain ? had peculiar ideas about blood transfusions (they don?t allow them even at risk of death); that they didn?t like governments, and did not vote at elections; that they were governed by a group of elders based in Brooklyn, New York; and that they were Bible-based fundamentalists. But what on earth could they have against the UN?
Surely, such a position for a religious group must be like being in favour of sin? But there it was, stark in black and white: for 80 years the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (WTBTS) of New York, as the Witnesses are formally known, has not just criticised but condemned first the League of Nations and then the UN. The UN appears there as the Scarlet-Coloured Beast of the Book of Revelation, the Great, a disgusting thing in the eyes of God and man.
Yet there also the Watchtower Society sat on the UN?s website as one of 1,500 accredited non-governmental organisations.
"It?s certainly a bit strange", said a UN spokeswoman. "I guess we didn?t know what they really thought of us."
No, said the Witnesses? British spokesman, they would never be associated with the UN ? though they might make representations to it.
But there they they were. The WTBTS had been affiliated to the organisation since it first applied in 1991. To be recognised, it would have had to agree that it supported the UN charter and was prepared to disseminate and publicise its objectives and policies. Not once, but every year. There was no mistake. I wrote the story, which limped into the Guardian, deep in the paper on the day the bombing of started. That, I thought, was that, until the emails started arriving, from , , and . Somehow, within a few hours, it had been posted on a Witnesses? website in English and translated into French, and 14,000 followers across the world had read it. Hundreds commented on the article, others demanded to see a copy of the original newspaper (as if they could not truly believe it if it was just on their computer screens). Only one response was hostile: our subeditors had cut the word "coloured" from "scarlet-coloured", which was enough to damn the article as being riddled with inaccuracies, according to a chapel elder in .
Then the most surprising thing of all happened: two days after the article appeared, the WTBTS disaffiliated from the UN. Surely not a guilty conscience? Under pressure from incredulous Witnesses, the UN issued a statement on headed notepaper confirming it. The sect?s followers besieged the office of the head of public information demanding an original of his letter, or at least a copy. Word filtered back that, when queried about the story, loyal elders were telling their congregations that it was a lie disseminated by apostates. Or that the UN?s website had evidently been infiltrated by forgers. Or that it was the work of the devil. At the least it was a mistake ? though one, as critical Witnesses pointed out, that had been continuing for 10 years. Or had the elders just ignored the correspondence they received?
Witnesses who showed copies of the article to colleagues and relatives, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, had them torn up or thrown on the floor, or simply handed straight back unread. They were accused of apostasy. The Witnesses? talkboard was abuzz with hundreds of messages, virtually all of them outraged with the elders of the Watchtower. One said that when he had shown a friend the UN website, he was summoned to a two-hour judicial hearing with his local elders and he and his wife were subjected to a public reproof in front of the entire congregation at their next meeting.
"My wife?s 16 years of faithful service are about to be null and void for merely having a private conversation with a friend about some factual and private information", he wrote. "We heard the scripture applied to us about ?those that arise and speak twisted things? . The elders? decision was presented as good news. They said: ?We?ve decided to show mercy and not disfellowship you? ? it was something that had to be cut out of the congregation like a gangrene."
"Disfellowshipping" is a serious matter because Witnesses are discouraged from having close friendships with outsiders. "Disfellowshipping" means other Witnesses, including your own family, should cease contact with you and shun you if you meet them. It is done ? the elder told me ? only in a loving way and after attempts to make you see the error of your ways.
There is a sense in this row, which must seem footling to outsiders, in which disaffected Witnesses feel they have been misled once too often. In the deeply introspective, defensive and suspicious world of the WTBTS, questioning is discouraged, so an issue of hypocrisy such as this causes all the more anguish. This is felt particularly strongly on the blood-transfusion issue. Over the years hundreds of Witnesses and their children are thought to have died because they refused life-saving operations on the basis of Acts 15:20. But then, last summer, the elders met in and, after an apparent divine revelation ? but more precisely following a vote of eight to four ? decided that in certain circumstances the transfusion of blood components such as plasma might be acceptable, so long as the recipient genuinely repented afterwards. This was not publicised to congregations and, under questioning, was said to be no change at all.
Then there is the issue of child abuse, in which official guidance is that accusations should be investigated only if there are two independent witnesses ? a near impossibility. I have seen instructions sent to elders which tell them that written allegations should be burned. This may, or may not, constitute an obstruction of justice, but is hardly helpful. The outside world appears to impinge very little on the cast-iron biblical certainties of the Jehovah?s Witnesses ? which is what makes their tangle with the UN all the more embarrassing. The disfellowshipped join the rest of humanity and are known informally as "bird seed" after ? actually, a long way after ? Ezekiel 39:18. For, as the Watchtower magazine says, Jehovah holds the proud and mighty in contempt, letting the wild beasts and vultures feed upon them as worthless carrion.
The Witnesses are told to engage in a "theocratic war strategy": "in times of spiritual warfare it is proper to misdirect the enemy by hiding the truth. It is done unselfishly; it does no harm to anyone. On the contrary it does much good."
The trouble is that the elders appear not only to have misled the enemy but their own followers as well. To have such a growing body of disillusioned members cannot be right. No wonder some of the disaffected believe Armageddon is coming for the WTBTS, sooner even than the Watchtower predicts.
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shakedowns
by bavman inhas anyone else noticed shakedowns in their area.
in my state whole service committee's (presiding overseer, service overseer, sectretary) have been replaced in many congregations including our's.
also, at the green bay convention and in many talks locally it seems there is a lot of hammering on the faithful and discreet slave.
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allpoweredup
P.S. I did not say the End is imminent but do say that it is well underway.
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shakedowns
by bavman inhas anyone else noticed shakedowns in their area.
in my state whole service committee's (presiding overseer, service overseer, sectretary) have been replaced in many congregations including our's.
also, at the green bay convention and in many talks locally it seems there is a lot of hammering on the faithful and discreet slave.
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allpoweredup
In the U.S. the End is now underway:
District, Circuit and Presiding Overseers know the organization is in danger of collapse so are wanting reforms that the worldwise Governing Body members refuse to grant. The GB hoped that forming new corporations would protect their assets but now see that is not necessarily the case, plus the elders know that they as elders can also be sue over their carrying out the GB's child molestation policy. Once informed the better elders and regular members are cutting off monetary donations.
There is much fear in the organization also over elders being told to cover up for and shut up about fugitive murderers, invasions of privacy, threats against and the harrassment of current and ex-members, so forth. In some areas elders are using their mailing lists of other elders to contact them with their concerns although not giving their own actual names or return addresses as the sending elders.
The GB is responding with more harrassment, disfellowshipping, deletion from elder bodies and committees. In turn the GB can expect more elders and non-elders to turn on them revealing things they have been told, mailing incriminating copies of Judicial Committee items to Bill Bowen of silentlambs.org and the like.
That's the take. Yours?
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How can I get my daughter, who's in j.w. Bible study, to look at this forum
by hubert ini have a daughter and son-in-law who are in a j.w.
bible study, thanks to my sister-in-law.
i have been researching the w.t.
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allpoweredup
Here's a good one with scriptures and information to de-program them about Christmas
CHRISTMAS' ORIGINS DIFFER FROM WATCHTOWER TEACHINGS TO JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES AND THEIR BIBLE STUDENTS: More recent scholarly studies prove that the Christmas Tree is from the Tree of Eternal Life (Genesis 2:9, 3:22) depicted in church plays of the Middle Ages, not Luther or Druid tree-worshippers, although outdated articles for example in World Book Encyclopedia still repeat the legends and Luther may have originated the use of candles attached to Christmas trees. An interesting point often ignored by those against using trees for Christmas is that some of the giant cedars of Lebanon were used to build the holy temple in Jerusalem .
In fact Christ himself was wrongly attacked as a "glutton and drunkard" simply for believing in a good time (Mt ). He once turned water to wine at a wedding party in (John 2:1-11), told followers to invite needy persons to parties (Lu -14), and accepted gifts including expensive nard oil. Interestingly, Revelation 1:14 even describes the resurrected Christ's hair as like "white wool" or "snow," his cloak was scarlet-colored (red with a bluish tinge--Mt 27:28), and white symbolized purity. True, all that just coincidentally reminds one of Santa Claus, but do note that the earliest Christians enjoyed balanced merriment at "love feasts" (Jude 12), the angels celebrated Christ's birth (Lu 2), and Job's children had enjoyed birthdays (Job 1:3, 3:1, 3).
Most Christmas trees are topped by a star remindful of the Christ star. According to John Mosley's The Christmas Star (1985) from September 3 BC to June 2 BC Jupiter, known as "the royal planet" passed Regulus "the king star" in the constellation Leo, reversed then passed again, turned and passed a 3 rd time. By June 17 Jupiter and Regulus were so close they seemed a single star when seen by the eye. This then is one intriguing possible source for the Christ star in the Bible.
Before Christ's birth unspecified men called "magi" in Biblical Greek came from the East first to Jerusalem (Mt 2:1-2) then went on to find the Christ child in Bethlehem. Some translations render the word magi as astrologers because its root like the word "magician" is linked to the idea of being a person of great might but although magi may refer to people who try to predict the future by observing the stars, using omens and consulting spirit beings as forbidden by God at Deuteronomy 18:10-12, it can also refer to people who worked to predict future weather patterns, good times to plant and harvest, buy and sell crops, etc via careful observation of the clouds, stars and other natural phenomena and with very little to absolutely no special focus on the occult at all. So for solid reasons some Bible translations continue to translate magi as simply "wise men" or "stargazers" and this is also supported by the Bible?s positively saying they brought gifts for Christ then also protected him by leaving without telling his location to King Herod who wickedly desired to slay him.
Persons such as Jehovah's Witnesses who kept their families from celebrating Christmas should not be condemned if they acted out of lack of accurate knowledge in the past, being mistaught by their leaders and magazine articles, but also no Jehovah's Witness or other persons, once informed with this, should keep claiming that those who do celebrate the birth of Christ are out of harmony with the Bible or "immature" (as they have sometimes written and said) even as the preceding information proves. Please also go to, read and meditate on what Paul writes at Colossians 2:16.