jookbeard: "The cart days could be numbered?"
Nope. When has the Governing Body ever dropped a bad habit?
reading a report of an elder in a friends cong has been hiding and spying on the pioneers who seem to have a practise of dumping the cart and finding a local coffee shop, i've noticed that they do this in my local high street as well but this week they seemed to be all huddled around the cart, they've clearly been warned, a vast percentage of the time i see they seem to be more interested in fiddling with their mobile phones and gossiping, is just seems these carts are a means for the pioneers to turn in "easy time" i wonder what sort of figures show how much literature is being taken by the public?
i bet its very minimal.
naturally the gb would say they are a phenomenal success , we clearly know they are not.
jookbeard: "The cart days could be numbered?"
Nope. When has the Governing Body ever dropped a bad habit?
..specifically, the suffering of animals.
you can talk about free will/sin/people choosing to not listen to god etc to explain human suffering being allowed.. but how can you love a god that allows animals, that haven't sinned or chosen to not have anything to do with god, to have their short lives ended in often long, drawn out, painful ways.
i could list stories i've read that would probably make you feel ill, but i'm not looking to shock anyone or start an emotional debate.
@ cofty: "Why did your god - who Jesus claimed cares for every sparrow - design a world to maximise suffering?"
It's really simple. A talking snake told a naked lady to eat a fruit and share it with a naked man with a missing rib then all hell broke loose. Lions stopped eating grass and started devouring baby lambs; tyrannosaurus stopped eating palm trees and started munching on Brontosaurs; Galaxies started crashing into each other and we started having discussions such as this.
Now think of all the cruelty down below where a gazillion species are having their planets getting ripped out of their stars orbit plunging into a freezing death or a fiery one from two stars crashing into each other.
this is the latest offering from the caleb/sophia duo - lesson 16, preach in a foreign language.
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Face it fellow apostates, Caleb and Sophia are going to grow on us. It will be a love/hate relationship.
what's the problem with prophecy?prophecy primarily requires a pattern recognition or insightful strategy not an analytical strategy.
prophecy rarely gives names whether of empires or their rulers.
even the name of the messiah - yeshua -wasn't foretold.
@ Perry: "This writer below offers some possible reasons why Russia might want to invade Israel:"
That question was very simple. Couldn't you give a simple answer instead of a mere link?
I read that link and it is pure conjecture. It implies that energy sources may be one thing that Russia covets but the truth is that Gazprom is likely to hold far more in reserves than a miniscule nation like Israel may have in yet to be discovered reserves. Israel is not much in the way of competition when someone looks at a map of energy sources. In comparison Russia has 6.6 million square miles compared to Israel's 7,800+. That comes out to approximately 850 times more land area.
what's the problem with prophecy?prophecy primarily requires a pattern recognition or insightful strategy not an analytical strategy.
prophecy rarely gives names whether of empires or their rulers.
even the name of the messiah - yeshua -wasn't foretold.
@ Perry:
"...Russia, in alliance with several other countries, will amass a huge army against Israel, with a view to plunder the Jews’ land."
What will tiny Israel have that the Russians will want to plunder?
we have debated for many a long year on jwn about the "proper" date for the passover/memorial and my conclusion is that jw's get it all wrong for a number of reasons, but as the gospels are contradictory, nobody can say for sure.. most years they are close to the time by a day or so, signalled by the full moon occurring about then.. i believe this year they have chosen saturday april 11th.. this is a full week, near enough, away from the full moon.. what has gone on with their calculation ?.
who told you that the world should be free from suffering?.
do you find any value in suffering?.
do you think it is possible to experience all the beauty and goodness and pleasure the world offers without also experiencing the bad?
@ little_Socrates:
"If you where God and could eliminate suffering what would the world look like?"
If I were to play god I would do the following:
"The Atheists argument is... the world does not appear as though it has been created by a loving God so therefore no God."
The Universe shows signs of order and disorder but not intelligence. Think of all the suffering that life forms on other planets would go through when two galaxies crash together or when a supernova incinerates everything within several light years. There is no "love" in that. Any god who would have created that must be callous and above, or beneath, a sense of love and morality.
There you have it.
growing up a jw has made me some what socially awkward.
i would often push people away due to my weird traits.
this was made worse by surrounding myself with certain people within the congregation who didn't have my best interest at heart, who now i know where trying to bring me down, this has invoked in me trust issues with people i meet.
I have been socially awkward since childhood, before I became a JW. The Witnesses made me worse. I was lucky to have a friend who was not a JW who listened to my tale of woe after my disfellowshipping. The JW friend that I had abandoned me before a judicial committee was formed.
I see my problem as a combination of innate personality and the negative effects of growing up as a JW during the formative years of my adolescence. As to overcoming them I have yet to do that fully. Working with people in retail stores helped me to socialize my self and practice my communicative skills but that depends on the type of work that you have.
they simply belong to a religion.
they cannot explain why they follow all the dictates of the organization.
they live in blind faith.
did you really believe in things as ;- the earth is only 6000 years old- the 144.000- 1914, based upon the destructiono of jerusalem- harmagheddon or the end of the world coming soon???
?i married a jw when i was an interested person and studying with the jw's ( not the way they wanted) but i told my wife before marrying her that " most probably " i would never have been a jw.she accepted me as i was and married me.
after that i had interrupted the study for one year, i started all over again with an elder of my wife's cong.
Roberto avon,
I was an atheist at 10 who suddenly got an interest in the Bible at 13. At 14 I converted to JWs wholeheartedly believing it was the "Truth" completely. Then, as the years went by, I started getting disillusioned because of the egotistical, pathological organization worship - doctrine did not come up even at my disfellowshipping though I was beginning to wonder.
It was soon after I was disfellowshipped that I became an atheist with a Carl Saganesque awe of the Universe. It wasn't until some years after that I read books like the Gentile Times Reconsidered and Crisis of Conscience. After that I lost all interest in JW issues.