Posts by Terry

26

Am l the only one.?The older l become the more hostile l become towards god.

by atomant in

they say you mellow out with age.maybe so but not in my case.l feel its an insult and degrading to us humans to have to live the way we do if there is a god.deep down l guess l do believe theres a god but lm having great difficulty trying to understand why things are the way they are.l dont need a bible bashing from anyone l just feel frustrated and helpless.l just battle on like everyone else but l get the feeling theres a whole lot more to our existence.

Terry

First off, getting older makes you cranky. I mean, after all, we're on Death Row and our shelf date is creeping up on us. Who wouldn't be pissed?

But, the whole "God" thing is so shapeless and subjective to me at this point in life, how could I get angry at a floating blob of imaginary nothingness?

Humans are a drop in the ocean and I don't know why an actual "god" would bother with us unless we are the celestial Grand Poohbah's version of Soap Opera.

So, having said that . . . I get peevish with the "true Believer" who is absolutely convinced about god and simply won't rest until they've made it quite clear how annoyed they are I don't join them in the jamboree.

I do get to opt out. But, they resent my exercising the right to remain silent when not speaking to deity. Instead, I end up talking to them--the deafest of all hearing-impaired on earth.

Smile and nod. Works in most situations.

17

I like the fact that XJW's are passionate about politics

by minimus in

jw
friends

the fact is we could never talk about politics or of use toward political issues as witnesses now we can and we can disagree without being disagreeable .

Terry

Passionate? Mmmm, I'd say puerile and snippy and thin-skinned,

and wound up tight and ready to burst a blood vessel. :)

Lots of folks get personal in a hurry. Generalities are taken as specifics. Hearts are eager to be broken.

I'm going to avoid political posts from now on. There is too much drama in the trauma. Too much heat and very little light.

The crowds with pitchforks and torches are on the march. Jackboots are clipping on the cobblestones.

Get me outta here--I seem to be the monster!

Ahhhhhhhgggggh!

13

The Evolution of the Awake's Back Cover

by ILoveTTATT2 in

jw
friends

i don't think anyone's actually considered this, but a post in the extj.com forum made me think about the many changes (not just one) on the back cover of the awake!

magazine.

thanks to avoidjw.org for scanning all of the magazines in pdf format, since there is a lot lost with the wt library.. take a look at the following paragraphs in the awake´s back cover throughout the years:awake!

Terry

Important policy changes are sneaked into existence like anonymous ransom notes in the dead of night.

There is no formal announcement.

Why?

Shame? Culpability?

This is a lesson in nonconformity and individuality (Richard Harris was never better than here)

by Terry in

jw
friends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cot1n3jdqa

Terry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8COt1n3jDqA

166

2nd amendment right ... where should it end?

by Simon in

one thing i like to do to test a theory is to take things to extremes or to their logical conclusion to see if the premises still hold.

very often, a claim that seems to make sense at a superficial level falls apart when you start to stretch it a little.. so let's play a game.. suppose the 2nd amendment is valid, that some "well regulated militia" really is necessary to hold the government to account.. obviously when this was drafted the government had access to the weapons of it's day which would be muskets!

so muskets all round.

Terry

Perhaps the real issue is dealing with the ILLUSION of self-protection vis-a-vis the ruling powers. Ownership of weapons may only be the symptom rather than the cause of 2nd amendment fetish.

Benign governments won't use guns on the population and insidious governments will stop at nothing to achieve total control.

A Sadam Hussein style government achieves dominance through intimidation. A terrified populace facing torture if caught conspiring against the leader are not likely to put up much of an insurgency. Fear has won.
Sadam was not worshipped, only feared. That was enough. To keep outside enemies at bay, the rumor of weapons-of-mass-destruction worked as well as the real thing.

In North Korea, the leader-du-jour is deified. The populace wouldn't dream of even thinking an insubordinate thought. Mind control has nullified the use of weapons to overthrow the government.

In Cuba, guns brought down Batista and a Communist 'paradise' was seemingly achieved as long as you agreed with Castro and did not speak aloud in criticism of the downside of inviting ICBM's from Russia and bringing about subsequent blockades which reduced everything to a near standstill for over half a century.

In other words, there are all sorts of ways the government becomes the enemy of the people. Sometimes, as in Cuba, guns bring about regime change only to yield a worse condition in the aftermath.

Like I said at the beginning, perhaps the real issue is dealing with the ILLUSION of self-protection vis-a-vis the ruling powers.

______

I was a boy in America when President Eisenhower used the military to keep racists from blocking the entrance of black children into white schools when desegregation began.
In the 60's I saw college students fired upon by soldiers at Kent State University.

President Obama has ordered drone strikes to murder American citizens who turned traitor in joining terrorists.

I've seen cult members surrounded and extinguished in Waco, Texas under David Koresh.

("The result is that the public remains in the dark about how exactly U.S. policy governing targeted killings is operating, under which legal authorities, and who exactly are its victims," said a letter to Obama in December from nine rights groups.) Excerpt from http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/10/politics/us-killing-americans/

_____________

The less secure a population becomes about the fragile boundaries between themselves and their government, the more they are likely to descend into a paranoia-driven fear which--in fringe instances--leads to acquiring weapons.

In Texas we now have open-carry laws. You walk into Starbucks and Billy Bob is sipping his latte with a six-gun on his hip.
Do I feel less safe? Frankly, I'm like Rhett Butler, "Frankly. . . I don't give a damn."

We create all sorts of hypothetical worries for ourselves unnecessarily.
We all think we know what we don't know. We are all confident the "other" fellow is out of his mind and we are right.

The problem isn't fundamentally a problem of weapons---it is over-active imagination and personal convictions in the face of opposition.

As JW's we had enemies everywhere around us and fully expected to pass through a Great Tribulation. We actually bought into that propaganda paranoia. Now we see it was all in our mind and we were duped.

I think the same is true, more or less, in gun owners and anti-gun activists.

Everybody knows better than everybody else. Except--they don't.

We create our own heaven or hell by how strongly we believe our own nonsense!

21

RESPONSIBILITY vs. "moral" Responsibility (What is the distinction and what is the difference?)

by Terry in

this is not intended to be a highbrow discussion!.

you ( ought ) to pay me back that $100.

.. bank loan.

Terry

Village Idiot20 hours ago

Terry, concerning your bank loan/friend loan analogy both are moral responsibilities but you have the addition, with the bank loan, of a legal responsibility. The legal responsibility is how the state enforces and regulates what is at heart a moral responsibility.
________________

There is a loan industry which preys upon low, fixed income people who need cash between paydays. The interest rates are sky-high.

Part of the success of this fast-cash loanshark strategy is the postponement of the payback date built-in as a 'friendly' cushion. This delay, of course, increases the amount of payback.
A very close friend of mine is hooked in and cannot escape. He borrows and owes over and over again. His checks regularly bounce. Last month there were 25 bounced check fees collected by his bank and each of the Loan companies.
Counter-intuitively, daily he receives e-mail offers of yet larger loans available NOW. You see, all these lenders want to do is open up a wound large enough for them to lay their maggoty eggs inside.

I said all of that to say this. I don't think morality has anything at all to do with lending money or paying it back. It has more to do with strategies, tactics, and human weakness.

Your mileage may vary, of course.
Nature itself is based upon exploitation of resources. Only in the mind of certain individual humans does any sense of morality exist. For each of us, the extent of that ethical territory varies.

Laws pertaining to lending and interest are obviously contrived to allow victims to get in as deep as they are willing to go. Beyond that, the collection and write-off mechanism defaults into yet another circle of Hell.

24

The official relationship between Jehovahs Witnessses and the Watchtower? I'm confused.

by Joliette in

jw
friends

can anybody answer this for me?.

whenever i tell people i'm ex jehovahs witnesses, they always assume that i'm against the jehovahs witnesses, but i am more so against the watchtower then anything.people assume that i'm anti-jehovahs witness, but now that i've done more research i've realized that its the watchtower thats more harmful then the jehovahs witnesses, even though theres a lot of jehovahs witnesses i dont like, i'm not against jehovahs witnesses as a group.. can anyone explain this to me?.

Terry

Let us begin by setting up some fundamental axioms.

Let's assume there is a genuine distinction between reality and perception. If so, the Watchtower corporation operates in the real world by recruiting real people to do X. Those people are willing to do X because they've been convinced that X-work is ordained by an entity who calls Himself Jehovah. From this premise, we can extract some corollaries.

1. Watchtower Corporation relies on the X-work of its members whom they solely guide while self-referencing as a conduit for the invisible entity Jehovah.

2. Whether or not there exists this Jehovah, the members are real and the corporation whom they obey is real.

3. Regardless of the Jehovah-connection, members (Jehovah's Witnesses) perform X-work directly as agents of the Governing Body of the Corporation.

4. If the Corporation (Watchtower) is directing its members to do X-work under false pretenses and that work is harmful to others, Jehovah's Witnesses are morally culpable for their complicity, though less wittingly so than the GB wielding authority under false pretenses.

5. Nazis who were tried for war crimes at Nuremberg offered as a defense of their atrocities that they were under compulsion of Authority.

This defense was not permitted because each member of the Nazi party made the decision to follow those orders without resistance. By not using their rational mind and conscience to resist, they were found guilty and hanged.
Nazi rank and file believed in the Thousand Year Rule. Jehovah's Witnesses believe in something similar. Nazis murdered six million. The Watchtower enslaves seven million, draining them of self-empowerment, education, charitable acts, societal solidarity, and circumstantially twisting their natural affection for their own flesh and blood kin into a dispassionate indifference sometimes causing death.

Using the above as my premise, I would offer you the following opinion.

Jehovah's Witnesses may not originate the harm they accept as the highest calling, but the harm is done anyway.

The Watchtower is run by either delusional despots or psychopathic control freaks who will stop at nothing to spread the contagion of a movement dedicated its own enslavement as well as that of the world in total.

The threat of death (ultimately) and marking and shunning in the immediate, are weaponized religious beliefs used as coercion and undue influence.

You may distinguish the hit-man from the mob boss who orders the hit, but the distinction is illusory when the body hits the floor.

19

The Truth is not an ORG.....It's inside of you

by tor1500 in

jw
friends

the truth, the org is the truth...ummm...let's think about that...i was thinking that the bible is the truth & what it does is that it reveals the truth about you...the more you read the bible the more you may see yourself & your actions.

you may be a person who judges people, the bible will show you what's wrong with that...viola, another truth revealed about you.

you may be a prideful person, you read a story in the bible about that...again, it's another truth revealed about you.

Terry

Truth isn't a thing. It is a correspondence between reality and a description of that reality.

The logical test of accuracy in describing reality is the absence of internal contradiction. You see this in cross-examination of a witness by an adversarial attorney probing for discrepancy and changes in previous testimony.

Jehovah's Witnesses as "witnesses" have had numerous changes in their testimony which they never admit to being anything less than the Truth. For a JW, Truth is not unlike today's weather.
They've been forecasting with 100% inaccuracy for over 100 years.
If confronted by the unreliability of their predictions, they act offended and point to their source authority: scriptures and Jehovah's spirit. What they never seem to question is their definitive presentation and its having been based on mere opinion.
"God's dates and not ours" is hardly a call for prudent skepticism.

21

RESPONSIBILITY vs. "moral" Responsibility (What is the distinction and what is the difference?)

by Terry in

this is not intended to be a highbrow discussion!.

you ( ought ) to pay me back that $100.

.. bank loan.

Terry

Right now in America, we have an unravelling of commonality which is reflected in our Political process of selecting candidates for President.

Roughly half the population is at odds with the other half in regard to Moral Responsibility, as to how it will be practiced through Governmental oversight, enforcement, and social programs.

Both sides are handling this confrontation with deplorable unintelligence!

Name-calling, bullying, chaos are not virtues practiced by Moral Agents.
The common denominator is reasoned discourse, facts, formal debate or Town Hall meetings with a view to arbitration.
Nope.
We have newspapers, magazines, talking heads, and crowds devolved into ignorant blunt instruments of harsh rhetoric, disinformation, and one-sided propaganda.

Both sides assume they alone are totally right and their opponents are not simply wrong-headed but have demonized them with the most vulgar personal descriptions imaginable.

To my way of thinking, this is a demonstration of anarchy and a soul sickness.

Being snotty, foul-mouthed, and loud in response to an opponent who is snotty, foul-mouthed and loud is reprehensible and counter-productive at best, and dangerously revolutionary nihilism at worst.

You cannot practice preaching of Ethics if you are a violator of the rights of others just because you assume you are on the side of angels.

This is just as true for the Liberal as the Conservative.

Let's cut out the bold-face hypocrisy, okay?

21

RESPONSIBILITY vs. "moral" Responsibility (What is the distinction and what is the difference?)

by Terry in

this is not intended to be a highbrow discussion!.

you ( ought ) to pay me back that $100.

.. bank loan.

Terry

LEGAL

MORAL

ETHICAL

I took a 101 class in this type of topic

To learn what the difference is between these three...short answer

When we examine anything in order to better understand it we must go from the GENERAL to the SPECIFIC.

Philosophy was man's first effort at trying to make a rational and logical procedure out of the inquiry into how we know what we know.

Humans survive by the use of their minds as homo sapiens (man + rational ) at the top of the food chain. Figuring out better ways of surviving led to this supreme position.

Survival among others in a social setting was a practical matter of cooperation with minimal conflict.
Mankind, in order to survive, must figure out how to make choices determining the purpose and course of life.
Developing a code of values is the GENERAL heading of "Morality".
The specific details of those values guiding choices and actions is "Ethics."

Laws are binding rules in the hands of agents who administer force.
The Laws of Hammurabi and Moses listed offenses and consequences which mostly defined "justice" as a restoration process on behalf of the aggrieved victim by fines or punishments.

The important question to ask and understand is this. Why do humans have Morals in the first place? The answer is simple: if every individual person did what seemed immediately beneficial to themselves alone, only the strong, the cruel, and the sneaky would prevail (as it is among animals.) By using intelligence to gain consensus about fair play, tribes, villages, nations were able to cooperate and manage resources for the common benefit.