Posts by Terry

3

Steven Hassan's interview on a new fictional cult film, "The Path" Fact-Checked: The Ugly Truth Behind Real-Life Cults

by AndersonsInfo in

jw
friends

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/03/the-path-cults.

the path fact-checked: the ugly truth behind real-life cults .

part of hassan's interview: "a lot of the older cults that have been around for a really long time, like the jehovah’s witnesses, for example, and even the mormons, are having a really hard time with young people growing up in the age of the internet, because they’ve been basically telling lies to their followers about their history, and now people can easily find out what’s true and not true, and look at their own literature and copies of their own literature.

Terry

The first thing which struck me about THE PATH is how authentic the structure and dialogue felt. TV and movies almost never get religion right. Two things authors cannot do, 1. Write smarter than they are 2. Create believable "spiritual" situations if they are non-believers.

This TV series comes closest to being Scientology without simply stealing or parodying. I find it compelling.

33

"But WHY would you want to know those things??"

by stuckinarut2 in

i ran into an older sister who has always been very sweet.. it was a friendly chat...yet she pushed for a reason why my family have been missing from meetings for some time.

the question was deflected, until it just had to be said: "well, there have been some troubling and disturbing issues about the society especially the way things were handled during the royal commission, as well as many other issues".. she quickly cut in and said "but why would you want to know these things?

its best not to research and look at those sort of things - so we don't get upset!".

Terry

Why would you want to know those things?

"If we choose to close our eyes we are choosing to live in darkness."
Hypocrisy is having one set of values for others and a different set of values for ourselves. If we go from house to door expecting others to listen to disturbing facts--why would we carve out such an exception for ourselves?

4

The Remarkable Story of Lili Boulanger

by Terry in

jw
friends

_____________the remarkable story of lili boulanger____________.

there are stories that cannot be written and shouldn't be told because the truth of those stories cannot be embraced on first hearing.

this is the life of a real person who appeared and vanished as though only dreamed up by an overly emotional writer.. lili boulanger was born to a father 77 years old, yet they formed an adoring bond almost from the moment she drew her first breath!

Terry

_____________The Remarkable Story of Lili Boulanger____________

________________________________

There are stories that cannot be written and shouldn't be told because the truth of those stories cannot be embraced on first hearing. This is the life of a real person who appeared and vanished as though only dreamed up by an overly emotional writer.

Lili Boulanger was born to a father 77 years old, yet they formed an adoring bond almost from the moment she drew her first breath!

What now to tell you that you would believe?

What if I told you her mother was a Russian princess?

She was.

What if I said her family was swarming with musicality surrounded by great music and the finest composers and performers?

They were!

1892 was an unusual time in world history, especially in Paris.

As to Lili herself?

The remarkable French composer Gabriel Faure', her mother's music tutor, discovered the 2-year-old Lili possessed perfect pitch and an insuperable attraction to everything musical. Yes, 2 years of age when the average child is learning not to mess their own diaper and will perhaps soon be able to walk--Lili was already glowing with a prodigious promise of something extraordinary!

Her 77-year-old father was a teacher in the Paris Conservatory. Do you suppose he and his wife would see to it that Lili would have only the most sublime encouragement? Yes, you would be right! Lili learned to sing, play piano, cello, violin and harp instructed by the most finest of teachers.

By the time she was 19, Lili was competing for the Prix de Rome.

During her performance, she collapsed due to illness! She was diagnosed with intestinal tuberculosis. Now this is tragic enough already--is it not? So young, so talented and with such great promise but living in an age when the science of medicine was unequal to the task of restoring her health.

I will now disclose an even greater tragedy; she would only live 6 more years.

Her beloved father had died when she was only 6--so great a blow--and now with only a few more years to carry on with her second great love: music itself! What could she possibly accomplish? After all, this was not a time for women to rise to the top of any profession. And, being so young and so ill would prove to be no advantage. What can I say to you now that will make this story worth the telling?

Read on, my friend....read on!

First, as an aside, I shall now reveal that her older sister Nadia would grow up to be one of the great music teachers and a composer in her own right.

Among Nadia Boulanger’s students we find stellar greatness in the likes of Aaron Copland, Philip Gass, Astor Piazzolla, Quincy Jones, Michel Legrand, Virgil Thompson, Burt Bacharach, Daniel Barenboim, Robert Russell Bennett, just to name a very few!

Had Lili lived longer--what might she have done? We cannot know that, but, we can now give our full attention and consideration to the very reason I have elected to tell this story to you.

I had not previously heard of Lili Boulanger and neither have you, I suspect. Quite by accident I was researching her older sister and ran across Lili's own extraordinary music.

One cannot talk about music to others except to say idle things and to grunt opinions.

What I will do for you is one simple thing. I shall give you a reason for curiosity in exploring the compositions of Lili Boulanger--and this for a very good reason: this young ill-fated musical prodigy was fully up to the task of imbuing her own work with an incredibly intense love of life. Her music is delicate, rapturously melodic, numinous with mystical emotion and incredibly well orchestrated.

Oh, I failed to mention. . .!

Lili drove herself to recover enough strength to compete for the Prix de Rome again and was the very first woman to win the prize! Her sister, Nadia, passed away in 1979 and was laid to rest beside Lili in Montmartre.

But, enough with words!

Try her music and be transported from this Earth to a vision of oneness with life, nature and the eternal. Let the music wash over you and absorb this brief voice of a young woman so soon departed from life.

Let us celebrate her in the transcendence of her genius!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5YQD7XEaEs

Why not explore her other works as well!

12

True or False .... The JW Religion was Started by Amateur Self Avowed Bible Theologians ?

by Finkelstein in

.....who were able to propagate their self devised bible theology by utilizing a printing plant which they themselves were the head editorial writers .

c t russell and the man to follow him j rutherford, were both not academically trained bible theologians but they certainly were inspired businessmen to the fact, charlatans of their own era and time.. the return of jesus christ and a new world order to replace an old wicked world order, was just too much of a marketable and tangible concept for those men to just leave alone.

they exploited the already existing belief in the bible already structured within the population to where they preached their created version of the gospel, the rest is now history as well their many self devised albeit commercially appealing failed doctrines .

Terry

And speaking of Religion and Amateurs . . .

Religion is insignificance ritualized.

Worship is man's reaction to anthropomorphic awe.

At the core of religious ritual is a quaking appeasement by a lower life form of a higher one. (God=highest in the food chain.)

A sort of bribe transacts. I'll do this and that and it will demonstrate my abasement.

The BROKERS of this power struggle (between pathetic trembling wimp (mere man) and the being so awesome he/she/ it can wipe you ) inserts himself into the transaction.

These BROKERS tell you how to negotiate your lifespan and afterlife entitlements and how much it will cost. (i.e. Broker's fee).

Who are these Brokers? They are gamers, flim-flam artists half-drunk on their power to convince you of what they come up with. Some are simply

well-intentioned mopes who are self-deluded, but, canny. Like a drug dealer who not only deals but uses.

What is the baseline? How do we separate the honest broker from the flim-flam artist?

The HONEST BROKER treats religion, theology and his fellow believers with the highest respect. How? He gets as close to the scientific criteria of theory & practice as possible. Universities are established. History and precedent are honored and taught. Levels of mastery are ordered and maintained and licensed the same as in Law or Medicine. A religious counselor, for example, must study counseling and have knowledge of psychology and family therapy.

The Dishonest Broker is the AMATEUR. They have a sneering contempt for the honest broker and cut corners by pretending they've scored an end run around scholarship by GOING DIRECTLY TO THE SOURCE. The worst fraud perpetrated is pretending they've been directly SELECTED BY GOD to receive inside information! Why? No college, no exams, no learning languages, no peer review, no Master's thesis defense--in short, they COUNTERFEIT their bona fides! The Amateur religious counselor knows nothing of human psychology and could care less. Any human weakness merely means there is sin, weakness and a need for more strenuous effort.

That is what I mean by distinguishing the Amateur from the Bona Fide theologian, the honest broker.

This does NOT mean the man with a Master's Degree is not full of birdshit. It means he's intellectually honest enough to treat the birdshit as though

it were the Word of God and well worth 3-5 years of hard study!

If the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses (really Judge Rutherford who co-opted the platform built byC.T.Russell's fortune) had been intellectually honest about believing he had a red telephone hotline direct to Jehovah's heaven (with the spirit of Pastor Russell on the other end!) he'd have NOTICED HOW WRONG HIS TEACHINGS WERE and stopped making stuff up! But, he IGNORED is many errors. He simply didn't care about what was true.

12

True or False .... The JW Religion was Started by Amateur Self Avowed Bible Theologians ?

by Finkelstein in

.....who were able to propagate their self devised bible theology by utilizing a printing plant which they themselves were the head editorial writers .

c t russell and the man to follow him j rutherford, were both not academically trained bible theologians but they certainly were inspired businessmen to the fact, charlatans of their own era and time.. the return of jesus christ and a new world order to replace an old wicked world order, was just too much of a marketable and tangible concept for those men to just leave alone.

they exploited the already existing belief in the bible already structured within the population to where they preached their created version of the gospel, the rest is now history as well their many self devised albeit commercially appealing failed doctrines .

Terry

What is an Amateur but a person who does something because they love doing it rather than a specially trained professional serious about study?

What would you expect if you went to the Emergency Room at the hospital and an Amateur doctor examined you and recommended surgery?

Would you trust them because they love what they are doing? Or, would you...umm..oh, I dunno sort of want a 2nd opinion by a REAL doctor?

Or, what if something went wrong with your expensive automobile and your next door neighbor walked up and peered under the hood and suggested

some radical repairs nobody else ever heard of? Would it be worth trying? Would you turn it over to them? Naw, didn't think so!

One of the big problems with the Amateur is they have nothing at stake except their ego. They didn't invest time going to special schools and earning a degree and passing strenuous exams. They don't have multi-thousand dollar student loans to pay off. They don't have a brick and mortar establishment to operate out of with insurance indemnity against malfeasance. There are no watchdog agencies guarding you against their malpractice.

An Amateur is just a big grin and a lot of opinion and not much else!

Until it comes to Religion.

What about Religion founded by an Amateur? What would the doctrines look like? Would they seem normal or slightly off-center?

Would you expect an amateur theologian to come up with some really wild, weird and crackpot "truths" they'd defend? Sure.

Why? Because, like the amateurs who write books about the Kennedy asassaination, imagination is all it takes to reach a conclusion. Evidence can be bent, warped, twisted, ignored or misunderstood. Amateurs read other amateurs for ideas. Why? Because they aren't schooled in difficult texts by real experts.

Religious amateurs go with their whims, deuces wild and end up so far away from mainstream they are convined they MUST REALLY BE ON TO SOMETHING.

When they predicted something wacky and IT DIDN'T HAPPEN wouldn't you expect to hear, "Aw, I was just enthusiastic--I didn't mean any harm. You shouldn't have listened to me so seriously."

Yep.

And with the Watchtower Society you have over a hundred years of Amateurs and more Amateurs teaching other Amateurs until stuff has to be changed, fixed, repaired, turned around and explained away constantly.

Why?

Because they do it for the love of the subject. They do because of their egos. They are easily self-duped.

That's what you get with amateurs.
______________________

Professionalism means you are vetted.

It means there must be evidence, standards, testing, judgement and oversight.

Without a baseline you have nothing but imagination and rhetoric.

The JW's thrive on teaching ignorant people inside "tricks" that appear to refute a mammoth load of historical bullshit.

But, they don't go far enough!

The basis of everything they claim comes from that all-important BIBLE which has nothing but tradition on which to rest.

Non-experts who tell you what an ancient language really "means" are kidding themselves and you as well.

Jehovah's Witnesses are the blind leading the blind. When they fall into a ditch they call it New Light.
________________

An amateur (Frenchamateur "lover of", from Old French and ultimately from Latin amatorem nom. amator, "lover") is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit, study, or science, without pay and often without formal training. Amateurism can be seen in both a negative and positive light. Since amateurs often do not have formal training, some amateur work may be sub-par.

Not to put too fine a point on it, dedicating your entire life and putting all your trust and hope in a Religious doctrine invented and sustained by Amateurs

is what got many of us former JW's into a bind.

The result is what tests the quality.

How fine a job have the amateur theologians such as Fred Franz and his magic chronology chart done in the long run?

The religion swarms around fake dates the way flies swarm around doggie poo.

40

Politically Correct Wasteland

by freemindfade in

this was a comment i made from another post, but i would like to hear some people discuss this.

i know the social justice warriors will scream i'm some sort of trump supporter for what i say even though i don't agree with his ideas and no i am not voting for him... i accept this is a go to for them.. i think we have fallen into a pc vacuum.. criticizing someones religion = racism!.

telling someone to not be so sensitive = misogyny!.

Terry

To nobody in particular, I say:

Let's face it, Topics containing controversy seldom bring out a well-reasoned, insult-free discussion free of pejoratives and Ad Hominem.

I suspect it may sometimes be due to an inability to articulate the sense of what you're trying to get across.
This is especially frustrating when the person you are addressing simply will NOT take a moment to listen.

But, isn't there a significant difference between saying, "I disagree with you" and saying "You ignorant a-hole, you're completely full of sh** and I hope you die soon"?
:)
The anonymity of the Web bolsters a coward's courage.
Trolls and other catfish get their jollies by teasing a negative vibe out of a subject and spotlighting an individual for a pounding.

In the almost 12 years I've been on this Board, I've only tangled with about 4 posters with venom dripping from their yellow fangs :)

When I'm feeling good, I ignore them. If I'm depressed or in a bad mood I might engage them. But--guess what? It is NEVER a good idea to engage a bully or psychopath.

The best place to settle differences is PRIVATELY one on one using the Personal Message.
Guess what? Narcissists won't do that because they like to show off and drain away the dignity and respect necessary to actually settle things, and they get off on negative energy.

I'm still learning to bite my tongue and avoid controversy.
Being negative and personal is a sickness in Society. I've never seen it worse than it is right now.

Here's how it works:

If you don't exactly agree with me, then you are a worthless idiot. I'm going to publicly humiliate you!

That's not much of an argument!
_______________________________
Nobody can blame you for wanting to have a say your way. That's normal. If more than one person complains about HOW you have your say--well, what can it hurt to reflect on the critique and grab a handful of self-awareness?
Humility is the scarcest virtue there is. I know I hope to have a little some day myself.
I enjoy opinions and insights and feel bad when any of us is in an aggrieved state of mind. It will all blow over and be forgotten sooner than you think.

I'm pretty certain, this too shall pass.

8

IS DOUBT always an indication of moral failure---FAITH vs. DOUBT?

by Terry in

is doubt always an indication of moral failure-- faith vs. doubt?.

human survival depends upon a rigorous balance between perception and the means of testing first impressions.

nature’s own test is that of eater and eaten.. inside the food chain, predators blend with their surrounding habitat.

Terry

2+2=4 does not require a huge philosophical argument to prove.

Religious arguments are very dusty, creaky, and long-winded. In fact, religious Doctrine is so ramshackle, the religious Authority must censor critics because they can't risk using silly rebuttals to convince intelligent people. Criticism exposes false things.
If JW's had THE TRUTH they'd be eager to reason, argue, debate till the cows come home. They'd never shut down discussion and makr you as an Apostate. Why?

Because having the TRUTH, their arguments would make critics look like idiots immediately.
Instead, it's the other way round.

To destroy the possibility of being foolish, religious authorities seek to destroy the moral authority of critics. They label them pejoratively.

8

FREE AGENTS without responsibility

by Terry in

i was 11 years old and i was sitting at my desk in homeroom class when the student on my left, gregory, tapped me on my shoulder.. he held a folded note in his hand and was gesturing for me to take it.

he leaned toward my desk and whispered barely loud enough for me to hear,“pass this note to robbie.” robbie was the girl sitting on my right.. i took the note, unfolded it and read it just as gregory punched my arm.

a shout-whisper came along with the fist, “don’t read it, you moron!”i picked up my pencil and scribbled one word of my own and passed the note to robbie.. i had a crush on robbie and so did gregory bunn.

Terry

I can see Jehovah handing the Governing Body a bucket of water to give to the thirsty in the congregations and just before doing so, the GB pissing in the bucket!

Drink up!

8

IS DOUBT always an indication of moral failure---FAITH vs. DOUBT?

by Terry in

is doubt always an indication of moral failure-- faith vs. doubt?.

human survival depends upon a rigorous balance between perception and the means of testing first impressions.

nature’s own test is that of eater and eaten.. inside the food chain, predators blend with their surrounding habitat.

Terry

The dividing line between humans and animals is the ABILITY to QUESTION or own impulses. Animals totally rely on instinct. Pets are easily trained because animals grant unquestioning submission to any more dominant influence.
For a human being to roll over and show their white underbelly is bestial. Submission is surrender.
http://muslimvoices.org/word-islam-meaning/

"In Arabic, the word “Islam” means submission or surrender – however, it was derived from the root word “salam”. From this root word, you can also derive the words peace and safety. Many people feel that Islam implies some sort of enslavement to Allah, but others find it more helpful to define the word “Islam” as surrender."

8

IS DOUBT always an indication of moral failure---FAITH vs. DOUBT?

by Terry in

is doubt always an indication of moral failure-- faith vs. doubt?.

human survival depends upon a rigorous balance between perception and the means of testing first impressions.

nature’s own test is that of eater and eaten.. inside the food chain, predators blend with their surrounding habitat.

Terry

1 Corinthians 7:22

For he who is called by the Lord as a slave is the Lord’s freedman. Likewise, he who is called as a free man is Christ’s slave.

______

We are so accustomed to this sort of language, we never stop to QUESTION whether being a sheep or a slave is a terrible debasement of human intellect.
The realistic thing to point out is this: We actually become sheep and slaves of---NOT GOD--only those claiming they represent God.

That is a HUGE claim and requires doubt to hurdle the possibility we are being conned!