A phrase that can mean anything means nothing.
The SIGNS of the times are ALWAYS identifiable as NOW because they are always present
to be singled out and magnified for fear-mongering.
Jehovah's Witnesses have not seemed to notice that their leaders are resorting to an old retail trick
called the GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sale gimmick.
FOMO (fear of missing out) is a real grabber. The fear of End Times and Great Tribulation and Armageddon
is a sales gimmick.
The Kingdom Halls grow fat (for a while) and when a great big NOTHING happens - well, some leave but most
people have settled in and will not leave. Cognitive Dissonance takes hold and excuses are made.
I know about 50 JW's who are at least as old as I am (75) who are stuck like dinosaurs in the La Brea Tar Pit
who may struggle but who cannot free themselves.
They just "Wait on Jehovah" like "Waiting for Godot".
These ancient JW's have had practically NO LIFE AT ALL except the routines of meetings, service, self-reinforcement (fellowship), and overwork. They look awful and have no energy.
But you know what? The GB is still running that GOiNG OuT OF BUSINESS SALE like "this" time is different.
Last Days.
Last part.
Last part of the last part.
Blah blah blah.
Posts by Terry
-
12Watchtower July 22 - JWs being interrogated need to muzzle their mouths
by Listener inthe watchtower has printed a disturbing article about self control and gives this instruction to the r & f .
self-control also allows us to remain silent when opposers try to trick us into revealing things that could endanger our brothers and sisters.
this might occur when we are being interrogated by the police in a land where our work is banned or restricted.
-
-
Terry
-
48
"Jehovah God"
by Jeffro inthe expression "jehovah god" has always seemed strange to me.
even when i was a jw, i found the term awkward, and never used it myself.
both words are nouns intended to be synonyms of each other, unless the name "jehovah" is being used as an adjective, which is also weird.
-
-
Terry
Once your ear adjusts to the constant rhythmic dit Duh dit Duh (Jehovah God) it becomes very natural.
Same thing with Christ Jesus instead of Jesus Christ.
Same as "torture stake" instead of Cross.
Same as Kingdom Hall instead of Church.
In fact, brainwashing wipes away what binds our conscious minds to a historical Christianity and REPLACES
everything with a CUCKOO'S EGG religious interloper cult.
Constant use like constant rain becomes white noise and we only begin to notice again if things go silent. -
10
Why are Jehovah's Witnesses determined to be WRONG (about saying JUH-HO-VUH and JEE-Suss)?
by Terry inall throughout history in greek, hebrew, and latin languages - there was no j sound!
no jay sound.. .
why did christians start using a non-hebrew name for the son of god?
-
-
Terry
Joseph Franklin Rutherford was an odd duck who pretty much replaced Jesus as the star of the show with
a completely novel throwback REBRANDING for Christianity as Jehovah-ianity.
Did Rutherford get anything right?
Complete failures:
1. Allowing and promoting THE FINISHED MYSTERY
2. Agreeing to promote war bonds
3. Millions Now Living May - no wait! not "may" let's say WILL Never Die.
4. Predicting 1925
5. Building Beth Sarim AFTER the failure of 1925 and pretending it wasn't for himself.
6. Continuing with the Pyramid teaching for over a decade and then suddenly flipping
7. Complete script-flip on interpreting Romans 13
8. Letter to Hitler
9. Bullying Moyle and dragging his dirty laundry out in the open
10. Making a fetish out of alcohol and bellowing about how PROHIBITION was backed by Satan
11. Strutting around with 2 12 cylinder cadillacs
And so on ...
Making Jehovah's kingdom replace Jesus on the Watchtower cover was really wrong-headed. -
10
Why are Jehovah's Witnesses determined to be WRONG (about saying JUH-HO-VUH and JEE-Suss)?
by Terry inall throughout history in greek, hebrew, and latin languages - there was no j sound!
no jay sound.. .
why did christians start using a non-hebrew name for the son of god?
-
-
Terry
Iloowy, goowy said: This silliness about insisting English speakers pronounce names in Hebrew not English, is for the birds.
______
I feel that Jehovah's Witnesses IF THEY WERE SERIOUS scholars themselves, would make an "adjustment" toward being more accurate if, for no other reason, they have made a FETISH out of using the name.
Encyclopedia Britannica:
Early Christian writers, such as St. Clement of Alexandria in the 2nd century, had used a form like Yahweh, and this pronunciation of the tetragrammaton was never really lost. Many Greek transcriptions also indicated that YHWH should be pronounced Yahweh.
More "respectful" and more nearly accurate are not, however, to be expected of this organization. They are contrarian in every way possible to the point of absurdity.
The instance of "torture stake" is practically pathological, IMHO.
The elite Governing Body has never, ever been afraid of "taking the Lord's Name in vain" as evidenced by all the false prophecies they've published for over a hundred years. Always in the "name of Jehovah." -
10
Why are Jehovah's Witnesses determined to be WRONG (about saying JUH-HO-VUH and JEE-Suss)?
by Terry inall throughout history in greek, hebrew, and latin languages - there was no j sound!
no jay sound.. .
why did christians start using a non-hebrew name for the son of god?
-
-
Terry
Waton, thank you!
I should have spent thirty seconds looking that up on Google! -
10
Why are Jehovah's Witnesses determined to be WRONG (about saying JUH-HO-VUH and JEE-Suss)?
by Terry inall throughout history in greek, hebrew, and latin languages - there was no j sound!
no jay sound.. .
why did christians start using a non-hebrew name for the son of god?
-
-
Terry
So why do we call the Hebrew hero of Jericho Joshua and the Christian Messiah Jesus? Because the New Testament was originally written in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic. Greeks did not use the sound sh, so the evangelists substituted an S sound. Then, to make it a masculine name, they added another S sound at the end. The earliest written version of the name Jesus is Romanized today as Iesous.
The initial J didn’t come until much later.
That sound was foreign to Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Note:
Not even English distinguished J from I until the mid-17th century.
Thus, the 1611 King James Bible refers to Jesus as “Iesus” and his father as “Ioseph.”
The current spelling likely came from Switzerland, where J sounds more like the English Y. When English Protestants fled to Switzerland during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I, they drafted the Geneva Bible and used the Swiss spelling. Translators in England adopted the Geneva spelling by 1769.
Jew (Yehudah) -
10
Why are Jehovah's Witnesses determined to be WRONG (about saying JUH-HO-VUH and JEE-Suss)?
by Terry inall throughout history in greek, hebrew, and latin languages - there was no j sound!
no jay sound.. .
why did christians start using a non-hebrew name for the son of god?
-
-
Terry
**Correction**
Above I made the statement:
Jesus is very rarely DIRECTLY quoted in the NT in Aramaic.
He was not speaking Greek but the NT is (thanks to the 70 translators) written in Greek.
Remove the phrase inside the (parenthesis). The Septuagint translators only translated the O.T. not the N.T. -
10
Why are Jehovah's Witnesses determined to be WRONG (about saying JUH-HO-VUH and JEE-Suss)?
by Terry inall throughout history in greek, hebrew, and latin languages - there was no j sound!
no jay sound.. .
why did christians start using a non-hebrew name for the son of god?
-
-
Terry
DID YOU KNOW?All throughout history in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin languages - there was no J sound! NO JAY SOUND.Why did Christians start using a non-Hebrew name for the Son of God?
BLAME THE PAGANS!
A name that can't even be pronounced in Greek or Hebrew because neither alphabet has the J sound changed everything!In fact, (brace yourself) THERE WAS NO SUCH NAME as Jesus.The actual Hebrew name was:יהושע (yehoshu'a, and we think of that as JOSHUA.A related Old Testament language is Aramaic and so:ישוע (yeshuAre you still with me?I can keep going if you keep on reading...Alexander the Great conquered the ancient world country by country and when he died all those conquered lands were split up into kingdoms by Alexander's generals.So what?So this had an EXTRAORDINARY IMPACT on language, culture, philosophy, and religion. GREEK was Sort of like a giant meteor impact.Most ancient JEWS (ha! see the letter J?) started speaking GREEK and eventually lost the ability to read or to talk in HEBREW or ARAMAIC. Greek became the international common language.
Jesus is very rarely DIRECTLY quoted in the NT in Aramaic. He was not speaking Greek but the NT is (thanks to the 70 translators) written in Greek.What good were the ancient writings (Old Testament) to Jews if they couldn't read them?None. 200 years before B.C. became A.D. a body of 70 translators set to work and out comes a NEW version of the Hebrew and Aramaic into GREEK (it was called Septuagint which means the 70).(Hebrew scholars always and still do learn Hebrew and can read it and write it) but ordinary folks did not/could not.If I haven't lost you yet - let's go one level deeper, shall we?Get it? Those are ALL the very SAME name!Translations into GERMAN used the German letter J for those words and why? BECAUSE IN GERMAN, J is pronounced like Y.When copyists (scribes) started copying the Bible and they came to the letter I (pronounced yuh) they put a flourish in the script - a sort of tail (called a swash) and it looks like this: J.YESHUA became JOSHUA and I Ἰησοῦς (iesous) became JESUS.
Aha! It was pretty but now it became pretty confusing.
Christ or Christos is PAGAN Greek. Jesus is pagan Greek.
Jehovah is Catholic Spanish derived from pagan Latin and mispronounced with J sound.So you get - in the Restoration/Lutheran Middle Ages - Bibles that had ‘Jacob’ and ‘Joseph’ and ‘Joshua’ and ‘Jesus’ and ‘Judah’ - all spelled with J BUT PRONOUNCED AS Y (would be in English).The German ‘Jude’ is pronounced ‘Y’hudah’. It means ‘Jew’, which is an English word derived from - guess where - ‘Jude’.Except English DOES have a ‘J’ sound.This also means there was no such name as JEHOVAH either!Four Hebrew letter (yod he vav he) was not pronounced for fear of "taking God's name in vain." יְהֹוָה Yəhōwā, Remove the vowels - they were never written down...Years later, some cultures began using the "I" for the vowel sound and "J" for a "Y" sound. It was not until around 1500 AD that the letter J took on the "dg" sound we are familiar with today.The name JEHOVAH was invented by Catholic scholar (and anti-Semite) Raymundus Martini in 1270 A.D.English translator William Tyndale selected Martini's Jehovah for God's name and introduced it to English speakers in 1522. English speakers mistakenly used the J (sound juh) instead of Y sound (yuh).SUMMING UP in CONCLUSIONNobody used the names Jehovah or Jesus historically until the sixteenth century A.D. or Common Era.
Pagan names were used employing Greek and Latin and later mispronounced in English as variants.)If you are sensitive about saying American INDIANS instead of "Native Americans" - then be consistent about Yeshua too. Or - if you are a Jehovah's Witness and so pedantic about everything else - why not be accurate as possible when it comes to the Name of God and His son?
Biblical scholars around the world use YAHWEH because it is as close as possible as we can get but JW's are pig-headed, obstinate, and - duh - contrarian in every detail.
Jesus spoke in Aramaic but is rarely EXACTLY quoted in our Pagan New Testament.
"And these leftovers from Aramaic caused most scholars to say he probably spoke most of the time in Aramaic, which was a Semitic language — it was related to Hebrew, and very much like Hebrew in Judea and Galilee at that time. This means we probably don’t have the very words of Jesus all the time because he didn’t speak in Greek, and what we have is Greek. The New Testament was written in Greek originally, and we read it in our translations. And so, even if he sometimes taught in Greek, which he may well have, readers of English today don’t have the very words because they’re reading English."- “Talitha cumi” in Mark 5:41
- “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” in Mark 15:34
- “Ephphatha”in Mark 7:34
- “Abba” in Mark 14:36
-
8
IMHO the finest TV interview with Ex-JW's ever broadcast!
by Terry inquite effective and enjoyable.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijzvt_jptx8&t=1306s.
-
-
Terry
I like the gruff but fair get-to-the-point manner and style of the moderator.
-
19
Beards- just told by an elder
by dothemath ini know this subject has been talked about lots over the years, just thought i would share a recent finding from canada.. while visiting with a group of friends, an elder (don’t recall how the subject came up) mentioned the local body had voted to allow brothers with beards be allowed to give talks from the platform.
(it was a very close vote).
the direction given was for each congregation to decide for themselves if that is now acceptable.. so some congregations will be for, and for many it will not.. it’ll probably be a long time before we see any pictures on the watchtower where they’re allowing this though..
-
-
Terry
Tyrants savor CONTROL but scared Tyrants must appear benevolent.
I think the pressures on all sides are making the GB pick which hills to die on.
Think how stupid and incomprehensible it is to say: "Growing a beard is a matter of conscience."
Yeah, huge moral issue, huh?
