going through pictures of rome, i put on one of my most favorite italian singers andrea bocelli.
his music lifts me, tugs at the heart and soul, a soothing voice.
eyes closed, a glass of red wine in hand, ah magic i tell you.
Sounds like most of the posters are into the more contemporary Italian music. In that case, you might find some enjoyable material played at past San Remo festivals.
I enjoy some of Bocelli's own songs too, but the nostalgic side of me enjoyed his Viaggio Italiano album even more. Those songs are definitely not pop, but nicely demonstrate how good a tenor he really is.
has anybody noticed in many recent watchtowers that christ is now said to have "turned his attention to the earth in 1914.".
unlike the 60's they do not say christ "came" in 1914. the "proclaimers book " p137 says the bible students came to discern that "christ did not return, (even invisibly), in 1914.".
the way is now paved.
Hamsterbait
First off, I 'm stuck going to several, and being as oblivious as I am, I still would not have missed something like that if dubbies were talking about it. It strikes me as a spoof. But if its real, I have access to the most recent Study editions of the WT. If you give me the exact reference I can post a scan for others.
so i have a decent computer.
hp, nice sony monitor.
when my dad passed i inherited a new mac.
If you're the type of computer user who just wants to get work done (be it photo editing, home movies, or slideshows)and are more concerned about user experience than tinkering with hardware to max out performance: then you'd consider the mac. Even then only if you have considerable spare change. :)
hey kids, what's doing?.
i sent off an email to a relative and asked if she heard anything about the big announcement this sunday.
i told her what i heard about it and here is her response.
Since I'm in the same cong as my family I couldn't say I heard it from there but from someone else. Well, my sister was agitated by it. Spewing off about how only people who lacked apppreciation for spiritual food would be happy with the cuts. Pretty much the same reaction when I mentioned about the public talks being shortened by a third.
our culturally biassed and contextual image of god is that of a male being, omnipotent, eternal, and existing outside the created world.
sirona introduced me to a new type of god (maybe one without caps, i'm not sure): a divinity who is human-like, framed within the human perspective, subject to suffering, growing and dying, like anything else in the visible universe.. isn't it time to face the fact that our western image of god is nothing more than our perspective on god with all its negative and positive aspects included?
why do we need to prove the existence of our god if it's only the perspective we feel comfortable with?
Are there any empirical clues pointing at the possibility of a transcendental God without referring to the superiority of our perspective?
I'd say there's little to no objective evidence for any sort of God/god. Those who claim mystical encounters have some experiential evidence but its only valid for themselves. If one thinks of god as a creative process, then I guess one slant can focus on the way sub-atomic particles come in and out of existence from the seeming void. That void can in a sense be considered an all pervasive field. As to the transcendance of that "god", there's a possibility of this field also being the fabric from which multiverses spring.
There are 3 congregations in the KH I attend. There are 2 servants finishing off degrees in business, a sister finishing off a nursing degree and another publisher finishing off a diploma as a pharmacy assistant. There are also two elders with a university degree (one marketing and the other administration) and a few sisters with accounting degrees. I'm not counting myself in the above.
what would you love to find on ebay, that you can't find anywhere?.
I bought a Picasso II video card for an A3000 I once had. As well as TurboPrint which allowed me to use 24 bit printing on my Amiga. Yeah, I know, pretty sad compared to all the PC platform had to offer at the time. But I loved the platform. Kinda like Mac Addicts....which I may soon become.
I'd love to get a great condition G4 Cube from Ebay.
it happened last night guys.
i got early to the kh and the boe came to talk to me.
they ask me to read the bible and asked me a couple of questions.
I can't judge you Neo, err, OOTB. Mostly because, to my shame, I accepted a MS position and served at it despite disagreeing with alot of their end time teachings and their 2 class system. Now this was well before I learned about how much the WTS was keeping from publishers. Even with their hypocrisy, I've felt/continue to feel poorly about myself for doing that. I wasn't all that much better. I can't imagine being an elder.
Getting your family to doubt the whole spirit guided premise by good faking sounds reasonable. Maybe your family will be swayed by that. Mine wasn't. They knew my leanings from the beginning and it hasn't affected their faith one iota. They rationalized away my appointment like the KGB appointments...and had even greater satisfaction in saying that I stunk in that role too.
Frozen One
Believe me. Its not all that hard to get appointed. Its all about perception as was honestly explained to me by the PO. If the congregation sees you as "theocractic" enough, you're in. Which isn't all that hard nowadays with average dubs being such slackers compared to the average dubs a decade back.
There's a huge shortage of idiots (don't take that personally OOTB - I was one of them) willing to be worked to the bone. One of the elders would always joke with me about whether the BOE was making me squeek with all the work they piled on. I do think though that OOTB is exaggerating how vocal he is with his dissenting views. But hey, I was fooling myself in how subversive I was too. I needed to.
in the wake of lovelylil's recent threads on the "historical jesus," a side question.. let's assume, for the sake of the discussion, that the four canonical gospels are not historical accounts of jesus' life, but a much later elaboration of christian faith in narrative form -- there are many reasons for such a proposal, but i'm not going into them right now -- let's just assume.. what do you think would be better or worse to find out in the historical field, from the perspective of christian faith:.
1. that there was no "historical jesus" at all, and that the gospels are essentially a religious myth made (hi)story, "the word made flesh" so to say;.
2. that there was a "historical jesus" completely different from the christian saviour -- for example, a galilean apocalyptic prophet and political zealot, trying to cleanse the nation and the temple from both the roman occupation and ritual disorders, with no interest at all in starting a new universal (i.e.
I think # 1 is worse for the ardent believers because myths nowadays are looked down upon as being fabricated stories. People can get the valid points made by some of them, but ultimately they are just somebody else's points. Nothing coming from a suprahuman source. I don't think there are many christians today who claim having direct communion with a divine Jesus. So without that experiental element feeding their faith, I imagine they need some historical basis to validate it.
reading one more time (on the umpteenth thread about the 70 weeks of daniel, into which i'm not going again) the idea that "anti-supercalifragilnaturalistic bias" ruin the unbelievers' (or misbelievers') exegesis of bible texts, and readily admitting to such... bias, i have one very general and simple question which might be worth its own thread.. here it is:.
once you admit such thing as the "supernatural", .
on what grounds can you assess anything.
IMHO, I don't think one could assign any degree of likelihood to anything supernatural.
Our natural world, regardless of each of our own personal subjectivities, is a concrete objective reality that is manifest and can be probed with tangible results. Going beyond that tangible puts us into the untestable. There's no productive dialectic. I haven't found any manifestation of the supernatural in which I've been able to consistently get certain responses from certain actions.
Edit: And on the other side of the coin. Being agnostic, I also can't with any certainty say there exists nothing beyond what we understand as natural. After all, even with regards to whats natural, theoretical physicists talk about multiple dimensions to our universe. Now 4 of them I can directly attest to interacting with. Not so with the others. There's even less I can say about the supernatural.
