Posts by Annanias

39

John 10:10

by Dawn in

john 10:10the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; i have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

a friend of mine quoted this and applied it to life "right now" - her application was that jesus meant for people to enjoy life now - not always putting off for the future - but to have joy, peace, etc in this life.

this life is a gift in itself.

Annanias

Agreed. Life is to be enjoyed as much as humanly possible. But be mindful of the Marie Antoinette syndrome.

6

Please call 1-800-The-Slave! We need your input, The GB!

by cyberguy in

well, it?s official!

we, the "faithful slave" (aka gb) are now calling on all those claiming to be ?anointed!?

we are now conducting weekly surveys, to ask your opinion on very important topics!

Annanias

Wait a minute, hold it, stop the tape. cyberguy, you're saying that the GB had two homosexual members (no pun intended) and that one of them was moelsting a 13 year-old? And these two guys are still breathing? Please, I need proof of this. No, not 8x10 glossies or testimony under oath. Was this ever discussed previously on this board? or anywhere else?

31

You Will Know By The Love They Have Among Themselves

by Corvin in

the organization of jehovah's witnesses boasts of having true brotherly love for one another.

i always believed they did, although i never felt it growing up in it.

i reckoned that there was something wrong with me since i never felt that "joy" and "spirit of love" that supposedly permeated the congregations.

Annanias

I think that what bothered me the most was the competition. Someone told me that once, a long time ago, there used to be "tote" boards in the KHs that publicly displayed everybody's FS score, but then somebody decidided to take them down. But the principle remained. What got me was the "Warholesque" slant to showing love. We had a sister in our congo that was destitute, she had 2 boys in their mid teens. One child was incorrigible,and the other was so-so. Any how, this poor sister was over weight and not exactly the face of an angel. Anyhow, this sister was starving to death, although she made as many meetings as she could, was really trying, but the congo didn't even see she existed. What was embarrassing to me was that this sister was being kept alive by the charity of her landlady who was not a witness. The statements about field service being a "witness" to the nations suddenly started to get so very big cracks in it for me.

So me, in a fit of "Christian love" took the poor sister and her so-so son into my house. They stayed with us for a little over a year. (The so-so son actually began to turn around, and today I understand he is a somewhat upstanding citizen.) Now, what do you suppose the congo did, said, thought about this insanity? (Yeah, like on this board I need to ask that.) Of course, I was "marked" for this questionable action of taking in (cue the sinister organ music) a single sister under my roof! Although not one word was ever said to me about it in a manly, face to face way. (I started to wonder if the reason elder's wives always had big purses was to have enough room for their husbands' genitallia.) But that's not what pissed me off.

One of the reasons that I had taken this sister into my house was because it was going to be a practical exercise to my own children in showing love. This was to show what giving out of your need rather than your excess was all about. Now, I didn't really expect laurel wreaths or a ticker-tape parade, after all, I a fairly ugly, cantakerous fart when you get right down to it; but, the lying SOBs never said a word to my children. My children had elected to lose some of their own freedom, some of their own space in order to help another human being. These "elders" would just praise up a storm the 30 hours a month the oxen would do, and how the pioneers were the "backbone" of the congo giving a witness to the world in showing love for neighbor and blah, blah, blah. But not one person (and trust me, the knowledge of what we had done had circled the congo in msecs) bothered to say one thing to any of my children, who were expressing their love 24x7.

Now, here's a question: what kind of reaction do you think would have been forthcomming if there had been a slot on those f*cking, hypocritical "publisher" cards that was labeled 'Hours spent helping a brother or sister'?

wedensday is absolutely right about nurturing.

43

Do You Still Think & Act Like A Witness??

by minimus in

jw
friends

one of the criticisms i see on this board, especially if one points out a similarity between jws and jwd or other similar discussion boards, is that a person is still seeing things in the eye of a jehovah's witness.

what's your take on that?

?

Annanias

Yes, primarily because I have found nothing better.

But then, three weeks ago, I went to a public talk and WT meeting in levi's, athletic shoes, and a Pink Floyd T-shirt. It was great. The "bros" reactions were kinda funny. "So, you've just started studying then?" It was like a naturalist describe the common house cat: The housecat will show intense interest in something until it determines if it's going to eat him, or he can eat it, if both are 'no', the object is pretty much ignored. I don't know, does wearing a Wall TShirt to the sunday meeting constitute "acting like a witness"?

16

Fearing the Pain

by rockhound in

after the death of her witness father, a dear friend of ours told us her mother, in deep depression, said "this wasn't supposed to happen.the new system should have come by now" .

depression is not unique to this heart broken sister.

a witness in our old hall was out in service one day with four pioneer sisters.

Annanias

Fearing the pain, facing the pain, it is interesting how pain became the center piece of lives. Pschologists say that the human mind does not remember pain (less the population=17), but as a JW, I was taught to keep it formost in my mind. I remember that Sir Thomas Moore would reputedly wear burlap (sackcloth) underwear all year round as a method of reminding him of his humiltiy. The graveside comment bit kind of deep into my thoughts as I read it, as that is a point I have often said. I realize that there is a legal case in the offing here, that things so much bigger than any of us are being played out and brought to fulfillment, but I have the damn hardest time rectifying what I see and what I feel with what I have been led to believe.

When I first started in the truth, I was told that initially, people become JWs out of fear of pain, of death. But as time goes by, after we learn more and more about him, we stay JW out of a love for him. That was as poetic a thought as even Emily Dickenson could pen.

Question: At what point does Jehovah's "waiting for his appointed time" cross over into accomplice status? I have sat in tearful contemplation for hours asking, "If your point hasn't been made yet, what could ever make it? Now, either s*it or get off the pot."

However, there is one final note. If, some 1000+ years from now, Satan is out on his last recruitment drive and somebody asks me if I want things to be the way they are now, I hope I remember how I feel this day.

And I realize that the hardliners (right wingers?) on this board will state (I like to think it stated without an air of superiority) that as long as I choose to believe the cosmic joke, the longer I will continue to hurt. That only when I finally throw up my hands and declare it all as garbage will I be able to be free of it. I think it's like that one lieutenant on "Band Of Brothers" reasoned, "Once you accept that you're already dead you'll be able to enjoy this war."

I'm sorry, but the problem of timing is not the fault of the FDS, or the borg.

25

The end of this system in 2005?

by Brigido in

hey everybody, check this story out.

i got a call from an inactive friend of mine today.

while we were just shooting the breeze, she happened to bring up something she heard at the hall from others.

Annanias

It may not make it to 2005....

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/09/13/lost.bomb/index.html

72

Rationalism and religion

by Narkissos in

i've not been too good at creating topics thus far, but for my 1000th post (in case you wouldn't notice .

we often oppose reason (ratio) and belief, as if those were mutually exclusive.

reason always works from presuppositions.

Annanias

Cicatrix - ur right. Atheism is a form of religion (complete with it's set of beliefs that must be taken on faith), just like no pattern is a pattern.

20

The END is NIGH??

by Samdownunder in

i watched a fascinating documentary tonight called "the corporation".

it exposed the development of big business in modern day and their greed and corruption of the world.

many of the scholars and experts conceded that by the year 2025, we truly would not have any water left to drink and they discussed the ruination of the rainforests and other important resources as well.

Annanias

First of all, what exactly does "bullocks" mean?

Try reading about the last moments of the Titanic. ("The only difference between this place and the Titanic is that the Titanic had a band.") Or the last days in the Fuher Bunker beneath Berlin. Or AC Clarke's "Childhood's End". Or the last days of the Japanese Empire at the end of WWII. There are some eerily similar thought patterns among the participants. I read an interesting book about the Concentration Camp at Treblinka. The book had been written in honor of the author's parents, who had both died at Treblinka. He opened the book with the question of how six million Jews had allowed themselves and their children to be hustled off to the holocaust? He said that Hitler had once said that after the war, that he was going to allow only six Jews to remain alive, and that he was going to put them in a cage and cart them all over the world so people could see what Jews had looked like. Chillingly, the author said that every Jew believed that they were going to be one of those six.

But things have always been bad, right? Sure, why I can remember reading how Henry IV troubled himself over the nuclear problem of radioactive waste. And Teddy Roosevelt started that senate committee on AIDS, While the Emperor Justinian led the march to save the Brazilian Rain Forest. And everybody knows how damn near 3/5 of the population of Paris in the 1890's were stoned to the gills on anti-depressants and how the Incas were so troubled that a single outbreak of a disease could spread around the planet in just a matter of hours. Nope, nothing has changed .

24

Satan sent to earth in 1914?? My mom's on drugs!

by Bubbamar in

in my mom's last letter she made a statement that in 1914 satan was sent to earth.

does anyone know what she's talking about?

i thought everyone pretty much agreed that the snake in the garden was satan, that satan was on earth in jesus day and still is and has always been.

Annanias

kls, I know, and "where is this promised presence of his?" I agree that the black death, and small pox, and all that is that did occur before 1914; however, anyone who is going to say that the 14th centrury and the 21st century are the same hasn't been paying attention.

72

Rationalism and religion

by Narkissos in

i've not been too good at creating topics thus far, but for my 1000th post (in case you wouldn't notice .

we often oppose reason (ratio) and belief, as if those were mutually exclusive.

reason always works from presuppositions.

Annanias

Narkiosis - Good(?) question. According to the classical Greeks, "Gullible Rationalism" is impossible. (Or, at the very least, oxymoronic). I enjoy these philosophical discussions because they get me to think, help me learn new ideas, and are inherently harmless. But they are also, ultimately, futile. I ran across this somewhat small book in the mathmatics section of the library that had been authored by the guy who invented the geodesic dome. (I am having a brain fart and cannot remember the guys name, but he is an unquestioned genius) The book was about 120 pages of small type that proved 1+1=2. I kid you not. I had to read this thing because why in the world would it possibly take 120+ pages to prove something as simply obvious as that. Well, the vast majority of the book was spent proving that unity in the universe is possible, after all, how can you add something to something of which it's already a part? Another portion of the book dealt with the mechanisms of combination, i.e. when 1 and 1 form a 2, does the universe remain? And so on. My point is that unless I apply a certain amount of "presupposition" to my life, I will "never be able to do nothing". Like the man with the truely "perfect" memory, every sound, every sight, every smell will unlock such a flood of remembrances that I will, for all practical purposes, be completely incapacitated.

The same is true with the "reason" of religion. Do the JWs feel good about their presuppositions because they've accepted them, or have they accepted them because they make them feel good? Quantum physicists (as well as psychologists, curious bedfellow they) do agree that our perception of reality alters our reality. Maybe the reason the JW's have shut their brain off is because they have become completely satisfied with their presuppositions and that's as far as they want to take it. I say, "Good for them." The problem comes in when, like the citizens of the valley of the blind, they want to make me stop my babbling by removing these things I keep calling "eyes".