Ossification of western religion? Incentives for the marginally invested to explore alternate spiritualities? Happened in Rome. Daring demonstration of rhetorical ownership of spiritual authority? (Granted, nothing like 9/11 happened in Rome.)
Posts by rmt1
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5Why European women are turning to Islam
by Dogpatch inhttp://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1227/p01s04-woeu.htm
from the december 27, 2005 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1227/p01s04-woeu.html
why european women are turning to islam
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Shunning someone is one of the worst things anybody can do, JW or not
by JH in.
i guess that being shunned doesn't affect everone equally.
i never did mind being shunned by jw's because i don't have any family or friends there, but being shunned by anyone you care for is cruel.. how did you cope with being shunned?.
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rmt1
Being shunned by my elder father (who'sinvestinginthefuturewithrealestateandrentalpropertychucklechuckle) causes zero major concern, but I sympathize with my mother who because of this is unable to have meaningful contact with her first-born son. So although I am the shunned, the worst effects go to an innocent party. (i.e., "just a sister," not invested in patricentric hegemonies.)
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Apostates protesting conventions = Something I laughed at
by free2beme insorry if there are those apostates here that do this, but you were often the butt of a joke and nothing taken serious.
i personally loved the ones who wore paper bags over their head, as they were often people still afraid of getting in trouble.
it is not like a political rally with people saying "make love, not war.
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rmt1
Rome did not have a permanent policy of persecuting Christians; human-torches and being thrown to lions flared up under just a handful of emperors. Nevertheless, the negative cathectic awe that """pagan""" Romans had for this new cult largely stemmed from the Christians' willingness to BE persecuted, to be tarred and feathered as it were, to BE laughed at, ridiculed, thrown to lions, et al. The apostates who picket conventions are no different from the Christians in their whole ones and twos who lived up to their principles by becoming a laughing stock to the many for the one chance of saving one soul. JWs who laugh at the apostates are rationalizing and repressing a potent, profound concern that the apostates are not doing this for their health, and must have a very good reason for risking resources in time, reputation, and legal concern. Any scripture that Brooklyn can quote from Peter, Paul and Mary about their philanthropic and beneficient motivations for suffering ridicule can be (at least) tested on apostate picketers. If an apostate could reasonably expect that shouting "get out of Babylon the Great" could be correctly interpreted by at least one JW, even if only an adolescent who has no physical means of escaping the situation, they would.
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2034...
by Tuesday ini'm sure this has been posted about but can someone link me the old thread or something, i'm interested if this is still being pushed..... .
http://www.jwfiles.com/2034.htm.
that's a link to an online article about 2034 being the new end date, is this still going on?
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rmt1
There's a generational attention span that must elapse before the next major deception. The generation that swallowed the traumatic deception of 1975 must be largely attritioned, fallen away or inactive for the next installment to work properly. People minimally old enough to contextually comprehend the deception in '75 (15yo?) will be _at least_ 74yo by the time 2034 rolls around and Brooklyn is hammering in earnest. This segment of wisdom and empirical experience will be severely under-represented in the publisher mix. As far as the periodicity of punctuated deception, Big Brother has nothing on Brooklyn.
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Just finished my last final for my first semester of college!!!
by Cognitive_Dissident inso i just took my last final for this semester, which was in fact my very first semester of college ever.
and it feels great!
dear watchtower bible and tract society, .
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rmt1
Good feeling, isn't it.
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How did you overcome the allure of Paradise? Or have you?
by M.J. ini think the biggest reason someone maintains their faith in the wts is because the wts is the "ticket" to paradise earth.. how did you deal with the prospect that the "ticket" salesmen weren't totally reliable?.
did it cause you to let go of your hope in paradise earth?
did it redirect it to another hope?.
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rmt1
Fascinating question.
Paradise became distasteful when I learned that mates who die cannot remarry when they are resurrected. Although I could understand that their resurrection might have deprogrammed their own desire for marriage to anyone, let alone their previous faithful mate, I could find no logical reconciliation for the surviving mate would have faithfully remained single through Armageddon just on the chance that the “They are like angels” rule might be bunk.
The Revelations Book’s artistic visions of heaven were too fascinating a look from the outside in. Why are humans, however faithful, supposed to not want to participate in such an awesome place if we’re allowed to conceive of it by seeing illustrations of it in a book? Who is it that gets to decide and enforce what Paradise residents are allowed to want to see, when all that they might want to see is good, holy, proper, etc?
In high school biology class we saw photographs of fish whose teeth could not possibly have ever been used to eat seaweed. They were meant for one thing, and unless the photograph itself was lying, God had created something designed for a very violent existence in such a place as Paradise. There was no way those teeth could have evolved in only 6000 years due to some corruption of the natural world.
The Society’s resistance to nature worship made for a very tense relationship. On one hand we are required to look at “Creation” to verify to ourselves how awesome a Creator we have, but no matter “how wonderfully we are made,” we are not allowed to “worship the creation.” First of all the burden of proof is circular, but then you’re not even allowed to go hog wild with that initial circular reasoning. Added to that, we have to still wear clothes unlike how things were in Eden, and not just comfortable pieces of cloth for modesty, but non-casual clothing that we would not wear for equivalent yard labor now? Something was amiss.
There’s also a Marxist/anti-Marxist angle to consider: The multi-bedroom residences that look out over very high visual value terrain, frequently including a lake, are, for some older people who remember, not precisely signals of wealth, status and hierarchical hegemonies. It used to be in the heyday that such a rural setting of 4, 5, 10 acres with high visual value mountains or waterways was affordable on one income, assuming it was sufficiently far from the city proper. However, there was always a high degree of apparent yard maintenance for such vast tracts of estate. WHO is it that has to do all that, and WHAT value is accrued by doing it? Is the meaning of Paradise to sit on a tractor and mow acres of grass every week just so that it can be in tip top shape when the future-traveling cartoonographers from the twentieth-century WTBTS stopped by to take a snapshot? Doesn’t such saturation in the work of creating such a Paradise reduce the very value placed upon the Paradise-ality of such Paradise? The only way to maintain the Paradise-ality is to have an anti-Marxist hegemony of property owners who “appreciate,” and the non-owning laborers who make, the Paradise-ness of Paradise. I.E. the residents of such a place could not retain the same cathexis placed upon it by modern JWs if they themselves were responsible for maintaining its Paradise-ness.
I would love to see a hard-core ass-kicking article in an archaeology journal that traces the emergence of the |idea| of “““““paradise””””” from the pre-historic Mesopotamian climatic peak for horticultural gathering (non-argricultural) up through the initial usages of a nostalgic Hebrew “garden” up through the Greek deployment of sacred geography, up through the Hellenistic incorporation of gardens within domestic architecture, up through Roman pastoral poetry which re-located political discourse in meadows, up through the locus amoenus or “pleasant place” of Middle Age and Chaucerian symbolic moral discourse, up through Naturalism’s response to Enlightenment via sentimental landscape art, up through the Industrial Revolution’s urban encroachment up and along comparatively scenic river-valleys, up through the emergence of evidence that man was in fact polluting the atmosphere, long before we knew about global warming. I’d like to see that.
Caligirl, consider this: What precisely do you associate with the ocean? Would I be too far off the mark if I guessed that it represented openness, freedom of perspective, visual confirmation of limits, and the implicit capability, right and inevitability of self-deterministic travel? If there is an antithesis to the Society’s ideal of a patrilocal Eden, perhaps the ocean is it. -
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Is Blood Now 'The Tail Wagging The Dog'?
by metatron ina few years ago, the organization seemed to be drifting towards reason.
the knowledge book downplayed holidays and blood.. witness kids were told they could go to college.
the new worship book - as a re-edited "united" book - removed all mention of.
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Am I weird, in that I actually want the world to end?
by free2beme insince leaving the witnesses, i have noticed that i enjoy movies about the world ending.
they might be movies about major disasters killing off the world (deep impact) or maybe movies about a world after civilization has fallen (the postman, waterworld).
i even like those movies that show society falling apart in alien invasions (war of the worlds, independence day).
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rmt1
While you may consciously think that you "really want the world to end," I really doubt that you do "really" do subconsciously. Are you not, after all, looking for encouragement on a trauma rehabilitation forum? Read this, then look up "Apophis," then see how you feel. http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=165
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Active Imagination? I blame the WTS
by Mysterious ini remember always having one of the best imaginations in my class even when i was in high school.
my secret?
all those meetings to zone out in.
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rmt1
My wife blames my short-term memory and not being able to remember certain things on my JW years where I had to sit through that auditory crap. In this theory, which makes sense to me, I would have had a cognitive dissonance that caused a resistance to hearing and retention precisely proportional to the stupidity. Now, even though I can attend to and retain things that have an active positive cathexis (I desire to know), things that are not as positive (wife's future plans (which may or may not always change)) but are still good to know - I cannot retain even after hearing it several times. Possibly some practice of deferring the cathexis of wait-and-see upon with Brooklyn is founded. I.e., I now |know| things change, so only a minimum knowledge of an immediate future is relevant. So, this same phenomena of zoning out at the meetings, or mentally screaming for the door, causes a Freudian resistance that activates the imagination. I.e., the imagination is a defence mechanism. -
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All right cut the crap.... why are we fighting over the Big News?
by Check_Your_Premises inif the big news is legit, someone will file suit and win.. if it is the big snooze one of the above will not happen.
nothing we do or say here will bear on the outcome of the above.
if you think it is the big news, by all means promote it as such.
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rmt1
Brooklyn used to explain how the bible doesn't contradict science by, among others, saying that when Job said "skin of my teeth," he was actually being given divine spirit - no, not a metaphor of a body part that obviously or apparently doesn't have skin, so that it means "no margin", no - we're talking divine spirit - and that this corroborates with how science has to tell us that the tooth actually has a "skin." Why the fuck a JW thinks that it matters why or whether a tooth has "skin" or whether Job really cared what enamel was is besides the point: Brooklyn works very hard to dream up shit that makes them sound like they have science on their side and not the other way around. If this blood business is hard core and they can document that what *they researched was Fully Available to anyone else researching such matters, and can demonstrate that Brooklyn could not have arrived at some of its more informed correct conclusions without bypassing such data that would undermine things it has obfuscated, then, there's something to care about. I'm sure Brooklyn will give it hell's best shot to simulate that they did not find such data in their findings, or will find a way to discredit or question these other findings as, "Yes, your honor, we did consider these findings but experts X Y and Z have given reason to dismiss them." Experts being in quotes. I don't know, this might be interesting. But it would not be surrpised if Brooklyn told their people that Satan has control of everything and hid the more correct science. And they would believe it. And there would be more tacking back and forth light gets brighter talks. But I smell that this could be another Colin Powel hunt for weapons of mass destruction, i.e., someone standing at a podium trying to explain that Brooklyn has not proven that it did NOT know about controversial findings X Y Z. Proving a negative, difficult. Am I off on any major points?