My parents took me to the July 1973 DC in Veteran's Stadium, Philly. I was two weeks old. I don't remember much from that one.
Posts by rmt1
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50Really enjoyed the CONvention....why?
by punkofnice ini remember when i was a mind cleansed(tm) jw i would listen to the talks when i wasn't napping.. on the long tiring drive home i'd say how i ''enjoyed(tm)'' the sessions and felt ''encouraged(tm)''.. .....and yet i couldn't recall a single ''point(tm)'' made.
i couldn't remember what it was that actually made me feel good.. on one occasion i asked the family what they found ''encouraging(tm)'' or interesting.. tumble weed.
no examples.
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Baffling comment by my JW parents about non-witness funeral
by joyfulfader inmy parents attended the funeral of an elderly family member today.
being out of state i was unable to attend.
i asked how it went and was told that "worldly" people don't care enough about anyone to mention anything personal.
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rmt1
"I always thought, even when mentally in that it is a more comforting thought to believe that your dead loved one is happy, and pain free in heaven, and you can join them later, and they are with you, still loving you. To me this is more comforting than the JW teaching that the dead are not concious, rotting in the ground, to maybe be ressurected (really re-created) at some unknown future date, and maybe you can see them if you listen ond obey the GB well enough!"
Pre-apologies for the capitalizationitis, but it is a very subtle distinction I will attempt to make: This was absolutely one of my disconnects when I was 14 years old. The party line was that the person's person-hood, potential of conscious self, potential for continuity of memory, resided in some absolutely unspecified way with a deity, yet there was no immortal soul. Had there BEEN an immortal soul analogous to a data record, or a file, it would be no trouble to imagine that this soul was dormant, unconscious, in god's memory. But the JW line was that nothing continued of the person, by itself and in and of itself. ONLY god's memory retained the imprint, the impression, the reception, the notion, of their existence. But it was not THEM. But SOMEHOW, you were still supposed to get back the very same identical individual that died, yet who did not persist in some Independently Contiguous form of organized information like a soul. The JW version of resurrection defies common sense from an Information Technology perspective. A MEMORY of a thing is NOT that thing. If you clone yourself and you die, it is not YOU, the continuous conscious session of your own life experience. It's someone else who looks like you and talks like you. There are so many texts about this cloning or copying principle. I'd suggest Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, The Prestige ( Hugh Jackman ), Moon (Sam Rockwell), Oblivion (Tom Cruise), Caprica/BSG (tv shows), to name the first things to mind.
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Is Grandma evil
by moley inbumped into an old acquaintance the other day, one of those who used to cross the road when they see me.
this time he was all smiles and even shook my hand.
to cut a long story short went for a pint and a chat and he apologised for his previous behaviour and he told me he is in the process of fading and this suprised me because he used to be a super pious dub.. he said the thing that made him start to think was when his 4yr old daughter asked him if her grandma was evil and he said of course not, her reply was why is jehovah going to kill her.
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rmt1
"But as for me and grampa - we Believe..."
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Baffling comment by my JW parents about non-witness funeral
by joyfulfader inmy parents attended the funeral of an elderly family member today.
being out of state i was unable to attend.
i asked how it went and was told that "worldly" people don't care enough about anyone to mention anything personal.
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rmt1
Well that's quantitative. You could spend 70 or 80 years in the machine, with 50 to 60 years paying monthly contributions, and have max 10 minutes' acknowledgement to show for it. Brooklyn could at least print a 4-color t-shirt.
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Baffling comment by my JW parents about non-witness funeral
by joyfulfader inmy parents attended the funeral of an elderly family member today.
being out of state i was unable to attend.
i asked how it went and was told that "worldly" people don't care enough about anyone to mention anything personal.
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rmt1
I am ruminating and attempting to quantify on an epiphany someone else had here on JWN:
Since there's a raging inflammation of the PC in the body politic, this use of "worldy" by JWs is standing out starkly. If a bureaucrat in the highest diocese of the PC clergy compared the word's tone or tenor to the panoply of other words that are used with structural violence to ostracize, alienate, intimidate and denigrate other races, religions, orientations, socioeconomics, they would find some similarity with other words that are now categorized as hate speech. I never needed to read up on what exact tone or tenor, from a structural violence standpoint, goes into the Jewish (Hasidic?) term Gentiles / goyim / etc. Is there more or less """"hate"""" (Caprica gods almighty I cannot stand that usage) in the JW word "worldly" as opposed to the "goyim"? (rhetorical) -
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The Bible as explained to my 5 year old son....
by stuckinamovement inthis is a long story son, are you sure you want to hear it?
ok here goes......... it all began when a talking snake tricked a naked lady into eating a piece of fruit.
her husband decided that he liked the fruit so he ate some too.
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rmt1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80entLldZOg
Kid History
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdtD19tXX30
Conversations With My Two Year Old -
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Former Unbaptized Publisher, New Here
by GloomySunday informer unbaptized publisher, here.. i'm new to the forums and have hesitated for months to join this forum.
i was raised in a jw family, and was never baptized, because one of my parents didn't think i should be baptized early.. my mother became inactive, but i eventually went back for social contact, eventually starting a study.
i raised a few questions, only to find that the conductor would get irritated and defensive when my questions would get deeper into the topic.
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rmt1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T8_4s3Y4jk
We all bundle
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The more time I spend with "worldly people" the more I realize...
by confusedandalone in... that they actually have more of a desire to get to knoww you then jehovah's witnesses.
for years at the kingdom hall although i was an elder everyone "knew of me" but no one knew me.
i realized that i never really had a friend who knew anything about me as a person or my background.
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rmt1
I'd respect anyone's autonomic, visceral reaction to this word, since it is *used* in a tenor and demeanor that is analogous to usages of the n-word.
The first definition offered by http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/worldly is:
"of, relating to, or devoted to this world and its pursuits rather than to religion or spiritual affairs".
I don't take offence at it as proffered by an objective observer, because I certainly don't do church, organized religion, or have easily recognized spritual customs. But I would raise an eyebrow quite painfully if a JW called me that, being as their religion doesn't share as many aspects of a commonly-understood religion as it does a para-military cult, and their notions of spirituality don't ring true as being, well, very spiritual at all.
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26
Losing my religion
by vikesgirl101 inhowdy!
i have been out of the jw's for about five years now.
it has been about four years since i've posted.
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rmt1
In the control room of the 61" Kuiper telescope on Mount Bigelow, there is an I-beam in the center of the room, painted white, in the way of chairs and walking, unavoidable, inconvenient, and helping to hold up the great mass of the telescope on the second floor. Overhead, crossing right in front of this I-beam is a cable tray for various network cables. If you stand back and you squint, the two compose a cross. The I-beam dates to the construction during the Cold War when gobs of federal money were poured into a project to beat the Soviets. The cable tray dates to more recently, a development, innovation, improvement. I don't gamble that there's a Jesus the way they paint him, or a God the way anyone paints it, but I do gamble that there is a future of and for humanity in the heavens, in the future. Not an oil-and-canvass Revelations heavens, but a heavens of life and economic activity in the solar system, that grows up and out like tendrils from a well-tended blue marble.
One primary mission at the telescopes on Mt Bigelow, Mt Lemmon and nearby Kitt Peak is the unsleeping search for harzardous asteroids like what the local JWs in Chelyabinsk, Russia, may have had to come to grips with on Feb 15. Asteroids at the right time (long ago) deliver essential rare earth elements we need for iPhones and catalytic converters. The wrong asteroid at the wrong time (>1km, future) have the calculated power to cause damage eclipsing a human conception of Armageddon. The most fevered apocalypses of any Biblical writer could not match the KT boundary extinction. So, the DATA tells me that although there may be evils among men, and destructive men who beg the existence of an orchestrating Satan, the event that has a greater claim to hellfire, brimstone, Gehenna, Gomorrah, the earth opening up, or coming as a thief and the heavens passing away with a hissing noise, and other firey outcomes, is a thing we might be able to anticipate, and, perhaps avoid by carefully directing our own step.
Another substantial use of the telescopes on the mountain is to characterize the atmosphere, periods, mass and radius of extrasolar planets. Extrasolar planets are logically the first place to look to see if life has evolved elsewhere. If we do one day see conclusive signs of an oxygen-rich atmosphere, or other bio-markers, and the reserved, guarded concensus among the professionals (not me) is that it is a likely signature of life, that will be yet another dinosaur bone that Satan has buried to fool the gullible.
I went a long time with no religion of any kind. I presently have a kind of faith, I can point to a cross, I can point to firey demons (>1km, or less) and I can point to guardian angels (exoplanets in habitable zones).
Repetition for emphasis: If you are inextricably bound to a purpose, I think you 'have religion'. -
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Catholic Cardinal Says Adam and Eve Didnt Exist
by His Excellency inhttp://consciouslifenews.com/catholic-cardinal-adam-eve-didnt-exist/1127457/
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