Yeah whoever wrote that thought they were being smart, or appealing to their GB bosses, or whatever. Even if it loses member I guess they prefer that to losing face.
slimboyfat
JoinedPosts by slimboyfat
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50
Pomo because of Proclaimers book, 1995 generation change and Daniel prophecy book
by Gorb inhave some time thinking about my recent and less recent personal history because of the summer holiday.. the 90's crossed my mind.
the years i became pimo.
a friend, a room mate during the 1993 moscow international convention, went to university.
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152
Do JWs believe Jesus is an angel?
by slimboyfat ini would suggest:.
the short answer is yes.. the longer answer is a qualified yes, with some caveats.
the short answer is yes because jehovah’s witnesses teach that jesus is michael the archangel, their leader, eldest and most powerful, and have taught this since the very beginning of the religion.
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slimboyfat
That’s a joke. The thought stopper came on page 3:
Angels can’t be demonstrated to actually exist so as a fictionalised trope, there is a fair amount of latitude for ‘defining’ what can be classified as an angel.
As such, it is entirely trivial that JWs consider Jesus to be an angel independent of other denominations’ characterisations of what it means to be an angel.
I can’t understand the mentality of people who are not interested in a topic themselves so want to stop it.
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50
Pomo because of Proclaimers book, 1995 generation change and Daniel prophecy book
by Gorb inhave some time thinking about my recent and less recent personal history because of the summer holiday.. the 90's crossed my mind.
the years i became pimo.
a friend, a room mate during the 1993 moscow international convention, went to university.
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slimboyfat
A lot fewer than used to. The conversation around the end is very different than it used to be. I’m still reeling from the fact that the summer convention released the first episode of a proposed 18 episode movie of the life of Jesus. What sort of message does that send about the nearness of Armageddon? It could be the 2030s before the project ever gets finished. I remember some JWs used to get twitchy if the speaker at the convention talked about next year’s convention without qualifying it with a comment about Armageddon coming first.
On the other hand, at least until the last year or so, JWs are still very active and engaged with the religion in other respects. There is a high number of pioneers and auxiliary pioneers and people still go on preaching vacations where the need is greater and all the kind of thing. Maybe participation in the ministry will begin to decrease because publishers no longer report hours. It would be remarkable if it didn’t have at least some dampening effect on participation in preaching. If it goes really pair-shaped then it’s possible to imagine a steep decline in preaching in the medium to long term. It will be interesting to see how it goes.
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50
Pomo because of Proclaimers book, 1995 generation change and Daniel prophecy book
by Gorb inhave some time thinking about my recent and less recent personal history because of the summer holiday.. the 90's crossed my mind.
the years i became pimo.
a friend, a room mate during the 1993 moscow international convention, went to university.
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slimboyfat
Yes, I worked out a couple of years ago that, judging by the baptism and publisher figures, there are likely now more JWs who were baptised after 1995 than before. That means that more than half the current JWs didn’t experience the generation disappointment the same way those of us who grew up around the JWs in the 80s and 90s did.
Having said that, I was actually baptised at fifteen years old in 1997, two years after the generation revision in 1995. I don’t know what that says.
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Gaslighting older JW couples to avoid BLAME
by raymond frantz inhttps://youtu.be/kvdqtookscu?si=fuqhj44cokmdzkt7.
one of the greatest issues facing the organization today is couples that sacrificed family life or businesses opportunity in order to preach the many dates the watchtower set in the .
past only to be betrayed in recent years as the watchtower is moving away from date setting.
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slimboyfat
I was there. I remember working out that 80 years after 1914 was 1994 and that Armageddon simply had to come by 1995.
On the other hand, I don’t remember any fuss around the year 1999/2000 among Witnesses I knew, and I was at my most active in this period.
I did know one older JW who said Armageddon would come in 1999 because that was 120 years after the first publication of The Watchtower magazine and Noah had 120 to preach before the flood. She was very much an outlier and arrived at this opinion on her own steam. She was baptised in 1941 and rejected various Watchtower updates along the way, for example she insisted that the old teaching about the Great Tribulation starting in 1914 was correct and that we are still living in an interlude before the Great Tribulation resumes.
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50
Pomo because of Proclaimers book, 1995 generation change and Daniel prophecy book
by Gorb inhave some time thinking about my recent and less recent personal history because of the summer holiday.. the 90's crossed my mind.
the years i became pimo.
a friend, a room mate during the 1993 moscow international convention, went to university.
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slimboyfat
Thanks for your reflections Gorb! It’s interesting that you found the Daniel book too much, but presumably you sat through the multiple studies of the Revelation book a decade earlier. The Revelation book is way more out-there compared with the Daniel book it seems to me - I arrived at the KH too late for the Revelation book the first time round. Do you think it might be fair to say that the wackiness of the Daniel book was released at a time when you were ready to recognise its wackiness? Because on an objective basis I think the Revelation book is more extreme/eccentric/wacky, or however we want describe it, than the Daniel book. Plus coming on the heels of the generation change in 1995, maybe you were primed and in the late 1990s to realise that the organisation had problems.
I know one brother who claimed to have got baptised in the early 1990s as a result of a study of the Revelation book alone, nothing else. He is a rather odd individual to this day, quite old now. I know of another Bible study in the 1990s who was at the point of baptism but objected to the identification of the United Nations as the scarlet beast in Revelation and cancelled her study. A sister still called on her for years but she was not interested in joining after that discovery. This had nothing to do with the so-called Watchtower UN scandal of the late 1990s, she simply objected to the demonisation of an organisation that she perceived as attempting to do good in the world.
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Gaslighting older JW couples to avoid BLAME
by raymond frantz inhttps://youtu.be/kvdqtookscu?si=fuqhj44cokmdzkt7.
one of the greatest issues facing the organization today is couples that sacrificed family life or businesses opportunity in order to preach the many dates the watchtower set in the .
past only to be betrayed in recent years as the watchtower is moving away from date setting.
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slimboyfat
The generation failure was huge, perhaps an even bigger deal than 1975, in my opinion. It wasn’t a specific date but it was a massive disappointment. I think the graph below shows it had a bigger impact on JW growth in Britain than 1975 did. You can see there was a temporary dip after 1975, but there was a much more prolonged decline and stagnation following the revision of the generation teaching in 1995.
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9
Gaslighting older JW couples to avoid BLAME
by raymond frantz inhttps://youtu.be/kvdqtookscu?si=fuqhj44cokmdzkt7.
one of the greatest issues facing the organization today is couples that sacrificed family life or businesses opportunity in order to preach the many dates the watchtower set in the .
past only to be betrayed in recent years as the watchtower is moving away from date setting.
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slimboyfat
The only specific date that was set in the lifetime of anyone now alive was 1975 and that was a long time ago. It’s misleading to say anyone around now gave up opportunities to “preach the many dates the Watchtower set”.
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Sad observation
by Gorb inreading about jw.org rules changes these days gives me a sad observation.. everything what "is" today, can be gone tomorrow.. that makes it all worthless.
you were an elder, searching for evidence, and proof to df a person.
because he or she was not humble enough.
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slimboyfat
Very gradually and with mixed signals.
On the one hand they have got rid of the word “disfellowship”, told elders only to remove people as a last resort, and then only for three months or so, and to say hello to them at the meetings in the meantime. That seems like a huge change.
On the other hand, apostasy is still viewed the same, all the procedures are still in place to remove people, and they haven’t technically rescinded the instruction from earlier videos to socially cut off relatives in an effort to incentivise them to return to the organisation.
How will the new instructions be applied by JWs and will further relaxation of the rules follow? Are they going to remove the extreme shunning videos of the past few years and disavow their message?
Things are a bit up in the air and we wait to see how things land. In the meantime there is still scope for elders to convince themselves that not much has changed, if they are included to that view, and so not condemn themselves for past actions. If the organisation spells out the changes slowly and sends mixed messages along the way then they will leave room for elders to make sense of the changes in ways that can sit more comfortably with their past actions.
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Watchtower Used to Teach Jesus Was Not an Angel and was "the Lord from Heaven" Who Died on a Cross!
by Sea Breeze in.
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no wonder they instructed congregation elders to throw away old literature from kingdon hall libraries.
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slimboyfat
Thank you for even acknowledging that early 1st and 2nd century church Leaders quoted 1 Timothy 3: 16 as "God" and not "He".
I didn’t say that. I said:
I agree that quotations from early church fathers is one of the strands of witnesses that can be useful for recovering the early text.
The situation seems to be the opposite of what you stated above. Metzger notes that early church Fathers read “who was manifest in the flesh” in 1 Tim 3:16 and “God manifest in the flesh” is not attested by any writer until the last third of the 4th century. (See pages from his textual commentary attached) Where did you get your information?