Very interesting thread.
The early depiction of cars in paradise is interesting.
Does anyone know why there are so many waterfalls and bridges in the pictures over the years?
perhaps we could post the pictures the wt have presented in their literature that depict their version of paradise here for comment/discussion:.
from: spirits of the dead—can they help you or harm you?
do they really exist?.
Very interesting thread.
The early depiction of cars in paradise is interesting.
Does anyone know why there are so many waterfalls and bridges in the pictures over the years?
i went to a christening at a church today, a black church.
it was an incredible experience!!
women were an active part of the service, and the people were very welcoming.
That’s good 👍
It might not be your thing, but I’ve been to over 30 denominations now to see what they’re like. Yesterday I was in a Lutheran church for the first time, not for a service though. Some churches meet on a Saturday morning such as the Seventh-day Adventists, if you feel like a change of day. They give good food in the afternoon too, vegetarian though. The Iglesia ni Cristo give good food - non vegetarian too. Most just cup of tea and a biscuit, which is more than at the KH.
i 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.
I don’t need to give you any evidence for angels any more than you need to give me evidence against them. If you don’t think angels exist nobody is compelling you to discuss them as if they do.
have 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.
For me a real hair raising phrase came in 1996 when the WT claimed that the wrong interpretation of the superior authorities in the 30s to the 60s was a good thing because it helped JWs not to compromise during war. Can wrong interpretations be good?
have 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.
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.
i 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.
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.
have 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.
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.
have 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.
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.
https://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.
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.
have 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.
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.