Ah, found it now.
Yeah that depiction is no accident. It can’t be. It takes a long time to produce an image like that and a lot of people are involved in the process. So WTF is going on?
this image is from "the watchtower" july 2024 (study edition):i can't figure out what that object is that is between the sleeping apostles.wath is it?
a stick, a scroll of the scriptures?
....
Ah, found it now.
Yeah that depiction is no accident. It can’t be. It takes a long time to produce an image like that and a lot of people are involved in the process. So WTF is going on?
this image is from "the watchtower" july 2024 (study edition):i can't figure out what that object is that is between the sleeping apostles.wath is it?
a stick, a scroll of the scriptures?
....
July magazine isn’t up on the website yet. Where did this come from?
this image is from "the watchtower" july 2024 (study edition):i can't figure out what that object is that is between the sleeping apostles.wath is it?
a stick, a scroll of the scriptures?
....
Oh for crying out loud. Are they for real?? 😳
on a scale of 1 to 100, i would put the lds in the high 90s, and the witnesses at about minus 10.. these days (well, around here at least) one encounters the mormon missionaries all over the place.
if they are not knocking at your door, they are approaching you out in the street.
of late, this has been happening all the bloody time!.
JWs are growing faster than the population in developed countries, or in countries such as Poland, Italy, Japan and South Korea, where the overall population is in decline, they are declining more slowly than the general population, or keeping steady, whereas the general population is in decline.
on a scale of 1 to 100, i would put the lds in the high 90s, and the witnesses at about minus 10.. these days (well, around here at least) one encounters the mormon missionaries all over the place.
if they are not knocking at your door, they are approaching you out in the street.
of late, this has been happening all the bloody time!.
But at no greater rate than that of the population in general.
That’s incorrect. JWs are growing faster than the general population and always have done except for a couple of years during the disruption of the pandemic. The latest figures are JWs grew at 2.4% compared with world population growth of 0.9%.
i’m still an elder and i consider myself jw light.
as my fellow elders are.
we don’t throw our weight around like elders used to in the past, it’s all very easy going these days.
There is some irony in the fact that as WT loosens its grip and becomes more liberal, those who have already left WT become even angrier at WT and those who stay in the religion. You’d think reforms would be welcome and encouraged to go further if impact on current and future JWs is the paramount concern, but for some who have already left WT any reforms are simply an affront in view of their past experiences and nothing but the entire collapse of the religion will satisfy.
on a scale of 1 to 100, i would put the lds in the high 90s, and the witnesses at about minus 10.. these days (well, around here at least) one encounters the mormon missionaries all over the place.
if they are not knocking at your door, they are approaching you out in the street.
of late, this has been happening all the bloody time!.
Only a small fraction of Mormons preach whereas all active JWs preach, fewer than 100,000 Mormons missionaries compared with 8 million plus JWs who preach, nearly 2 million of them pioneers.
Mormons are in decline in the UK and many other developed countries whereas JWs have steady numbers or are increasingly slightly, in particular among immigrant communities.
years ago rick fearon hosted on his six screens podcast a person identified as "johnny the bethelite" who talked about goings-on in watchtower headquarters.. johnny talked about the experiments with cart work.. johnny talked about pedophiles and child pornography in jw headquarters.. people claimed "johnny" was a fraud.
a fake.
cart work is everywhere.
Me neither. I remember watching the scenario unfold with some amusement at the time. I can't remember the details but it seemed pretty clear it was an elaborate hoax by admittedly somewhat affable showman. I trust my earlier judgment on that without feeling any need to go back and check and relive the experience all over again. Some pretty unlikely people are right about a few things it and doesn't make it generalizable. Hitler was pretty good and arguably ahead of his time on environmental concerns and animals rights, to choose the most outrageous, and somewhat inappropriate example, it doesn't justify any "he was proved right" scale revision.
uh oh, looks like the mega thread gave up the ghost, so while i investigate / fix it just continue the discussion here .... it's been a long 9 years lloyd evans / john cedars.
the apostles creed could be recited in less than a minute in latin.
it was like an ancient youtube video clip: christianity in less than a minute.
it is very ancient, reaching back to the 200's.
Many of your observations are not factual or miss the point. For example, Watchtower has described Jesus as “our Lord” many hundreds of times, as any search will show.
And JWs do use the biblical phrase “God the Father”. What they don’t do is follow the Trinitarian inflection of pairing it with the non-biblical phrase “God the Son”, and the habit of divorcing the phrase from its context, such as instances where Paul refers to “God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” showing that even as Lord, Jesus looks to another as his God; or 1 Cor 8.6 where “God the Father” is equated with the “one God” of the Bible, rather than merely one person of the one God, as per Trinitarian dogma.
And JWs agree that Jesus was in Hell/Hades for three days, they just have a different understanding of what that means.
In all I think JWs could agree with most of the Apostles Creed. There’s no Trinity in it at all, which is striking, but should not be entirely surprising because the Trinity hadn’t been invented yet.