The reason JWs are complaining to Bruce Schulz, who is a baptised JW, about your blog posts is because you have been somewhat critical of Watchtower. They are appealing to him as a JW to maintain orthodoxy, rather that to him as a man to silence a woman. But I guess it is easier to defend against phantom misogyny than it is to tackle head on the complicated (but interesting and important) issues involved in a baptised JW conducting such a project with non-baptised person with some critical views of Watchtower. I guess one way to deal with the tensions involved in that collaboration is to pretend they don’t exist and to label any JW who complains about the blog a misogynist, but I suggest that is not the most productive way of handling the situation.
slimboyfat
JoinedPosts by slimboyfat
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I wish all Witness men were like this ...
by vienne inmy intro essay for the new book caused all sorts of off blog controversy.
my writing partner, a retired educator and a witness, responded.
why aren't more witness men like this?
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Evidence of a form of telepathy, science and personal experiences.
by Bad_Wolf ini believe in rational explanations for everything, whether they are understood yet or not.
medication used to be considered 'magic' until understood how it worked.
on the subject of telepathy, for me it's very subtle but has happened many times.
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slimboyfat
The burden of proof is on those who insist that this world with its laws and conscious beings can exist without any ultimate intelligence behind it at all. If it’s really true that the world just exists without any cause beyond itself then that’s a magic trick that puts any other miracle or supernatural phenomenon well and truly in the shade.
As Rupert Sheldrake says, a materialist perspective relies on the belief: “give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest”. The one free miracle being the appearance of the universe and the laws that govern it in the first place. That takes some faith!
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Evidence of a form of telepathy, science and personal experiences.
by Bad_Wolf ini believe in rational explanations for everything, whether they are understood yet or not.
medication used to be considered 'magic' until understood how it worked.
on the subject of telepathy, for me it's very subtle but has happened many times.
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slimboyfat
The thing about supernatural phenomena is either they are real or they are not.
Maybe telepathy, remote viewing, prophecy and other “miracles” are possible or maybe they are not. It would be remarkable if at least some of the things we now call “supernatural” didn’t turn out to have some basis in fact. Because it would mean we already know the exact limits of what is possible in the world. This claim in itself seems pretty incredible to me.
Reductive marerialists seem to have an obsession with dimissing the reality of anything that science can’t explain. It borders on superstition. But even if we grant materialist assumptions, and agree that only material things exists and have material causes, and there is nothing supernatural. Even if we grant all that, we still need to explain the mysterious fact of existence itself. In other words, even if we grant that there is nothing supernatural in the world, the very fact that the world exists at all is “supernatural”. We can’t explain the laws of nature by a natural process. They just exist, by themselves, or by an infinite mind? Any possibility is deeply mysterious, and supernatural.
In a way it is true that there is nothing supernatural in the world, as such, because everything about the world is deeply supernatural. Not just parts of it, but its very existence, and everything about it.
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Infiltrated Elders?
by john.prestor inso i'm watching john cedars commentary on the annual meeting from this last october, and at one point he shows a clip of garrett loesch talking about the struggles jehovah's witnesses faced decades before in the soviet union.
he claimed that police officers, maybe the kgb, infiltrated congregations which met in secret by studying with jehovah's witnesses, getting baptized, and then working their way up to becoming elders.
ceders jokes that this shows what kind of role holy spirit actually plays within body of elders, but another interpretation came to my mind just now.
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slimboyfat
JWs have long taught that elders infiltrating the organisation is a fulfilment of bible prophecy. This from the Daniel book published in the late 1990s.
https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/11019990368 Not all who professed to have an interest in serving God during the Cold War years had good motives. The angel had warned: “Many will certainly join themselves to them by means of smoothness.” (Daniel 11:34b) A considerable number showed an interest in the truth but were not willing to make a dedication to God. Yet others who seemed to accept the good news were really spies for the authorities. A report from one land reads: “Some of these unscrupulous characters were avowed Communists who had crept into the Lord’s organization, made a great display of zeal, and had even been appointed to high positions of service.”
9 The angel continued: “And some of those having insight will be made to stumble, in order to do a refining work because of them and to do a cleansing and to do a whitening, until the time of the end; because it is yet for the time appointed.” (Daniel 11:35) The infiltrators caused some faithful ones to fall into the hands of the authorities. Jehovah allowed such things to happen for a refining and a cleansing of his people. Just as Jesus “learned obedience from the things he suffered,” so these faithful ones learned endurance from the testing of their faith. (Hebrews 5:8; James 1:2, 3; compare Malachi 3:3.) They are thus ‘refined, cleansed, and whitened.’
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Remember 1992?
by Tobyjones262 inanyone remember 1992?
i can remember i was in the cult.
times were changing at a rapid pace.
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slimboyfat
I agree 1995 was the turning point for JWs. It was the autumn of that year when the Watchtower announced they were giving up of the generation prediction, and the Awake! dropped its generation purpose statement too. They have never recovered from the loss of confidence following that failure, or come up with a reasonable excuse, or a viable alternative for insisting the end must be near.
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I wish all Witness men were like this ...
by vienne inmy intro essay for the new book caused all sorts of off blog controversy.
my writing partner, a retired educator and a witness, responded.
why aren't more witness men like this?
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slimboyfat
You say that the people complaining are “both male”, but their maleness doesn’t in itself make their objections gender based, does it?
Do these emails actually object to your input on the basis of your gender, rather than being a non-Witness and somewhat critical of the Watchtower Society?
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I wish all Witness men were like this ...
by vienne inmy intro essay for the new book caused all sorts of off blog controversy.
my writing partner, a retired educator and a witness, responded.
why aren't more witness men like this?
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slimboyfat
The interesting issue here is the extent to which baptised versus non-baptised researchers can freely investigate and write Watchtower history. I have no idea why this is framed as an issue of gender, which frankly seems like a red herring.
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G.B.Are they Manipulative Lying S.O.B.`s / Not Genuine in their Beliefs ?
by smiddy3 ini raise this question for many reasons really ,thinking back on their past history and how they have responded to past failures .that they explain away as human imperfections.. on the one hand they claim to be gods spokesperson on earth .the only true religion god is using to dispense his truths at the proper time.
and that members of the gb are the f&ds class assigned to do this.. or do they deliberately manipulate witnesses vulnerability about world events ,disasters ,earthquakes etc ,to prey on those fears about the gt /armageddon.. that they are constantly warned about .
and that it is impending.. producing videos that show how jw`s will be persecuted round up and imprisoned simply for being a jw .on a worldwide scale .. the bunker video ?.
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slimboyfat
I only have to consider my own mind at different times to realise how complicated a question this is. Who is a true believer? Who really has no doubts? In some ways the nature of true belief is to have doubts. Because to take anything seriously involves thinking about it deeply.
Which perhaps raises another question. Are there any on the GB who don’t take it seriously? I don’t think there are real signs of that. (Compare some TV evangelists where the signs are rather obvious) There do seem to be genuine signs of mental fatigue from a couple of members, in particular I think of Loesch and Herd. They no longer appear as confident or enthusiastic as they once did. Their early exuberant support of the organisation and its mission may have mellowed into some form of accommodation rather than outright cynicism.
They all have personal lives, and health issues, and families, and mundane organisational issues and other things that occupy their minds. I would not be surprised if big picture questions about truth and the nature of the religion they oversee is mostly crowded out by other concerns.
One thing I’ve become increasingly aware of is the ability of people to avoid thinking about things that, from the outside, it seems should be a serious concern. People on the whole are not terribly reflective, especially if reflection would interfere with getting on with life in a way they find immediately comfortable.
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Are the younger generation taking on roles in the Cong?
by purrpurr ini notice that several of the congs i've been to seem to have a majority of the male roles performed by older men.
very few young men are wanting to be ms or elders etc.
it also seems like very few young people are being pioneers either.. would you agree with this?
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slimboyfat
What younger generation? What I see is mostly people who joined around the 1970s who are now in their 60s or 70s. Their children and grandchildren have 80% upwards left, nowhere to be seen, apart from the odd memorial.
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THIS IS IT Tony Morris Identifies King of Norht
by scotoma inthis is the announcement we have heard “about” but now it has been released to the whole world.
its in the 2nd of a three part serries about the jw annual meeting (oct 2018).
to minute 52. .
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slimboyfat
Morris said Russia’s King-of-the-North “allies” cooperated with them in the biggest war games since the Soviet Union. According to this article it was China that joined Russia in war games in 2018.