here is an interesting link http://www.tjdefendidos.org/ and here is an english translation of the article on that site about apostates testimony.
is the testimony of apostates reliable?
sometimes, the mass media offer testimonies of people who used to be jehovah's witnesses as a means of finding out more about our religion.
An easy way to enjoy the ridiculousness of the above article is to remove the terms "Jehovah's Witnesses" and "apostates" and replace it with the terms "Communists" and "counter-revolutionaries," and envision it as having appeared in Pravda.
Since this is a cut-and-paste job and will likely be removed, there seems to be no reason to delve into the dozens of blatant exaggerations and misleading claims presented, which nearly scream out to any normally-intelligenced reader.
i just got back from a trip designed to conquer a fear.
i have always been afraid to camp by myself in the deep woods, and last week i set out to change that.
next night.
Justice-One: If you could read, you would have noticed that in the thread you referenced, I said "at one time" I had this problem. I no longer do, but when I did, I did NOT keep a firearm by my bed.
So then, you disagree with the medical literature which states that there is no known cure for this disorder. You claimed to have your terrors relieved by the use of a CPAP, but you no longer use it. Therefore, there is the possibility that it could reoccur, along with your hallucinatory beliefs. Yet you are certain that you are entirely competent to own firearms, and, keep them by your bedside-- lo, even cocked at your side, and another in your lap, as you sleep.
No doubt you are so amazingly competent, that prior to your first hallucinatory episode you locked your firearms away. How thrilled your family and neighbors must have been at your prudent diligence.
And BTW, setting out tripwires around your camp when you are in the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest is NOT something that I would call insainity. You know I was not exactly camping at the local KOA campground.
Sitting with two loaded weapons, one a cocked sidearm, in a fearful state, while potentially subject to a known medical problem which causes vivid psychosis is not insanity, it is a reckless disregard for the safety of others. That you continue to justify and award yourself the competence to own and handle firearms, despite the clear indications you are not, is the insanity.
No doubt you feel that all those who suffer, or could rationally be expected to suffer, hallucinatory visions should be similarly armed-- the mentally ill and those who habitually use mind-altering drugs.
i just got back from a trip designed to conquer a fear.
i have always been afraid to camp by myself in the deep woods, and last week i set out to change that.
next night.
Justice-One: I put tripwires connected to 7.62 blank firing devices on two main game trails that were very close, and "rattle cans" (coffee cans with .45 slugs in them, connected to tripwires) about 30 feet around the camp at intervals in the brush. All was fine and dandy until the sun began to go down. Then the shadows came out. I sat in my camp chair with my .45 cocked and locked on my hip, and my M14 across my lap.
As if necessary after the above insanity, more evidence that those with a pathological interest in their firearms are precisely those who ahould be kept the farthest away from them can be found here.
Justice-One: At one time I suffered from sleep apnea. They did a sleep study on me, and found that when I stopped breathing my O2 levels went dangeroulsy low. - Low enough to cause what the doctor called "Hypo Induced Hallucinations." Another name for this is "Night Terror" or "Waking Terror." Very scary stuff. It is basically having a nightmare while you are wide awake with your eyes open. One of my worst was when I awoke to see a man standing over my bed. He seemed COMPLETELY real. I jumped out of bed and took a swing at him, and he disapeared. Another common one was "waking" to see huge spiders all over the bed. Yet another was having the ceiling cave in on me. All VERY real. When I got my CPAP machine, this all stopped.
You do not seem to mention that, along with your other equipment, you brought along a 12-volt car battery to run your CPAP. Or did you not bring it with you? Or do you disagree with the medical literature that states that there is no cure for OSA?
Given your combination of fears, paranoia, artillery, and medical issues, it really appears that--rationally speaking-- those within firing range of you should be the ones suffering night terrors.
perhaps you would care to indulge an old man?
anagrams are a hobby of mine, and i have discovered some surprising anagrams through the years, such as clint eastwood = old west action, etc.
can anyone come up with further enlightening and revealing anagrams of tao te ching?.
Ethnic Goat (Tight Canoe)
I Can Ghetto (Thine Cat-- Go)
Cheat Got In (Con At Eight)
Can't Tie Hog (Get Antioch)
The pairings may be inscrutable or smutty, as the reader deems necessary.
i work with a young woman in her mid-thirties that is openly lesbian.
we have been friends for about 10 years when she first started working at the company.
i was crazy about her before she came out as "gay" and i still have a good time working with her.
As you identify yourself as a straight male, perhaps as a Lesbian she feels that going out with and having sex with women is something that you now share in common. Apparently you should inform her that she is incorrect in her assumption.
(i threw this into the "jw view of cloning" thread yesterday, and thought maybe a few would like to have some fun with it so i gave it its own thread.
there was this comment in a letter to the body of elders about clowning in march 2003:
"as to the matter of clowning, we can see from phil.
When I was quite young, I endured a Sunday afternoon convention tirade by Governing Body member Albert Schroeder in which he was highly indignant that modern society did not force distinct modes of dress upon the sexes.
An example he provided of this horrifying trend was that of an outrageous Witness woman who attended a costume party dressed as Groucho Marx. Had I held any doubts that this was a religion of uncultured literalists, they would have vanished upon hearing what I casually reckoned was the stupidest public utterance I had ever heard.
at this stage i feel it prudent to start a thread on which all those who have been involved in debating thirdwitness and his behind the scenes cronies can begin to list questions that he is unwilling or incapable of answering.. i do this for two major reasons :.
1) to prove to all the thousands of lurking jw's that thirdwitness and his orchestra of theological mice are actually not able to defend wts theology without ignoring pertinent questions that seriously compromise their arguments.. 2) to prove to all reading this board, including the moderators, that thirdwitness is here not to discuss his/their theology ( which differs in some respects from wts theology ) but merely to preach their ideology.. i will be away from the board until tomorrow evening, but as you might have noticed i have posed numerous questions on various threads which thirdwitness has ignored, bypassed or bluffed his way past.
these will all be listed.
Thirdwitness--
You use the terms often, so I would be very interested to hear how, and by what process, you decide when an argument is justified in being termed "logical" or "reasonable." For instance, "Likewise, using logic and reasonableness," from 256.
[Dilaceratus]
i had a bit of a shock last month when, in a routine check-up, my doc told me i had high blood pressure.. i can't remember what the reading was the first time but the next few days it was averaging 150/100.
not wanting to go on drugs for the rest of my life i decided to look at alternatives.
there are some chinese clinics in the town where i live so i tried one of those.. they recommended a course of herbal medicine and acupuncture.
High blood pressure is not a joke diagnosis. There was one study (BBC link) that suggested that acupuncture used with electrical stimulation had some effect on rats. Notice that traditional acupuncture had no effect, so any moxibustion or cupping treatment would likely be as useless.
Before you begin investigating unproven modalities you ought to familiarize yourself with www.quackwatch.org, particularly the "Questionable Products, Services, and Theories" section.
in alanf's thread on whether or not thirdson (or whoever!
) is a gb apologist, there are several posts discussing the intelligence of jws.
on that subject, this is what i observed from over 30 years as a jw:
I doubt that a person's actual native intelligence has anything to do with their remaining a follower of the Jehovah's Witnesses. While Jehovah's Witnesses appear dull, complacent, and incurious, they do not seem to be any more so than other Fundamentalist groups.
I suggest that people in industrialized nations remain Jehovah's Witnesses (and other weirdo Fundamentalist sects) because they are essentially incompetent. This incompetence may be caused by genuine mental slowness, ingrained conditioning, long-term mental illnesses such as depression, shorter-term mental tragedies such as the death of a loved one, troubled married or family life, loneliness, or an inferior social or economic position. When an individual-- of whatever age, or level of education-- finds themselves validated in their own minds as intellectually competent to address the key issues of their life and beliefs, no Watchtower indoctrination can hold them back. There is simply too much evidence, in any direction one cares to look, to a person with open and easy access to a newspaper, a library, a museum, or a public television station that directly counters a Fundamentalist, and particularly a Jehovah's Witness, outlook.
It is the near-criminal task of the WTBTS, then, in Westernized lands to seek out those who are already incompetent or nearly incompetent, and then maintain and even encourage the incompetence of their members, as well as foster and demand the incompetence of their children.
(The subject of Jehovah's Witnesses holding, or actively seeking, leadership rôles is different than those who are followers, and requires somewhat more complex analysis, as does the conversion of those who live in non-Westernized countries.)
thirdwitness -- an agent of the governing body?
this evening i was talking with an old friend about recent postings on this forum by jw defenders.
we concluded that something unusual is going on.
POSTSCRIPT
From Ideology and False Consciousness: Marx and His Historical Progenitors, Christopher L Pines, 1993, State University of New York
Chapter Five: The Hegelian and Feuerbachian Approach to the Alienated Mind
p. 103:
For Feuerbach, ultimate being or reality is material in nature and human thought acquires its ideas from the external material world by means of sense activity.[Note: Quoting the 1843 Preface to Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity][...]I unconditionally repudiate absolute, immaterial, self-sufficing speculation-- that speculation which draws its material from within... [...] I do not generate the object from the thought but the thought from the object; and I hold that alone to be an object which has existence beyond one's brain.
