Heh...the thing about shooting a hole in the floor reminds me of when I used to do security work...cars were vanishing from a new car lot, so my company was hired to investigate...we planted a guy with a shotgun in the back of a brandnew van, the thieves happened to pick that van to break into, and scared the sh*t out of him because he was on the verge of dozing off...to make a long story short, the brand new van ended up with a hole in the roof, the thieves ran like hell, and my company lost the contract for that car lot.
AllAlongTheWatchtower
JoinedPosts by AllAlongTheWatchtower
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24
Something is in the basement...
by frozen one inthis morning i was doing my typical sunday morning routine, which consists of pretty much nothing, and went to the kitchen for a coffee.
i noticed that one of my cats was sitting next to the basement door which was an odd place for the cat to be sitting but i didn't give it a second thought.
a bit later i went to refill my coffee cup and the cat was in the same place.
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35
More JW Folklore, Enjoy
by moomanchu insent to me by my jw relatives.. is this for real ??????????
from a brother in kansas.. this was an experience from japan, as told by a circuit overseer: .
jehovah's witnesses were doing street work and placed some magazines with a man.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
vomit:
If you asked some native Japanese speakers about "Nekata", and they laughed, it's probably because the actual name is Nakata...though I was never fluent and I'm pretty rusty now, as far as I know there is no name 'Nekata' in Japanese. What might have made them giggle about it is that the Japanese word for cat is neko...it probably sounded to them like you were trying to say cat, or a word derived from cat. Hmmm... depending on how you pronounced it to them, there could be a number of things they thought you were trying to ask.
Apparently the story has been lost in translation over the years...Nakata became Nekata, Brother Iszlaub became Brother Islop...sounds like these people only heard the story orally and tried to recreate it the way they thought it sounded. (Considering this story is only about 50 years old, it makes a significant point about the bible, which has been translated and retold and translated again for centuries.) Notice below in the original quote which started the thread, the lines about JWs being out in field service and placing magazines...sounds like somebody was worried about their congo not doing enough field service and embellished upon the story, which Blondie later quoted from the source material. Note the differences of the two versions.
"Jehovah's Witnesses were doing street work and placed some magazines with a man.
At first, the fellow decided he would discard them in the next trash can.
He just thought he was doing the Witnesses a favor by buying the magazines. As he walked along however, he thought of a man he knew in prison; he would send them to him instead!" -
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Nobody Noticed?
by Outaservice inafter all this time, i finally went over 1000 posts.
does a jedi master get paid any more than a newbie?.
outaservice .
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
Please note that all responses to Reverend Cheetum must be passed through the law offices of Dewie, Dickem, and Howe as they are the official representative of Reverend Cheetum in this matter.
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Pharaoh's drowned army - arqueological proof found?
by Abishai ini wanted to get your thoughts on the claim that pharaoh's drowned army was discovered.
the claim comes from ron wyatt.
he seems to have a cult following and some critics to his claims.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
Let it first be said that I am not an expert in any capacity in the field of archaeology. However, I've watched lots of Discovery Channel and History Channel. Things like Jacques Cousteau, exploring the wreckage of the Titanic, etc. Out of all those deep sea dives I've watched, one thing stands out in my memory: they always had to bring stuff to the surface and clean it. Whether it was green scaling on copper plates, or rust on steel and iron, or whatever, nothing that stays underwater for years stays shiny and pristine. Yet in that picture you posted, it looks like the metal (brass?) is reflecting the underwater searchlights. There are 3 distinct glints of shiny metal around the rim of that supposed chariot wheel. After 30+ centuries? Below, the caption says "GILDED CHARIOT WHEEL". I'm no expert, but I don't think even gold is thay shiny after such a prolonged immersion in saltwater. I'm not buying it.
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Why is Europe more liberal then the United States?
by free2beme ini have wondered this for awhile and can not figure out why.
any ideas?
apparently being liberal does not lead to an economic power house, but it does lead to a lot of hatred of the united states in these countries.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
I think that Europeans in general are indeed more liberal than Americans, and I think that at least part of that does come from the world wars. Not just from the number of people that died, but also because of the amount of devastation inflicted on infrastructure. Because of American geographical isolation, We've never really had to deal with the aftermath of war. Oh sure, there was the War of 1812 when Washington was burned, and there was the attack on Pearl Harbor, but comparitively speaking we've been unscathed. That leads to an attitude of there being very little risk involved in diplomatic policy, whether it be just throwing our weight around, annoying other nations with our policies, or actually going to war.
There's an acronym used in the US; NIMBY...it means Not In My Backyard. Don't know if Europeans use that or have a similar one. It's usually used when speaking of things that might be needed, but nobody wants them around. Like a new sewage processing center, a city dump, a jail, whatever. Lots of people may agree that such a thing is needed, but nobody wants it built in their hometown or neighborhood. Well similarly, foreign policy politics and war have never been in America's 'backyard'. I think that American attitudes might be a little different if they were.
Many posters stated that Americans feel superior, or are in 'their own world'. I think this can be related to geography as well. We only have 2 neighbors, Canada and Mexico, while the typical European country has 3 or 4 bordering countries, in many cases those borders can be reached in a matter of hours, while in the US reaching a border can take an average person days. From what I understand from speaking to a few friends I have on the net from Germany, Denmark, and the UK, it is also not so rare to have a relative in your family from a different country than yourself, just a few miles away. In my opinion, this leads to more of a feeling of community and comradery across borders than what exists in the US.
Regrettably, I also have to admit that many Americans are just plain stupid...I tried to have a conversation at work once with someone about politics, and had to explain to them who Chirac was in the course of the conversation. *sigh* Even though I consider myself somewhat above average, I only speak a smattering of 2 other languages other than English; Japanese and Spanish. But my Danish friend is fluent in 4, and can get along in 2-3 others passably well. Again, I feel geography has a role in this. Most Canadians speak English (despite their English vs French political schism in recent years), and many Americans look down on Mexicans as just a potential source of illegal immigrants, so nobody much cares about learning other languages in the US.
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More JW Folklore, Enjoy
by moomanchu insent to me by my jw relatives.. is this for real ??????????
from a brother in kansas.. this was an experience from japan, as told by a circuit overseer: .
jehovah's witnesses were doing street work and placed some magazines with a man.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
Thanks Alligator Wisdom, I wasn't aware of that...although the guy who wrote it definitely seemed to have a religious background, and the syntax in a few places raised some red flags about his objectivity...
"...transcribed the religious literature..."
For instance, the use of the word 'the' in that line; an objective writer would have just said he 'transcribed religious literature', the use of the word the implies significance. And then...
“unity of spirit, a divine timeless cosmic affinity”
...is completely biased, and the quote marks indicate it was not his own words, yet didn't give a source. So apparently, there are NO non-JW sources on the net for this story...which either means the story is completely manufactured, or that it was of so little consequence to the rest of the world that it just never got recorded anywhere else.
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More JW Folklore, Enjoy
by moomanchu insent to me by my jw relatives.. is this for real ??????????
from a brother in kansas.. this was an experience from japan, as told by a circuit overseer: .
jehovah's witnesses were doing street work and placed some magazines with a man.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
Just out of curiousity, I did a Google search to see if I could find a non-JW source for this story. This is the only thing that came up, from a webpage claiming to be from 'The Canadian Institute of English'. I noticed while scanning briefly through the entire page (which is rather long), that the writer apparently had a very religious background, there were many references to how rock music caused people to kill, a statement that comparing the human brain to a computer was an insult to the creator of the brain etc that I would expect from a fundy. For somebody that was supposedly educated, there were a lot of grammatical and spelling errors too...
Prof Malcolm J Watt M.Ed on "Audio Lingual Programming"-
"Another man, named KimihiroNakata, was a violent death-row prisoner who had been paid to kill two men. Eventually, while in prison, he began to study the Bible and after getting baptized was described as “one of the most zealous Christian I have known” by a close friend. While in prison, he studied Braille and transcribed the religious literature into Braille. These publications were distributed to various parts of Japan, including schools for the blind. Of course, it may be reasonable to question the validity of this experience as some criminals may hide behind religion as a way of expecting punishment. Yet, KimihiroNakata willing accepted capital punishment to satisfy justice and did not use any new found religion as a means to sidestep responsibility. Clearly, KimihiroNakata faith, or “unity of spirit, a divine timeless cosmic affinity” had a profound effect on his mental programming."
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Debaters: Let's have It Out !
by Amazing inthis thread was going to be about the true church.
but i simply changed the title.
okay ... so my experience thread set the stage for what seems to be a need to debate catholicism ... maybe because in the minds of many, there is a comparison to the watchtower ... a comparison which i believe is false.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
1) Well, having never been Catholic, I may have some wrong ideas, but as far as I know, the first actual pope was Siricius in 380-ish AD. If the pope is supposed to be an unbroken continuation from the time of Christ, I never understood why 300 some odd years went by before somebody became the first to use the title of pope.
2) Papal infallibility. Before I became atheist and still actually believed the bible, I had a problem with the Catholic faith and the doctrine of papal infallibility; the bible says no man is perfect but Jesus, how then can the pope also be perfect? (And historical, secular evidence exists that quite a few of them were very un-perfect indeed.)
3) Confession. I never quite could accept that simply doing a few hail marys or our fathers could absolve one of any wrongdoing. True story, I used to know a woman that was having an affair with a married man, she was Catholic and had been told she had to break off this affair. She was reluctant to do so however, and to avoid guilt/lectures/whatever, would travel around to different churches each week to make her confession, gradually making a circuit so as to only see each priest once in a blue moon. That way she never had to confess to the same priest twice in succession that she was still having the affair. I found it all kind of amusing and ridiculous, but to her way of thinking, she was sinless becauses she continued to go to confession each week. I often wondered if these priests didn't get together once in a while and share info, if they ever did, she'd have been so busted, lol.
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ex JW atheists
by Bobhere ini know we were sold a lie in believing god was only dealing with the wt and to obey them is to obey god.
what puzzels me is that in rejecting the wt so many also reject their belief in god.
surely they believed that god existed as witnesses.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
Well, I can only speak for myself, from a somewhat different perspective, as I am an ex-WWCG atheist. I was DFed from the WWCG at 13 at the same time I became a ward of the state. I began attending church services with my parents in WWCG again when I was around 14, because when I moved back home I had no choice. At that time, I guess you'd say I was a "questioning believer". I still thought the church had the truth, I just couldn't resolve many of my questions. Mostly scientific/theistic clash questions like evidence (or lack thereof) of a flood, what about the dinosaurs, if Adam and Eve are the mother and father of us all then why aren't we all a bunch of drooling 6-fingered web-toed genetic rejects, etc.
By the time I was 16 I was a ward of the state again, and at that point I was agnostic. I still believed in god but I had rejected god as portrayed by the WWCG. There were a few things I grew up believing that I just couldn't let go of though, like Saturday being the "proper" day of worship rather than Sunday. "...and on the seventh day, he rested" had been drilled into my head so much that I just couldn't accept any church which didn't hold that as a tenet. I did actually investigate several other religions, but the churches with a seventh day belief are few and far between, and pretty far out on the fringes for the most part too. I went through them all, one by one, and rejected them. The only one that seemed to "have it right" as far as I was concerned at the time, was the Jewish religion, but since most Jewish people are also Jews by birth, that seemed a bit problematic.
As a result of investigating all these different religions, I was also doing a fair amount of reading of the bible on my own, without the influence of the WWCG. I began having even more trouble with scientific questions than I had previously, it was all starting to unravel. Somewhere around when I turned 17, I decided I was atheist, and have remained so ever since. A few friends or well meaning acqaintances over the years have given me the self-righteous know-it-all lecture of "Well, you aren't REALLY atheist, you just had a bad experience'. Nothing raises my hackles more than that statement, which I completely resent. In my search for what was right, with a few exceptions, I had done far more study and research than almost any of these people, and had far more knowledge of the bible. I feel like I actually WORKED to be atheist, rather than just falling into it out of resentment, and any statement to the contrary is an insult, and denies all that inner turmoil I went through.
Furthermore, I had come to the conclusion that even if I was wrong, if god really did all the things that are attributed to him, then god had a lot to answer for, and was morally repugnant to me. Things like the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the flood, what supposedly is in store for us in Revelations...god as portrayed in the bible is like a little boy with an antfarm and a magnifying glass, gleefully zapping humanity with a ray of light whenever we displease him. What astounds me about all this is when I hear people pray, and say things like "Our loving father, who art in heaven" and things of that nature. Loving?! Please!! So, I'm quite sure that should I turn out to be wrong, a room is reserved for me on one of the deepest levels of hell, but I'm fine with that. Because if god wants to fry me cajun style for eternity because I think his morals suck, it pretty much validates what I think of him.
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What are your favorite top 5 science fiction movies of all time?
by new boy in1.star wars (first movie).
2.blade runner.
3. alien .
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
1) Star Wars (original)
2) 2001: A Space Odyssey
3) Alien (Because I also love horror films, and in the first one, before you knew about the aliens, it was kindof a combination of sci-fi and horror.)
4) Dune (I actually didn't much like the book-to-movie transition, neither version (1984 or 2000) did Frank Herbert's story justice, but I still have to include it...and for Trek fans, the 84 version has Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck.)
5) Blade Runner
Honorable Mentions:
All the Star Trek movies, the original Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Matrix (mostly for the special effects), Logan's Run
Cult Classics:
Too campy and/or funny to be serious contenders, but still good in their own cult classic way...
Time Bandits (Monty Python fans, rejoice)
The Adventures of Buckeroo Banzai
Ice Pirates
Worst of Sci-fi:
1) Battlefield Earth: I hate John Travolta, this movie showcases why.
2) I, Robot: I like Will Smith, but this movie totally mangled Isaac Asimov's concepts, his three laws of robotics are practically the bible of robots post-'Frankenstein Complex", you just don't mess with that. Furthermore, the Dr Susan Calvin character becomes too humanized as Smith's character's love interest, what made her interesting in all of Asimov's stories that she was featured in was that she was more robot than the robots.
3) Running Man: Almost totally removed all the elements of social commentary from Stephen King's only full length sci-fi story (under his pen name of Richard Bachman) and made it a Schwarzenegger action movie with a completely different ending.
4) Starship Troopers: Mangled Heinlein's book. At least Denise Richards is pretty to look at.
Story I would most like to see made into a sci-fi movie:
Riverworld, by Phillip Jose Farmer.
Who is your favorite real life character in all of history? They can all be in this story, and one of my own personal favorites, Mark Twain, is. The premise of the story is that everybody who ever lived wakes up in a giant world with one long river valley, surrounded by impassable mountains to seperate different zones. There is no technology present until it can be invented, except for the "grail" that everyone owns which produces food. If you are killed, you wake up the next morning in a different zone.
Note: I almost put this as my #5 for worst movies, because it actually has been done already, as a very bad made-for-tv cable special. It needs to be done again, but good