My JW family has "Family Day" every year (and my bil is an elder, too). I still show up for it. The date is different every year ... usually whenever everyone ends up with enough money for presents. Funny thing is ... we never did this when I was growing up. We started doing it when my neice and nephew were little ... about 10 years ago. We would all get together and eat dinner and give wrapped presents to the kids. About 3 years ago, I talked them into doing our own version of secret santa ... we draw names and buy a present for one of the adults. I think it is hilarious that they justify doing it, but I just joke about it being their "festivus". Every year, I threaten to put up an aluminum pole. (only Seinfeld fans will get the reference). I think its good for the kids ... I don't how they twist their reasoning to justify it.
Wild_Thing
JoinedPosts by Wild_Thing
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"Family day" Is this a new jdub thing?
by cultswatter ini know of jws that celebrate "family day" at this time of year.
i have asked these jw about where they got the term "family day" was it from the watchtower?
they seem to deny the watchtower had ever mentioned "family day", but i can sense they are trying to hide something here.
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TIME Magazine Articles on Jehovah's Witnesses
by Wild_Thing inhas anyone ever posted about the tons of time magazine articles about the jws?
time has been around forever and has been a 'witness' (pardon the pun) to much of their history .. clear back to the 1930s.
go to the time website and search for yourself!
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Wild_Thing
I found this footnote interesting, since as far as I know Rutherford was a Lawyer who served as a judge for a week or two, but was not really a judge, why would it say here that he served as a circuit judge for 14 years? If any of you know, please share this with us. Thanks for posting these Time magazine articles, I am sharing them with a few active JW's I know, since the source of the info is "non-Apostate" they will read it.
He was for 14 years a circuit judge in Missouri; "consecrated myself to the Lord" in 1906. He is now 58 years old.
IC
I think it is pretty common, even today, for reporters to take information like that at face value. I am sure if Rutherford told him that, he printed it with the presumption that it was true without verifying it. I would be interested to know what can be dug up on his history here in Missouri.
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Question about EARLY Watchtower history
by Wild_Thing ini found a reference to a magazine called our hope from the 1920s and it reads just like early watchtower mags.
anybody heard of this?
if you do, maybe you know who dr. arno clemens gaebelein is?
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Wild_Thing
Wow! Thanks to both of you for your help. I guess new cult leaders were a dime a dozen back then. What made me wonder is when I was looking up old TIME magazine articles, I found an article about him printed in 1927. They quoted him and then the attatched a footnote:
"One of the first things Christ will do upon his return will be to put Satan literally into the bottomless pit, and then do away with all sickness, all airplanes and all wars. For those Christians who are still alive there will be no death."*
* "Millions now living will never die" is the hope of International Bible Students (TIME, Aug. 1).
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Question about EARLY Watchtower history
by Wild_Thing ini found a reference to a magazine called our hope from the 1920s and it reads just like early watchtower mags.
anybody heard of this?
if you do, maybe you know who dr. arno clemens gaebelein is?
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Wild_Thing
I found a reference to a magazine called Our Hope from the 1920s and it reads just like early Watchtower mags. Anybody heard of this?
If you do, maybe you know who Dr. Arno Clemens Gaebelein is? He was supposedly the editor of Our Hope.
Were either this publication or person connected to the "International Bible Students"?
Thanks!
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In [the] beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
by nicolaou in.
so where did god live before he'd created the heavens?.
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Wild_Thing
What came first ... the chicken or the egg?
Did God create the Earth or did Earth create God?
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TIME Magazine Articles on Jehovah's Witnesses
by Wild_Thing inhas anyone ever posted about the tons of time magazine articles about the jws?
time has been around forever and has been a 'witness' (pardon the pun) to much of their history .. clear back to the 1930s.
go to the time website and search for yourself!
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Wild_Thing
Wow Ironhead ... you have no idea how you just gave me goosebumps!
I found another TIME article about the Judge and his California mansion.
Monday, Mar. 31, 1930California CultsBig, blue-eyed Judge Joseph Frederick Rutherford, 60, lives in a ten-room Spanish mansion, No. 4440 Braeburn Road. San Diego, Calif. Last week he deeded No. 4440 Braeburn Road, an adjacent two-car garage and a pair of automobiles to King David, Gedeon, Barak, Samson. Jephthae, Samuel and sundry other mighties of ancient Palestine. Positive is he that they are shortly to reappear on earth. Said he: "I have purposely landscaped the place with palm and olive trees so these princes of the universe will feel at home when they come to offer man the chance to become perfect."
Judge Rutherford's deed can scarcely be considered eccentric, for his conviction that the sunny boulevards of San Diego are soon to be trod by men with the light of ages in their eyes is presumably shared by the 1,000,000 members of the International Bible Students Association and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, of both of which Judge Rutherford is President. In 34 nations these members have read his declarations as editor of both the Watch Tower and Golden Age magazines.
Judge Rutherford was born on a Missouri farm, practiced law at Boonville, acquired a circuit judgeship, continued practice in St. Louis, Kansas City. He accompanied the late William Jennings Bryan on his first Presidential campaign tour, announcing him as "appointed by God to straighten out the problems of the world." Mr. Bryan's example inspired Judge Rutherford to wear habitually a black bow tie. In 1916 he succeeded the late Charles Taze Russell of Brooklyn, founder-president of the International Bible Students Association.
Members of this organization designate themselves as Bible Students. Their creed holds that Biblical prophecies govern all earthly events. By careful scrutiny of Holy Writ, the Bible Students have discerned that three periods of time, termed "cosmos," prevail in human affairs. Cosmos I began with Adam, ended with the Flood. Cosmos II began with the Flood, ended with the World War. Cosmos III, begun in 1914, will end in 2874, when "The Kingdom of God" will fill the whole world. An erroneous prophecy that the year 1928 would provide a cataclysm— ''Nations will battle; the dead will be dung on the earth"—upset considerably the Bible Students' calculations, but the major tenets of their belief are as yet unshaken.
Newsmen last week asked Judge Rutherford whether he would not be troubled by bogus Davids applying for admission to consecrated No. 4440 Braeburn Road. Said he: "I realized the possibility of some old codger turning up bright and early some morning and declaring he was David. The men whom I have designated to test the identity of these men are officers of my societies. . . . They will be divinely authorized to know impostors from the real Princes."
It would be idle to deny that organized religion is sore beset in the present age. Agnosticism and atheism are on the rise.
Protestantism is struggling for Unity. Catholicism reiterates its commands but has a hard time enforcing them. In Russia is the unprecedented spectacle of the Communistic anti-religious crusade. Thousands of persons, dissatisfied with the faiths of their fathers, seek new spiritual footholds. Thus, as always in such troubled times, there is a flourishing of cults, of religious novelties and new fashions in faith. Flowery, sun-drenched California, where Nature exhibits herself in mystical opulence, where plenty of people have plenty of money, where there are many invalids contemplating eternity, is particularly propitious for this flourishing.
Recent years have witnessed a great burgeoning of California cults. Examples : The Rosicrucian Fellowship. In Oceanside is a fellowship founded by one Max Heindel who wrote a book called Cosmo-Conception while living in a Manhattan boarding house on a diet of milk and shredded wheat. Object of his cult: to distribute literature on Western learning, to practice spiritual healing through agents known as "Elder Brothers" and "Invisible Helpers." There are no public ceremonies; a maxim of the fellowship is in substance: "Know all things but remain unknown." Founder Heindel died in 1916. his work is now continued by his wife and her associates. The Rosicrucian Brotherhood in San Jose, directed by H. Spencer Lewis, Imperator for North America, onetime Jew ish salesman, is joined to an international brotherhood conducted, like Freemasonry, on the lodge system. It extols good citizenship, patriotism, scientific and cultural self-improvement. Its primary significance is not religious. It claims descent from an occult and ancient line supposedly including the Egyptian sages and Sir Fran cis Bacon. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson.* Its ritual is elaborate, archaic, Egyptian in symbolism. Imperator Lewis recently threatened suit against Mrs. Heindel of Oceanside because she employed the term Rosicrucian in connection with her fellowship.
Theosophists. On Point Loma is the International Headquarters of the vast Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, founded in Manhattan in 1875 by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, long led by the late Katherine Tingley. The late Lyman Judson Gage, San Diego banker, Secretary of the Treasury in the McKinley and Roosevelt Cabinets, was an ardent Point Loma Theosophist. The cult attempts to harmonize with all great faiths, but is deeply colored in its observances and specific modes of thought by Eastern philosophers and prophets. In glass-domed buildings on Point Loma children may attend a Theosophical school. Excellent is the musical education obtained therein.
The Order of the Star in the East recently established a 1,000-acre colony, one of four world centres, in Krotona, Ojai Valley. It is the U. S. headquarters of 82-year-old Dr. Annie Besant's Theosophical Society, a schismatic offshoot of the Blavatsky-Tingley cult. Constant is the conflict between the two; each is anxious not to be confused with the other. Dr. Besant's teachings are very closely linked with Eastern thought, occult and mystical. She has proclaimed her famed, sloe-eyed Hindu protege, Krishnamurti, to be the vehicle of the World Teacher (i.e. the divine spirit at times appropriates his physical organism, speaks through him as it spoke through Jesus, Mohammed, etc.). Once an avid tennis-player and tea-drinker at Oxford and on the Riviera, he arrived last week in Krotona to begin new vigils and meditations. The Besant Society believes that children born on the Pacific Coast, Canada and Australia (or other fresh, unexhausted lands) are creatures of a new, sixth race, capable of seeing ethereal spirits, possessed of clairvoyance. All other people living are said to derive from the fifth, or Arian root race. Another Besant belief: California is highly electrical, hence occult manifestations are frequent. Great is the hope of the Society that Krotona will prove a breeding place of strapping, golden children.
The Apostle Faith Movement has a branch in Los Angeles, claims to heal by correspondence, dispenses blessed handkerchiefs.
The Holy City in the Santa Cruz Mountains is for men only. Its inhabitants wear long hair, sell barbecued pork and gasoline to travelers, broadcast from their own radio station, post signs reminding the countryside of the likelihood of Death. Their hillside retreat includes a dance hall from which feminine shouting frequently echoes down the mountains.
The Great Eleven lapsed after the imprisonment of May Otis Blackburn ("Heel of God"). From one Clifford Dabney it is claimed she stole $40,000, having promised to reveal universal secrets. Mr. Dabney declared that she told him he was the Christ but could not prove it.
*Certain 17th Century religious reformers called themselves Rosicrucians: creditable historians, however, have discovered no evidence that they were fraternally organized.
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Are Witnesses now partially accepting the internet?
by ellderwho ini started this thread asking the question because since my parents retired to florida (gods waiting room) ive been getting all kinds of internet witness junk from my mom, ie.
email stories, video clips of pat robertsons' comments about using the name jehovah, andy rooney of 60minutes stories.. also the email header is filled with adresses of im sure all witnesses.
i know my mom doesnt have any worldly friends.
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Wild_Thing
I have two JW sisters and a JW mom and all them have computers with high speed internet. My mom barely knows how to use it, buy sisters are quite a whiz at it. They use for everything! But as far as for spititual things and connecting with other JWs its still a no no.
I remember when I first got a computer years ago and I hooked it up to dial up ... the only internet we had back then. My sister came over to see the new fangled contraption and we decided to see if there were witness websites online (we heard you could print off the scriptures for the current meetings already prepared by someone (obviously I was still a JW back then). Anyway, we did and search and some 'apostate' sites came up on the search page like Freeminds and the little snipit said something about the JWs being a cult.
My sister threw her hand over eyes and was screaming 'get it off! get it off!' I was the funniest damn thing I had ever seen! I showed her the miracle of the 'Back' button and how we could modify our search by typing "-cult" she was okay, but I still remember her reaction and have wondered if she would do the same thing today.
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TIME Magazine Articles on Jehovah's Witnesses
by Wild_Thing inhas anyone ever posted about the tons of time magazine articles about the jws?
time has been around forever and has been a 'witness' (pardon the pun) to much of their history .. clear back to the 1930s.
go to the time website and search for yourself!
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Wild_Thing
There they parked their trailers, pitched tents, built their own privies and slept like Spartans on mats of straw.
Nearby filling-station attendants complained that their washrooms were clogged with naked Witnesses taking sponge baths.
More than 2,500 of them, togged out in bathing suits, playsuits, pajamas or long underwear, waded hip deep into Lake Erie to be immersed backwards in its waters. (Baptizers, chilled by the four-hour ceremony, swigged from a bottle of port wine.)LOL! When I read that, I thought ... in the words of Cartman ... "g**d*** hippies!!"
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Question: Why did Daniel reject delicacies, but later did not reject ...
by Lady Liberty inhi everyone.... i was thinking about the whole star in bethlehem issue as many have posted on the subject.
and something struck me as strange.
and i wanted to know if any of you have ever thought about this:.
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Wild_Thing
You mean .... the bible contradicts itself?? I'm shocked!
The only thing I can think of is that there were supposed magic practicing priests that were okay with God ... like turning a staff into a snake. Those were the good guys that did that. Right? Sounds like magic to me.
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"Crazy" JW Bites Off Man's Thumb
by Justitia Themis inhttp://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006580338,00.html.
bible rants of 'mad' cannibal .
by andrew parker.
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Wild_Thing
Wow! I would say that this guy has either masterbated or received a blood transfusion ... since both are said to make you go insane!
I suppose he could've been exposed to aluminum at some point in his life, too.
