DATA-DOG, when you say the "current study edition" what date do you mean? I have not kept up with the WT lit. in years, so I don't know. I realize from comments at this forum that the mags have changed. If you wouldn't mind sharing the pages numbers this stuff is on, that would be helpful to me. I'm going to have to read it, and I'd like to keep the pain of doing so to a minimum. Thanks in advance.
careful
JoinedPosts by careful
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The Governing Body are doubling down on dogma!
by DATA-DOG inin case you were wondering if the governing body we're going to become kinder and gentler, the answer is a big "no!!!
in the current study edition of the wt magazine, the sheeple are reminded of some very important key points.
1) god has an organization ( corporation ) that you must respect.. 2) only the gb/faithful slave can dispense spiritual food and only the gb/faithful slave can interpret the bible.. 3) individual dubs absolutely cannot learn "truth" on their own.. 4) god requires "unity of doctrine.
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careful
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Go into the city to So-and-so
by Funchback inmatthew 26:18 ("go into the city to so-and-so..."-nwt) and ruth 4:1 ("at that boʹaz said: 'come here and sit down, so-and-so.
' "-nwt) used to annoy me.
i didn't really understand it.
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careful
If you're interested in more detail, a professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University wrote an article in 2012 on this phrase in the Ruth passage. Here's the link. It begins on page 251:
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/jacksasson/files/2013/03/Sasson-So-and-so-Eskenazi-Fs.pdf
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Does anybody know the story with this?
by careful inthere is a book entitled untouchable by jacob miller published in 2010 (© by angel garcia).
the cover says that it's about "the biggest latino gangster ever recorded to be associated with the mafia.
" ordinarily i could care less about things like that.
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careful
There is a book entitled Untouchable by Jacob Miller published in 2010 (© by Angel Garcia). The cover says that it's about "the biggest Latino gangster ever recorded to be associated with the mafia." Ordinarily I could care less about things like that. However, I ran across the book when doing a quick google search on a biblical passage that I remembered (quicker than just looking it up) from the NWT, one that would not be rendered in any other Bible translation as I remembered it because it contained Freddie Franz's unique "systems of things" (1Cor. 10:11). The first hit on google was to this Untouchable book, so I unsuspectedly clicked it. What came up was one of those "teaser" partial electronic copies of a complete book with extended excerpts, actual pages from the book but which also lacked huge sections of it. The purpose, of course, is to get people to buy the book by teasing them with bits of it.
From the three-page Preface, dated April, 2008, which is presented in its entirety, I learned that the author Miller has written a book about a gangster, a Puerto Rican/NYer and an admitted murderer named Frankie, who "was a man of dualities, a veteran criminal to the bone but also a religious man aiming to improve himself" (17). Pages 375-381 (less p. 380) are in the electronic preview. Paragraph after paragraph on these pages contain quotations from the Bible exclusively out of the NWT. It is clear from them, as well as statements along with them that show JW theology, that whoever this Frankie character is, he converted to the Witness faith.
The story of that conversion is evidently told somewhere between p. 327 and 375 as those pages are missing in the preview. It's interesting that this link came up at the top of the search list because, as I understand it, google prioritizes its results in a search by the frequency of users who actually click on the link provided. That would mean this book must have some popularity. However, I did a search on Worldcat and no library in the world that is indexed in that database, a huge number of them, holds the book. Admittedly the market for it is pop culture, but it seems like a strange contradiction.
Whatever the case with that, if indeed some gangster/murderer-turned-brother has gone to a worldly writer to have his life's story told and that story is gruesome and shameful as any seriously involved gangster's life would be, and this brother has not paid his debt to society for his crimes, but is a member in good standing in some congregation (admittedly my speculations since the book sample is incomplete), this could present an embarrassing problem for the org and the GB, especially with all this child abuse exposure they are so actively running from. Again from the details in the Preface, "Frankie" had gone to a shady loan shark to get the money up front for Miller to publish his story, not a very positive thing for a brother to do, eh?
So does anyone know what the story is with this book and/or this "Frankie" guy (perhaps "Angel Garcia")? Does anyone know if the book's publication is now, or will become, a problem for the org? If nothing else, it bears watching.
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question from readers: with all the animal sacrifices, wouldnt the temple smell worse than a stockyard?
by nowwhat? inwith all the cattle, sheep and others wouldn't they be shitting and peeing all over the place?
along with the gallons and gallons of blood being drained and then the flesh being burned as well.
wouldn't the stench be unbearable?.
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careful
It would also have smelled like Burger King with all that beef sizzling on the altar. Maybe one smell worked against the other.
It is good to remember that such was the case in most, if not all, of the other ancient societies. In Homer's Iliad "hactaombs" (the sacrifice of groups of 100 animals, though probably not always to be taken literally at exactly 100) are mentioned regularly (for example, at 1.431-447, 2.306, 4.120). The only way people could eat fresh meat was to slaughter an animal and cook it right away. Since meat was not a regular part of most people's diet, it was offered to the masses at festivals/holidays/celebrations, and these were centered in the temple. The priests were the cooks, their assistants, the slaughter men. It wasn't just the Jews in Jerusalem. If you were an average Syrian, Babylonian, Greek, it was the same story.
Temples were also the banks since they were the most secure places in a city. Hence the common temple robbers, and the money changers Jesus threw out. Knowledge of the temples of antiquity helps one today appreciate why they were so important.
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What is the vow of poverty
by Jafox ini was told by someone that in 2007 two members of the branch committee in greece were removed because they breached the vow of poverty.
the matter was over a small amount, in the range of a few hundred euro.
is there a copy of this vow available and how would this be applied here?
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careful
Partly on topic was a question I had asked about this matter here, just a few weeks ago:
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Aid to Bible Understanding - can you help summarise any useful sections?
by Fernando inrandall watters presents the fascinating backstory of the "aid book", and the brouhaha surrounding it, in this article:.
"the watchtower bible and tract society: the critical years 1975-1997".
so far it seems the project to research and write the "aid to bible understanding" revealed serious doctrinal and institutional flaws that the gb wanted to preserve nonetheless.. it seems what ray franz and his team were learning, and were largely blocked from presenting:.
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careful
SBF, a good observation.
Crazyguy,
He even helped out on some of the Greek translations of the new updated Septuagint bible that was published a few years ago
Do you mean the revised NWT of 2013? Surely you are not thinking of the translation of the Septuagint done by real scholars in 2007 and published by Oxford, and slightly revised in 2009. That was the first English translation of the Septuagint into English in over a century. Do you think that Reinhard Lengtat "helped out" with that?
Fernando, I think it is in the old Aid book that I first saw a reference to the translation of the New Testament by George Woosung Wade (1934), an Anglican scholar, trained at Oxford with a doctorate of divinity, and who was a professor of Latin at St. David's College in Lampeter, Wales for 40 years. He was a liberal academic theologically and his NT translation is quite good. The Aid book cites it, if I recall correctly, at Rev. 19:1-6 because Wade used "Jehovah" in his translation of the four instances of "Hallelujah" there. Unfortunately, I never saw this excellent translation used again in any WTS publications. It has a lot to offer beside the use of the divine name at Rev. 19. I suppose it was deemed too liberal by WTS writers, a real shame.
So there is one useful thing in the old Aid book that I can remember.
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Information Disparity
by doublespeak inthe scriptures reveal that god never takes advantage of the ignorance of anyone.. j.rutherford, jehovah, brooklyn, international bible students association, 1934, p.19.
would that the oligarchy followed suit.. tom..
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careful
Jeremiah 20:7—how does that fit into JFR's theology here?
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the 2013 NWT in Dutch ---- when ??
by menrov inwe are almost in 2017 and some 3 to 4 years have passed since the release of the 2013 revised nwt.
also, i am supposed to believe much money has been spent on rto's.
and as the end is even closer, i should have access to the "best translation ever" in my own language...how else can i be saved???.
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careful
Caminante's comment is quite interesting and revealing. If what he/she reports is true, it provides some info on the time frame it took to produce the revised NWT, namely that it had been in the pipeline for a decade or more before the English version was released. A bit more of the super secrecy is revealed! -
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Noah a Preacher of Righteousness?
by Spoletta induring the watchtower study today, i browsed genesis and looked for evidence of noah ever preaching to anyone.
from what i could glean from the scriptures, it was a foregone conclusion that noah's family would be it on the ark.
(unless they towed some rafts behind) my wife says that building the ark could be considered a witness of his faith to the wicked world, but that seems kind of lame to me.. so, should i just assume that god decided not to give anyone else a chance for redemption?
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careful
For any who care, the idea of Noah being a preacher was common in the historic milieu that 2 Peter reflects. Josephus reports it (AJ 1.74), and an extensive description of it is in the non-canonical Jewish Sibylline Oracles (1.125-129, 148-198); it's also in numerous rabbinic works (like the one referenced above), and other early Christian authors (1 Clement 7.6; Theophilus, Ad Autol. 3.19; Apoc. Paul 50). Not that the WT writers know this or are allowed to share it, if they do.
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JW employing pre-teens to work religious propaganda phonebank
by oppostate in.
what do you think about using pre-teens to work religious propaganda phonebank?.
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careful
Thanks for the info. I cannot help but wonder how this is connected to their push for child baptism...