smellsgood

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Posts by smellsgood

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  23

  R.F'S MUM JUST HAD EMERGENCY SURGERY

  by free2think in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i just spoke to r.f.

  he told me his mum was rushed to hospital early yesterday morning in a great deal of pain.

  she subsequently had emergency surgery and is now in intensive care.

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  smellsgood

  I'm terribly sorry to hear that R.F. I hope he's ok.
  
  I hope there never comes a time when it will be fatal if blood is to be refused
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  24

  Experiences at the meetings

  by slimboyfat in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  since i still go to meetings i am going to post some thoughts about what i see and hear to refresh apostate memories of what glorious experiences you are missing out on these days.

  yesterday we had the book study, the boredom of the study itself was only alleviated by two incidents, one sad and the other strange.... there is a sister who is bi-polar and comes infrequently who was there.

  she was called to give an answer and started crying into the microphone.

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  smellsgood

  I've never really properly understood you and all your mysteriousness slimboyfat. Why do you go to meetings again? Do you have the "faith" of the Witnesses? What's up and what gives, could you fill me in?
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  4

  A MUST READ::: a book that I've not seen mentioned

  by smellsgood in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  son of the revolution .

  it's about liang hengs experiences growing up during the cultural revolution, led by chairman mao ze dong, after upending chaing kaisheks totalitarian regime.

  amazing the parallels at times to religious cults.

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  smellsgood

  I should mention the Authors :)
  
  Liang Heng & Judith Shapiro
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  4

  A MUST READ::: a book that I've not seen mentioned

  by smellsgood in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  son of the revolution .

  it's about liang hengs experiences growing up during the cultural revolution, led by chairman mao ze dong, after upending chaing kaisheks totalitarian regime.

  amazing the parallels at times to religious cults.

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  smellsgood

  Son of the Revolution
  
  
  It's about Liang Hengs experiences growing up during the Cultural Revolution, led by Chairman Mao Ze Dong, after upending Chaing Kaisheks totalitarian regime.
  
  Amazing the parallels at times to religious cults. Everyone here knows how much the WT has in common with the Fictitious Oceania in Orwells 1984. This is the REAL 1984, in a political/governmental setting. I knew of China, but not like this. We've had this book around for ages since my Mom studied History of China in College. I just picked it up last week and cannot recommend it highly enough to every person. All those things such as newspeak, thoughtcrime, family members trained to tattle on one another, everything happened under Mao in China.
  
  I learned there's really not much to complain about, and appreciated even more deeply how much freedom we enjoy, and perhaps even take for granted, not having experienced what it's like to not have Liberty.
  
  Wasn't communism supposed to equal out everyone? It certainly has moved further and futher away and as of today there is a massive gap between the wealthy of China and the peasants and workers of China. Almost like instead of Marxist/Leninist/Maoist "Utopia" they have something more akin to the caste system of India.
  
  I was so touched in so many places. As a result of the "Revolution" and under all Mao's policies, Liang grew up separated from his Mother who was labelled a "Rightist." Here's just a snippet from the book that sets up a recurring theme in Liangs life, being bullied, harassed, marginalized, criticized his entire upbringing as a consequence of his families "black thoughts," which weren't really even there.
  
  
  
  
  
  p. 8
  
  "Meanwhile, whenever I went home to Waipo's, I hoped Mother would be there, for I loved her very much despite our limited time together. But when I was about four, I began to sense there was something wrong. She would come home looking worried and she never played with me, just talked on and on with Uncle Yan in a hushed Liuyang County dialect which I couldn't understand. Finally, one Saturday afternoon it was Nai Nai who came to get me, and I was told Mother had gone away and I shouldn't go to Waipo's house anymore.
  
  Only years later was I old enough to understand what had happened and more than twenty years passed before anyone, including Mother herself, go t the full picture. In early 1957 the "Hundred Flowers Movement" had been launched. Its official purpose was to give the Party a chance to correct its shortcomings by listening to the masses' criticisms. Father was away in the countryside reporting on something, but in the Changsha Public Security Bureau, meetings were held and everyone was urged to express his or her opinions freely.
  
  Mother didn't know what to do. She really loved the Party and didn't have any criticisms to make; the Party had given her a job and saved her from the most abject poverty. Still, her leaders said that everyone should participate actively in the movement, especially those who hoped someday to join the Party. Mother was already in favor; she had been given the important job of validating arrest warrants for the whole city. So, regarding it her duty to come up with something, she finally thought of three poings she could make. She said that her Section Head sometimes used crude language and like to criticize people, that he should give his housekeeper a bed to sleep on instead of making her sleep oin the floor, and that sometimes when it came time to give raises, the leaders didn't listen to the masses' opinions.
  
  But then, with utterly confusing rapidity, the "Hundred Flowers Movement" changed into the "Anti-Rightist Movement." Perhaps the Party was caught off guard by the amount of opposition and felt compelled to crack down. Or maybe, as I've heard said, the "Hundred Flowers Movement" had been a trap designed from the beginning to uncover Rightist elements. Anyway, every unit was given a quota of Rightists, and Mother's name was among those at the Public Security Bureau.
  
  It was diastrous. When she was allowed to see her file in 1978, she found out that she had been given a Rightist's "cap" solely because of those three criticisms she had made. Perhaps her Section Head was angry at her; perhaps her unit was having trouble filling its quota. At the time she had no idea what the verdict was based on, she only knew that a terrible wrong had been done. But ther was no court of appeal. Mother was sent away to the suburb of Yuan Jia Ling for labor reform. She lost her cadre's rank and her salary was cut from fifty-five to fifteen yuan a month. ( A yuan is one hundred Chinese cents) My naive and trusting mother went to work as a peasant.
  
  Just as his wife was being declared an enemy of the Party, Father was actively participating in the Anti-Rightist Movement in his own unit. Father believed in the Party with his whole heart, believed that the Party could never make a mistake or hand down a wrong verdict. It was a torturuous dilemma; Father's traditional Confucian sense of family obligation told him to support Mother while his political allegiance told him to condemn her. In the end, his commitment to the Party won out, and he denounced her. He believed that was the only course that could save the family from ruin.
  
  I still remember the first time Mother came home for a visit. It was a rainy Suncay in late autumn, and Father and Nai Nai were both out. There were footsteps on the stairs and in the corridor, but it was almost a minute before the knock came, timidly. Liang Fang opened the door.
  
  Mother was almost unrecognizable. She was in patched blue peasant clothing, muddy up to the knees. The skin on her kind round face looked thick, leathery, and not too clean, and someone had chopped her hair off short and uneven. There was something both broader and thinner about her. "Mama!" cried Liang Fang.
  
  Liang Wei-ping and I ran up to her too, and she was hugging us all at once, weeping, forgetting to put tdown her oilpaper umbrella. Then as my sisters rushed to pour tea and bring a basin of hot water for her to wash her face, she sat on the bed and held me tightly for a long time. After she had rested, she busied herself with all the housework Nai Nai couldn't do alone, sweeping dusting and sharpening our pencils for us, scrubbing our clothes, and cleaning the windows. She wouldn't speak of where she'd been, just asked us about our schoolwork, our health, Father's health. We were so happy. We thought Mother had come home."
  
  Please borrow this book or buy it if you can. It's incredibly moving and informative.
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  44

  Human Nature

  by nvrgnbk in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  are we essentially moral beings, corrupted by society?.

  or are we in fact amoral, socialized by cultural pressures and religious beliefs?.

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  smellsgood

  amoral -a means without, or against. I probably used the the terms a bit interchangeably. oops.
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  8

  Rutherford: was he all that bad? (And how can we understand him if he was?)

  by slimboyfat in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  is there no one else who finds the rather one-dimensional character of apostate discourse on the society's third president a bit empty?

  even if it didn't end up that way, isn't it likely he was initially motivated by a concern for the truth, the same way many are drawn to the witnesses even today?

  to paint someone as a villain is to invite incomprehension as to how they could have acted as they did.

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  smellsgood

  Even if it didn't end up that way, isn't it likely he was initially motivated by a concern for the truth, the same way many are drawn to the Witnesses even today?
  
  smellsgood: If he was "concerned for the truth" he wouldn't have gone on a campaign of identifying a false prophet who led people to believe for forty years that Armageddon was to come in 1914, as the "faithful and wise servant" or the "mouthpiece of God." Who then went on himself to promulgate and advertise more and more false prophecies, who solely and arbitrarily dictated and seeded more and more lies and deceit, whilst being disingenuous to the facts of the WT from its inception. He was a big ole cover upper, and an instigator of lies.
  
  :But isn't all religion fundamentally self-serving?"
  
  smellsgood: Not nearly to the degree that a cult like the WT is. They set themselves up as the bridge to men and God...Other Christian religions defer that spot to Jesus. Attempting to at least glorify him rather than themselves. Most Christians don't believe you need to belong to an organization, and the WT demands it as if God himself had come down and said as much on a Worldwide broadcast on Larry King Live.
  
  I would say that many religions are not self serving in the way of plunking themselves down as the swami to God. That is a specialty of cults.
  
  
  "Is God sending mixed messages, or doesn't it simply reflect the changing concerns of different interest groups?"
  
  smellsgood: Clearly the WT is a soveriegn unto its own, not bothering about anything besides its own agenda. Of course its just reflecting change (you're stepping dangerously close into "new light" bunkery) but the fact is they do it in a way that has the faithful believing they are this infallible entity, specifically and uniquely chosen by an infallible God to reveal the newer, better truthier truth. Thereby not only making fools of themselves, but unavoidably making a mockery of the God they espouse to fear, worship and believe this word that reads that God "cannot lie." Nor did he send a prophet whose prophecies fail.
  
  C.T. Russell was just as much or more a villian in my eyes, he was the original fake maker. Knorr was a piece of work too, all the leaders of WT dom have been instrumental in creating and promulgating their falsehoods, their lies, and are responsible for the consequences of the WT policies.
  
  
  "compare for instance with a man who forbids the use of condoms in Africa"
  
  smellsgood: That is the most stupid thing and it pisses me off. I was just going off on this to my Mum the other day. It's ridiculous, how many women, who are faithful to their husbands, were virgins, etc...have contracted the virus through a monogamous relationship with a soldier or whatever husband who went away and got busy with other women or prostitutes. This realllly needs to change, the worst policy I can think of in the Catholic church presently, is the no condom/ birth control.
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  44

  Human Nature

  by nvrgnbk in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  are we essentially moral beings, corrupted by society?.

  or are we in fact amoral, socialized by cultural pressures and religious beliefs?.

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  smellsgood

  I think we all have a flawed nature, and can make moral or amoral choices. I think men, man is easily corruptable, that we are susceptible to immoral actions. I think it is a matter of the will, like Kierkegaard says.
  
  Just look at history or the present, and see how much suffering and ill-will and terror caused by men. Clearly it's not really confined, rare, or sporadic. Just look at how many ordinary Germans became tools of Hitlers slaughtering machine. I don't think that that many people could have been considered psycopaths or sociopaths before they became murderous villians. I think they were just like you and me, but there is something inside where its almost like we have our conscience overtaken through insidious means, and I think that they believed they were doing the right thing under the hypnosis almost of their Fuhrer, while they were performing the most wicked and violent of atrocities imaginable.
  
  It's interesting to see how entire societies, this is easily seen in history, can be party and unified in doing immoral things. Such as the Incan, Aztec or Mayan human sacrifice. The younger, the more pure, the more pleasing to the gods. This means that seven year olds were taken up the mountain and blugeoned.
  
  There is something sick, and it seems that human nature can find itself lacking immunity.
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  25

  So non-Euclidian Physicists what do you think of believers in 4 dim space?

  by IP_SEC in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  no firestorms please.

  but be honest.

  do you think that we are of a higher level of intelligence than those who accept euclidian geometry theories?.

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  smellsgood

  I think there's at least 10 dimensions. You need that mathematically to make a theory like string theory work. You can't test it of course. Thing is you can't see, touch, smell, or sense those dimensions, so does that mean they're not really there? I love quantum physics/mechanics even though I understand them at about the level that Paris Hilton understands complex literature such as "Horton hears a Who" ,,,but I listen to those who are smarter than I am.
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  83

  Music!! Who's your Favorite Top Ten Rock Groups or Solo Artists All Time?

  by flipper in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  mr. flipper here again gang!

  so who do ya like all time?mr.

  flippers list is as follows, almost in this way.

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  smellsgood

  1. Radiohead
  
  2. Manic Street Preachers
  
  3. Garbage
  
  4. Nirvana
  
  5. Metallica
  
  6. The Beatles
  
  7. Smashing Pumpkins
  
  8. The Smith's
  
  9. Stone Temple Pilots
  
  10. The Flaming Lips
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  25

  pray for my uncle--blood issue

  by Junction-Guy in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  my great uncle found out last week that he has to have triple bypass surgery.

  he was raised a jw back in the 1930's and 1940's, but left and joined the navy.

  approximately 8 years ago he started studying again.

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  smellsgood

  Will do Dave.
  
  In the meantime, is there any way his relatives can reason with him on this, the taking of blood in Bulgaria? Jesus healing on the Sabbath? Anything?