anybody have any ideas where they are going with the "new light" they have been pushing last week and this week?
for instance in this weeks study article one section reads:.
in years gone by, we believed that jehovah became displeased with his people because they did not have a zealous share in the preaching work during world war i. we concluded that for this reason, jehovah allowed babylon the great to take them captive for a short time.
Gobble-dee-gook, YADDA YADDA
It sounds like, "We had a negative outlook but later things were more positive than we realized."
That sets them up for consolidating congregations, selling off properties, appearing to be on the decline, but then saying that things will clear up later to show that they were really doing fine.
think of your favorite tv shows.
what do they all have in common?
the answer is they revolve around some type of problem or conflict.
Smiddy: OTWO remember competition is frowned on and a big no-no , dress codes are strictly controlled , imagine a sister or brother designing their own clothes in the new system it would be as bad as the Muslim nations of today you would have the religious police patrolling everywhere ."You cant wear that ?"
That's a JW-paradise or one ruled by some religious entity. I am not specifically talking of a religious dictatorship but of a place of never dying. It isn't real anyway, so my speculation is a fantasy just as your description of living forever where so much is frowned upon is fantasy.
i know you know who i am by now...the one that forgets to use paragraphs...anyway, all over all the jw sites (not jw.org).
it's been asked if you knew this or that why did you stay...it's been discussed how no matter what you hit the friends with, failed dated, new lights, pedophiles, etc, yet they stay and you can't reason with them....so what i've come up with is that most stay because they feel it's god's org.
and they were chosen in place of the jews.
I had my doubts about the organization for a decade before I left. I stayed because I was sure God put me there, that it was God's organization.
No way I would have stayed if they admitted the truth. Same for most JW's, even hardcore ones.
guess what, first book of the bible genesis 3:16 and he found other books that condones torture, exodus 7:3, numbers 31:17,18 and many more in that book.
so trump thought i have god's blessing..
You can find anything in the Bible.
Yeah, Donald gave me a weird vibe. He's still convincing the lowest-denominator common Americans that the U.S. needs to become harsher, more ruthless. He's telling us that waterboarding and torture are better than what happens when we don't do that. He had experts tell him that torture is effective. (Bullshit, by the way.)
Still, even under liberal leadership, the stuff the military does has been going on nonstop. Maybe dragging it out of Guantanamo Bay and the middle east and out into the open would cause people to see that torture is wrong and stripping humans of their rights without trial is wrong.
Donald also says that ending all the shootings in Chicago is easy. He told O'Reilly he could do it in one week. So I have deep concerns for the military establishment that Trump may turn the United States into once he figures out executive orders are very similar to the expedited powers that the German Parliament gave to Hitler.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybujst8kozq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeojxtqtwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxovacssahu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mary_tyler_moore.
meant to hopefully get your mind off the craziness which we sadly refer to as the news these days,.
we'll call this one .
fun for seculars.
#7 for me.
Everything had (in our limited understanding) a beginning. Life from lifelessness had to be. No need for a god.
None of the gods of man's creation exist. I have a slight belief that there may be evolved beings beyond human beings that would seem godlike to us, but in a Star Trek kind of way. I am extremely confident that were there any such beings, they have never visited Earth. Even if I am wrong and they visited and actually started out our primordial soup, they started out themselves from lifelessness and are not gods. But I really only put that up as a tiny slight silly notion of a possibility.
think of your favorite tv shows.
what do they all have in common?
the answer is they revolve around some type of problem or conflict.
I am torn on this. I get that man has evolved due to the need to overcome. I get that we are shaped mentally, philosophically by our challenges.
I know that I would be happy in retirement on the beach but we are talking about 2 decades, a far cry from "forever."
But it seems we could challenge ourselves in small ways even in perfection- learning an instrument or how to build certain things, then a different instrument and building different things. We could learn how to win auto races or horse races or foot races, then rowboat races. We could sew our own clothing and become skilled at that. To rid the world of large facilities, we could get our own water and food the hard way and dispose of our own sewage and garbage the hard way, so our daily drudgeries become a workout. Sure, tiny goals would become important goals and it may be a bit weird to focus on cutting a half-second off your rowboat mile, but it could be done.
I think I could find a way to "switch it up" over time.
It matters not, though. It's all just a fantasy.
we all 'exit' in our own way and at our own pace but i'm curious, why carry on stuffing yourself into that stiff suit and tie or meeting dress years after you realised the truth about 'the truth'?.
they kept you a prisoner, what's stopping you from leaving now that you have the key to your own cell?.
loved ones?
I have strong opinions like everyone else about this subject. My thoughts drove me to quickly fade. Some would say I am still living a lie if I am not openly opposed to Watchtower.
I had strong opinions about homosexuals and revealing outfits on women, and abortion, and tobacco and all kinds of things when I was a JW. I have since learned that no matter what my opinion is, I have no right to impose my way of thinking on others.
It's fine to ask others why they still attend meetings. It's fine to have opinions about it. But I was so wrong about so many things before, and I have learned to just let people lead their lives. Even beyond this forum and a little bit on facebook, I don't even try to influence religious people to wake up to reality unless I am asked for my opinion.
I think you all meeting attenders should find a way to seek more personal peace through less meeting attendance, but who am I to decide that your peace comes ahead of a delicately achieved happy relationship with family?
"do you believe in jesus?".
yes.. "do you believe in jehovah?".
yes.. "do you believe in the grand man of the universe?".
So I understand that you believe in the Santa-Claus-type of Jesus. For the naive, they can be coaxed into a morality via stories of that Jesus.
I don't like when older children haven't been taught the truth of how a Santa Claus would be more fair to poor people, so Santa Claus must be their parents. There's a time to grow up and realize you have to do good works for the sake of the good works instead of for the sake of Christmas presents.
Very few sane adult people continue to believe that Spider Man, Darth Vader, or Santa Claus are real people.
I think the same should be true of Jesus. It's time that mankind stops "believing" in him and grows up.
some go back to churchianity!.
and that, to me, indicates they never had real faith in god- but it was in men.....
The GB are flawed men.
The Bible was written by flawed men.
All the gods were created by flawed men.
Churches/Religions were all created by flawed men.
The God of the Bible can be anything readers want him to be- a god of love, war, justice, injustice, peace, slavery, macho standards, yadda yadda yadda.
