Posts by veradico

8

"Searchable"--1969 Kingdom Interlinear Translation--PDF!

by Atlantis in

after i posted the "1969 kingdom interlinear translation" pdf, my friend (anonymous), was kind-hearted enough to provide us with a "searchable" pdf of the kingdom interlinear of which the download link is listed below.

this is the only "searchable" pdf of the 1969 kingdom interlinear on the net that i am aware of.

anonymous knows that there are many "master researchers" coming here to this forum and their time is valuable.

veradico

This is awesome! Has this been done with other JW publications?

21

thank god (another letter to jehovah)

by theinfamousone in

dear jehovah,.

it has been a few days since we have last spoken.

well, since i sent you a letter.

veradico

I think it's facinating that your letter attracted the attention of two self-proclaimed prophets. Of course "God" ignores our suffering. If the word "God" has any content at all, it can hardly refer to a humanoid being with various superpowers, and the problem of human and animal suffering directly challenges the idea of an anthropomorphic God. If God exists, he is not humane; he is not kind. You have been urged to not trust your own rational abilities, to accept on faith the strange claim that what seems irrational to you is rational to an all-knowing God. You do well to reject God's prophets' demand that you abdicate your reason and compassion in order to preserve belief in the traditional God.

To the prophet and the messiah, I have only this to say: Your words are less than worthless. Your reverence for God is built on a foundation of human humiliation. In order to give us a Father, you make us all children--weak, powerless, waiting for a God who does not come. Keep your God of blood and fire and sacrifice who calls himself by the names of love and mercy and peace.

11

The Morals we were Taught from the Podium

by The wanderer in

jw
friends

the morals we were taught from the podium the organization for the most part used to stress, moral, mental,.

physical and spiritual cleanliness.

the magazines would period-.

veradico

Let's consider for a moment the November Awake! After we get through the initial articles which fail to answer the question of suffering and the three-page article on the Quakers, we come to a very brief article on having meals together as a family. We get a delightful, Bradey Bunch-esque quote from Algirdas [name has probably been changed, as is customary]: "During mealtimes all of us feel free to talk about the day's events and to share our problems, thoughts, plans, likes, and dislikes." Honesty is a big part of morality, right? Could Algirdas' children really talk about their problems: the sense of isolation at school, the sense of judgment in the hall as everyone concerns themselves with the hierarchy of spiritual maturity, the strain of keeping up with all the meaningless busywork of the Organization while trying to do well in school, the mental gymnastics of interpreting everything that they hear through the filter of JW-orthodoxy, the guilt for what little life they have with their friends at school, the shame of thinking ordinary human thoughts. Could Algirdas' children talk about their thoughts: "Hey, since we are interested in what is true, I was thinking that when the teacher talked about evolution today it made sense," "A friend of mine told me today that she had an abortion. I know she did not make her decision casually, and I have a hard time not agreeing with her reasons," "So, mom and dad, even though I'm a guy, I find I like checking other guys out." Could Algirdas' children really talk about their plans: "I don't want to pioneer. I want to go to college. I know you don't think it's practical, but there are other things in life that are more important to me than being practical. I just really love this subject," "I want to be involved in a work that really saves lives. I'm not saying our message isn't good, mom. But why can't I work with this charity oragnization to feed people who have nothing?" What about likes and dislikes: "I don't really like sitting for hours and hours listening to redundant talks that fill me with guilt," "I like to wear clothes that make me feel like a young and sexy person." JW morality (and it's all rolled into one package) does not allow even the most basic level of honesty. Witnesses (particularly the really good publishers) spend more time concealing their thoughts from each other than they do preaching their message from door to door. And I would say that honesty is one of the fundamental principles of morality. If people are not free to speak and behave honestly and authentically, then it's not morality; it's enforced and externally imposed conformity. Instead of teaching morality, instead of teaching people how to reason for themselves, the November Awake! goes on to have two articles designed to make people feel guilty for masturbating and for having sex without being married. These rules are arbitrary, simplistic, and (particularly in the case of masturbation) contrary to human nature. The Society fills people with guilt for being human, for being messy, warm-blooded, living creatures. Morality must be self-generated and arise from a sense of freedom and a consequent sense of responsibility to live well and with regard for the value of others due to an awareness of our own value. The Organization takes this away from people because they are not free and they are not taught to value themselves. I suspect this question is asking whether the rules we were taught from the podium stuck with us, but that has very little to do with morality.

107

Lets say something positive about Islam!

by eyeslice in

jw
friends

i'ii start off.

i have traveled widely in asia and have visited iran on business.

i have always found the average muslim to be extremely hospitable and generous.

veradico

Rumi

54

Your Favorite Poem or Saying

by compound complex in

jw
friends

dear friends,.

my favorite poem is not in vain by emily dickinson:.

if i can stop one heart from breaking,.

veradico

I just remembered a list I made a while ago on this subject. I'll paste it below.

"To his Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell, "A Poison Tree" and "The Chimney Sweeper" and "The Tiger" and "The Divine Image" and "The Clod and the Pebble" by William Blake, "How Do I Love Thee?" by Elizabeth Browning, "My Last Duchess" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" by Robert Browning, "Kubla Khan or, a Vision In a Dream: A Fragment" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "A Bird Came Down" and "Because I could not stop for Death" and "I cannot live with you" "I never saw a moor" and "Success is counted sweetest" and "I had been hungry" and "A Certain Slant of Light" and "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" and "This World is not Conclusion" and "I'm nobody, who are you?" and "Faith is a fine invention" and “I would not paint a picture” by Emily Dickinson, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot, "Fire and Ice" and "Design" and "Departmental" and Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost, "Delight in Disorder" by Robert Herrick, "Pied Beauty" and "Binsey Poplars" and "Thou art indeed just, Lord" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "A Dream Within A Dream" and "The Bells" and "The Conqueror Worm" and "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe, "Sonnet 116" and "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" and "When Icicles Hang By the Wall" (from Love's Labour's Lost act V scene II) and "Sigh no more, ladies" (from Much Ado About Nothing act II scene III) and "Tomorrow, and tomorrow" (from Macbeth act V sceneV) and "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!" (from King Lear act III scene II) by Shakespeare, "Ozymandias" and "Love's Philosophy" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, "I Am Not Yours" and "Moonlight" by Sarah Teasdale, "Daffodils" and "The World Is Too Much with Us" by William Wordsworth, "Abou Ben Adhem" by James Leigh Hunt, "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, "My love is like to ice, and I to fire" and "One day I wrote her name upon the strand" by Edmund Spencer, "Jabberwocky" and "Father William" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll, "Richard Cory" and "Miniver Cheevy" by Edwin Arlington Robinson, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe, "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop, "Gethsemane" and "Gunga Din" and some of the verses at the beginnings and ends of stories in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books, "Valentine" by Carol Ann Duffy, "First Fig" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden, "What the Bullet Sang" by Bret Harte, "Say not the struggle naught availeth" by Arthur Hugh Clough, "Ode (We are the music makers)" by Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy, "Imagination" by John Davidson, "The Destruction of Sennacherib" and "So we'll go no more a-roving" and "She walks in beauty" by Lord Byron, "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou, "Sunlight" by Seamus Heaney, "O Captain! My Captain!" and "There was a child went forth" by Walt Whitman, "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, "Leisure" by W. H. Davies, "Money" by C. H. Sisson, "o sweet spontaneous" and "what if a much of a which of a wind" and "i sing of Olaf glad and big" by e. e. cummings, "Brahma" and "Fable" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quantum Est Quod Desit ['To the brink but no further.']" by Thomas Moore, "Happy the Man" by John Dryden [translating Horace: Odes, book III, xxix], parts of Edward Fitzgerald's paraphrase/translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, "Body" by Sasha Moorsom, "The Power of Maples" by Gerald Stern, "Love Is Love" by Sir Edward Dyer, "The Eagle" and "The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Poem" by Simon Armitage, "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas, "To the Terrestrial Globe: by a miserable wretch" by W. S. Gilbert, "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" by Edward Lear, "The Author to Her Book" by Anne Bradstreet, "Ars Poetica" by Archibald MacLeish, "Nude Descending a Staircase" by X. J. Kennedy, "The Falcon to the Falconer" by Jonathan Steffen, "The Leaden-Eyed" by Vachel Lindsay, "Invictus" by W. E. Henley, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde, "The Lie" by Sir Walter Raleigh, I like some of Alexander Pope's words, but I don't know how to guide you to the spots I like, "The Jumblies" by Edward Lear, "The Battle-Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe, "Before the beginning of years" by Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Poetry" by Marianne Moore, "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot, "The End of the World" by Archibald MacLeish, "Song for the Clatter-Bones" by F. R. Higgins, "The Turtle" and "Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man" and "Very Like a Whale" by Ogden Nash, "The Slaughter-House" by Alfred Hayes, "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert Service, "Where's the Poet?" by John Keats, "Bonny Barbara Allan" [but the Scottish version, not the American one, which ruined it] by the famous Anonymous, "Terence, this is stupid stuff" by A. E. Housman, "Incident" by Countee Cullen, "Curiosity" by Alastair Reid, "Cinderella" by Anne Sexton, "Adivce to My Son" by Peter Meinke, "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Harlem" and "Theme from English B" (I hope I got the title right on that one.) by Langston Hughes, "The Unknown Citizen" by W. H. Auden, "Formal Application" by Donald W. Baker, "Love Song: I and Thou" by Alan Dugan, "Crow's First Lesson" by Ted Hughes, "Hurt Hawks" by Robinson Jeffers, "Five Ways to Kill a Man" by Edwin Brock.

54

Your Favorite Poem or Saying

by compound complex in

jw
friends

dear friends,.

my favorite poem is not in vain by emily dickinson:.

if i can stop one heart from breaking,.

veradico

I don't know that I have a favorite, but I do like the following quote by Robert Ardrey: "But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses."

45

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (helping JWs see)

by apocalypse in

i am an "active" jw.

i serve.

give talks.

veradico

When I still attended, I tried to do what you are talking about. Every answer I gave, I pushed things to the very limit of what is allowed. Gradually, they called on me less and less, but I persisted. People in the Hall would notice if I were completely ignored, so they had to let me talk every once in a while. In my public talks, I did not base things on the Society's material, but what I said was not exactly forbidden. And the neat thing was that real conversations developed after the meetings. People in the hall would come up to me and start expressing their thoughts about controversial subjects. "I was thinking about abortion. It's wrong. I know it's wrong. But I'm wondering why it's never explicitly condemned in the Bible, since people in ancient times did perform abortions with herbs and things. Why do we have to use 'biblical reasoning' to determine what Jehovah feels about this matter? Why is the Bible itself silent?" Another Witness said, "We have to stick with it. They are like scared parents who are making rules that are too strict out of their concern for us. You young ones will be the next generation. You'll change things." I said, "But the difference is that we are ADULTS who are being infantilized. And they don't promote the kinds of people who would generate postive change. They only want people who will submit." He did not disagree. I think it can be done. It just came to a point where I wanted to have my own life. I could not spend any more time in that world.

33

Your opinion: Are those raised as Witnesses more likely to end up godless?

by under_believer in

jw
friends

was thinking about this the other day and wanted to get your (yes: your) opinion.

i find myself slipping farther and farther down the agnostic scale in my thinking--it's possible that i'll end up an atheist.

my suspicion is that because i was raised being taught that all other religions are false, that i came to the conclusion that if the witnesses don't have "the truth" then nobody does.

veradico

I definitely relate to what you’re saying. As a Witness, I was free to analyze and criticize other religions as long as I focused on their flaws, and, once I made the first steps toward freedom, I found that being a JW had in many ways trained me to start analyzing the JW religion. However, as I stopped believing the Watchtower, their condemnatory perspective on other faiths and traditions was one of the first things I questioned. I found that Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, and various philosophies all have wonderful, beautiful, and useful insights. But, as I learn more about religions and philosophies, I find them all both more enjoyable and less believable, in the sense of compelling my absolute assent. Instead of coming to the conclusion that objective and universal moral laws, incorporeal beings, or even I myself exist, I tend to view all normative claims as conventional and useful, spirits as products of the imagination, and my sense of self as a emergent byproduct of the cognitive system in my brain. Of course, I can’t live as an absolute skeptic, so if I feel like behaving as if God exists (for example, when I read a beautiful devotional poem, see an impressive cathedral, or hear an inspirational hymn), that’s how I behave. I don’t think we can ever know anything with absolute certainty, but even this conviction is not certain enough to be a belief. Some people claim to really know that God exists. Maybe they’re correct.

8

Nemesis raised Jehovah's Witnesses now artists

by Dogpatch in

jw
friends

just saw this on google search on jehovah's witnesses:.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/10/11/entertainment/e092638d11.dtl.

they were raised jehovah's witnesses in montana's big sky country.

veradico

I think this is great. I wish I had known of a group like Nemesis Rising when I was growing up as a gay JW.

6

the apocalyptic wrath of Jehovah

by veradico in

has anyone here ever read donald hall's "prophecy," from the one day: a poem in three parts?

it gives deuteronomy chapter 28 a run for its money.

its disturbing vision is sure to thrill those dubs whose only christmas wish (if they could have such a pagan thing) would be for everyone else to just die already.

veradico

Has anyone here ever read Donald Hall's "Prophecy," from The One Day: A Poem In Three Parts? It gives Deuteronomy chapter 28 a run for its money. Its disturbing vision is sure to thrill those dubs whose only Christmas wish (if they could have such a pagan thing) would be for everyone else to just die already. And it makes the perfect tribute to that strange deity, Jehovah, that manly person of war who drowned to death an entire world for the ironic sin of being too violent.

Where shopping malls

spread plywood and plaster out, and roadhouses

serve steak and potatoskins beside Alaska king crab;

where trianguar flags proclaim tribes of identical campers;

where airplanes nose to tail exhale kerosene,

weeds and ashes will drowse in continual twilight.

I reject the old house and the new car; I reject

Tory and Whig together; I reject the argument

that modesty of ambition is sensible because the bigger

they are the harder they fall; I reject Waterford;

I reject the five and dime; I reject Romulus and Remus;

I reject Martha's Vineyard and the slamdunk contest;

I reject leaded panes; I reject the appointment made

at the tennis net or on the seventeenth green; I reject

the Professional Bowlers Tour; I reject matchboxes;

I reject purple bathrooms with purple soap in them.

Men who lie awake worrying about taxes, vomiting

at dawn, whose hands shake as they administer Valium, --

skin will peel from the meat of their thighs.
Armies that march all day with elephants past pyramids

and roll pulling missiles past generals weary of saluting

and past president-emperors splendid in cloth-of-gold, --

soft rumps of armies will sissipate in rain. Where square

miles of corn waver in Minnesota, where tobacco ripens

in Carolina and apples in New Hampshire, where wheat

turns Kansas green, where pulpmills stink in Oregon, --

dust will blow in the darkness and cactus die

before it flowers. Where skiers wait for chairlifts,

wearing money, low raspberries will part rib bones.

Where the drive-in church raises a chromium cross,

dandelions and milkweed will straggle through blacktop.

I will strike from the ocean with waves afire;

I will strike from the hill with rainclouds of lava;

I will strike from darkened air

with melanoma in the shape of decorative hexagonals.

I will strike down embezzlers and eaters of snails.

I reject Japanese smoked oysters, potted chrysanthemums

allowed to die, Tupperware parties, Ronald McDonald,

Kaposi's sarcoma, the Taj Mahal, Holsteins wearing

electronic necklaces, the Algonquin, Tunisian aqueducts,

Phi Beta Kappa keys, the Hyatt Embarcadero, carpenters

jogging on the median, and betrayal that engorges

the corrupt heart longing for criminal surrender.

I reject shadows in the corner of the atrium

where Phyllis or Phoebe speaks with Billy or Marc

who says that afternoons are best although not reliable.

Your children will wander looting the shopping malls

for forty years, suffering for your idleness,

until the last dwarf body rots in a parking lot.
I will strike down lobbies and restaurants in motels

carpeted with shaggy petrochemicals

from Maine to Hilton Head, from Skagit to Tucson.

I will strike down hang gliders, wiry adventurous boys;

their thigh bones will snap, their brains

slide from their skulls. I will strike down

families cooking wildboar in New Mexico backyards.

Then landscape will clutter with incapable machinery,

acres of vacant airplanes and schoolbuses, ploughs

with seedlings sprouting and turning brown through colters.

Unlettered dwarves will burrow for warmth and shelter

in the caves of dynamos and Plymouths, dying

of old age at seventeen. Tribes wandering

in the wilderness of their ignorant desolation,

who suffer from your idleness, will burn your illuminated

missals to warm their rickety bodies.
Terrorists assemble plutonium because you are idle

and industrious. The whip-poor-will shrivels

and the pickerel chokes under the government of self-love.

Vacancy burns air so that you strangle without oxygen

like rats in a biologist's bell jar. The living god sharpens

the scythe of my prophecy to strike down red poppies

and blue cornflowers. When priests and policemen

strike my body's match, Jehovah will flame out;

Jehovah will suck air from the vents of bombshelters.

Therefore let the Buick swell until it explodes;

therefore let anorexia starve and bulimia engorge.

When Elzira leaves the house wearing her tennis dress

and drives her black Porsche to meet Abraham,

quarrels, returns to husband and children, and sobs

asleep, drunk, unable to choose among them, --

lawns and carpets will turn into tar together

with lovers, husbands, and children.

Fat will boil in the sacs of children's clear skin.

I will strike down the nations, astronauts and judges;

I will strike down Babylon, I will strike acrobats,

I will strke algae and the white birches.

Because professors of law teach ethics in dumbshow,

let the colonel become president; because chief executive

officers and commissars collect down for pillows,

let the injustice of cities burn city and suburb;

let the countryside burn; let the pineforests of Maine

explode like a kitchenmatch and the Book of Kells turn

ash in a microsecond; let oxen and athletes

flash into grease: -- I return to Appalachian rocks;

I shall eat bread; I shall prophesy through millennia

of Jehovah's day until the sky reddens over cities:

Then houses will burn, even houses of alabaster;

the sky will disappear like a scroll rolled up

and hidden in a cave from the industries of idleness.

Mountains will erupt and vanish, becoming deserts,

and the sea wash over the sea's lost islands

and the earth split open like a corpse's gassy

stomach and the sun turn as black as a widow's skirt

and the full moon grow red with blood swollen inside it

and stars fall from the sky like wind-blown apples, --

while Babylon's managers burn in the rage of the Lamb. [emphasis added]