i was sent this talk by a brother awhile back...... it is from the trinidad zone (2010).
william malenfant (vp of wt penn).
all in all it ain't a 'bad' talk...... lots of jesus until all of a sudden malenfant goes into high-creature worship of gb toward the end.. like almost all speakers in the wts (from lowly tms 9 year old boy to gb) he too is supremely better than tony morris....... http://www.sendspace.com/file/feag6d.
My old PO used to have a major hard on for Malenfant. Apparently he met him back in the late 70s or early 80s and maybe went out to field service with him or something. It's been a while. Anyhow, his eyes would light up and he'd talk about him as if he were royalty.
I want to say there were/are two bigwig Malenfant brothers, but I might be getting my stories mixed up.
i've posted this thought before, but i've yet to get a lot of feedback.
it's also not a point i see brought up very much on jwd, but it seems like a very simple, logical way of disproving witness doctrine/eschatology.. witnesses believe that the parable of the wheat and the weeds is having its fulfillment in our time.
that's to say that jehovah began to gather his people in these last days so that those rightly-disposed can survive armageddon.
sir82:
What's of real interest to me is how the Watchtower will handle the holes in their doctrine going forward. Will they develop a new doctrinal framework to make their beliefs internally consistent or will they stop teaching them and bank on the rank and file forgetting and/or not paying attention to them.
My money's on the latter. There has been an obvious "dumbing down" of their literature since the beginning of my involvement with this group in the mid 80s. As I pointed out earlier, a precedent was set with the whole Adam/Eve, 6000 year creative days, 1975 nonsense. The Watchtower initially tried to explain the 1975 failure by saying that a gap existed between the creation of Adam and Eve and that this gap explained why the 6,000 years didn't run out in 1975. Then the WT simply dropped the issue completely. They stopped teaching it. I never knew this was an official WT teaching while I was in and I doubt that more than 5% of Witnesses I associated with had any idea this was the case. Most had become Witnesses after 1975.
But it could go either way. All that's needed is some smarty-pants know-it-all on the GB who believes Jehovah has appointed him to be the new Fred Franz, a chief theologian, and a whole host of new, crazy doctrinal interpretations could be in the works. Time will tell.
i know this is a pointless question, but what if this happened:.
you came home from work one day, sat down, and turned on the tv.
there is a sudden announcement that the un has banned all religion.
There is a sudden announcement that the UN has banned all religion.
We might as well ask: "What if the YMCA suddenly announced it had banned religion?" Or Goodwill, or the Daughters of the American Revolution, for that matter. The UN simply does not have the authority to enforce any such ban. It's preposterous. There is no single, global government capable of enforcing such a prohibition.
i've posted this thought before, but i've yet to get a lot of feedback.
it's also not a point i see brought up very much on jwd, but it seems like a very simple, logical way of disproving witness doctrine/eschatology.. witnesses believe that the parable of the wheat and the weeds is having its fulfillment in our time.
that's to say that jehovah began to gather his people in these last days so that those rightly-disposed can survive armageddon.
When I put that to a dub relative though, the answer that I got was that if God could foresee wanting to save upwards of 7 million people then he had to start early to allow enough time for the Organization to grow that big ....
The real problem here, of course, is that a fully-indoctrinated JW can talk himself into anything. That's how mind-control works.
In Russell's time they believed that the end was coming in 1914, not over a hundred years in the future.
That's part of the problem right there. Further to your and BluesBrother's comments, this religion was founded on a premise that the Armageddon would come very, very soon. As the years have passed (131 years since the first Watchtower was published), JWs have simply failed to explain this simple, yet gaping, hole in their doctrine. I suppose JW leadership doesn't notice it or hopes their followers won't (I know I never picked up on this while I was still in).
A corollary to this point, and a subject that has previously been explored on this board, is that the great crowd that was "identified" in 1935 is supposed to make it through Armageddon alive. If those individuals identified by Rutherford as the great crowd (multitude) all die off, as they most certainly will soon if they haven't already, then they were never really the great crowd to begin with. Rutherford would have necessarily made an error in his identification.
This second point, however, is probably more confusing to your run-of-the-mill, rank-and-file Witness. I doubt more than a quarter of active Witnesses know that the great crowd was supposedly identified in 1935. The first argument I made initially seems to me to be easier for an indoctrinated Witness to understand. Cognitive dissonance may require that they explain it away like BluesBrother's relative did, but you never know what might begin the independent thought process in an indoctrinated Witness. I know that after many confrontations with religious people in the door-to-door work I finally began to see that Witness arguments were not as strong as I thought.
Going forward, the interesting feature will be whether the Watchtower bothers redefining their doctrine to cover up some of these inconsistencies or whether they will simply stop teaching a lot of this and hope people forget (in the 1975, Eve was created after Adam mold).
i've posted this thought before, but i've yet to get a lot of feedback.
it's also not a point i see brought up very much on jwd, but it seems like a very simple, logical way of disproving witness doctrine/eschatology.. witnesses believe that the parable of the wheat and the weeds is having its fulfillment in our time.
that's to say that jehovah began to gather his people in these last days so that those rightly-disposed can survive armageddon.
Did he start this warning in 33 CE?
Although I'm not a believer, I think this is a better interpretation of the Scriptures. Ray Franz makes this argument in his books quoting from Acts to show that Old Testament prophecies that JWs believe are having a modern-day fulfillment today were actually applied by Christ's disciples to the immediate post-Pentecost era, such as those prophecies pertaining to the pouring of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues.
This in not, however, how the Watchtower interprets things. They believe their religious group (specifically, the faithful and discreet slave "class") was selected to warn mankind about God's impending wrath. Presumably, this warning-work began back in Russell's time or else their interpretation begins to fall apart. If the preaching work didn't begin in Russell's time, then was Russell not God's chosen messenger? And if it did begin in Russell's time, why would God "warn" a bunch of people who would all, without exception, die before Armageddon? What purpose did the warning serve?
For instance, what good would it do me if someone warned me that my house would burn down...50 years after I die? According to Watchtower doctrine, the preaching work is supposed to serve the purpose of separating the wheat from the weeds in the last days in fulfillment of Jesus’ parable.
i've posted this thought before, but i've yet to get a lot of feedback.
it's also not a point i see brought up very much on jwd, but it seems like a very simple, logical way of disproving witness doctrine/eschatology.. witnesses believe that the parable of the wheat and the weeds is having its fulfillment in our time.
that's to say that jehovah began to gather his people in these last days so that those rightly-disposed can survive armageddon.
I've posted this thought before, but I've yet to get a lot of feedback. It's also not a point I see brought up very much on JWD, but it seems like a very simple, logical way of disproving Witness doctrine/eschatology.
Witnesses believe that the parable of the wheat and the weeds is having its fulfillment in our time. That's to say that Jehovah began to gather his people in these last days so that those rightly-disposed can survive Armageddon. They like to cite Matthew 24's talk of Noah and pre-flood conditions as evidence that Noah carried out a preaching work to warn people before the flood came and wiped them all away. There is supposedly a modern fulfillment being carried out today where Witnesses warn people of Armageddon's imminence.
But all this begs the questions: Why would God BEGIN warning people of the upcoming destruction of the world in 1879 when the Watchtower magazine was first printed. That was over 130 years ago. No human being alive in 1879 roams the earth today. They have all, without fail, died.
It seems to me that this very simple point makes the whole JW house of cards come crumbling down. So which is it: Did God miscalculate things and begin warning people too early or was Russell simply not God's designated Noah-like messenger?
Thoughts?
as you know the way the rags are distributed to the congo has changed.. people just collect what they need at the kingdumb hell... this means that some who are not fast enough will not be able to get a copy.. more and more will start downloading the koolaid edition.
when enough people are doing this, the slave will decree that it is no longer necessary for this to be printed and shipped, brothers may "avail themselves" of the opportunity to download their own copies.. this will save on printing, ink paper and shipping.
will all that extra cash go to provide pensions and medical care for elderly bethhellites?.
My dad's been inactive pretty much since right after his baptism in the mid 80s. Every now and then, maybe every two years, he all of a sudden gets on a "spiritual" kick and goes back to the meetings a few times until he tires out and goes back to his old habits.
Over the weekend he told me that the Kingdom Hall was out of magazines and somehow this was a sign of how near the end is. I told him the distribution method had changed and he didn't get any magazines because he didn't show up to claim them on time. He then went on to recite some urban legend that some brother said he'd heard a circuit overseer say about a Bethelite genius who gave up millions in order to remain at Bethel. I just politely nodded and changed the subject after he finished.
i was pushing my sister's wheelchair as we were enjoying the perfect .
saturday noon weather.
we were going to a local restaurant to get .
I think this exemplifies cognitive dissonance at work. I tried to post a Ray Franz quote from In Search of Christian Freedom last night, but I couldn't get my computer to work.
The gist of the quote is that people have to conform their thoughts and attitude to their actions in order to avoid psychological discomfort (cognitive dissonance). The Society mandates a rigid program of "theocratic" activities, and as a natural result, members begin to justify and defend the Society's positions so that their thoughts can be in harmony with their actions. Thus, when confronted with logical fallacies or downright cruel behavior, Witnesses tend to minimize their importance, or in some cases, pretend they don't exist.
The young man seems to have gone from outright denying that shunning of family members is practiced (perhaps justifying this statement by thinking of a few examples where Witnesses ignore this rule and pretending that situation is the norm rather than the exception) to minimizing its importance by saying that it didn't matter because HE would never leave the JWs anyway.
The situation you described doesn't surprise me. I've not surveyed conditions around the world, but from my own experience, I can see that JW youth are particularly ignorant of their beliefs. This is probably the result of some 20 years of the Society's moving away from trying to empirically and Biblically convince members that they have the truth in favor of simply beating the members over the head with messages of obey the Slave at all cost.
i was pushing my sister's wheelchair as we were enjoying the perfect .
saturday noon weather.
we were going to a local restaurant to get .
mark zuckerberg says that the philosophy of facebook is that people only have one identity.
i think then it's fair to say he couldn't have had jws leading a double life in mind.. i was careful not to add any jws to my page, so i thought i should not have any problems.
i did however add friends and family, including family members who are former witnesses and some who are related to current witnesses.
It sounds more like a post hoc pseudo-philosophical justification for the pre-existing architecture of the site.
I've been on facebook for 4 years. Back when I signed up, it was the anti-myspace. By that I mean, myspace had zero privacy controls. If you wanted to be on myspace, ALL of your information had to be public. Facebook had very tight privacy controls. You couldn't even register if you didn't have a .edu email address, and only people who were in your network could interact with you.
Facebook has now become the new myspace, minus the annoying customized backgrounds. They have become what they initially despised, and there's a lot of historical revisionism within that company to paint their move away from their roots as something other than an expedient money-grabbing ploy.
