fodeja

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Posts by fodeja

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  28

  Pasted from a jw board!

  by claudia in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  oh im going to puke, i did a copy and paste from aisnes db, all real jws.

  the part where she says the awake and wt mags surpass a college education really sent me over the edge!.

  "i have 5 children.

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  fodeja

  <i>Many witnesses say that reading the Awake gives one the equivalent of a college education.</i>

  Sure, just like I'll get my Masters from glancing through a couple of old Reader's Digest copies in my doctor's waiting room.

  This attitude simply reflects the fact that the concept of "studying" has been re-defined and narrowed down to "memorizing rather simple, one-dimensional stuff without a hint of critical analysis" in the JW world. It's that desparate programme of forcefully simplifying a world that seems just way too complicated to grasp. That's why so many JWs seem to believe they "know how the world works". Yes, their model of the world: good vs. evil, black vs. white, God vs. Satan. Hey, the world is so simple, why even finish high school? What could we possibly learn from such an "advanced education"?!

  Poor kids.

  f.
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  18

  Funny grammatical errors by foreigners......

  by LDH in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  as you may know, i will laugh at you if you confuse:.

  hear and here.

  too and to.. i will also, laugh at syntax errors.

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  fodeja

  "its" vs. "it's"

  "phenomenon" (singular) vs. "phenomena" (plural) - why does NOBODY get this right?!

  "compatabile" (compatible)

  "per say" (one of my favourites! - oh, Maximus already listed that one)

  And lots of others that don't come to my mind right now.

  Seems to me that non-native speakers (like me :-)) usually get the spelling right, but have trouble with grammar and common phrases. Sometimes grammar mistakes can indicate where the person is coming from: Scandinavians tend to make a lot of singular/plural related errors, for instance "Many people gets annoyed". Those from German speaking countries like to use "the" too often and concatenate words: english-lecture, spellingmistake.

  f.
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  10

  The Good, The Bad and Evolution

  by Defender in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  in the bible account of genesis, there we were told that adam and eve ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge of good and bad and thus, like god, they started to know good and bad.

  these few words and actions apparently changed the course of humanity.

  even if we assume that this account is just a fable and did not actually happen, a number of questions and issues come up namely;.

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  fodeja

  joel,

  Morality basically comes down to an ESS (evolutionary survival strategy) that keeps us from conflict with fellow humans ...

  That should read "evolutionary _stable_ strategy", I think? I wouldn't overrate game theoretic approaches as an explanation of phenomena on all levels - it seems quite a bit too mechanistic to explain the unique things that make us human. But I agree that game theory is a very powerful scientific approach to the understanding of interaction between entities of all kinds: from biology to economics.

  One of the first things you learn from game theory is that it's NOT always the most aggressive strategy that dominates all others (given a sufficiently non-trivial model). As a matter of fact, strictly dominating strategies are rare in such models, but Nash equilibriums (basically, stable situations in which no participant has any reason to deviate from his particular strategy or mix of strategies) can always be derived. In these situations, a variety of strategies prevail. Things aren't as easy as "the baddest guy wins", and game theory shows us why without having to resort to fuzzy moral principles and other subjective valuations. Which may be surprising to many people who believe that co-operation makes no sense without a supernatural explanation.

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  37

  The secret of SUE revealed

  by Sue in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  ok, now i reveal the truth about sue.

  1/ i am a woman.. 2/ i am german.

  3/ i am disfellowshipped.

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  fodeja

  The "questions" in German:

  Hast du auf der Grundlage des Opfers Jesu Christi deine Sünden bereut und dich Jehova hingegeben, um seinen Willen zu tun?

  Bist du dir darüber im klaren, daß du dich durch deine Hingabe und Taufe als ein Zeuge Jehovas zu erkennen gibst, der mit der vom Geist geleiteten Organisation Gottes verbunden ist?

  Which is, of course, very much a literal translation of the English original. (Hey, we all know that the WTS translators in Selters do not hesitate to bend and break all laws, rules, and style conventions of the German language just to keep their translations as literal as possible. Nicht wahr?)

  See also: http://www.bechhaus.de/zjtaufe.html
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  7

  Jehovah is Going to Kill Your Babysitter

  by metatron in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  this is such a useful quote, it needs to be repeated.

  and recopied everywhere.. sept.2000 kingdom ministry article entitled.

  "lives are at stake!.

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  fodeja

  Is there a scanned copy of this article available somewhere?

  Would be nice to have this in hardcopy when (if) the dubs ever show up again at my door: "No, we don't believe that everyone except us is going to be slaughtered really soon now...we don't judge...only apostates would say so, haha!". Grrr...

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  13

  Branch Office Report

  by Dogpatch in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  http://thetruthhurts.freeservers.com/report.htm

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  fodeja

  Villages are far off from cemeteries. Chief asked, `Why do you want the KingHall next to the cemetery?' Bros. replied: `Because Jeh has promised to resurrect the dead. We do not want them to have far to go.' What faith in Jeh's promises!

  Hmmm....makes you wonder why the JWs didn't like Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, then? ;)

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  11

  new assembly procedure?

  by wheelwithinwheel in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  a brother just told me about a new assembly procedure.

  during the program at his d.c. this past week-end (cornwall, ontario) the chairman asked everyone to pick up their belongings and leave the stadium immediately.

  everyone gathered in a nearby park.

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  fodeja

  The circulating rumor (damage control ?) was that the city wanted to test evacuation procedures for the stadium and thought the J.W assembly would be the best to test with, they being so organized.

  This reminds me of an interview with two JWs in a regional newspaper in Germany. Asked about the reasons for keeping track of field service time, placed magazines etc., they actually claimed that it is a requirement of the tax authority!

  f.

  link to the interview (German language): http://infolink-net.de/docs/news/presse050.htm
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  32

  Is this a apostate website

  by robertK in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  nothin on this website is positive, its all anti-witness!!

  it helps nobody and does no good, and is for breaking down not building up, is there any righteous witnesses out there??

  ?

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  fodeja

  Jehovah offers freedom!

  Fine. So why do you refuse his offer and serve men instead?

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  32

  Is this a apostate website

  by robertK in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  nothin on this website is positive, its all anti-witness!!

  it helps nobody and does no good, and is for breaking down not building up, is there any righteous witnesses out there??

  ?

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  fodeja

  It helps nobody and does no good, and is for breaking down not building up ...

  Thanks for sharing your latest DC experience with us.

  is there any righteous witnesses out there???

  No, because the righteous ones have moved in here :-)

  f.
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  53

  American / European Incomprehension.

  by Englishman in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  reading through some of the posts re the mcveigh debate, it's obvious that there is a huge divide between the usa and europe over many issues, in particular with reference to the way that society should deal with deviants.. i think that there is a lot of other cultural differences between our societies, and i'm just wondering if this is why the wtbts has had a far higher "conversion factor" in the usa than in europe.. some of the phraseology contained in the watchtower magazines is incomprehensible to europeans.

  i remember that words that are in common usage now, were, when first used in the wt, totally baffling.. the expression "no way" wasn't in common use until years after the wt featured it, like wise with "points up", also "right on" meant nothing to anyone.

  indeed, many return visits to placed magazine householders resulted in them asking a bewildered dub for an explanation of these then strange terms.

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  fodeja

  Thanks, Englishman.

  Waiting:

  By far, most of us here don't know what you're talking about. That makes it no less real to you - we just didn't have to live your sorrow.

  My sorrow is nothing in comparison to what my parents went through at a very young age. But that was then, and this is now. (BTW, my parents also used to relate lots of stories about the GIs and British soldiers giving chocolate and bread and corned beef cans to the kids...this made a lasting impression on an entire generation here).

  My family story didn't make it easy to develop a comfortably simple world view, and maybe I'm a bit oversensitive in this area. The only thing I can say for sure is that war is never a thing to be proud of. Never ever. I wish people would learn that lesson eventually.

  f.

  (edited for grammar)