Posts by witnessgirl

12

Assembly day one - less than two hours attended

by insearchoftruth in

well my wife went to day one of the assembly, but for only 1.5 hours, she left early to meet me for lunch and off to an appointment this afternoon.

she really did not say much about the assembly except it was "nice" and she said that the speaker was really good, not sure which speaker she was referring to, either why be guided by god's spirit or the holy spirit at work in creation, most likely both....... when she called i told her stay if she really wanted to, but she did not..... any ideas of what these two presentations were about.....and any references that may help me drop some ideas and provoke some thoughts?.

not sure of her plans for tomorrow or sunday......may be heading to some of each of those days as well, if she goes tomorrow, i may go for a few hours with her, to insulate from love bombs as well as to be able to ask why folks are allegiant to an organization rather than jehovah??

witnessgirl

She really did not say much about the assembly except it was "nice" and she said that the speaker was really good

I am completely and utterly convinced that a speaker on the first day of an assembly could read the Communist Manifesto and the only thing anyone would remember about it was that "the speaker was really good".

(Aside: I don't know why I thought of this, but something about JWs complimenting any speaker for no reason other than that he spoke got me thinking about the slide shows they used to show at the KH when a speaker couldn't make it and how much everyone seemed to like them. I remember one that had some stuff about sheep and goats in it; afterwards an elder had to get up and explain that there had been New Light™on the subject since.)

Anyhow, here are YouTube links to the assembly drama; I apologize if they've been posted before. I actually went looking for it because I have a hangover this morning and wanted to really abuse myself.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JOJ-vHPYBfQ - Part One

http://youtube.com/watch?v=szbEiVH0j74 - Part Two

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JOJ-vHPYBfQ - Part Three

Incidentally, the chick who posted those videos on YouTube (who lists "Serving Jehovah God" among her interests) is wearing exactly the same shirt that I have on right now in some of her vids. As JWs do not believe in coincidence, I wonder what that would be supposed to mean.

14

Any computer savvy folks out there?

by BlackSwan of Memphis in

jw
friends

hey there people.. i have a flash project that i could use help with.. i don't own a flash editor, like say uhm flash .

i have a file which needs to be edited.

if anyone can help send me a pm.. i anxiously, and hopefully await help.. thx.

witnessgirl

You can try Flash for a month for free by going to their website and downloading it. Failing that, you could maybe try Swish or something like that, but I don't know that you would be able to end up with the filetype that you want.

Good luck!

Heather.

35

Some questions about WT sources

by witnessgirl in

something has been bugging me for years and years, and always bugged me when i was an active witness.

i've never mentioned it before and i've never seen it discussed.

like with a lot of other matters, i just assumed that this meant that i was missing something that everyone else understood.

witnessgirl

Have you seen material where scholars who have been quoted by the Watchtower are shown their out-of-context quotes and react with shock or disgust? I kind of vaguely recall having seen a video like this years ago. I've seen things like this in print, too.

EDIT: Here is a direct link to misquotations in the Creation book, if you're looking for it:

http://corior.blogspot.com/2006/02/misquotations-in-creation-book.html

Be aware that there are two Creation books, and that both are blue. One of them, the older one, was about the size of the Truth book (192 pages), as james_woods noted, and the newer came in two sizes, identical to the two sizes that the Live Forever book came in.

16

Some observations and questions about the NWT

by witnessgirl in

i don't know whether anyone here has encountered a program called e-sword (with the hyphen in it like that).

it is bible study software that lets you install literally dozens of different translations of the bible to compare, plus dictionaries, maps, and commentaries (including historic commentaries like the ones ray franz describes in coc).

you can install both modern and historic translations, plus versions of the original greek and hebrew manuscripts as well as the latin vulgate and greek septuagint translations.

witnessgirl

Sylvia--you can't copy and paste Hebrew directly onto this board; you have to use Unicode. There is a handy table here:

http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/hebrew.html

Also you type the letters in the order that they come in the word and the board automagically turns it right-to-left when you submit. Took me more than a few edits to get it figured out.

I'm mostly bumping this thread because OTWO's comment about the Nag Hammadi library got me thinking some more about the NWT canon. If you really want to practice Christianity the way that the First Century Christians did, I guess that you would want to be using the same Bible that they were. That would mean (as I recall) twenty gospels, fifteen Apocalypses, and about fifty other documents discussing Jesus and his ministry. If the Society wanted to really be revolutionary and different, putting out such an edition of the Greek Scriptures would have been an excellent opportunity, in addition to providing them with a great chance to point to all the material that Babylon the Great was trying to suppress. Hey, I'll bet that at least one of those books probably even uses the Divine Name somewhere. (If none of them does, that would be interesting, too--anyone know?)

But instead of something really interesting like that, we got to settle for the Society trying to be different by making a normal Protestant Bible green, omitting the word "Bible" from the title, and printing a dinosaur on the flyleaf. But I suppose that creativity was never their strong suit.

35

Some questions about WT sources

by witnessgirl in

something has been bugging me for years and years, and always bugged me when i was an active witness.

i've never mentioned it before and i've never seen it discussed.

like with a lot of other matters, i just assumed that this meant that i was missing something that everyone else understood.

witnessgirl

At least part of why I left was realizing how little WT doctrine was unique. I discovered the United Church of God, which denies Hell, denies the Trinity, believes in soul sleep and the Paradise Earth, doesn't celebrate holidays, stresses the importance of using the Divine Name, loves to quote Matthew 24:14--pretty much everything except 1914 and the FDS. Their literature is much slicker than the Society's, however (magazines that actually look like magazines, thick glossy tracts). There are other groups that are really similar.

It's amazing to me how much they borrowed from Catholicism. I've read that at Bethel, they deliberately give out work assignments that are completely different from people's secular areas of expertise to instil a sense of humility. For example, a graphic artist might be assigned to work in the laundry; someone who worked for a dry cleaner might be assigned to be a graphic artist. The Jesuits do the same thing in their monasteries, and for the same reason.

EDIT: and, for whatever it's worth, I really regret parting with these:

It honestly never occurred to me that their contents differed from those of the bound volumes. :(

35

Some questions about WT sources

by witnessgirl in

something has been bugging me for years and years, and always bugged me when i was an active witness.

i've never mentioned it before and i've never seen it discussed.

like with a lot of other matters, i just assumed that this meant that i was missing something that everyone else understood.

witnessgirl

Hi Cathy!

At the time that many of the older WT publications were written this was the most common Bible translation found in Catholic households. This would be especially true of Judge Rutherford's time.

I wondered if that might be the case (although I kind of doubted it because I'd never encountered a new copy of the translation). I've never really known any Catholics, though, so I wasn't sure.

The simplest answer is probably that it's what the guys in the Writing Department read on Sunday mornings. It's a likely source for lots of their ideas.

My guess too. It just seemed really odd to me, since it was full of psychic stuff and patriotic stuff even back in the 1950s. Reading older bound volumes of Awake! it's kind of funny how you can see what sort of books the Writing Department liked to read because they wrote articles based on them.

I really really like your website, BTW. I collect old Society literature (mostly Russell and Rutherford stuff), and I wouldn't be surprised if I've done business with you at some point or another. Dealing in old WT publications always seemed like a fun business to me, I just could never do it because I hate to part with anything really old or interesting, even if I've already got multiple copies. I liquidated most of my library on eBay after I DA'd and have been kicking myself for it ever since.

15

Pantyhose

by Princess Daisy Boo in

something that has facinated me since i started reading and posting on this board was the whole "women must always wear pantyhose" idea... .

the thought sometimes crosses my mind as to whether or not there were any differences in the borg from country to country - but the only issue i have come across is the pantyhose one.

in south africa, to the best of my knowledge, while i was "in", this was not a requirement - we only wore stockings if the weather required it.

witnessgirl

I knew some missionaries in a Pacific tropical country and she did not wear nylons and he wore shorts, short sleeved shirt, no tie and sandals.

I hated wearing pantyhose. They used to chaff my legs really bad. I saw a photo in one of the yearbooks of a sister in the South Pacific some place witnessing in shorts (!) and flip flops (no pantyhose). I quit wearing them after I saw that. Nobody said anything. Judging by things I've read on here, I think that my cong was more laid back regarding dress codes than others. (Brothers would often wear a sport coat and slacks rather than a suit, for instance.) But, then, like RubaDub, I'm from Florida, so maybe it's a regional thing.

I think some elders wore pantyhose under their suits.

LOL!

35

Some questions about WT sources

by witnessgirl in

something has been bugging me for years and years, and always bugged me when i was an active witness.

i've never mentioned it before and i've never seen it discussed.

like with a lot of other matters, i just assumed that this meant that i was missing something that everyone else understood.

witnessgirl

IMHO, it is more important to question the WTB&TS's accuracy in quoting than their information sources. There have been many posts on here that prove that the society quotes out of context.

Oh I know. I've seen some excellent analysis of some of the quotations taken out of context in defense of the NWT, and seen the actual reviews that quotations were lifted from. Likewise the Creation book. I was mostly curious here about the apparent fondness for certain publications that nobody else would have chosen to use as sources.

I had forgotten about it, but I do remember seeing a lot of Christian Science Monitor quotes. I didn't know about the Il Picollo reference; that's really funny.

35

Some questions about WT sources

by witnessgirl in

something has been bugging me for years and years, and always bugged me when i was an active witness.

i've never mentioned it before and i've never seen it discussed.

like with a lot of other matters, i just assumed that this meant that i was missing something that everyone else understood.

witnessgirl

Hello;

Something has been bugging me for years and years, and always bugged me when I was an active Witness. I've never mentioned it before and I've never seen it discussed. Like with a lot of other matters, I just assumed that this meant that I was missing something that everyone else understood. Today, I can't figure out how I ever managed to make myself believe that.

I am confused about some of the sources that the Society appears to have assigned particular importance to. That is, the Society seems (seemed?) to think that these sources are significant and I can't figure out why. I don't think that they are citing these sources as frequently as they used to, but I haven't really been keeping up with the literature.

Why is their go-to Roman Catholic translation of the Bible the Douay Bible? This has always struck me as being very weird. Their older publications (pre-1990s) quote this version all the time, often as one of only three or four translations cited in a book. This is not a common translation at all. I'm something of a Bible collector; I have loads and loads of different translations, but the only time I've ever seen a Douay Bible, it was a hundred year old antique being offered as a collectable. More frequently seen Catholic Bibles are the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB), Today's English Version (TEV; also known as the Good News Bible), Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, Jerusalem Bible, and King James Version With Apocrypha. Why not use one of these?

What's up with all the quotes from Parade magazine? For most of the 1950s and 1960s, the Watching the World section of Awake! read like a recap of Parade--seemed like every other news piece cited it. Are you familiar with Parade magazine? It is not a normal news magazine. It is a free insert in Sunday newspapers. Most Sunday newspapers in the US have something like it; they aren't always called Parade, but all are very similar. Parade prints trivia, puzzles, cartoons, psychic predictions, celebrity and entertainment gossip, and ultrapatriotic rhetoric. Why would the Writing Department turn to this, of all publications, as a frequently cited news source? (To their credit, more recent issues of Awake! seem to be relying more heavily on The Economist, which is a totally reliable and absolutely mainstream news source--but why didn't they always use it?)

I could go on and on. I mostly wanted to mention that the Writing Department's sources always felt a little strange to me and I've never seen anyone mention it before. Thanks for reading my ramblings.

Peace,

Heather.

7

scans of WT pubs from 1946-1980 torrent anyone?

by Solace1998 in

i just received the scans of 1879-1946 on torrent, and it didnt take long at all.

does anyone have the remaining ones available?

the earlier ones are great, but i would like to focus on the 1965-1975 era.

witnessgirl

I guess that something that you'll definitely want is the May 1974 Kingdom Ministry. I don't think I have that one, but all my old Kingdom Ministries/Kingdom Services are mixed up right now, so I'm not sure. The most damning quote from it was

Reports are heard of brothers selling their homes and property and planning to finish out the rest of their days in this old system in the pioneer service. Certainly this is a fine way to spend the short time remaining before the wicked world's end.--1 John 2:17.

Another issue of interest would be the March 1968 Kingdom Ministry.

In view of the short period of time left, we want to do this as often as circumstances permit. Just think, brothers, there are only about ninety months left before 6,000 years of man's existence on earth is completed.

Someone posted the "Is It Later Than You Think?" issue of Awake! on here recently.

Also here is some info if you haven't seen it:

www.jwfacts.com/index_files/1975.htm

Probably someone has scanned Life Everlasting... by now, but I haven't come across it. That one had tables in it that you could work out 1975 from.

Good luck!