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Cadellin
JoinedPosts by Cadellin
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31
my story....
by losecontrol inwell i am new to this, and i must admit that at first i was very opposed to this site.
i grew up being a witness and was warned about looking into apostate things, which is exactly what this site would be that they are referring to.
i always tried to live my life the best that i could under the societys control, and never really got to have any life experiance at all.
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7
New Light !
by mann377 inhttp://news.discovery.com/history/god-wife-yahweh-asherah-110318.html.
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evidently jehovah had a wife according to the above article..
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Cadellin
Mark Smith's (authoritative, I think) The Early History of God describes the Asherah-Yahweh-El as being located in Ugaritic tradition and migrating into Hebrew religion before the time of the judges. However, although there are somewhat oblique references to Asherah as goddess here and there in scripture (he references Gen 49:25 where the epithet blessing "Breasts-and-Womb" is a title applied to Asherah in extra-biblical ANE texts, and presented contextually in Genesis along with royal titles for Yahweh), his conclusion is that, according to biblical records and "inscriptional material" (I'm not sure what that would be, maybe archaelogical finds? Leolaia I'm not (but I wish I was )) "the explicit cult of the goddess did not endure" in Israel (19).
I haven't read the news article; I suppose I should if it sheds more recent light on this.
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32
Assembly/Convention Accounting
by dontplaceliterature injust having had my circuit assembly recently, i felt that the expenses in a watchtower-owned building seemed extremely over-inflated.
over $9000 for two days.
there were approximately 750-800 in attendance each day.
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Cadellin
Family members just went to their CA at the Surrey, BC, Canada assembly hall. It was renovated a few years ago, but it's not a new building by any means. There are 2 kh in it as well (I think) and the assembly hall itself is used almost year round. The announced expenses for the 2-day CA (which would have had around 1,000 in attendance, maybe a bit less) were--get this--$14,000. That was what was announced.
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34
Hey fellas, would you cheat on this woman? Beautiful, but deadly.
by miseryloveselders init might be kind of risky........ .
i never heard of her until today.
leryn franco.
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Cadellin
ESTE, with the voice of reality!!! ROFLMTO!!!
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35
New watchtower
by bohm inthe new watchtower is out (woooo) http://www.jw.org/ , and there is an article about "prophecies which has come true".
the most funny one is the one about earthquakes since, well, there just isnt an increase in earthquakes:.
what do the facts show?
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Cadellin
Boy, the mermaid got ranting! Let me just add that I was in no way dissing Indians and Chinese b/c they want to live like Americans. Who can blame them? But we'll need to find a few extra planets to get the resources...
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New watchtower
by bohm inthe new watchtower is out (woooo) http://www.jw.org/ , and there is an article about "prophecies which has come true".
the most funny one is the one about earthquakes since, well, there just isnt an increase in earthquakes:.
what do the facts show?
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Cadellin
" However, it does say that "great earthquakes" would occur..."
Notice the addition of italics for the word "great," the insinuation being that it's not the actual number of quakes that marks the sign but the magnitude of them. Notice, too, that they give not one drop of evidence that the earthquakes have, in fact, grown larger. Why? Because there is none-not one drop. Still, that doesn't stop the sly beggars from implying that they've become bigger.
This article, which is available at www.jw.org as a .pdf, mp3, etc., is really fairly sad, supporting the truth that a weak defense is worse than none. The logic is fallacious, particularly in the section on disease, and the whole thing is a mishmash of selective facts removed from any kind of context that would lend credibility or proportion to their claims. For instance, supplying raw numbers without the backdrop of what percentage of humanity those numbers represent--particularly in comparison with other time periods-- is misleading.
When they do supply numbers in proportion (for instance, 1 out of 7 people is malnourished), they fail to give any historical context, which is necessary to establish that things are, in fact, worsening--i.e., conditions can only be considered as "worsening" when compared to another time in history. When I was pioneering in the 1980's the percentage of people malnourished was 1 in 4. With that bit of info, the answer to "Are food shortages worsening?" becomes clear.
Ironically, in the section on disease, they do admit that the population is much greater than at any other time, but, oddly, they use that as part of their reasoning that the aggregate effect of disease is getting worse. The objection presented is that sure, there might be more people suffering from disease than at any other time, but that's because there's more people around to get sick. The WT response is that, at the same time the population has increased, humans have made great strides in medical care--and people are still dying in great numbers. However, is any evidence provided to prove this claim? Nope. The only way that this claim would support the idea that the Last Days are here is if it could be shown that mortality rates from communicable disease have climbed over the last century and are now higher than at other times in human history. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of history knows that is untrue.
In fact, as I said in another thread, the fact that human population has exploded over the last century is evidence that famine, disease, earthquakes and warfare are NOT having the dire effects that they have historically had.
It's funny (I mean funny in a pathetic way, not in a humorous way. Okay, kind of in a humorous way) that they include the "ruining the earth" canard as part of the evidence of the Last Days. The only scrip to mention that is in Rev. and it's clearly echoing the sentiment from Genesis pre-Noachian flood where the earth was being ruined by violence. Any implication of ecological ruination is pure eisigesis, to use a cool word I picked up from the amazing Leo. Moreover, if any JW would reflect on the nature of the environmental devestation being wrought on our planet, it's virtually all linked to increased industrialization which what has caused the great elevation in human standards of living across the planet. Its BECAUSE Indians and Chinese and other groups are now able and desiring to live like Americans that the planet is being degraded, NOT because everyone's starving and dying of malaria. Widespread disease and starvation suppresses innovation and technological advancements, not enhances it!!!
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Here i am....
by makersmark inhere i am - born in truth, hard-core spiritual everything all my life, early reg.pioneer, ms, elder, assembly parts, tour at bethel, etc, married now...... i'm trying to examine jw teachings a little closer...... i've spent the last two weeks reading many many posts, info , references on where ex-jw's are coming from.
i'm kind of concerned about a few things lately..... honestly - some points make sense to me - some don't - here are my general thoughts:.
-wt getting un membership for access to library - doesnt bother me - some passports and other governement documents have similar forms and requirements..... -blood issue - some counterpoints to the jw 'rules' makes sense (original intent of scripture is unbled animals, white blood cells similar in mothers milk) etc -however a lot of 'apostate' reasonings and proof are inaccurate.
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Cadellin
Makers Mark, welcome. Yes, it's tough. For me, it was the intellectual dishonesty. You might find it enlightening to research how the WT uses secular quotes to lend a veil of authority to their teachings, when in fact the original context nullified their use. Crisis of Conscience is a must-read.
You might also want to investigate the history of the Bible from an authoritative, non JW source. So many of their teachings regarding the Bible's canon and authorship of individual books is based on...Jewish tradition! The SI book acknowledges this for many books of the Hebrew scrips. And yet a close examination of recent, scholarly historical analysis shows that there is literally no way that, for example, Moses could have penned the Pentateuch and other similar things. For this, Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Friedman is excellent.
And keep reading posts, and let us know how it goes.
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Help w/ Bible Teach ch 9 section "Major Developments of the Last Days"
by InterestedOne ini'm in ch 9 in my study, and we will go over the section "major developments of the last days" (pars 6-9) next week.
although i don't see anything special in pars 7-9, i think par 6 allows the jw's to strike a chord with people, and i was wondering if anyone could help me with how to respond to it.
they are able to quote real figures in that paragraph such as "three times as many people fell victim to war in [the 20th] century as in all the wars from the first century ad to 1899.".
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Cadellin
The main point to keep in mind is that there were many, many times MORE people alive during the 20th century than during any other time in history. Therefore, there were more people around to be killed during war. If the comparison is simply raw numbers, without putting those numbers in context, then, yeah, it will seem like the Society has a point. Ditto for famines, disease, etc. What you need to do is look at what percentage of the total global population those numbers represent. When you make that the basis for comparison, suddenly the 20th century numbers aren't so impressive.
And the explosion in population is really staggering--For most of human history, deaths roughly equalled births, which meant the population stayed static. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th to 19th century that the population started to really grow. By the early 20th century (pre-1914), it was soaring and continued to soar all through the 20th century until the late 1960's.
But this leads to another point you might want to raise with your conductor. It is a well-established demographic fact that when populations (whether fish, birds, or people) are under stress (ie famine, disease, upheaval, violence, etc.), they do not grow, or grow extremely slowly. In fact, the combination of factors (ie famine PLUS disease, or disease PLUS war, etc.) has a depressive effect on populations--they shrink. That's one reason why so many animal species are endangered right now. Yet when you look at the 20th century, you find that human population exploded--exactly the OPPOSITE of what you might expect if we really had been living in the worst of times. Why is that? Because even with 2 world wars and all the social and political unrest, things were getting better. Medical advances meant people WERENT DYING of disease. Agricultural and technological advances meant people WERENT DYING of famine (okay, obviously many did--I mean its relative when looked at globally. For instance, when famine strikes today, often the UN or other nations step in with food supplies, which simply didn't happen 200 or 300 years ago).
The point is (and this is what got me thinking seriously on my way to the fade), what should population demographics look like if things really were as terrible as the Society makes them out to be, especially given that these "terrible times" have been going on for a century now? For one, populations should be nose-diving. And they're not.
This is too long a post, but as final thought, you may find it intersting to check out the UN's Millennium Goals Update . While the picture is not all rosy by any means, it's amazing what has been accomplished. You won't find info like that in the Bible Teach book.
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Facial Hair a Perfect Fading Strategy
by zarco instartfragment.
so a brother wants to fade, but would rather not explain his reasons.
lets say he grows a nice beard or goatee.
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Cadellin
I gave this a try but my husband wasn't crazy about it...
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19
Women can't face the audience from platform? Is this in writing?
by InterestedOne ini just read the thread about women & men waking up etc.
and saw a post saying women can't face the audience from the platform.
i thought, hmm yeah, now that i think about it, they're always looking sideways, like toward the other woman in the role-playing, or if they're being interviewed, they look toward the guy at the podium.
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Cadellin
So much for not making rules like the Talmud. If there was ever any doubt that the head covering rule was designed to make sure everyone knew where women's place was, it's this stupid and insulting QFR...