So would this be THE big change in doctrine that we had heard rumored was coming this year? The one that they were going to have to prep the elders for in the special KMS at the end of the year?
Fencing
JoinedPosts by Fencing
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22
Help please, The original letters on both sides of rutherford taking over by force, and court documents/etc of the real reason he was jailed
by EndofMysteries inanybody know offhand where i can download those?
part of my project :) i think he just printed in the golden globe or something about the takeover, if so i have access to that.
but unsure where to get the pamphlet the brothers unjustly kicked out had published.
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Fencing
Didn't have anything to do with property. There were a handful of pages in The Finished Mystery that came out very strongly against patriotism and basically said a true Christian would not enlist in the military. I'm greatly paraphrasing, but that's the import of it. At the time, during WWI, the US had passed the Espionage Act of 1917. This criminialized any attempt to disrupt the recrutment efforts of the military. The government interpreted those passages in Rutherford's book as an attempt to prevent enlistment in the army. They went after Rutherford and some of the other directors for it.
What the society doesn't like to talk about, and you can discover in the trial transcripts, is that Rutherford actually tried to capitulate and willingly censored The Finished Mystery by having those few pages physically removed from copies of the book, and not including it in further printings. However, a good number of them had already been distributed and the government went after them anyway.
They also were never "exonerated" of the charges like the Society likes to claim today. They got the verdirct set aside on appeal over a procedural matter. The war ended shortly thereafter, and since the war ferver that led to the Espionage Act had died down, it wasn't worth the government's time to proceed with a new trial and they dropped the charges.
In hindsight, it probably would have been overturned by the Supreme Court over First Amendment issues if it had made it that far, anyway.
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What you should keep in mind about apologists like Recovery, Alice, etc.
by Fencing ini don't post here much, but read often.
seen quite a few jw apologists and trolls come and go.
they are almost always successful at getting a good number of people here upset and riled up, leading to personal attacks.
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Fencing
I don't post here much, but read often. Seen quite a few JW apologists and trolls come and go. They are almost always successful at getting a good number of people here upset and riled up, leading to personal attacks. But you need to remember a couple important things about people like that, before you unload on them.
- No active, happy Witness would willingly join or participate in an "apostate" forum. If they're here, it's because they already have very serious doubts.
- If they really are active Witnesses, they are already knowingly disobeying the GB in a big way just by being here. Think about that.
- If they are obsessively arguing and trying to come up with apologetic argument after argument to refute every little point, they're really arguing with themselves and trying to chase their own doubts away.
So, instead of getting worked up with these people, chasing them down rabbit holes, insulting them, trying to beat sense into them, remember that each one of these "trolls" is really an apostate-in-training. They're going through that extremely difficult time when the congnative dissonance first starts to become too much to bear. Instead of looking down on them with disdain and hate, think of them with compassion and some pity and remember how lost and confused you were when you first starting having serious doubts.
Anyway, just a couple thoughts I had after watching this whole Recovery drama unfold.
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Who On This Site Would You Like To Meet?
by minimus inthere are a lot of interesting people that frequent this site.. sometimes, we get an idea of what the posters are really like in "real life".
and i'm sure i could be easily surprised by some that you think might be strong personalities because of their board presence, and in reality, they might be shy in a face to face setting.. i would enjoy meeting simon.
simon used to be terribly annoyed by my posting and now i think he's accepted with tolerance my being here.. farkel seems like a grouchy cantankerous fellow but i think he'd be very interesting company!.
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Fencing
AllTimeJeff and Awakened At Gilead. Anyone who can go through the heavy indoctrination of Gilead, sacrafice so much by going to a dangerous country, and still overcome cognative dissonance enough to get out must be a fascinating person to talk to.
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Conti Case and the WT's Pedophile Registry
by Euphemism injust made it through the register of actions posted on the court's website for the conti case.
i found an interesting couple of briefs regarding the society's database of known child abusers:.
plaintiff (conti): http://apps.alameda.courts.ca.gov/domainweb/service?servicename=domainwebservice&pagename=itree&action=27402662.
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Fencing
Wouldn't this mean Shuster comitted perjury in the deposition? I thought it was pretty well known Bethel keeps a sex offender registry. It came out in one of the other cases they settled. Could swear that a Bethel PR person even admitted it, he just objected to the number of people that were said to be listed in that database.
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The Bombshell Memo
by Celestial inhttp://wcfcourier.com/news/national/calif-jury-awards-m-in-jehovah-s-sex-abuse-case/article_e0667684-7053-573c-a597-fec48ae78bfd.html.
"conti also claimed in her suit that the religion's national leaders formed a policy in 1989 that instructed the religion's elders to keep child sex abuse accusations secret.
congregation elders followed that policy when kendrick was convicted in 1994 of misdemeanor child molestation in alameda county, according to simons.".
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Fencing
They neglect to mention the letter to the BOE which clarifed the term "known to have been a child molester" to mean "known to the local congregation or community", not just the local BOE. So if a molestor moves into a new congregation where no one knows who he is, he can be re-appointed.
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Fistfights for seats at DC?
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Fencing
Never personally witnessed any fist fights, but I will tell you having spent many a convention opening the doors in the mornings, these supposedly unified, loving, "happiest people on earth" turn into rabid animals the second those doors open.
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30-minute Public Talk = More association ???
by Alfred init's been nearly 5 years since the letter was read at the end of the service meeting.
the society would lovingly decrease the public talk to a brief 30 minutes, eliminating the 15-minute doom-and-gloom introduction and thereby resulting in lower heating and air-conditioning costs allowing for more "association" after the meeting.... for those who still go to meetings... do you find that there is any more association with the 30-min public talk when compared to the former 45-min public talk?.
please share your observations.. thanks!.
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Fencing
Public talk length shortening was more about being able to cram more congregations into the same hall, IMO. Same with the elimination of the bookstudy. Opens up more nights for congregations to use the hall during the week, since before then every congregation was supposed to maintain at least one bookstudy at the hall for DFd people. Now, you could theoretically have 4 congregations in one hall pretty easily, and maybe 5 if one was willing to meet on Saturday.
I think you're going to see more hall consolidations in the coming few years, ala Menlo Park, as the Society seeks to increase their cash-on-hand.
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2005 - The year the Society began its decline (without anyone noticing)!
by cedars ini've just finished an article for randy over on freeminds.org, which i've submitted to him for review.
hopefully it should be online soon, so please keep checking!.
the article discusses the fact that the watch tower society is already in decline, and suggests the year 2005 as the turning point.
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Fencing
I somewhat agree with Billy about 2001, though I would argue the mental decline actually started right around '96 with the change to the generation doctrine, and solidified at the turn of the century. It took a few more years for that reality to fully set in, as people realized that the "end" was basically open-ended now, there was no immediate goal to look to on the horizon, and the zeal was all but sapped out of the WTS.
If you look at the growth numbers, it backs that up. Growth in the early 90s was always between 4.5-6%, with the trend line slowly dropping as you approach 1994 (80 years from 1914, i.e., the lifespan of a humany being "80 years in case of special mightiness" that a lot of people were clinging on). Bit of an uptick in '95, but before the generation change comes into play. Then the generation change happens. 1996 growth drops by one whole point which was the biggest single year drop in a while. It goes into freefall after that, with a huge 1.6 point drop between 98 and 99, which happens to correspond to when the internet started getting mainstream.
It finally hits 1.7% in 2001. Another uptick in 2002 to 2.8%, which is most likely because of 9/11 getting some formerly inactive JW's (and the public at large's) fears up. 2005, cedar's year in question, was a new low at 1.3%.
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Is there ANY JW belief/doctrine that has remained the same from start to now?
by journey-on ini was trying to think of one teaching or doctrine that has remained consistent from the society's inception to now, and couldn't.
.
can you give me one?.
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Fencing
And I would argue that 1914 shouldn't really be included on that list. What Russell and the early Bible Students believed about 1914 is completely different from what Witnesses believe today. In fact, the only thing about 1914 that stayed the same was calling it "The End of the Gentile Times", but what that meant to Russell wouldn't even be recognized by a modern JW.