Bungi Bill

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Posts by Bungi Bill

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  14

  The Telephone we take for granted!

  by TerryWalstrom in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  march 10, 1876: “mr.

  watson —come here—i want to see you” the voice of alexander graham bell is transmitted.

  he wasn't the first to invent it but the first to own a patent.. in 1910 telephone "subscribers" had 4 digit telephone numbers.soon, larger cities had 5 digit numbers.mark twain was one of the first to have a phone in his home.. the first phones had no dials or buttons.

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  Bungi Bill

  cofty,

  My first job when I left school was as a trainee technician with what is now Telecom New Zealand. (Where I remained for barely 12 months, because some idiot of a local elder made me throw it in - a story for a later telling!)

  The exchange I worked at was of a variant somewhere in between a "crank-handle" (i.e. Magneto) manual exchange and an automatic one. They called it a "Central Battery" exchange, in which you lifted the hand-piece off its "cradle" to alert the exchange operator - with the resulting low resistance loop pulling in your number's Line Relay and illuminating your line's "Call Lamp" on the operator's console. (From that, the generic term used to describe either an earth fault or a short circuit on the line was "PG", for "Permanent Glow").

  Even then (1972), that thing should have been long pensioned off, yet they retained this museum piece right up until the late 1980s.
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  66

  The urban legends we heard as JWs!

  by stuckinarut2 in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  how often have we heard some sort of sensationalist urban legend as jws?.

  here is an example i was told as a kid:.

  the experience of a sister who knocked on a door and was greeted by a big fierce looking man- intimidating and mean.

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  Bungi Bill

  There was the story going around in the early 1970s about a Ouija board being asked what was going to happen in 1975. According to that urban legend, the Ouija board then promptly disintegrated!
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  7

  To big to fail

  by pepperheart in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  some people think the watchtower is to big to fail.

  i dont because a lot of the branch offices around the world (about 70 i think) are in the third world they are not paying the full cost of running them and so the american branch is having to find the money,so if they got $1 billion dollars betwwen 70 branches that is only$ 25 million a year.per branch.if each branch has 500 people working there and they spend just $1 a day for food each person that works out at £35,000 just for the food alone .

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  Bungi Bill

  Nothing is too big to fail; it is just that some entities are too important to be allowed to fail. The WTS is hardly in that category!
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  6

  Husband reading from the readers digest to our daughter...

  by nonjwspouse in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  ...i could have sworn , hearing it from another room, that he was reading from a watchtower by the way he was talking!

  he used that jw cadence.

  slow reading with over emphasizing words.

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  Bungi Bill

  Well there is one similarity:- the Readers Digest is about as informative as anything published by the WTS!
  
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  44

  Has Your JW Background Benefited You In Any Way?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i would like to think there was some good that resulted from our being a witness at one time..

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  Bungi Bill

  User99,

  Words like that were only commonplace when Crazy Fred used to write the publications!
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  55

  Cults in our Midst

  by Lee Elder in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  this is related to a comment i made in a previous thread.

  cults exist in many diverse parts of society.

  this includes politics.

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  Bungi Bill

  The more extreme forms of political ideology can and do inspire a level of fanaticism which rivals the worst of the religious forms. (Numerous examples of this were observed in Malaysia’s 12 year battle against the communists, during what was known as the “Malayan Emergency”).

  Not surprisingly perhaps, traces of this same “all or nothing” mentality are often observable even after a person abandons a cult. Speaking for myself, it took some time for the realisation to sink in that things are seldom ever clearly black and white. Instead, you are much more likely to be dealing with various shades of grey. This is particularly the case with politics - where a healthy dose of cynicism is a bloody good place to start from!
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  44

  Has Your JW Background Benefited You In Any Way?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i would like to think there was some good that resulted from our being a witness at one time..

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  Bungi Bill

  It did help me overcome the almost crippling shyness that once affected me. (Not that overcoming this was a pleasant experience!)

  However, for every benefit being a JW brought, there must have been at least 20 disadvantages.
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  11

  How did Christianity Achieve its Position as the World's Largest Religious Grouping?

  by fulltimestudent in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  there is little evidence to indicate that there were many christians in the first 2 or 3 centuries of its existence.

  but after the conversion of constantine (or, at least his toleration of christianity) things changed.

  with one notable exception all future emperors promoted christianity.

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  Bungi Bill

  African people caught onto that one quite quickly - particularly the irony of it all.

  A parody of the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” reads

  ”Onward Christian Soldiers, into pagan lands,

  Prayer books in your pockets, rifles in your hands,

  Bring the gladsome tidings, where trade might be done,

  Spread your peaceful Gospel, with the Maxim Gun”.

  Both the point of a Roman sword and the muzzle of Maxim Gun proved to be very effective methods of converting the “heathen.”
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  11

  Zeal vs Fanaticism. What is the difference?

  by stuckinarut2 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  a good friend of ours and i were chatting the other day about the difference between a zealous person and fanatical person.. what is the difference?.

  why is someone praised for being "zealous" , but another person is mocked or condemned for being a "fanatical" person?.

  how would jws be classed?.

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  Bungi Bill

  Be very bloody careful, lest “zeal” turn into fanaticism - particularly when either religion or politics get involved.
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  9

  I Think It’s Great That ExJWs Have Gotten Politically Involved!

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  remember when we could never say an opinion regarding politics?

  it’s refreshing to see that we can tell everyone what our political stances are and have no fear of shunning .

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  Bungi Bill

  Giordano,

  You hit the proverbial nail fair on the head there!

  It would seem that the JW “All or Nothing” mentality does take a long time to break from.