my mother was not the most emotionally stable person.
she was a follower and instilled in me the idea we were better than those worldly people.
its hard to go to school as a child and you can not be friends outside of school, you can not celebrate any holidays, and you are told all these people are going to die.
No!
Rather, I cannot thank my father enough for resisting the pressure from his mother to raise us kids as JWs.
My newly-converted grandmother managed to get my father to attend the odd Circuit Assembly public talk, but he remained unimpressed. He particularly noted that much of what he heard was totally unsuitable for children.
Wherever you are now, Dad, I thank you profusely for that!
just read a post on facebook where somebody is making some wild crazy-talk about the descendants of cain being the beast of revelation or something.. cain was always a strange tale to me.
don't people use any critical thinking skills when they read this stuff?
everybody knows cain killed his brother abel, but do they ever look at the surrounding tale?.
Where is David Jay when you need him?
He would be quick to assure us that the Jewish writers who penned such legends as that of Cain and Abel never intended these stories to be taken literally. Likewise, also for the entire Old Testament!
So, if the story of Cain and Abel doesn’t stand up too well to critical thinking, there is a very good reason for that - it was never intended to!
has anyone been able to verify that fred franz received the minimal training in ancient greek that he claimed gave him the expertise to translate the bible?
you would think that would be fairly easy to verify or disprove in this day and age.
what college did he attend?
vienne,
Are you sure it was his knowledge of Greek that was questioned in that way? I thought that Franz was challenged to translate Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 from English back into Hebrew?
has anyone been able to verify that fred franz received the minimal training in ancient greek that he claimed gave him the expertise to translate the bible?
you would think that would be fairly easy to verify or disprove in this day and age.
what college did he attend?
A word of caution here!
During the Walsh trial in 1954, FW Franz never said that he "could" not translate a bible verse, he said that he "would" not do so. We are talking about two different verbs - could and would.
Furthermore, when you read the context of what led up to those remarks, Franz was probably within his rights to do (and say) what he did. What was on trial there was NOT his abilities to translate the Bible. That had Fanny Adams to do with what was on the line that day. This trial was about whether JWs were a "church", whether their rank and file qualified as "ministers", and from that, whether this then should exempt their "ministers" from Military Service. Franz's knowledge of Hebrew was a red herring that some smart-@$$ of a lawyer was attempting to introduce.
PS: In case anybody was wondering, I am no fan of the late Crazy Fred!
looking back on my two decades as a jehovah’s witness, i’ve come to realize how the constant theme of endurance is playing a detrimental role on the individual's psyche.. jehovah’s witnesses have become far too good at keeping going.
they’re experts at surrendering to the demands of the watchtower, living up to what’s expected of them, and getting on with the priorities that those in power have defined and imposed upon them.
they keep showing up, presenting themselves a dutiful pioneer or ministerial servant.
So sad, yet only too true!
"millions now living will never die" that teaching persisted for a number of years from the early 1920`s ,sad to say that their would not be anywhere near millions alive today.and with another few years their won`t be anybody alive .. the year 1925 was supposed to see the resurrection of faithful men of old such as abraham issac and jacob and noah who were to be princes in the earth.
of course no such thing happened and we don`t here anything more about that prediction anymore.. the time period between adams creation and eves creation was an excuse why armageddon was delayed in about october 1975 because they didn`t know how much time had elapsed between the two.
that`s all forgotten about now.. six thousand years of human history was supposed to have ended in about october 1872 according to studies in the scriptures vol.2 1906 , the "time is at hand" page 11 (forward 1916 ) puts the start of the one thousand year reign of jesus christ as of the year 1873. so in 1906 they the i.b.s.a.
eyeuse2badub,
I think you are on to something there!
Last year, I took that one up with some JWs at a literature cart. They assured me (then 62 years of age) that I am "not old".
That lot do appear to have invented "bungee words" out of the terms "old" and "generation."
shouldn't the unhappy and unfulfilled worldly people see what jws have and be drawn to them?
shouldn't they be showing up at khs asking for bible studies?
at work shouldn't they be asking how jws families are so happy?
As the old saying goes "actions speak louder than words".
i did for many years even if i had doubts that i would put on the back burner.
but i thought the majority of witnesses believed, even if they were “weak” in the faith.. obviously, we have elders , pioneers and ministerial servants that are here and they are not true believers.. do you think many jws simply do not believe what they are preaching?
?.
Do many of them even know what it is they are supposed to be preaching? Furthermore, one gets the feeling that this no longer matters too much. Not like in the day when the JWs used to rubbish members of the "Churches of Christendom" for not understanding what they were supposed to believe in!
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.
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.
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.
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!
