Pretty much everything else is determined by who has the more effective weapon.
As my late father was wont to say "You are free to do as you are told!"
Bungi Bill
JoinedPosts by Bungi Bill
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121
What Are Your Rights?
by Simon inrights seem to be everywhere nowadays.
say hello to someone in the wrong way and you've violated 101 of their human rights.
people imagine they have the right to all sorts of things - food, healthcare, housing, internet ... so many things are labelled basic rights and then you get onto their human rights - a favourite of the do-nothing bodies such as the un to declare.
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Bungi Bill
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41
"This system will probably be over in about 5 years"
by john.prestor ini don't think i shared this story yet, it's strange and although i did a little detective work trying to figure out who said what and when i never found out much, big surprise, jehovah's witnesses love their secrets as we all know... but i thought other posters might find this interesting both in and of itself, because of what an elder told me one sunday back in 2011, and because of what it could imply as to high-ranking jehovah's witnesses prophesying the date of armageddon.
specific dates went out the window in 1975, although governing body helper ken flodin hinted at 2040 in a talk uploaded to jw.org a couple years back, and the governing body hinted at 2034 in a watchtower back in the 90s.
but it might be, just might, that more specific date-setting still goes on behind closed doors in certain circuits.... so after i went to "meetings" and talked to witnesses for a couple years at a rural congregation in the eastern united states an elder pulled me aside one service into the vestibule at the hall, in other words, into a private area where no one would overhear us.
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Bungi Bill
Nothing like wanting to have it both ways!
In the early 1980s, when the WTS began another campaign to promote "pioneering", the Circuit Overseer posed the question "Can you see this system lasting another ten years?" His next sentence, though, carried the proviso "Please do not say the Circuit Overseer said Armegeddon was coming in less than ten years".
Bloody hell!
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47
Did you actually read the bible end to end?
by Ultimate Axiom inin my ten years as a witness i never read the whole bible end to end, what with four magazines a month, the book study, meetings and talk preparations, there just wasn’t the time.
i knew all the important references to ‘prove’ the various jw doctrines, and the cherry picked chapters that help foster the idea that it’s a good book, but that’s not reading it.
well after nearly forty years out, i decided i would do it.
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Bungi Bill
I figured that as we were supposed to be offering the public "free" home bible studies, one ought to at least have read the thing from cover to cover. It was hard going, and I ended up using the New English Version. This at least is laid out like a book, instead of being broken up into individual verses. For me, that made it a little easier to follow!
The results, though, were disappointing - although I now realise that I had completely unrealistic expectations about what it was going to achieve. Somehow, I imagined reading the bible was going to be a mind-altering experience of some kind!
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The paranormal.
by Lost in the fog ini know that a lot of the people on here have turned their backs on the idea of a deity deciding that god does not exist.
but what about the unseen spirit world generally such as poltergeists, jinns, voodoo, etc.
if you have become agnostic, atheist, or just don't care since leaving, do you think that there are spirits out there or have you decided that is also hokum?
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Bungi Bill
Xanthippe,
I believe you have summed the matter up perfectly!
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24
More on South Africa
by zeb inhttps://killingfieldsmovie.com/.
write to your mp help these people to leave to come to safety..
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Bungi Bill
Are we forgetting how the white Dutch stole their farms from the indigenous people
The reality is a little less clear-cut than one might imagine. Southern Africa's indigenous peoples were of a group of non-Bantu people, referred to collectively as the "Khoisan". This included the hunter-gatherer San people (formerly called "Bushmen") as well as the pastoralist Khoikhoi (formerly known as "Hottentots").
At the time the Dutch established their 17th Century outpost in what is now Capetown, they found the district already settled by the Khoikhoi. These peoples had previously experienced displacement from the north by various migrations of the Bantu, and now faced similar displacement from Dutch settlement. Later, during a period known as the "Mfecane" (1815 - 1840) widescale warfare between various African (i.e. Bantu) tribes left large areas depopulated; and therefore ripe for settlement by others - including Trek-Boers from the Cape.
Regarding the whole of Southern Africa, the matter of who did what to who is just a little bit more involved than merely the good guys wearing white hats / black skins and the bad guys wearing black hats / white skins. (For a starter, the "indigenous" people weren't black; but were more Asian in appearance).
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Should calling someone 'Nazi' be made illegal?
by LoveUniHateExams ina rabble-rouser called james goddard and a crowd of pro-brexit people called anna soubry 'nazi' recently.. the same crowd also called owen jones a few names.. i don't know these people but they seem to be unsavory people - they were certainly not behaving themselves.. the met police are looking into the matter, to see if the crowd did anything illegal.
a journalist asked the police officer if calling someone 'nazi' is illegal.
the officer said 'that's what we're looking into'.. first, this crowd behaved badly, no question.. what i find fascinating, though, is the speed of response from authorities.. calling people fascist or nazi has been going on for decades.
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Bungi Bill
Labels of are of no use to me. Liberal. Conservative. Right. Left. Far Right. Far Left. Center right. Centrist. Socialist. Fascist. Nazi.
Same here!
The only label I identify with is "Left Right Out".
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Elders encouraging young ones to live in a fairy tale
by Addison0998 inso one of the elders at the meeting tonight addressed to parents in his talk, “if your child wants to flip burgers for the rest of their life, because that’s is the only job that will allow them to have a schedule for full time service, you would want to support them the best you can.” he has also said told parents that if their children already have plans to go to college, even in the near future, they should try to do everything to stop them.
there’s so much ranting i could do about that alone, but to make matters worse, this is a considerably well off man.
he has his own buisness, a nice house with an additional room he added on last year, and him and his wife just took a lavish european trip.
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Bungi Bill
we've always been discouraged from putting money in pension plans because we'd never need one.
Oh, yes! That priceless gem of wisdom in the Awake of May, 1969, quoting Nathan Knorr himself and assuring our generation that we would "never grow old in this system of things." It was stated in so many words, AND put in writing.
Let the apologists try weaseling out of that one!
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Elders encouraging young ones to live in a fairy tale
by Addison0998 inso one of the elders at the meeting tonight addressed to parents in his talk, “if your child wants to flip burgers for the rest of their life, because that’s is the only job that will allow them to have a schedule for full time service, you would want to support them the best you can.” he has also said told parents that if their children already have plans to go to college, even in the near future, they should try to do everything to stop them.
there’s so much ranting i could do about that alone, but to make matters worse, this is a considerably well off man.
he has his own buisness, a nice house with an additional room he added on last year, and him and his wife just took a lavish european trip.
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Bungi Bill
Hypocrisy is a central theme throughout all religion - without exception, and including that of the JWs.
The case cited above by Addison0998 is yet another example of the "I've got mine, but you cannot have yours" attitude.
that!
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Who were the Picts?
by LoveUniHateExams inso, i've been reading a bit about the picts recently.. i'm not sure there's a consensus on exactly who they were or what type of language they spoke.. even their name - picts - has more than one explanation of where it came from.
i've read some scholars believe it comes from latin pictus (painted), referring to their supposed habit of painting themselves and/or tattooing themselves.
other scholars believe that the name pict comes from another source.
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Bungi Bill
Roman writers described the typical Pict as being tall, long limbed and red-headed. This raises an alternative - that they were possibly of Germanic origin.
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The Reasons for Cart Witnessing
by Simon inwhatever we think of it, you have to admit that it's quite "genius".. the door to door ministry as done in western developed countries where the jw quirky religion has probably reached their saturation level was a complete and utter waste of time in terms of the effort expended to recruit people.. at the same time, it was rarely something that anyone enjoyed which led to people being labelled as inactive, being pressured to doing more and maybe ultimately deciding jwism wasn't for them and leaving.. there was also the issue that many jws are actually pretty bad at knowing and articulating their beliefs so were pretty incapable of getting any meaningful message across.. they solved all this with the cart witnessing.
the real point isn't to recruit, it's to make life easier for jws.
now they can stand and chat with their friend, have a coffee, not talk to anyone or make eye contact and still act as a walking billboard for jw.org.
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Bungi Bill
but not every member of a jw congregation can do cart work. The "privilege" is given to pioneers and a few select prominent ones in the congregations.
Sounds like yet another example of "its not for bastards like you"!
The apathy cart may make things easier for the select few, but everybody else has to firstly win their spurs, before receiving this "priviledge".
That may involve some pounding of the pavement in genuine door-to-door work. More likley though, as DesirousOfChange pointed out, "winning ones spurs" is done by sloping off to Sturbucks at first opportunity (or some other ingenious ways of clocking up impressive numbers of "hours" with minimal effort).