imagine a company sells you a product... you like the product and begin to do more business with them.. then one day this company demands that you never visit any of their competitors for the rest of your life.
they also add that you are never allowed to read a negative customer review about their company or products for the rest of your life.. actually this company threatens you with a humiliating future death if you engage in either of these activities..... how does that sound to you?
sound reasonable?
A powerful illustration TTATTe...the realisation of the parallel would startle anyone with minimum reasoning ability who has just begun to learn about JWs.
I wonder though, how such a message might come to the notice of zombified, Jdubs with hermetically sealed information input?
jesus said about keeping off from the leaven (meaning influence?
) of the pharisees and that's why the use of azim bread in the supper.
but what about the leavened grape juice aka wine?
The reason that alcoholic and hence fermented wine would have been used at the memorial is because the ritual, along with its specific symbolism were stolen from the cult of the ‘Good shepherd’ Mithras.
did anyone go to meeting sunday?
i'm curious about how the 'we must be holy' watchtower went and what the comments were like, especially in regards to disfellowshipped family members.
@Tenacious, there were many christ-cults in the first century. Since the particular christian cult which much later became the dominant one needed to absorb and adopt the salient beliefs from all the other christ- cults for the sake of mass support, this necessarily included many incompatible beliefs.
The Jewish prohibition on blood was not compatible with the borrowed Mithraic doctrines of cleansing through blood. In Mithraic practice this meant standing under a grating in the underground temple or Mithreum whilst the blood of a slaughtered bull rained down on the supplicants who stood beneath with mouths wide open. The Christian faith was cobbled together from many pagan sources especially Mithraism in its effort to be catholic or all embracing. Eventually the Jesus christ-cult got the ascendency which was then funded for political leverage by Constantine in the fourth century.
The familiar first century Christianity story as projected backwards by JWs and modern Christians is mainly a myth.
psychiatrist: so what position do you hold tony?.
tight pants tony: strictly only the missionary position, any other position is the work of satan........ oh!
sorry, i thought you meant... never mind, its the way yous guys speak, it cracks me up!
Psychiatrist: So what position do you hold Tony?
Tight Pants Tony: Strictly only the missionary position, any other position is the work of Satan........ Oh! You mean what do I do? Sorry, I thought you meant... never mind, it’s the way yous guys speak, it cracks me up! Heh heh. Well, me and my guvnin’ body are the only goldarn religion God is using in these very last days to organise the investments , er... I mean, to organise the preaching which Jesus said gotta be done. And we’re the guys organisin’ it. Yup.
Psy: How many are you in your governing body?
TPT: Seven... the heavenly seven! We’re going to heaven when we die...
Psy: And you believe that out of all the seven billion people on Earth, God speaks only to you and that he has exclusively entrusted just you seven individuals with the organising of all of his work down here?
TPT: Hole in one! But seriously, we are good... just look at our website!
Psy: In our line of work when someone claims to be exclusively spoken to by God we take it seriously and we call what you describe as being “delusional behaviour”.
TPT: Yes, it does sound rather good.
Psy: And what is your role in the governing body?
TPT: My role? yeah well...... I’m kinda a front man, I tell it like it is and they love me for it. I show them dudes out there on our website what a true member of the guvnin’ body really looks like, you know, slick, handsome, smart tailoring and baggy trousers. Ol’ rubber lips letts, he does the speakin’ to the camera...does it kinda slow like, ‘cos many of our dear brothers out there lookin’ in don’t get much other kinda education ‘cept what we give ‘em.
Psy: There has been a lot of bad publicity on television, in the press and on the internet about child abuse and harmful shunning by your members. How do you respond to these criticisms?
TPT: I never did shun nobody ‘cos at HQ we make sure anyone what doesn’t toe the line gets chucked out an’ we never see ’em again. Look, let’s get real on this, any great organisation like ours is going to have a few bad apples, can you believe it, even in the guvnin’ body! We chuck’em out! got rid of ‘em! Just like Joshua done in Canaan, got rid of them pesky critters what didn’t believe right .
Psy: We understand from our clinical experience that many of your members seem to be suffering from what we call ‘cognitive dissonance’. It’s an experience rather like arriving at the traffic lights where they are showing both red and green at the same time. For example, your members believe in an organisation which claims to be in the very last days yet simultaneously is making vast investments in property and building grand new headquarters... Another source of anxiety is the fact that your organisation said that the end would come within the lifetime of the generation which saw 1914...and that has long died out? Can you reconcile these contradictions?
TPT: I think I know where you’re a comin from... and I can smell persecution when I want to... and don’t tell me! the next thing you are going to say is “critical thinkin.” Well I’ve got something to tell you on that subject, I wrote it down ‘cos it’s reeeeeal good.
(rummages in wallet to find quotation)
Here it is! I wanna read you my statement, ’cos I wrote it myself li’l while back, I put all the dots in it,
“It’s kind of amazing that once you learn critical thinking. Once you remove yourself from it and then take another look from a different perspective. How manipulative it is. How the ‘double think’ is right there in your face.”
Now don’t that trumps it all? Critical thinking is double think in your face, kinda amazing hey?
Psy: Nurse! Bring the restraining jacket and the sedative injection immediately please! ......... No, no, not for the patient! It’s for me, so I can’t strangle him...
in the last day or so, the 2015 yearbook of jehovah's witnesses has been available on jw.org.
broadly speaking, results are pretty ho-hum - except to note a huge increase in memorial attendances for 2014, but still shy of 20 million.
this is a big increase over the previous all-time-high year of 2011 by several hundred thousand.
@Inside, you said " the aging population is shrinking" sorry friend but its increasing. Your wiki figures show that Japan has the largest percentage of 'ageing' or elderly people, in the world.The general population stats however show it to be on a plateau of 127/128 million for the last eleven years with every likely-hood of it reducing rapidly in the future but it has not done so up until now. The blue line on the graph represents the projected population numbers.
My comment with a little knowledge of that country is that JW belief no longer answers people's needs, high control religious cults are less fashionable there these days.
in the last day or so, the 2015 yearbook of jehovah's witnesses has been available on jw.org.
broadly speaking, results are pretty ho-hum - except to note a huge increase in memorial attendances for 2014, but still shy of 20 million.
this is a big increase over the previous all-time-high year of 2011 by several hundred thousand.
inside the KH: You have it exactly the wrong way round, the elderly population is increasing, not shrinking.............The decline of JWs in Japan has little connection with the fact that the population is not dying off as early as happens in other countries.This fact should have kept their numbers higher had they remained in!
The decline in the membership of the WT org is the consequence that the people of this socially and technologically advanced land have realised that the Watchtower dream is not the realistic answer to the problems of being human.
In this regard, where enlightened Japan leads... the western world will follow... (thank goodness!)
they have discovered a temple complex in turkey they call gobekli tepi and another in southern iran they tentatively call arata.
both of these sites were discovered in the last decade or two and are being dated to older then 12000 years ago.
can anyone explain how they go about dating these site since carbon 14 dating doesnt work on stone and theres no patina or very little since these places were buried?
Ah Fiddler! my fellow fan of Gobekli Tepe... At the mention of ancient dates for mankind...whether the dating method is applicable or not... JWs trot out “carbon 14” like Pavlov’s dogs...in their minds meaning to say “carbon 14 is a flawed dating method and therefore whatever we believe cannot be disproved by science."
They put the cart of belief before the horse of evidence.
a currently active jdub acquaintance occasionally stops by to say hello and we share a wee dram or two.
after the general small talk of new cars, exotic vacations and sports we often get into the "why" we are xjubs.
he is a well educated publisher who holds a phd in child psychology.
Quite so Phizzy and therefore NVR as well...you know what you are worshipping with a good old fashioned pagan idol like Yahweh. But what a clever wheeze to have invisible deities! For one thing they are much, much harder to knock down...
There is only one factor which appears to validate the belief in an invisible being.
It is not the invisible god’s works or actions that make them real because they cannot be proved or disproved. Since invisible Gods never make themselves known to the five senses of humans, the only route for belief in such is observing what it is that believers do... and imitate them. There can be no possible proof of an invisible non- communicating entity! So belief in invisible deities appears to be validated only by the sheer force of the numbers of believers.
To say god is invisible and to say that JC returned invisibly in 1874 as Russell did and in 1914 as Joe Frankly Ratherflawed did... are confidence tricks to trap the gullible and easily led.
a currently active jdub acquaintance occasionally stops by to say hello and we share a wee dram or two.
after the general small talk of new cars, exotic vacations and sports we often get into the "why" we are xjubs.
he is a well educated publisher who holds a phd in child psychology.
Thank you Breakfast and Billy, I have enjoyed both of your posts over time...I usually post on Ex-JW forum as do some others here. Although you have a picture of a cute dog/banana hybrid I have to admit that I am actually part human but mainly sloth (well my other half thinks so).
they have discovered a temple complex in turkey they call gobekli tepi and another in southern iran they tentatively call arata.
both of these sites were discovered in the last decade or two and are being dated to older then 12000 years ago.
can anyone explain how they go about dating these site since carbon 14 dating doesnt work on stone and theres no patina or very little since these places were buried?
Because fundamentalists imagine everything to be recent in origin it is most interesting to realise there is a plethora of archaeological material stretching back forty thousand years in the Middle East and Europe. Near my computer as I write, I have Neanderthal tools from France approximately 120,000 years old.
Reference the ruins at 11,000 years before present, surprisingly a lot is known about this time period since other nearby peoples produced cultural items such as figurines and tools. Archeologically it can be placed in the early to mid Neolithic. This is otherwise called New Stone Age (with capitals for punctuation Nazis). Golbecki Tepe is pre-pottery and this in itself indicates an early date.
As a consequence of being horribly misled by the Watchtower, after I escaped I spent some years doing prehistoric archaeology part time but I don’t claim extensive knowledge of the scientific side of dating. Archaeology is done as a multi-disciplinary research and relies on the expertise from many specialists including dating experts.
Carbon dating has improved its accuracy since it was first described and there are so many means of corroborating it, such as dendrochronology (tree ring dating) so as to know that it is accurate within a margin of just hundreds of years at the 10,000 year range. Radiometric carbon dating was used at Gobekli Tepe. They dated the bones found in the soil and the charcoal from fires. There are other methods available as well the mineral apatite which forms a patina on bone and stones and can be dated.
Pre-historic archaeology depends on knowing about the climate of the periods involved and consequences of climate are the various types of vegetation, insect and animal populations (flora and fauna assembleges) A study of the soil using sieves of increasingly small grids usually brings to light bones, rodent teeth, insect parts and pollen etc. It is the specific combination of these which pins the samples down to a specific stage in the natural geological climate period which other dating methods can confirm. Archaeologists always look at the stratigraphy, the different layers of deposits and note any disturbance. The type or style of the implements found in them such as stone tools or carvings can sometimes indicate which culture group fashioned them.
So the dating for important sites like Gobekli Tepe are made by a comprehensive scientific enquiry not from just one or two sample readings.
