Starting about the fourth century CE, pagan was the roman word of contempt for the uneducated people from the pagus or village, those who were not taught the sophisticated city beliefs such as Roman Christianity, the peasants who were bedevilled by belief in the folk myths. The essence of this meaning is also found in the word heathen i.e. those living out on the heath or rough lands (where heather grows). By contrast Roman Christianity was a city religion and hence urban or ‘urbane’.
Half banana
JoinedPosts by Half banana
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Rejecting something due to unscriptural or pagan origins.....?
by stuckinarut2 inso witnesses reject many practices or holidays due to their "unscriptural or pagan" origins.. for example, birthday celebrations, mothers or father's day, christmas etc..... most people in the world will say "but the origin doesn't matter anymore, we follow this custom now because it's a joyful occasion that creates happy times and brings the family together".
it is still firmly rejected.. so, if the wrong origin is so important, and should result in rejecting something, why isn't the same principle applied to the actual jehovah's witness faith itself!?.
after all, the very foundation of the organisation was based on wrong understandings of the bible, far fetched teachings and doctrines, links to false religious backgrounds, pyramidology, false predictions, inaccurate beliefs etc...... using their reasoning, it doesn't matter how good something is now, if the origin was faulty to begin with?
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New BBC article on JW abuse
by snare&racket inis religion doing enough to root out abuse?.
he would go upstairs, on the premise that he was saying a prayer with his niece, then sexually abuse her.
mark sewell was sentenced to 14 years in prisonafterwards, the elders told her that as it was only her account against that of sewell, nothing more could be done.
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Half banana
I heard much of this information on Radio 4 on the BBC at about 6.45 this morning...good negative publicity for putting people off Jehovah's Witnesses.
A significant element of the JW position is that they choose to insist on the Biblical 'rule' of "two witnesses".
Does this not expose the stupidity of basing modern life on primitive tribal dogma? JWs cling to the Bible and faith in its brand of holiness since they have such narrow horizons and are prevented from seeing that better methods and opportunities exist elsewhere.
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Resistance is NOT futile!
by Bonsai inall i want from this life is to be able to wash windows at bethel.. my story.. when i was fresh out of high school and pioneering, i said those exact words to my friends and family.
all i wanted to do was be at the core of the organization where it was the safest.
i gleefully told people that i'd gladly spend the rest of my life washing windows, waiting tables, doing laundry or cleaning bathrooms.
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Half banana
Bonsai, thank you so much for your experience as a zealous JW. We all wasted so much of our lives in this mind-bending cult.
The notion of putting flowers on the deceased seems to be the most natural token in remembering loved ones who have died. There is even evidence from a Russian site that Neanderthals used flowers to say goodbye to their dead. With the paranoid GB, they forbid every natural human gesture only so that their followers will not forget to laud the leadership. It is sickening.
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WHEN IN ROME DO AS THE ROMANS DO
by TerryWalstrom inromans were pagans.. why wouldn't pagan romans use a pagan cross to execute jesus?.
should pagans have spared jesus a pagan means of execution?.
hell no!.
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Half banana
Terry your logic is impeccable. It would however come as a great shock for JWs to realise that the Jesus story of crucifixion is just a copy of the earlier solar religions where all god-men get crucified at the spring equinox. The cross being a symbol of that moment in the solar year. The whole of the Jesus story is pure paganism. Just removing the cross element cannot restore the account to an imagined pure state uncontaminated with pagan folk belief.
As the learned and influential Saint Augustine admitted, writing probably around the beginning of the fifth century; “The same thing which is now called the Christian religion existed amongst the ancients”.
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BURNING AMBITION by Jehovah's Witness YOUTH: "I want to clean toilets in Bethel for the rest of my life."
by TerryWalstrom inas i have written previously, i crashed a discussion between a young j-dub and his baptist workmate who were having.
a religious debate outside starbucks.
this was months ago.
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Half banana
Perhaps he had irritable bowel syndrome? -
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So much "growth"! JW Land double sided coin
by thedepressedsoul ini'm finding it more and more funny how every wt article for the public or congregation, including jw broadcast talks about all this "growth" and how fast jehovha's organization is speeding up!
yet everything behind closed doors, insider information, elder letters and sales paint a very different picture.
i have news for you gb members!
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Half banana
The imperative for the individual and collective GB member is to honour their appointment as custodians of the sacred Watchtower cash-cow.
Everything else is subordinated to this end. The pride they hold in this role has only been revealed by their antics on the JW TV; a bunch of ignorant pedagogues, a living example of the proverbial blind guides. (I used to think they must be decent people before they became visible, yet I knew Knorr was a grumpy old bugger)
When it comes to money matters (and money matters most of all), the JW doctrine is ever flexible to meet the needs of the moment. When doctrine become implausible... which it routinely does, it can always be rationalised by tweaking Bible texts to give the famous Watchtower spin by presenting something as “God’s will”...and the sheep, with brains on hold, can only follow. Just think... if the sheep are told something by the GB that it is God’s will; that cements it for the follower, he or she is not permitted to say or think “Oh no it’s not!” Or question “How do you know that?”
As a business venture the imperative is to be rich enough to do what you want and the management need money to keep their message prominent to bring in new punters. Using a publicly accessible TV station is surely the commercial rationale of the moment for an ex publishing company with a cult agenda.
For thirty or more years they have been getting a fairly consistent number of new publishers, averaging something around 175,000 per year. As the membership steadily increases notwithstanding the disfellowshipped, the faders and the deaths, the effort vs results indicates a significant drop in efficiency. It now takes something like 13,000 hours of witnessing to make one new JW. In other words the message is no longer all that popular and in future it will continue to decline in appeal as the internet arbitrates religious questions with its democratic freedom of information.
Money and membership numbers are the only true Watchtower values which denote operational success. Through years of selling pointless literature printed by virtual slave labour; the WTBTS amassed great wealth and great wealth earns great interest. At the same time there exists is a lot of momentum of loyalty through family membership built up over the century and whilst there are fewer converts in the educated and richer West, there are enough old JW families to perpetuate the religion through their offspring alone. So this is the trend: the org is growing through breeding and not by preaching. This makes me think that the same could eventually happen in the third world where expansion does exist for now, that a saturation point will come and the JW org will nevertheless be in control of even greater wealth and large numbers of dim-witted believers loyally breeding new child members... just like they did in the Catholic Church.
There is however a dramatic difference; the Roman Catholic Church has a magisterial hold over its vast but diminishing membership based on the myth of an apostolic inheritance from Jesus’ appointment of Peter. The Watchtower religion makes its claim by contrast as a doomsday cult, not of this world, which can never claim the ‘earthly’ authority as does its envied and supremely successful rival.
The authority of a doomsday cult arises from the confidence in the accuracy of its predictions...
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Yet more trolley (in)activity
by konceptual99 ini am currently having to spend a little time waiting for an appointment in the vicinity of a central london station.
whilst waiting i am catching up on some work in a cafe.
i can see a couple of trolleys and have been watching them for around an hour now.. not one person has stopped to take literature.
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Half banana
I was in central London two days ago with twenty minutes to spare and felt like doing some JW-baiting (bit like bear-baiting but not so bloody). But when I got to Oxford Circus tube station the resident JW was chewing the fat with a passing fellow believer. I felt like interrupting and saying "Do you mind but you are already converted and I want to have an exclusive and devastating argument with this lady". I didn't... heigh ho. -
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Facing up to the reality of the world
by purrpurr insince becoming atheist i have been paying more attention to world events and issues.
this is giving me some worry's when i see what's going on.
as a jw i could just dismiss stuff saying "armageddon is coming, jehovah will look after us" etc etc now of course i can't do that.
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Half banana
Purrpurr, congrats on arriving at reality! Yes the old publishing religion gave a sense of security which was a false comfort but real life has to be negotiated with rational values and common sense... and of course there are horrible things around us not the least of which are those caused by religious fundamentalism.
My own experience was to realise that there is no god even before I left the org. The meetings became unbearable, the crassness of the preaching from the platform made me squirm inside, I felt even though I was forty years old I was being treated like a child. I had an overwhelming feeling that I was not flourishing under the WT regime, I was getting nowhere quickly I was being stifled mentally and intellectually. I wanted to shout out at the meeting and say, stop this is madness! But sensibly I didn’t as I had planned to fade asap.
In answer to your situation ”how do atheists cope?” I would say firstly that atheist people (who are not a homogeneous group) get along fine just as religious people do. It’s true that True Believers like JWs put all their emotional eggs into the one basket of spiritual hope, take that away and they are floundering...and that is what I think you are talking about.
What characterises the human animal is their active intelligence in understanding situations and I think that to leave the depressing cult allows for a wonderful opportunity for personal growth. I was told on leaving school that I shouldn’t go to college, so, fool that I was, I became a window cleaner. (If you want to fail in life---join Jehovah’s Witnesses!)
Upon leaving the org, I began to study hard and started on my first college course at the Open University (UK). I love learning at uni level, it has given me the broad view of the power play in history and in society and illuminated for me more detailed information on my favourite subjects some of which relevant to my work as a designer. Good education gives a person confidence, or rather shall I say it gave me confidence and great pleasure... which are the very things taken from you as a JW drone.
So I’m suggesting that to counter years of religious indoctrination; firstly gain an understanding of what life is actually about; read and know why the org is wrong, catch up on education and secondly develop your own talents, make your own objectives...and really enjoy achieving them ‘cos the world is actually a wonderful place and full of lovely people!
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People should learn more about the Bible flaws
by opusdei1972 ini have noted that the main problem for those who are seduced by the watchtower society is their ignorance about the bible itself.
people who believe that the bible is the word of god usually ignore the studies on textual criticism and how scientific criteria forbid absurd stories like that of the global flood.
so, i strongly believe that students in schools need at least an obligatory course on "the bible" through the point of view of science and the textual criticism.
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Half banana
What planet do you come from Lorenzo Smith? You want your cake and eat it as well.
Education means being led out to where you would not be otherwise able to travel intellectually. To have, or even need faith, is the reverse of education, it is the blinkered, inward looking cultural impulse to appear acceptable to others in your chosen community and it is based on nothing other than wishful thinking. The contrast between faith and knowledge must first be fully understood and then faith removed from the discussion if one is to get a proper education. Faith is whimsy, only knowledge from evidential and testable (disprovable) sources make for useable information. This fundamental cornerstone of the western intellectual discourse dismisses at a stroke the whole shebang of religion with its faith and other holy drivel. Religion and mythology were the socially unifying tools which enabled mankind to hobble along before the clarity of the scientific method for determining realities. Times have changed.
The Bible is nearly all drawn from paganism...Surface reading of the texts ignores the primitive and universal folk myths from which the Bible finds its origins. Its stories are these much older stories bent around Jewish and later Greek ideas dressed up and as holy imperatives and delivered for political cohesion. To imagine that it is God’s inerrant word is just ignorance, to believe so was socially acceptable in the past but today it no longer stands up to scientific scrutiny. It remains a very important collection of historical texts but to believe that it is from God is naive.
Forget the edicts of the past, move forward and base your judgement on knowable things...the Bible is on a par with fairy stories.
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How much damage has internet done against the The Watchtower Society ?
by opusdei1972 inin the beginning of internet the society was worried about the information published exposing its falsehood.
so, i wonder how many people lost the society on account of forums and web sites like this.
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Half banana
I agree Brokeback, it’s a bit early to determine the real cause for the decline in expansion of the WT but surely the proliferation of negative information on the internet must be involved. With few new members coming in, the rot will start showing and discourage the existing members who will be mainly “born-ins”.
The folly of the governing body is imagining that Big J is going to bless their work whatever medium they use...”God is richly blessing his people, just look at all the honest hearted ones coming to his holy organisation” (pause for vomit). I hope the internet with its openness and ready access to universal information will demonstrate this to be a myth. I hope that the internet will be the death of them and the sooner the better.