Posts by Half banana

9

The identifiable reasons the Jehovah's Witnesses religion is a cult.

by Finkelstein in

this topic or debate has arisen a few times so, i thought it would be prudent to make an honest evaluation upon that statement.. if one reflects back on the history of this organization one can see how the leaders of this organization enforced or instilled it rules of conduct and rules of avowed allegiance to the those specific leaders, keeping in mind how j rutherford's forceful tactic to take over the organization upon c t russell's death.. j rutherford, the past president of the wts and the one that created the name jehovah's' witnesses ruled over the (his) organization with a strong arm, anyone who questioned his personal behavior, not only his doctrinal teachings were given the boot or dfed as its commonly known .

one particular documented instance ........ .

on october 7, 1940, olin r. moyle, formerly of the jehovah's witness legal staff met with joseph rutherford and several members of the watch tower board of directors in court.

Half banana

Thanks for posting this Phizzy and good on you Lennyinbluemont.

Fink, I reckon that the key to all cultic behaviour is to elevate the leadership presented through a powerful propaganda machine. The claim made by cults is that the governance, though human is under divine enlightenment and if you play your cards right; you too will get a piece of the action.

A set of doctrines are built around this idea and every propaganda utterance reinforces the leader’s vision which are given to the grateful followers. Just analysing a paragraph or perhaps even a sentence in the Watchtower magazine exemplifies this. Objectivity is thrown out of the window and the reader settles down to absorb gobbledegook. A special language develops with words having new and specific meanings for the insiders only, which strengthens the identity of the cult. It makes for an esoteric “truth” which only the initiates or baptised can know. An identity which the hapless follower cherishes since it gives them an exclusive identity too, it helps them to see who they are; a slave of their heavenly lord...though in practice this work is for the aggrandisement of the leadership.. To work like this in the company of like minded colleagues encourages a sense of purpose because if others are doing it, then it must be ok mustn’t it?

What a trap for the poorly informed? What a disaster for those investing their hopes in doomsday cults like the Watchtower org?

20

Grandchildren pay for the sins of their parents.

by Bonsai in

my wife's mother just related to us an interview she heard during the recent three day convention that she just had to share with us.

a brother and his wife have, for over 20 years, shunned their daughter because she ran off and eloped with a worldly guy.

while openly sobbing, he related how difficult it has been to shun his daughter and avoid unnecessary contact with her and her family.

Half banana

Datto you’re right, the Watchtower uses reptilian thinking. Higher brain functioning is not permitted.

Shunning is not to keep the congregation “uncontaminated” as they say but to threaten those who might stray and punish those who do.

At the same time it prevents JWs from learning about the glorious freedom which comes from NOT BEING A JEHOVAH’S WITNESS!

7

When did things turn from paganism to religious?

by ssn587 in

jw
friends

heard someone mention that certain acts are pagan.

so thinking about it, i surmised that marriage, sex, eating certain things were okay and then after g-d gave the law to moses (supposedly) there was a separation for things, actions etc., that were pagan and otherwise bad.

just wondering what others may think about this.

Half banana

ssn587 your question makes an assumption that is incorrect. It implies that paganism, that is the beliefs of the rustic crowd as determined by the literate town crowd, was not religious. Pagan beliefs were distinctly religious because they made a connection between the visible universe and an invisible heavenly host of gods. The actions of these gods were described by the Sun stars and Moon with their predetermined, predictable course telling daily, monthly and annual stories of heavenly dealings.

Primarily the Sun gods activities were profoundly connected to the farming world since it marked the seasonal work in the countryside. The Sun Gods had offspring who were also Sun Gods who were born at midwinter and died sacrificially and went to their heavenly father at the spring equinox. That was why the sunlight was strongest after Easter to ripen the crops.

Most religions based on agricultural myth has at its root an elaboration of these pagan tales.

38

Whatever Happened to the Remnant?

by snugglebunny in

jw
friends

back in the 50's, when i was just a skinny kid, my father became po of a new congregation.

he'd only been baptised for around 4 years, so his rise was quite remarkable.just one of his flock in the new cachement area was of the "remnant".

this lady was well into her 60's, childless but married.

Half banana

@ Paradisebeauty. As I said the clever bit of Christianity was in obscuring the pagan sources of the ideas. Wikipedia is not a scholarly source but neither would you expect to find the Jesus/ Horus parallels under the Horus entry, it is another discussion and as I also warn that the vehemence with which Christian believers regard the subject of the parallels make up the vast majority of the comments. It is actually hard to find the core subject matter for analysis. It does exist in scholarly books such as "Who is this king of glory" by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Academy press 1944.

I’m not attacking you or your faith but since the JW religion is based on the Bible, we do not want to be duped a second time. We need to be sure of what is truth and what is story. JW org shares the same errors as the other churches do and that is that the very foundations of Christianity are drawn fairly and squarely from the earlier Christ cults whatever Popes or Saints say. The Jesus story is just the re-labelling of older cult myth and mystery religions to appeal to the beliefs of cosmopolitan Jews, Romans and Greeks back in the first four centuries of the calendar.

38

Whatever Happened to the Remnant?

by snugglebunny in

jw
friends

back in the 50's, when i was just a skinny kid, my father became po of a new congregation.

he'd only been baptised for around 4 years, so his rise was quite remarkable.just one of his flock in the new cachement area was of the "remnant".

this lady was well into her 60's, childless but married.

Half banana

Paradisebeauty, apologies, it was late when I wrote, I should have said the character Horus has a more than remarkable parallel with Jesus in the Osiris myth.

Do note the barrage of Christian rejection of the parallels between Horus and Jesus. The argument of the modern Christians in the Wikipedia entry on comparative myth is very faulty and they preface that it is it has a questionable neutrality. The first Christian objection is that the agreement is only partially true, therefore they dismiss any link of the past myth with the Bible, secondly they claim it implausible because Christian monotheism in the first century rejected paganism. These two arguments ignore the nature of the transmission of fundamental myth and make the false assumption that the Bible cannot be in error. Christian doctrines were almost all borrowed from paganism especially from Mithraism, itself a fusion religion drawn from many older beliefs. Nobody promotes a new doctrine unless it had already some foothold in the human religious imagination (although Ron Hubbard bucked the trend).

Without a shadow of doubt the first century Jesus religion came from pagan folk belief. As I posted elswhere, Saint Augustine in the early fifth century said,

“The same thing which is now called the Christian religion existed amongst the ancients”.

And how about this from Pope Leo 10th:

It was Pope Leo X who made the most infamous and damaging statement about Christianity in the history of the Church. His declaration revealed to the world papal knowledge of the Vatican's false presentation of Jesus Christ and unashamedly exposed the puerile nature of the Christian religion. At a lavish Good Friday banquet in the Vatican in 1514, and in the company of "seven intimates" (Annales Ecclesiastici, Caesar Baronius, Folio Antwerp, 1597, tome 14), Leo made an amazing announcement that the Church has since tried hard to invalidate.

Raising a chalice of wine into the air, Pope Leo toasted:
"How well we know what a profitable superstition this fable of Christ has been for us and our predecessors."

And that is from the horse's mouth!

The great skill of the early Church was in suppressing the source information.

10

How strange that God's organisation needs tob eg for money

by Half banana in

i would say that if god or jehovah or any other named or nameless god needs money then he/she/it is not much of a god.

as a poor jw pioneer i scraped by as a way of life serving a god i could not know, see or sense in any way but i swallowed the biblical dogma and recalled that the birds of the air neither toiled nor sowed but were provided for.. so for goodness sake...why is the jw org so concerned with keeping, promoting or downright snatching as much money as they can from the sheep?.

is it a sign that jehovah has disinherited them?

Half banana

Yes WT Wizard, it’s only the truly impoverished who need god...or “that thing thing” as you call it!

So the answer is have as many poor and desperate people in your crummy organisation, empty their pockets and bank accounts and they will love you forever...that is until they learn TTATT.

189

How much was Christ's ransom sacrifice? Equal to Adam?

by jonathan dough in

how much was the ransom?

gods justice did not require an exact equivalent man-for-man sacrifice between the first adam and jesus, the second adam.

gods gift required more.

Half banana

Sacrifice is so very Stone Age.

6

This misquote makes my blood boil! (Excuse the pun)

by ILoveTTATT2 in

this absolutely upsets me!they always keep doing this garbage, putting people into harm's way by not telling them the whole information!and plus, any blood info from australia is likely biased... the two jw's they hired to manage blood transfusions in australia are doing an excellent job at doing propaganda.

.

Half banana

ILT and Birdy, the incongruity is so absurd, It is the subterfuge of the cuckoo who gets its brood established and nurtured in the nest at the expense of the nest builders. Perhaps that's just business folks!

Why on earth do the medical authorities in these affected countries permit Watchtower lunacy when they are responsible for the lives if their patients? JWs would be the last people to be consulted medically on the matter of blood, it does not gel with normal protocol. Life is far more important than dogma.

I assume that it is partly a matter of the wedge principle. The thin end was inserted by the Liaison Committees in response to satisfying the hospital’s need for guidelines on the JW no-blood stance. This engendered some respect for JWs and entrepreneurs followed up with a credible professional team with carefully checked documentation for medical acceptability. Indeed bloodless surgery does have benefits but overall the transfusion of blood has proved its worth for almost a century.

The individual I personally know or rather knew, involved in the schemes is most definitely not a clinically experienced medic but a successful business man. The Watchtower and the JWs have for a long time made millions of people uneasy about taking blood and it is easy to scare the ignorant. Surely the Australian medical authorities and other such are not so naive?

I know you have done so much valuable and welcome research on this (and I haven’t) but I am still looking for your definitive evidence of official Watchtower complicity and profiting from the promotion of the work of Farmer and Hofmann et al.

38

Whatever Happened to the Remnant?

by snugglebunny in

jw
friends

back in the 50's, when i was just a skinny kid, my father became po of a new congregation.

he'd only been baptised for around 4 years, so his rise was quite remarkable.just one of his flock in the new cachement area was of the "remnant".

this lady was well into her 60's, childless but married.

Half banana

Paradise beauty, I recognise we have a democratic right to differ. You say you think that being anointed with holy spirit is the true Christian hope. You have every right to have a stab at belief but it can hardly be called knowledge can it?

Your opinions however are based on the Christian scriptures and the conventional spin taught from them... mine, on this subject, come from a literary reality. May I suggest that you quote the text of the Bible as if it is from a divine source whereas the NT is the work of cult leaders who wanted to use the old pre-Jesus saviour figures as the basis for their new vision of religious control. Partly it is due to the inclusions of the various older tales such as the different gospel versions of the nativity which make for the contradictions in the NT. And in part it was due to the need to harmonise irreconcilable dogma such as found in the different cults, including Judaism in the Catholic push to organise Christianity under the one united umbrella of the Roman Church. The Bible, for all its time honoured holiness is most certainly not from God. To believe that it is, leaves one vulnerable to perpetual misunderstanding.

If you quote the Bible and God and Jesus you must first be sure from a rational knowledge that these things are what you believe them to be. It is however very easy to believe things because we like them...but that doesn’t make them true.

As an example of what I am saying, might you suggest why it was that the saviour god-man Osiris had a mother called Isis Meri, was born of a virgin, had twelve disciples, healed the sick and raised from the dead his friend Lazarus. (The names and tales changed significantly over the course of Egyptian history) All this two thousand years before Jesus was attributed with the same magical properties? Can you imagine why this was?

10

How strange that God's organisation needs tob eg for money

by Half banana in

i would say that if god or jehovah or any other named or nameless god needs money then he/she/it is not much of a god.

as a poor jw pioneer i scraped by as a way of life serving a god i could not know, see or sense in any way but i swallowed the biblical dogma and recalled that the birds of the air neither toiled nor sowed but were provided for.. so for goodness sake...why is the jw org so concerned with keeping, promoting or downright snatching as much money as they can from the sheep?.

is it a sign that jehovah has disinherited them?

Half banana

(I notice it's not possible to correct the title line!) The organisation needs to beg money