The Searcher I had exactly the same experience, even with those who had been close friends. Yes subtly provoke thinking and never condemn the org to an active JW.
Half banana
JoinedPosts by Half banana
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need input: My older son has an interesting theory as to why my wife has her head in a watchtower 90% of the time
by goingthruthemotions ini am still having issues with my still in wife.
my two son's and i don't want anything to do with the cult.
our marriage is a battle ground all the time.
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My Conclusion After Research
by Disassociated Lady 2 insince leaving the jws i have looked into many beliefs and have come to this conclusion.. paganism has a high regard for women, as they worship goddesses and respect the female for the ability to give birth to new life.
christianity puts females in second place to males and blames women for male temptations which goes back to eve eating the fruit and tempting adam with it.
they also created a devil with the appearance of the pagan god pan and built churches on pagan worship sites so that people would still go there to worship, but within a christian building.. i have come to the conclusion that paganism versus christianity is about a battle of the sexes.. the fear of demonic forces is taught by religions to deter you from straying.
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Half banana
Diss lady2, to adopt "pagan" beliefs is not that simple because it only implies believing folk tales. By no means is it the case that paganism places women on an equal footing with men. Most pagan ideas accept the male principle as being above the female. Try not to get carried away with idealistic assumptions like we did with the JW rubbish!
The ancient Egyptian religion is based on an unsubstantiated claim that all humans are always alive...a comforting thought but without the slightest evidence for its truthfulness. (As it happens I was just reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead this morning).
Religious belief, pagan or otherwise, is an attempt at an EXPLANATION for illiterate people in past times who had no chance of knowing the truth about the universe.
Nowadays we know about life, death and the universe.
.................................Why worship anything at all?
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My Conclusion After Research
by Disassociated Lady 2 insince leaving the jws i have looked into many beliefs and have come to this conclusion.. paganism has a high regard for women, as they worship goddesses and respect the female for the ability to give birth to new life.
christianity puts females in second place to males and blames women for male temptations which goes back to eve eating the fruit and tempting adam with it.
they also created a devil with the appearance of the pagan god pan and built churches on pagan worship sites so that people would still go there to worship, but within a christian building.. i have come to the conclusion that paganism versus christianity is about a battle of the sexes.. the fear of demonic forces is taught by religions to deter you from straying.
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Half banana
Since leaving the JW org I also realised that any individual or group who hold power over others will fight tooth and nail to hold on to that power irrespective of the moral legitimacy to do so. I have also learned to be true that as the saying goes; power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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Evidence of condescending thinking on the part of the GBoJW / Writing Committee.
by Nicholaus Kopernicus insource: july 2016 “study” watchtower.. .
page 11 paragraph 17.. “we should not imitate the people of ‘the nations,’ who have no real faith in a loving heavenly father who cares for those who put the interests of his kingdom first in their life.”.
page 16 paragraph 13.
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Half banana
Nicholas K, I hardly no where to begin when criticising the Watchtower---all of it is a distortion of reality and based on concocted sacred beliefs supported by patronising praise for those doing the will of the governing body.
The irony of the Watchtower is that the demand for things like humility apply in greater measure to those writing it in the first place!
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What were two Chinese doing in Roman London?
by fulltimestudent inin the ancient world, people moved around much more than we may have expected, (think of paul's reported journeys and those of his supporters), but the identification of two skeletons in a roman era burial ground, as chinese has surprised historians.. the uk bbc reports: .
dr rebecca redfern, curator of human osteology at the museum of london, told bbc radio 4's the world at one, the find was "the first time in roman britain we've identified people with asian ancestry" and it was "absolutely phenomenal".. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37452287.
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Half banana
Yes Mephis trade may well have been a reason if indeed ancient Chinese skeletal material has been found in England. The highly valued silk thread or cloth from China was clearly known to the ancient Egyptians and also to the Classical world because we have samples of it today in museum exhibits. It was often blended in with linen thread.
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Logical Problem with WT Anointed
by Vanderhoven7 inthe watchtower september 1, 1951, in a wonderful article entitled “hated for his name”(pp518,519) describes the persecution and martyrdom of steadfast christians in the first 3 centuries ad.. by the year (a.d.) 64 christianity was.
prominent throughout much of the roman.
empire, including the capital city.
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Half banana
I agree with the point you are making Vanderhoven, there are far more candidates for heaven than the literal figure of 144k.
However I would firstly caution the literal truth in the application of the word "Christian" to followers of Jesus in the year 64 and second, the reliability of church propaganda on the persecution of christians.
For the first point the "Christ cult" predated Jesus by centuries. There is no historical evidence of followers of Jesus amounting to any numerical force by 64 CE.
For the second, see: The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom 2013 by Candida Moss, a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity. The Idea of persecution began as did most of Jesus Christianity with the Catholic Church in the third and fourth centuries.
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Self-righteous Watchtower vs the pagan-inspired New Testament.
by Island Man inwatchtower refuses to translate stauros as cross despite having no evidence to refute the long-standing ancient belief that jesus died on a cross; and in spite of evidence that the romans were in fact using crosses in executions by jesus' day.
they shun the word simply because of the use of crosses in ancient pagan religions.. watchtower refuses to refer to their places of worship with the word church because of the word's supposed pagan origin or past usage to refer to pagan places of worship.. now contrast watchtower's self-righteous attitude of avoiding the use of all words having pagan religious usages, with the new testament verse of 2 peter 2:4:.
certainly god did not refrain from punishing the angels who sinned, but threw them into tarʹta·rus, putting them in chains of dense darkness to be reserved for judgment.. tartarus is a word that had rich pagan mythological meaning when it was written in the nt.
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Half banana
Spot on Island Man! The NT, like the OT for that matter, is drawn solidly from paganism, that means the folk beliefs of the common people.
Paul talks of being in the third heaven, he couldn't remember "whether in the body or not" so he said. What he was doing was referencing current pagan beliefs of levels of heaven to gain the confidence of those pagan believers to get them into his cult. After all they had similar goals of heavenly life, a ransom sacrifice through a god man saviour whether it was Dionysus (who was crucified for believing mankind) or Mithra who instigated the Lord's Evening Meal hundreds of years before Jesus did; they all believed in heavenly gods.
An intriguing link with all God-men including Jesus was that they were born of a virgin and the were the son of a powerful God (the Sun God). This links strongly with the very source of these folk stories: they were traditional and near-universal tales woven into the constellations of stars, the Sun and the Moon. "Born of a virgin" was reference to the part of the sky even today still labelled Virgo.This related to the ancient calendar when the saviour was born in mid winter... and died the sacrificial lamb in (Aries) at the spring equinox.The NT dresses up these familiar accounts and brings to the mythology an account of flesh and blood as if they were real people.
To take the paganism out of the Bible would completely take all the stuffing out of it because at its heart, it encapsulates the essential stories of paganism.
So: long life the Bible...but don't believe a word of it!
It's much better to know why it was written.
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Looking at this video with Dr. Angel Fierro and I'm cringing.
by Island Man ini'm cringing because the video is very empty in the way of presenting any credible evidence or logical reasoning for rejecting evolution in preference for creationism.
but it's not the only reason.the video wreaks of propagandistic manipulation.
first, angel gives very stereotypic reasons for why he accepted evolution in the past.
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Half banana
Empty, unchallenging and misleading information for those who yearn to be slaves under the delusion of Watchtower propaganda.
Wakey wakey people! videos like this will wither your brain cells.
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The elusive song 151 makes an appearance.
by SadElder inthe missing song 151 now titled "the revealing of god's sons" shows up with the september edition of tv.jw.
no words or score on the jw page yet.
can't say that it sounds any different than any of the other songs they produce now.
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Half banana
@ Anders, it seems that there is a whole Freudian world lurking under the skin of JW orgasm.
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JWs accused of pressuring Syrian refugees in Northern Greece to convert - so far, 40 have converted
by AndersonsInfo ini just received the following link to a video where some claim that jws are pressuring syrian refugees in northern greece to convert.
fyi, i tried to locate the date of the video, but couldn't, so don't know if it is recent or not.
https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/vb.407570359384477/791011651040344/?type=2&theater.
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Half banana
A religion of desperation, designed to appeal to the desperate.