I think you're right Steve, words like "rational" might be a bit of a stumper and then there are others quite alien to the JW vocabulary such as "delightful" and "innocent".
Half banana
JoinedPosts by Half banana
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Letter to Tony Morris and the management team at the Unicorn Ranch
by Half banana indear tony morris and all the management at the unicorn ranch,.
since i know you are avid readers of our delightful posts here on jw discussion, i thought i would take the opportunity to ask you a few key questions but first a little background info about me.. when i joined your outfit many years ago i was a schoolboy and believed what your organisation told me to believe (i was not very bright) and i expected the end of the “old world system of things” to come in my youth as you had said.
of course it didn’t, it still hasn’t and i’m sure this fact must hang heavily on your conscience.. my father told me that jehovah’s witnesses break up families and defending the watchtower up to the hilt, i told him, ”rubbish!” how disrespectful of me.. i declined the offer of college education as you had suggested and later gave up my job to become a window cleaner, my father threw me out of his house for giving up a career and joining such a family- breaking cult but i wouldn’t listen to him, i just got on with it and pioneered like a good obedient jw zombie.. later still i got married and had three children, alas, i only have one of my children who speaks to me freely as one warm rational human to another, the other two remain jehovah’s witnesses.. ok governing body and other managers, i admit we mock you here, it may not all be justified but once you also wake up and leave the org, then you too will get to be as angry as we are, then you too, will understand us.
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The anonymity of Jehovah's Witness material
by stuckinarut2 inis it vital for credibility to have the name of the writer of an article referenced?.
does this allow for honesty and accountability?
does this assist in ensuring that whatever is presented is as factual as possible, or not biased in some way toward the religion's ideas?.
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Half banana
Ruby I disagree with you saying that HQ research is "pretty thorough".
It is one thing to mine scholarly texts and find ideas which will support cult doctrine and it is another matter altogether to understand the political, religious and mythological context of the original documents.
The lack of attribution of sources and absence of an individual writer's name is symptomatic of propaganda as is the cloying and patronising language. The essence of Watchtower literature reveals wilful ignorance and cherry picking.
There is nothing academic or scholarly about the JW cult, it is all about controlling its members' minds.
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Letter to Tony Morris and the management team at the Unicorn Ranch
by Half banana indear tony morris and all the management at the unicorn ranch,.
since i know you are avid readers of our delightful posts here on jw discussion, i thought i would take the opportunity to ask you a few key questions but first a little background info about me.. when i joined your outfit many years ago i was a schoolboy and believed what your organisation told me to believe (i was not very bright) and i expected the end of the “old world system of things” to come in my youth as you had said.
of course it didn’t, it still hasn’t and i’m sure this fact must hang heavily on your conscience.. my father told me that jehovah’s witnesses break up families and defending the watchtower up to the hilt, i told him, ”rubbish!” how disrespectful of me.. i declined the offer of college education as you had suggested and later gave up my job to become a window cleaner, my father threw me out of his house for giving up a career and joining such a family- breaking cult but i wouldn’t listen to him, i just got on with it and pioneered like a good obedient jw zombie.. later still i got married and had three children, alas, i only have one of my children who speaks to me freely as one warm rational human to another, the other two remain jehovah’s witnesses.. ok governing body and other managers, i admit we mock you here, it may not all be justified but once you also wake up and leave the org, then you too will get to be as angry as we are, then you too, will understand us.
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Half banana
Dear Tony Morris and all the management at the Unicorn Ranch,
Since I know you are avid readers of our delightful posts here on JW discussion, I thought I would take the opportunity to ask you a few key questions but first a little background info about me.
When I joined your outfit many years ago I was a schoolboy and believed what your organisation told me to believe (I was not very bright) and I expected the end of the “old world system of things” to come in my youth as you had said. Of course it didn’t, it still hasn’t and I’m sure this fact must hang heavily on your conscience.
My father told me that Jehovah’s Witnesses break up families and defending the Watchtower up to the hilt, I told him, ”Rubbish!” How disrespectful of me.
I declined the offer of college education as you had suggested and later gave up my job to become a window cleaner, my father threw me out of his house for giving up a career and joining such a family- breaking cult but I wouldn’t listen to him, I just got on with it and pioneered like a good obedient JW zombie.
Later still I got married and had three children, alas, I only have one of my children who speaks to me freely as one warm rational human to another, the other two remain Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Ok governing body and other managers, I admit we mock you here, it may not all be justified but once you also wake up and leave the org, then you too will get to be as angry as we are, then you too, will understand us.
Having stopped being a JW we awaken to the realization that we have been deceived, had our education stunted, our earning capacity limited, years of our lives totally wasted spent on a useless and undeserving cause, and often for good measure we had our families torn apart and split into factions, for and against the JW organisation, exactly like my father had warned me.
Tony and co, have you ever stopped to think and ponder that if God existed he has not blessed the Watchtower/ JW org at all? Never have the predictions come true. How ironic that it was the very same false predictions which have financially fuelled the JW business enterprise! Gives pause for thought doesn’t it?
Do you ever lie in bed thinking that all you have to do is keep moving the goal posts forward into the future and the wonderful, simple, faithful brothers and sisters will keep going to the meetings and lap up the propaganda and pay your bills?
Ask yourself, search deep into your heart; is this really what God wants? Or is it rather a matter of keeping the business on the rails? What do you fear most? What you fear most is your master. Who really is your master?
Which one of you will be the first to come clean and admit that the organisation is a fraud and offers a delusional, never to happen hope of paradise and that your hope of heaven is yet just another Biblical fantasy. Have you awoken to the reality that religion universally is kept alive by the by the vain hope of avoiding death? Have any of you already realised that there is no possible means of avoiding death?
Have any of you yet discerned that your reliance on a collection of fictional Iron Age texts is not providing life or benefits for the sheep, it is harming them and you don’t care for their welfare, you only care about your squeaky clean public image and your standing in the financial community.
Please-- when the first of you wake up, do come here and let us know how you really felt.
Wishing all of you the sleep of the innocent and a clean conscience,
Yours sincerely
Half banana
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Tony "Tightpants" Morris Talks Of Tight Pants AGAIN!!
by pale.emperor inagain with the pants... tony, if you can't stop looking at young men in tight pants don't take it out on the rest of us.
https://www.facebook.com/john.cedars.5/posts/868329653345317.
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Half banana
These overfed and undereducated men are not spiritual leaders they are substitute parents for 8 million sheepy type people. The more absurd they are in their demands, the quicker their “children” will grow up and leave home forever.
So keep at it Tony!
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May I ask for help about Egyptian chronology and Neolithic settlements?
by paradiseseeker inone of the first things that shook my faith as a teenager was learning about egypt and how its history goes back as far as 3500 bc, much earlier than the flood.
also learning about the first settlements like çatalhöyük, which flourished around 7500 bc, much earlier than the creation of adam.
the only answer i got from my mother was that this world is dominated by satan and thus we cannot trust in worldly chronologies.
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Half banana
Paradise seeker, this is not a one minute post but it does demonstrate that so much groundwork so to speak has to be understood before arriving at a scientific answer.
I think a word is necessary on the subject of archaeological labels. The Iron Age was followed the Bronze Age which followed the Neolithic which followed the Mesolithic which in turn followed the Palaeolithic, the old Stone Age. These are broad terms referring to a type of culture based roughly on the developmental stages of tool materials. I.e. Neolithic (meaning from Greek; the “new stone” age) is the last part or most recent part of the Stone Age and is characterised by use of polished stone tools unlike the preceding lower, and therefore older levels containing flaked stone tools exclusively. The thing to understand is that these period names cannot be consistent with all locations since developments took place in different spots on the map at different times. For example the Neolithic could have been, and was in progress in North Africa while parts of Europe were still the preceding epoch, the Mesolithic etc. So a specific name and date for a site is given for one location and importantly at the specific physical occupation level for that site. One site may have artefacts from a dozen cultural levels, this is very common in caves where occupation episodes might cover one hundred thousand years or more. This is one reason why archaeologists are painstaking in getting the stratigraphy well defined and any prehistoric dig will have a vertical cross section of the layers showing the horizons representing each superimposed layer laid over an older layer and maked with pins and pegs, all carefully measured and photographed. The term Prehistory broadly is before writing began.
So how do we know the dates of Egyptian kings? Well unlike the simplistic minds of creationists instead of looking only at one source, historians and archaeologists look at every possible reading of the evidence. In historic sources we have, most especially in Egypt, a head start because of the written annals of the kings and although not without error, the variables for gaps in dates are at least known and we have a sound chronology going back in time from Alexander in the fourth century CE to the earliest dynastic period 3,100 BCE. The great pyramid at Gizeh pyramids was built around 2500 BCE under the direction of the architect Hemiunu and never is there a mention of any flood in the region before or after.
So Egyptian chronology is easy peasy being historic compared to earlier stuff in the Neolithic. The later Neolithic covers the discovery of copper tools and is called the Chalcolithic (copper/stone age) and you may remember that Oetzie (or Otzi) the Ice Man found in 1991 frozen the Italian Alps, carried a copper axe and this was dated to late Neolithic/Chalcolithic and from 14C (carbon dating) it was confirmed he lived about 3350-3100 BCE, just before the historical Egyptian dynastic sequence.
I don’t know which country you are in but most national archaeological museums carry Egyptian material and it is possible to see in the Ashmolean in Oxford and the British Museum for example, the continuity of artefacts going back from the prehistoric Neolithic Egypt with pottery and stone tools continuing into the dynastic and historic period. Surprisingly, (well it surprised me) that there was a continuity of obviously Egyptian style which can be witnessed, demonstrating a cultural continuity from prehistoric into dynastic Egypt.
When items are found out of context, often it is the cultural motifs which determine its provenance but dating can be done as well even for things such as stone tools. (thermoluminesence and electron spin resonance are used) Archaeological dating methods are used age appropriate to an artefact or bone. So carbon dating is not used for early man because it only dates living objects, ideally younger than 30,000 years but doable up to 50,000. If your object is a very old skull, radio carbon will not work and other radiometric methods are used.
To summarise; in archaeology the first thing is to know the age of the soil horizon containing the artefact or bone. If a bone is found in the same soil horizon as a stone tool and a vole’s tooth for example, we have a lot of immediate information including the type of animals and cultural period from the style of the stone tool, all of which have known and limited time frames.
Geologists will determine the stratification by virtue of rock and soil horizons, small animals evolve quite rapidly and palaeontologists are part of the dating team in prehistoric digs which will give the parameter dates for extinct animal species. Other scientists such as entomologists will sift the soils to know what insects and other microfossils are present and others will look at pollen data with similar boundaries for determining the soil matrix date. It is these details along with the fauna and flora assemblages which pin-points specific climate conditions AND DATES for the region in prehistory supported by a myriad of earth scientist’s measurements to know the full sequence of climate data which is the backdrop to all dating in prehistory.
Therefore it is never a guess, it is a coordinated research based on multi-disciplinary scientific analysis which yields the date for the prehistoric periods. The historic periods as I said are by comparison easy and the distinction between the two is useful to appreciate.
Incidentally what I have touched on--and at the risk of boring the socks off you-- is hardly scratching the surface of the subject but needless to say, scientific evidence is not accessible to the closed minds of JWs and their ilk. However never let them get away with “carbon dating is faulty” because dendrochronology is absolute dating (i.e.to the year) and corroborates the accuracy of those 14C radiometric dates.
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Non JW and JW friendships
by ricsa inhimy story is as follows.
i've been friends with a guy for round 1,5 years.
he told me once he had another guy friend who was gay.
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Half banana
Thanks for your contribution risca, JWs are messed up in the head so a logical response sometimes is hard to elucidate. The whole mind-set of a JW is bound by what the governing body of JWs determine and that includes many primitive superstitions including the condemnation of homosexuality.
It may be useful as an outsider to wake your friend up by telling him just how far removed from normality he is. It has to be borne in mind that he takes enormous pride in believing what it says in the Bible as literal truth and by holding onto this delusion, (including condemnation of gays and lesbians) he thinks he will survive into paradise after all non JWs are killed by God. This is utterly paranoid!
Jehovah's Witnesses have the worst kind of paranoia; it is systematically organised paranoia.
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Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History
by pseudoxristos ini found the following article to be a nice contrast to the jw's gloomy point of view.. why 2017 was the best year in human history.
we all know that the world is going to hell.
given the rising risk of nuclear war with north korea, the paralysis in congress, warfare in yemen and syria, atrocities in myanmar and a president who may be going cuckoo, you might think 2017 was the worst year ever.. but you’d be wrong.
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Half banana
A good counter to the doomsayers and the Whitehouse, thanks pseudoxristos.
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Joe attends Iglesia Ni Christo church service
by joe134cd inwell i have heard various comments about them on here, so last week i decided to do an internet search on them.
i was quite surprised to find there was an inc in my local area and ironically only meters away from the kh.. it was very interesting to say the least, and in the short time i was there i could quite understand how they get there reputation as a high control religion if not a cult.
in some respects i think they are probably more jw than the jws.. let me explain how my visit went.
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Half banana
I can imagine the GB drooling in envy reading about the INC leadership buying a $200 million Airbus!
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Why the JW org should fail.
by Half banana indr margaret t singer, a professor of psychology at berkeley university california has studied the experiences of 700 cult members.
''consciously and manipulatively, leaders and their trainers exert a systematic social influence that can produce great behavioral changes,'' said dr. singer.. .
one of the ways the jw organisation exerts so much influence over its members is because it has created a culture sustained by constant propaganda, which polices itself according to how the leadership has moulded it.
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Half banana
Venus, what a typical and fatuous comment by the WT!
"More recently earnest researchers of the holy Bible have made a re-check of its chronology".
Its wording betrays indoctrination, it completely lacks academic authority, it was written for true believers to pressure towards conformity to their overlord's demands of belief. The statement relies on "earnest" researchers as if they really existed, no proper research project wants earnestness! It wants evidence and objectivity.
The other stupidity of this WT idea is the downright delusion that mankind has been treading the earth only six thousand years. How come humans were having sex with Neanderthals 300,000 years ago? Neanderthals died out around 30,000 years back.
Moral: Never believe anything the Watchtower or the JW org says.
But you're right, JWs are a social club first and foremost. If they stuck with that and dropped the religion they could remain viable (it would still be ugly) however I see them poised to fail due to the increasing light of social and technological progress, The world's toleration of primitive thinking which harms people has a limited shelf life.
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Why the JW org should fail.
by Half banana indr margaret t singer, a professor of psychology at berkeley university california has studied the experiences of 700 cult members.
''consciously and manipulatively, leaders and their trainers exert a systematic social influence that can produce great behavioral changes,'' said dr. singer.. .
one of the ways the jw organisation exerts so much influence over its members is because it has created a culture sustained by constant propaganda, which polices itself according to how the leadership has moulded it.
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Half banana
@ scratchme My feelings towards the JW org will not change by anything they do, whether they morph into a social club cum property scam or whatever, they have caused a lot of misery including pointless deaths and breaking up families including mine.
My hope is simply that they are exposed for the religious charlatans they are and that their grip on their followers' minds is released.