Nathan Natas --- Yes.
LoneWolf
LoneWolf
JoinedPosts by LoneWolf
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41
Will the WBTS order JW's to Kill??
by Anne Marie indear post reader,.
about nine months ago, while surfing through different jw web sites, i came across a reference to an e-mail that was sent to the poster.. the e-mail basically said that with the way that things are going with the society, i.e., so many " waking up", and not being so easy to mislead and control., that there very likely will be a "big" announcement regarding the order to kill the "apostates" and the "wicked people".. the source said that it would go something like this:.
there would be talks, and some wordings in the magazines, alluding to an upcoming announcement.
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41
Will the WBTS order JW's to Kill??
by Anne Marie indear post reader,.
about nine months ago, while surfing through different jw web sites, i came across a reference to an e-mail that was sent to the poster.. the e-mail basically said that with the way that things are going with the society, i.e., so many " waking up", and not being so easy to mislead and control., that there very likely will be a "big" announcement regarding the order to kill the "apostates" and the "wicked people".. the source said that it would go something like this:.
there would be talks, and some wordings in the magazines, alluding to an upcoming announcement.
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LoneWolf
LOL, Alan. You did quite a job on that.
Anne Marie --- I must agree with the others. The scenario described is just too obvious for it to work. If anything were to come down like that, they would almost undoubtedly use a line of reasoning similar to A.F.'s, but restrict it to a very few, expecially "privilaged" individuals that they knew they could control.
These would be used as commandos and the rank and file would never learn of their existance.
LoneWolf
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19
Shunning/Ostracising
by DevonMcBride inthe past few weeks i have been comnunicating with jw's in my area who attend kh meetings physically but not mentally.
they are "closet apostates" or "double agents".
some are planning to leave the area altogether to avoid the hassles of being shunned.. according to one of these "closet apostates", he believes that 30% if not more of the members in his congregation would leave if it were not for the shunning.
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LoneWolf
I believe there is a way. However, it will take a few of us to have the courage to take the bull by the horns, so to speak.
The biggest bulwark the Society uses to hide behind is the Freedom of Religion clause in the constitution. What we need to do is to transform this protection into something we can use against them.
We could pit the freedom of religion of an organization against the freedom of religion of an individual. In short, does a religion, by right of being a religion, have the right to force an individual to violate their conscience? For instance, does Islam have the right to force a member to kill infidels?
There are plenty of instances where conscience is deemed as supreme. During the Nuremburg trials, many of the Nazi's were defending themselves by saying that they were only following orders. That arguement was thrown out on the basis that their consciences should have told them that what they were doing was wrong.
We can further sell this idea by referring to Jim Jones, Koresh, and those fools who wanted to ride on the comet. We need something that can reign in these egomaniacs, to even the playing field, so to speak. Limiting them in this manner would be a large step in that direction.
LoneWolf
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14
More on my Mom and the elders
by Mulan inmom and i have both talked to the elders at her kh, to tell them what the guy at patterson told us........that there is no problem with her living here, and that people should be visiting her.
mom misunderstood, and thought she was supposed to call all the elders.
i am sure the fellow meant to tell an elder, so he could tell the others.
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LoneWolf
Mulan, I too am disgusted by this high-handed conduct. You did well, but I must add my voice to Had Enough's:
Mulan, you mentioned in another thread that the one you called in Patterson said to keep him informed. Why not do just that and inform him of this latest unchrist-like retort from that elder to your mom. Perhaps some "elder cleanup" action from the "higher-ups" may come of this.
The Society has a great deal to answer for, yes, but we must also be fair and let them know what is happening. Otherwise they have no chance to deal with it.Plus it raises the question as to how many others will be hurt by this man's attitude if he is not corrected.
On a further thought: I've been thinking for some time now of organizing a network of witnesses and ex-witnesses to care for things like this if the Society itself falls down on the job. We could pattern it after what the Society did with officials and even nations when they were being persecuted.
A simplified letter campaign (emails and telephone calls would be all right too) to the offending individuals should have a rather dramatic effect, especially if details of (what they thought were) their private conversations or committee meetings were referred to. Copies could be sent to the local newspapers and to the Society itself. Just the suggestion of such a thing would scare the living bejabbers out of most elders.
In this case it wouldn't even be necessary to know the name of the elder. The letters could simply be addressed to the entire body of elders with the opening words to the effect of "It has come to my attention that . . ." There is no need to mention how it came to our attention.
The network would be very simple. Anyone interested (say 5 to 10 people) could send me their email address. Should something like this come up, I would send them the details. They could respond or not, according to their time and desire. In turn, they could have their own group of 5 to 10, who in turn . . . you get the picture. All would be autonomous, and these calls to action could be sent up or down.
The more people who participated, the more clout the letters would have, as well as the more eyes and ears we would have in the congregations to make sure they are walking the straight and narrow.
As to the letters themselves: They should be brief but blunt, containing enough information to let them know that we are aware of what's going on, but letting them wonder how much more we know. They could be signed or not. An anonymous letter from California or Austrailia to an elder in New York (or anywhere else) making reference to something he thought was private will have considerable impact.
The letter should be free of profanity, as such will weaken that impact. Depending on each individual, we could personalize them if we desire: "I was/am an elder/pioneer/Bethel worker/witness/lawyer/etc. of XX years experience and . . ." We could even draw up our own form letters and just leave spaces for the address and a few pertanent details that could be filled in on a moment's notice and fired off. If done on the computer, all it would take is a few seconds of typing, hit "print", and it's ready to go.
As to repercussions, how? How are they going to prove that any one individual leaked this information and address? Plus, they're going to feel under the gun. He will feel that there are ??? number of people watching his every move and just waiting for him to make a false one. It's that uncertainty that we want to instill in such individuals.
If doing such things anonymously bothers one, just keep in mind that this is exactly what the Society does to us. If I remember right, Mulan, didn't you say that the individual you called refused to give his name?
I don't know about you, but I feel that it is high time that these high-handed fools be made to feel the same feelings of fear, frustration, and helplessness that they have so freely made us feel. This is one way to do that, as well as keep them in line.
A beautiful thing about this is that anyone; man, woman, or child, could have a part in this without fear of repercussion as long as they didn't give themselves away. It will give us an opportunity to actually do something about these things instead of just hunkering down helplessly and enduring while they run roughshod over us.
Looking at it in the bigger picture, this would also tend to drive a wedge between the elders and the GB.
In your case, Mulan, I would say that to take such a step right now would probably be a little premature. Let the Society have a chance first. If that doesn't work, then post their address here on the board, or if that is too open for you, send it to me and I'll take it from there.
Anyone interested in joining such an effort? Or perhaps have suggestions that would increase its effectiveness? I have a couple of situations that are ready for such a thing right now. One of them is an elder's son who molested his own daughter. His wife is divorcing him and he is suing her. He's disfellowshipped, but his family, who is still in, is backing him. You gals who have been molested in the past ought to have a field day with this one.
LoneWolf
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122
How old were you when you lost your virginity...
by butalbee inhow old were you when you lost your virginity and was it all that you thought it would be?????.
i was 19, and my first time was a complete let down.
i envisioned that gothic romance motif, all about romance and love, i didn't know what i was doing, didn't know sex was like that.
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LoneWolf
Mulan ---
That's fairly close to our story too. We married when I was 20 and she was 15. No, it wasn't a shotgun wedding.
She'd told me back when she was 13 that she was afraid that her older sisters were going to have the whole earth populated before she had a chance, and she was quite serious about it. We had six before she was satisfied.
4 kids, 7 grandkids.........all intact, and happy people!! Was it all easy going? Of course not, but what marriage is all smooth? I don't regret a thing.
I feel exactly the same. Plus, we're working on our 42nd year together and we have 7 grandkids too! LOL.Frankly, I'm inclined to believe that the young age is not so much the problem as is the input the "adults" give them about not expecting it to work. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps if they gave them as much support as they do doubt, there would be many more young marriages succeed.
LoneWolf
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11
An Unusually Insightful Opinion
by LoneWolf inapparently it just came out today.. lonewolf.
sacred cruelties.
commentary by maureen dowd for the new york times.
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LoneWolf
I like this. Apparently it just came out today.
LoneWolf
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Sacred Cruelties
Commentary by Maureen Dowd for The New York TimesNot long after Sept. 11, somebody scribbled these chillingly profound words on a wall in Washington: "Dear God, save us from the people who believe in you."
The atrocities and brutalities and repressions committed in the name of God fill us with a greater need for God, or some spiritual solace.
Dark days — in New York, Washington, Central Asia, the Middle East, the Archdiocese of Boston — make us look inward and affirm the power of faith to make the unbearable slightly more bearable. Beyond Prozac and Paxil, religion should be able to step into the breach.
But there's the rub. At precisely the moment when religion should have a calming influence, it has a dispiriting influence. Just when people need religion to bring them peace, it brings them war or crisis or abuse or just plain pain.
As the need for spirituality is growing, the credibility of various faiths is waning. Instead of addressing itself to the angels in our nature, religion seems to be inspiring the demons in our nature.
Asked by a British interviewer on Thursday how he coped with pressure, President Bush replied: "I believe in prayer. I believe in exercise." Stepping into the Middle East morass, the Believer in Chief intoned, "The United States will work for all the children of Abraham to know the benefits of peace."
Abraham was the patriarch of three great monotheisms: Islam, Christianity and Judaism. But now all of Abraham's faiths and Abraham's children are roiling.
The most grotesque example is the politicization of religion in Islam. Among the Palestinians, Egyptians, Saudis and Afghans, and elsewhere, the Koran is read as a political program, an incitement to holy violence, a charter for sacred cruelties.
Islam seems to be appropriated and eaten away by parasites: the terrorists, who cite Islamic teachings that violence is obligatory in the defense of the faith, and the Muslim clerics who preach a radical purity, an intolerant, messianic vision of a jihad to destroy the infidels.
In the Holy Land, radical Islamists are blowing themselves and other people to bits to get a foothold on the stairway to heaven. And some Jews are also displaying the deranging effects of extreme religion. The Israeli settlers' movement and many people on the Israeli right are prepared to go to terrible lengths in the name of God's promise of the land to the chosen people. They, too, treat scripture as a warrant for political aggression and outright militancy.
What more blasphemous spectacle could there be than Palestinian gunmen hiding in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the traditional birthplace of Jesus, and Israeli tanks laying siege to the manger?
Closer to home and much less apocalyptically, the Catholic Church also provides evidence of the damage that dogmatic faith can do. The pedophilia scandal engulfing a shameful number of parishes throughout the Roman Catholic world is sickening for anybody who believes that religion makes us better.
And beyond the sins of the priests, there is the truly godless cover-up by church officials. A little like some of the institutions of Islam, Rome is in a defensive crouch, protecting criminals in its midst instead of telling the truth and searching its soul.
Even the pope seems more concerned about damage to the church than damage to the individuals who were abused and wounded.
Evangelical Christians have also had a brush with the dark side of their shepherds. We now know that the Rev. Billy Graham — America's pastor, the preacher whom President Bush credits with putting him on the right path — is a man of prejudice. Recently released Nixon tapes give incontrovertible evidence of Reverend Graham's anti-Semitism.
Forgive me, but something is badly awry. I was taught that religion should inculcate sympathy, patience, compassion, understanding, forgiveness, a love of peace. Instead, the name of God is used to justify vices that are the opposite of these virtues.
It is not news that religion has its ugly, tribalist and bellicose sides. What is news is that those sides are having a field day. Just when we wish to flee to religion for sanctuary, we find ourselves fleeing from religion for sanctuary.
As my friend Leon Wieseltier once wrote: "Metaphysician, heal thyself
Copyright 2002 The New York Times
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LoneWolf
Yeah.
Sometimes I feel blue. Other times I see red. When both happens at the same time, I turn purple.
LoneWolf
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35
Austria goes "German Only"
by Adam ini must be a glutton for punnishment or something, but here i go again, broaching the subject of speaking english in america.. apparently a law was recently passed in austria that people must satisfactorily pass a basic german language skills test in a few months or they will be fined.
if they do not master basic german in 4 years, they can be kicked out of the country.
many people interviewed in the article mentioned that they are too poor to afford the classes.
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LoneWolf
LOL, expatbrit and Adam. I've always loved the different accents.
Reminds me of when I was highschool years ago. (1954-1958) The English teacher got mad at me one day. "Tom Howell, do you or do you not want to learn English?" She demanded.
"Heck no!" Came my answer. "I speak American." She didn't appreciate it.
LoneWolf
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41
How Would You Respond?
by silentlambs inbelow is an email i received this morning, can you feel the love from the spiritual paradise?
this brings it to a new level of accusations, now i am apparently gay according to the jw gossip mill.
i will have to add that to the list.
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LoneWolf
silentlambs --- I thjink I'd just sent him Proverbs 18:13 and let it go at that. He's not worth much effort.
As to thewiz --- There's not enough intellect there to bother with. My father, raised in the Organization in the 1920's and 30's and a congregation servant or elder for most of the time since, told me once, "Tom, profanity is the result when a weak mind expresses itself forcefully." I must agree on that point.
Plus, look at his name. Apparently he is so untalented that to him, urinating is an accomplishment worth bragging about.
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20
Ancient Egypt and the Isrealites
by MrMoe inok, moe gets serious, in a serious mood.. how accurate is the bible as a history book?
who knows, generally accurate in parts.
25-32 pharaoh basically makes joseph a holy man and.... 33 and now let pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of egypt.
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LoneWolf
Well, rats!
It seems that every time something comes along that I'm really interested in that I'm already up to my rear in alligators and haven't time to do anything about it.
I'll try to say a little anyway. The trouble is that I'm constantly approaching subjects from a different angle than anyone else does. Guess I'm just the original odd-man-out.
Thanks to the different approaches, I've come to different conclusions than you suggest. I don't mean to imply that you are wrong or that I am right, as I feel that it is far too early in such an investigation to set anything in concrete. However, I'll give a brief description of my thoughts and how I got there.
I first became interested in this when I was a kid and we were studying the ten plagues in Egypt in the book study. This was back in the 50's somewhere. Most people would be commenting on the contents of the paragraphs or on some other aspect of the lesson. But I would be completely lost in my own thoughts on the subject and would not be even listening to what was said. There were two aspects of this that absolutely fascinated me.
The first was that for such a monumental calamity to come upon any world power at any time would be impossible to keep under wraps. There had to be a secular account of this somewhere. No, I did not doubt the Biblical account. I wanted to believe it, as incredible as the story was, and to find a secular account would be a big step in that direction. Plus, what was the aftermath? How did the Egyptian officials explain these events to their followers, the Egyptian people left behind? They couldn’t just ignore it. True, it would be a twisted account, but any account at all, twisted or not would be a verification of the Biblical one. When I finally found it I was delighted, for my idea of what the account might be like was surprisingly close. It was short, and it seems that the Egyptians, having been terribly abused by these barbarians who had been raping the whole country, had rallied and managed at great cost and effort to throw the invaders out. Yeah, right.
But there was something that fascinated me even more. Remember how Jehovah had Moses tell Pharaoh, “But, in fact, for this cause I have kept you in existence, for the sake of showing you my power and in order to have my name declared in all the earth.”? Each one of those plagues was a slap in the face to one of Egypt’s gods. This was done openly, contemptuously, and all of the common people could see it first hand. Theoretically speaking, the common people would be afraid, even deathly afraid not to worship this powerful new god. What would the priests do? This situation would be extremely hard to hide.
That the common people were not accustomed to "love" their gods was the common experience among the Egyptians and other nations around about. Love was deemed unnecessary. Obedience and fearful awe was what was demanded, so worshipping a new god would not be particularly
difficult for the citizenry.And I found it. The book The Egyptian Book of the Dead by E. A. Wallis Budge is a record of the ancient Egyptian teachings about life after death. To read what the people of Moses day were forced to believe is enough to make one cry. They must have lived lives filled with nothing but terror and hopelessness.
But included in this book is a list of the main Egyptian gods and a description of who they were. To my utter delight I found that the largest write up of all was given to the god Amen who had, according to the author, “ . . . nothing whatsoever to do with the book of the dead; . . .” Shortly afterwards he goes on to explain: “When, however, the last kings of the XVIIth dynasty had succeeded in expelling the so-called Hyksos and had delivered the country from the yoke of the foreigner, their god assumed an importance hitherto unknown.” (Pages cxxvi and cxxvii) To then read the words of a hymn dedicated to the praising of this god Amen, some of which could have been lifted from the Bible itself, is to remove all doubt that one is looking at a corrupted worship of Jehovah. I found it extremely interesting to see how over the generations this worship was gradually corrupted further until it was nearly indistinguishable from the worship of the Egyptian sun god Ra.
According to what I read and in view of the above suggested series of events, I feel that all of the similarities you mention are easily explained by this forced introduction of Jehovah into the Egyptian culture. I have found practically no similarities in the two beliefs previous to that time.
You have no idea how much I wished to find others that were interested in such things when I was young. If I even mentioned such things, I was looked at like I was freak or something. That's one of the big reasons that I became
LoneWolf