have you guys noticed, this year 2023 no more public edition magazines...i wonder how they are gonna spin that fact.
It is often claimed, the problem with that is that it may have been true once but the contents and title vary country by country, so the question is whether it is actually the same magazine.
Remember, in some languages they had a “study edition” already since the 80s and 90s. I know moving between countries, the articles and sometimes even the study articles were not the same, often delayed by 1-3 months (so you had to look in your Dutch November article for the US September Watchtower studies)
i would like to ask a question regarding gun ownership in the active american witnesses community.
while rifle ownership has been put in the same category as spear guns and fishing rods, how has the issue of pistol ownership been handled in us congregations?
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I know several elders that had gun collections, either from the army or direct purchase.
It depended on the congregation you were in, the ones in Appalachia were heavy gun owners and not even the JW could change that, second amendment applied to God as well, but go to New York City or Europe and you would think, like a Smurf, guns could walk out and kill people and having one in your home was tantamount to murder.
So in the end, as with everything in JW-land, it depends on your elders.
the bible is well known for its ellipsis* and its lack of explanatory statements of a term used.
there are exceptions in grammatical patterns, such as john exclusively using archon for ruler in his writings - which make the term self evident.sin - is defined"one" (unity) - is somewhat defined and also self evident from the context (no exceptions, every person part of that unity is listed in the context)an interesting thing to see would be how many terms are actually used and explained.
*the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues..
You also have to understand both the translational issues as already pointed out, the other problem is that most of the original texts were written in subversion of existing governments and thus not just written within context, but also using code that were designed to not be understandable even by contemporary readers.
Most of the apocrypha, the books of John of Patmos, Paul and even older books and writers like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel etc were all likely writing critical pieces chronicling the actions of their contemporary kings, leaders and governments, nowadays interpreted (falsely) as prophecy.
“supplies of offensive weapons to the kyiv regime would lead to a global catastrophe,” state duma chairman vyacheslav volodin said.
“if washington and nato supply weapons that would be used for striking peaceful cities and making attempts to seize our territory as they threaten to do, it would trigger a retaliation with more powerful weapons.”.
what is russia implying?
The tanks haven’t been delivered yet, the Biden admin is now saying they don’t even have the Abrams tanks and it may take up to a year to get the delivery arranged.
Likewise Germany’s 10-15 tanks is both not enough (just a token), apparently the Ukrainians aren’t trained on the equipment and have no clue on how to use them in battle and the delivery is likely ‘not to happen this year’.
So for all the ‘provocation’ it seems to just be a media stunt, neither Biden nor the Fourth Reich (EU) seems to be willing to actually provide any support and we know Russia has now amassed and plans to invade with a force 10x larger than what they did last year and Russia can literally throw another few waves of that size.\
Meanwhile Ukraine is so desperate, it is forcing conscription on older men, women and even men from groups like Crimean Tatars in territories they have re-occupied, there are many videos of the Ukraine military invading homes and forcing any male they find, even snatching them off the street to put into the meatgrinder. That is besides any support they are burning in the disputed territories with major war crimes.
bible says flood occurred approximately 4000 years ago.
that is about *200 generations of breeding to get to the population on earth now.
keep in mind that the population increase is geometric.
The Hapsburgs reproduced with a starting pool of about 8. They died out in a few hundred years and it wasn’t very pretty.
Even if you claim some extraordinary intervention in the gene pool, child mortality alone was 40% back in the day. So you needed to produce a lot of babies just to replace yourself and then the women had a 15-25% chance at death every birth which would stop further reproduction.
So statistically speaking, it would have been near impossible. For healthy gene pool and genetic drift you need a population of about 500-1000 humans.
nicola sturgeon's daft plan to introduce a gender bill which allows anyone aged 16 and over to legally change gender without a doctor's diagnosis of gender dysphoria has rightly been stopped by pm rishi sunak.. under the rules of devolvement, the uk government can overrule holyrood if the pm so chooses.. lots of predictable howling form the scotch nuts, with ridiculous claims that rishi is trying to organise a fight with holyrood.
of course, it's actually the other way round - the snp has been trying to pass this gender bill in order to drive a wedge between scotland and the rest of the uk.. sensibly, rishi has pulled rank on sturgeon and stopped her nonsense.. nicola sturgeon needs to know her place ....
@peacefulpete: I hope your family member gets sufficient mental health support, the rate of suicide, both before and after transition is very high. Only healthy, professional self-integration therapy has shown to be effective.
That being said, the rates of sexual abuse per capita by members of LGBT on children is approximately 4x higher than the per capita rate amongst heterosexuals. That is a fact that has long been established by statistics.
Moreover, people claiming to be trans has increased by 10,000% over the past decade. Unless you know something I don’t, this is an epidemic which is purely caused by media exposure and indoctrination. Much like being gay became a bit of a trend in the 80s with similar characteristics and similar problems (many people, but especially children were encouraged to ‘experiment’ causing the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS).
We are going to see an entire generation of people with mutilated genitalia, permanent dependency on hormonal and anti-rejection medication and the accompanying mental health and physical health issues. Off course those people will also want to ‘get their rocks off’ leading to much higher rates of sexual abuse of all varieties as ‘regular’ people don’t find their sexual presentation attractive, they will be forced to prey especially upon the weakest and least protected (children).
And to that last statement, we already have a lot of evidence, from the infamous serial school rapist case in Loudoun County in the US to jails across the world seeing a massive problem with male rapists entering female prisons using the claim of being female and impregnating other inmates.
2023-01-27--civil unrest.
click image to enlarge.. .
https://postimg.cc/gxqvnfcq.
Wondering if that is an indirect way of telling elders they should remove the documents from Kingdom Halls given recent searches on Kingdom Hall properties by local law enforcement. I think I predicted this exact action in another thread.
investing in unethical enterprises.
in the ocean, big fish swallow the little fish while the big fish are swallowed by the even bigger fish.. below is an example of this principle.. .
a fellow named mccann donated 50k shares of rand cam engine corp. to the watchtower society.. rand cam engine corp. manufactures aircraft engines for commercial, recreational, and military clients.
I don’t think Disney owns PornHub but they do/did own Viewer’s Choice back in the day, which was/is a pay per view provider which owns labels like WWE (wrestling) but also the seedy hotel room videos (although you can subscribe at home too).
“supplies of offensive weapons to the kyiv regime would lead to a global catastrophe,” state duma chairman vyacheslav volodin said.
“if washington and nato supply weapons that would be used for striking peaceful cities and making attempts to seize our territory as they threaten to do, it would trigger a retaliation with more powerful weapons.”.
what is russia implying?
@waton: wouldn’t it be nice if the world operated like that. Russia and Germany both want to expand their empires, this has been true for literally centuries. The best outcome for everyone is if small regions keep a national identity independent from both empires and don’t become deeply involved with either side, which was where Ukraine misstepped.
Yes, the USSR fell, but the drawing of the map in the 20th century, in Ukraine and the Balkan was a lot like late 19th century Middle East and Africa, carved up by third parties like the USSR, US, France, England and the (West) Germans in their self interest.
Ukraine has been at war with itself for years, Russia simply took advantage of a weakness in the west (Biden). Had Ukraine allowed the Donbas to become independent a decade ago (although that would cut into oil revenues for companies like Burisma) I don’t think Russia would’ve had gone this far.
“supplies of offensive weapons to the kyiv regime would lead to a global catastrophe,” state duma chairman vyacheslav volodin said.
“if washington and nato supply weapons that would be used for striking peaceful cities and making attempts to seize our territory as they threaten to do, it would trigger a retaliation with more powerful weapons.”.
what is russia implying?
@Sea Breeze: the Slovaks have been purging Czech language from schools and media. Yes, they had a “friendly” breakup but they still broke up, you don’t do that if you’re a happy singular group of people. Basically for most of the 20th century the Slovaks were the “hillbillies/dumb farmers” in the region that had to be educated proper Czech language while resources were extracted for not much in return.
The only reason they didn’t start fighting is because of what happened in Yugoslavia, the central Czech government wasn’t nearly as powerful and understood under pressure from the US that negotiated breakup was their only way out of civil war.
Czechs and Slovaks breakup was gerrymandered so Czechs maintained significant influence weakening Slovak politics with US propping up corrupt governments until a few months ago when the government collapsed while nationalist and anti-EU parties have sufficient popular support to coalesce.
There is a lot of information and context you don’t see in mainstream media. The culturally and socially imperialistic dreams of a United Europe is coming to an end and the chickens have come home to roost. I’m not saying the Czechs will start fighting the Slovaks, but there is a pathway for Russia to find a foothold there and expand into Europe, and there is enough local popular support.
If Russia starts funding the new Slovak government economy with cheap gas in exchange for leaving the NATO/EU for example, since that was the primary cause of the government downfall last month (all of Europe has been subsidizing the excessive gas consumption in Germany because they shut down their nuclear reactors).
Slovak nationalism and nationalism in all countries has been on the rise, like the Donbas region which wants to be independent and has been at war with Ukraine since 2014.
The US can bring many tanks in, I don’t see how that will stop the Donbas from wanting to be free. If anything it will deepen those feelings even further. And even if they even have enough people to drive tanks, where will they drive them? Are they looking to invade Russia? The Donbas doesn’t want to be liberated and it is a logistical nightmare for tanks in those swamplands between Ukraine’s border and the Donbas.
Ukraine should simply agree to a cease fire and give up the Donbas as a free independent state, but as said before, Biden and Zelensky both have personally profited significantly from this war so they want to stretch the inevitable out, Biden probably hopes at least 2 years until the next President so his image isn’t tarnished. Having a buffer region that can be “bribed” into favoring your foreign policies is better than having Russia as your neighbor.
