Anony Mous

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Posts by Anony Mous

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  33

  Do JWs see the org falling apart?

  by ThomasDam21 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i have been away from the jw cult for many years.

  i don't have any family i talk to that are in it.

  so i don't know if the jws as a whole are seeing the cult fall apart or if they or the majority of them are head in the sand la la la the end is neigh.

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  Anony Mous

  The WTBTS since COVID has had the same issue many large corporations have: people noticed that sitting at home and doing nothing had the same result as going into the office and ‘doing work’. Guess which is easier. That is why they stopped hammering on service, first they had to comply with their WEF and UN cronies to keep the money flowing, then they realized nobody wants to go ‘back to the office’. Problem is they can’t lay off their funding source, if they found a way to keep the money flowing without the cost, they would do it in a heartbeat, like they have been doing merging building use.

  As with real (large) employers like the Federal Government or Microsoft, both parties know they can’t live without the other and both sides just have to figure out the minimum amount of mutual benefit that is acceptable. Some smaller companies and those with existing funding issues have been having mass layoffs for several years now (eg Twitter, Dell and HP) which doesn’t at all impact their service.

  I’m thinking we will end up with something similar eventually, where participation will be a ‘subscription benefit’, you have then 2 classes of JW, those willing to pay for the ‘club’ that will have access to even smaller KH or some kind of country club resort (temples like other cults eg scientology and Mormons have), they’ll get visits from CO and even GB members depending on level of subscription and those that just kind of show up to the ‘free web version’ on Zoom.
  
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  44

  New GB member Judy Jedele critizing Job's "humility" while wearing $20,000 Rolex, gold cuff links, coloured suit. Incredible!

  by WingCommander in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i swear, you can't make this shit up!

  for years and years growing up in this cult, i had to constantly hear from my parents, from the stage, in the literature, about "keeping your eye simple", not being "materialistic", not "having a showy display of one's wealth.

  " of course, this never seemed to apply to the wealthy business owning elduhzzzz who ran and lorded it out over the congregations, but i digress.

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  Anony Mous

  I don’t have a problem with the churches (or anyone really) not being taxed, but since we all do pay taxes, I do think these kinds of ‘benefits’ should be accrued towards their personal income and they or the org should pay employee taxes on it.

  The IRS has been very keen on prosecuting individual pastors the Biden and Obama admin didn’t like and making sure any private use of church property, even accidental was treated as tax evasion, yet these assholes live fully on the dime of their ‘flock’ and NYS and the Feds both don’t seem to care at all.

  Note that pastors CAN have both income and benefits that are “reasonable” for their position. Income however should be taxed and benefits cannot be “personal”, my mother living in the house and paying a fraction of the mortgage is considered taxable income for me, if I got a Rolex from her, I would have to report it as income, yet the GB lives like kings in private hotels and don’t pay a dime in taxes, get Rolexes and don’t consider it paying ‘income’ (the state publishes the annual tax records of all non-profits).
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  4

  Jehovah's Witnesses in the news: "Czech Culture Ministry Considers Deregistration of Jehovah’s Witnesses"

  by Balaamsass2 in

  1. watchtower
  2. child-abuse

  2/2025 czech news agency czech culture ministry considers deregistration of jehovah’s witnesses.

  the czech ministry of culture is considering the possible cancellation of the religious registration of the jehovah’s witnesses religious society, and has sent the organisation an appeal to desist from its illegal activities, ministry spokeswoman jana zechmeisterova told ctk today.. the ministry has received thousands of complaints from the jehovah’s witnesses about the proposal, which must be dealt with first.

  administrative proceedings have not yet been initiated, zechmeisterova said.. she said the ministry had begun to deal with the proposals it had received about the cancellation of the registration of the religious society of jehovah’s witnesses (nssj).

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  Anony Mous

  Once again I don’t agree with the fact that the government either supports or opposes any religion, but people have to understand that with support comes financial benefits and with financial benefits there should be responsibilities or expectations that need fulfilled. Also with proven issues of child abuse or neglect, the parents should be held responsible, not some higher up societal or group level of responsibility assigned by the government.

  As proven time and again, Europe does not have a right to freedom of religion as guaranteed in the US constitution, so people should look at it from that perspective as well. The WTBTS will make it seem they have been granted certain rights when they have not, they’ve accepted the cash, they need to be aware of what their benefactors want, whether that is religious, political or societal.
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  7

  Hole in the Wall

  by peacefulpete in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  a recurring motif is generally used by writers to connect stories and characters to the past or suggest parallels.

  the gospels and acts are filled with them.

  an example of this is found at acts, 2 cor, 1 sam and joshua.

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  Anony Mous

  That’s what I agree with as well, although I think a lot of the scholars still look through the lens of Christian apologetics. So a lot of scholars are theologians rather than archeologists.

  People here often quote scholars like Ehrman that even defend the JW interpretation without realizing that scholar is likely a JW or at least models his belief system according to it. Thus I have to discount their interpretations for clear bias. Likewise theologians often believe the story is the important part rather than the facts surrounding.
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  4

  Jehovah's Witnesses in the news: "I was exiled from my strict Jehovah's Witness community"

  by Balaamsass2 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i was exiled from my strict jehovah's witness community after i broke a major convention - they'll never speak to me again.

  daily mail.

  "a former jehovah's witness has shared her extraordinary journey of leaving behind everything she knew after falling in love with a colleague at tk maxx.

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  Anony Mous

  @vienne - what? You clearly haven’t been a JW. I was threatened with DF’ing for having a ‘worldly’ girlfriend. Later on, during my second divorce, they tried to DF me again as I was having several worldly girlfriends at the same time, they followed me to collect ‘proof’. Hell, during my first divorce, I was counseled for having a JW girlfriend ‘too soon’ and we were told to break it off, just because it could reflect poorly on the congregation.

  Yes, having a worldly relationship is a reason for disfellowshipping, it’s in the secret elder manual that people that ignore or reject the counsel of elders or what the WTBTS says on ANY matter is a disfellowshipping offense, it is clearly implied if not outright written in various publications that dating or marrying an unbeliever is ‘ignoring’ or ‘rejecting’ the WTBTS.

  w89 11/1 p. 18-19 - Nevertheless, the Bible’s counsel is clear: ‘Do not yoke yourselves with unbelievers.’ … To marry an unbeliever is to ignore Scriptural counsel (and there are other publications)

  the old YPA book said young people may rebel by having a worldly girlfriend/boyfriend, that was the book I was counseled from by the elders when I was 18, that publication doesn’t seem to be online anymore, but people that ‘studied’ it can tell you all kinds of stuff that wasn’t allowed (and they weren’t shy about the sexual stuff either).

  w61: being willfully rebellious…, disfellowshiping from the congregation may be the only course

  ypq: Jessica says, “I knew what I had to do.” Was breaking up easy? No! “This was the only boy I had ever really liked,” Jessica says. “I cried every day for several weeks.” Yet, Jessica knew something else​—that she loved Jehovah and that although she had got sidetracked, she truly wanted to do what was right.
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  7

  Hole in the Wall

  by peacefulpete in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  a recurring motif is generally used by writers to connect stories and characters to the past or suggest parallels.

  the gospels and acts are filled with them.

  an example of this is found at acts, 2 cor, 1 sam and joshua.

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  Anony Mous

  @peacefulpete: elsewhere I made the claim that Paul’s story was basically a rip-off/rewrite of an even older Greek tragedy that was well known at the time. Everything from his conversion to his death is a literal reference to that Greek story. Much like the Jesus stories as well as most of the (apocryphal) stories about the apostles later life. I find it thus extremely unlikely that the people referenced were ‘real’ in the sense that they actually experienced those things. They may have been figures that existed, but they were made into ‘superheroes’.

  So too many Bible stories are rewrites and references to older stories. The Bible wasn’t written in one go and most writers did not know of other books, so they are different versions of the same story that later were (poorly) rewritten into some kind of single story. Much like today you have stuff written like the Captain America, X-Men and Superman stories. Someone has been writing those stories since early 1900s, but they’re not the same writers and as time goes on they reboot them, they rewrite the characters to fit modern times, they have different timelines and universes, and people also make knock-offs and fan-fiction.

  We’ve done this for 100 years now, let’s say the distributor wants to make all the official and fan-fiction and derivatives into a single authoritative book on the characters, they’ll have to pick what they want from the stories, the book will never be fully coherent, it will have to be written by multiple authors that need to coordinate etc. You will have your super-hero Bible but a committee (let’s call it a council) will have to get together and agree on what goes in the final version. And all the superhero stories have literal references to prior stories, the ubermensch (Superman) and scientifically enhanced beings were a popular trope and like characters can be found in literature back in Victorian times, the Marvel and other writers took sometimes very strong inspiration from those stories.
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  18

  Using GROK 3 (Artificial Intelligence) to fact check UKRAINE theories/conspiracies, et al

  by Terry in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  to dig deep into what has taken place in ukraine both pro and con.

  i tasked a.i.

  with a pro vs con proposition.

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  Anony Mous

  @TD: AI does not ingest data that fast, they are trained on data that is about 6 months to 1 year or older. Hence they cannot ‘know’ what is going on ‘today’, it only makes inferences based on the structure of your sentence. If you see influence from your own Reddit in your AI response, it is because you (all humans) are predictable and you are even subconsciously bringing a Reddit-like sentence structure into your question, since it is trained on Reddit data, so when it sees your structure it will respond like a Redditor would. Try using other language (eg. long sentences that are typical to science papers) and you will see it changes ‘form’.

  All the AI (really they are langchains, not real intelligence) tells us is that humans are extremely predictable and our vocabulary extremely small and people are easily influenced, even subconsciously. The Grok engine can to some extent ingest ‘on the fly’ from the Twitter firehose, but really it is embedding the last few hour/days worth of data into a pre-trained model, Bing/OpenAI can do something similar with its most advanced model, basically embedding summaries of websites related to your query, but that feature is extremely expensive (the next version they are quoting $75 for every 150,000 word-chunks).
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  14

  PIMA is best so it’s not a shock to the system if the tower collapsed

  by JohnR1975 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i know most people here are totally out and that’s fine.. many these days are staying physically in for the social life and that is also fine.. i feel being fully mentally in is dangerous as it could be such a shock mentally if or should i say when the tower collapsed.. im sitting in the fence like so many others here.

  mentally agnostic if god exists or not and if the bible is his word.. when i talk to people who are physically and mentally still in i can tell that they so need it to be true.

  i’m worried for them when they wake up to the fact that they have been lied to 1914 wasn’t true 1975 wasn’t true 1999 wasn’t true and now here we are 2025 it’s all not true.

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  Anony Mous

  The problem you state is that you believe people are truly happy. I have not known a single JW that isn’t in some shape or form dealing with depression or other issues. How can you be truly happy when you believe 99.9% of people in the world, most if not all people at work and school, some if not most of your family will be destroyed and should otherwise not be associated with. That hot guy, sorry, not a JW, can’t even talk to him, your own parents, sorry, not a JW, better be careful, people in the hall, better walk on eggshells so you don’t have to offend or put yourself in a position where people question you.

  People pretend to be happy in a lot of situations, JW can honestly not be happy if they follow the rules of association strictly. I recently commented to someone else, the first time in my life that I was truly happy was when I was on a path of leaving and doing things “I wasn’t supposed to” but you still deal with the guilt. It wasn’t until a few years later I truly dumped the entire thing and truly was happy. If, like me, you grew up in that environment, you don’t even know what happiness is until you step out. You can make yourself believe a lot of things, I tried the whole PIMA thing, it gives you some relief against the duality inside you, but you cannot know what it’s like until you’re completely out.
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  23

  In the past 24 hours, the world has been breaking into fragments. What will be the Outcome??

  by liam in

  1. social
  2. current

  new german chancellor merz has won the election.

  trump congratulated his victory but the response was not what trump expected.

  merz condemned america, saying that america seemed to be aligning with russia.. he also expressed doubts about nato’s future.. he is now advocating that germany must gain independence from usa.

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  Anony Mous

  @Vidiot: the snow Mexicans definitely deserve it, you elected Trudeau over and over again.
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  23

  In the past 24 hours, the world has been breaking into fragments. What will be the Outcome??

  by liam in

  1. social
  2. current

  new german chancellor merz has won the election.

  trump congratulated his victory but the response was not what trump expected.

  merz condemned america, saying that america seemed to be aligning with russia.. he also expressed doubts about nato’s future.. he is now advocating that germany must gain independence from usa.

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  Anony Mous

  Yes. A Great America is a Superpower. The fact you agree that it has to happen “again” means that America since Clinton has lost that status.

  So If that is the case, first of all the JW prophecy of the King of the North/South has fallen apart. Second of all, would you rather it was China that is the superpower. Because that is your choice, if you give up American hegemony, it’s going to be a cabal between Islam and Communism ruling the world.

  As far as the German election, that was to be expected. A center-left and center-right party must now combine into a coalition government and the left wing party leader is bashing America and steering for more war in Ukraine. What else is new?

  Also the UN bashing the peace process and condemning Russia and the US in a pointless vote (because Russia can veto unilaterally), Ukraine and EU stands with Hamas against Israel and Zelensky and EU doesn’t want to join any peace talks while Putin is open to them.

  All of the above has been the status quo for the past several years, now that Trump is in office, the media is finally passing information and blaming Trump when NOTHING has changed and Trump is the only people that want to change are being blamed. 2 years ago Putin was open to peace talks and Biden sent them more missiles and jet fighters instead. The last German election had similar results and the will of the people was ignored in favor of coalition left-wing government.