The National Redess Taxation Scheme is in Australia, not UK. But the UK thing has been known for a while, they are basically letting all the local halls go in favor of a centralized organization. That has been a thing in the US for a long time. The paperwork is simply par for the course, I guess it's too much work to close them all properly.
Anony Mous
JoinedPosts by Anony Mous
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15
WATCHTOWER extracts 104 million from Trust in U.K. Plan to ditch Kingdom Halls at play??
by Terry in{brother ?, a copy of this is being passed around here in bristol, kent, london, etc.
to “certain” elders by way of heads up.
feel free to ignore it or investigate it.
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The only man in the room - Kennedy 1962
by slimboyfat inin the current situation, it’s worth listening to this podcast about nuclear near misses.
the cuban missile crisis was only one example, but is worth considering.
in 1962 the united states and russia went eyeball to eyeball over russia’s military base in cuba.
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Anony Mous
@slimboyfat: The incident surrounding Vasily Arkhipov was not due to a command from up high, it was a commander that had gotten the idea that the US had already launched because he lost communication. This wasn't the first and definitely not the last time these things happened. There are various occasions that due to miscommunication threatened to launch a war.
There was no indication during the Cuban missile 'crisis' that the Russians would strike, putting the nukes in Cuba would have given no warning to the US had a missile strike been ordered against southern US states. So it seems insane that JFK would think they would first strike and then allowed them to put the missiles so close to home, he would have no warning when they actually did. I think both parties correctly assessed and backchanneled that neither would launch a first strike and the whole thing was just political theater in the end.
But JFK had, like Biden, no idea who or what would come after him, the fall of the Soviet Union dismantled a lot of protections in the command structure and like Biden he didn't care, as long as he had his political 'win' and could go another election (well, that was his plan at least). They don't think long-term, like China does. Hence why China doesn't want a long-term war nor a nuclear option, they, like the Soviet Union think not about winning today's battle but about winning tomorrow's war.
I think here too, there are still a lot of backchannels into Putin's organizational structure. The media isn't telling us everything, the government sure as hell isn't and Putin, like Biden is probably oblivious to the puppet masters that pull the government strings. I stand by the notion that even if Putin loses, he will not pull the trigger and if he did, there is definitely someone standing in the shadows to put a knife in his back if he truly loses it. His health is already weaker, so it'll probably blamed on that, the next president will then not admit defeat but start consolidating his forces and that will be it.
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Peak Cancel Culture
by Simon inwe seemed to have reached peak cancel-culture.
now, we get to try to cancel the citizens of an entire country for something their government chose to do.. really, we can't allow russian individuals to compete in sports?
to live a life?.
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Anony Mous
This is exactly what the left wants though, they want to JUSTIFY cancel culture. This gives them opportunity. They want to JUSTIFY higher oil prices, that's why they let Ukraine be invaded. The Biden admin won't do anything, because this war benefits him, it takes the attention away from disastrous economy and his administration.
Biden is not dumb, he's ruthless. Remember when he got Shokin fired for daring to investigate his son, he was basically threatening that he would let Russia invade in 2014 (which was effectively what $1B in military aid was earmarked to prevent) in order to get his son off the investigation.
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The only man in the room - Kennedy 1962
by slimboyfat inin the current situation, it’s worth listening to this podcast about nuclear near misses.
the cuban missile crisis was only one example, but is worth considering.
in 1962 the united states and russia went eyeball to eyeball over russia’s military base in cuba.
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Anony Mous
I think JFK royally screwed that one up though. In the end JFK practically chose for Cuba to be a terrorist dictatorship with terrible suffering for millions over the years and gave Turkey over to Islamic and particularly Iranian interests which led to the modern era of Turkey being a hellhole, Afghanistan, Iraq etc. Not only that, it lead to a massive nuclear scare, nuclear missiles off the coast of Florida means the US was permanently weakened.
There would've been no nuclear war, this is all just grandstanding, the Soviets knew they had no chance of winning any war, but they knew JFK was a weak president, they didn't do the same with Nixon or Reagan, because they knew that actions have consequences with those presidents.
Just like Russia knows they cannot win a nuclear war, China knows that would be the end of both their empires, it's all just grandstanding in the hopes that a weak US President will just give them what they want. They're basically North Korea, only bigger.
Sometimes leaders just got to tell their constituents that they have to sacrifice, that is true leadership, not cowering and letting others take both the blame and bear the results of your actions.
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Did you ever have an “Olaf” moment.
by Slidin Fast indid your class mates queue up to have sex with you?
it happened to olaf according to today’s wt.
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Anony Mous
Not queue up. But I had a couple that wanted to. My dumb JW self rejected them. Not sure why the WTBTS would make such big deal out of it, requests for sex happen all the time amongst single teens and adults.
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JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them
by Anony Mous inso a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.
if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.
now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.
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JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them
by Anony Mous inso a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.
if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.
now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.
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Anony Mous
@pistol: hence why I started this thread. I noticed the same several years before I even let JW and I’ve always been interested in the apocrypha. They are basically books written by contemporaries of Paul that were left out because the Catholic faith needed a single direction. But you still have Ethiopian and other Orthodox churches that do not accept the Catholic (council of Nicea) version of the Bible and include or exclude certain books from their canon. There had been an attempt in some Protestant circles to basically rewrite parts of the canon (hence why older NWTs have a few sections that are excluded from the KJV), but nobody never went as far as creating a full Bible with commentaries and “apocryphal” stories the way the Jews have the Talmud for example. Until ~1950 there also never was any real attempt by modern scholars to unite the views either theologically or archaeologically and come up with a more accurate story of the potential historical events and even the ones that are don’t see much mainstream attention.
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JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them
by Anony Mous inso a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.
if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.
now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.
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Anony Mous
Using only these sources, the 12 facts of Jesus Resurrection are agreed upon as literal history by the majority of skeptic scholars who publish in this area. And, as such cannot be dismissed by thinking people.
That is a very strong claim. I think you mean theologians, not archeologist. Big difference between the philosophy of Christianity, which include the requirement to accept those 'facts' but they aren't facts in the sense that they are true things that happened.
You're talking and quoting theologians, not scientists.
Even so, you cannot dismiss that the stories of the Passion and Resurrection are completely different and occasionally conflict in the 4 canonized books and even more different in the apocrypha, Muslim and contemporary Jewish theology, including the link you pointed at showed that according to the Jews, Jesus was hanged.
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JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them
by Anony Mous inso a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.
if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.
now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.
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Anony Mous
No, those “facts” take the resurrection as a fact and then come up with those articles to support it. However, no scientific evidence of either Jesus and especially not of anyone ever having been resurrected has been brought.
What you define as a fact and scholarship is faith, and complete different than what the scientific method requires for proof, facts and evidence. It is not faith, I have it on good authority that resurrection is not a regular thing, however during the time the resurrection is written about, it had become so banal not even the Romans wrote about it?
You’d think a city full of zombies, the story of Lazarus, the story of the girl Paul resurrected, the story of Jesus; you’d think someone else would’ve noticed all these people kept coming back, and if it were that common that nobody noticed at least tax and death records would indicate this was a common occurrence.
But it seems only Christians noticed a few decades after Jesus had already died and even they can’t agree on the specifics. You said it’s a different part of a story, which is possible if they all had different sections of the story but that doesn’t explain the blatant contradictions in all the stories or even the completely different order of events depending on the target audience.
Simply said, if you take away the Christian sources on the subject, what is the story on Jesus you are left with? There is no Jesus in any contemporary record, Christians are mentioned as a sect from the Jews, Pontius Pilate is a footnote at best. Resurrection doesn’t even come up, there are no graves we can visit, you’d think, given the importance of the event to their faith, that is the first thing early Christians would remember to properly identify, geographically pinpoint and later on secure as evidence. This is what the Muslims did, they have an important stone, they have to make a pilgrimage at least once in their life, they always seem to know where it is anywhere on earth they are. Same for the Jews, they only have one wall left, but they know where it is, they try to make pilgrimages to it.
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JWs don’t use the apocryphal, yet source them
by Anony Mous inso a quick little note about a few things that i recently learned.
if you ever had the yellow book of bible stories, there was the story of enoch, also repeated in other watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth.
now if you look at the nicean bible, which is the wtbts selection of the bible, it mentions enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about nephilim and ben elohim.
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Anony Mous
@Sea Breeze: there is no scientific evidence for any of those “facts”. They are simply articles of faith. That list is simply paraphrasing portions of the gospels and the Pauline epistles that Christians have to accept without questioning.
But as you know many of the gospels, as well as the apocrypha have large variations of the events surrounding Jesus’ supposed death, it is very much devoid of a historically accurate and verifiable story and every single story, even in the canon, has differences that are hard to ignore both during the passion (see here: https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/research_sites/cjl/sites/partners/cbaa_seminar/Passion_Narratives.htm) and the ressurection (how many angels, men or Jesus himself were in the tomb, which belies at least one of the “facts” you mentioned, the tomb was not empty in any account, how many did he appear to and who first etc etc)
As far as the lack of historicity, Pontius Pilate for example in the Biblical story is written as a kind but weak willed person, allowing the Jews to carry out their own judicial proceedings, however historical records like that of Philon and Josephus describe him as a cruel, stubborn and merciless person that oppressed the Jews and would never allow any sort of self-governance.