i was raised a catholic until the age of eight which was a normal life.
my mother took everything the jws said literally and this destroyed my schooling and education.. the issue that i have with this religion is that they contradict what they say about education and elders encourage parents to prevent kids from gaining a college or university education as the jw objectives should be the primary goal in life.. they sometimes seemed to encourage education and recently i checked and now they are saying that education leads to alienation and suicide.
they state that university leads to immorality and drug taking.
They say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. I totaled up the hours I've spent going out in service, getting ready for meetings, attending meetings, studying for meetings, personal study, attending assemblies, pre-convention work, writing talks etc. etc.
Grand total approx. 40,000 hours.
I am an expert at nothing.
an emotion is an arbitrary, personal and wholly subjective physical reaction.
an emotion is a physical reaction to the value placed on something.
in short, an emotion is an appraisal.
Prodigal Son:
Self-conscious can be semantically rephrased conscious OF self. In other words the content of self consciousness is SELF.
This appears to be a trait that is on an evolutionary continuum. If you paint a White dot on a Chimps head while its sleeping it will notice it when it looks in the mirror. It doesn't try to touch the mirror. Instead it sees the dot and picks at it with his finger on his own head - NOT on the reflection.
an emotion is an arbitrary, personal and wholly subjective physical reaction.
an emotion is a physical reaction to the value placed on something.
in short, an emotion is an appraisal.
Consciousness is an unfinished term. It needs the additional word "of". Consciousness always has content.
Consciousness OF ...
i believe today's witnesses lack zeal, resolve, "love" of the "truth"......just to name a few things.. years ago, witnesses were excited to knock on doors and tell people they were gonna die if they didn't accept paradise.. now, when you see jws in service, they all look zombied out.. it's a slowly dying religion that will last probably forever like an ancient rotted out tree..
Same thing happened in the first century. When Christ didn't return soon as he said he would:
Internal power struggles.
Ritualization of gatherings.
Catechism before confirmation.
Schism over doctrine leading eventually to war.
There seems to be something about the transition from 3rd generation to 4th generation.
Around the middle of the first century just about all expectation of Christ return became something that would happen in the distant future.
JW's are at that point now. Each generation that burries the previous generation loses half of their hope.
JW's are at an impasse. They have to repudiate most of their past doctrines and predictions. But they have nothing to replace them with.
2014 will be an interesting milestone.
i am looking for confirmation on the following:.
jws are now being individually assigned to smaller territories, and they are told to consistently work that same territory over & over again.
the reason is that the watchtower wants the jws to build relationships with the people in that area.
When I was growing up in the 1950's the book study was called a service center. We went out in pre-study work from 6:45 to 7:45 on tuesday nights before our 8pm book study. My parents had the study in our home and I hated the fact that I had to continuously work the territory around my house and call on school mates. "Hey whatcha sellin"? Got so tired of hearing that.
so my wife and i survived leaving the jw faith together over the course of the last 4 years.
it was a wild ride for our relationship, but thankfully we are stronger than ever.
so looking back, here is my observation about the "threefold cord", at least the jw version of it.. i believe the idea of the threefold cord actually weakens a marriage, keeping it less mature.
The Divine menage a trois???
I don't see where that scripture has anything to do with marriage. It is simply a statment for self-defence perhaps when traveling in the ancient world. Another way of saying it is "there is strength in numbers."
i watched the nicolas cage film the knowing http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448011/ last night and i'm sure.
that the pictures of daniel's prophecies of wheels within wheels were from watchtower literature.
i don't mean the newer publications but old pictures from the earlier books on daniels prophecies.
It could be pictures from 7th day adventists too. They were big into the same types of prophesies. No wonder. JW's are considered off-shoots of the adventists.
reading political threads on this site (and really any site for that matter) is incredibly frustrating.
namely because they all boil down to the same argument.
who is it that is fucking society over?
Greed and Envy are twins. They balance everything out. Humans evolved in small groups where they took everything they had with them everyday. There was no practical way to survive by accumulating junk. If someone had more than they could haul with them and they refused to jettison the excess they would stay with their junk and die. Greed makes sure you have "enough". If you have too much your envious brothers will snub you until you share. The political divide is between those who feel everyone needs to carry their own load and those who understand that some can't carry their own load.
If there really were a Jubilee it sounds like a decent remedy to massive accumulation of wealth.
i don't see much difference between paul writing a letter to the corinthian congregation and the gb writing a letter to the timbucktoo congregation.. is what paul wrote to the ephesians just as fallible and subject to 'new light' as the letters the wts writes to congregations today?.
if a letter from the governing body today which says it's immoral to have an organ transplant can be dead wrong and changed later.
can the letter from paul which says it's wrong to eat blood be dead wrong and subject to change later?.
The letters are just old "bound volumes". JW's don't give a damn about "Studies in the Scriptures" anymore. Why should people care what the early Christian writings. Jesus never wrote anything.
over the past few weeks i've been told that the eurozone will go into melt down and that this will be the start of armargeddon because the goverments will then turn on religon to get their money instead.. i have been told that the greek pm almost rejecting the greek bailout plan would lead to armargeddon.
of course much to the jw's disapointment the greek pm resigned and the greeks did accept the bail out.
thus saving the greek banks from collapse and thus the rest of the european banks.. i have been told that italys debt will mean they will plunder the vatican for its wealth!
The idea that governments are going to take the money from religion shows their naivete about economics.
Religion has property. So what. The governments have more property than they can manage already.
There is plenty of property and its all cheap because no one has money.
If you destroy all religion it would free up 3% of the GNP which would quickly be spent on entertainment, medical care etc. etc.
Apple has more money than the Vatican.
These scenarios for attacking Religion are the product of a couple crazy men (Russell, Freddy Franz (Rutheford got his crazy ideas from Franz).
