so picture this, you are suddenly withdrawing troops after 2 decades in a country and, well, its all gone to shit.. how do you ensure that your vulnerable citizens and allies can get out when the airport is surrounded and no one can get through?.
option 1: it's a trick question surely?
you don't get yourself into this mess in the first place - you withdraw the citizens first, not last, duh!.
Yep, you've have to be a complete dumb-ass to enter into negotiations with the Taliban and trust them to abide by anything.
Truth is, all US Administrations from Bush to Biden have been dismal failures in Afghanistan for the simple reason they have not addressed the fundamental reason the Afghan Army proved so useless – corruption! While senior military figures were pocketing millions from ghost soldiers, real soldiers were going unpaid. And the response from US/NATO??? Throw more money at it.
women!
don't listen to jazz!.
"new orleans jazz has a primitive tom-tom rhythm that does a single woman's peace of mind no good, is one of the insane claims from the tower about the harmful jazz music.. the fact is - if you check up the writings of the tower - the only safe music is the "kingdom songs" - and those do kill your brain if you love music:-)) .
many that have come to this forum have left the jws religion and moved on with their lives but from a outsider's viewpoint what do think makes the jws religion wrong or incorrect as a active christian faith ?.
somethings come to mind such as its long continuous end times/armageddon soon doctrine which has really been a core doctrine for decades going right back to its beginning .. maybe they should have adopted the stance as other christian based faiths and adhered to jesus's own words when he said " no one knows of the time not even he ".
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Child baptism. While they will make the case that infant baptism is unscriptural, and that baptism requires consent and a full understanding of its significance, they see no problem (even boast about) baptising children as young as six.
so i was watching an evans video he just put out where he was interviewing a man about how the cult treated his daughter who was rapped as a criminal.
the man said his wife's first experience with an apostate site was here.
i could tell by the look on his face he did not like that site and then could not help himself and said that he could not recommend going to this site.
He may be a dick, but I don’t remember him being particularly insufferable when he was here. So he makes a living exposing TTATT, I hope he continues doing so for many years to come. His web site and UTube channel played a huge role in waking my born-in niece after over five decades of Watchtower indoctrination, and that’s something this site can no longer do. I agree with him, I couldn’t recommend this site to newly awakening dubs, it no longer does what it says on the tin.
i'm doing a little background research for a novel.
what is the craziest thing you heard a witness say was demonized, and what did they do about it?.
Not exactly demon possession JeffT, but back in the 80s a sister who had watched an episode of the late Paul Daniels magic show told me a week or so later that, "There was no way he could have done that trick without the help of the demons. Absolutely no way". I hadn't seen the show so I couldn't possibly comment!
In our congo in London there was only one sister who attributed virtually every mishap to the demons, the rest of us would find more rational explanations and hardly ever brought the subject up. That was back in the 70s and 80's so a lot could have changed since then.
as far as i know, sincere jws are always welcomed here.
even though this site is not pro jw , if someone wants to ask a question or try to understand a point of view, there are many here who over the years have tried to help sincere witnesses.
if i believe someone is here just trying to push buttons, i will either ignore them or actually question their motives.
There is also a third group – the deluded. Those who believe they are some kind of
modern day prophet, and they come here to spout their visions hoping someone
will listen. Although this group is not
limited to Jehovah’s Witnesses, those that come here are, or were. This group have a genuine delusion, a genuine mental health
problem, but feel free to tell them to fuck off if you want. I believe that’s standard practice for such people
on this forum.
let me follow the trial.
in 1931 rutherford started jehovah's witnesses.
be before that.. bible student and they merged before 1917 with russelites and they merge with adventists, and then miller in 1844.before that be disperse into baptist and other denominations.
A breakaway, or a takeover? Whenever the question arises as to who founded Jehovah’s Witnesses, I always answer Rutherford, not Russell. Russell founded the Watchtower and the IBSA (and a few other entities), and after he died Rutherford hijacked the lot. Once full autocratic control was established, and most links to the past were either modified or cut, he changed the name and the religion of JWs was born.
i read a recent post from mickbobcat about how expensive some of the old watchtower literature for sale is.
is there a group or entity that is working to digitize or somehow preserve the old literature, giving others the ability to research them?.
There are quite a few sites storing old WT publications. Those that I have found the most comprehensive are;
https://archive.org/download/WatchtowerLibrary/
http://www.watchtowerwayback.org/en/static1/library
obviously at some point you stopped believing the witnesses had the truth or else you wouldn’t be here.
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but for the most part, were you a true believer or were you typically a rebel or a doubter?
I was a convert at 16, and believed it completely. Within a year I had left school, got baptised, started pioneering, become a typical SR jerk thinking that those who went into full time jobs after leaving school were hypocrites. This was 1969/70, so if you were around at that time you might understand.
Having said that, I don’t think many of us actually believed all of the stuff in the books about Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation. We “accepted” it not because it made sense, but because of all the other stuff the WT taught, and we knew that some of it would change anyway, and took the view that all would be revealed after Armageddon.
My first doubts about the WTS started creeping in when I discovered that a huge percentage of witnesses in Africa were in Nigeria, and I thought, what about the rest of Africa, so I started to investigate further. When I discovered that less than 1% of JWs were covering 50% of the world’s population I realised something was wrong, and not just with the Watchtower. The evil in the world that had been going on for thousands of years made me realise there was also something wrong with God (I had had a somewhat sheltered childhood). It took three or four years for me to go from PIMO to POMO, but by 1980 I was out.
the youngest reference i have come across is in the 1992 watchtower (march 1st page 27) - “in the summer of 1946, i was baptized at the international convention in cleveland, ohio.
although i was only six years of age…”.
i would like to find more examples of this, particularly of examples in more recent times.
I have not yet come across an example of anyone under six being baptised, but I have found a couple examples of seven year olds, and another six year old. I have also come across scores of examples of 8 and 9 year old children being baptised, and literally hundreds of examples of 10-15 year olds.
“In 1934, Mom and Dad were baptized. I too wanted to get baptized, and I kept insisting until Mother asked an older Witness to talk with me about it. He asked many questions in a manner that I could understand. Then he told my parents that I should not be prevented from being baptized; it might harm my spiritual growth. So I was baptized the following summer, when I was still six. (WT Aug 1, 1996, p21)”
“Reared in such a spiritually rich environment, I made my dedication to God and was baptized before my eighth birthday. (WT Oct 1, 2000, p28)”
“In September 1938, my parents were baptized. My siblings and I were baptized in December 1941 at a national convention held at Hargreave Park in Sydney, New South Wales. I was seven years old. (WT Oct 1 2006, p12)”
I particularly like the reasoning of the “elder” in the six year old’s case – “it might harm her spiritual development if you don’t allow her to get baptised”. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. And while this happened nearly a century ago, it is quoted here with approval in 1996, showing that they would do the same again today if the occasion arose. Indeed they have done so, as shown in R&R’s example earlier in this thread.
The Watchtower makes a lot of noise about the unscriptural and illogical practice of infant baptism, but they clearly ignore the concept of “age of consent” in this matter. It shows something of their ingrained hypocrisy, when they can say the following, while continuing to baptise children, I mean, who on earth would consider a six year old to be anything other than a "small child"?:
“Jesus’ words at Matthew 28:19, 20 show that it is those who have been made his disciples that should be baptized. Hence, it follows that no infant or small child could meet the Scriptural requirements for baptism.” (WT March 15 1988, p14)”
