my brother has been talking about the earth being flat and some big conspiracy going on to make people beieve otherwise.
what are people's thoughts on this?.
Question for Kairos.
The flat earth map seems to show, for example, Sydney and Johannesburg on opposite sides of the world, and a straight line between the two would go somewhere near the North Pole. Yet Qantas is selling flights between the two cities that take a little ove 11 hours. How do they do it?
2017 grand totals.
branches of jehovah’s witnesses: 90. .
number of lands reporting: 240. .
If we assume that there are less converts and more born-ins who are getting baptized, would the above statement of yours take the premise that more and more JW kids are staying in the religion and then having kids who are becoming JW's, thus repeating this cycle and the rate of publisher increase is equaling the world population growth?
It would appear from past figures that in places such as USA, Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia, this is what is happening. There seems to be few converts, and the numbers are made up of born-ins. Unsurprisingly, numbers are stagnant in such countries.
In Latin America and other strongly catholic countries, there is still growth. In Christian African countries, where there is strong population growth, there is often a massive increase in numbers and a lot of those countries already have higher ratios of JWs to population than many Western countries.
Because, if JW's have low retention rate( born-ins are leaving the cult) and outside converts are also less, then the peak publishers should go down at some point.
That is probably already happening in some Western countries. On another thread I all but proved (using Australian census data) that decline is now inevitable. Better to just rely on “average publishers” not “peak publishers” when trying to work out what is going on, by the way.
For e.g. In my congregation of 40 publishers, almost everyone is a born-in JW, i.e. all had witness parents. There has not been a single convert in years, but the publisher number is increasing because existing witnesses are having kids who are growing up as JW's. So, in reality, in my cong, born-ins are staying in the org. Is this a worldwide trend?
From memory, you are in India? In many Western countries, a number of born-ins leave when in the 15 to 25 age bracket, but a lot of them drift back in, particularly when having their own kids, sometimes dragging a spouse in with them.
well done aussie's 60% voted yes.
i really did not think this would happen here there is alot of gay phobia.
i saw men on the streets holding signs "vote no.
Hi fulltimestudent, sorry to be slow to respond. Brief responses as follows:
1. I hadn't kept up with the news on Pell. Perhaps I had missed it because the allegation (at least as reported) is very vague at the moment.
2. In relation to Abbott being pugilistic:
I see a strongly opinionated man who is intense in the way he approaches the causes in his life. Would you call his attitude pugilistic? I would...
I agree.
...and could believe the above incident. You may not - but there are times when there is only one witness to an event.
I don't know whether it occurred. The point is that it was denied and, without re-hashing details, it is dubious. Political opponents of Abbott at the time portrayed it as undisputed fact, as does your original post. That prompted my reply.
3. Is Abbott like Trump?
I don't think either of us are too worried about this one. For what its worth, I would describe Abbott as far more like Pence than Trump. (And I am not a fan of any of the three of them.)
4. "But how deeply are Abbott's religious beliefs involved in his political agenda?"
I have to point out that further down in the article that you quote:
Kelly needs a lot more evidence and more examples before his proposition holds that Abbott is deeply indebted to Santamaria in his policy stances. But he raises two fascinating questions. First, is Abbott drawing on some instincts deeply lodged in Catholic social teaching? The evidence is slight.
Anyway, I think we both like to see accuracy and support for positions. Sorry to be a "kill-joy".
BTW: I enjoyed reading your articles on the history of Korea.
well done aussie's 60% voted yes.
i really did not think this would happen here there is alot of gay phobia.
i saw men on the streets holding signs "vote no.
I am not a fan of either Tony Abbott or Cardinal Pell, but I just feel I have to correct a few things in FTS’s post.
First we have,Tony Abbott. A former (very) conservative Prime Minister ( a bit like one D.Trump),
Now Tony, who in his student days gained a reputation for slamming opponents in student politics, against walls and threatening them with worse, was also once a novice priest and is still very much a supporter of the church.
and having come under some unwelcome suspicion as having had a specific liking for younger boys
from facebook:just saw my jw mother after not seeing her for more than 2 years.
when i do see her, it is brief, she never asks about my life, doesn't ask about my 4 children her grandchildren, doesn't ask about my grandchildren...her great grandchildren, she doesn't ask about my other 2 brothers that she is also alienated from, she doesn't ask about my brothers family.
she doesn't talk about the jw/org either.
I noticed from the reddit site as well, that there iseems to be a bit more hysteria than normal.
I wonder if this is just the result of a few JWs becoming a little more delusional, as a result of recent less-than-encouraging recent news. One part of the typical JW brain must be noticing consolidation, Hall sales and less printed material. Maybe other parts of the brain for some JWs are just ramping up the search for signs, to drown out any thoughts that they want to avoid thinking.
well done aussie's 60% voted yes.
i really did not think this would happen here there is alot of gay phobia.
i saw men on the streets holding signs "vote no.
One reason the vote was needed, was that it was an election promise.
However, probably the main reason was the difficulty individual members of Parliament were facing in their own branches. Just to explain, political apathy in Australia makes it easy for small aligned groups to control branches. But the apathy is so prevelant that even small aligned groups are hard to form. In my electorate, there were about 10 branches of the political party holding that federal seat. I saw first hand how a christian alignment got effective control of 8 out of 10 of those branches (ie branch stacking and putting office bearers in place), despite the typical member not being religious. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that that is a relatively common thing to occur in Aust; Christians being one of the few that can pull together a small but effective aligned group.
Controlling branches means controlling the appointees to the committee that selects and vets potential candidates. Politicians don’t want to be dis-endorsed. When Labor was in power for 6 years, Labor wouldn’t legislate SSM, despite strong community support, control of both houses, and a lot of noise within. Neither would the LNP Coalition more recently, despite even stronger public support.
Now the vote allows the politicians to move forward and introduce SSM, without fear of repercussions. Obviously the survey was a waste of money in one sense, but it probably was the only realistic way forward.
dear brothers and sisters,.
considering the end is so near at hand we thought it important for to reiterate that it's absolutely impossible to prove god's "one true organisation" wrong.
there is nothing on heaven or earth that could ever be shown to be false or incorrect in our entire .
I don’t think it’s possible to prove JWs are wrong. It’s not possible to prove they’re right either, of course, until Armageddon comes.
I think it is easy to prove (to any sensible level or standard) to a rational, logical and impartial person, that the JWs are wrong. It is just impossible to prove it to a thoroughly indoctrinated JW.
dear brothers and sisters,.
considering the end is so near at hand we thought it important for to reiterate that it's absolutely impossible to prove god's "one true organisation" wrong.
there is nothing on heaven or earth that could ever be shown to be false or incorrect in our entire .
My wife once told me that the fact that Armageddon didn't come, just shows that the "new light" is correct.
i don't think anyone else has raised this point.
below i set out the case that the jw demographic in usa has a steadily decreasing combined income, and as a consequence, has less money to donate.
not only is the flock not growing, the flock is producing less wool for the borg to fleece.
Hi all, thanks for all of your good comments.
A couple of points:
I'm guessing this means since women are increasing as a percentage of jws over men, and women generally earning so much less than men, this too will impact donations.
Yes, that is what I meant. This is a complicated subject, and it would take me lot of work to explain in detail. Just for starters, a graph of median income vs age for women (instead of men) tends to be a different shape.
So, my question is: does Watchtower know how much income its members have and the liklihood of their spending some of it on WT?
They would have a trove of data direct from congregations. I doubt that they would have data about people's incomes, but they would definitely have sufficient data to line up demographics with expected donations. Do they do that? I don't know.
i think with all the child molestation lawsuits the watchtower corporation is and has been hit with is the main reason for all the prime property sell off recently.
the silent lambs protest back in 2001, and the dateline prime time expose probably was the death knell for the watchtower's hey day in brooklyn.. their membership is drying up, young people are leaving in droves, the situation is no doubt far worse than the annually published yearbook figures show and so they ceased it's publication permanently.
and those left remaining are experiencing a huge grab of money from their congregations accounts and now are required to make pledges about how much they can contribute which i think is a last ditch effort by the governing body to squeeze more money out of the rank and file watchtower indoctrinated drones.. i think all this is happening because even those still loyally attending are hearing reports of these tremendous pay out that the watchtower is making to the victims of their self serving policies that put young ones at great risks so that even the rank and file don't want to contribute to pay court costs and so are withholding giving contributions to a very great extent.
Truthseeker: I will shortly be working on a project to analyze all congregations in the U.K. and their contributions once the data has been pulled
That would be fantastic. I have thought for a long while about doing that, but it is far too big a task for me. It should tell us a lot about the real financial position of Watchtower in U.K.
