lets face it russell was a religious fanatic who new how to run a business.
he figured out how to sucker people into devoting their time to sell his printed goods to the public for free.
also he took advantage of the tax free status granted churches and religions in general to built a nice little empire of devotees(free labor) and printing presses..
They're worth multiple billions, no doubt about it. They own tens of thousands of properties all over the world. They don't pay taxes. They don't pay their workers (aside from a laughable "allowance" at Bethel for the grunt workers). Who knows how much they make via donations every year?
A business for sure - and an extremely successful one at that.
they were allways off limits when jw's.. but now, analysing everything, there are more questions.. like what about healers, and alternative therapies etc.. .
I don't know much about faith healers, but I do know that the placebo effect can be more powerful than actual treatment.
Semi related example: http://www.mindbodyhealth.com/kneesurgery.htm
Paranormal / esoteric stuff in general though?
People with no experience on the matter will scream at you 'til they're blue in the face that there's no such thing as anything paranormal, but I can tell you from firsthand experience that this is not the case. Let the Dawkins "Magic of Reality" bombardment begin.
so given the amount of focus on things that we can be angry or upset about, or how we have been wronged or abused.... i thought it was time for a bit of a change.. how about sharing some fun experiences?!!
ok, i will start.
i promised, in my opening post the other day, that i would share some that have happened over the years.
Probably a common experience...
The local lone weirdo brother was doing mics. Decides to go use the bathroom during a paragraph reading. Brings mic in with him, whole congregation hears him pissing and talking to himself.
my dad used to pray for the witnesses behind the iron curtain.
i couldn't figure out why were they caught behind this heavy curtain.
couldn't they just find a door and leave?.
My pops always made sure he gave the longest possible dinner prayer possible - probably just to piss us off while we had to sit and be hungry as we smelled the food.
He once literally recounted the entire story of Job in a dinner prayer. Why? No clue. He was a batsh*t insane animal.
does the us government have highly advanced technology that it is concealing?.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n0fo_htf5s&feature=youtu.be.
forget the obamney election.
We're a middle aged star in an incomprehensibly large universe. If you would have told someone a couple hundred years ago that we would be able to travel in the air from New York to London in a few hours they would laugh at you, dunk you under water as a witch, or think you're crazy. Take that technological curve, add a few billion more years onto it (as there are many stars billions of years older than ours), and think of the possibilities...
Tis silly to me to think that our floating wet ball of dirt is the only place that life exists. The very fact that life is 1 place in the 'verse is enough to argue that it has to be elsewhere too.
Have we been visited? Perhaps, but telling the public that this is the case would negate most religions and cause chaos IMO. If there's no Jesus or Allah to reward or punish - folks gonna go on a rape and pillage-fest.
http://memorialwebsites.legacy.com/oompaakaericreed/homepage.aspx.
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RIP Eric. So sad. So unfair. So unjust.
theres a story in the ny daily news today that says this jw is homeless and was denied shelter after having a brief conversation with the woman who helped him with his application after he mentioned he was a jw.
her reasoning of why she denied his application was that she thought he would go door to door in the 45-unit facility!
i myself find that hilarious, he just mightve done that to get his time in!
How are the J-Dumbs still a tax-free entity? They don't even help their own members, nevermind helping anyone else.
They're so focused on squeezing every possible penny. Hell, I'm sure there's plenty of destitute blue-collar, non-college-educated JW's that would benefit greatly from having a used circuit overseer car. But what do they do? Set up a shell company solely for the purpose of cranking out every last dime: http://www.circuitvehicles.com/
my sister and i were just talking about this very topic this morning.
when jesus supposedly chose the watchtower society as the faithful and discreet slave in 1918, no one got disfellowshiped for anything!
how is it that now, in 2012, our disfellowshipping policy is used as proof that they are god's earthly visable organisation, in that they "keep the congregation clean?".
The person that wrote the article, and the people that approved the article, should all publicly beheaded IMO.
the anonymous hacker group has proven themselves effective in the past.
lets wait and see if they pull it off again with the wts.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhyl4waps2o.
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um, this is (supposedly) the group that has hacked government sites and major corporation sites and they're having trouble decrypting files from a penny ante cult?
This is a large scale money making operation under the guise of a religion that has billions in resources. Anything IT related of any importance is outsourced - there's not a lot of brainwashed pioneer go-getters with degrees in computer science at HQ. The file that they got their hands on is heavily encrypted. Even with massive computing power at your disposal in conjunction with a brute-force attack, decrypting a file that has modern heavy encryption on it could literally take many years to get the job done. The best hope would be an inside source helping out IMO.
Don't get me wrong... I'd love to see it pulled off by such a group. Really expose the inner dirty dealings of the WTS, but I am not sold on the idea that a group like this would pay any attention to such a fringe religion.
I feel kind of the same way. Watchtower Corp keeps themselves out of the limelight unlike Scientology, and have a far smaller social consciousness footprint. I don't think that the drive to take them down is nearly as high, thus probably won't attract the talent and numbers needed to actually accomplish anything. Even if they did something like a large-scale DDoS, all it will accomplish is to take their websites offline for a little while, which isn't much in the grander scheme of things.
That being said, if anyone can get this done, it's Anon for sure. At the very least, I'm all for anything that brings attention to this disgusting business/cult that has ruined and stolen so many lives.
