I am a little surprised that nobody from Down-Under has mentioned “Cyclone Rex” Manwaring. Don’t think the term “Jack Ass” would quite describe him, but he was certainly unforgettable!
Rivergang
JoinedPosts by Rivergang
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88
Who Was The Biggest Jackass Circuit Overseer You Ever Met?
by Sea Breeze inthere was on older white-haired circuit overseer in houston around 1989 or 1990. last name started with a w i think.... not sure though.
even the most brain-dead robotic elders told me he was offensive.
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18
Know it’s not true but stay anyway
by Elena inhow many of the millions of jws know it’s not true but stay anyway?.
my guess is most jws know it’s not true on a subconscious level to an extent but they don’t want to think about it too much and would never ever voice it out loud.. but this is probably true with all religions around the world?.
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Rivergang
but this is probably true with all religions around the world?
Typically, they might give lip service to whatever their religion teaches, but in practice just quietly ignore its more extreme demands. (A good example of this being the Catholic Church's stance on contraception. Not too many "practicing" Catholics pay a lot of heed to that one!)
It is similar amongst the JWs. I notice that the ones who have remained long term with the religion are generally those who are likewise inclined to turn a blind eye to the more extreme (or more ridiculous!) utterances of the GB. This is certainly the case in my family, anyway.
Within any of the so-called "Mainstream Churches", such a course of action is not too difficult to take. For example, the Catholic Church's rules are "attend mass at least twice a year, and confession at least once a year". Meet those requirements, and the church generally leaves you alone.
However, amongst the JWs, it must be a lot more difficult to maintain the charade? (This question is addressed to those who are PIMOs).
As WC Stevenson summed it up in his 1968 work The Inside Story of Jehovah's Witnesses: "No other religious group would demand so much from its members, in return for so little". Compared with the other Christian churches, the demands placed on their adherents by the WTS/GB is greater by a number of magnitudes. (In fact, this difference is what mathematicians would describe as "exponential").
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30
Education video this midweeks meeting
by jehovaxx inthere is an item this week all about yang ones leaving school.. the two brothers go to a career advisor seminar.
one brother thinks it’s good to work hard full time while you are young and tries to encourage his friend to as well.. his friend (who is the good jw trust the gb no matter what they say)) he wants a part time job.. the video shows him dreaming about investing his money on his phone and the chart goes up, he drives a nice car and seems to be doing well financially.. then he reads the scripture in proverbs and next you see that investment chart go down in the red and he is so pleased he just got a low paid part time job.. this infuriates me.
how many of us are now struggling because we were told to get menial part time jobs and we were told the end would have been here by now.. i will never tell a young person to listen to the gb advice on this.
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Rivergang
Beth Sarim,
There is nothing like expecting to have it both ways, is there!
During the recession of the early 1990s, I was living in a circuit which encompassed a low socio-economic area. People there struggled at the best of times, yet the WTS still expected everybody to be forthcoming in paying for the planned new Assembly Hall.
There were pointed talks "from the platform" which practically accused us all of being just a bloody bunch of tight-@$$es. However, interspersed with those were other talks expressing dim views of young persons who even just wanted to enter into an apprenticeship - let alone pursue a higher qualification.
At the time, the most charitable thing I could think to describe the situation was "a total disconnection with reality".
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Education video this midweeks meeting
by jehovaxx inthere is an item this week all about yang ones leaving school.. the two brothers go to a career advisor seminar.
one brother thinks it’s good to work hard full time while you are young and tries to encourage his friend to as well.. his friend (who is the good jw trust the gb no matter what they say)) he wants a part time job.. the video shows him dreaming about investing his money on his phone and the chart goes up, he drives a nice car and seems to be doing well financially.. then he reads the scripture in proverbs and next you see that investment chart go down in the red and he is so pleased he just got a low paid part time job.. this infuriates me.
how many of us are now struggling because we were told to get menial part time jobs and we were told the end would have been here by now.. i will never tell a young person to listen to the gb advice on this.
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Rivergang
Not again - the €{¥#ards have broken out in a fresh place!
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In Defense of the Crusades
by aqwsed12345 inchristians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics.
muslims really were gunning for them.
by the time the crusades started, muslims had already captured two-thirds of the christian world.
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Rivergang
If Constantinople had fallen in 1100, the Turkish army would have descended upon Europe four hundred years earlier, and the flourishing late medieval culture that was beginning to emerge at that time might never have developed:
The problem was, though, that the Fourth Crusade (1204) sacked Constantinople. In doing so, they fatally weakened the Byzantine Empire - which was Europe's key defence against Muslim expansion.
That the Crusades ever kicked off at all was because of an appeal for help by the Byzantine Emperor, Alexios I Komnenos. In 1095, he asked for assistance from Western Europe to resist incursions into his territory by the Seljuk Turks. What the emperor envisaged was an addition of another force of mercenary soldiers to reinforce his army - an army which already contained a large number of mercenaries. (Those mercenaries included Muslim troops - the matter was a lot more involved than just "Good guys wearing white hats, bad guys wearing black hats").
However, what the emperor wanted and what he ended up getting were two quite different things! While the First Crusade did take a little of the heat off the Byzantine Empire, in the longer term the Crusades weakened it to the point where it no longer served as an effective bulwark against Turkish invasion.
The real unsung heroes in defending Western Civilisation would have to be the Poles. Twice (in 1683 and again in 1920) they saved Western Europe from disaster.
In 1683, Polish forces under Jan Sobieski lifted the Siege of Vienna and inflicted a decisive defeat on the Ottoman Turks, thus saving Western Europe from invasion. Then again in 1920, when the seemingly unstoppable Red Army was poised at the River Vistula and looking certain to burst into Western Europe, it was routed by the Polish forces under Jozef Pilsudski. Were those Soviet armies not defeated at the Vistula, there would have been very little to stop them from sweeping through to Germany and beyond. The "Iron Curtain" would have been in place a generation earlier than it was - and would have bordered right on the English Channel!
(The Battle of the Vistula is well described in Dennis Wheatley's Red Eagles)
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40 Years Ago Today: May 15th 1984 "1914 Generation" issue was released. False prophecy, thy name is WatchTower.
by WingCommander init's incredible how this cover, and also this "series" of watchtower's is burned into my mind.
i was almost 5 years old when these were released.
“1914 and you” — may 1, 1984 watchtower.
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Rivergang
I don’t recall those 1984 articles causing a lot of excitement. Perhaps the group of JWs I was with had been through the fiasco of 1975, and had developed the attitude of “Oh, yeah - whatever!”
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Materialistic and Soon
by OnTheWayOut ini was reading a bart ehrman book, .
armageddon: what the bible really says about the end.
no, i won't bore you with complicated various theories i was reading.
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Rivergang
Perhaps it was regional thing?
To be fair, I only ever recall “I’m having that house after Armageddon” being said in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. Nobody that I knew seriously expected to be able just to walk into a nice house of their choice once the system had ended.
Of course, little did they imagine that even spoken in jest, such remarks were perfect ammunition for propagandists!
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Armageddon Car
by OnTheWayOut inhow many of you bought a nice sedan, suv, or even a minivan back in the days that you described as your "armageddon car" that you would care for and it would last until the end arrived?.
i was driving a 1974 plymouth volare wagon in 1992 when i managed to get an 8-year old buick century.
it was low mileage and had a very luxurious interior.
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Rivergang
Gorb,
What do they say:
”Cows may come, and cows may go, but the bull in this place goes on forever.”
It is certainly the case when “This place” is JW land!
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Armageddon Car
by OnTheWayOut inhow many of you bought a nice sedan, suv, or even a minivan back in the days that you described as your "armageddon car" that you would care for and it would last until the end arrived?.
i was driving a 1974 plymouth volare wagon in 1992 when i managed to get an 8-year old buick century.
it was low mileage and had a very luxurious interior.
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Rivergang
Blondie,
No, you wouldn’t have wanted to share that with others. In their wisdom, sometime in 1968 the WTS declared that “Now was not the time to be hiding behind Matthew 24:44” (The article was entitled “Why are you looking forward to 1975?”).
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Armageddon Car
by OnTheWayOut inhow many of you bought a nice sedan, suv, or even a minivan back in the days that you described as your "armageddon car" that you would care for and it would last until the end arrived?.
i was driving a 1974 plymouth volare wagon in 1992 when i managed to get an 8-year old buick century.
it was low mileage and had a very luxurious interior.
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Rivergang
I don’t know about an “Armageddon car”, but I well remember an Armageddon set of tyres. Early in 1975, one of the congregation’s elders was certain that the set of rubber on his Fiat 125 sedan was going to see out the system.