Posts by FFGhost

28

May JW Broaadcast - so bad, "it's not even wrong"

by FFGhost in

don't know how many of y'all still watch it.. this month's topic is "the king of the north" - cook goes into monotonous detail over the jw interpretation about rome, germany, ussr, russia, etc.. leaving aside for other commentators the emotionally manipulative videos of jws in russian holding cells, the tearjerker interviews, the god-awful stiffness of cook (i suspect he has never genuinely smiled, much less laughed, in his 60+ years), just thought i'd comment on one topic.. the centerpiece of the program is a "morning worship" monologue from splane.

let's again just leave to the side the dude's pomposity, smugness, and inflated sense of his own genius, and think about this part of his monologue.. he was tracing the history of the "king of the north" and talked about how "britain" (not england, not the united kingdom, not great britain, but "britain" - no idea why they have that fixation - anyway...) became the kotn in the 19th century.. paraphrasing his comments: "britain would not have become kotn if france had its way.

france was much wealthier and more powerful, but at the battle of waterloo, britain defeated france.

FFGhost

And the JW's just sit back, nod, and mutter: WOW!

"Wow", and "Man, that study / broadcast / talk was DEEP!"

I'll give them that. A lot of their content is some really deep $#!+.

46

The camp of Israel and the problem of pooping

by FFGhost in

so, in a couple weeks, the jws move on in their bible-reading slog to the book of deuteronomy.. take a gander at deuteronomy 23:12,13:.

a private place should be designated for use outside the camp, and there is where you should go.

13 a peg should be part of your equipment.

FFGhost

Correction to my first post - a square with an area of ~250 square miles has borders 16 miles long, not 14.

So Moshe and Yentl, living in the center of the camp, have an 8 mile hike to the edge, and 8 more miles back. That's more like a 5 hour round trip walking. Every day. Or twice a day. For 40 years.

"Where you goin', Chaim?"

"Where else is there to go, ma? Gonna go poop again. See you in about 5 or 6 hours, unless we pass each other coming & going."

46

The camp of Israel and the problem of pooping

by FFGhost in

so, in a couple weeks, the jws move on in their bible-reading slog to the book of deuteronomy.. take a gander at deuteronomy 23:12,13:.

a private place should be designated for use outside the camp, and there is where you should go.

13 a peg should be part of your equipment.

FFGhost

Ooh! babies!

There were 3 million when they left Egypt, and 3 million when they entered Canaan. Everybody over the age of 20 when they left died, so at least 2 million babies (probably more) must have born during those 40 years.

That's at least 50,000 newborn babies per year. Not sure what sort of toilet training went on 3500 years ago, but it's safe to say that well over 100,000+ infants were not yet toilet trained at any given time.

It is reasonable to expect the guidelines on excrement would apply to everyone - all poop, outside the camp!

"I've been told" babies don't keep to a regular schedule of pooping, nor do they restrain themselves to once a day.

So, again, let's think about our poor schmucks camping dead center in the middle of the square camp. Let's suppose they have 6 month old twins. It's a 4 hour round trip every time they've got to dump out the babies' diapers. Between the parents "needs" and the constant "production" of the infants, there would be literally no time for anything else besides eating, sleeping, walking to the poop place, and pooping.

The above paragraph, multiplied by 100,000. Every day. For 40 years.

I dunno, eating cucumbers and leeks in Egypt is sounding better all the time!

10

Double Speak from last night's CLAM

by eyeslice in

now that there are no meetings to physically attend, i am in a position where i listen in to my wife's zoom calls.

i thought some of the ideas in last week's clam were a bit strange, for instance they harped on about being 'friendly' to non-jws but not to become 'friends' with them.

the poignant question being put to the audience; 'what is the difference between being friendly to an unbeliever and being his friend?'.

FFGhost

"Thank you for being my friend, Sophia".

"Well, of course, Priya, I'm not really your friend. You see, you worship demons, and well, frankly, my God is going to kill you and your parents and, do you have any brothers or sisters? One of each? OK, he's going to kill them too. Any pets? Dogs, cats? Gone. Jehovah kills animals too. All because you worship demons.

"Of course, if you decide to worship Jehovah like me, he won't kill you. Of course, he'll still kill your parents and brother and sister unless they stop worshipping demons, too. Wait - why are you running away? I'm not done being 'friendly' yet!"

46

The camp of Israel and the problem of pooping

by FFGhost in

so, in a couple weeks, the jws move on in their bible-reading slog to the book of deuteronomy.. take a gander at deuteronomy 23:12,13:.

a private place should be designated for use outside the camp, and there is where you should go.

13 a peg should be part of your equipment.

FFGhost

Must be the ADHD, can't stop thinking about this...

Assuming the whole camp is asleep during the night, that leaves 16 or so hours for everyone to poop.

That works out to about 188,000 people per hour doing their "bidness". Outside the camp.

Assuming my square campground (see above) that's a perimeter of 56 linear miles at the border of the camp. That's about 3300 people per hour per linear mile of camp border a-squattin' and a-diggin'.

Now just picture this: You've managed to hold it in for 2 hours, after hiking 7+ miles to get outside the camp, and now you can finally relieve yourself, and what do you see?

Left, right, and center - as far as the eye can see - thousands of your fellow Israelites squatting and digging, digging and squatting. A constant stream of hundreds more arriving every minute, looking for some unoccupied plot of ground. Imagine the smell, the sounds.....

Now imagine that scene repeating every day of your life for 40 years....

Maybe "the rebels" were right - they were better off in Egypt.....

28

May JW Broaadcast - so bad, "it's not even wrong"

by FFGhost in

don't know how many of y'all still watch it.. this month's topic is "the king of the north" - cook goes into monotonous detail over the jw interpretation about rome, germany, ussr, russia, etc.. leaving aside for other commentators the emotionally manipulative videos of jws in russian holding cells, the tearjerker interviews, the god-awful stiffness of cook (i suspect he has never genuinely smiled, much less laughed, in his 60+ years), just thought i'd comment on one topic.. the centerpiece of the program is a "morning worship" monologue from splane.

let's again just leave to the side the dude's pomposity, smugness, and inflated sense of his own genius, and think about this part of his monologue.. he was tracing the history of the "king of the north" and talked about how "britain" (not england, not the united kingdom, not great britain, but "britain" - no idea why they have that fixation - anyway...) became the kotn in the 19th century.. paraphrasing his comments: "britain would not have become kotn if france had its way.

france was much wealthier and more powerful, but at the battle of waterloo, britain defeated france.

FFGhost

Oops, correction - "Britain" defeated France to become "King of the South".

As if any of this makes a flea-weight of difference to, well, anything.

46

The camp of Israel and the problem of pooping

by FFGhost in

so, in a couple weeks, the jws move on in their bible-reading slog to the book of deuteronomy.. take a gander at deuteronomy 23:12,13:.

a private place should be designated for use outside the camp, and there is where you should go.

13 a peg should be part of your equipment.

FFGhost

So, in a couple weeks, the JWs move on in their Bible-reading slog to the book of Deuteronomy.

Take a gander at Deuteronomy 23:12,13:

A private place should be designated for use outside the camp, and there is where you should go. 13 A peg should be part of your equipment. When you squat outside, you should dig a hole with it and then cover your excrement.A peg should be part of your equipment. When you squat outside, you should dig a hole with it and then cover your excrement.

Sounds pretty simple, right? "Gotta go answer the call of nature, be back in 10" - right?

Except...

How many people were there? See Numbers 1:46

the total number registered was 603,550

And that's just the men!

WT Publications have stated repeatedly that the 600,000 men implied "3 million" total Israelites trekking thru the wilderness.

One example: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102004325

In 215 years, a small number of Israelites in Egypt increased to as many as three million

That's a lot of people! Let's think about this for a minute.

How densely were those people packed together in their 40 year camping trip?

Let's say they were packed together really tight. Really really tight. Let's say they were packed together as tightly as modern-day Chicago, which has a population density of 12,000 people per square mile.

So, to fit 3,000,000 people packed together Chicago-style, you need 250 square miles.

If they were arranged in a perfect square, that's about 14 miles by 14 miles.

What if you're one of the poor schmucks who is camped right in the middle? If you've gotta go, you have to hike at least 7 miles - 2 hours - to get "outside the camp". Probably a lot longer, as you are walking through a densely populated area, stepping around, over, past, hundreds of thousands of people on the way.

Oh - and then to get back home, you've got to hike another 2+ hours.

God forbid you have to go twice a day - that's 8 hours a day walking just to do your business "outside the camp".

You can pick other shapes than a square of course, but to get to a reasonable amount of time to walk to "outside the camp" you've got an oblong shape 100+ miles, maybe 200+ miles, long. So, was there a 200 mile long string of Israelite camps in the desert? That would make communication a bit tricky.

And again - that assumes an unrealistic population density for the Israelite nomads as thick as that of modern-day Chicago. The problem exacerbates enormously with more reasonable population density estimates.

OR.....

Maybe the writers of Numbers and Deuteronomy just make $#!+ up that sounded good, but really didn't think things through?

Evidently there were no "continuity checkers" in the late Iron Age.

34

Why did Jehovah Kill all the animals in the flood? What purpose did it serve??

by pistolpete in

some of my jw family that is waking up posed that question to my jw family that is still hanging on to jw belief.. the stepbrother that posed that question told me;.

"in all these years of being a jw, i actually never gave it much thought as to why jehovah had to kill millions of innocent animals that had nothing to do with mankind becoming evil.".

i keep picturing in my mind, all the baby puppies and kitties that were destroyed by jehovah.

FFGhost

And yet....

Not so many years afterward, Jehovah felt sorry for the animals he would have "had to" kill in Nineveh.

Jonah 4:11:

Should I not also feel sorry for Ninʹe·veh the great city, in which there are more than 120,000 men who do not even know right from wrong, as well as their many animals?

Maybe the Assyrian donkeys were more repentant than the Noachian ones?

28

May JW Broaadcast - so bad, "it's not even wrong"

by FFGhost in

don't know how many of y'all still watch it.. this month's topic is "the king of the north" - cook goes into monotonous detail over the jw interpretation about rome, germany, ussr, russia, etc.. leaving aside for other commentators the emotionally manipulative videos of jws in russian holding cells, the tearjerker interviews, the god-awful stiffness of cook (i suspect he has never genuinely smiled, much less laughed, in his 60+ years), just thought i'd comment on one topic.. the centerpiece of the program is a "morning worship" monologue from splane.

let's again just leave to the side the dude's pomposity, smugness, and inflated sense of his own genius, and think about this part of his monologue.. he was tracing the history of the "king of the north" and talked about how "britain" (not england, not the united kingdom, not great britain, but "britain" - no idea why they have that fixation - anyway...) became the kotn in the 19th century.. paraphrasing his comments: "britain would not have become kotn if france had its way.

france was much wealthier and more powerful, but at the battle of waterloo, britain defeated france.

FFGhost

Don't know how many of y'all still watch it.

This month's topic is "the King of the North" - Cook goes into monotonous detail over the JW interpretation about Rome, Germany, USSR, Russia, etc.

Leaving aside for other commentators the emotionally manipulative videos of JWs in Russian holding cells, the tearjerker interviews, the god-awful stiffness of Cook (I suspect he has never genuinely smiled, much less laughed, in his 60+ years), just thought I'd comment on one topic.

The centerpiece of the program is a "morning worship" monologue from Splane. Let's again just leave to the side the dude's pomposity, smugness, and inflated sense of his own genius, and think about this part of his monologue.

He was tracing the history of the "king of the north" and talked about how "Britain" (not England, not the United Kingdom, not Great Britain, but "Britain" - no idea why they have that fixation - anyway...) became the KOTN in the 19th century.

Paraphrasing his comments: "Britain would not have become KOTN if France had its way. France was much wealthier and more powerful, but at the Battle of Waterloo, Britain defeated France. France should have won, but a great rainstorm came and allowed Britain to win, thus becoming KOTN. Of course, Britain was not interested in sharing its power. So, the American colonies declared their independence and fought to gain it. Mistakes were made on both sides but the Americans prevailed."

It's just such a...mishmash....it's...it's....

There's an expression, when someone says stuff that is just so flat out bizarre and weird and convoluted, that it's "not even wrong".

If someone says, for example, "The US gained its independence from Pakistan in the 18th century", you can point out the error ("not Pakistan, but the UK"). Or if they say "Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo in 1066" again, you can point out the error ("1815, not 1066)". You can correct it.

But if someone says "Aristotle's writings are the reason why George Washington built his mausoleum in Monticello using ancient Egyptian techniques"....you're just left with your mouth hanging open. Where do you start?

Splane's comments are just so....so....I don't know, where do you even begin to correct it?

It's so completely unhinged, it's "not even wrong".

Anyways, just thought I'd share my rambling comments. Anyone else see it?

34

Why did Jehovah Kill all the animals in the flood? What purpose did it serve??

by pistolpete in

some of my jw family that is waking up posed that question to my jw family that is still hanging on to jw belief.. the stepbrother that posed that question told me;.

"in all these years of being a jw, i actually never gave it much thought as to why jehovah had to kill millions of innocent animals that had nothing to do with mankind becoming evil.".

i keep picturing in my mind, all the baby puppies and kitties that were destroyed by jehovah.

FFGhost

Fish and birds survived

Most birds can't swim.

With the earth literally 100% covered in water, the salinity of the water would be consistent worldwide. So did the freshwater fish die? Or the saltwater fish? Or both?

I guess the seagulls and the ducks were OK.

Oh. Except for not having anything to eat for a year.

Everything died.

Except all vegetation. Olive trees, and everything else, survived after an entire year underwater and without sunlight.

OK, gotta stop. Trying to think this stupidly makes my head hurt.