Posts by FFGhost

34

STUDY ARTICLE When a Loved One Leaves Jehovah

by RULES & REGULATIONS in

the watchtower—study edition | september 2021. study article 39. when a loved one leaves jehovah.

2 think how heartbroken jehovah must have been when members of his own angelic family turned their back on him!

(jude 6) and imagine how hurt he was at seeing his beloved people, the israelites, rebel against him time and again.

FFGhost

We need to remember that Jehovah has given each of us the gift of free will. This means that we can choose whether we will obey him or not.

I know this is not the point of this article, but once again, these numnuts still can't see how utterly ridiculous this idea is.

God: "I'll give you free will, but if you actually, you know, use it, I'll slaughter you mercilessly."

What's the point of having "free will" if you are punished for using it?

JW "free will" (to be fair, pretty much any Christian religion's version) is comparable to the "free will" you have when a mugger holds a knife to your neck and says "give me your money!" Well, yeah, you have "free will" to say "nope", but the consequences are immediate, irreversible, and fatal.

22

2021-08-August-S-147-Announcements And Reminders!

by Atlantis in

jw
friends

2021-august-s-147-announcements and reminders.

in english and german.

see number 10.10. experienced attorneys and paralegals needed: .

FFGhost

A-hoooga! A-hooga! All hands on deck! This is not a drill!

"Send lawyers, guns, and money, dad, get me out of this"

Wait a minute - if Splane says (in his Saturday afternoon convention talk) that Jesus recommends settling everything out of court because the criminal and civil court systems of the entire world are hopelessly corrupt, why do they need so many lawyers? It doesn't seem like there would be an urgent need for gobs of lawyers if all they need to do is negotiate out of court settlements for "lying apostate" accusers.

41

Have you been vaccinated? Have you had any side effects?

by LoveUniHateExams in

jw
friends

hi all.. i'm 42 years old.

i have had two jabs of the oxford-astrazeneca vaccine.. after my first jab i experienced flu-like symptoms - shivering, wanted to lie down in a dark room, etc.. i experienced no side effects after my second shot.. how about you?.

how many jabs have you had?.

FFGhost

Still no autism and can't receive or transmit 5G

But Bill Gates knows exactly where you are now, and is personally tracking your every move!

IIRC, I think he reports it to George Soros.

28

Splane's "Apostate" talk transcript

by FFGhost in

jw
friends

for any who can't (like me) muster the masochism necessary to sit through an 18-or-so hour commentary on a 30 minute talk from a certain famous/infamous commentator, here is a link to a transcript from splane's saturday afternoon "apostate" talk:.

https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/ot7z2e/splanes_apostate_rant_transcription/.

there are many topics worthy of consideration, but this particular section really stood out to me:.

FFGhost

The good thing is the fact that they had to give this talk at all.

As the comments in the reddit speculate, it seems he is trying to get out ahead of something big. It seems very unlikely that the few minutes segment on the generally not-very-popular Vice channel would be enough to generate a 30 minute reply.

Politicians do this all the time - get out ahead of the story, plant doubt in advance so that when the news breaks, they can say "See? We told you they'd do something like this."

What's the big news to come?

28

Splane's "Apostate" talk transcript

by FFGhost in

jw
friends

for any who can't (like me) muster the masochism necessary to sit through an 18-or-so hour commentary on a 30 minute talk from a certain famous/infamous commentator, here is a link to a transcript from splane's saturday afternoon "apostate" talk:.

https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/ot7z2e/splanes_apostate_rant_transcription/.

there are many topics worthy of consideration, but this particular section really stood out to me:.

FFGhost

For any who can't (like me) muster the masochism necessary to sit through an 18-or-so hour commentary on a 30 minute talk from a certain famous/infamous commentator, here is a link to a transcript from Splane's Saturday afternoon "apostate" talk:

https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/ot7z2e/splanes_apostate_rant_transcription/

There are many topics worthy of consideration, but this particular section really stood out to me:

Now, I’d like to say a kind word to some who may be involved in discussion forums. You may like to use this medium to blow off steam, so to speak. Maybe there are little things in the congregation that are happening that you wonder about or decisions the elders have made that you wonder about, and so you write.
You get involved in the forum, and you blow off steam, and after that, you feel better. But what about others in the forum? How do they feel? Wouldn’t you feel awful if negative comments you made were responsible for someone leaving the truth? I know you wouldn’t want that to happen. So please, please, be careful about what you say.

My comments:

-- Anything explicitly mentioned in this talk must have been provoked by dozens or hundreds (thousands?) of reports from dozens or hundreds of CO reports. So apparently there is a significant number of JWs who join forums (such as this one) to "blow off steam", then go back to being JWs

-- Splane gives them "a kind word". I find that thoroughly bizarre, folks like that are blatantly fitting, to a tee, the WT definition of "brazen conduct". They are flouting the clear direction and counsel coming directly from the GB (this ain't the first time an "apostate warning talk" has been given). These folks are deliberately "mixing in company" not just with "sinners", but "apostates", several orders of magnitude worse (from a JW perspective).

-- He also comments on "decisions the elders have made". Who knows more about the "decisions elders have made"....than elders? It seems he is referring to elders coming to forums such as this one to "blow off steam".

-- Even so, he only has "kind words" for them. Why? Why not rain down fire and brimstone on the heads of all these dozens or hundreds or thousands of elders who apparently come to sites like this one, and inform "the world" about WT-world goings-on, then return to continue as, in effect, double agents.

I don't get it. Why the tolerance extended to such an evidently large group of evidently disloyal adherents?

19

Gee-hovah does this and Geehovah does that for me!

by Overrated in

jw
friends

did you ever had a over zealous brother/sister with tales that where even told from the platform on how gee-hovah did things for this person at nausea.

just made you sick.

an insult to one's intelligence.

FFGhost

I'm endlessly amused by the thought of the sovereign Lord of the Universe, the one who created trillions of stars, each of them performing trillions of thermonuclear reactions, the one who cannot be contained by the size of the 14-billion-light-year universe....

...is so caught up in the minutiae of the inhabitants of one planet orbiting one star out of all those trillions.

"Hmm, I think I'll leave off managing these superclusters of galaxies over here and those trillions of angels over there to cause a breeze on, what was that planet again? Oh yes, earth, cause a breeze on earth to blow a discarded JW tract to the left instead of the right, so it happens to cross the path of this depressed teenager who is upset because the kids in school make fun of him."

9

The Last Day

by johnamos in

[7-1-98 wt – martha said of her dead brother, lazarus: “i know he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.” (john 11:24) how did she know that?

…she might even have learned this from jesus himself.

(john 6:39 - this is the will of him who sent me, that i should lose none out of all those whom he has given me, but that i should resurrect them on the last day.

FFGhost

It's closer than the inside of your eyelid!

Don't buy any green bananas!

Everyone, all together......VERY.....SOON....NOW!

25

CO said; “Friends (plural) who’ve been raised in the truth are beginning to have doubts regarding their faith”

by pistolpete in

here is what a co said at the elders and ms meeting.

it goes to show that no matter how hard the governing body tries to instill fear of apostates, it's just not working on the young crowd of jws.. it's a new generations of born in jws--------and they don't buy this shit anymore.

it's really over for the watchtower.

FFGhost

Due to the COVID variants spreading around, and the cautious nature of the org., I suspect it will still be at a bare minimum another year, quite probably longer, before in-person Kingdom Hall meetings begin again. And I suspect restarting door to door witnessing will take even longer.

I think they will be in for a rude shock whenever these things commence again. For maybe a month, the novelty and excitement of meeting in person will prevail....to followed, I suspect, by a precipitous drop in participation, as the reality of "oh, so we're really back to the drudgery again" settles in.

-- No more "shirt, tie, shorts, and slippers" for the meetings.

-- No more "turning off the video" while the meeting is in progress.

--No more "pizza & beer" while the video is off for the midweek meeting.

--No more "0 commute time" to the meetings, in fact with the sale of Kingdom Halls, commute time for many will have increased dramatically.

-- No more "taking 40 minutes to write one short letter wile I gab with my buddies and drink coffee". Field service is back to trudging through brutal heat or numbing cold, knocking on doors of people with better houses and better lives than you

-- No more "pioneers don't worry about your hours, do what you can". No more "even 30 seconds of witnessing lets you be counted as active". Hours, hours, hours, HOURS! Count your hours.

If there are any at Warwick with a few still-connected neurons, they have to know that restarting everything after 2, 3, 4 years of 100% virtual is going to just kill them.

But (a) I suspect there are few of such remaining, and (b) the nature of the organization has been and always will be reactionary. Rather than try to figure out in advance what to change to make things better, they'll just sit on their duffs, then be gob-smacked when things pan out as I explained above, then they'll do what they've done for centuries (literally, now): scold the sheep for being ungrateful and unappreciative and try to motivate folks by "fear of being annihilated in the near future". Only slight difference will be that the scolding will come via JW.Borg videos rather than WT articles.

28

David Splane's apostate warning convention talk

by neat blue dog in

i know this recent video has been talked about already but i just watched it and here are a few things that got me annoyed as usual:.

splane says that if a bible student says he saw some negative information from apostates and asks us to explain it, we shouldn't look at it or address anything specifically, but instead we should tell them to go to meetings and hear what we have to say about ourselves and also tell them to befriend people at the hall.

for any person with integrity and/or intelligence, this is not a satisfactory answer.

FFGhost

Nobody can poison us NOT to believe that the sun or the moon Exists. If that is so, why does an argument against God or the WT so powerful and devastates faith?

Bingo!

There are thousands of people who believe the earth is flat and they have written hundreds, thousands, who knows maybe millions of pages of "evidence" as well as websites, videos, etc.

I can read their literature for hours, days, years on end and it won't change my certainty about the shape of the earth.

If someone's faith is so rickety, so tenuous, so utterly fragile, that even 15 minutes exposure to a contrary idea is enough to destroy it, what does that say about the viability of whatever that person has faith in?

34

What Do You Think About Home Schooling?

by minimus in

jw
friends

i knew a few witnesses who were very proud of the fact that their kids were homeschooled.

years ago, i would raise my eyebrows wondering why these families couldn’t simply integrate their kids with other “worldly” kids.

at this point in time, with so many theories being pushed on kids and their parents, i can see why parents, if they are qualified, could instruct their kids themselves.

FFGhost

By far, it's not even close, the most thoroughly mentally and emotionally stunted JWs I have known were invariably home-schooled.

I know that's a pretty unrepresentative sample, but personally it always give me pause when thinking about it in general.

It could probably work well with fully involved dedicated parents who value "education" rather than "Watchtower's version of education",