schnell

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Posts by schnell

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  221

  Judge sanctions WTS - $4k per day penalty for not producing sex abuse documents

  by Simon in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  judge sanctions jehovah's witnesses.

  imposes $4000-a-day penalty for not producing documents in sex-abuse case.

  by dorian hargrove, june 24, 2016. a san diego superior court judge has ordered the church of jehovah's witnesses, also known as the watchtower bible and tract society of pennsylvania, to pay $4000 a day for every day that it fails to produce documents requested in a civil lawsuit brought by former parishioner, osbaldo padron, who claims a church elder sexually abused him when he was seven years old.. in a june 23 ruling, expected to be made final today, judge richard strauss admonished the church for willfully ignoring a court order to produce all documents associated with a 1997 body of elders letter that church leaders sent to parishes around the world in a quest to learn about sexual abuse of children by church leaders.. over the course of the past year, the watchtower society and its lawyers have fought hard to keep the letter confidential, claiming that turning over the documents would infringe on the privacy of those mentioned in the letter that were not associated with the case.. in march 2015, the church turned over a heavily redacted version of the letter.

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  schnell

  Oh ffs.....
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  18

  7th Day Adventist growth/decline stats similar to JWs

  by fukitol in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  the sda's are also getting most of their growth in africa and latin america but plateauing or declining in europe and parts of the western world.. what's also interesting is the sda leadership fronts up and attempts to explain why there is decline in some areas of the world (albeit somewhat disingenously), eg, on the link below from 2014. but the watchtower leaders have never tried to give any explanation for why membership is dramatically falling away in the western world.

  increasingly worried jws are instead turning to other sources of information to try and understand why the 'true religion' is contracting.. http://news.adventist.org/en/all-news/news/go/2013-10-13/membership-nears-18-million-secretary-highlights-regions-of-growth-decline/.

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  schnell

  I don't know anything about SDA end-times predictions other than they have some, but I'm willing to bet they aren't as branding as that of JWs.

  PS: SDAs are huge in Oregon. Nice people, from what I can tell, and they've never once shied away or tried to hand me a pamphlet.
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  401

  So, the Womens March ... What Is It For?

  by Simon in

  1. social
  2. current

  it seems like mobilizing after the election, which seems pointless.

  i keep hearing demands for equal rights but don't understand what rights they are missing exactly.. normally a march is to show the support (and potential votes) for a cause, but ... votes for what?

  ... and the election happened already.. is anyone else confused?

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  schnell

  I don't know, but if I see anyone protesting more in my neck of the woods, it's crazed old white men protesting Planned Parenthood and conflating abortion with homicide.
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  36

  How do JW's determine a person is anointed?

  by thinker11 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i've always wondered about this.

  when a person believes they made a spiritual connection with god and proclaims themselves as anointed, how do they determine whether this person is anointed or not.

  does a group of elders look at the person's spiritual resume and check off the person's pioneer stats, bible knowledge, attendance, work ethic, personality, etc and then believe in the person if they have a good track record?

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  schnell

  And when Dawkins tried the God helmet, he said it felt strange and relaxing.

  Put that thing on Steven Lett and see what happens.
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  5

  Promise Keepers

  by schnell in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  "real men keep their promises.".

  i remember that bumper sticker from the 90s when i was a teenager in texas.

  i didn't know it was attached to a kind of cult.. this article is 14 years old, and may well have appeared on this site before, but i'd like to reference it anyway because i see parallels, of course.. whatever happened to the promise keepers?.

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  schnell

  "Real Men keep their promises."

  I remember that bumper sticker from the 90s when I was a teenager in Texas. I didn't know it was attached to a kind of cult.

  This article is 14 years old, and may well have appeared on this site before, but I'd like to reference it anyway because I see parallels, of course.

  Whatever happened to the
  Promise Keepers?

  Excerpted from John P. Bartkowski’s forthcoming book, The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men (Rutgers University Press, 2003)

  Careful observers of PK could notice telltale signs of the movement’s decline soon after Stand in the Gap. Just four months after that event, the organization laid off its entire office staff because of its dwindling finances. Armed with the catchy slogan, “Open the gates in ‘98!” PK had decided to drop its conference admission fee of sixty dollars at more than a dozen venues across the nation. The donation–only strategy of fundraising was designed to attract a more economically and racially diverse group of men to PK conferences. PK had long promoted reconciliation among men from different racial, socioeconomic, and denominational backgrounds under the banner, “Break Down the Walls.” Yet, the most significant breaking that took place in 1998 was the financial sort. PK was in desperate need of cash.

  The organization’s cancellation of its long–planned millennial march was another sign of its decline. Dubbed “Hope for a New Millennium: Light the Night,” that event was billed as the follow–up march to Stand in the Gap, and was introduced to PK faithful there on the National Mall in 1997. The goal was ambitious—have PK men across America descend on capitol buildings in each of the fifty states at midnight on January 1, 2000. This “Y2K” reprise to 1997’s Stand in the Gap was anticipated to lend even more visibility to the movement. Yet, by early April 1999, the millennial march fell prey to the Y2K bug. Caution apparently being the better part of valor, PK leaders told men to remain home with their families to face what was expected to be a precarious transition to the new millennium. Many wondered if the event had been cancelled primarily because it would have been an embarrassment, a testimony to the falling fortunes of PK.

  PK lost much of its newsworthiness soon after laying off its staff and canceling its millennial march. In the blink of an eye, the high–profile media attention PK once enjoyed had evaporated. Gone was coverage of massive PK stadium conferences and the personal testimonials of lives changed that had graced the covers and feature stories of all the nation’s top weekly news magazines. And front–page headlines captured so effectively by the group suddenly became a distant memory. Those left scratching their heads from diminished news coverage would see the writing on the wall with a quick glance at the numbers. The Promise Keepers’ annual budget dwindled from $117 million in 1997 to $34 million in 2001, and its surviving office staff of one hundred—those rehired after the layoff—was a skeleton troupe when compared with the veritable army of three–hundred and fifty that it employed during its heyday.

  More convincing yet, the movement’s stadium gate draw became a mere shadow of its former self. Once able to attract more than 50,000 men to each of more than a dozen football stadiums during its “conference season,” the movement adopted the more modest goal of filling convention halls and civic centers of about 15,000. One of the more striking examples of the drought in attendance was found in Minneapolis. PK attracted 62,000 men to the Metrodome in 1995, but could muster only 16,000 men to Minneapolis’s much smaller Target Center in 2000. Similar drops in attendance occurred in other repeat–venues throughout the nation.
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  36

  How do JW's determine a person is anointed?

  by thinker11 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i've always wondered about this.

  when a person believes they made a spiritual connection with god and proclaims themselves as anointed, how do they determine whether this person is anointed or not.

  does a group of elders look at the person's spiritual resume and check off the person's pioneer stats, bible knowledge, attendance, work ethic, personality, etc and then believe in the person if they have a good track record?

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  schnell

  So some quack has a shamanic fever dream (or more likely something a lot more lame) and decides he's one of the literal 144,000? I'd have thought it could be verified by your service report at least, and more than just a checked box.
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  36

  How do JW's determine a person is anointed?

  by thinker11 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i've always wondered about this.

  when a person believes they made a spiritual connection with god and proclaims themselves as anointed, how do they determine whether this person is anointed or not.

  does a group of elders look at the person's spiritual resume and check off the person's pioneer stats, bible knowledge, attendance, work ethic, personality, etc and then believe in the person if they have a good track record?

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  schnell

  You actually have to qualify more to hand people mics
  

  Is that so?
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  15

  I really hate the word "ones".

  by schnell in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  necessary as it is at times, i hate this word.

  for one thing, "ones" is a plural form of the number 1. that is dumb, and it's reason enough to avoid it where it isn't entirely necessary.. one could argue that it never is necessary, but it can still come up in colloquial dialogue when discussing objects.

  jw leaders use it to discuss people.. interestingly, jws even did this to jesus christ in their own translation of the bible, referring to him in ephesians 1:7 with "through the blood of that one" where another translation would say something like "through his blood".

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  schnell

  Well, JWs are historically pretty weird.
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  52

  Russia to liquidate Jehovah's Witnesses' organization

  by processor in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  http://starconnectmedia.com/2017/01/19/russia-gets-go-ahead-to-liquidate-jehovahs-witnesses-organisation/.

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  schnell

  @sbf, well, that would result in a decrease. But since numbers are down across Europe anyway, how would that sentiment be anything more than a pity party?
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  144

  2.16.2017 NJ Star-Ledger Ad: "Were you sexually abused by the Jehovahs Witnesses?"

  by breakfast of champions in

  1. watchtower
  2. child-abuse

  my wife found this 1/4 page ad on page 2 of yesterday's nj star-ledger, probably the biggest newspaper in nj.

  pretty telling.. .

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  schnell

  Watchtower's a helluva drug.