The GB are old men. They grew up in the Cold War era of bomb shelters.
That's their frame of reference. It was easier to scare people back then. They long for the days
of Gorbachev's birthmark on the forehead. It was so easy back then.
TerryWalstrom
JoinedPosts by TerryWalstrom
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13
Why would the Society put this picture of a 'nuclear bomb' on a WT cover talking about Armageddon?
by Esse quam videri ineffects of a nuclear bomb video - .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aza-2wopcfy.
just trying to understand their 'thinking'.
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Ayn Rand - Opinions?
by cappytan infor those of you familiar with ayn rand and her ideas on morality, rationality and reason, what is your opinion of those ideas?.
i'm talking about her actual ideas, not the ideals that libertarianism has adopted and, in some cases, perverted.
do you think she's a charlatan?
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TerryWalstrom
I spent a year and a half reading everything I could by and about Ayn Rand.
You cannot form an honest opinion about her philosophy by reading what others say, you have to read what she said.
You can divide people who speak about Ayn Rand into those who dismiss her because they have some vague idea she was anti-charity. Then there are those who marginalize her because she believed in free enterprise. Then there are those who are against her because she was openly atheist in an era when it was dangerous to say so publicly in America. Finally, you have a large group of people who voice contempt for her as a person because she lived an unconventional lifestyle, smoked heavily and could defeat anybody in a debate.
The one thing you can't do is come out against Ayn Rand in any honest way without having taken the trouble to learn what she espoused and how it holds together as a philosophy.
Let's face it, people who have been drowned by a cultic religion need to re-examine their rational thinking process more than almost any other group. I approached Rand's writings for this reason: their claims to be OBJECTIVE. My task was to discover if it was objective and if it were useful to me.
What I discovered was extraordinary! It was entirely helpful. The best part of it was that it was an entirely non-spiritual, non-superstitious system of discovering what we know, can know, and how we can know it. It is logical, reasonable and pragmatic.
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Let me acquaint you with her thinking by means of some handy quotations. Think of it as a buffet or sampler of her mind.
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The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
It only stands to reason that where there's a sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity is a good motive.
The man who lets his leaders prescribe his course is like a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive. God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.
Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
What is Virtue? Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
The economic value of a man’s work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return. This is the moral meaning of the law of supply and demand.
Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him.
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What is the most current information on the Ricco indictments of Don Adams re: Menlo Park?
by TerryWalstrom indid this quietly go away?.
details, please.
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TerryWalstrom
Take this for what it is worth. It is pathetically amusing.
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What is the most current information on the Ricco indictments of Don Adams re: Menlo Park?
by TerryWalstrom indid this quietly go away?.
details, please.
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TerryWalstrom
Relatively speaking, and in my personal estimation, this is the BIGGEST story ever to address corruption in the Watchtower Organization, and it is not high on the list of interests by the majority of Ex-JW's--at least, as far as I can tell.
WHY?
Money laundering is huge.
If nothing corrupt were being carried out by the Org there would have been no need at all to create the mechanism of money washing, hand-changing, influence peddling, and phone-tapping.
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Sidebar: Several months ago, quite by random, I met and spoke with a man who turned out to be (and to have been for 40 years) legal counsel for a large contingent of Pentecostal ministers with TV ministries.
My ears perked up! We discussed the books I had written in aid of exposing the Watchtower Organization, and the lawyer's ears perked up too!
He began telling me a mind-boggling tale of corruption.
Long story short, he had spent his entire adult life helping a wide assortment of evangelists escape prosecution for extraordinarily illegal activities which were rampant in their ministries.
He described 'black bag' operations wherein he was handed bags filled with cash and told to hide them until further notice. He described drugs, prostitution, pederasty, and bloodshed he would be called in the middle of the night to clean up and make go away!
He wanted--and had wanted--for a long, long time to turn the tables on these minions by exposing them in a tell-all book. But, he told me with his eyes brimming with tears, he knew nothing would be done by the authorities and his life wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel afterward.
I asked him why authorities wouldn't prosecute. He gave me the sort of smile an old man gives a young boy who is naive. He shook his head side to side and bespoke a tale of intrigue that dumbfounded me and left me reeling. He explained how 'the system' worked. At the top, the connected look out for each other. Politicians need money for election / re-election and turn to donors and money laundering schemes. In return, the politicians provide certain protections for the donors. There are vast networks of officials, bankers, police, clerks, etc. who earn a 'shadow income' supporting such networks.
Well, as it turns out, it has A LOT to do with them!
Religions are tax exempt and their inner workings are cloaked in a special status which hides and shields many opportunities for 'others' to employ them for nefarious purposes.
Large real estate transactions, hedge fund investments, charitable projects in foreign lands, etc. do NOT attract the same attention for a religion as would be the case for a for profit corporation.
The attorney proceeded to tell me how a local preacher, Robert Tilton, had purchased so many satellites for televising his ministry, he had cornered the market which allowed him the opportunity to lease transmission accessibility for TV networks such as NBC (as well as a host of other ministries) which raked in billions of dollars annually! Tilton, of course, was a phony preacher and a scurrilous, addicted low-life who couldn't keep himself out of trouble. He had an enormous cocaine habit as well as gambling problems which frittered away so much cash he was jeopardizing things for his Network of cronies. His ministry had to taken in at leas one million dollars PER DAY just to break even!!
The only requirement his Network of fellow evangelists demanded was the absence of public scandal in order not to jeopardize their gravy train. Tilton could not / would not comply and took a big fall by defaulting on his satellite payments. Even with 30 million viewers and carloads of cash donations pouring in from people needing prayers and healing, Tilton screwed the pooch. His average donor pledged and paid $25,000 per year! (Do the math!) His income was greater than Madonna and Michael Jackson combined, according to Diane Sawyer's expose' of Tilton on national television. A 'visible' income of 80 million dollars per year TAX FREE was easily detected, but--according to my lawyer friend, it wasn't a freckle of the total bonanza beneath the surface which went for payoffs to police, politicians, officials, and lawyers such as himself, as well as a hefty paycheck for mastermind Jim Moore, a well-connected 'media consultant.' Jim Moore would zoom in on who among the donors had big money. They came under his microscope to be scrutinized, surveilled, and targeted as to the number of assets, family members, habits, weaknesses, etc. All of which were compiled into a data base enabling Tilton's ministry to zero in on how to pinpoint his appeals for more cash!
The network Tilton and a host of others shared, had connections with organized crime through a man named Herman Bebe. Ralph W. Nichols and J.C. Joyce.
Ralph W. Nichols (the lawyer who was telling me this) and J.C. Joyce, his partner dealt with the lowest of low-life schemers, con-men, and architects of fraud on a daily basis for decade after decade.
Nichols told me he was now 70 years old and sick at heart. He just couldn't do it any longer.
But, he said he also knew things about the Watchtower Organization as well because some of the people he had to work with were doing consulting work with them. I don't know the details because Mr. Nichols was late for an appointment. It really raised my curiosity, to say the least!
We made plans to speak again. I offered to help him if he would help me. I could be his 'beard' or camouflage in publishing a book exposing the snake pit of crime behind the Pentecostal preachers syndicate. He would provide me with expertise in how things operated and point to what to look for.
Alas, after that one solitary meeting I could never reach him by e-mail or cellphone again.
Make of all of this what you will. It is pointless to speculate further.
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Are we pro-shunning or against it?
by Simon injust to continue my theme about religious freedom and how we approach criticizing the wts, i've also been thinking about 'shunning'.. i think shunning is the most unifying complaint that most ex-members of religious groups that practice it have in common.
it is the layer that runs under every other complaint - whatever the reason for leaving it seems "... and i was shunned" can be added to it as the final rap on the charge sheet.. of course it seems like a no-brainer to many of us and we hardly ever stop to really think about it - shunning is bad, the watchtower believes in shunning therefore the watchtower is bad.
they need to stop it.
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What is the most current information on the Ricco indictments of Don Adams re: Menlo Park?
by TerryWalstrom indid this quietly go away?.
details, please.
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TerryWalstrom
Did this quietly go away?
Details, please. . .
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Are we pro-shunning or against it?
by Simon injust to continue my theme about religious freedom and how we approach criticizing the wts, i've also been thinking about 'shunning'.. i think shunning is the most unifying complaint that most ex-members of religious groups that practice it have in common.
it is the layer that runs under every other complaint - whatever the reason for leaving it seems "... and i was shunned" can be added to it as the final rap on the charge sheet.. of course it seems like a no-brainer to many of us and we hardly ever stop to really think about it - shunning is bad, the watchtower believes in shunning therefore the watchtower is bad.
they need to stop it.
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TerryWalstrom
FORCED shunning is the issue.
If you are threatened with spiritual death (disfellowship) if you make a personal choice of association, it is a crime against humanity. If there was such a thing as Christian Conscience permitted by the WT, it would be far more bearable.
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IDEAL BATHROOMS
by TerryWalstrom ini use to dream about designing a bathroom that was, well.
crazy.. today, i saw this photo and almost fell over.
obviously somebody else had the same dream!.
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TerryWalstrom
I use to dream about designing a bathroom that was, well. . . crazy.
Today, I saw this photo and almost fell over. Obviously somebody else had the same dream!
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EXPERTS ONLY! A Pop Quiz on (current) Watchtower teaching
by TerryWalstrom inpop quiz on jw (current) teaching.
1. was jesus 2nd coming in 1914?.
2. is jesus 2nd (parousia) presence the same thing as his coming?.
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TerryWalstrom
The GB is like the lazy relative who borrowed money from you years ago and every time you bump into them they have yet a bigger excuse and elaborate story as to why they don't pay.
It becomes a kind of spectator sport watching them spin new webs.
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"Scum, roosters, jackasses, harlots, s.o.b.s" hate speech by JW's the reason for their "persecution"???
by TerryWalstrom infrom the online journal yad l'achim .
http://yadlachim.org/?categoryid=203&articleid=577.
in the above article jehovah's witnesses and the jews, a great many controversial issues are placed squarely in the spotlight of history.
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TerryWalstrom
The article gave the JW Org a real bitch slap.
I'm posting it on Facebook.
