by their fruits you will know them.
a good tree (religion) does not bear bad fruit, neither can a rotten tree bear good fruits.
true faith is followed by good fruits/works.. dead faith is followed by bad works or no works at all.. 30 bad fruits/works of counterfeit christian religions.
villagegirl: " Parakeet - two degrees in English Literature ? From what university ? "
B.A. from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. M.A. from the University of Connecticut.
villagegirl: "... thats where I get my creative spelling ..."
I was taught how to spell and punctuate correctly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcs751gcp10.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52j5stxkbkq.
Parakeet: I never knew the verb "to hide" could twisted into so many meanings.
Cold Steel: Yes, it's called English. You really should have paid attention in class.
I have a master's degree in English from a real school (i.e., not BYU). I eat sentence diagrams for breakfast and spit out participles for lunch. I forgot more about the English language than you will ever know about it. Twit.
as a serving witness, i am not foolhardy enough to ask elders this question, because their 'praetorian guard' instincts would kick in, and i would be treated as an anti-christ.. w07 1/1 p. 28 par.
11- "it seems that resurrected ones of the 24-elders group may be involved in the communicating of divine truths today.
my question is simply based on this 'inspired' 'spiritual food at the proper time'; please put a little meat on the bone and tell all 7+ million of us, how do receive these "divine truths" from spirit creatures whom you cannot identify?.
They make it up as they go. As science reveals new, uncomfortable (to religion) information, the gb repackages their doctrine and do away with objections by calling it new light.
It's a high-wire balancing act. One wonders how long they will be able to manage it.
i will not die and unlived life.
i will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
i choose to inhabit my days.. to allow my living to open me, make me less afraid, more accessible, to .
My dub brother's life is a perfect example of an unlived life.
He was dragged into the cult in his teens by our parents and took to it like a fish to water. He went to Bethel for four years but doesn't like to talk about it. Heaven only knows what happened to him there.
Then he married a dub, who, over the years, has steadily and quietly gone crazy. Literally. She's a shut-in who covers her windows with aluminum foil to keep out pollutants and demons. My brother has spent a fortune trying to find a (quack) cure for her. Never took her to a shrink, which is what she needed most. She's beyond help now.
He went into business with a dub friend, who bailed on him when the business started to go under.
He's now in his 60s, doing menial work, nursing a mentally ill wife, has no retirement funds, and is exhausted night and day. If he makes it to 70, I'll be very surprised.
His grades in high school were straight As. He could have been anything -- a doctor, lawyer, scientist -- anything.
But instead he devoted his life to misery in order to hold on to a lie.
Am I bitter about the WTS? You bet.
i'm an active witness from brazil (who would leave if it weren't for my family/friends inside) and always dreamed about practicing skydiving.
but as radical sports are a no-no for witnesses... i wonder if any elder or ex-elder on this forum knows if an active jw, practices skydiving/parachuting once and/or regularly, can he or she be disfellowship on that basis?
i'm considering secretly jumping but afraid if someone finds out.
I went white-water rafting in my 50s and went zip-lining and parasailing a few months ago. Didn't know the WTS disapproved of those things.
Wish I'd known. That knowledge would have made it even more fun than it was.
Parakeet, the dare-devil grandma!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcs751gcp10.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52j5stxkbkq.
I was hoping you would show up, Qcmbr. We've got a live one here. Dawkins would just love a chance to chat with him!
just wanted to post this because i just discovered most of it, and you may be interested.
also, it is relevant to the victoria australia case, specifically the wtbts's defense.
if you read the transcripts, you will see how the lines are being blurred between who is a minister, and who is not.
The WTS's stance (if you can call it that) on their having a hierarchy and all baptized dubs are ordained ministers is situational. At the Australian hearing, the officials couldn't pin the dub and the dub lawyer down on that point.
Their double-speak reminds me of the voice mail message my son and his roomates had on their phone when he was in college:
"If this is a creditor, we'll send the money. If this is a friend, we have no money. If this is our parents, we need money. If this is a girl, we have lots of money!"
the watchtower society is a monolithic power invested by its own self with power of attorney representing the supreme being in his dealings with mankind.
the watchtower represents itself as the "mouthpiece of god".
it speaks for jehovah.. but, does it treat the persons it deals with fairly and with due process?
Terry (response to Cold Steel's post): " Chatty serpents, horny angels, Giants, Ass Jawbones as weapons of mass destruction are exactly the same kind of tale-spinning! If only you'd gotten your story in place BEFORE the Watchtower did their's! "
Terry, he did get his story in place before the WTS. He's parroting tenets of the Church of LDS. It's a case of the cultist leading the cultist.
the great day of god the almighty certainly is a fit description for the destruction of men, women, children, grandmothers, infants and puppy dogs in the days of noah.. why didn't destroying everybody on earth except a remnant of 8 count as armageddon?.
i mean, if you are starting all over by genocide--shouldn't it count for more than bad temper?.
what are we missing?.
Cold Steel: " This doesn't mean God didn't love the people He destroyed; they are His children, just as we are. But they didn't cease from being. Instead, when their bodies died, they were put in sort of a penalty box, where they stayed until the crucifixion of Jesus.
(P.S. -- The "nephilum" is a fanciful story and did not refer to angels at all. This issue of "giants" is an interesting topic and one for another topic.)"
Where are you getting this stuff from -- the Book of Mormon?
what would happen if a jehovah's witness claimed to see an angel or have an angelic experience?
what would the reaction of the church be if one of the governing body claimed to have seen an angel or have an angelic experience?
by "angelic experience" i mean being shown future events by an angelic presence.
Cold Steel: " What would the reaction of the church be if one of the Governing Body claimed to have seen an angel or have an angelic experience?
By "angelic experience" I mean being shown future events by an angelic presence. "
It would be a disaster for the WTS of one of the gb claimed a direct communication with a supernatural entity of any kind and it was made public.
The reason is that over the length of its history (about 140 years or so), the WT has made a lot of outright predictions and a few guarded predictions about the end of times, Jesus's second coming, armageddon, etc. All have failed to materialize.
The gb wiggles out of these failures by claiming they (the gb) are only "spirit-directed," not in actual communication with angels or god or whatever. They don't claim to be direct prophets of God. This allows them to rewrite their history of failures and keep their adherents in line by claiming that God's "light" (that is, his indirect guidance) keeps getting brighter as "the end" approaches.
There are no magical gold tablets or peep stones" or directly "revealed" info about "future events" in the dub religion.
That's sort of thing is the province of Mormons.
