i was in the first month of kindergarten on the night my parents had their first bible study with the jehovahs witnesses.
it was around october and would be my last halloween, christmas, and birthday.
i cherished those last memories though i cant really recall my last birthday celebration as a child.
I had a good JW youth. Got baptized when I was 14. Never had any problems with not celebrating holidays, did some occasional 'witnessing' to my school mates. I had a lot of friends at school and they loved to discuss religious matters with me. I laughed at them and they at me, and we mutually respected each other.
The only thing I regret: there was this one girl I fell in love with when I was 17, and she with me. I really should have uhm... 'explored' our relation a lot more.
this incident in paris makes me feel absolutely furious.
yes i feel desperately sorry for the victims and their families no one should have to deal with that.
the thing that makes me feel absolutely incandescent though is the attack on freedom of speech and expression.
Quoting a journalist friend:
We all have our tendencies towards certain ideologies or belief systems. For example, you can be a follower of Christ or be convinced socialism is the best socio-economic system, it doesn't matter. I'm an atheist. We are all different. We all have our individual or shared beliefs.
Now, I feel we're being generally quite hypocritical as we tend to be more lenient towards acts of brutality depending on how loyal or disloyal we are to their alleged cause.
I'm quite impressed by some of these scholars and how they really lay the responsibility of extremist elements within their own community. We should do this too. Ultimately, the justest way is to meet in the middle. It's where I meet my friends. We do this by moderating the extremes on our own end, not by targeting our so-called opponents.
BTW I live in Colombia. Since 1977 about 142 journalists got killed here (and none by a Muslim).
a letter has just been read out indicating that effective immediately, witnesses are no longer to use the s-8 slip known as the "house to house" record slip, as well as the s-43 "please follow up" slip (usually used for foreign language people).. the letter stated that this is because of the changes in privacy laws etc that are becoming common in the world today.. i will try and get a copy of the full letter and post it asap.. .
I know the slips were banned in Belgium years ago. In The Netherlands they still used the forms when I got out (2012), I don't know the current situation. And for the foreign field (I was the ministerial servant in charge of the territory) we builded a nice program to keep track of all the foreign addresses, which we printed on S-8.
I use RSS in Firefox. Love it. Especially for a dozen blogs that don't update every day, or news sites that have a lot of not-interesting articles.
so this weeks service meeting is so full of "crazy".
a whole 15 min part devoted to trying to indoctrinate everyone on how to "explain our beliefs on 1914".
then another 15 min part called "a tool to help us explain our beliefs about 1914".
Marked
hello all, as you know, when jw tv was announced, our board went wild.
many comments, much speculation and alot of negative feedback on the quality, etc.
well, what has me concerned is that i have not heard a peep from any of my connections left in kingdom-land.
How many JW read their magazines? Read the Bible daily? Participate at the meetings? Pioneer? How many do recognize 'new light' when they read it? (Usually the WT needs a footnote to indicate: this is new light.) How many are really able to lead a Bible study? Etc.
Really, most JW aren't very jolly about their religion: they're followers, not more. Maybe just 10% is really active and happy about it. The rest is mentally inactive.
So, I am not suprised that most jdubs aren't very exited with tv.jw.org.
makes a good point.
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x8i192fbuq&list=uuz1w0ll081jjiycjb298pow.
Who is Rick Fenton?
who thought in the early months of 2012 that such a rebranding would take place in only a matter of 24 months?.
they managed to go from an antique looking and boring website (watchtower.org) with hardly any attractive content to go to a fresh looking new website with stuff for everyone, families, children, teenagers.. movies, and short videos about almost everything and new ones added every month.
cartoons, animation video's , interviews, picture activities all kind of projects, many audio files like dramatic bible readings, dramas and music, online research tools, new brochures for kids (off and online) etc.
So, the OP is actually saying that until 2012 the WTG did not take care of it's members and didn't had much to offer.
this is brillant!
watch this before the wt takes this down!.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgstms2sioa.
OMG, that's freaky!
an odd letter was read at last nights' meeting.
it was in regards to a special campaign for next year arranged by the governing body to go and preach in israel.
the call is going out to anybody that speaks hebrew and english.
From my own experience: traveling to Israel is very safe. Except for Gaza, which is pretty far away from every place where tourists will go.
A few years ago we've visited a Dutch sister who lives in Israel since the 80s. She had some nice stories about the jewish opposition against JW. They are getting some serious threats now and then. So funny when she showed a poster which was distributed in her region with the faces of her and other JW and a nasty text (I don't remember the words). But in general she was really positive.
