I first heard of Ray Franz when I saw a piece about his expulsion in "Time" magazine in 1982. I hadn't been in long at that point, so of course I discounted everything he had to say in that interview, but it did plant a seed that, perhaps, things in Brooklyn weren't as spirit-begotten as I'd been led to believe. I left of my own accord six years later, and never really thought aboit Ray Franz again until 1996, when I first ran into Randy Watters' website and saw an article about "The Franz Incident." That piqued my interest, amnd when I finally did read CofC I developed great respect for the man, What would really be interesting is for someone to write a modern-day CofC. All I know about the current GB bunch is what I read here, and it sounds like someone really needs to do a definitive insider expose for the "2.0" generation.
em1913
JoinedPosts by em1913
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43
Did Ray Franz Help You To Get Out of “The Truth”?
by minimus ini sneakily read his books at work.
it was written in such a way that no one could accuse him of being another bitter old apostate.. once it registered in my brain, especially after reading the second book, i knew i had to get out!.
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em1913
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Should Voters Be Made To Prove They Are Eligible To Vote?
by minimus ini believe that just because someone shows up at the voting booth, it doesn’t automatically qualify them to be legitimate voters.
i think it’s not unreasonable to provide proof that you are qualified..
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em1913
Where I live you have to provide a photo ID and a Social Security number to register. Voting is done at neighborhood polling stations where the wardens know most, if not all, of the voters by sight, and no ID is required other than confirming your name and address on the registration roll.
Since 1970 there have been three cases of voter fraud confirmed in my state. Two of them were described as "good old boys" who owned property straddling a town line, and who claimed they thought that entitled them to vote in both towns. The other was a man with "cognitive difficulties" who was simply confused. None of them were cases of "non citizens" or other persons not legally qualified to vote.
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Why Do People Hate Jews???
by minimus ini have never understood anti-semitism .why sooo much hatred?.
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em1913
Nazi anti-Semitism derives primarily from the writings of the Anglo-German "philosopher" Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who promoted a sort of weird Teutonic racial nationalist mysticism which combined a belief in Nordic superiority with ideas drawn from the works of Richard Wagner. Chamberlain lived in VIenna around the time of Hitler's residence there, and his writings were extremely popular among the pan-Germanic nationalists of that era. Hitler picked up the central tenets of his ideas from Chamberlainite pamphlets that widely circulated in pre-WWI Austria, and cited Chamberlain as a major influence during and after his rise to power. He sought out and interacted with Chamberlain in person late in the latter's life. Chamberlain was not a Muslim, and Hitler was a convinced anti-Semite long before he ever met, interacted with, or thought about Islam.
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“Monkey this up”...
by minimus inthat expression is a no-no now.
it is racist and hateful.
some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..
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em1913
As you wish. Right is left and left is right, or so Brother Mustard would have us believe, and never the twain shall meet. I'll leave you now to your monkey memes.
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How many JDubs would believe this ridiculous statement?
by Sour Grapes ina circuit overseer or a member of the gibbering body is giving a talk about demonism and he says the following, "there was an elder in a congregation in california who let his 8-year-old daughter watch disney movies that involved witches, gremlins, magic, and sorcery.
many may feel that they are harmless movies and are just entertainment.
well, the 8-year-old daughter actually brought a blue smurf doll to the public talk and watchtower study.
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em1913
I heard that exact Smurf story in California in 1983 -- Santa Barbara West congregation to be specific --and I knew it was ridiculous then. It was making the rounds of the usual suspects -- elders' wives, Brothers Reaching Out, that bunch. I just shook my head. I was "in," but I was never that in.
I didn't hear it from the platform, though -- it was strictly whispered back-of-the-hall gossip. But everybody in the circuit had heard the story.
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J.W.Sisters are not recognized as part of the 144000 Anointed class by the Governing Body of Jehovah`s Witnesses and never have been.
by smiddy3 inrev.14: 1-6 describes the 144000 as males who do not defile themselves with women and are classed as virgins.?.
how does the governing body of j.w.`s explain that a man having a sexual relationship with a woman defiles a man?.
isn`t this or shouldn`t this be an affront to women who are jehovah`s witnesses ?
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em1913
Well, looking at most JW men, I have to say that they probably won't have much trouble with the "virgin" thing.
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85
“Monkey this up”...
by minimus inthat expression is a no-no now.
it is racist and hateful.
some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..
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em1913
See, there's where we disagree. You're looking at capitalism in, basically, a theological bubble.. I'm looking at in in terms of practical application. Our perspectives are so utterly opposed that there's really no grounds for a discussion, because I don't accept your basic premise and you don't accept mine. For me to argue on your grounds, I would have to accept your basic premise that capitalism is a "system of free voluntary exchange." Well, it's that because your theology, or your cosmogony or whatever, chooses to define it that way, and I don't agree with that definition. I'll give you my definition and then you'll disagree with that, and the rest of it will just go around in circles.
I have a pretty good friend who's a Libertarian of your style, and we've discussed these very points many times, And I know *exactly* what you'll say and the points you'll make, and I know exactly the points I'll make in return, and I could cut and paste the entire conversation here, and it would make absolutely no difference for either one of us, so why bother?
I think you should research the Black Codes a bit further. They were inextricably tied to the economic system of the post-bellum South, and were entirely driven by the holders of Southern capital in their practice of capitalism.
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J.W.Sisters are not recognized as part of the 144000 Anointed class by the Governing Body of Jehovah`s Witnesses and never have been.
by smiddy3 inrev.14: 1-6 describes the 144000 as males who do not defile themselves with women and are classed as virgins.?.
how does the governing body of j.w.`s explain that a man having a sexual relationship with a woman defiles a man?.
isn`t this or shouldn`t this be an affront to women who are jehovah`s witnesses ?
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em1913
I wouldn't want to spend eternity next to 143,999 self-aggrandizing jackasses like them in the first place. So there.
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85
“Monkey this up”...
by minimus inthat expression is a no-no now.
it is racist and hateful.
some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..
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em1913
"“A Negro labor force would tend to keep the Chinese steady, as the Chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet.”
Yep, divide and control. This is actually a really good example of the point I was making, so thanks for noting it. Moving ahead a bit historically, but on the same general theme, I'd call your attention to Stetson Kennedy's book "Southern Exposure," published in 1946, which offered a detailed and thoroughly documented expose of how major Northern industrialists were in full collusion with Southern racists to ensure a continued source of cheap manufacturing labor to fuel their operations. A book well worth seeking out for anyone interested in these issues/
Getting back to the railroads,I think you might want to look more deeply into the treatment of "coolie labor" by the railroads, because it isn't quite as simple as "paid labor.". It wasn't a particularly happy situation for those workers, to say the least, and their importation en masse by the railroads for the specific purpose of cheap labor was used as yet another tool for driving down wages overall in that particular sector. White rail workers saw the Chinese not as fellow laborers, but as a specific threat. This attitude continued long after the Transcontinental Railroad itself was completed, and led to incidents of racial violence between white and Chinese workers into the following decades, most notably the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885 in Wyoming, involving miners employed by the Union Pacific Railroad -- which in turn detonated a wave of anti-Chinese racism that swept rapidly across much of the Western United States.
Among those jumping on this particular bandwagon was the then-thriving Populist movement itself -- which adopted a rather militantly racist, anti-Chinese platform in response, which had the effect of pushing the entire movement sharply in the direction of reactionary nativism, and after a disastrous alliance with William Jennings Bryan's failed presidential campaign, to the movement's eventual adoption in the early years of the twentieth century of an overall white-supremacist orientation.
The remnants of that movement, especially in the Midwest, made a significant contribution to the rise of the Second Era Klan, a movement which swept the entire United States in the early twenties and even controlled the state of Indiana, before collapsing under the weight of a debilitating sex scandal in the late twenties. Its fragments in the 1930s drifted into other movements, notably those of Father Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith. After much fragmentation and straining thru the filters of Birchism and Cartoism, this identical strain of nativist populism -- its racism now encoded rather than worn on the sleeve -- resurfaced in the Buchanan movement in the 1990s, which eventually hijacked the straggling remains of Ross Perot's nativist but not especially racist Reform Party, and laid the groundwork for the populist movement that began in the late 2000s and continues to the present day.
History's fascinating, it really is -- and as Mr, Faulkner so aptly put it, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."
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85
“Monkey this up”...
by minimus inthat expression is a no-no now.
it is racist and hateful.
some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..
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em1913
Capitalism uses racism, and profits from it. That's a simple historical fact. The great New England fortunes of early America were largely built on the slave trade -- and those of us here are only just beginning to come to terms with that. But it's unimpeachable historical fact. The great fortunes of the pre-Civil War south -- need we even discuss those? The vast railroad fortunes of the 19th Century -- whose physical labor, exactly, built those railroads? It goes on and on, but I think the point is made.
The "black codes" imposed in the South in the late 19th Century were largely imposed to ensure a continuous source of cheap labor for, not just the plantation system, but also for manufacturing. The continued repression of African-American wages served as a useful tool for keeping working-class white wages down as well. And it wasn't just the South that profited from this -- the use of lower-paid black labor during the years of the Great Migration was used as a constant threat over white workers, thus preventing them from coming to any understanding of working-class solidarity across racial lines. The CIO worked mightily during the 1930s to overcome this, to only limited success, because the problem was so widespread. It wasn't until the Fair Employment Practices Act of 1941 outlawed race differentials in wages for defense contractors that any real progress was made toward dealing with this issue, and that law was bitterly opposed by the National Association of Manufacturers and similar capitalist-interest groups, and enforcement was always spotty. This, too, is unimpeachable historical fact. And I won't even start on our current administration, run by a billionaire who was seeded in his "self made" business career by a slumlord father who ran racially-restricted buildings, and who himself had an extremely dubious racial record in conducting his own real estate enterprises.
As for the rest of it, I believe that economics, as I said, is far more a "faith" than a "science." And when discussing matters of faith there's really no point in two people who are clearly of different fundamental philosophies running around in circles with each other. I can cite Marx and you'll cite Bohm-Bawerk and I'll cite Hilferding and you'll cite Hayek, and I'll say tomata and you'll say tohmato, and eventually we'll just call the whole thing off. I'm not in this for the ego-boost, so I'll save us both the trouble. If there's one thing I learned on the doorstep it's that you can't make a Witness out of a Mormon. OMG MORPHS LAW!