Being of the "anointed" doesn't really carry any weight with jw's anymore. If one younger than 80 years old claims to be "anointed", they must be mistaken or mentally ill cause that door closed in 1935 according to crazy freddy franz!
just saying!
eyeuse2badub
JoinedPosts by eyeuse2badub
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24
How many anointed have come and gone; how many remain?
by Moster injust wondering if there is any data about how many anointed there were in say 1914, and considering most would have passed 'beyond the veil' already, are the jw's numbers adding up?
we know there are more in 2017 then there were in 2016, but just where are we in the grand total column?.
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Is Kim Jong Un a jw?
by eyeuse2badub inworldkim jong un expands his war on christmas with new ban on singing and drinking.
aol.com 14 hours ago .
reactions.
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eyeuse2badub
WorldKim Jong Un expands his war on Christmas with new ban on singing and drinking
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has upped the ante in his war on Christmas with a new rule that prohibits any "gatherings that involve alcohol and singing."North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has upped the ante in his war on Christmas with a new rule that prohibits any "gatherings that involve alcohol and singing."
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service reported the details of the latest ban, which is designed to control the spread of information coming from outside of official channels and contain potential dissent that may arise from recent tightening of sanctions against the secluded Asian country.
Just substitute Kim's name with any one of the gb and you get the point! Time to up the ante and control the rank and file by cutting out anything fun or normal.
just saying!
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Why my religion is the truth
by eyeuse2badub ini found this extremely interesting and poignantly true.
it's a bit long but so well worded, highlites and bolds are mine!
by yoginder sikand.
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eyeuse2badub
I found this extremely interesting and poignantly true. It's a bit long but so well worded, Highlites and bolds are mine!
By Yoginder Sikand
Throughout the world, the overwhelming majority of people who believe in, or otherwise feel emotionally linked to, a particular religion are those who have been born into it. This fact has crucial implications for how most ‘believers’ come to develop notions of what they regard as ‘true’ and, conversely, ‘false’, religion.
For almost all people, their religious faith is something they inherit from their immediate families. From infancy itself, they are carefully socialized by their parents and other close relatives into accepting the religious doctrines, beliefs and rituals of their families. At this stage in their lives, children are most susceptible to the influence of their parents. Unable to think for themselves about matters such as religion, they naturally accept whatever is taught to them by their parents, whom they implicitly trust. Being wholly dependent—psychologically, emotionally and materially—on their parents, they automatically imbibe the religious beliefs and prejudices of the latter. This is how blind, unquestioning belief in the religion that they inherit at birth becomes so deeply-rooted in most people as to make it almost impossible for to shake off at a later stage in life. Along with this, in many cases children are also socialized by their parents into believing that their religion alone is true and that all others are false, impure or deviant. Naturally, all these religious prejudices—about the supposed superiority of their own religion and the putative falsity of all other religions—that they inherit at this impressionable age remain with many people deep into adulthood and last till they die.
The fact of the matter, then, is that what almost all ‘believers’ —irrespective of religion—passionately regard as ultimate religious truth is simply the collection of religious beliefs, rituals and prejudices that they unthinkingly inherit from their parents, and which, through very effective indoctrination, they are trained into blindly believing as Absolute Truth. This means that the vast majority of the world’s Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Sikhs, ‘pagans’ and so on are such only because they happened to have been born into families linked to the particular religion that they grew up to believe in. If almost all ‘believers’ regard their respective religions as the best among all or as the truest or as most fully manifesting the Ultimate Truth, it is almost inevitably only because this is what they have been reared into believing by their parents from a very young age itself. Such faith in the superiority of their inherited religion is rarely, if ever, based on a careful, objective, unbiased and neutral examination of all religious, including their own.
There is more to the reality of the inherited nature of notions of religious truth that most ‘believers’ adhere than this. Every religion is susceptible to multiple interpretations, and this explains the existence of fierce sectarian divisions within each of them. Each sect within a larger religious tradition claims to monopolize religious truth in quite the same way as most religious traditions themselves do. Here, too, membership in a particular religious sect is almost always based on one’s birth in it and consequent socialization into its doctrines from a young age. Almost inevitably, a person is a Sunni or a Shia Muslim, and, then, a Deobandi Sunni or a Barelvi Sunni or an Ithna Ashari Shia or an Ismaili Shia, not on the basis of conscious, informed choice made in adulthood, when alone such a choice can be made, or as a result of a careful comparative study of the competing doctrines of these rival Islamic sects, but simply because he or she was born into a particular sect whose beliefs he or she is then socialized into believing represents the ‘true Islam’—which, in his or her mind, is equated with Absolute Truth. The same principle holds in the case of sectarian divisions in other religious communities, too.
What does all this mean for our understanding of religious truth? Quite simply, it indicates that for the vast majority of us, what we fervently regard as ‘true religion’ (which a very great many of us spend our entire lives ardently believing in, defending, and passionately seeking to convert ‘non-believers’ into accepting, through persuasion or even, sometimes, coercion) is simply the bundle of religious beliefs, rituals, traditions and prejudices of the families we happen to have been born into and which, through no fault of our own, we have been made to believe represents Absolute Truth—even if it really doesn’t!
That most people simply inherit from their families their understandings of what they regard as Ultimate Truth indicates another key aspect of their religiosity: a fundamental inability or unwillingness to search, think and experience the Truth for themselves. Being effectively drilled into accepting the religious beliefs of their families as representing the Ultimate Truth, they see no reason to search for such Truth, for, so they think, they already possess it! So effective is this indoctrination in most cases that to even contemplate such a search and to think of going beyond their inherited religion comes to be regarded as a dangerous lack of faith that supposedly merits Divine wrath. Little wonder, then, that relatively few people are able to escape the totalitarian religious brainwashing that they are subjected to as children, and relatively fewer are courageous enough to even question if their inherited religion is truly the perfect embodiment of Ultimate Truth or the Divine Will that its unthinking votaries insist it is.
Yoginder Sikand is a regular contributor to Countercurrents and the author of several books on Islam-related issues in India. -
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Lead us not into temptation
by eyeuse2badub in'lead us not into temptation': why pope francis is wrong about the lord's prayer.
m j c warren, lecturer in biblical and religious studies, university of .
pope francis recently announced that he thinks the common english translation of the lord’s prayer is mistranslated.
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eyeuse2badub
'Lead us not into temptation': why Pope Francis is wrong about the Lord's Prayer
M J C Warren, Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies, University of Pope Francis recently announced that he thinks the common English translation of the Lord’s Prayer is mistranslated. He is calling for a new version that doesn’t imply that God might lead people into temptation –that, he says, is the Devil’s job. But aside from changing hundreds of years of tradition in the English version of the prayer, is the Pope’s claim that the English misrepresents God an accurate one?
As usual, the Bible itself doesn’t give us a straight answer. Matthew and Luke each have a slightly different version of the prayer that Jesus instructs his followers to emulate. Luke’s version is much shorter, leaving off the request that God “deliver us from evil”. Both Matthew and Luke include in the prayer a hope that God will not lead them into temptation – and, unfortunately for the Pope, translation is not the issue here.
Holy writ: Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. WikimediaA quick and very basic look at the grammar of the prayer shows why. In both versions, the prayer starts by invoking God as Father. The rest of the prayer is addressed to God as Father: “Give us daily bread”; “Forgive our trespasses”; and so on. Some requests are made using a form of a Greek imperative verb, a verb that makes a demand – for instance, in the phrase: “Thy kingdom come” the verb “come” is a demand. The same goes for: “Give us this day our daily bread” and “Forgive us our trespasses”. Each example of the imperative verb addresses its demand to the subject of the prayer, God the Father invoked in the initial line.
The next line, about temptation, is not in the imperative, so in some sense the Pope is correct that this verb is different from the others. However, it is still addressed to the subject of the prayer, to God, as a hope or a wish, being in the “you” form of the subjunctive.
In short, the Pope’s declaration that the sentence be changed to “do not let us fall into temptation” does not accurately reflect Jesus’s words in either Gospel. The Bible is clear that God is implicated in both temptation and its avoidance.
Mysterious ways
This leaves the Pope, and many Christians, in the uncomfortable position of acknowledging that in Jesus’s time, divine protectors were not always benevolent. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, as the saying goes. But God also, as the Bible illustrates, frequently works alongside malevolent forces to test or tempt human beings to sin.
William Blake’s depiction of the misfortunes of Job. WikimediaA clear example of God testing one of his worshippers is the case of Job, where God actually makes a bet with Satan. Satan hints to God that Job only worships God because of his prosperity and tells God that if Job had nothing he would curse God’s name. God takes Satan up on the bet and allows him to put Job in increasingly awful conditions with the aim of tempting him to curse God’s name. While Satan brings about Job’s misery, it’s clear that God is the true the architect of Job’s misfortunes.
Another example comes from Genesis, the familiar story of the Binding of Isaac, where God decides to test Abraham by demanding that he sacrifice his only son. While Genesis isn’t clear about why God tests Abraham’s faith in this way, we know that Jews from around the time of Jesus understood the test to be another incident of Satan and God working behind the scenes to prove a point. The Book of Jubilees describes how Prince Mastema, a Satan-like divine figure, prompts God to tempt Abraham into disobedience by asking him the impossible. Abraham resists temptation and obeys God, but this remains another example of God and Satan colluding to tempt humans into sin.
The Binding of Isaac. CaravaggioExecutive decisions
The New Testament is not immune to this understanding of God – and in fact the Pope’s claim about God’s role in temptation is undermined in the very same Gospels that give us the Lord’s Prayer. Apart from Jesus deliberately telling stories as parables that are difficult to understand in order to mislead people, Matthew’s Gospel also implicates God directly in temptation.
In both Matthew and Luke, Jesus is led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit “to be tempted by the devil”. Again, even if the Devil is the instrument of temptation, the Gospel is very clear that God plays an executive role in making Jesus face that temptation. It is only two chapters later in Matthew when Jesus urges his followers to pray that they avoid the same situation, praying to God that he not lead them into temptation as Jesus was led.
Duccio, The Temptation on the Mount. WikimediaThere are two major issues with Pope Francis’s call to change the Lord’s Prayer. In attempting to remove any implication that God has some hand in evil, the Pope not only overlooks the many biblical examples where God works with Satan to test his followers and even his own son, but he also ignores the plain meaning of the Gospel text. A more consistent understanding of God actually requires that wording, begging God not to lead a worshipper into temptation.
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The '' other and remaining '' Faithful and Discreet Slaves are '' useless ''
by RULES & REGULATIONS infaithful and discreet slave parable.
matthew 24:45-47 "who really is the faithful and discreet slave whom his master appointed over his domestics, to give them their food at the proper time?
happy is that slave if his master on arriving finds him doing so.
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eyeuse2badub
A few years back when the governing body announced that they (at that time there were 8 members), and they alone were the “faithful and discreet slave” of Jesus’ parable, it certainly made me wonder, How did that "legally" happen? After all, for nearly 100 years, all jw’s were taught and we believed that all the ‘anointed’ on earth at any particular time is what constituted the “faithful slave”. The “anointed’, we were taught, were both the “slave” and the “domestics” of Jesus’ parable. Since the 1930’s, there has been a very distinct difference between the “faithful slave” (anointed on earth) and the ‘great crowd’ and this distinction has been a core teaching of our religion. Then suddenly and without warning, much of what we had been taught to believe and what was an integral part of our core beliefs for many, many decades all changed in just ONE Watchtower magazine. So what happened that would require such a drastic change in our core belief system?
Before this historically drastic change, as mentioned before, the “faithful slave” was supposedly as all the 'anointed' on earth, and the governing body was only part of that special group, serving as the spokesman for the group. Individual governing body members, theoretically, had no more authority than the other members of the “faithful slave” class.
Then came the stunning change. The governing body decided, independently from all the other members of the “faithful slave” class, that they, the governing body, they alone were the “faithful slave”. That, IMHO, was exactly like a governmental coup. It was an illegal overthrow of ALL the 'anointed' on the earth and the establishing of a completely new ‘slave class’ comprised of only the 8 men of the governing body!
IMHO, I believe that before this silent ‘coup’, the non-governing body members of the “faithful slave” class were sort of a thorn in the side of the current governing body. The remnant of the ‘anointed’ scattered worldwide were probably writing letters, asking questions, offering unsolicited input and suggestions, trying to help supply “food at the proper time”, etc. and the governing body wanted to stop all that. So the governing body found itself some obscure scriptural backing and proclaimed there was "new light". The governing body slyly pulled off a silent ‘coup’ and that, IMHO, it was a very profound event in the history of Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was a seizing of power and authority in a most visible way.
I really wonder how the rest of the ‘anointed’ truly feel about their being stripped of their “faithful slave” class designation without their consent or input?
As most jw’s conscientiously know, those non-governing body members who are of the ‘anointed’, the ‘remnant’, never actually had any real power nor any meaningful input into the organization’s teachings. They never really got to contribute anything to what we fondly term, “food at the proper time”. Nevertheless, when it came down to such an enormously historic decision, basically overthrowing a recognized, established authority, stripping the ‘anointed’ of their membership as part of the “faithful slave” class, the decision should not “legally” have been made by only eight men. All the other ‘anointed’ members had a, sort of, "legal" right to protest that decision, because at the time, according to jw "law" (doctrine), they were officially part of the “faithful slave” class!
Was what the governing body did "legal" or was it a ‘COUP??
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Toasted daughter: Why Jephthah almost certainly sacrificed his daughter to a complicit Jehovah
by Diogenesister injehovah's witnesses insist that jephthah did not sacrifice his daughter to jehovah.
this is important to them because, rarther than jephthah just being a random bad person, jehovah was very much in on the deal.
after all, he made the promise to jehovah that he would "offer up as a burnt offering" on his return the first thing to come out of his house if jehovah would give the ammonites into his hands in battle, and since they were this makes jehovah complicit.. the isrealites had been getting a good thrashing of late, and the gilead elders (oh boy) had come out to ask jephthah, the rejected son of a prostitute (wouldn't you know it) and renown soldier, if he would lead the isrealites into battle for them.. this is when jephthah makes the deal with jehobo, and it all centres on the word for "burnt offering", which is given as "olah".
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eyeuse2badub
At least they didn't cut her up and send a piece to each tribe of Israel like they did to the concubine mentioned in Judges chap 19 vs 29:
29 When he reached his house, he took the slaughtering knife and took hold of his concubine and cut her up limb by limb into 12 pieces and sent one piece into each territory of Israel. 30 All who saw it said: “Such a thing has never happened or been seen from the day that the Israelites went up out of the land of Egypt down to this day. Consider it, take counsel, and tell us what to do.”
When I read that bible account from god's inspired word and meditate on it, it really does make me feel closer to jehober!just saying! -
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It Seems Some People Don't Listen
by Wasanelder Once inmy dad's phone rings.
its a secretary from his dermatologists office.. her:.
"just calling for "mr. wasa sr." to remind him his appointment is next wednesday at 2pm.".
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eyeuse2badub
My wife often accuses me of not listening, but I just ignore it!
just saying!
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Unbelievable KMS example
by Saltheart Foamfollower ini've been to the kingdom ministry school (for elders) recently and can report that it is mostly the usual mix of cliches and platitudes.
several letters where basically just read through one line at a time.
one point early on though almost made me laugh out loud.
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eyeuse2badub
To those of us who were former MS's or Elders, remember how important it made us feel when we got to go to the KMS "for more spiritual training"? Wow we were so special because we got in on all the latest secret sh*t from the wtbts.
I went to the 'Elders School" in Norco, CA for 2 friggin' weeks back in the early 70's. What a fiasco that was but since Armageddon was only 2 years away, we needed the additional spiritual instruction that would get us through! LOL
just saying!
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November Is The Cruelest Month
by JRK ini have been going through old papers and photographs since my mother passed away.
it has reminded me of some of the reasons that i really hate november.
this year has added to it obviously.. thirty-four years ago, my father passed away in early november.
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eyeuse2badub
JRK
I lost my mom 11 years ago-----in November also. She was a legend in her own time. Loved and remembered by all because of her generosity beyond belief. She raised all of her children (me included) as jw's and 3 of the 5 have remained jw's-- so far! She was part of the "greatest generation", having lived through the 'great depression', WWll, etc. I still miss her and think about her often and her 'pearls of wisdom'.
just saying!
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Where in the bible does it say that the governments will turn on the religions. Like the Dubs always say this will happen
by goingthruthemotions ini have not been here in a while, just trying to move on with my life all the while dealing with a very pimi brainwashed wife.. so the other day she started saying that we will have to go our own ways when things get worse with this world.
she has said this before because she believes that the government will turn on religion and the great and powerful wizards (guardians of doctrine g.o.d.
) will call everyone and tell them where to go.. thank god, (no pun intended) i have been out of the loop for such a long time.
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eyeuse2badub
Man oh man, that John has him some good drugs to have all those wild hallucinations that he wrote down in Revelation. But the guys that think they can put a meaning to those hallucinations are even more strung out and delusional, IMHO!
just saying!
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has upped the ante in his war on Christmas with a new rule that prohibits any "gatherings that involve alcohol and singing."
