based on a daily telegraph article : jehovah's witnesses accused of selling off assets and moving cash to avoid sex abuse compensation
watchtower has 800 charities in australia and australian law says they don't have to report assets below 1 million .
doesn't this imply watchtower can have in excess of 700 million laundered funds?
I think that the wt organization has very real financial issues and troublesome concerns that need to be seriously addressed or they may just go out of business! When you're looking at financial ruin, you do whatever, even shady, underhanded shit to try and recover!
Would be a damn shame if wt goes out of business-------NOT!
just saying!
not sure if i posted this before but it's so damn interesting, i'll do it again!.
by yoginder sikand.
03 april, 2012
Not sure if I posted this before but it's so damn interesting, I'll do it again!
By Yoginder Sikand
03 April, 2012
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.
just saying!
he talks about how a group of 5,000 broke away from the organization due to distrust of government agents infiltrating the jws.
they weren't regarded as apostates, just distrustful.
he uses phrases like "their leader" and "his elders", and how they had a meeting with the governing body and made the decision for all these thousands to reintegrate them into the jws, splitting them up among congregations.
I watched the video with my pimi wife last night. My word's to her afterwards were along the lines of; "if this is truly jehober's organization and he is safe guarding them from satan, then why in the hell did he allow 'spies' to infiltrate the organization in the first place? And you gotta know that not all those that left came back to the organization,"
Silence followed!
just saying!
i used to watch his videos on the monthly gb talks.
he has went over the top a few times doing one video on why being liberal idiot is a good thing.
he has made comments on the usa not knowing shit about what he was desperately trying to talk about.
I like Loyd. He's been at it a while and has done some very good stuff!
just saying!
i guess it's the covid-19 thing.
but very little news from a couple of people i know well there.
they can't leave the "compound" or much of anything else.
Yep the only thing that has stopped the 'celestial chariot' is Covid-19!
just saying!
what are the craziest books or magazines the tower ever printed?
i know of the millions now living is crazy the finished mystery.
.
The NWT of the bible! Hands down!
just saying
1
there was a 50 year gap between the failed dates of 1925 and 1975.. memories fade, people die, and who cares what was said 50 years ago.. most jw's now in the religion werent there when 1975 was a thing.
even my mother who was baptized in 1974 who i do remember speaking about it back in the day, can barely remember what the fuss was about.
for active jw's who are doing all there studying online now, its practically impossible to find any wt contemporary reference to 1975.. i read recently (sorry i cant source it right now) that at the time, even watchtower may have taken the view that even if they knew 1975 was wrong, the short term gains would far outstrip those who left leading to an overall net gain so it was a risk worth taking.
The WT has already pinned it down to a date!
"the last days of the last days"
I mean how much more specific than that can you get!!!!
just saying!
the 2 or 3 witness rule to substantiate a truth about a matter .joh.8:17 , 2 cor.13 : 1. jehovah`s witnesses claim they were appointed by god in 1919 ?
as the only religion that god was going to use to dispense food at the proper time ?
and to lead his people by.. fact 1.
Fact 1. .Jehovah`s Witness Organization didn`t even exist at that time , however "The International Bible Students Association" I.B.S.A. existed then ,and if anything ,they would have been given that approval . If that was the case .
The INBS was just "overlapping" the WTBTS--right?
just saying!
This site, the contributing members, and the insightful information, i.e. ttatt, was very helpful as I actively began my very successful fade about 11-12 years ago.
Is it just me or does it seem like it has morphed into a more political/racial opinion battle ground. CNN vs FOX news. Actual, helpful facts about religion, it's man made origins, the bible and it's mythological beginnings , have, to some degree been supplanted by opinions on politics and racial issues!
I miss Blondie's comments/research on what the wt really says!
just saying!
so we've all been locked down and there's only so much netflix / prime / disney / hbo you can watch and computer games you can play.
what has everyone been doing to pass the time?.
when you're completely stuck inside and working from home it can get a bit boring staring at the same walls all day and then in the evening as well.
I'm a old fan of old fans! Their fan-tastic!
just saying!
