by Alfred 23 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
We had a visit from the DO recently and he used a special talk to make the exact same point against higher education using the so-called example of Baruch.
Do COs and DOs never see the irony of men who don't need to work for a living lecturing others on not pursuing qualifications to help find work?
They really are getting that desperate!!!
I would love to talk to some of the rank and file to see what they think about this quite obvious frontal attack on higher education. This has to be getting them pissed.
You can be a computer programmer without going to college, if you learn from a young age you should do fine.
I would however like to see you get a job with no credentials on a resume, just sayin. I have a son who has learned on his own and he is not working for Microsoft.
The other thing I would like to say about these scumbags is. who are the ones that created the MEP'S program and continue to keep the extensive use of computers for all sorts of activities from office to writing up and running.
It's like hounding the rank and file about working shift work etc., but then running the presses in Canada two shifts, 6 a.m.-11 p.m. But of course since it is in Jehovah's house working directly for Jehovah it's okay!!! Hypocritical cult leaders they are!!!
The last elder school I went to had a talk on how bad higher education is. Being near Gainsville FL he said the witness kids who are going there are droping out of the WT like flies. Higher education like that is extremely dangerous to our young ones. Its bad, bad, bad for your JW health. Idrnomo its been 3 months now sense I have been to a meeting but before that no one gave it much thought. But I am in a pretty old congregation. Most there were lucky to have a high school education. But there is a big push to stop higher education in the JW world. It reminds me of the old TW ad many years ago were it said "Knowledge is Power". The GB does not want their flock to have power because of knowledge. The only power they want is what they have and nobody else can have it. Totally ADD
the 2nd most heinous thing the watchtower does (after disfellowshipping) is ruining people's lives by denying them a higher education
Baruch was a scribe. That ain't like a scribbler. No, a scribe was an esteemed professional in his day. Thought of as an attorney. They were trained and literate, and read the law(s) to the uneducated masses. I find it absolutely hysterical that the Watch Tower would say that Baruch preached a simpler, less educated life!
*****
Ancient Israel
Scribes in Ancient Israel, as in most of the ancient world, were distinguished professionals who could exercise functions we would associate with lawyers, government ministers, judges, or even financiers. Some scribes copied documents, but this was not necessarily part of their job. [ 13 ]
In 586 B.C., Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians. The Temple was looted and then destroyed by fire. The Jews were exiled.
About 70 years later, the Jewish captives returned to Jerusalem from Babylon. According to the Bible, Ezra recovered a copy of the Torah and read it aloud to the whole nation.
The Jewish scribes used the following process for creating copies of the Torah and eventually other books in the Tanakh.
Ancient Egypt
Egyptian scribe with papyrus scroll
The Ancient Egyptian scribe, or sesh, [ 1 ] was a person educated in the arts of writing (using both hieroglyphics and hieratic scripts, and from the second half of the first millennium BCE the demotic script was used as well) and dena (arithmetics). [ 2 ] [ 3 ] Sons of scribes were brought up in the same scribal tradition, sent to school and, upon entering the civil service, inherited their fathers' positions. [ 4 ]
Much of what is known about ancient Egypt is due to the activities of its scribes. Monumental buildings were erected under their supervision, [ 5 ] administrative and economic activities were documented by them, and tales from the mouths of Egypt's lower classes or from foreign lands survive thanks to scribes putting them in writing. [ 6 ]
Scribes were also considered part of the royal court and did not have to pay tax or join the military. The scribal profession had companion professions, the painters and artisans who decorated and other relics with pictures and hieroglyphic text. A scribe was exempt from the heavy manual labor required of the lower classes.
An account of monthly barley rations issued to adults (30 or 40 pints) and children (20 pints) written in cuneiform script on a clay tablet. Written in year 4 of King Urukagina (circa 2350 BCE). From Girsu, Iraq. British Museum, London.
The Mesopotamian scribe, or dubsar, [ 7 ] received his or her early education in the "tablet house," or é-dubba. [ 8 ] As in Egypt, he was generally male [ 7 ] and belonged socially to an elite class. [ 7 ] The youngest of the Mesopotamian students typically received their first instruction from older students. [ 7 ] The older students appear to have been bribed into proffering preferential treatment, such as to avoid punishing certain children. [ 7 ] Excavations suggest that all the male children from the wealthier families of Mesopotamia were educated. [ 7 ]
Writing in early Mesopotamia seems to have grown out of the need to document economic transactions, and consisted often in lists which scribes knowledgeable in writing and arithmetics engraved in cuneiform letters into tablets of clay. [ 9 ] Apart from administration and accountancy, Mesopotamian scribes observed the sky and wrote literary works as well as the famous myth The Epic of Gilgamesh. They wrote on papyrus paper [ 10 ] as well as clay tablets. They also wrote and kept records. Scribe's writing tools were made of reeds and were called a stylus.
Babylonian scribes concentrated their schooling on learning how to write both Akkadian and Sumerian, in cuneiform, for the purposes of accountancy and contract dealings, in addition to interpersonal discourse and mathematical documentations. [ 8 ]
The Mesopotamian scribal profession was associated with the goddess Nisaba, who later would become replaced by the god Nabu. [ 8 ]
Besides the scribal profession for accountancy, and 'governmental politicking' , the scribal professions immediately branched-out into the socio-cultural areas of literature. The first stories probably related to societal religious stories, and gods, but the beginning of literature genres were starting.
In ancient Egypt an example of this is the Dispute between a man and his Ba. Some of these stories, the "wisdom literatures" may have just started as a 'short story', but since writing had only recently been invented, it was the first physical recordings of societal ideas, in some length and detail. In Mesopotamia, the Sumerians had one of the beginnings of this literature in the middle to late 3rd millennium BC, and besides their creation stories, and religious texts, there is a series of disputations. An example from the small list of Sumerian disputations is the debate between bird and fish. [ 11 ] In the other Sumerian disputes, in the 'dispute between Summer and Winter' , summer wins. The other disputes are: cattle and grain, the tree and the reed, Silver and Copper, the pickax and the plough, and millstone and the gul-gul stone. [ 12 ]
It is absolutely amazing that in 2011 they still print this kind of crap.
The desperation does seem increasingly palpable. But desperation is just a side effect of lack of control, direction, and imagination.
Well. I think I have a question. What did the prophet Jeremiah do for a living? That is important for us to know why and how Baruch was doing so well as a secretary. The denaries, pieces of silver or gold, or the whatever Baruch earned had to come from Jeremiah, and Jeremiah's denaries and pieces of silver or gold, where did they come from?
Did Jehovah provide them?
Did the prophet Jeremiah lived off the equivalent of welfare in the Jewish system of things, meaning he was able to eat and have time to listen to Jehovah only because someone else DIDN'T, and worked instead?
When you are a good Jehovah's witness and are working your way up to elder, are you NOT making a name for yourself, realizing personal aspirations? What if you're a member of the Governing Body?
My (JW) hubby often points out that her skillset will be useless in the paradise to come. ~ jgnat
Really? You mean people won't have accidents, falling out of trees while picking apples, landing on their heads or breaking a leg? Women will stop having babies? I wonder if your hubby needs reminding that according to JW doctrine, human Perfection™ will not be achieved until after the 1000 Year Reign of Jesus. In the meantime, survivors of Armageddon™ - who obviously come through that ordeal completely unscathed and unscratched </sarcasm> - are tasked with cleaning up the mess left behind by Jehovah's battle of Armageddon™. That's right, Almighty God, who has the capacity to cleanse the earth before our eyes, has deemed that it's beneath him to do the post-Armageddon™ clean-up and rebuilding, and has, instead, left that task to puny still-Imperfect™ human survivors of his worldwide genocide of non-JWs, ex-JWs and dirty rotten Apostates™... at least what's left of them after the birds of prey have had their fill of the corpses... with the best jobs, of course, going to those with extensive janitorial and window cleaning experience.
Of course physicians will have a useful skillset in the Paradise™ - especially if they are psychiatrists.
