https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl6e4emx-4k
No, I was suggesting being imprisoned and/or fined for the offense- not a polite request. A cop doesn't just pull you over and politely ask you to stop speeding.
Whooooaaa.
Totalitarian control.
Thought crime police.
Imprisonment.
"Don't think like that...other people are thinking like that."
Group think outlawed.
Are you really proposing that, JD? Seriously?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl6e4emx-4k
One way or another, by force or, as others have stated here, just by time- religion will soon not exist. It's inevitable.
Or maybe, JD, we will learn to re-define 'religion' and understand it for what it really is - a vital part of political movements and political power structures. The template of 'religious' versus 'secular' has to disappear.
Politics and religion is one and the same - there needs to be an 'enlightened' view, if you will, as to what 'religion' really is. A political tool for government regimes.
yorkshire ripper peter sutcliffe 'planning his own jehovah's witness funeral' at broadmoor.
10 february 2015. while charles manson is busy avoiding being displayed in a glass coffin by his now ex-fiancee, peter sutcliffe is managing his own mortality within the confines of broadmoor hospital.. .
the yorkshire ripper apparently met with funeral directors to plan his own send-off.. sutcliffe, 68, contacted holmes and family funeral directors, whose office is three miles away from the high security hospital in berkshire.. he apparently wishes for the ceremony to be performed in line with his jehovahs witness beliefs.. sutcliffe was handed 20 life sentences for brutally murdering 13 women in the north of england between 1975 and 1980, and attempting to murder seven others.. police believed his killing spree started after he was conned out of money by a prostitute and her pimp.. however, sutcliffe later claimed the voice of god had commanded him to undertake the killings.. the independent (lots of photos of broadmoor psychiatric prison).
And here is another thing: the JWs have promised a serial killer madman that he will return in a physical body, with fresh victims ready and waiting, outside the confines of an insane asylum.
Why wouldn't you take that promise if you were Sutcliffe? Especially as the JWs have promised that the 'bad' people will be killed first. Bad people, in Sutcliffe's mind, are all those who put him where he is right now and are guarding him. He will LOVE the JW Paradise - no policemen, no lawyers - just those gullible JWs to deal with.
And...the JWs have promised that the Paradise, after resurrection, will be drug-free. Imagine - not even psychotropic drugs to hold him back! Truly the doctrine to tug the heartstrings of a madman. And he will be perfect. A perfect madman.
*maybe the JWs are only 'fulfilling prophecy' - Sutcliffe could be Satan - "let loose at the end of a 1000 years to roam this earth..." The JWs must be like Judas Iscariot..."just fulfilling Jehivah's will for them". You know how it goes when Jehovah calls..."it's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it..."
jehovah's witnesses are taught that it will be joy to be around a lion or other such animal without fear in paradise:.
it truly will be paradise restored.
what of the joy to be around a lion or other such animal without fear?
There is a thread over on jwtalk titled 'The Day After Armageddon' that is quite insightful - the comments are from apparent active JWs. it is an interesting read.
i have been thinking about how the notion of an 'earthly Paradise' feeds into the mind of a psychopath and also, included in that demographic, a pedophile. In essence, how the idea of returning to a physical body is what propels, and maintains, such an attraction to JW doctrine for the criminally disposed mind.
A pedophile cannot change - their motivation is always predatory in nature - the stalking, and catching of the victim is what is their primary focus. It cannot and will not change. Receiving a heavenly reward - going to a 'bodiless' place, is a pedophile's worst nightmare. But...the JW promise of a return to this physical earth, in a physical body, fulfills the pedophiles most secret desire - possession of the physical body of their victim. None of that carnal/physical material reality exists in heaven but there will be plenty to found here on earth...forever!
Or, at the least...maybe...a thousand years of indulgence in physical pleasures before having to face da' judge.
The JW Paradise ideology targets those who attracted to the notion of a 'pedophile paradise' in the millennium. Who do you think will survive Armageddon but still be there to offer 'tribulation and persecution' to JWs in the 'Great Tribulation'?
yorkshire ripper peter sutcliffe 'planning his own jehovah's witness funeral' at broadmoor.
10 february 2015. while charles manson is busy avoiding being displayed in a glass coffin by his now ex-fiancee, peter sutcliffe is managing his own mortality within the confines of broadmoor hospital.. .
the yorkshire ripper apparently met with funeral directors to plan his own send-off.. sutcliffe, 68, contacted holmes and family funeral directors, whose office is three miles away from the high security hospital in berkshire.. he apparently wishes for the ceremony to be performed in line with his jehovahs witness beliefs.. sutcliffe was handed 20 life sentences for brutally murdering 13 women in the north of england between 1975 and 1980, and attempting to murder seven others.. police believed his killing spree started after he was conned out of money by a prostitute and her pimp.. however, sutcliffe later claimed the voice of god had commanded him to undertake the killings.. the independent (lots of photos of broadmoor psychiatric prison).
vidiot: Is it just me, or does anyone else here think that a psychopath and the WT religion is, actually... a strangely good fit?
Like hand and glove.
Two peas in a pod.
Mirror image...
Yes. Good fit. Superb, in fact.
The Watchtower doctrine fits perfectly into a psychopathic serial killer's mental functioning. Just like Rose West, the opportunity to actually avoid going to heaven, where the insubstantial existence could not offer the chance to slice and dice bodies, Sutcliffe has had his most fervent desires answered through the JW religion.
He gets to come back again.
The ego-centric mental functioning of a pyschopath is incapable of changing, incapable of being anything other than what it is. A pyschopath will never, and can never, change. Ever.
The blending of the JW doctrine with the pyschopathic mind is as smooth and perfect of a fit as mixing cream in your coffee.
Delusion...meet delusion. Insanity. In its purest form.
Is the institutional administration aware that the JWs that visit this madman are promising him that he will return to this earth? Do they know that the JWs are fulfilling the wishes of a madman who just can't wait to start all over again?
To add:
A pyschopathic mind never changes. Their behavior will - in order to get what they want and desire. But the thought is the same - get what they want always. Change and control the environment and you can change behavior - but even in that changed/controlled environment is a mind that continues to plot the next best course of action to accomplish their overriding need to fulfill their fantasy. The JWs walked into that prison and gave him exactly what he needed - a new way to make his fantasy reality. The fantasy has not changed. It can't. He sees the JW religion as an opportunity to continue to be who he is - a madman.
and remember your boosters as adults!.
currently there is a measles outbreak in the u.s. the outbreak is clustered into communities where parents choose not to get their children vaccinated.
vaccination works primarily on herd immunity.
I think that the early campaigns of the Watch Tower Society, through their early anti-AMA stance and their relentless anti-vaccination campaigns in the Golden Age magazine during the 1920s and 30s and beyond, - which was circulated extensively throughout rural North America targeting the low educated masses - are now seeing the fruits of its labor. Those seeds that were planted, nurtured and watered by early Watchtower doctrine, fueled by 'alternative'/quack medicine - spread far and wide...are now bearing fruit.
I myself am a 'fallout' of those early Watchtower beliefs and was not vaccinated as a child. I have only ever had oral polio vaccine. As a newborn, in 1957, i contracted whooping cough and have been exposed to many childhood diseases, including measles. Yes, I survived. But I wish i hadn't had the diseases I did as a child.
I attempted to get vaccinated in early adulthood. I had a job at the hospital and it required me to be vaccinated. The tests that were required to assess my levels of immunity and tolerance to the immunization procedure were disastrous and resulted in being told by the medical doctor and public health nurse that it would be dangerous for me to embark on a vaccination program.
My children were both vaccinated. I was delighted that the vaccinations were developed, just prior to the birth of my son, for diseases that I had already endured and survived.
so i have been doing some reading lately.
i have yet to bump into the text that show that preaching is a requirement to qualify for baptism.
in fact, i have read more paragraphs that say otherwise.
Steve2: Decades ago, JW baptism became a parade to bolster religious identity and pride. It served, not as a personal symbol of acceptance of Christ as Lord and Savior (as occurred in the first century), but as a means to publically advertise organizational growth and prosperity.
And don't forget the implications it would have on the WTS' tax status as a 'religion' as well as qualify the 'publisher' to step up to the status of 'member' - a vital legal distinction that would be necessary to qualify as 'ministers of God' to side-step military duty.
dr. jena barchas-lichtenstein is an anthropologist who received her doctorate through ucla.. https://www.linkedin.com/pub/jena-barchas-lichtenstein/43/427/702.
in 2013, barchas-lichtenstein submitted the paper "when the dead are resurrected, how are we going to speak to them?
": jehovah's witnesses and the use of indigenous languages in the globalizing textual community as a partial submission for her doctoral dissertation..
Dr. Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein is an anthropologist who received her doctorate through UCLA.
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/jena-barchas-lichtenstein/43/427/702
In 2013, Barchas-Lichtenstein submitted the paper "When the dead are resurrected, how are we going to speak to them?": Jehovah's Witnesses and the Use of Indigenous Languages in the Globalizing Textual Community as a partial submission for her doctoral dissertation.
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2c67f371
Dr. Barchas-Lichtenstein’s dissertation is a comprehensive look, from an anthropological view, at the role of the Watch Tower Society in Language Revitalization in rural Mexico.
a description of the article on her Linked-in page:
This article explores Jehovah's Witnesses' use of Oaxaca Chontal, an endangered language spoken in Mexico. The Witness religion is highly centralized and standardized: Witnesses obeyed instructions to use Chontal because these instructions bore the authority of the Watch Tower Society institution. This article proposes the concept of the globalizing textual community, which synthesizes understandings of community from throughout social science literature, in order to explain how religious identity can supersede national, ethnic, and linguistic identities. A central mechanism of this community is the discourse of the “pure language,” which renders language choice irrelevant even as it provides a warrant for extensive translation.
*all quotes that follow are from the article
Some of her research methods:
This project was based on approximately eight months of fieldwork in Santa María Zapotitlán, Oaxaca, Mexico, including short trips with my hosts to stay with family members in nearby Salina Cruz and attend large Jehovah's Witness events there. Additional data come from several visits to a Chontal-language congregation in Oaxaca City over a six month period, as well as short visits to Jehovah's Witness headquarters both for Mexico and worldwide. The Mexico Branch Office is located in Texcoco, just outside Mexico City. The worldwide offices, meanwhile, are located in three cities in New York State: Brooklyn, Patterson, and Wallkill; I was only able to visit the Brooklyn offices.
The paper is almost 400 pages in length and is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the history of the JWs in Mexico and/or the study of language and text and cultural studies as well as religious studies. The research she has done in support of this is a valuable contribution to the existing body of knowledge about the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Watch Tower Society, as well as to global indigenous communities who are actively involved in language preservation and revitalization as a vital part of cultural identity politics.
Although Jehovah's Witnesses have been publishing tracts and magazines in multiple languages for some time, the extension to indigenous languages without a long tradition of literacy is a recent initiative and thus has not yet been widely studied
(Mubimba 1987; Pharao Hansen 2010).
The community - with a population of just over 1,000 - that Dr. Barchas-Lichtenstein visited was unique in that the majority of this small, rural community were Jehovah’s Witnesses:
The town population is divided along religious lines. The 2011 agente municipal estimates that between 50 and 60 percent of the population are Jehovah's Witnesses, with the remainder divided between Pentecostals and Catholics. Other individuals have estimated 45 percent Witnesses, 30 percent Pentecostals, and 25 percent Catholics. While the numbers vary, most people seem to agree that Witnesses have a plurality if not a majority, while the numbers of Pentecostals and Catholics are fairly similar.
Dr. Barchas-Lichtenstein’s paper includes much detail of the history of the Watch Tower Society and she includes well known sources (giving much respect to Penton for his academic research and acknowledging that most other contributions come from ‘apostate' sources) including this information about Mexico:
By the end of the 19th century, Jehovah's Witnesses were active in parts of Mexico, and
the Watch Tower magazine became available in Spanish by the end of World War I, while the
Mexico Branch Office opened in 1929 (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania
1993a: 414, 436). The 1995 Yearbook (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania
1995) presents the history of Jehovah's Witnesses in Mexico as one of persecution, citing laws
that did not allow Witnesses to go door-to-door or sing in public meetings. However, this and
other Witness texts do not point out that the organization chose to accept these restrictions. At
the time of their legal incorporation in Mexico, laws prevented religious organizations from
holding property, and the Witnesses chose to become a "cultural" organization to circumvent this
restriction, although doing so curtailed the full expression of religious activities (Penton 1997:
149-50, 320-22).
And, from a footnote:
130 After the U.S. (1,115,786) and Brazil (706,699). Mexico also has a relatively high percentage of Witnesses, with
one publisher for every 153 people. This is a particularly impressive feat when you realize that only two of the
countries with a higher percentage of Witnesses have populations significantly larger than 1 million (compared to
Mexico's 108 million) and in fact, most are island nations. (The countries/territories with a higher percentage of
Jehovah's Witnesses are: Aruba, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Bonaire, Cook Islands, Cuba, Curacao, Guadalupe,
French Guyana, Hawai'i, Martinique, Niue, New Caledonia, Puerto Rico, Saba, San Marino, St. Martin, Santa Elena,
Tahiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos, the British Virgin Islands, and Zambia.)
I have selected the following bits from Dr. Barchas-Lichtenstein’s paper, but, to get full context of what the author means or her intentions, it would be best to read all of her paper.
She poses critical questions:
I began, then, with a seemingly simple question: what implications does Jehovah's Witnesses' use of a contracting language – that is, a language that is being used in fewer domains than previously, or one whose speakers are aging – have for the continued maintenance of that language? To carry out their religious mission worldwide, the Witnesses translate their materials into 595 languages,8 although not all publications are available in all languages. Furthermore, this number may not include languages that are used in services but have no written publications.
The Witnesses constantly add new languages to their repertoire as they see new opportunities for proselytizing, yet many of these languages have few, if any, monolingual speakers. Why, then, do they make the effort to introduce new languages that are otherwise contracting (cf. Pharao Hansen 2010: 130), particularly in communities where the Witnesses have long been active in the dominant language (here Spanish)? Scholars have seen the Witnesses' encouragement as unambiguously positive in terms of language maintenance (Mubimba 1987; Pharao Hansen 2010). However, I would suggest that the Watch Tower Society,9 the institutional arm of Jehovah's Witnesses, is not primarily concerned with the fate of the languages it uses to spread its message; its orientation to these languages is chiefly instrumental.
And she offers answers, identifying the Jehovah's Witness community as a textual community:
I argue that the Jehovah's Witnesses produce their moral authority through their use of language, particularly through a globalizing textual community (see Chapter Two) that defines not only legitimate sources of knowledge and ways of understanding that knowledge, but also legitimate speakers. What role does translation play in their textual economy? I argue that translation is deliberately differentiated from authorship to avoid any challenge to the Watch Tower Society's top-down authority.
She identifies the role of the publishing industry in the link between text and authority/power:
Textual economies are more limited than linguistic ones in one important dimension: everyone produces some form of language, but not everyone who consumes texts produces them. This creates an asymmetry in which readers' relationships to texts have more everyday importance than writers'. The process of creating a text-artifact such as a printed book authorizes (Bucholtz and Hall 2004) its content. Relatively few people have access to a printing press, and the multiple authenticating steps in between drafting the content and seeing it in print allow us to ascribe authority to the written word even with relatively little knowledge of its author. Print as a 53 form is not inherently authoritative; rather, this authority emerged over time and has more to do with the publishing industry and its controls than with the physical properties of books (Eisenstein 1979; Johns 1998; Adam Shapiro, p.c., 3/8/2012). If editors and publishers are willing to put their reputation at stake to authenticate this text, readers assume it contains something of worth.74
She describes the transference of authority within the Witness textual community:
In the Watchtower magazine study, a male congregation member in good standing reads aloud from the magazine, while another man (almost always an elder) reads the questions given in the text and mediates the discussion, calling on congregation members to comment, typically with contributions they have prepared ahead of time. In this type of literacy event, participant roles display a hierarchy: congregation members can only participate as commenters who may talk about the text – and quote from it – but cannot give voice to it, while a select few baptized men can animate the text in full. The even more select group of congregational elders, meanwhile, can participate as mediators who make sure that commenters' remarks appropriately reflect the text and attempt to
ensure that the community has a shared understanding. The author of the text is the Watch Tower Society as an institution; individual writers never receive credit. Finally, the agent of these texts is also the Watch Tower Society (in etic perspective). For Jehovah's Witnesses, however, the Watch Tower Society is God's instrument on this earth, and so the agent of The Watchtower magazine is Jehovah himself,79in emic perspective.
The Witness textual community, then, creates an economy of participant roles, which in
turn creates a class of legitimated speakers who are not legitimate authors. Such a breakdown of roles allows Witnesses to feel they are part of the authority structure yet simultaneously maintains a top-down hierarchy:80.
Not only does Barchas-Lichenstein take a critical, honest evaluation of the Watch Tower Society and how the organization is structured, operates, and the impact of language on the system of power it represents, she also offers the same approach to her personal interactions with the JW hosts she stayed with – ‘embedded’ somewhat in a Mexican JW family for several months. Her comments are sensitive, honest, and respectful of the people she visited, offering us a intimate view inside a community that is usually closed to ‘the world’.
this, my day's long and arduous journey, is winding down as infinite night gracefully descends and takes me into her welcomed embrace.. i have no reason to fear the inevitable, my transition into a higher and more glorious estate than was allowed me upon this beautiful but angst-filled habitation.. what must be borne with calm, with dignity, with rejoicing, has been prepared for me from earliest times.
its accomplishment requires nothing of me .
.
my doctor said that I was lucky to be alive.
Ah..and so are we. We are lucky to have you back at the keyboard CoCo.
Get better...A little bit at a time...breathe deeply.
And live. With each and every breath.
yorkshire ripper peter sutcliffe 'planning his own jehovah's witness funeral' at broadmoor.
10 february 2015. while charles manson is busy avoiding being displayed in a glass coffin by his now ex-fiancee, peter sutcliffe is managing his own mortality within the confines of broadmoor hospital.. .
the yorkshire ripper apparently met with funeral directors to plan his own send-off.. sutcliffe, 68, contacted holmes and family funeral directors, whose office is three miles away from the high security hospital in berkshire.. he apparently wishes for the ceremony to be performed in line with his jehovahs witness beliefs.. sutcliffe was handed 20 life sentences for brutally murdering 13 women in the north of england between 1975 and 1980, and attempting to murder seven others.. police believed his killing spree started after he was conned out of money by a prostitute and her pimp.. however, sutcliffe later claimed the voice of god had commanded him to undertake the killings.. the independent (lots of photos of broadmoor psychiatric prison).
You know, I now see the appeal that the JWs had for him.
That fucking bastard. He loves the idea of living forever on THIS world. Being resurrected in a real, physical body. He wants to come back here so he can do it again. He likes the idea of staying here. So many victims all over again.
He doesn't want to go to heaven. He plans to come back for the Great Tribulation.
That bastard.
And the Jehovah's Witnesses gave him that promise.
*ps - I hope Hell is real. May he rot in Hell for eternity.
