I never met him but I never got the impression he was black. At least no one mentioned it. Maybe you are confusing him with someone else.
slimboyfat
JoinedPosts by slimboyfat
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Looking for Anton irons
by Super ted inanybody know where he is now?.
i have a friend who wants to get in touch..
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Estimating future growth or decline of Watchtower
by shepherdless ini have seen a few posts here, in various guises, in relation to whether watchtower is in decline.
plenty of people respond, but it is all fairly anecdotal, or "gut feel".
some of it has been wishful thinking.. as of late 2015, watchtower's numbers suggest it is still growing marginally, but there are various anecdotes on this site of publishers typically being older, and younger ones disappearing.
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slimboyfat
shepherdless firstly are you already aware that there have been two academic articles that discuss precisely the point about JWs' prospects for future growth? In the 1990s Rodney Stark wrote an article about why JWs "grow so fast" compared with other churches and he projected JW figures for the next 100 years or so on the basis of either 4% or 2% annual growth, producing a range of 27 million to 194 million by 2090. Both of those look very optimistic now.
http://www.oocities.org/rogueactivex/JWGrow-O.pdf
Then in James Beckford's festschrift the secularisation theorist David Voas wrote a really interesting article arguing that JWs may suffer a dramatic decline in membership in the near to mid term. He argued that once decline begins to set in within a sectarian movement it tends to proceed rapidly, likening it to declines in fish stocks which tend to suffer collapses in numbers rather than gentle declines. I made a thread about it at the time.
I think you are absolutely correct to focus on the age profile of adherents as an indicator of decline. Increasing age of membership is a well studied phenomenon in the UK in relation to declining churches such as Methodists, Anglicans and Presbyterians. Peter Brierley has collected data on church attendance, including age profiles and lots of other details for decades.
https://www.ministrytoday.org.uk/magazine/issues/43/352/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pulling-Out-The-Nosedive-Contemporary/dp/1853211680
David Voas, Steve Bruce and others have argued that secularisation proceeds as each succeeding generation rejects the faith of their parents. I reckon this is true for JWs as for other groups, they are just a little behind the curve. David Voas explains this sort of cohort analysis and what it means for church decline in this video.
It's been years since I attended meetings now so I can't give accurate local information. I can only say that from talking to people who still attend they remark on the total lack of young people. As far as I know there are only 2 teenagers in the congregation, no children, two couples under 40, a few single sisters under 40, and the rest over 40, with probably about half aged 57 or over.
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if you had the slightest of doubt about leaving leaving the watchtower org. go to to jwsurvey.org NOW!
by nowwhat? inand we are suposed to trust these guys with our lives?
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slimboyfat
It seems you'd have to be pretty naïve, have an inflated sense of your own importance, and lack critical thinking, to actually believe this is a real award. How on earth could the GB have fallen for it?
Actually I think the title of this thread is interesting and somewhat accurate. You'd like to think it's the big things that shake faith in the religion: false prophecy, blood, falsification of science and history and so on. But often it's relatively trivial things like this that "wake" people up.
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Our COBE(Coordinator Of Body of Elders) Cried at the Kingdom Hall
by James Jack init was announced recently, that "bro.
z is no long the coordinator(76 years old), bro y(60) is now the new coordinator of the body of elders".. you see, bro.
z has been an elder for 43 years and 35 of them as the cobe/po.
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slimboyfat
Middle aged JWs are the most likely to leave in my experience, just as people are learning a bit more about life and are less idealistic. It would be ironic for the WT leadership to engineer responsibility to be passed on to 30-40 year olds only for most of them subsequently to leave. What do they do then?
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Can I pick up a New World Translation from the JW London head office?
by Camperdown9 ini'm an anglican and not a jehovahs witness.
what i dislike about lots of church congregations is their readiness to make unpleasant and unhelpful comments about other christian groups.
recently someone in a church tried to tell me a little about the views of jehovahs witnesses.
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slimboyfat
Not sure if they'd give you one at the branch. If you ask JWs at a cart they'd arrange for you to get one. Or you could ask for a visit on their website. Or you could just buy a secondhand copy on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/New-World-Translation-Holy-Scriptures/dp/1624971644/
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Second Class Citizenship
by Coded Logic incan you imagine if a person was refused services because they were black?
or because they were christian?
there would be nationwide outrage.
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slimboyfat
Excellent cartoon that rightly lampoons fundamentalists' insistence that you show them tolerance and respect.
The tide is definitely turning. In just ten years support for gay marriage in the US for example has climbed enormously from something like 35% to 60%, and rising. Soon support will be pretty much universal and they won't even bother measuring it any more. A new generation will just not put up with discrimination any longer.
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The people are mobilizing Mr Drumpf
by Simon inprotesters shut down a trump rally.
massive numbers of people are out in chicago and have shut his event down.
there were scuffles inside the event.. despite his lame attempt to pretend the violence he instigates is nothing to do with him it's clear that it is as the cnn quotes during the last event showed only too well.. this doesn't happen at anyone else's events - candidates have even given up the stage to protesters, not called for them to be beaten and punched.. trump is an ugly person and this is just a small taste of what a future under his rule would be like.. shame on the gop for not kicking his ass out.
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slimboyfat
Chomsky describes the filter system at about 10.40. It's not so much that reporters self-censor. It's that people who don't share the hegemonic view of the world don't get into those positions in the first place. They are early on labelled as cranks and marginalised. Very few people who actually question the system itself slip through the net. Robert Fisk springs to mind as an exception, but it's not been easy, and you don't see him often in mainstream media.
I agree with Chomsky that there is a lot of media bias. But his additional step that all reporters are indoctrinated and tools of propaganda is moon landing conspiracy stuff.
Well I don't think it's in any way a conspiracy theory to note that the media plays a key role in upholding the current capitalist and imperialist world system. It's a straightforward statement of fact. The media may be good at spotting and exposing corruption operating within the system and eliminating it. But asking basic questions about the corruption of the system itself? It just doesn't happen, and for the reasons Chomsky gives.
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The people are mobilizing Mr Drumpf
by Simon inprotesters shut down a trump rally.
massive numbers of people are out in chicago and have shut his event down.
there were scuffles inside the event.. despite his lame attempt to pretend the violence he instigates is nothing to do with him it's clear that it is as the cnn quotes during the last event showed only too well.. this doesn't happen at anyone else's events - candidates have even given up the stage to protesters, not called for them to be beaten and punched.. trump is an ugly person and this is just a small taste of what a future under his rule would be like.. shame on the gop for not kicking his ass out.
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slimboyfat
I think Chomsky's explanation of how media propaganda works (manufacture of consent) is spot on. He explained it very well in this interview he gave to Andrew Marr years ago. What's amazing about this interview, that viewers outside the UK might not appreciate, is that Andrew Marr is himself an example of what Chomsky is talking about here in the UK because he was very much a media facilitator for Tony Blair in the lead up to the Iraq war. He was basically the main media figure who enabled the government to lie its way into the war. So his challenges to Chomsky are highly ironic in that context.
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The people are mobilizing Mr Drumpf
by Simon inprotesters shut down a trump rally.
massive numbers of people are out in chicago and have shut his event down.
there were scuffles inside the event.. despite his lame attempt to pretend the violence he instigates is nothing to do with him it's clear that it is as the cnn quotes during the last event showed only too well.. this doesn't happen at anyone else's events - candidates have even given up the stage to protesters, not called for them to be beaten and punched.. trump is an ugly person and this is just a small taste of what a future under his rule would be like.. shame on the gop for not kicking his ass out.
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slimboyfat
Those comments from Chomsky appear to be from before Trump's proposed ban-the-Muslims policy, refusing to disavow the KKK, inciting people to violence, threatening the press, and so on. I think Chomsky would have difficulty repeating the view that there's nothing much between the candidates. Now Trump is clearly a fascist and much more dangerous than any of the other candidates.
Elsewhere I read the observation that at the moment Americans face a choice that includes electing the first woman president of the United States, the first socialist president of the United States, or the last president of the United States.
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Richard Dawkins on spirituality - please help
by Fernando ini would like to better understand what richard dawkins is saying and would appreciate your help, views and opinions, including the implications:.
"far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.
".
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slimboyfat
Have I become... the thread killer?