https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/secrets-of-the-watchtower/?utm_source=reveal&utm_medium=dist&utm_campaign=zalkin.
not only will you hear howie tran, former-bethelite, but irwin zalkins talks about watchtower's child abuse secrets.
debbie mcdaniels talks about her child abuse and you will hear trey actually talking to the jw who molested her..
I listened to it but at the end I'm still not sure where we are at.
Are the WT going to lose the case? Will they need to disclose their files? Are they likely to suffer financial penalty so severe the organisation needs to close? Might the GB be personally prosecuted?
shocking information near the bottom of this report from a watchtower lawyer definding the organization in australian courts.focus on the information under the heading: "the faithful and discreet slave".
quite the shocker... the society's lawyer statesthere is no true physical body of people, but only a theological arrangement.
the jws in the crowd gasped.
Identifying the faithful slave with the GB rather than anointed JWs generally may have been a dumb move. What were they thinking?
jws will deny that local needs parts are often just a way to mark those in the congregation who are deemed to be "bad association" or who don't fall in line with the elders viewpoints.
now, for the first time in a long time the wt discusses their marking policy and how it works in the nov study wt:.
recall paul’s counsel regarding disorderly ones in the congregation.
The GB won't be happy until all JWs shun everyone: non-JW family, colleagues, schoolmates, former JWs, plus everyone else in the congregation you can find fault with. In the end JWs will be reduced to embittered and self-righteous isolated individuals with no one else good enough to associate with.
there was an interview with a 107 year old lady who had been a jw since the age of 10 or so.
remembers seeing the "photodrama of creation" when it was still a thing, etc.. so she's explaining about herself & her husband witnessing thru the years, 1930's thru now.. she says at one point, her husband called on a guy who said something like "the last time i got a call from a jw, it was 50 years ago in xyz village by a guy on a bike who said armageddon was coming soon.".
the lady was just so tickled, because the guy on the bike was her husband, who happened to run into the same guy (who remembered him) 50 years later.. and i'm thinking "wait a minute....her husband said 'armageddon was coming soon' 50 years earlier...obviously he was completely wrong.
"Present truth" - it's a quote from 2 Peter 1:12 in the King James.
Russell and others mistook the "present" in the verse as having a temporal rather than a spatial sense. In English the word is ambiguous, whereas in Greek the term means "present" in a spatial sense.
when i was a jobo, i used to thing of 'life without end at laaaasssssst'.. having been on my journey out of the wbt$ slaveholdery, i have found that something that makes sense is that life doesn't owe us a meaning.
psalms 146:4 was actually bangeth on the money-eth 'his breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.'.
although i am now very atheist, and really do not even think there is the remotest possibility of a god, that bible passage is correct.
Punkofnice a few years ago I could have written your opening post.
Now I am deeply sceptical about the idea that life is just accidental or that there is no afterlife.
I don't know how but I think there is a direction behind existence. And I doubt we are destined for oblivion, although sometimes that may feel appealing.
One thought I've had for a while is the idea that maybe humans are destined to create ourselves. Since time may not always have existed (a contradictory statement - I don't know how to put it). Or since there may be conditions under which there is no such thing as time. Or time may be a way of looking at things rather than an objective reality.
Anyway since time isn't necessarily the immutable stream we sometimes thought it might be. And since human technology becomes ever more advanced. Might technology and human/artificial intelligence reach a stage where humans can create life, conscious beings, worlds, a universe? If that is possible then maybe we will do so. And if we do so, maybe we have done so, and if we have done so, maybe we are such. Only if time is a linear stream is the idea that we created ourselves necessarily ridiculous. In some ways I think it's the only answer that makes sense. But then again my scepticism kicks in. I'm only suggesting an idea no firm conclusion.
As regards afterlife. If consciousness results purely from the material stuff we are made from, then essentially we consist of information that can be retrieved at some point. If there is an almighty being this should be no trouble for him. If there is no almighty being, but humans become almighty (or some decendent species or conscious being) in the future then he or they would be able to retreive the consciousness and inner life of those who existed. I don't see how this would be a problem. It's a matter of will.
If on the other hand consciousness is more than simply an epiphenomenon of our material bodies then this may suggest that reality consists of more than purely the material. I suspect this may be the case actually. Probably because materialism is such a dominant orthodoxy in the period we live in, makes me suspect all the more that there is something deeply wrong with it. Materialism cannot be proven in philosophical or logical terms, which makes the insistence from certain atheists that we must accept it anyway all the more suspect.
Anyone who thinks materialism is a straighforward, and should be taken for granted way of looking at the world, I would recommend to read Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel. The materialist worldview has a comforting sort of nihilistic certainly about it, which blinds many, who perceive themselves to be warriors fighting irrationality, to its many shortcomings.
firstly thanks to cofty & smiddy for the kind words on my " final post" .
this post is simply to say over two months have passed since my last post and since then i have with my wife and son seen elton john live, visited stockholm, berlin, and most importantly appreciated " the natural beauty of my neighbourhood" with out even thinking about the watchtower.
i have also attended 3 watford football matches with my son and made better relationships with my parents, discovered harvey's draught beer and made new friends in my local pub.
Rebel don't forget to read food books too.
i don't want to seem like a jerk.
i know full well economic times are not the greatest.
there's no shame in struggling and staying with your family until you're back on your feet.
Yeah baby boomers wrecked the economy and the planet and blame their children for being "lazy".
an excerpt from plato's republic, the 'allegory of the cave' is a classic commentary on the human condition.
it is a story of open-mindedness and the power of possibility.. .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69f7ghasodm.
Very interesting I enjoyed this.
Richard Rorty and others have argued that western civilisation, down through Christianity and modern science, has rested upon a distinction between appearance and reality that goes back to Plato.
We may now be emerging from this conception of reality.
I am convinced that distinctions between appearance and reality cannot ultimately be sustained and that this has implications for our understanding of ourselves, the universe, and everything we encounter or can encounter.
wife read me the daily text this morning out of the blue this morning and a couple of sentences stuck out in my head.. all of jehovah’s promises are dynamic, not static, because he is constantly working toward their fulfillment.
(isa.
46:10; 55:11) once a person realizes this about jehovah’s word, what he reads in the bible can exert a powerful force in his life.. .
They are perhaps alluding to their longstanding interpretation of the meaning of the divine name, something along the lines: he becomes whatever he needs to become in order to fulfil his purpose.
Also reminds me of the plan/purpose distinction they made when they dropped the word "plan" (as in Divine Plan of the Ages) in favour of Jehovah's "purpose". The idea is that a plan is fixed, whereas a purpose adapts to changing circumstances.
this is interesting:.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38145118.
"a whole lot of the time, i just don't like being a mother, and i generally don't fit well into this role.".
There is a large and growing antinatalist sentiment. It is more than simply catharsis.
When this book first came out many people thought it was a joke.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Better-Never-Have-Been-Existence/dp/0199549265/
