Posts by neverendingjourney

46

Lawyers: Can a Jehovah's Witness sue the Watchtower Society for Civil Rights violations?

by Balaamsass in

i have been on boards and run businesses, and been reminded by more than one cpa and attorney to cross ts and dot i s regarding corporate requirements or we would become liable to lawsuits.. therefore, my questions to any attorneys and cpas, and the keen minds on this board, are the following;.

i have been reading old threads on this site about watchtower society irregularities regarding tax filings with state and federal agencies.

evidently, a number of filings for different years were identical (unlikely if not impossible) or missing.

neverendingjourney

Civil rights legislation, in the US at least, is designed to prevent the government from violating certain enumarted rights and/or liberties. There is no nexus between a private religion and the federal government, so the answer to your question that a civil rights action against the JWs would be thrown out before it ever goes to trial.

A little background info of general interest: http://www.constitution.org/grossack/bivens.htm

If a cop barges through your door without a warrant or probable cause and beats you to a bloody pulp, you have a civil rights violation on your hands. If your neighbor beats you up because you parked too close to his car, you don't have a civil rights violation, you have an assault and battery. The key is whether there was government involvment and whether a civil right specifically extended by legislation was violated.

96

True Pink Floyd Fans Only...(ok everyone is invited)

by charlie brown jr. in

listening to a retro lunch...... this queensryche song comes on....... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhat-xuq6dw.

the only song from them i like for 1 reason........ pink floyd rip off...... hidden voices..... and the corny...........help me!.

lmao!!!.

neverendingjourney

My favorite Pink Floyd hidden gem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rr83J1k1ik

141

"Theocratic Warfare" and the Annual Report

by Billy the Ex-Bethelite in

one of the things i certainly noticed as a jw, and even during the time i was in bethel, was the complexities of reporting "truth.".

beginning with an observation on a personal level, i consider myself an honest person.

but something happened along the way, beginning when i pioneered.

neverendingjourney

Most of us (if not all) have stories that could back this up. The congregation secretary at my old Hall was a disaster as far as organization went, and his wife was one of the biggest gossips in the circuit. He used to leave the elder's book out in plain sight in his house and you'd often find publisher cards under the seat cushions. He also had five small kids. His wife seemed to know the intimate details of judicial committe matters going back many years, but that's another story.

Not long after my baptism, he not surprisingly lost a boat load of publisher cards. He started houding the brothers for the slips they had already turned in because the CO visit was drawing near. He asked my Mom and she told him that she no longer had records going back that far. He point blank told her in front of me to give him a number, any number. Estimate it, he said. My jaw hit the floor. This was back when I was all in and thought it was actually a rosy spiritual paradise such as is portrayed in the literature.

A year or so later I became a regular pioneer and was out in service with the service overseer (also a pioneer). We were out for about an hour and fifteen minutes. I kept meticulous records at the time (although with the passage of time I too fudged my numbers) and when he saw me write down 1:15 in my notebook he said to me, "Write down 3 hours. We're pioneers, after all." It suddenly made sense how we was able to work a job that often required overtime, be an elder and pioneer all at the same time.

It's part of the culture. You may not start out that way, but most eventually become that way. The numbers are fudged from top to bottom.

53

Shocked at what my 3 year old just asked me

by jwfacts in

me - jehovah?

who is jehovah?.

me - oh.. zac - are you happy with me dad for remembering jehovah.

neverendingjourney

That's a tough one. My nephew (who was about 6 years old at the time) looked at me once with tears in his eyes and asked me why I didn't go to meetings with them. What do you say to that?

I guess it really depends on what kind of relationship you want to keep with your MIL. I would be inclined to say something along the lines of "well, you know son, different people have different names for him. Some call him Jehovah, others Jesus, others Allah...." but getting conficting info about important things like that from his grandma and dad would probably greatly confuse the poor child.

31

Governing Body arrogance vs. Legal Department's pragmatism - do you think there will be a slip-up at some point?

by sir82 in

jw
friends

the recent & surprising developments in the uk and australia got me thinking..... the governing body of jehovah's witnesses is nothing if not arrogant.

they consider themselves "god's channel of communication", stopping just short of claiming divine inspiration.

they believe that they and they alone are the masters of "christ's belongings" and are answerable only to him.. the watchtower society's legal department carefully crafts gb decisions so as not to put the watchtower society's assets or prestige as risk.

neverendingjourney

Your conjecture on GB/legal tension is pretty well-founded based on what we know, but it's still conjecture. That's what really bugs me about trying to arrive at conclusions about the Watchtower's direction moving forward: we simply don't have enough facts.

When Crisis of Conscience was published it revealed a lot the inner workings of the religion previously unknown to all but maybe a dozen or so individuals. That was 30 years ago! Who knows what developments there have been at the top of the hierarchy in the past 30 years.

We can make certain safe assumptions based on policy decisions that have come down (as Sir82 has done), but it doesn't change the fact that credible information concerning top-level decision making has not leaked out in 3 decades.

Is the 2/3 voting requirement still in place? Answer: none of us know for sure. Has the GB passed some internal policy mandating that certian policy changes receive approval from legal? Again, who knows.

It's like trying to decipher a phrase on Wheel of Fortune with only 3 or 4 letters visible.

78

Do you sense that the Watchtower will implode?

by AK - Jeff in

since leaving the organization 8 years ago, there have been more significant changes in the actual, physical activities of the organization than occurred in all the 40 plus years i was 'in'.

bethel closings.

bethel layoffs.

neverendingjourney

Two scenarios come to mind:

1. Some sort of coup or leadership struggle at the GB level.

2. External government or judicial forces.

Outside of that, the Watchtower's demise (and they will eventually fall) will be gradual over many decades.

95

Why Arguments and Debates on the Trinity are a Waste of Time

by AllTimeJeff in

this isn't meant to be a shit stirring topic, just a thought or two, a memory really, from my jw days.

because i know i have more experience then most on debating the veracity of the trinity..... there are two camps, people of faith, and people of math.. people of faith will always be more convinced of the trinity every day, because for the most part, the teachers of the trinity are very up front about the fact that it is a mystery.. so the more you point out how illogical it is, the more a mystery the trinity becomes, and thus, it also becomes more real.

awesome!

neverendingjourney

I enjoy trinity debates in the same way I enjoy debates over who the more powerful wizard was: Gandalf or Dumbledore.

78

What is the ULTIMATE goal of the Watchtower Society?

by MrDarkKnight in

jw
friends

in a number of different threads comments have been made about the motives of the gb and the wtbts.

it made me think, what is their ultimate goal?

what is their end game?.

neverendingjourney

The "ultimate goal" has become that of any other large bureaucracy: self-preservation.

More to the point, it's about the preservation of an idea: that they possess religious truth and that its members have not spent their lives sacrificing for ordinary, run-of-the-mill religious beliefs indistinguishable from any others.

49

The 'Last days' of the Watchtower Society - any truth in this?

by callitquits76 in

jw
friends

i have heard this said a lot lately.

is it wishful thinking?

6 screens of the wt has this as their website banner but that website is like a tabloid newspaper..

neverendingjourney

If you think of it in terms of MONEY or MEMBERS, STOP.

Ray Franz said in COC that the there were 2 primary motivating forces behind the GB's actions:

1. Numbers (i.e., membership increases) and

2. The need to uphold traditional policies.

I would give the numbers-game a little more credit than you do.

11

Revelation Prophecy Fulfillments According to WTS.......How Long Has it Been?

by drewcoul in

i recently listened to an old fred franz talk that i found online that i remember attending when i was 11 in 1983 in indianapolis.

since i remembered that i didn't follow what he was saying back then, i wanted to listen to it and see if i could understand it now.

(the only difference is he still doesn't make much sense, but now i know it wasn't just because i was too young to understand at the time.).

neverendingjourney

Good point.

But you can take this logic and go back in farther. Does the Watchtower really believe that Jehovah had Russell and his followers preaching to a bunch of people in the 1880s who would ALL die before Armageddon?

What about 1919? Does the Watchtower really believe that Jesus selected Rutherford and the Bible Students as the "faithful and discreet slave" in 1919 even though 99.99% of the people alive back then (who would be able to discern their message) are now dead?

Their eschatology may have been internally consistent ("made sense") back in Russell's day, but every time the Watchtower has had to make an adjustment due prophetic failure, it's become less and less so. They are working off of a prophetic outline established 80-100 years ago, an outline that contemplated the coming of Armageddon many decades ago. They would be better of scrapping the whole damn thing and starting all over. It seems they've decided against that and have been slowly making minor changes hoping that their followers won't notice. It's working!