reading a report of an elder in a friends cong has been hiding and spying on the pioneers who seem to have a practise of dumping the cart and finding a local coffee shop, i've noticed that they do this in my local high street as well but this week they seemed to be all huddled around the cart, they've clearly been warned, a vast percentage of the time i see they seem to be more interested in fiddling with their mobile phones and gossiping, is just seems these carts are a means for the pioneers to turn in "easy time" i wonder what sort of figures show how much literature is being taken by the public?
i bet its very minimal.
naturally the gb would say they are a phenomenal success , we clearly know they are not.
Back in the mid 90s when I used to do street witnessing I'd place a ton of magazines. It was carried out in the downtown area of a major city. The magazines were extremely popular with the homeless, who, as I later discovered, used them as rolling papers for their tobacco. You'd also see them lining a lot of their cardboard box homes. The placements looked great on the monthly report, though.
This isn't an attempt at humor. It's a true story.
as fans of the walking dead know, our heros have found sanctuary (or have they) at alexandria, a seemingly normal safe zone from the walkers/rotters/etc.
this past episode had rick's 'family' invited to a 'welcome to the community' cocktail party, hosted by deanna, the leader of the community.. having entered alexandria, we're starting to see the different levels of ptsd in our little group.
rick, carol, and daryl trust no one.
That's a good analogy.
I'll never forget one of my first jobs in the professional world when I was 22 years old. A pair of female co-workers who were 7-10 years older than me graciously invited me to a baseball game with them. One was married; the other had a boyfriend. They caught me off guard in the morning and I said yes.
Of course, a man could not be alone with women or else an orgy would surely break out. I spent the rest of the day panicking trying to come up with a good excuse to back out. I made up some stupid story and told them I couldn't go after all. They rarely asked me to do anything ever again.
Knowing what I do now (I'm in my mid 30s and have been in professional work settings for over a decade), these women were just being nice and trying to make the new guy feel like part of the team. I've often found myself on lunches or traveling alone with women and it's never led to sex. Even the thought of it is absurd, but I had been indoctrinated to such a degree where I felt it was the natural consequence of such an outing. In fact, when I left the witnesses I was quite disappointed that getting laid wasn't as simple as that. Seriously.
I must have come across incredibly awkward in my interactions with them, like I was from a different world.
i've heard is said many times that watchtower is a publishing company bringing in money from the proliferation of its literature.
how exactly does this process work?
i know that jws are encouraged to tell the householders of the donation arrangement to support the worldwide work.
It's about economies of scale. Each edition of the WT has a distribution of something like 40 million copies. The fact that they operate at that scale and they use free labor means the cost to print one copy is very, very low.
Even if the sheep donate 10 cents per magazine that's probably enough to cover costs. The exact amount needed to break even is obviously unknown to us, but we have every reason to believe it's very low.
That being said, with the advent of the digital age it's clearly a dying model. They're going to have to find a new source of income and I suspect that'll be real estate development.
the "preaching work" they're so eager to brag about is just laughable.
they say their number is an indication of god's blessing.
oh, please, give me a break!
The line of reasoning I used to buy into said that God extended Armageddon to provide more time for people to "learn the truth." That's what the preaching work was all about: God's love.
Eventually I realized that the passage of time was just increasing the number of people God would have to kill since only a tiny fraction of the world will ever become Witnesses. The growth in the number of non-Witnesss far exceeds the growth in the number of Witnesses.
The more loving thing would have been to bring Armageddon decades ago when the number of non-Witnesses was hundreds of millions less than it is today.
so here we are, almost a year into the "new" congregation donation arrangement.
and its beginning, as was predicted, to fail miserably, and to have direct negative consequences on the poor sheep.. let me give you a little experience, directly from our congregation of about 80 publishers.
back in may, after reading the letter about the "new" arrangement, the elder body decided to "donate" the extra funds on hand to wt, as directed.
They weren't ever gonna get the full amount of the pledge. I suspect they knew that.
Still, this gives them a useful hammer to whack the sheep over the head with. They aren't begging for money, you see. They're reminding them to fulfill their "voluntary" oath.
i've been invited to go to central america for a week on a global village project.
.
are there any possible issues that the congregation might have with me doing this?.
It's definitely a religious charity. If you're trying to avoid trouble with the elders, you might want to make sure they don't find out.
From Habitat's mission statement:
http://www.habitat.org/how/mission_statement.aspx
Mission principles
i think i've mentioned before that from time to time my commute on the bqe takes me past the old factory buildings and the soon to be former headquarters building.
i was struck the other day with how shabby they've become.
even 25 columbia heights, still currently occupied, its facade is filthy.
I think a vastly underrated factor in the religion's decline is the governance-by-committee structure they instituted in the 1970s.
What this religion needs is bold leadership. It needs to reinvent itself and head off in a new direction, but you're simply not gonna get that kind of change when it requires a 2/3 supermajority from a ultra-conservative group of geriatric men. Instead we see the malaise and gradual decay that's quite evident today.
crofty can you please break this article and main points down for the average individuals to understand, i found this article and thought of you, thought you might be interested in this topic too.
i don't fully understand it, can you please help us, you are our "resident expert" on this topic!
will you please break it down for us as to what it means and how it affects us brains?
My problem isn't with the science. It's with the way it's sometimes sold to the public. I put the word retraction in quotes because it was no such thing.
Science worked as it should but the stories the public saw were that a once in a generation discovery had been made followed a few months later by a "scientists were wrong yet again" headline. I would argue scientists should know better than to trumpet research before peer review is concluded, but the pressure to grab attention is all too often a driving force.
i haven't heard this one in a while but it has been on my mind lately.
maybe it's because i'm noticing that these days people at the kh are going the extra mile to vary their seating places in all meetings.. having skipped meetings for a few weeks, i'm wondering if there has been a talk/article about that recently.
that's one of the most laughable rules they made and i never felt bound by it.
When I was a kid there was an older couple in my KH who always sat in the same seats. Middle front row, the two seats furthest to the right. You didn't dare sit there if you knew what's good for you.
The husband was an elder and had a sweet disposition. I remember him being a gentle giant of sorts, but he may have seemed bigger to me than he actually was because I was a child. The wife, on the other hand, was a mean, spiteful, bitter creature. She still wore 1950s style hair and dress. Children were terrified of her. She had zero patience for kids who didn't behave like mini-adults. They eventually moved about 45 minutes away and changed congregations. A few years later her husband was no longer an elder. I never found out why.
Years later I found out that these folks had gotten burned during the 1975 fiasco. They'd sold off their belongings and moved to a foreign country to pioneer before the end came. They put off having children for the same reason. After the dust settled, they moved back to the states disillusioned and became inactive for a little while. By 1980 or so they were back in the witnessing game and helped found the congregation that I belonged to.
About 10 years ago my mom ran into the wife at the doctor's office and it turned out she'd been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Even though I had nothing but terrible memories of her, my heart went out to her. Now that I'm in my mid 30s I realize that her disposition was likely affected by the disappointment and disillusionment she was likely suppressing. People who can't have children (or choose not to have children) often develop a hatred of children as a defense mechanism. It couldn't have been a mistake to forgo having a family if children are awful, could it?
At the end of the day, she was duped like I was, but at least I got out in my early 20s. Something tells me she secretly wished she'd never gone back after 1975.
i think i've mentioned before that from time to time my commute on the bqe takes me past the old factory buildings and the soon to be former headquarters building.
i was struck the other day with how shabby they've become.
even 25 columbia heights, still currently occupied, its facade is filthy.
But what if we've misread all this?
Are the two ideas mutually exclusive? Could the transformation to a real estate development model be motivated by declining cash flows from the publishing model?
