Of 13 blood members of my family who were JWs at one time, 2 died while I was still a JW. The other 3 still talk(ed) to me. My dad died 10 years ago, but talked to me as long as I didn't discuss JW things.
My sisters and I have never been real close as they are older and getting married by the time I was 4 or 5. But I have seemed to notice even less communication lately. Of course they have their grandkids and other things going on. I have my kids. And they live in different states. I had just talked to them both a few weeks ago to let them know a family member had died.
Posts by jws
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18How Many Here Are Estranged From Your Family Because Of The Witnesses?
by minimus indo your jw relatives still talk to you?
are you now not very close?
are you avoided?
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jws
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16
Matt Dillahunty From The Atheist Experience vs A Jehovah's Witness
by pale.emperor inthis was cringe worthy, and yet hilarious to watch.
i'm sensing that this was a person studying with jws because she's so bad at defending the very basics.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0rcmjczeb8.
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jws
The JWS state the total time of desolation which they calculate 537 - 70 = 607 BCE
Right, Finkelstein, but even the JWs agree that Babylon was overthrown in 539BC. Or they were saying that when I left in the 90's. But they have to make the end of 70 years (starting in 607 BC end in 537 BC). Kind of a problem if the king died in 539 BC. So as I recall, I remember them making up some story about the Jews not returning home right away. And it took 2 years to move back and THAT was when the 70 years were up. Contrary to Jer 25:12
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Matt Dillahunty From The Atheist Experience vs A Jehovah's Witness
by pale.emperor inthis was cringe worthy, and yet hilarious to watch.
i'm sensing that this was a person studying with jws because she's so bad at defending the very basics.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0rcmjczeb8.
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jws
redpilltwice wrote:
The difficulty with this move was that by the 1940's historians had proven that Babylon fell in 539 B.C.
And I think that's what the JWs believe now too. But, they say, Cyrus conquered Bablyon in 539 BC and it took the Jews a couple of years to pack and stumble their way back to Jerusalem. So, 537 is still right.
They completely overlook Jeremiah 25:12“But when the seventy years are fulfilled, I will punish the king of Babylon and his nation, the land of the Babylonians, for their guilt,” declares the Lord, “and will make it desolate forever.
There is an order of events here.
- Seventy years fulfilled
- Punishment of the king of Babylon.
They agree Babylon was overthown in 539 BC and the Babylonian king killed. That's #2 above. So #1 had to come in or prior to 539 BC, not 2 years later. How was the king of Babylon supposed to be punished 2 years after he already died. I thought the Witnesses don't believe in an afterlife. So tell me how he was punished in 537 BC when he died in 539 BC.
Of course, they can't. It's just all tricks they're trying to play to make the math work out to a year they think significant. And despite evidence to the contrary, they still claim the world changed in some major way in 1914. -
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Selling KH to another religion
by blondie ini found this question box in the july 1969 km.
question box (july 1969, p. 4).
• is it all right to buy a church building for use as a kingdom hall or, when a new kingdom hall is built, to sell the former hall for use as a church?
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jws
My very first hall's next occupant was some religion. If I'm probably mistaken, but I thought it was some sort of play on JWs like Jehovah's CHRISTIAN Witnesses or something.
Now if the JWs actually bought an ex-church, that'd be so much of an improvement. Maybe even some windows.
I'm part of a running club where somebody lays a trail and we follow it. A few weeks ago, I was in a neighborhood I didn't know. You listen for things like voices. Maybe somebody else found trail. But the voices were coming from people coming out of some building. I didn't know the area and it was some distance away and my first thought was that it was a KH and a meeting had just let out. But as I got closer, I could see big windows for entrance area and knew it couldn't be JWs. It doesn't look like a bunker. -
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Jehovah's Witnesses Announce Plans to Build Giant Media Center
by iwantoutnow inomg!
this has to be more of "keeping the flock busy and excited" so as not to notice whats going on.. how did i miss this?????
the jehovah's witnesses announced plans to build a 1.5 million-square-foot audio-visual production center in upstate new york, two miles away from the witnesses' headquarters in warwick.
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jws
Good point Pete. Next thing, it's movies. Christian movies are regularly appearing and they must think they can get their cut. With their version of stupid movies like "God is not Dead". And somehow, as if it's possible, their movies will be even more poorly written and more poorly thought out.
On the good side for them, I'm sure there are plenty of great actors in their ranks. Think of all of those JWs secretly living double lives and acting like good JWs. -
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JOKER
by peacefulpete ini don’t think that the world needs that many brooding psychopathic avengers.
i don’t know that we need any........they’ve lost a lot of their original innocence, and they can’t get that back.
and, they’re stuck, it seems, in this kind of depressive ghetto of grimness and psychosis.
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jws
Great performance (I brought my 16 year old son). But neither of us came back with a feeling of that was so awesome! I want to see it again.
There were good performances that might receive a lot of awards. But it was just upsetting and depressing. Like the feeling of watching a paraplegic at a run down nursing home for an hour. I suppose that's what a lot of good art can do. And to evoke those feelings means the director did his job.
But you just leave the theater kind of quiet and disturbed. On the other hand, my son and I saw Zombieland Double Tap and came out with smiles, talking about cool things and things we liked.
I HATE what modern cinema has done to the super heroes (and villains). I grew up with reruns of Adam West as Batman and George Reeves as Superman. The good guys were always selfless and good. The bad guys were always bad. Speaking of Jokers, I will compare every Joker to Cesar Romero, BTW. And the good guys always won. And lived.
Absolutely HATED Superman vs. Batman. Where Batman was basically a bad guy. Nowadays the good guys fight against each other. The bad guys have their own movies. I know. Life is complex and life is a scale. Nobody's going to be all good and nobody's all bad. But this is the f'ing comics, not real life, nor need it be like real life.
Plus the fact that each new reboot has to retell it their own way. Different from the way it's always been. Or that the writers can't seem to find any better villains than a bad version of the good guy. Like General Zod vs Superman. Or Black Panther vs. another guy in a Black Panther suit. And lots of other examples I could name. -
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Jehovah's Witnesses Announce Plans to Build Giant Media Center
by iwantoutnow inomg!
this has to be more of "keeping the flock busy and excited" so as not to notice whats going on.. how did i miss this?????
the jehovah's witnesses announced plans to build a 1.5 million-square-foot audio-visual production center in upstate new york, two miles away from the witnesses' headquarters in warwick.
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jws
Media center? KInda like televangelists?
Just watched the Fabulous Gemstones. They're headed that way.
Religious variety shows, coming up. -
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Do You Think That Belonging To Certain Political Parties Suggests You Are Uneducated or Poor?
by minimus ini hear some people say that if you are a republican or democrat that you must not be very educated, intelligent or monetarily stable.
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do you think it’s proper to paint any person as less than favorable because of their political opinions?
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jws
I remember my move to the south 25+ years ago, where I joined a medieval re-creation group that mainly did a lot of campouts. Mostly adults. Though not the majority, some parents brought kids who ranged from toddlers to late teens.
At one point, there was a heated online debate. Some camps started putting out baskets of condoms, free to those who needed them. What a wonderful idea I thought. Protect from pregnancies. Protect from STDs. At the time, HIV was still very much a death sentence. How clever and thoughtful. What kind people.
But a bunch of idiots thought it was just horrible. Kids might take them.
Yeah? And? If kids (and I'm assuming teens) are going to have sex, they're going to do it anyway. Better to use protection. But these idiots just didn't understand reasoning and logic. What was wrong with them?
One parent even said if his child disobeyed him and had sex, they deserved whatever happened. Pregnancy, AIDS, whatever. WTF? Who are these morons? You'd rather your child die or suffer just because they didn't obey you???? Such authoritarians. What kind of parent would risk their children's safety due to not following their rules? A little like a certain father figure who doomed all of humanity to suffer for not doing what he said and eating a certain fruit.
I was not political at the time. I just thought it was southerners. Or stupid people. Or religious.Later I began to realize this particular brand of stupid as a certain type of conservative. So concerned about rules and everybody following their rules, they missed the logical.
It was the same type of idiot who thought that gay marriage was going to ruin marriage. Guess what? Straight people still get married. Nothing was ruined. -
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Murmurs from the locals
by Moster ini was ministered to by several different people at a jw funeral i attended today.
one older lady said to me, "you know the end is right around the corner, just look at the state of the world today".
i said, "well yes but that has been the mantra for decades, remember 'stay alive till '75'".
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jws
Carl Olaf Jonson's book "Last Days, When?" really analyzes whether things are getting worse.
Steven Pinker's book Better Angels of our Nature (despite the title, non-religious) uses statistics to show that as a whole, society has been improving and getting better. Nothing moves in a smooth line, and society has it's occasional issues. But overall, statistically things are getting better.
The numbers are astounding. If I recall the right numbers, it's estimated that early man had a 1 in 3 chance of dying by violence. I forget the numbers, but the wealthy didn't fare so well a few hundred years ago. Between duels and political coups, lots of aristocrats met violent ends. Whereas today, these people stay safe behind various forms of protection. Obviously disease and such is not claiming as many lives as a percentage. Heart attacks with clogged arteries can be fixed with minor surgery as opposed to the chest-cracking some relatives have endured.
Just think of the plague. I think it was one of three in Europe died. The WTBS likes to quote figures for disease after WW1, proving things got worse. A few million was NOT 1 in 3. Think of 3 people. One of them would have been dead from plague.
Things have improved. Despite television news trying to scare you into thinking otherwise. More can still be done, but things are way better than a few hundred years ago. Or even a few decades ago.
I HATE the claim by religions that things are getting so bad, Jesus will have to step in. -
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The "figurative" heart
by Sour Grapes inabout 25 years ago i gave a talk about how when the bible talks about the heart that it is the literal heart and how the heart and the brain are connected by nerve tissue.
the watchtower even stated that some people who received a heart transplant would take on some of the personality of the donor.then all of a sudden the borg changed and said that when the bible refers to the heart that it is figurative.
then when ever the watchtower referred to the heart it always put the word figurative in front of it.. does anyone know why there was a change in the use of the word heart?
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jws
25 years ago? I'm in my 50's now and I remember this change happening when I was in my teens. 35-40 years ago maybe.
The WBTS insisted that the heart was where things like emotions come from, not the brain. Even as a teen, I assumed it was figurative, though one day I was assured the Society did in fact not take it figuratively. They thought it literal.
My brother and I, who had middle school and high school science thought this was utter BS. The heart is a muscle that pumps blood. It has no control over higher functions like emotions. And my brother and I kind of laughed that anybody would be stupid enough to take that literally.
Upon which, our parents got real serious quick. We were to shut up about what we thought and NOT to ever speak to anybody at the hall about it. As I recall, and I might be wrong, I think it was kind of to the effect of "you can think that if you want, but don't ever let anybody know you think that".
As I recall it, the first artificial heart was used in 1982. And shortly afterwards, the society changed it's mind and published that the heart was a figurative seed of emotions, not literal. I figured the society realized after the first person with an artificial heart still had emotions, they didn't originate in the heart, so they HAD TO change.
Though we still followed the religion, that was eye-opening. WE (my brother and I) were right all along. BEFORE the society. What's up with that? Shouldn't the holy spirit have guided them to the correct understanding in the first place? Obviously the GB was not ALWAYS right. And people could have the correct understanding when they did not. Kids in their early teens knew more about biology than they did.AND, that the bible is not always correct. Now, that's probably an example that's open to interpretation. Obviously you could say the bible was figurative all along. But that whole thing probably planted seeds that were to grow later about both JWs and the bible itself.