i wonder if jws are currently undergoing a more significant transformation than generally appreciated.
and i wonder if the drivers for that change are a combination of legal, economic, and technological factors.
legal challenges changed jws stance of whether they are a "religion" with "ministers", in the 1950s, and stopped them charging for the literature in the 1990s.
Interesting line of reasoning. I would agree, but I think it runs deeper than just the JWs. At least in the US, the print industry is diminishing all across the board. People just are not reading much printed page.
Also, in many countries where the JWs are growing, African nations especially, electronic medium is a long long way from general use.
i remember about 5 years ago reading on another site about subliminal images in wt literature.
i honestly thought it a load of bs until i checked out one glaringly obvious image of a creepy skull in clouds within the knowledge book.
i was shocked and even showed my wife at the time who thought it was creepy.. so my question is why?
I personally knew a Bethelite in the art department, and he complained/commented that there were some good artists there, by the time their drawings were resized and converted to print, much of their work was lost. I think it likely that some of the 'faces' or whatever were not in the originals but were a result of the conversion to print.
i remember about 5 years ago reading on another site about subliminal images in wt literature.
i honestly thought it a load of bs until i checked out one glaringly obvious image of a creepy skull in clouds within the knowledge book.
i was shocked and even showed my wife at the time who thought it was creepy.. so my question is why?
There have been some cartoons with imagery inserted in the pictures. Mostly attributed to devious pranks by the artists. Im not an artistbut I've read about it. I think The Little Mermaid was one of them.
illustration of the rich man and the poor man lazarus indirectly hints that the materially rich would go to hell and the poor ones to heaven.
if one reads between the lines, one can discern that this illustration is a later adoption intended to exploit the rich using the poor as a means.. i have friends who are extremely rich (net-worth in billions) and also who are materially very poor, and have found both are living in hell because of their attitude.
the excess the rich have prevents them from enjoying it (and even the affluent find a huge gap between income and desires, hence find themselves often in conflict and competition) and whereas the deprived compare themselves with the haves which prevents them also from enjoying their lives.. jesus would not provide an illustration that undermines his own most favored statement: “happy are those poor in spirit because kingdom of heavens belongs to them” (mathew 5:3) and his own explanation that heaven is the condition of one’s heart (luke 17:21) obviously he had in mind those who do not have the baggage of attachment and sense of possession, those few people of simplicity that belong to both the categories—the rich and the poor. simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, a stage where every possession serves a purpose living a life that is deliberate and intentional (not one that someone else has scripted for them) and wanting to feel more complete (not more objects of the world), at ease.
The Dives parable is usually interpreted as an allegory about Jews and Gentiles.
anybody remember the 8 day 1969 international convention.
i was at the braves stadium in atlanta all 8 days with a sunburn and then wet clothes after the rain storms.
if you were there (not necessarily in atlanta) do you remember anything about it?
Chicago, baseball stadium, where the White Sox played. I was 8. I dont remember the sessions at all, but i do remember doing pre-convention work. Back then we would go door to door to find houses willing to put up people in their homes for the assembly ( believe it or not). Sounds crazy now, but some people would actually do it.
thw wts likes to play games with their statistics.
one interesting but truly tragic is the number of jwhovah's witnesses who commit suicie.. now i suspect that if a person commits suicide shortly before or after they are disfellowshipped then the elders would say that person wasn't a witness or that they had done something so terrible that they were too guilty to admit it and by their action of committing suicide they pretty much declared they were no longer a jw.. yup fancy talk to make sure any crap didn't fall on them.. so my question.. do you know of cases like this?
if so then can you answer a few more questions.. had this person been dfed or in real danger of being dfed or whatever the equivalent is if they were never baptized?.
The suicide rate in the US is about 13 per 100,000 people per year, with the rate for men being higher than for women. I would say I know about 500 JWs in my circle of JW friends and acquaintances. These are people I know by name, who have been to my home for meals, we've talked at the KH, etc. So the way I see it, I would expect about 0.065 (13/100,000 * 500) of my JW friends to die by suicide in a given year. Another way to look at it, I might expect to see 1 suicide in about 15 years among my JW friends.
Just this week I saw the fifth suicide in only 10 years. Four men and one woman.
At least from my perspective, the rate of suicide among JWs is much higher than the general population.
hey uk folks, what's going with this story?
was it an unbelieving mate that attacked and elder or something?.
Ive seen some non jw husbands become very jealous of the time their wives spend at the kh, service, etc. They really go bonkers once in a while. I knew one who rammed some cars in the parking lot iin a fit of rage.
interesting article.
3,800 words long.
so it's a 'long read'.
Lol,it saysRutherford was 'bland and courteous'. Guess they didnt know him well.
jehovah's witnesses...that's the trademark of the religion, the use of the name "jehovah.
" if there is anything jws and non-jws can agree on is that this one thing sets them apart from everybody else.. i have only had witnesses come to my door less than five times since i left in the 1990s.
i guess they don't work the territory i live in often, or perhaps after that first time (which was still after the year 2000) they have marked the words "jew who knows a lot" or something in their notes on my address.
D J thanks for your answers
it seems that the wt is guilty of illegally dumping printing chemicals (or as they like to say "ruining the earth") in upstate new york.
read the full articles from the news sites below.. "state officials are investigating chemical pollution found buried at an upstate new york property owned by the jehovah's witnesses organization.
" http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/8e675d204fbf4352ab2cf65086b4b411/ny--buried-chemicals/.
I asked a Walkill bethelite about this recently and he said thiis was an underground storage tank that started to leak. It had to go through a mitigation process to be cleaned up. Maybe he didn't want to tell me, an outsider, all the details, but that is what he said.
