James Thomas Rook Jr.

1 hour ago, JW Insider said:

Hebrews 1 and 2 had already dealt with his Kingship and royal power: "God is your throne." "He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. So he has become better than the angels to the extent that he has inherited a name more excellent than theirs." "The scepter of your Kingdom is the scepter of uprightness." "But we do see Jesus, who was made a little lower than angels, now crowned. . ."

Except for people with a combination of tourette's syndrome, dislexia, and one leg shorter than the other, which gives you brain-tilt .... that seems to wrap up THAT discussion.

On 6/27/2017 at 11:48 AM, Shiwiii said:

I think it is unnatural for a parent or child or sibling to ignore their family member. Who is the closest to us? Who has know our tendencies from birth/childhood? When the family moved across country, who was there? Family. Family is part of what makes a community, but a community starts with a family. To treat family members lower than strangers is wrong, it is not loving, it is not encouraging nor is it up building. This practice is only meant to control

To treat family members lower than strangers is wrong, it is not loving, it is not encouraging nor is it up building. This practice is only meant to control.

I agree 100% .... but then again I got my morality not only from the Bible, but from the old "Code of the West", and I embrace BOTH.

Sometimes we become parts of EXTENDED families... like joining a wagon train for mutual support and protection back in the early settling of the West. (Western United States ... think Cowboys and Indians, and the struggle for survival in a hostile land.).

..and sometimes that extended family abandons you, or casts you out as a perceived danger to them, when ignorant incompetence and  peer pressure prevails. 

That's O.K.

Princess Esterina and her body guard Brunhilda, and Frosty the Snowflake don't like it EITHER.

14 hours ago, Queen Esther said:

"Your request is righteous, and I will give it to thee, and I will give thee the best weapons, which thou canst overcome and conquer."
And  God  gave  the  Lamb  his  BEST  gifts,  namely  meekness,  devotion  and  patience..

..and the LORD sayeth , " ... and because of the gifts I give you ..meekness, devotion, and patience, I also give you attributes that will preserve you and your offspring forever on this Earth .... that when all other animals shall become extinct ..you and your progeny will survive until the Earth is no more ... I give you portability ... being delicious ... and mechanical refrigeration."

...and LOOK!, the LORD saw that the lamb was good ! ... and NEVER gave anybody indigestion ...

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... perhaps a short ANALOGY will bring clarity .....

5 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

  13 hours ago, Anna said:

if in the future the GB scrapped 1914, would you lose faith? [yes, I know the question wasn't directed to me]

It seems to me that AGAIN ... the WRONG question is being asked.

How about " ... if in the future the GB scrapped 1914, would you lose faith in the GB?"

The answer to that seems, from the discussions already made here, to be like closing the barn door after all the sheep have gotten loose .

But, I was assured yesterday at the 2017 Convention in Greenville, SC., that Jehovah God and the Governing Body LOVES our "young ones".

(...except in Australia, the UK, and California, where GB Member "most qualified" to testify, Gerritt Losch,  refused a subpoena to testify in a Child Sexual Abuse Court Case, and the Society was originally fined 11.5 MILLION DOLLARS.)

How about the question "" ... if in the future the GB scrapped 1914, would you lose faith in Jehovah God and his Christ?"

THE GB ...  AND JEHOVAH AND JESUS  ..... THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

Actually, I do NOT have an answer ... that's why I asked the question ... and hoped someone who KNEW would answer.

Agenda driven " ...  you will see how he most likely dressed to read in the synagogue." Is completely useless, and has no value whatsoever.

On 6/2/2017 at 1:21 AM, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

I hope someone out there knows Jewish "rules' and customs about "dress codes" in Jesus' time ... he was referred to as "Rabbi".

The Society's opinions, without backup for a rational basis are as useless as Ronald McDonald's opinion on restaurant clown running shoes.

..and HOW do you know this?

It seems to me if they are ALREADY married, per WTB&TS policy ... and the State has granted them a divorce .... (remember ... in the eyes of the "Congregation" they are always married unless one commits adultery, and the other does NOT forgive the adultery ...) they have satisfied the requirements of the Society... AND .. the state, and any interference is just busybody meddling.

Ok... lets say that in the middle of the Amazon Jungle, I meat ... er .. meet a tribe of cannibals, and in order not to be the guest of honor at dinner, I agree to marry the pigmy chief's daughter, he chants, dances, and makes a marriage certificate on the side of a coconut, and according to that tribe, I AM MARRIED.  Guards stand outside the grass hut to make sure the marriage is consummated,

The only way to get divorced is to feed the coconut to an alligator, which I do.

I guess then that according to current WTB&TS policy ... I have to wrestle the alligator and have IT ... after a reasonable time, of course ... barf up the coconut, and hang it around my neck on a chain.

On 6/27/2017 at 2:08 AM, The Librarian said:

They would be disfellowshipped if they did not marry properly (legally) in a reasonable amount of time.

I have no doubt that is true, THAT IS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN  ... BUT HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS?

AND MORE TO THE POINT ... WHAT IS THE SCRIPTURAL BASIS FOR THIS?

It is ABSURD that people married in the sight of God ( disregarding the Amazonian specifics ..) need approval and registration from the State... WHEN THE STATE DOES NOT CARE AT ALL ... AND HAS GIVEN THEM PERMISSION FOR A CIVIL DIVORCE.

1. God considers the couple still married.

2. The "State" could care less or not at all, and even GRANTS legal divorce.

If I was a cynical person ... I might think the ONLY thing the WTB&TS cares about is controlling EVERY aspect of human behavior, and that EVERYTHING not specifically allowed ..... is forbidden.

... round up the "Usual Suspects" .....

If you see this ... you will remember it for the REST OF YOUR LIFE!

THIS is the definitive site to do your research .. please spend several HOURS reading it ... you will thank yourself over, and over.

http://www.eclipse2017.org/2017/path_through_the_US.htm

Susan and I will be going to Cross Hill, South Carolina early Monday morning to see it .. weather permitting ... it's only about 120 miles from where we live, and it's in the exact center of the path of totality impossible not to be able to find ( a small town) ...

Because the moon is traveling in the same direction as the Earth's rotation, there will be a full 2 minutes of TOTAL solar eclipse, and more.   The lead in partial eclipse  will start about an hour before, and last about an hour after the local times listed on the maps.

Order your viewing glasses RIGHT NOW, for obvious reasons. They are about $3.00 a pair.

DO NOT take photos without a 16.5 stop rated neutral density filter in FRONT of your camera lens, as it will burn out your camera sensor.

This is the EVENT OF THE CENTURY, ... AND MORE! FOR THOSE LIVING IN THE UNITED STATES.

I have not been keeping count ... but continue on ... it's not even CLOSE to a million words yet about how many angels can dance on the head of a sewing pin.

If you keep asking the wrong questions ... all you will ever get is wrong answers.

This is normal.

Actually, it's 53 MILES of interlocking tunnels ..... 1500 or so feet down ... big enough to store loaded rail cars with high level radioactive waste for 10,000 years, WITHOUT TUNNEL MAINTENANCE.. 

Spend perhaps 20 million dollars lobbying to have it declared surplus, and have it auctioned off as surplus ... and an imaginative engineer could become a multi- billionaire in about six years, if he had the capital.

It's really QUITE Simple ...

FIRST...

Get 50 million dollars .....

I worked off and on for 20 years on the Yucca Mountain high level radioactive waste storage project in Nevada, from the beginning until Obama cancelled it to pander to the ignorant for votes.

These boring machines are INCREDIBLE.  And the Engineering truly MAGNIFICENT!.

Youtube has many videos of these GIGANTIC machines digging through solid rock ... worth the hunt!

49 minutes ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

The entire Universe SCREAMS! ...  screams .... SCREAMS! ... of the existing time scale of all things .... stars, planetary formation, geological epocs,  climate variations , life .. extinctions ... life ... extinctions, etc., and of vast and widespread civilizations of proto-men, precursors to "Homo Erectus" , eventually leading to the direct creation of "Homo Theocraticus" ... the first sanctioned  humans ...by God.

THIS is the single paragraph I had in mind ......

BOOM!

I have often given thought as the MOST PROBABLE way to calculate time ... and it is ONLY my BEST EDUCATED GUESS, at the present time ...  is first realize that the PERSPECTIVE of the narrator in Genesis is of one standing on the surface of the Earth watching it's formation.

It is NOT a "view from Space".

Then ... we know from MOUNTAINS of very hard evidence (  no pun intended) that the Earth went from formless and void about Three and one-half BILLION years ago to a ball of molten rock from collisions with impacting and accretion materials, became an oblate spheroid (generally a ball...) and it took that long to become the Lovely Blue-Green-Tan Planet we have today., with the Moon in EXACTLY the right place, for the first time in the history of the Solar System, so that Earth observers can use it as a tool to wrestle the secrets from the Universe, as Einstein waited 18 or so years for a Solar Eclipse to verify his theory of relativity as being TRUE.

So ... if you take 3-1/2 billion years divided by six creative days, (and a day of rest ...), that is 3, 500,000,000 years divided by 7, which gives you each of the seven "days"  is about a half-billion years long.  

Time to have the entire Earth go through many changes, from a ball of super-heated steam covered incandescent rock in total darkness, to a lush jungle and ecosphere with hundreds of millions of frolicking dinosaurs and other critters swarming over the Earth.

My current BEST GUESS ... based on VERY hard evidence ... is that we are living in God's rest day now .... but where we are in that half-billion year long rest day would be wild guessing without any hard evidence.  (That means delusional fantasy, for those in Rio Linda...)

The entire Universe SCREAMS! ...  screams .... SCREAMS! ... of the existing time scale of all things .... stars, planetary formation, geological epocs,  climate variations , life .. extinctions ... life ... extinctions, etc., and of vast and widespread civilizations of proto-men, precursors to "Homo Erectus" , eventually leading to the direct creation of "Homo Theocraticus" ... the first sanctioned  humans ...by God.

             By the way ... this "theory" SOLVES the problem of  evolution's  billions of tons of hard evidence across all sciences being irrefutably true, and the Bible account of the first "Humans" being the direct creation of Jehovah God.          

IT FITS ALL KNOWN FACTS FROM BOTH SIDES .... WITHOUT ANY COMPROMISES OR OBFUSCATIONS OR COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.

If it takes more than one paragraph to explain ANY concept ... it probably is NOT true.

I am 70, now, and these things are for younger and smarter people to work out the details.  

As Kenny Rogers sang in his song "The Gambler" ....

"You gotta know when to hold 'em,

Know when to fold 'em

Know when to walk away,

Know when to run.

You can't count your money, while you're sittin' at the table ..

The'ill be time enough for countin' ...

when the dealings done."

20 minutes ago, ARchiv@L said:

 

On 6/25/2017 at 4:46 PM, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

I don't know why people don't just GET IT!

JESUS MADE IT SO SIMPLE TO THE PEOPLE HE SPOKE TO!

yI yI yI yI yiyiyi !

 

 

Read more  

yes, but in this last days seems that we all need a forum to discuss somethings.
otherwise, how do you explain all these fb pages, groups and e-pages that exist all over the internet?

 

You are "preaching to the choir"  here on that one ... an American English expression that means I am ALREADY a believer that what you say about this is true. 

Unfettered human communication is SO IMPORTANT that atheists ( as the classical extreme example)  will go into mortal combat against those who try to restrict the free exchange of ideas, and are willing to die FOREVER to defend free speech and expression ... they knowing that without it the human race will always be in bondage to those who want to maintain THEIR power ... by restricting what WE are allowed to know.

A GREAT movie about this is the 1997  "THE POSTMAN", starring Kevin Costner ... about children who know that there is NOTHING more important than family communication ...and other similar themes.

I bought three copies of this book from the Congregation Book Counter for $4.00 each, in the early 1960s.

This book, "The Two Babylons"was used quite extensively to support all the various theories we have about Christendom and its customs .... and was the inspiration for the Society's book, "Babylon the Great has Fallen - God's Kingdom Rules",

... there is a whole other backstory  about this book and the influence it had ... but I have to pour concrete today ..... It is worth reading, though, to see how it influenced the religious world of that time, and for almost a hundred years, the Society's perspective on things.

I personally do not think there is ANYTHING erotic about that photograph ... and have seen more "stuff" at a commercial  swimming pool / water park near Mason Ohio. 

Let's assume FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT that she really is a JW ... it certainly is NOT modest ... but then again ... when a woman becomes pregnant she gives up ALL, repeat ALL claim to modesty, unless she has her babie(s) in a closet  .... sometimes there is a whole room full of people staring at her "girlie parts".

Think of it this way ..... let's say you worked your way through medical school, paying your own tuition by working in a slaughterhouse in Chicago, and  decided to become a urologist or gynecologist.  Your sensibilities about sex and violence would be COMPLETELY different than Bro. Casper Milquetoast, who still lives in his mother's basement, and washes windows for a living.

We each stand or fall .... according to the sensibilities of our Master, Jesus Christ about such things ... and although I would not want my daughter doing such a thing ... she is over 18, and does NOT ANSWER TO ME,

It's called FREEDOM, folks .... and always entails risk.

Does Jehovah God, or Jesus care if she does this ?

I think not ... we have a world full of REAL problems ....  without inventing irrelevant ones.

I would give her the Jabba-The-Hut swimsuit award, though ...

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..... I dunno, but I remember when the ex-JW Janet Jackson, sister of Michael Jackson,  had that "wardrobe malfunction" during a half-time performance at the Superbowl years ago, I was so horrified that I can no longer drink chocolate milk !

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...and on a related subject ......

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What I find curious is how one of Jehovah's Witnesses gets mixed up with such a nutcase, in the first place ... ESPECIALLY someone who eventually chops off her (his?)  HEAD!

Something about this does not pass the "smell test".

12 hours ago, JW Insider said:

Before I read your name, Gnosis Pithos, I read your first sentence and still didn't have a clue who you were. The second sentence was an immediate give-away, however, based purely on the style. I even knew exactly what city would come up if I looked up the IP address, which I won't publish here, because not everyone has access to this information.

RATS!

... and I had two surplus North Korean middle range ballistic missiles ... READY TO GO!

It depends on whether you want to become a member of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society or not .... since 1985, the oath of dedication has NOT been to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit ... but has been to the Father, the Son, and " ... God's spirit anointed organization". (paraphrased ... it has varied greatly...).

The requirement from the Bible is that you must be baptized to symbolize PUBLICLY your dedication to God , but as a letter from Judge Rutherford to someone who wrote into him about that stated ( and I have a copy here, somewhere...),  ANYBODY can baptize you into Christianity, which MAKES you one of Jehovah's Witnesses in a functional way, just as it made Jesus a Jehovah's Witness in a functional way, and all the early Christians, Christians  in a functional way. 

I was baptized in 1964, so I have no oath of allegiance to the WTB&TS, and was not baptized into the Corporation that only in the past year has been forced to admit they are not inspired by God, or infallible, and are slowly prepping us in the meetings for the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT next year or so which everyone can see coming, like a glacier.

So, to directly answer your question ... yes you do have to dedicate your life to God, and PUBLICLY be baptized to have the approval of God and his Christ ...   BUT...

(see cartoon below...)

I have had to dig trenches across my yard for underground wiring with a 8 pound sledgehammer and a chisel, sitting on the ground.

When you have no help ... you do what you can.

".. Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition...".

Don't blame JTR for this thread. This is JWI hijacking one of JTR's posts that was just moved over here. I'm only stealing the top half of this post as an explanation for the the rest of this thread. JTR only gets top billing here because his was the earliest post chosen for this new thread.

I was asked to try my hand at splitting off some of the diversionary topics from the thread called:

Perhaps you heard of it. Well, as you can tell from the image attached to the link, above, it quickly turned into thread about buzzards and elephants and Rolex watches and even took a detour down sewers and down Broadway, too. So I did a quick review of the thread and decided that it might be good to just see if I can split off only several of the side topics, so that this new thread,  becomes a place for the obvious side topics that always come up in a 1914 discussion, such as:

• You have no right to discuss this because it's apostasy even to bring it up!
• You must be a follower of Carl Olof Jonsson
• You must be a follower of Raymond Franz
• You are not being loyal and faithful to the Governing Body
• You must have bad motives, ego issues, etc. etc.

In addition since that other thread is at least 14 pages too long, this new one will likely have a lot of free space, comparatively. So we might also just move over a few of the posts that weren't directly responding to the subject, although they might make interesting side topics, which could even be broken off of this thread someday. By diversionary topics, I don't mean they were unwelcome diversions (OK, some of them were) but some were excellent, informative posts responding to diversions, and some tied back to the original topic so well that they remained in place. Feel free to make suggestions. 

I wouldn't worry about this too much. In a few days, probably both of these threads could move to the back of the line. For anyone who worries about such things I won't move posts if I find out that it loses any reactions it had. Wouldn't want to change that. But I'm also worried about the chronological order of the posts and continuity of comments. So if it's not working out, then most things will just stay where they were.

AND NOW WE RETURN YOU TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED POST FROM JTR:

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I remember many years ago, in Mechanicsville, Virginia, an Engineering firm wanted to build  an office complex on land they had bought ... BUT ... there was a historic building on the site that by law could not be torn down without government approval .... so the Company applied to build a museum around it .... which was approved.

After the larger building was constructed around the smaller building, that changed the status FROM historical site to museum exhibit, and the Owners decided that their PERSONAL PROPERTY (no longer considered "Real Estate"), had to go ... and they demolished the smaller building, and built their necessary offices inside, on their own land.

This is EXACTLY what Jesus did (figuratively speaking) when establishing the Christian Congregation.

THE OLD BUILDING WAS "HISTORICAL",  BUT PEOPLE'S REAL NEEDS ARE MORE IMPORTANT!

When you find a dead elephant in your bath tub, a lot of analysis is not necessary ... you just fire up the Ol' chain saw .. and HANDLE IT.