James Thomas Rook Jr.

I have often wondered what would happen if I landed on the Warwick front lawn in a helicopter,  showed up at the Lobby, unannounced, with several Halliburton #103 aluminum suitcases filled with hundred dollar bills, opened them and showed the money to the receptionist, and asked to see one of the Governing Body for a special, personal, guided tour of the new Headquarters facility.
Think they could fit me in the same morning?

Jehovah has NEVER changed ... although he has changed his mind many times when entreated to do so, and he DOES "learn as he goes along".
He was genuinely surprised when children were offered to the fires of the god Moloch as human sacrifices, and before that there was of course ... the dinosaurs ... which did not end well, for them.
And the name "Jehovah" is in ENGLISH, a standard convention since about AD 1600 when the letter "J" was invented, and the name is different in different languages, the same as Jesus' name is different in different languages.
I under understand in Spanish my name James is pronounced HIGH-ME, or Santiago ....
Who knew?
 

How about that ... I have the answers even before you ask the questions ..... !

Do the "other religions destroy whole families to chastise one errant congregant?
Do the other religions require children to commit ritual medical suicide?
Do other religions have their congregants IN A LIFE BOAT with so many patches it looks covered in post-it-notes?
Inquiring minds want to know!

From the picture above, it appears Jesus shaved his arm pits.

Do the "other religions destroy whole families to chastise one errant congregant?
Do the other religions require children to commit ritual medical suicide?
Do other religions have their congregants IN A LIFE BOAT with so many patches it looks covered in post-it-notes?
Inquiring minds want to know!

The secret caption is hidden in the file name ....

That is always true when I use my right to bear arms ....
(... may not translate across languages ... )

Mark even says "we felt as if we'd been picked up be Jehovah and safely carried out of Russia." ??
So he gets you out of Russia but he couldnt make a supreme court judge overturn the ban of your own people? And what about the Russian witnesses that are still there?

Thanks for pointing that out, I never noticed! I wonder why the artist considered it inappropriate to include underarm hair.....must be an American thing....

The secret caption is hidden in the file name ....

I suppose it DOES work better for midgets and dwarfs.

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You  had  to  write  a  book  of  ALL  exciting  moments  in  your  life,  @James Thomas Rook Jr.  WOW....  SO  many  things  you've  experienced    SO  many  stories  in  your  head,  hahaha    Come  on,  tell  us  more  please !   Be  lucky,  there  was  NO  crocodile  in  the  water,  after  your  long  dive,  directly  into  the  crocodile - mouth...    huuuiii >>>>>>>> 
In  the  NW  let's  on  and  off  meet  us  to  a  big  campfire  with  brothers & sisters,  and  you  tell  us  some  nice  and  creepy,  old  stories  out  of  your  younger  life,  YES !

Unfortunately, as I was swept downstream by the rapids, the river flattened out and I fell over a waterfall into a pool of alligators, and they ate me.

Sorry! Truly. It's just that I think we get a little bored, and this is merely a frivolous light hearted interlude while waiting on others to gather something groundbreaking and worthwhile discussing

From the picture above, it appears Jesus shaved his arm pits.

I remember an incident when I was working in the Congo, in 1974.. it was called Zaire then ... and half way between Kinshasa and Kananga  a lion started stalking me and Jim, the Brother I was traveling with, walking on a one lane dirt road next to a rapidly flowing river in the jungle.
I saw it first and yelled "Jim!, lion behind you !" ...   and I ran and made a long  dive into the water. 
They say that you cannot outrun a lion, and that is true ... as I was being swept downstream I looked back and saw the lion had caught Jim.   To this day I believe Jim would have also made it to the river,  if he had not been wearing his lucky ham.

At the same time that I risked my life before a triple bypass heart surgery, about 9 years ago, and insisted on no blood or blood fractions ... and had to be taken by ambulance to a hospital 30 miles away, kept alive en route by six VERY BUSY EMT technicians, to get the operation without blood, I was beginning to understand that unless an animal, or a human actually dies ... the blood does NOT represent his life.
The soldiers who got water for King David RISKED their life to get it ... and the water represented their life, and LIKE blood, he refused to drink the water.
In ancient Israel, NO ONE drank live animal blood, and when the animal was slain for food, the blood was properly returned to God, BECAUSE the animal died. 
BECAUSE the animal died ... its blood represented its life .....
NOT BEFORE.
If the ancient Israelite Priests had drained blood from animals for sacrificial use, sprinkling it on the crowd, etc., and not killed the animal, allowing it to heal up ... would THAT blood have been proper for sacrifice to God?
NO ... because the animal had not been sacrificed ... only wounded.
If when as a young carpenter someone accidentally injured Jesus, and he had almost cut a finger off, would THAT blood have redeemed mankind?
NO.
When Jesus was killed by punching holes in his body, he bled ... and AFTER he died ... his blood represented his life.
NOT BEFORE!
Further, if he had been executed by drowning, or strangulation ... yes he would have died, but no sacrificial blood could be offered to God for that LIFE!
KNOWING what I know now, would I still insist on no blood for myself should I need more surgery?
The LIFE belongs to God ... and when life dies, specifically for hemoglobin carrying air breathers  (not fish, as an example), Jehovah has ORDERED the blood returned to him "on the ground", or in specifically approved ritual sacrifice.
The human blood would have NO sacrificial value unless it was blood from a cadaver .....  ANY MORE THAN A BLOODY NOSE AND SWALLOWING THE BLOOD UNTIL IT STOPS, HAS ANY VALUE WHATSOEVER.  And I have not quite figured that example completely out.
People used to eat blood saturated animals they had strangled ... the animal was DEAD. 
The blood, representing THAT LIFE, was ordered returned to God, from whence it came.
The blood had value to God, THE ANIMAL HAD DIED, and God demanded its return to him out of respect for his being the force behind ALL LIFE. 
In  some African tribes, they cut a cow and drink the blood, sometimes mixing it with milk.
The Jews did not do this, the very IDEA was totally abhorrent.
The New Testament admonitions specify keeping away from "... blood ... and things strangled ..."
                           FROM ANIMALS ACTUALLY KILLED .                                       
KNOWING what I know now, would I still insist on no blood for myself should I need more surgery?
Yes ... Jehovah, as an example,  ALLOWS pacifism, even though it is not required ... and many, many other things not required.
It's called FREEDOM.
People that believe in FREEDOM, often will sacrifice their lives ... for reasons that make no sense to someone else ... because they believe In certain symbols, and ideas.
I would bind myself with that restriction ... but I would not bind YOU.
To the best of my understanding at the present time. I could be wrong, and am completely open to other reasonable interpretations. I suppose I bind myself .. just in case I might be wrong, which is unlikely, but possible.
... but then again ... I have been at death's door many dozens of times without turning the knob, and am USED to the idea.
Not everybody is.
Perhaps the Russians are right ... and we are wrong ... in requiring of our Bretheren things God does not, and which civilization in general has the "high moral ground", and in addition to destroying families by shunning, we are destroying families by actually causing them to medically suicide.
This is a VERY REASONABLE definition of "extremism".
Perhaps it's a good thing to take the signs off of the confiscated buildings.
In about 5 years,  about many, many things .... we will all know.
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Could be worse ..... after an especially good meeting ... a speaker that REALLY knew his stuff... I stood up and excitedly said to an elderly Sister sittin' in the row behind me " Wasn't that a HELL of a good talk?".

Queen Esther:
It is OK by me .... it's YOUR thread ... and I do realize its a long rambling story ... but tried to tie-in WHY I told that story, at the end.
The connection makes sense to me ... but I am a guest on your thread.

Queen Esther:
It is OK by me .... it's YOUR thread ... and I do realize its a long rambling story ... but tried to tie-in WHY I told that story, at the end.
The connection makes sense to me ... but I am a guest on your thread.

Hah! I noticed this little blast from the past (and present for many of us, too). Hard to believe that so many of us fell for this little mix-up between which word was the better one to use and which was not so good. Turns out that "LUCK" was more than likely just a term for success or loss that came into English from middle German where a lot of gaming and gambling terms came from in the 1500s. So we all replaced it with a word based on FORTUNE, which had been personified as a false Roman goddess during Bible times. Even when it came into English the earliest known instance is in the phrase "Dame Fortune."
Even in the Bible, the word translated "fortune" was associated with bad things:
(Leviticus 20:27) 27 “‘Any man or woman who acts as a spirit medium or is a fortune-teller should be put to death without fail. . . . of course, it was based on the translation of
(Isaiah 65:11) 11 “But YOU men are those leaving Jehovah, those forgetting my holy mountain, those setting in order a table for the god of Good Luck. . . But the foot-note for that verse says
*** Rbi8 Isaiah 65:11 ***
“For the god of Good Luck.” Heb., lag·gadhʹ; LXX, “the demon”; Lat., For·tuʹnae. Compare Ge 30:11 ftns. Of course if you follow the footnotes for Genesis 30:11 you see that the same word for "Luck" here is translated "Fortune" in Genesis:
(Genesis 30:10, 11) . . .. 11 Then Leʹah said: “With good fortune!” So she called his name Gad. The name of the tribe was "Luck" just as "laggadh' basically means "to Luck" if the footnote for Isaiah 65:11 is correct. Or Isaiah was referring to the god of Fortune, if the footnote to Genesis 30:11 is correct.
It was about as silly as saying that we shouldn't say something was "destined" to occur, because this somehow invokes the god of Destiny.
(Luke 9:44) . . .for the Son of man is destined to be delivered into the hands of men.” (Mark 13:4) 4 “Tell us, When will these things be, and what will be the sign when all these things are destined to come to a conclusion?”
(Isaiah 65:11) . . .And those filling up cups of mixed wine for the god of Destiny.

 

"1984" was written just after World War II, when with fire, and blood and steel global tyranny at the hand of the Nazis was just barely averted, and at GREAT cost ... yet the Soviet Union was in it's ascendancy, and was actively building a civilization based on the horrors exemplified in the book "1984".
The reason this book is studied, to the best of my knowledge in EVERY good Public High School in the United States, is that we learn to recognize that "Ministrys of TRUTH" are not what they are are labeled, and neither are Ministrys of LOVE".
It is not even unusual that tyranny always adopts the same methods ... it has been so since there were tribal witch doctors running the local "theocracy" ... and it is true now across a BROAD SPECTRUM of human organization and experience.
Hence the expression ... "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing"