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WitnessConfectionProgram

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  1. Just getting back to the original question: I'd say that, firstly, 'this Generation' includes the lifetime of, for example, Geoffrey Jackson, who is only 60 at the moment, not even a pensioner, so the generation wouldn't need to be 'longer than we think' to allow for a considerable amount of stuff to happen. Also, bear in mind that Jehovah said he would 'speed it up in his own time'. And it's easy to see how things might speed up. In the past we've heard experiences of missionaries coming across congregations who were already practising the truth, because they'd come across some book from somewhere, and had started sharing it with each other, so that by the time the organisation found them, they were already doing more or less everything Jehovah wanted. That happened before the internet existed, before people in China or India or anywhere else could look up information in their own language and find out the answers to existential questions everybody has about life, and which people don't stop having just because their country isn't widely Christian. Consider the changes made in the past ten years. Apps designed to teach us foreign languages. Teaching to use videos as part of our presentations. Cart witnessing. Many ways of witnessing that were previously alien to us are now being embraced. It doesn't seem unlikely that we could be taught to witness online, in different languages, so as to reach these other countries. That would certainly be one way of speeding it up. Yes, it is also logical that since Jehovah can read hearts, he can tell the difference between someone who would have accepted the truth had they had the chance, and someone who wouldn't. But I think plenty has been said on that subject already. All I'd add is that given Satan's challenge in Eden, presumably what Jehovah is concerned about when deciding whether a person is suitable to live in the new world is that person's willingness to obey him rather than choosing their own path - not whether they actually got told what he wanted them to do. That, after all, was the test that Adam and Eve failed.
  2. The Languages of the Watchtower (to the tune of the Major-General's Song. More or less.) The Watchtower is the model of a multilingual magazine, Translated into every living language that I've ever seen, There's English, Afrikaans, Swahili, German, Macedonian, And Finnish, Twi, Slovak, Punjabi, Catalan, Cambodian, Then Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified) then Portuguese, Estonian, Samoan, Kongo, Malayalam, Japanese, The Neo-Solomonic pidgin similar to Tok Pisin, And Creoles whether Seychelles or Haitian or the Mauritian, Marathi, Turkish, Spanish, Danish, Kiribati, Hmong, Uzbek, Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, Lunda, Gujarati, Tongan, Czech, Bicol, Uruund, Kirghiz, Tetum, Chitumbuka, Kwanyama, Cebuano, Aukan, Pangasinan, and Chitonga, Myanmar, Moore, Malagasy, Guarani, Bengali, Quechua, Latvian, Silozi, Saramaccan, Shona, Serbian, Italian, Kiluba, Baoule, Dangme, Nzema, Tatar, Tsonga, Isoko, Cibemba, Kikaonde, Polish, Persian, Russian, Iloko, Icelandic, Swedish, Georgian, then Azerbaijani, and Maltese, Croatian, and Tahitian, Ga, Ossetian, and Vietnamese, Oromo, Sango, Papiamento, Luo, Igbo, and Efik, Amharic, Hiri-Motu, Urdu, Hebrew, Zulu, Arabic, Niuean, Zande, Nepali, Xhosa, Hausa, Lithuanian, Sepedi, Hiligaynon, Otetela, and Albanian, Then Gun, Bislama, Kazakh, Ewe, Tagalog, Hungarian, Tiv, Waray-Waray, Mizo, Krio, Kannada, Bulgarian, Swahili, Ndebele, Sranantongo, and Armenian, Tigrinya, Thai, Tshiluba, Hindi, Yoruba, Slovenian, Fijian and Korean and Telugu and Wallisian, Sinhala and Lingala and Umbundu, Indonesian, And Kisi, Dutch, Mongolian, plus Tamil, Greek, Romanian, Luganda, Tuvaluan, French, Norwegian, and Ukrainian, So while JW.org can put more languages on screen, The Watchtower is the model of a multilingual magazine! From Episode 4, 'Language', of the Witness Confection Program
  3. Some scientists have found such endogenous retroviruses to be necessary to life. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060911233630.htm "Many scientists believed these endogenous retroviruses were junk DNA, he said." Strange, but of the scientists I know who believe in creation, whether botanists, chemists, physicists, none of them ever jumped to that incorrect conclusion. By that, you mean, times like these when the theory of evolution predicts something (like junk DNA in the form of ERVs) which turns out to be false, and the facts are exactly as it would have been expected all along from a creation point of view, that these things are there because they serve a purpose, a purpose which simply had been difficult to discover because Jehovah is so much more intelligent than we are?
  4. The society never resisted such things. I remember seeing a video of people using a portable DVD player for the sign language ministry (I think it might have been the 'Organised to Share the Good News' video, but I'm not sure) long before we would have had such a device. (My first thought wasn't 'They're using videos on the ministry', but 'Wow, you can get DVD players that you can carry around'.) But obviously, they only widely promoted using videos in the ministry once lots of publishers had devices to play them with - that's just common sense. As for trousers for sisters (though they are always referred to as 'slacks', which I don't think is really a term we use here in Britain - or maybe women use that word among themselves and I just never hear it said), the Watchtower says as early as 1951 (which is as far back as the Watchtower Library goes, so it may have said it earlier) that there was nothing scripturally wrong with it. (w51 10/1 p.607) And there are some circumstances in which they are recommended. (g00 9/8 p.19) The guidance on our congregation notice board says this: While researching this question however, I found that this comes from betheltours.org, who state in their FAQ, " No, we are not directly associated with the Watchtower Society. " So it would appear that this guidance which has been on our notice board for years doesn't actually come from the society, a fact which I'll be sure to mention to our elders later this week! I could think of possible reasons why the society could have considered it unsuitable for a woman to wear trousers, but the fact is, I can't find any definite evidence that they do think that. All I can find is examples, like the picture above, of individuals having given weight to their own ideas when actually the society itself never said such a thing (and I can think of many examples of that, like how for years it was the popular opinion that you shouldn't use social networks, and one brother even announced that on the platform at an assembly, even though you can look back in the Watchtower Library and see that no such statement was ever backed up by the society). While I can't state any guidance from the society here though, I know it would look odd to me in the Kingdom Hall. You say "the JW community needs to catch up with late 20th/early 21st century." But why should we want to do that? Quite the opposite, we want to "quit being fashioned after this system of things." (Romans 12:2) The culture of some witnesses at a Kingdom Hall shares elements in common with the culture of the surrounding country, but it is a different culture, and that is as it should be. We don't want our language to "catch up" with the amount of swearing that is common for them. We don't want our morality to "catch up" with theirs. And there's no reason we should want our styles of clothing to "catch up" with theirs. Just as the Jews had a blue lining around their garment that garment that set them apart from the world, so our style of dress sets us apart from the world, and that's a good thing. Now, in their culture, trousers for women may be common (and I suspect, historically became that way through the feminist movement and rebellion against Jehovah's standards of headship, even if that isn't what every woman who wears trousers has in mind now), but in our culture, they aren't, not in a formal setting. We don't start doing something just because the world does it. There may not be anything scripturally wrong with a sister wearing trousers, but in the Kingdom Hall it would stick out like a sore thumb. Now if, as in the example one person gave above, she needs to do so because of allergies or something, then that's fair enough - but if she's deliberately choosing to dress in a way that will obviously draw attention to herself, isn't that an example of immodesty? (To give another example, there isn't any scriptural rule against dressing like Dorothy out of 'The Wizard of Oz', but I remember a teenage girl came to an assembly dressed like that once, complete with ruby slippers - was it appropriate? 1Co 6:12 ) That would be against scriptural principles. Of course, it depends on the circumstances. We've established there isn't any blanket rule against it, and circumstances will vary, but I can see there being times when it will be wrong. It will depend on motive and attitude.
  5. We're trying to provide some regular entertainment for other witnesses. Not that we're brilliant comedians, but hopefully we can excel over worldly entertainment when it comes to making it clean and not promoting bad conduct. The Witness Confection Program : http://www.witnessconfectionprogram.co.uk/
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