TrueTomHarley

Captain Kirk, Picard, and his successors went to the very limits of the galaxy and never found any, though he did find some wannabes here and there. No gods at all out there, only coneheads and boneheads, courtesy of evolution, their behaviors determined by evolutionary psychology.

Sometimes when I am discussing spiritual things with those slow to grasp or even resistant of them I find that I have backed myself into a corner. Whenever that happens, I say, “For reasons not understood it is that way” and move on to prove my next point. Maybe it was actually the comment of someone else. Someone way back in the thread accused me of throwing up a smokescreen to takeaway from the title of this thread. Maybe it was not you. Sorry

JTR has made this point, too. I try not to bring totally irrelevant ideas into thread. I confine myself to responding to fatheads that already have. Still, I confess that I sometimes think of starting a new thread, but I hold back because everyone is all hopped up at the old one and I think that they may not make the jump. JWI may be unaware that Pascal checked into Gamblers Anonymous in his later years. Since no end of organizations do set up such charities, and there are myriad government programs doing the same, I see no harm in there being one to focus on what the Bible describes as the Christian’s main mission. Still, I never diss those things. They are undoubtedly good works that we are not doing, even if they do not solve the problem (and sometimes even serve to perpetuate it) I do not diss them. (I am being a good boy, JWI. You should know this. Several of my group wanted to chime in—you should have heard the zinger Bob “Hammer” Urabi had up his sleeve, but I wouldn’t let him unfurl it. ....AllenSmith must have drove up with a pickup truck full of nukes to get tossed out because there seems little problem with anything less.

No. One reason I do not get worked up when Agent Jack or someone posts news of a JW elder caught in an act of CSA is because, with even the most cursory bit of follow-up, it is seen how extraordinarily rare this is. With other organizations, religious or secular, it is the pattern. JWs, unlike any other group, are being penalized for CSA among renegade members. Agent Jack posts news of a lawbreaker getting his just deserts, and who can get worked up over that? Not me. However, such deeds are extremely rare among JW elders. It may be that there will be a penalty to pay for leaving the reporting of CSA to the digression of affected or knowledgeable parties—and then it turns out that many did not do so out of concern for not bringing reproach on God’s name. That is why it is such a good thing that it was made very clear in the May 2019 study article that the reporter does not bring the reproach—the abuser does. https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/02/the-reproach-of-child-sexual-abuse-falls-on-the-abu.html Time will tell how above matters regarding reporting lapses from elders will shake out. Possibly it will go down as a matter to JWs lasting shame. This is a strange world and one cannot know how things will end. Much like the police go after consumers of drugs because eliminating sellers and producers has proved impossible, so they do now with attempting to make more and more persons mandatory reporters of CSA, even where previous norms of confidentiality used to apply: doctor/patient, lawyer/client, clergy/penetant (on the supposition that these relationships cannot work without the expectation of confidentiality). Now it is all being examined and conduct legal and even expected at the time is being retroactively criminalized. Time will tell how it all turns out. Still, despite modern efforts to criminalize the lesser “crime,” as it is being redefined because authorities have proven totally helpless in stamping out the former one, I still submit that there is a difference between the person who blows a person’s head off with a shot-gun and the person who came to know of it and, for whatever reason, did not report it. (File that one away, JWI. Or maybe, given the heading of this thread, file everything else away in some category or other in you card catalog, and just keep this one.) And just so @4Jah2me knows that I am not throwing up a smokescreen over Agent Jack’s topic... Somewhere along the line, he asked breathlessly, ‘How will it all turn out?’ The answer that I did not give then but perhaps could have is, “Who knows?” Maybe it will all be discarded at the highest level court, with opposers being made to pay all fees, and it will be a glorious victory for JW. Maybe the higher-ups named will be sent off to Atlanta again, and it will be a delayed victory for JW. For all I know, maybe Someone will perceive that as having had his eyeball touched, so that the delay will be no more than two seconds. I haven’t a clue. I don’t weigh in on court things on a play by play basis until they are resolved. When that happens, I sometimes do, such as here regarding a big Montana case: https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/01/is-it-time-for-jehovahs-witnesses-to-apologize-part-1.html I avoid play by play because I am not a lawyer, and when commenting on courtroom proceedings, this is a very significant deficit. So I wait until afterwards. The most arcane and unexpected twists can come, and ones that have come can be undone, so that I avoid the subject until the dust settles. I don’t know the ways of the courtroom. I learned this lesson as a very young man, representing myself (which is what most people do) in small claims court. All hell broke loose when I went to hand the judge a document without first asking to “approach the bench” (It is like young Timmy, who when the doctor asked, “What color is your stool?’ answered that it was white. He had never heard it called that before, but his Grab-a-Toy stool he used all the time.)

Don’t push me on this Alan. Like the angels holding back the winds, I have so far restrained my associates—you haven’t met them all yet, you have only met the bashful ones—to bombarding you with ridicule on every other thread that your ugly persona ventures. They haven’t gone there yet, nor have I done so myself. It is not that they and I have not been tempted. It is not out of consideration for you. Judging by the qualities you have put on display, you deserve none. It is out of consideration for the one or two persons I respect that seem to feel that your contributions outweigh your ill manners. Although there are many whom I vehemently oppose here, there are none of them who have not at times revealed “human,” even endearing, qualities. I have seldom met someone so bereft of them as you. You carry on as though a bot locked on nasty. Possibly there are born pugilists not put off by your manner. I’m not one of them. There may be ones of infinite patience willing to put up with your rudeness in order to extract what they think you have to offer. I’m not one of them, either. The most righteous case in the world is lost when the representing lawyer is so fantastically and consistently insulting that the jury rules against him out of sheer resentment.

Nonsense. Personality matters. There is not one topic you have raised here that has not been raised elsewhere by persons far less nasty. I have discussed those topics with them, and will intermittently continue to do so. But not with you. Sorry. I just can’t abide the ugliness. Crow victory if you like. You will in any event. You always do.

I would like to state for the record that I disagree with all the deviousness going on here! Stop it, @Top Cat O’Malihan!! I know what you are doing. You ostensibly appear to give Alan a compliment, but then you use it as a wedge to introduce what is your REAL purpose—to highlight his unbelievably unpleasant personality— a personality so ugly that, in the event he actually does make a good point, it doesn’t register with ones who resent how just plain unnecessarily nasty he is. I know what you are doing. Stop it! Or at least stop doing it in a way so that he thinks you are me. I don’t need this kind of nonsense! I know what you are doing, Top Cat (aka AllenSmth) Look, I get it that you are steamed about being banned by the old hen. I get it, too, that you are far from the only abusive person here, and that they are ones every bit as unpleasant as you were, and on the wrong side of the issue, besides. I also get it that while you showered contempt on people in the heat of disagreement, that contempt did not manifest itself the moment you rolled out of bed, nor was it interwoven with every other line. I get all these things, Allen. I am sorry that you got the boot. But don’t take it out on me. It is enough for Alan to be pounding me with insult as it is—don’t make it so he is also showering insult on Top Cat, thinking he is me. Sheesh!

Yes. Do not mess up the impeccable order that is this thread.

On the surface, this might seem a valid objection to the GB today. I could be wrong, but I think 3 of the 8 are not American—Losch, Jackson (Australian), and Splane (Canadian)—still I understand the supposed imbalance. It is based on a questionable assumption, though, that Eskimos (to take an example) cannot possibly be adequately governed unless there are Eskimos on the Governing Body. Is it really that way? First of all, I submit that the “imbalance” is not so dire as 4Jah suggests. If we were speaking of 8 mainly American businessmen, all educated in American universities, all wealthy as large corporate businessmen usually are, all “insulated” socially from the working-class people, then I would say that he raises a good point. But it is not that way with the GB. Why don’t you ask the military generals or the national politicians just how “American” their thoughts and personalities are? The fact is that nobody has been able to overcome nationalism—or racism, classism, or social and educational differences, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, and everyone knows it. Sam Herd is the son of a mule-driver. Think that puts him out of touch with the regular people? Both Sanderson and Jackson have served as missionaries in developing countries, doing work not as lowly, but more lowly, than those of most of those that they will later lead. Call that being out of touch? Didn’t Losch operate behind the iron curtain? Call that typical? As for the others, I am not sure of their backgrounds, but I know that all of them have worked full-time service, probably for a lifetime, where the emphasis is on working with the lowly people and even taking direction from them. I mean, these are not blue bloods by any stretch. Previous GB members have spent years as missionaries—humble door to door calling and interacting with the common people—in varied foreign assignments; Lloyd Barry in Japan comes to mind, but there are many others. So they are hardly so “white” and “American” as you suppose. I am in the US. A few decades ago, the question was asked: ‘how come there’s not more black brothers in positions of authority?’ The answer was that, due to social injustices, most black brothers were disadvantaged in various ways—plus the number of JWs themselves was quite small—they only hit 2 million in ....what ....1980 or so? and it was not too many years from when it was Brother Rutherford and Brother Russell and “pilgrims” and an organization of a few hundred thousand, and that, with time and growth and societal rebalancing of some grievances, we could expect to see more black brothers in “higher” positions. That has proved to be he case. Black brothers have “risen the ranks” and, to my mind, bring unique gifts to the table that whites lack. It is a black brother that gave the streamed Memorial talk one year (streaming is quite new) and the streamed special talk the next. I have spent most of my life working in congregations with about a 50/50 mix of white/black in the rank and file and the servant body. It is with congregation things as it is with music—things are more interesting and have more “life” once blacks are involved. Jazz, rock n roll, the interesting developments of American music, all come only from the contribution of blacks. (And I’d wager that Alan barely knows any black people—even as he huffs at the GB for not being more diversified) A friend in Myanmar tells me this inbalance of resources that once held American blacks back is duplicated where he lives with native brothers. Those in the positions of highest oversight are often “needgreaters” of various nationalities, and locals are not heavily represented. The reason? Poverty is so extreme that most locals cannot afford the nominal transportation costs to travel to any destination that isn’t absolutely essential. It is not the GB’s fault that the world is all screwed up. It is enough for them to spearhead the message of how it will be fixed. Will there be a Japanese GB member someday, or a Brazilian GB member, or a Mexican one? It could be, as those countries catch up (and even outstrip) US and European lands where the organization first took root. It is unlikely to be an Indian member, a Middle Eastern member, a Myanmmarese member, because the preaching is yet thinly represented there. But it could be one of the former, though I wouldn’t hold my breath. The end is “right around the corner.” It has proven to be one heck of a corner—but still, the end is right around it. I wouldn’t mind seeing it, but it is hardly a big deal. No, even as is, international interests are well-represented by the GB, given their unique backgrounds, worldwide unity, and lowly origins. Besides, this insistence that only Brazilians can represent Brazilians is largely a contrived political concern. President Obama is black and yet his background is not at all like those of all but a tiny minority of black Americans. He is mostly a product of large universities run by white blue bloods and infused with their philosophies for building a better world. Poor urban blacks will complain that he didn’t do a thing for them. Nothing changed for them with him eight years at the helm. You have permission to skip it, in that case, though it will be to your detriment. (Nobody else does.)

What do you care? The only people who know that there are anointed are Jehovah’s Witnesses, and you’ve put yourself outside that group. And here is Alan appending his “like”—Alan, the atheist—Alan, the evolutionist. Oh, yeah! Alan is real concerned about the doings of the anointed! Maybe they will consult him as their science advisor. But...but....isn’t Witness an anointed—Witness, who complains of being outmaneuvered by the 8 and deprived of her rightful recognition? Witness, who by her own word, does communicate with those she considers anointed—by the social media and internet methods that you mention. She communicates with as many of them as she likes, probably all that will speak to her—perhaps all of them except for the eight. So what does she care? Any meeting of any type will have at least eight absentees. Carry on without them! She’s made it clear innumerable times that she is not the slightest bit impressed with the preaching infrastructure that they have built and oversee, so what’s it to her if they don’t show up? I don’t know everything that Witness believes and I am afraid to ask for fear that she will tell me—at a length even longer than Alan. I did ask her a few things, and she immediately assumed that I was coming in from the cold. From that exchange I discovered, however, that her notion of anointed is not at all as JWs believe—she does not think they are all to be “kings and priests to our God” and she blows off the number of them in Revelation 7 as nothing. For all I know, she has reverted to that old time religion that believes “all good people go to heaven”—and Alan will approve that too if it means undermining Jehovah’s Witnesses, despite his atheism, and then lecture everyone else about being hypocrites.

Many manuscripts have been discovered in the desert where, after thousands of years, they are still perfectly preserved. Reflecting upon this, I decided to go down to the desert myself and give it a shot. Sure enough, after a bit of poking I found a manuscript. I brushed off the sand, flicked away the gecko turds, and sent it off to the scholars at the Whitepebble Biblical Research Institute. They went gaga over it. The manuscript sheds new light on events long thought to be beyond dispute, and most scholars find it a tough sell. Nonetheless, they are hard-up there for manuscripts at the moment, and the obnoxicus superiorticus is now housed in the AlanF wing of that venerable institution, where the foundation has been jacked up to accommodate the extra weight: And at about the sixth hour, he looked down upon his tormentors and said, “You people are so stupid! It amazes me that your tiny brains can generate the power to move your feet. I’m bored with you pitiful attempts to cause me pain. The hypocrisy and doublethink on display are just breathtaking!” And many other things like these he said. At about the ninth hour, soldiers approached to break his legs in order to hasten death. They did so. He said to them: “As I predicted, no reasonable answer here. As usual you've ignored at least 90% of my arguments and comments. I ask again: What are the names of the scriptural accounts you've read? Lack of an answer will tell me either that you don't read such, or you're embarrassed to name them. You have once again punted on most everything with which I challenged. Such transparent hypocrites! You demand an answer from me that, with a little online research, you can find the answer to yourself. Yet you refuse to answer my unique challenges and questions to you. You are a bunch of liars. I posed my challenge to disprove my logic that the one that is to come you posted your Intelligent Jewish claptrap. I posed my challenge this past Tuesday, but you posted your silly question only yesterday. You yourself are quite selective in your worship of Mommy Torah. Obviously you can't answer any of my challenges. You're dishonest to the core and too incompetent to say anything about science. Since you're too lazy to do your own research, I've done some for you. For example.....” At about the 20th hour, one of the centurions said to his companion, “Oh, for crying out loud!” Unfortunately, the complete text of the remarks runs quite long, and I had to leave some of the manuscript there in the desert because I couldn’t afford the freight. Possibly on another expedition I will fetch it, or ask @Arauna, who knows the African desert like the back of her hand, to fetch it for me.

Doesn’t that argue against your contention that Witnesses live and breathe the Watchower?

I always wondered where that stupid charge came from. I knew it had to be based on something. Thank you for providing the source:

There is an account of a brusque householder dismissing a brother with, “If you want to say something, talk to my dog!” Whereupon the brother knelt and did just that. Afterwards he straightened up and said, “Your dog says he wants a double sub.” I used this as introduction for a service meeting part. Young Stevie, who nobody thought was paying the slightest attention, said to his dad, “What’s Brother Harley talking about? Dog’s can’t talk!”

the Librarian has assured me that bytes are cheap and there no added cost to using up a lot of them Besides, Alan has already set the standard for abusing space, with comments just as long that are unreadable for their nastiness, and also because they contain as much as a dozen dialogue boxes that must each be opened so as to see the few paragraphs that he wants to argue with. Look, not all that you say is unworthy of discussion. But most of those items you bring up have been discussed at length on other threads. Some of those I have taken part in. You must forgive me if I do not weigh in to a full extent every time.

You read too much into this. You are a windbag, that’s all, and an unbelievably nasty one at that. I can deal with one malady or the other, but not both of them in tandem.

Even the Sermon on the Mount would be discarded if it ran 1000 pages. I can’t read that crap. Learn to write concisely like everyone else and I might answer.

He’s making a big deal over nothing. They had a sticky W key on the main typewriter back then, and the brother who should have fixed it had gone apostate. The other version I hear is that Vic Vomidog, who was in charge of writing back then, became ambitious. He no longer wanted to be known as a witness. He wanted to be known as a Witness. After his can was kicked to the curb, brothers took a look at what was in the hopper. Next up it was going to be Jehovah’s WITNESSES.

Doubtless it is the same with the announcement that replaces the one about disfellowshipping. It used to be announced from time to time that “so and so has been disfellowshipped.” For several years now—what is it? maybe 10? it is “so and so is no longer one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.” It gets the job done, and it avoids the problem of being attacked over the fact that “disfellowship” is not a word that appears in the Bible—and so villains try to spin it as an evil corporation of man-made rules “controlling” the minions. The revised announcement has all of the “upside” and none of the downside of the former one. “Upside” is in quotes, of course, because it is a downer when the announcement is made. It is a moment of silence, all fidgeting, daydreaming, and chattering halts. It is a very sad time, even if everyone concedes the necessity of it, and the road to recovery is not so plain at all. There may not BE a recovery. DF is a last-ditch measure of discipline, when all else has failed, to jolt the transgressor, but more importantly, to safeguard the congregation from the influence. To be sure, it can be perceived as mean-spirited, and it certainly is here by many persons who in most cases are opposed to JWs regardless, but given the way humans are built, the case can be made that values of the congregation cannot be preserved “without spot from the world” any other way. That is the lesson drawn from the book Secular Faith, by Mark Smith—a book the WT has quoted for a separate but related reason: https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/01/in-defense-of-shunning.html Of course opposers will rail at it because the well-being of the congregation is of no concern to them. If someone is doing the deeds and saying the sayings of Jehovah’s Witnesses, then that person is one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. If someone refuses to do that, how can it be said that he or she is still one of Jehovah’s Witnesses? The “improvement” of the new announcement over the old is that congregation members recall from the Bible just how a person who has served Jehovah and then willfully rejects that life is to be viewed. They think of “treat him as a tax collector and man of the nations,” that Jews had “no dealings” with. They think of “not even eating with such a man,” “never saying a greeting.” They will recall the counsel to “reject empty speeches that violate what is holy, for they will lead to more and more ungodliness, and their word will spread like gangrene,” (2 Timothy 2:16-17) and it comes to mind just how one deals with gangrene. Thus, it is indisputably the Bible that directs congregation members. It is the Bible that tells them what to do, and for now, it is not illegal to follow the Bible. Opposers want to spin it that they are fighting a “corporation;” they are temporarily thwarted with this announcement. They are forced to reveal that it is not the corporation they are opposing, but God, insofar as the Bible represents his thinking, which to Jehovah’s Witnesses it does. It is a better announcement than the previous one, not just for thwarting opposers, but also for us. It clarifies even for us that the Bible directs our conduct. The only “sin” that the “corporation” has committed is educating members as to what the Bible says on all aspects of life. It allows more internal freedom to examine just what those verses above and others like it actually mean in all areas of life, such as the ones people carry on here about—ones involving minors, ones involving words as well as deeds, and what kind of words. All of this re-examination is going on now, I am convinced, even if every minor little tweak is not heralded with the announcement that malcontents insist upon, mostly so they can get right to work at undermining it. With young people, the obvious tweak—and I think it happens now—will be to cut them some slack when they err, as young people almost by definition are apt to do. It is not to shut them out of the adult world of acting upon something once they come to know it is right. The late John Holt, a pioneer of homeschooling, used to maintain that juvenile delinquents are made that way—when they try to enter the world of adults and are shut out. A sign that today indicates most Witnesses are well aware that the Bible directs their conduct, and not an organization, is the frequent complaints of those who have gone POMO—physically out as well as mentally out—that they are kept at a distance by family members even though no announcement was ever made—not of “disfellowshipping” nor “no longer one of JWs.” They rail and rail about this—the ‘brainwashing goes really deep,” they say. They cannot link their “shunning” to an announcement, and thus they are forced to conclude (though they refuse to) that members are allowing themselves to be directed by the Bible and not some human organization. Close family members have discerned that someone has turned away from Jehovah, and they don’t need an announcement to apply scriptural direction to the situation. The man who studied the Bible with me and “brought me into the truth” had problems with this and went apostate himself—he may be sitting at Alan’s right hand now. Several were baptized through his efforts, and he later went back to try to undo some of the “damage” that he had done. To my knowledge, however, he had no success in this. Douglas was an incredibly zealous man. His enthusiasm was boundless. He was a welder for the public utility, and I was assigned to be his assistant for a summer job in between semesters. “Now according to the church, there’s far more wicked people than good, isn’t that true? For every good person, there has to be —how many?—say...100 wicked people? Right? Isn’t that what they teach?” he would gush, and then hit his punch line: “When was the last time you went to a funeral and the priest packed someone off to hell?!!!” I can hear him now, 40 years later. After several weeks of such, he invited me to his house, where he conducted a classroom—about a dozen chairs were laid out, most of them filled—and he conducted a Bible study out of the Truth book. Soon after, or maybe it was before, he invited me to a Sunday meeting for a really good public talk, I thought. Same was true the next Sunday, and the next one after that. But on the fourth, he whispered to me, “This one is kind of a dog, but they are not usually like that.” We had the incredible circumstance of an engineer who was so unbelievably inept that he would twiddle his thumbs for weeks on end, and those downstream from him, such as “his” welder and that one’s assistant, had nothing to do until he got his act together, which he never did. There must have been more to it than that—maybe he was someone’s relative—because even then that is not something that would normally happen. Speaking of one klutz, who had been fired, from an entirely different time, my Dad said, “You almost think that they could find a place for a donkey like him.” He said this because he came from a time and place in which large companies would do that. If they hired a man that turned out to be a clunker, they would say, “Ah, rats! Oh well—our bad. After all, he still has a family to support,” and they would give him a broom and find a spot for him where he could do minimal damage. So it was that Don would witness to me 8 hours per day for several weeks, and neither he nor I were goofing off—there was literally nothing for us to do but await instructions that never came. Holy spirit had arranged for this engineer to be an idiot. (I just threw that line in for Alan, but having said that, the holy spirit is like the wind that you cannot see, and if anyone says holy spirit did this or that for me, even finding a mate, I never counter them—how would I know?) The first move was not his, but mine. This engineer didn’t get along too well with Douglas (nor with anyone else, as I recall) and he rebuked him at one point with, “You think you know so much just because you are one of those ‘Bible students!’” This intrigued me. I didn’t know that there was such a thing. “What do you mean ‘Bible student?’” I asked him later. “What’s that all about?” I had been brought up in a liberal Presbyterian church (it comes in several varieties) where few knew much about the Bible—at least not those that I knew of—and didn’t bemoan the loss. That was not why they attended. It was more of a social thing. I did not usually want to go. I hated being herded off with my siblings by mom, with dad’s full approval because it meant peach and quiet for him with the Sunday paper—I envied him, as he said, “religion is good for kids.” He never set foot in that church himself, and indeed was not very hospitable toward the minister. “Just remember who is the source of that contribution!” he told the poor fellow when he had come to call. My mom was a housewife—which was pretty much the norm back then, and did not otherwise work. Seeng as I could not get out of it, I angled toward attending the church service itself, and not the Sunday School that I hated. I recall that there was some resistance to this from my mom, but in time I prevailed. I would there try to understand the Bible which was not explained—at most there was a ten-minute or so “sermon” to punctuate the service. I really did try to understand it, mostly because I liked the idea of understanding anything, but I could not understand it. I always assumed that it was my fault—I was not devoted enough, or studious enough, or persistent enough. I never dreamed that it was their fault. I made the first move with this welder, not he with me. I think for this reason I will only go so far in “chasing” people in the ministry. “Well, the angels have to do something!” I have been known to say. Some Witnesses are so persistent with chasing down “interest” that they train householders not to show any, imo. So.....fast forward now to after my baptism, and I run into Douglas at a circuit assembly. He is glad to see me, of course, and I him—we had met only one or two times after circumstances had taken us separate ways. This time he was different, however. This time he was not so enthused. This time he asked me—baptized less than a year—whether I thought ministerial servants and elders were really appointed by holy spirit. “Well, sure...I mean, I guess so,” I responded. It struck me as an odd question, and the next thing I know, he had gone apostate, he and his wife (though his wife later returned). In hindsight, I think that he felt he deserved to be a ministerial servant and was disgruntled at being passed over. In this case, all this bellyaching over being appointed by holy spirit stemmed from that fact that he wanted an office he not given. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it is so in every case. I have seen this several times with different people. One brother—plainly immature, though he went through the motions, would actually storm out of the Kingdom Hall if new servants were announced and he was not one of them. (He never was, and subsequent events demonstrated what a wise omission that was.) A variation of this happened within the last few months. An unbaptized woman whose family has been loosely associated but inactive as long as anyone can remember, came to the hall yesterday—she rarely does. I resolved to speak with her, and as she headed out during the song, I followed her and caught up with her in the parking lot. I asked her about her son, who had been recently baptized, had been very enthused for a time, volunteering for many things, and then had disappeared, taking a job that required about an hour commute both ways. I didn’t play spiritual concerns, but personal ones. “Doesn’t matter to me just now when he returns, or even if he does. How is he doing?” I framed it. She told me that she had been stressed out dealing with all the rubbish, as though making amends for leaving in such a rush, and I made it clear that I didn’t care about that, but about her. Thinking I had an “in,” I repackaged a comment I made during the Watchtower study at a paragraph stating how many persons feel unfulfilled and stressed out by their careers. I had said: “Being of that age, many I know are retiring. Sometimes they are Witnesses, sometimes they are non-Witnesses, sometimes they are people I meet in the ministry. Almost always they include the observation that they just can’t take the baloney anymore—and they don’t always say ‘baloney.’” I repeated this line to the woman in the parking lot, using the real word, and she replied that she hadn’t been speaking of the BS of the world—“you expect that,” she said, but “the BS here” is what she was talking about. I laughed. “Oh, the bullshit here,” I repeated. I really don’t think there is any—at least not enough as might be expected anywhere that people are involved, but I didn’t want to overreact. I tried to draw her out, promising that I would not put everything she said on the internet. She was miffed that her son had not been made a ministerial servant! That was the extent of it—at least in this case. He had done everything asked of him, he had volunteered for this and that, and they had not made him a servant! “Does he think that he was used?” I ventured, and I got the impression that this is far more her complaint than his—that is not to say that he doesn’t share it. At any rate, I said that I would love to see him again, that I have tried—for I was one of those ones who he volunteered to help when I was slogging through some unexpected troubles. Probably there is more to the story. The son was very zealous, and likable in every way, but he was new enough that I can’t quite imagine him expecting an appointment, much less becoming embittered with it not coming his way. I’ll speak with him in time—he really was a good sort, and probably still is. He had some that were trying to discourage him when he was putting himself out there—maybe they in time prevailed. Probably it is Alan. “Had enough of that overbearing know-it-all, yet?” I will ask him. “I know @Araunawishes to God that she had never learned of his existance”

That old hen

I liked the citing of vs 21 in that paragraph, presented as though it had just dawned upon Jesus himself how the father operated: 21In that very hour he became overjoyed in the holy spirit and said: “I publicly praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have carefully hidden these things from wise and intellectual ones and have revealed them to young children. Yes, O Father, because this is the way you approved.

That says it all, then. You can seek revenge, or you can bury the hatchet. The brother who told me, and who is now in poor health, says he was his table head.

I got to be a district overseer this way. I had ten kids—I had them for just this reason—and I would feed each one the answer to a question. I got so many credits for this that promotion was a slam-dunk. I am told that the brother who wrote the Truth book was a fellow named Peleyn. Yes?

She is disagreeing with you, that’s all, and not being mean about it. Grown-ups are usually able to handle that without “sinning.”

As far as I am concerned, this sign represents a win-win. It does not make me mad. It is doing me a favor. If anyone doesn’t want to talk to me, then I don’t want to talk to them. There is a squirrelly assumption that underpins this meme: that Jehovah’s Witnesses are determined to talk to each householder no matter what, and are incredibly frustrated if stymied. It plays into the infantile view that they are “recruiting,” a view popularly spread by “anti-cultists” who obsess over all the ways that people can “manipulate” others. They abhor all forms of “brainwashing” except for the brainwashing that is theirs, as they safeguard mainstream values—values that have not worked out very well insofar as promoting overall peace and well-being. If the mainstream thinking contained answers to the vexing questions of life, people would’t have to worry for one second about “sects” and even “cults”—they would be rejected out of hand. So are Jehovah’s Witnesses “recruiting?” “I am going to ask you to convert,” I told a certain householder, “but it is not going to happen until the 100th call—and what are the chances It will go on for so long? In the meantime, it is just conversation.” To householders who state they have their own religion or spirituality and who decline conversation on that basis I say, “Well, I’m not going to ask you to change, and if I do, you can say No.” I mean, it is fine to decline conversation—more people do than do not—but just not on that basis. You might say it to an evangelical Christian—the sort that actually do feature instant conversion of the “Come down and be saved!” variety. You might say it to a Moonie, because their people are known to disappear off the surface of the globe, only to reappear selling flowers in robes. But you ought not say it to one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose members live and work in the general community. No, the sign does me a favor. I have no problem with it. It might be different if they proliferated so that they became a commonplace gag sign, just a fad witticism inspired by late-night TV that didn’t necessarily mean anything. In that case, I might just walk away or I might playfully attempt to negotiate terms before deciding if I wanted to enter into such a “contract.” “Well, a guy has to serve the Lord,” I will say non-aggresively to some while trying to size them up. You’ve got to have a sense of humor. Like a No Soliciting sign, there are no legal consequences to blowing past it, and like a No Soliciting sign, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It might be put up by a previous owner, and the current one sees no reason to remove it. It might be put up by a family member that died. It might have been put up after those pushy people selling vacuum cleaners left. It might be put up in the heat of election campaign season. It might be put up to dissuade Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I do not assume that is the case. ”I saw your sign and was a little concerned that you might think it applies to me,” I sometimes say when one of them is staring me in the face. “It doesn’t—but you might think it does.” You can assess by the response if the householder had that intention or not, and if he did, I have no problem moving on from what would cause both of us stress. Don’t argue, “We’re not soliciting,” because it really doesn’t matter whether you are or not. What matters is what the householder thinks you are doing. Of course, you can tell him that what he thinks is wrong, but that is never a fine foundation for a visit, is it? I have said at times, when my attention is directed to such a sign, “Oh. Well....I’ll make sure not to do that, then,” either by soliciting money (which Witnesses never do) or soliciting opinions—drawing people out—which we do. Simply tell them stuff, don’t ask them a thing—that is enough to technically comply with such a sign. But the trick is not to be like Alan and argue over technicalities. The trick is to see if such and such a vague sign actually means anything to the householder and respect his wishes if it does. No, a No Soliciting sign means nothing legally, same as this new $50 per hour JW sign that Jack is giggling about means nothing. The only sign with legal consequences (in the US) is a No Trespassing sign, and even that only has legal consequences for individual dwellings—you can’t wall off an entire community with a No Trespassing sign. To be sure, some are trying to change that, but the idea of answering for large swaths of other people is repugnant to most and so the change may not readily happen. Let’s face, this sign is kind of crude, and not too many people are going to put one up. It is sort of like that sign in which you find yourself as though staring down the barrel of a gun that says, “Never mind the dog! Beware of the owner!” I don’t just jauntily breeze by that sign as though is was a Welcome mat. I tread a bit cautiously. If my companion was to turn around and leave, I wouldn’t blame him a bit. Still, you never know. I was leaving one such home—no one had answered—and as I was walking away, a pickup truck drove in with a gun rack in the back window. “Great!” I muttered to myself—“probably a real sorehead here!” He turned out to be the nicest guy in the world—very respectful of our purpose and of the Bible. There was a lot of crime in the neighborhood and he had just “weaponed-up” for the protection of his family. These signs are not a red light—No Soliciting, Beware of Whatever—but they certainly are a yellow light. They are not a yellow light legally, but they are a yellow light in that they might reveal something of the householders wishes, and I have no problem always complying with their wishes once I know what they are. As it is, Jehovah’s Witnesses have a method to keep note of those who have emphatically said that the don’t want JW calls ever. It is an imperfect system and I usually forget to consult it, but it works better than nothing. Ironically, it may all vanish one day if the current “data-keeping” laws gathering steam in Europe, spearheaded by the same people who see “manipulation” everywhere, spreads to the US. It will be illegal to keep track of who doesn’t want a call. As it is, one US brother I know reported on a trip to Europe and how the brothers there were wrestling with these new anti data-gathering laws that had never been intended (at least, by most) for them, but were being applied to them, with: “Good! They’ve just made your job easier! Preach to one and all and don’t worry about any “records”—keeping track of them is a pain in the neck!” What about a child answering the door? For me, that depends upon the age of the child. For a teen, sometimes I will go Bible-lite, such as commenting on what the words of the Lord’s Prayer literally mean, and I do not press any point. Or show a video geared to teens—I have never had a teen not pay rapt attention to the video, “Be Social-Network Smart.” With teens, I have sometimes told them that I really don’t know what to do with teens, because they are learning and gathering smarts, but they are also under their parent’s roof, and the latter is guiding that process, and so they may or may not want them speaking to persons of different beliefs at the door, and ‘which is it with them’? Even that doesn’t guarantee anything. One parent that I finally encountered said, “I don’t appreciate you speaking to my children,”—I had done so twice and had shown a couple of videos. I responded that I had never been looking for the kids—I had been looking for her—and that when the teens had answered I had asked them whether their parents would want them speaking to a visitor about religion and they had said she would not care. “Kids will say anything!” she told me. So I explained that I would not call again (she said ‘thank you’), repeated that I had never been looking for them in the first place, and even was able to give a brief synopsis for why we call at all—she became quite pleasant. Another teen—I had just finished something brief and similar—he had been home alone. As I left, the mother drove up in the driveway. I told her who I was, that I had spent a few minutes speaking with her son, I had asked him a question and he had answered intelligently. “You should be proud of him,” I said as I took my leave. Cultures are different. I once handed a tract to a child with directions to give it to her parents, and upon leaving, my companion said that she would have witnessed to the child. My companion was newly arrived from South America where it is nothing for parents to allow and even encourage children to talk religion to anyone calling about it. There are congregations there heavily populated by children with the full blessing of parents who do not attend themselves—respect for God runs deep in some lands and the assumption is that you cannot go wrong allowing your children to learn about the Bible. Though the following has nothing to do with the Bible, it has everything to do with that fact that cultures are different, and so when the GB speaks in a way that is not really my cup of tea, I say, “It is probably one of those others cultures that they are taking into consideration.” There is a large community of deaf persons in Rochester NY. Accordingly, there are a number of Witnesses who make their living as translators. One of them told me of a certain deaf family of two adults and two children—all deaf—who are known not only locally but also nationally, and the following story is told nationally as a way of highlighting the challenges of catering to different cultures: A neighboring “hearing” girl would come over to play at the home of the deaf family. The two children were surprised that she didn’t seem able to sign very well at all, but they all managed to sign well enough to each other to get by. Then the two children went to the little girl’s home to play, where they saw the mother not signing at all! Her mouth kept moving, and the little girl seemed satisfied with that, but there was no signing. Upon returning home, they related their bewilderment to their parents and asked, “Are there other people like that?”