TrueTomHarley

Come, come. Do you really think Stephen Lett is seducing and persuasive? He follows in the footsteps of ones of the first century who were so “ordinary” and “uneducated” that they were embarrassing in a world centered around “wisdom.” People find it necessary to go to bat for him: https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/01/let-us-appreciate-brother-lett.html Last I heard, your organization consisted of a page on Facebook. Thus, every time I see Mark Zuckerburg bumbling his way through Congress, flailing away against charges that he is rotting the fabric of society and handing the country over to the Russians, I am shocked—I tell you, shocked!—that you would be bedfellows with him! The reason humans organize is so they can do things. The motive to deprive them of organization is so they cannot. It is no more complicated than that. Yes. And if we want to serve Christ we organize so as to best bring our God-given talents to bear. Even when the scoundrels organize, God takes note that they do what they could not do as individual loose cannons: “Then Jehovah went down to see the city and the tower that the sons of men had built. Jehovah then said: “Look! They are one people with one language, and this is what they have started to do. Now there is nothing that they may have in mind to do that will be impossible for them.” Maybe that is what is so odious about a certain branch of Christendom. It is so selfish. “Me & Jesus” is all that counts—being saved. The thought of actually doing anything concrete in service to him turns them right off. Last I heard, God is pleased when we bring him our best, not when we abstain from what we otherwise could accomplish because it is too much work. You get to “enter Jehovah’s rest” when you take him up on his invitation, rest from your own and thus find refreshment in entering a work that is bigger than yourself. It is by “tasting” that you come to know that “Jehovah is good.”

Pretty much like this verse, from this week’s Bible reading: “They originate with the world; that is why they speak what originates with the world and the world listens to them.” (1 John 4:5)

I think you have watched too much Perry Mason. Was it really that way? So you feel each party in a judicial case should have his own lawyer, taking a page from the adversarial legal system of today? “When both sides properly prepare a case, the adversary system can effectively guarantee the revelation of all the facts bearing on an issue. The more experience you have with it, the more you’ll find it a surprisingly scientific method of trial preparation.” — Perry Mason. (Season 5, Ep 13 The Case of the Renegade Refugee) Come now, that is not a religious statement? Thrust upon us by a new world of “science” that has despaired of finding impartial judges the like of Exodus 18:26: “capable men fearing God, trustworthy men hating dishonest profit?” The reason they are hard to find is that the world embraces values to the contrary. Not so in the Christian organization. I will take the congregation justice system any day, which only deals with the spiritual matters that are of no concern of secular courts. But a hostile world tries to frame some of these spiritual matters as grist for the legal mill. What is happening is that those who refuse discipline are airing their complaints to a world that despises discipline and thereby finding common sympathy. It brings to mind the trademark of those describe in 2 Peter as “apostate”—they “hate” discipline. You don’t think that those who came out on the short end of the world’s court system don’t also complain about how they were abused and unjustly sold down the river? It is human nature to do so in a system that downplays responsibilities and upplays rights. Yes, Bubba. The effort today is to hinder those wanting to stay separate from the world—ideally, even making it illegal to do so. Several Bible statements would outrage the “anti-cult”-driven legal climate of today: “But now I am writing you to stop keeping company with anyone called a brother who is sexually immoral or a greedy person or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or an extortioner, not even eating with such a man.” (1 Corinthians 5:11). The Bible writer would be challenged legally today for trying to “control” people; who is he to tell them who they can eat with? “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your homes or say a greeting to him. For the one who says a greeting to him is a sharer in his wicked works.” (2 John 10) Ditto. He is “controlling people.” Let them greet whoever they want, even those whom HE finds “wicked.” “It is necessary to shut their mouths, because these very men keep on subverting entire households by teaching things they should not for the sake of dishonest gain.” (Titus 1:11) Oh? It is “necessary” to restrict someone’s free speech for the sake of “enforcing” your religion? See you in court, Paul. From time to time, the earthly organization rewords something—like the disfellowshipping announcement or the questions for baptism—to make clear that members are voluntarily adhering to Bible counsel rather than, as opposers try to present it, suffering the bullying of an “evil” “oppressive” “corporation.” It may fail in this one day, because the intent of those hostile to Christianity is to make the Bible verses themselves illegal, or at least make it illegal for anyone to actually follow them. The goal is to deprive Christians of organization. That way they can more easily be assimilated into the greater word. This is framed hypocritically, even obnoxiously, as an attempt to liberate them. It is no more better realized today than in Russia, where Jehovah’s Witnesses are not illegal, but only their organization is. ‘It’s not the foot-soldier they want to kill off. It’s only the generals that must go. That way the foot-soldier can more easily switch sides—and he will be all the happier for it,’ so the thinking goes. Of course, a scheme so devious cannot be comprehended by the average person, and the authorities simply feel free to beat up on any Witness. The goal to “liberate” Christians from the organization they form is more advanced in Russia, but it proceeds along the same path in Western lands. “Liberate” them into what? Yes. So that the worldwide rot that it has collectively produced does not manifest itself in the congregation.

It would be nice if you could provide a preview of this. I see no evidence of the “new and better,” only an emphasis on demolishing what is. In fact, that is why JWs became JWs in the first place; they tired of the “new and better” promises that always turned out to be but empty words.

It is far far far easier—and more alluring—to tear down than it is to build up. However, it is more noble to do the latter.

Yes. I wrote up a post on this at the time and included how other translations handled the verse. An excerpt: (from https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/01/who-is-mentally-diseased.html ) “Moreover, “mentally diseased” was placed in quotation marks, indicating it was not meant as a medical diagnosis, but as an adjective to suggest a manner of thinking. Nor is the term anything original. It is merely a repeat of the Bible verse 1 Timothy 6:3-4....“If any man teaches other doctrine and does not assent to healthful words, those of our Lord Jesus Christ, nor to the teaching that accords with godly devotion, he is puffed up [with pride], not understanding anything, but being mentally diseased over questionings and debates about words.” ...Douay-Rheims says ‘sick about questions and strifes of words.’ In view of the context, what sort of ‘sickness’ do you think the translator had in mind? Tuberculosis, maybe? Or is it not a sickness of thinking, so that ‘mentally diseased’ is not such a bad rendering after all? NASB...offers ‘morbid interest in controversial questions and disputes about words.’ Does ‘morbid,’ when applied to thinking, suggest balance and soundness of mind? Or is ‘sickness,’ even ‘mentally diseased,’ more to the point?” Here’s a few other translations: ‘diseased’ (Emphasized New Testament; Rotherham) ‘filled with a sickly appetite’ (Epistles of Paul, W.J.Conybeare) ‘morbid appetite’ (A New Testament: A Translation in the Language of the People; Charles Williams) ‘morbid craving’ (An American Translation; Goodspeed) ‘unhealthy love of questionings’ (New Testament in Basic English) ‘morbidly keen’ (NEB) ‘unhealthy desire to argue’ (Good News Bible). “Do any of these other versions suggest soundness of mind? So the NWT’s ‘mentally diseased’ is an entirely valid offering, even if more pointed than most. Plus, once again, the term is an adjective, as it is in all other translations, not a medical diagnosis. Context (in that Watchtower article) made this application abundantly clear.”

Hmm. Would this do for a headquarters? Look how some apostate put up a “no-left-turn” sign (into the store!) That might harm book sales—I’d have to take that down.

It irks me whenever eloquence is confused with competence. There is very little correlation between the two.

It was a visit to this place that made me do whatever was necessary:

Even hitmen suffer from bureaucracy. Next they will unionize.

In the US, one can easily be presented with a “surprise” medical bill upon being released from the hospital. This happens when one of those involved in patient treatment turns out to be a non-network provider. The resulting bill can be tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a hospital admittance that was covered by insurance. I had always assumed—I think most people did, if not all people—that the cause was simply blundering incompetence, that the US health care system is so disorganized, cobbled together haphazard one piecemeal step at a time, that nobody has a grasp on it all, and everyone feels bad about the monster that they have collectively produced, but it is typical inept human social evolution and nobody has a clue what to do about it. I never dreamed that it was deliberate. But that turns out to be so. Money flows from this planned mess to the hedge funds that back it. Hospitals themselves become dependent upon the system the former have foisted upon them. It is no more than “follow the money”—something I routinely do in order to get to the bottom of things but forgot to do it here. When bills are proposed to correct the abuses—seemingly everyone would back them—instead, opposition is intense: https://khn.org/news/investors-deep-pocket-push-to-defend-surprise-medical-bills/

What I said was that no one here was a typical witness

A dentist !!

It’s not lousy anymore. I fixed it.

@JW Insider did not write TrueTom v Apostates. He did not write Dear Mr. Putin. I wrote them. There were portions that I forwarded to him for comment. To that extent, he had input. His comments were most helpful and every time I ignored them I came to regret it. I got all excited about a statistical factoid from the follow-up Aussie case study. He told me it wasn’t so watertight as I had imagined. He was right and I downgraded it to a suggestive pointer. He said that there were a ton of errors—typos and punctuation atrocities—in the manuscript and I was later aghast at how abundant they were. It took me forever to get them out. Even now there are probably a few—but it is time for new things. Even his instinct about my describing the old bound volumes as the family gods—bulky, toted everywhere, and very seldom used—I came to agree with. I was just being self-indulgent, and no one had ever described them that way but me. Why put anyone off unnecessarily? His biggest contribution was when I ran by him beforehand the letter that I submitted to the Philly Inquirer in response to their first of what proved to be four incendiary articles. This was a big moment for me. The topic was white-hot, I had never seen anyone not run from it, and I didn’t want to mess it up. For all I knew, they might print it. I respected his insights and incorporated most of them. That letter became the core of what ultimately became a chapter in TrueTom vs the Apostates, “Four Incendiary Articles.” https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/01/four-incendiary-articles.html So yes, he has good judgement and instincts about what I consulted him for. Yes, his advice proved valuable. Yes, I am grateful to him for it. No, he did not write any of either book. Our cooperative role may expand. We came across The Librarian, that old biddy, bending over dusting Gibbon’s “Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire” on a lower shelf in her library. JWI and I toppled the entire bookshelf on her and squashed her flat. You should not expect to hear from her anymore except for some automated posts she may have previously submitted. I planted a story that a California law was going to kill the internet. Admin fell for it, and he sold the entire forum to me for only a dollar. JWI agreed to come in for just 50 cents. If I let him do his thing, going on and on and on about some egghead things that I don’t really care about—and after all, he did help me with the bookshelf—I will gain his good will forever. Yes, it is chronology he is into. But he writes at such length that everyone falls asleep except for other eggheads. He has done the research to expound on what he does, as others have done the research to disagree with him, even the semi-resident titan who doesn’t wish to be described that way. I gather that our view is not the one that predominates in the mainstream scholarly world, but this does not unduly concern me. I am too used to headlines that read: “Everything you thought you knew about such-and-such is wrong.” Matters of scientific scholarship can and have turned on a dime. Besides, even if his most drastic thought proved true, it would amount to no more that a (colossal) misread of the bus schedule. It would not mean that the bus is not coming.

Go figure.

Hmmm. How old is Mrs Rook? Out with it.

He forgets also that there really aren’t any typical Witnesses here. Everyone here (for any length of time) falls well outside the Bell curve in one way or another. Plus, one never knows who is just a pretender.

It seems to me that they have taken the very opposite tack—assuring every member that there is no stigma arising from reporting child sexual abuse to the authorities. https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/02/the-reproach-of-child-sexual-abuse-falls-on-the-abu.html

All the rest needed saying too. There was a time during which putting things in context was thought a responsible thing to do. Today it is raising a straw man, not to be tolerated by single-issue people.

This is factually wrong on one very significant point. It is not the “leaders” that were being kept track of. It is members in general. Later, the writer inadvertently admits this Here leaders are not mentioned. It is anyone within the church. The reason behind repackaging the second statement into the first is to blacken as much as possible the reputation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Without such repackaging, the picture that presents itself is that leaders who are molesters among Witnesses are extraordinarily rare, whereas in most other organizations it is the pattern. Be it Church, Scouts, the UN, private schools, foster care agencies, even the US gymnastics Olympic team, it is the leaders. With Witnesses, it is almost always the members. Indeed, there is no mechanism to track molesters in the general population of these other organizations. The reason that there is with Witnesses is that they track wrongdoing of all sorts, in the spirit of Romans 2:21-23. “Do you, however, the one teaching someone else, not teach yourself? You, the one preaching, “Do not steal,” do you steal? You, the one saying, “Do not commit adultery,” do you commit adultery? You, the one abhorring idols, do you rob temples? You who take pride in law, do you dishonor God by your transgressing of the Law?” They don’t want to dishonor God, so they keep track of all forms of wrongdoing and, the discipline meted out in an attempt to correct persons. This will strike more people than not, I suspect, as a responsible thing to do—so it must be repackaged into a wicked scheme to cover up. What is at root a proactive and responsible action is being distorted as being evil. For a writer who is normally clear, this article is decidedly muddled in places—seemingly to obscure the fact that the deviant now in prison was not a leader. At one time he had been an elder, but that was ten years prior to the event being tried. A lot of degradation can happen in ten years All this does not necessarily mean that there is not a CSA scandal among Jehovah’s Witnesses. However, it does mean that the scandal is unlike that of the others in which leadership itself produces the molesters. If confined to just this criteria, Jehovah’s Witnesses rise head and shoulders among anyone else, for it is only the Bible standards they adhere to that succeeds in producing such upright leadership. If not confined to just this criteria (of upright leadership) then it is very difficult to portray Witnesses as public enemy #1–which is the goal of its most determined opposers. If not confined to this criteria of upright leadership, then Jehovah’s Witnesses simply fall back into the ranks of everyone else who also did not rush to expose their dirty laundry before the world. It may be that it will be to JW’s everlasting shame that they relied upon affected parties to report, and did not override in cases where they did not—cases that proved to be very numerous, since many proved loathe to “bring reproach on God’s name.” That is why a study article of May, 2019, is so appropriate: https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/02/the-reproach-of-child-sexual-abuse-falls-on-the-abu.html Time will tell. Such are the issues being litigated these day. For now, I point out that the current challenge is to find an outfit NOT being sued over CSA, and in nearly all cases, it is the leaders COMMITTING the abuse—something very rare with Witnesses. With them, it is members committing it and leaders criticized for not forwarding the information.

Once again, I have no idea what you are talking about. “Dear Mr. Putin” has 3 sections—now 4, because I added one for updates. Nobody here has had any “input” on any of them except me. Part 1 is simply a real-time retelling of events in Russia as they unfolded. Input came from monitoring news reports, plus my own experiences throughout the letter-writing campaign. Initially, Part 1 was all I had in mind. In time, I began to envision more. Included in the introduction is both the charting of an added role and a caution that it was not for everyone: Does Kuraev really mean to suggest that prosecution presented no intelligible arguments at the Supreme Court trial? An observer of the trial might well think it. He might well wonder just what does the government have against Jehovah’s Witnesses? There must be something, but it is not stated. At one point the judge asked the prosecution (the Ministry of Justice) whether it had prepared for the case. A decision had been plainly made somewhere from on high and it would fall upon the judge to rubber-stamp it. Of course, he did, perhaps because he wanted to remain a judge. The actual reasons behind anti-Witness hostility were never presented. So I have presented them in Part II, along with how they might be defended. Some Witnesses, truth be told, will be uncomfortable with Part II and might best be advised to skip over it. They will love the idea of defending the faith but may be unaware of the scope of the attacks made against it, some of which are truly malicious. Deciding to sit out this or that controversy will earn them taunts of “sticking one’s head in the sand” from detractors, but it is exactly what Jesus recommends, as will be seen. Not everyone must immerse themselves in every “fact,” for many of them will turn out to be facts of Mark Twain’s variety: facts that “ain’t so.” You can’t do everything, and most persons choose to focus on matters most directly relevant to their lives. Part II thereafter rolls into Part III, which suggests an offense—not a legal offense, but an overall moral one. Okay? So I made significant effort to protect any Witnesses from “apostate” thinking. Go to Part 2 if you want, I told them, but know what you are getting into. Similar passages are included in “TrueTom vs the Apostates!” This is done deliberately, out of respect for counsel from the slave about not engaging with “apostates.” Go there if you must have an answer to the unsavory things being said these days on major media. But know that you are crossing a line of counsel as you do it. Counsel is counsel. It is not law. What is law is the law of love and the corollary that closely follows about not causing dissention or divisions in the congregation. For that reason, one must give serious thought as to whether it is wise to hang out with those determined to shoot down the faith. It really is no more than 1 Corinthians 15:33–“do not be misled—bad associations spoils useful habits.” But “apostates” have caught the ear of the media in some cases and they drive much of the current opposition. It was even true in Russia. Kicking back at negative articles in the media almost cannot be done without some interaction with those who inspire them, and some of them conveniently hang out here.

Let no one ever say that Lady Gaga is not a showperson.

The distribution of wealth worldwide and even within a country is obscene and is something no government has been able to address. Usually, it is just exacerbated.

This is why I never jump into the arms of any of my fans here. Some of them look awfully clumsy.