TrueTomHarley

The greater world places huge emphasis on punishing child sexual abuse, but relatively little on preventing it, unless it is figured that the example of punishment IS preventing it, but that idea hasn't exactly worked out, has it? It may be that the Dutch authorities will uncover information as did the Australian Royal Commission, that while there are instances of abuse not coming to the attention of the authorities, there is much less of it to begin with in the JW community. The reason abuse is linked with Jehovah's Witnesses is that they have a policy of investigating it, along with all other types of wrongdoing. Had they not done so, instances of abuse would still have happened, but they would usually not be associated with religious affiation, as is the case elsewhere. Any group maintaining that its influence leads to greater morality ought to take steps to see that this is, in fact, the case. Romans says "You, the one saying 'do not steal,' do you steal? You, the one saying, 'do not commit adultery,' do you commit adultery?' It will not do with God to bury your head in the sand. You must be proactive to search out and investigate reports as they occur. Who else did this other than Jehovah's Witnesses? When I wrote 'Dear Mr. Putin - Jehovah's Witnesses Write Russia,' almost as an afterthought I included a Part II, outlining what about Witnesses Russian authorities found so objectionable, along with defenses for those accusations. Almost as an afterthought again, I included a 9000+ word chapter 12, 'Pedophiles.' It is an accusation that has never arisen in Russia, but it has proven hot elsewhere. That chapter becomes one of the most relevent chapters of the book as time moves on. It is free, and I link to it here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/815620

It is Jael. Don't no opposers say nothin bad about it. #RememberSisera #IfIHadaHammer

My greatest creation, @JW Insider, has kept them all fooled for the longest time.

Why do I want to create a phony profile (another one!) ... that of a GB member who admits that, deep down in his heart, he knows that Witness is right, that he is utterly ashamed of himself, and that he is astounded by her phenomenal grasp of the scriptures and reasoning ability?

It all depends upon the cat’s legal representative Â

I never figured out all that new note-taking apparatus, didn’t try (though they make it easy enough) because I was already used to the Notes app on iPad. I can’t look up the scriptures that way, but I can take notes on them. As with any old-timer, I know my way around the Book pretty well by now. If I was starting from scratch, I would devour all those new study features.

I was somewhat of a holdout in adapting to the digital formats. But once I did, I passed by almost everyone. Except for the contact cards, specific calls, and invitations, I haven't carried a piece of paper with me in ages.

Sometimes the chest expanding indicates that the body is breathing. Other times it is the chest contracting that conveys the same idea.

The brown sign seems to indicate that he came up suddenly upon a dinosaur crossing

Early tweets I saw were unusually vicious, as in "Welcome to hell, Joe" SOB though he was said to be, though, nobody would have heard of Michael Jackson without him. Raising eight kids in gritty Gary Indiana, where many men walk away; it is not nothing. One wonders whether his son would have been happier had Joe followed another course. It is one of those "which is better off, a live dog or a dead lion?" deals of Bible verse. I wrote something of this long ago: http://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2009/07/the-pundits-michael-jackson-and-joe.html

I beat CBS to the punch by two years in what they said about the Oxycotin pharma fraud. It is in the Prince chapter of Tom Irregardless and Me, there because Prince died a victim of that fraud. Since the Prince chapter is Chapter 1, it is even in the free preview section. I didn’t mention the company or the drug by name. I followed the lead of Watchtower publications, which I have come to understand their reasons mostly through imitating them. You do not name a villain, for as soon as you name one, you create the impression that removing that villain will fix things. Instead, if you should succeed in taking him out, another villain immediately steps into his shoes and the play continues with barely a hiccup. It is the play we are watching, not the heroes and villains in it. You do not have to know the names of the actors to follow the play – it can even be a distraction if you do. The names don’t matter. If one actor doesn’t show up for curtain call, they simply plug in a substitute, and the play continues. 'Tom Irregardless and Me', in the Prince chapter, quotes a Dr. Johnson, who wrote to say he was “forced to paint an unflattering picture of the industry that I have been a part of for the last 15 years. I wish I could tell you that this epidemic was due to an honest mistake. That the science was unclear or had mixed results that only later became evident. But I can’t. I also wish I could tell you that the only reason the problem persists is a ‘lack of physician awareness.’ But I won’t. The reason this opioid problem started and the reason it continues is sadly for the most American reason there is - business.” At one time, Dr. Johnson points out, American doctors prescribed opioids as did doctors everywhere: for pain relief from cancer or acute injury. He then tells of a drug company, introducing a new opioid product in 1996, that swung for the fences. It didn’t want to target just cancer patients. It wanted to target everyone experiencing everyday pain: joint pain and back pain, for example: “To do this, they recruited and paid experts in the field of pain medicine to spread the message that these medicines were not as addictive as previously thought...As a physician in training, I remember being told that the risk of addiction for patients taking opioids for pain was ‘less than one percent.’ What I was not told was that there was no good science to suggest rates of addiction were really that low. That ‘less than one percent’ statistic came from a five-sentence paragraph in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. It has come to be known as the Porter and Jick study. However, it was not really a study. It was a letter to the editor; more like a tweet. You can read the whole thing in 90 seconds.” The CBS story of 5 days ago reveals a former drug rep of the company who spills for them.. I had it all two years ago, and it is even more damning. I didn’t put it in the book because illuminating Prince’s JW life was the object of the chapter, not crusading against pharma. In fact, not only was the drug far more addictive than doctors and reps were led to believe, but the pain relief it delivered only lasted a few hours, not the 12 that was advertised. Yet, when complaints of such were received, the company would not permit reps to advise patients take it more often, since that exposed the fact that the much more expensive drug was no better than what was already being used for pain. Instead, the advice was to increase the dosage, and that obviously served to intensify the addictive quality. Prince and millions like him got hooked on a drug that the doctor prescribed, and when doctors started to get squirrelly, withholding supply for fear of what they were unleashing, these ones were driven to the black market to find substitutes. Trying to trash anything organizationally related, @James Thomas Rook Jr.threw in my face that Prince died an addicted druggie. I never truly forgave him for that, but I am ready to now, as I assume he did not know the whole story, just as ones do not know the whole story about abuse allegations. It is here in the first chapter, Prince, which, to my knowledge, is the most complete, and perhaps only, published collection of the artist's JW experiences and interactions. And it is in the free section. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/686882

Oh, yeah! It's him all right. There he is in a meeting with the rest of the Governing Body, and he keeps them all waiting so as to answer tweets. Or he slaps his laptop right down there at the Bethel dinner table to peck away on Facebook. After all, he knows he must answer 'instantly.' That @Witness is on to something. As she says: 'How do you know until you ask him? What'sa matter? Chicken?' More likely, the lowlife interrupts his tea party with Witness to anwer an incoming missive. Let us not be (overly) unkind here, but imo it is a good thing she got outmaneuvered from her true status as annointed. If she ever assumed powerful heavenly position, I would fear for the earth to spin the wrong way.

No, he doesn't. How can anyone be so naive (or deceitful)? Anybody can pretend to be anyone on the internet. I, for example, have about ten personas on this forum and @James Thomas Rook Jr. falls for every one of them. If a Governing Body member were to be on social media, it would be a huge change in method of communication. He would not do so without abundant notice given beforehand on trusted channels.

It is rather a sloppy article but the subject is so visceral that such things are overlooked. All is told from the point of view of the wronged girl. I don't claim she speaks untruthfully. It is simply that, humans being what they are, we are inclined to remember things the way we remember them...embellish certain points and downplay or forget others. For example, when the judge recalled certain things in a matter-of-fact way, the victim says that's not how she recalled it, and the reporter at that point forgets all about the judge and runs with the victim. I suspect that the judge recollects it more accurately, because he has not carried the emotional baggage for two decades. When Lett, many years later, speaks of 'apostate lies,' the reporter presents it as though he is calling his old friend a liar. Of course, he is not. No one says that what happened is a lie; it is the spin that enemies (which now seem to include the Inquirer) put on it that is the lie. I answered at some length the Inquirer's first story and emailed it two two editors and the reporter. It was never acknowledged in any way. Instead, the reporter followed through on remarks he had made on the Reddit forum, that he had more material in the hopper that he considered damning to the Witnesses. Of course, this story that Witness is so thrilled about is what he had in mind. I take it as evidence that the Philadelphia Inqurer wants this story told one and only one way. If there is anything to mitigate a damning verdict, they do not want to hear it. Of course, they have a story. No one would say that they do not. It is a variation of the "If it bleeds it leads" theme - familiar and not so terrible in itself, but the refusal to consider or even acknowledge a different lens through which the topic might be viewed, is to paint it, imo, as a not very good newspaper. Adding to this perception is that the paper does not seem to have a comment section for its online articles. Comment sections are not necessarily great, as they attract many a moron, especially on 'hot' topics. But they have become ubiquitous and the fact that the Inquirer does not have one seems but another indicator that they will breach no dissent on what stories they report. It is the religious version of the shabby journalism that has become the norm today. Reporters of the right or left hype up their view to the point of hysteria, and refuse to look at things that in any way confound their conclusions.

More puddled reasoning from the Puddler-in-Chief. But IÂ’ll cut through it. Â Â

Jesus healed the leper and specifically told him to keep a lid on it. Show yourself to the priests, thank God, and go about your business. What did the fellow do? He shouted it out everywhere. He messed up the Lord! Jesus wanted to keep visiting the city. He no longer could do it. He had to hole up out in the wilderness! What could he do? Apart from divinely muzzling the guy or handing him back his leprosy, he was stymied! The Lord! He adapted, though. The cured fellow raised such a ruckus that everyone had to go out in the wilderness to check Jesus out. Maybe it even worked out better this way; they had to do something. I think there’s a lesson for us. You want your companions in service to be discreet and to behave in a certain way, and they don’t. You want them to be like the silhouetted fellow in the videos and they are the exact opposite. It’s enough to drive a guy crazy. It was enough to drive Jesus crazy, too, yet he didn’t go crazy. He just adjusted tactics and it turned out okay. And maybe at a later date he even ran across the fellow and said: “You know, you really should have kept your mouth shut. But it all worked out.”

Back in the days that I call when "each one did what was right in his own eyes," (late 70s or early 80s) there was an one-day special assembly in Niagara Falls, NY. Apparantly, local brothers, if they had the wherewithall, could put together whatever program they liked if they could assemble the speakers. It is at that gathering that Victor Blackwell spoke and I picked up afterwards his excellent book "O'ar the Ramparts They Watched," which I frequently quote in my own writing. David McClure also spoke, a circuit overseer, the son of Lucy McClure., who figured in the reversal of Gobitis. He told the story as it would have been seen through a child's eyes. He spoke of regularly getting beaten up walking to and from school. As only Dave McClure could do, he made getting beaten up sound almost like fun. The third speaker was a brother who essentially spoke about health, the sort of thing that would never be done today. "If you feel good, stay away from them," he said about doctors. He also spoke a lot about nutrution. Dave McClure was sitting not too far from me. Following that 'health talk' he said loudly: "Well, I guess I'm going to go down and get myself a hot dog!"

If he is posting the material that he does, and a lot of it at that, then he is an apostate

It is okay to save your next door neighbor if his house is burning down. I do it all the time.

They do not. It is your spin on them that they call false stories. Assuming that it is true, In an ever-changing population of 8 million, there will be examples of anything.

Ha! Scott Adams tweeted for ideas for his strip and added he would use a submitted one in an upcoming comic. I tweeted: "Maybe play with the idea of the mission statement being written by someone who was binge-watching Mission Impossible. Hmm. Like: ‘If you are caught or killed by this product, our company will disavow any knowledge of your actions’"  He gave it a like. Let's see if it appears as a cartoon.  Who doesn't love Dilbert?  To another tweet suggesting a play on "our employees are our most valuable asset," I added a quote from 'Tom Irregardless and Me': "He knows it is all hogwash. He knows one can go from 'most valuable asset' to 'person non-grata' in a heartbeat. But the newbie from the hills drinks it all in and thinks his new boss is his best friend in the whole wide world."  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/686882  The line as written refers to Phillip Brumley, Bethel attorney who was plucked from regular Bethel work and put through law school. He said it altered his personality to the extent that his wife said he was like a different person. I sympathized with the remark, but then speculated that maybe it was just him. Maybe he was like the new employee that must sit through interminable drivel about how "our employees are our greatest assets" and then I continued with the bit that I tweeted to Scott's contributor.

Signed by many journalists, lawyers, and human rights people - even the chairman of an LGBT group. Many comments a variation of the "if they came for them, they will come for you" argument. It is as though the earth attempts to come to the aid of the woman once more. Meanwhile, the dramatizations of arrests at the 2016 Regional Convention turns out to be spot-on, not over-the-top, not exaggerated at all. When Witnesses have been arrested, it is frequently with SWAT teamlike tactics. https://www2.stetson.edu/~psteeves/relnews/180619b.html

It does seem a little silly to see brothers trekking through the wilderness in ties. Still, most people readily buy the explanation (if we have opportunity to give it) that it is a matter of showing respect toward God. Maybe it depends upon the area. I have never sensed anyone put off because I used a tablet in the ministry (Moses used two of them) and not a paper book. Maybe it is like Christians were at the forefront of the movement to switch from scrolls to codex. Now they are at the forefront of those who go from paper to digital. You didn't come to our KH, did you? Still, one does see them. I like that quote some decades ago, in a study article, I think, of the brother who could afford a Mercedes but instead opted for a Volkswagen, out of regard for just what you observed. Dig that quote up for us, could you? It is not for nothing that they call you @The Librarian "Any ideas?" I like this post.

How do they know this is not being done? The current update of JW child abuse policies clearly show several refinements coming from the recent spotlight on the issue. https://www.jw.org/en/news/legal/legal-resources/information/packet-jw-scripturally-based-position-child-protection/ Tromboneck has a point. They mostly just want an independent inquiry that will answer to them.

I used to love it when Watchtower publications would run that Vermont Royster quote. After remarking on how far we have come science-wise, he added: “Yet here is a curious thing. In the contemplation of man himself, of his dilemmas, of his place in the universe, we are little further along than when time began. We are still left with questions of who we are and why we are and where we are going.” It is pretty obvious why Jehovah’s Witnesses would love those words; they make clear that a shallow world of materialism will not do. You can even think those words every time a Kate Spade or Anthony Bourdain takes his life. Or anyone else. Suicide is all the rage today. People decide that ‘Hotel World’ has not that much to offer, and they line up at the counter to check out. Isn't it a little missing the point when people look for the one factor, maybe social media, that is tipping people over the edge? Or suggest that it is all a matter of better mental health care? “For over half a century, as a journalist, author, and teacher, Vermont Royster illuminated the political and economic life of our times. His common sense exploded the pretensions of "expert opinion," and his compelling eloquence warned of the evils of society loosed from its moorings in faith,” read the citation when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986. There are few things I enjoy more than exploding the pretensions of "expert opinions."