TrueTomHarley

As it turns out, I did go to college and I do have a degree. It didn't help me a bit. It is my fault, not theirs. Nonetheless, I'm quite certain that both GF and JWI made more dough than I, and probably even Bellyacher-in-Chief JTR.

I can see you don't know anything about science.

Everyone knows what extremism is and they know that Jehovah's Witnesses are not it. And Jehovah's Witnesses alone were banned as a religion. But others may follow. Every non-majority faith is harassed.

Actually, I only crossed it out because I wasn't sure I had spelled it correctly.

The same chapter of the Kingdom book that spoke of the first use of 'Kingdom Hall' also spoke of the first time Witnesses met in their own building. A church group had been divided because half followed Russell's teachings and half did not. There were two groups but only one building, and for a time (this was in the 1880's) whoever got to the building first used it for services. I realized that our salvation lay in this account. The tyrannical and mean organization regularly abuses their authority by reminding Witnesses to get to meetings on time, even a little early for the sake of visiting. I realized the answer to the problem was to share our Hall with the Mormons or Catholics or Rastafarians. Then our people will get there early to prevent the others from using it. might it be, though, someone asked, that only one person would arrive early, and not the whole congregation? Not a problem. In that case, he or she can save seats. We're good at that, too.

All these explanations are wrong. It becomes tiresome. Luckily Fortunately for everyone here, I will elucidate. The answer is found in our family folklore. I invited my profane great uncle to a meeting long ago. He attended only one. He sputtered and groused throughout the talk and Watchtower study, just like some on this forum. Afterwards in the parking lot he grumbled to a brother, who turned out to be hard of hearing: "What is this nonsense about a Kingdom? Hell, I don't believe a word of it!" The brother mistook his remark as appreciation. He thought it would make a really cool name for something that had, up to that time, been called a "place." The term caught on. Brother Rutherford heard about it one day and said: 'Yeah. I can live with that."

I'm trying to sell my obsolete neckties to the Society, who brought this all on.

It is not a conspiracy theory. Just look what happened to me: Stuck in an evil time warp. At last I understand.

Arauna asked many fine questions of Witness, none of which were answered. They are not the kind of questions you ask, but they are the kind that strike to the heart of her claimed area of expertise. She is the truly annointed one, she says, so does she do anything that one would reasonably expect an annointed one to do? How can you not ask those things? I looked into this. In fact, I expanded upon it. One question Arauna did not ask of Witness was 'does she provide any nourishing spiritual food?' as the faithful and discreet slave are said to do. It is a good thing she did not ask it, because Witness has. She has provided us the diatribe of that fellow complaining that his permanent home at Bethel did not materialize. THIS is where you ought to demand a transcript, for a transcript allows one to quickly get the gist of something without having to plow through a videoed complaint. I could get no further than 'the Watchtower will throw you under the bus.' Please. To use his vernacular, they never said they wouldn't. They never promised lifetime residency. I live not that far from Warwick. Many responded to the invitation to help in building. All knew that it was not a permanent gig. That point was made clear from the get-go. Nobody had reason to misunderstand it. They all understand the nature of an organization that exists to serve, not to be served. Even were he already a full-time Bethelite, lifetime residency has never been promised. 'Try it for a year,' prospective Bethelites were once encouraged, or, going back, four years. The fact that some have ended up staying a long long time does not mean that anyone crossing the threshhold door has a lifetime connection. For a long time, while brute force was the commodity, many did, but as Arauna says, technology changes everything. Bethel would be robbing the worldwide brotherhood were they not to adapt to changing times and strive to combat bloat. Look, it is not as though I cannot empathize with the kid. The experience of panic that ensues when any phase of life ends is real. 'What will I do next?' is the fear. People handle it differently, but most know the feeling to some degree. High school ends. College ends. Military ends. Grants end. Secular employment ends - many work assignments in the States are temporary, after which the employee is back to square one. Young people have even become used to so-called permanent employment being temporary - the lifetime employment of my Dad's day went the way of the dodo bird long ago. Witness or her friends have used this kid and made him look like a loser. He will actually be one if he does not shake their influence. Have they helped him to readjust and manfully face the next aspect of life, or have they encouraged him to cry like a baby for the sake of their own ax they live to grind? Hopefully, he will recover and move on in life, as all of us must many times for many reasons. However, when he is respectfully employed somewhere and happily readusted to life, perhaps with wife and family, perhaps even restored to full-time service, Witness will still be running this video iimmortalizing him at his lowest - shedding bitter tears, sulking and hitting back at those he thinks have wronged him. He will forever look small, whereas he would probably rather look big someday. And unless there is positive evidence somewhere within the video, there is always the chance that the whole thing is made up - though I am willing to take it at face value. So let no one say Witness does not provide spiritual food. She does.

It works for me. I like it. Or one could just say 'they changed that.' They have never said they don't. Everyone knows Jehovah's Witnesses have thought Armageddon is just around the corner for a long while. It is. It simply turns out that it is one heckuva corner. But there is no question that this human experiment with self-rule will not turn out well.

Hmm. I'm listening to Lynard Skynard and @JW Insider is at the London Museum. That probably says it all.

Forty years ago Lynard Skynard's plane went down, killing six. I didn't know it at the time. It was during my righteous period when I was not listening to music. But in the years since I have heard song after song that I have liked, starting with 'Sweet Home Alabama,' only to find it is one of theirs. My righteous period lasted nearly 20 years. It didn't end until my kids reached the age where they wanted to attend concerts like their friends and I wasn't too happy about it. But I realized you cannot stop lava and so I gave in, with the stipulation that I would go along too. The first concert was Weezer. Everyone held their hand out in line to get stamped, so I held mine out too. "You don't need a stamp," the attendant said - I little disrespectfully, I thought. (it was to verify drinking age) So I shot back: "Aren't there any grownups here?" Oh, yeah, the boy was thrilled to have me along. But I rather liked Weezer, or at least I did not dislike them. I used to play a game with my kids which, in hindsight, was a little sick, but the purpose was noble and I think ultimately successful. I didn't want them idolizing any band members, so we would play: 'How did they die?' Was it suicide, overdose, or plane crash? It's amazing how long that game can be played. Lynard Skynard wins hands down, though Badfinger gets runner-up. The Badfinger lead singer hung himself. The group disbanded and some went back to laying carpet. Years later they regrouped with a new lead singer ... and he also hung himself! The fate of the second group, however, and the existence of the first group, I only discovered after my righteous period had ended. Lynard Skynard had just released the album 'Street Survivors' when their plane went down. The cover pictured the group standing before a wall of flames. Someone prevailed upon the record company to take the flames out and substitute a plain black background. The surviving members were ever a mess and some met their end through overdose. The band still survives with but one original member. Removal of the flames from the album cover was for emotional reasons. Strictly speaking, it was not necessary. There were no flames in the plane crash - the plane had run out of fuel. You would almost think someone would check on something like that before takeoff. It is a fine reason not to be stoned.

Surely when questions are asked they ought to be answered. I always do yours.

No, she has not. These, too, are fine questions that were not answered.

I have never asked. However, Mr. Rook, though your respectful request for a transcript may fall upon deaf ears even if you send both Putin and the GB a check for $20.....I am better than both of them put together. I solemnly swear that if you send me a check for five dollars and ninety nine cents I will send you a complete transcript of 'Tom Irregardless and Me.'

Pure guesswork follows, I admit, but it is educated guesswork. It could be wrong. But it could well be right, seeing that the reporter has shown herself either partial or inept. Any decent lawyer will raise objections at any trial. Some are sustained. Some are over-ruled. When overruled, the judge will say why, which invariably can be taken as a slap at that lawyer. A biased reporter, if she was one, could report that as the judge's 'exasperation' or sharp rebuke - implying that the lawyer really pushed her buttons, whereas in fact such retorts are routine. A vengeful reporter, if she was one, would surely report things this way. We should not assume that she isn't. In the field of politics today, many reporters are vengeful, for either one side or the other. Neither is. That is not even the nature of a tort case. One side is equating money with justice. The other side expelled a scoundrel (you have described expulsion as a fate worse than hellfire) once his deeds were known and presumably saw him jailed for a long long time, though that doesn't seem to have happened - but if it did not happen, it is clearly the legal system's screw-up, not ours. Unless there is some reason he should not be jailed, a reason not reported, and a reason that would alter everything.

excellent compare ! What in the world is a 'spiritual stoning?' Who is to say it is bad?

Yes, I have no doubt that you really highly suspect that.

This reminds me of a passage in 'Up the Down Staircase' in which a student was given a failing grade for wrongly interpreting a poem. He protested. The grade stood. It stood even when the student brought the poet himself to school and the poet said 'yes'- that's exactly what he meant. The only satisfaction he received was to see school policy changed. From that point on, only dead poets were used in connection with assignments.

I will go further. Since there is one large hole in this story (why isn't the perpetrator in jail?) and one blatant untruth, (JWs are prohibited from telling authorities) everything else must be viewed in this light. Thus, the judge's reported exasperation over the Witnesses' defense may be exaggerated, misrepresented, or even concocted. Maybe it is like the media reporting that Trump and Tillerson do nothing but argue and that Tillerson is about to resign - and so Tillerson calls a news conference to say they get along just fine and he has never once thought of quitting. And they say: ‘well, did you call him a moron as we said?’ and he answers ‘where I come from we don’t have time for such petty nonsense I mean, the San Diego case might be as reported, but the story is flawed enough and the reporter negligent enough, perhaps hostile, that it makes you wonder. It's not great to see JWs mentioned in courts in this connection - there is no positive way this can be spun. However, no tort lawyer wants to go to court - he or she wants a much-easier out-of-court settlement. The fact that this case is, nonetheless, in court indicates that one side or the other (or both) has dug in and is intransigent. People are used to seeing lawyers employ every type of legal maneuvering. If it is for a cause they like, they praise them for it. If it is for a cause they do not like, they condemn them for it. There are no legal loopholes in court because if it is legal, it is not a loophold. It is a chaotic and inconsistent system, not of our doing, and one must operate according to whatever flies legally. I'd rather not see such things play out in the courts, but if they do, most people realize that lawyers will do what lawyers have to do given the adversarial system they operate in.

I can get my head around that without much effort.

You seem to feel that I had you in mind in my last comment. I didn't. The idea of coming to the aid of immature ones who are playing in the street, not realizing the dangerous drivers deliberately trying to swerve into them, appeals to me. That's what you are doing. I am. Well - I guess I'm not - not really. But there a few serial gripers who seem unhinged, and I do not think it wrong to observe that.

Someone here made the charge that mental illness is higher among JWs than elsewhere, with the cryptic challenge: 'look it up.' When asked to produce proof by someone who did look it up and found only similar unsupported allegations, he immediately caved. I've heard the allegation before. I get around it by pointing out that, even if it were true, it is no more than what you would expect when Jesus says he came to seek, not those who do not need a physician, but those that do. The groups to worry about, to my mind, are those who have low rates of mental illness among them, for there are a lot of those people around. It must be that they feel excluded - driven away by condescension or lack of love or hospitality. I would not say our people suffer especially from mental illness, and even if I did, I would attach no stigma to it - a stigma is the very reason certain ones try to make the charge stick. From what I have seen on this forum, certain opposers - not all of them or even most of them - are the ones who are pure loonytoons, not the Witnesses who comment. Plus, if our people go off the rails, they nonetheless wouldn't hurt a fly. But if persons of the greater world go off the rails - better call the SWAT team and get a new identity from the FBI!

I am waiting for you to do this. I truly am. You are more savvy searching every nook and cranny of everything than I. You certainly seem to have the time. You even have the motivation to portray things as black as you can. I would like to know the truth about this.

Shouldn't you be sniffing under a pyramid about now? Your week at the museum is not yet up. Just because you don't like someone doesn't mean you have to dis him at every opportunity. There was a time when we could barely speak of churches without trashing them, but it is less so today. No longer are we attempting to break their stranglehold on public thought. That was done long ago. It is true that we hardly praise them for their charitable works but neither do we down them, unless there is obvious hypocrisy about. Whenever I am at a door and the subject comes up, I like to acknowledge charitable works people may be doing, whether through their church or not. There are hungry people. How can it not be a good thing to feed them? Moreover, we don't do it - no one can do everything. .So it is a good thing that someone else does. At another time - it needn't be right then - one can say that the 'problem' arises when churches do such works instead of the ones they are primarily assigned. If they do it in addition to, it is excellent and praiseworthy. But almost always, it is instead of. It is the illustration given that you hire someone to re-roof your house and he paints it instead. True, it did need painting, but that is beside the point. But you don't have to state that from the get-go. Better to build bridges by acknowledging good works. Whenever I run across a clergyman, I ask him to describe his day. I don't just assume he does nothing. I invite him to describe what he does do. When he takes me up on it, we have some good conversations - the beginnings of who knows what? - and he is always able to describe a very active life. Many clergymen of long ago had much free time and used it to advance other pursuits - sometimes in science. Gregor Mendel comes to mind. They have less free time today. They keep their nose in the job, as is true with almost every line of work today. The days of the Renaissance Man passed long ago.