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TrueTomHarley

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Everything posted by TrueTomHarley

  1. TrueTomHarley
    I'll go along with much of what you've said, but draw the line at some scenarios that your yourself declared unlikely: I'd be very hesitant to engage in civil disobedience to theocratic headship. If history is any guide, maybe the earth would open up. Instead, I've chosen the role to defend whatever the GB does. It doesn't mean I don't acknowledge it might be done differently or that they can't make mistakes - they've acknowledges that themselves; I just don't feel its my role to push for changes. If they decide to do things differently, I'll spin positively that new policy too. It's the role I have chosen. There's a lot of urging here that the GB should do this or the GB should do that. Is that permissible? Who knows? All I know is that I am uncomfortable taking part in it, so I will not. I see no biblical precedent for it and much biblical precedent that would discourage (if not forbid) it. It is 'leadership by the people' instead of being 'taught by Jehovah.' It is the Western model of journalism - 'exposing' errors that it assumes no responsibility to fix and no responsibility to deal with the consequences of stirring up discontent among persons not previously discontent. Do they arbitrarily decide things at Bethel without input from 'the people?' I wouldn't say that. Each week every circuit overseer in the world sends in a report from the congregation he has served. Okay, okay, one could say many are 'yes men' and all are loyal, but it is not a given that an organization send out its agitators to represent it. The COs, especially the more experienced ones, can be trusted to give input about whatever is affecting the congregations, including PR matters. It's for them to do it, not me, and if I was to do it, it wouldn't be in a public forum. Again, it is 'taught by Jehovah,' and not 'leadership of the people' because leadership of the people does not always lead to fine ends. It is largely an article of faith in today's world that it does, but a perusal of history shows that it only occasionally does. The truth faith is the true faith. It is a challenge piloting it in an increasingly irreligious world in which the very notion of keeping the congregation clean is spun as a negative, as a scheme to 'control' people. The world pushes hard for the viewpoint that, if you must have religion, make it bland and let it not interfere with serious things of life. The GB has its hands full coping and they are overall doing well in catering to God and not just the individual. I won't tell them where they are going wrong. How do I know? For every line of information I have, they have one hundred.
  2. TrueTomHarley
    As the C.O. said, we will have to see what sticks. Yikes! I've got a thing for Mormons and an entire Mormon category on my blog, which I do not have for any other religion.
  3. TrueTomHarley
    I know. I have seen her and it is getting embarrassing. Someone should tell her that one time is enough.
  4. TrueTomHarley
    This builds off the Witness assumption, held by few others, that not all roads lead to heaven and that, if one would survive into the new order, one must serve God according to his standards and his truths. Therefore the ultimate goal in avoiding a family member who departs for different beliefs is to help him see he must 'straighten out and fly right' spiritually, thus re-uniting the family forever spiritually and otherwise. Absent this outcome, it is a lose-lose for both parties - the departing one merely moves up the hour of separation which will occur anyway at cut-off for this system. Some of what throws a wrench into this discipline for ultimately a good cause is that, in many cases, the departing one no longer worries about living forever - on earth or anywhere else. He or she has gone atheistic and have thought the remaining few decades a cool bargain, with no sense of being cheated from all eternity. When the world embraces atheism, all sorts of paradigms shift.
  5. TrueTomHarley
    This might be seen as splitting hairs but... That is not to say there might not be consequences to a choice. That's not exactly the point you raised. The person departing does not have to choose to leave his/her family. The family, however, might choose to no longer associate with him. They likely will - if they value what makes the truth the truth.
  6. TrueTomHarley
    Perhaps I should take the time to read it but I won't. Probably the assumption that JWs have the truth is all one needs to know. For 5-10 years now, the word 'disfellowship' has not been heard in public announcements. Instead, you will hear that so-and-so is no longer one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Surely if you have joined the Mormons, you are no longer one of Jehovah's Witnesses. What if someone drifted from Witnesses and five years later joined the Mormons. Would that trigger the announcement? Frankly, I don't know. The purpose of disfellowshipping is to separate an (in this case spiritually - not that I have anything against the Mormons per se) unwholesome influence from the congregation, but if the person does it himself, nobody chases him down. The reason I don't know is that it seldom happens. If people leave Jehovah's Witnesses, rarely do they go in for another denomination of churches. I'm sure it happens but I know first hand of no case. Oh wait - I do. It is a typical case of one who was disfellowshipped and over time came to think a religious connection good for the family, so drifted into a church less demanding than Witnesses, having lost appreciation for the things we consider spiritual gems. My point is: it doesn't matter if there is an announcement or not. Joining another faith is, from our point of view, an apostasy, and no one in the Witness community would thereafter associate with the person - it's not that their arm has to be twisted by the GB - they know it from the scriptures. Far from being an extreme stand, it is the stand that any faith ought to take about their own members leaving for another religion. They don't do this usually, but scripturally they should. Few people take religion seriously. They can't imagine making too much of a fuss over God, though they will go for the jugular when it comes to politics. Some churches would not erect such a barrier because they realize there is little that makes them unique and if you want to switch from one to another it is little more than swapping a Ford for a Chevy. When my dad, years ago when they were more serious about such things, wanted to marry my mom, the Catholic church said she would have to convert to Catholicism first. 'Forget that,' my dad said and they never saw him again. Having little unique to offer in a world not too spiritual in the first place, most churches won't maintain obstacles to retaining members. However, the Witness faith is absolutely unique - the combination of beneficial teachings are found no where else - and they take firm action to be separate from a world that has willfully strayed from Christianity. So to answer your question: if they don't do it - avoid their apostates - it indicates that they have little to apostasize from. It indicates that they are sound asleep spiritually and they have acquiesced to the prevailing view that "all roads lead to heaven."
  7. TrueTomHarley
    I wouldn't recommend pursuing celebrity status for this reason - for every successful Witness celebrity there are two or three Michael Jacksons - but I think faithful Witness celebrities serve the cause well, like Coco, like the Russian (now American) punk rocker. The world revels in celebrity and understands little else. The punk rocker, I am told, generated floods of rare positive publicity in the Russian press following his exile in the West. The world loves celebrity and will even cut Witness celebrities a little slack. Many here will not, and ESPECIALLY Witness detractors will wait for the slightest misstep to hurl it into our faces, but the world in general likes them. I even think Selena - with her you-know-whats flying about, and her public thanks to Jehovah for letting her beat opponents into mush - does us well. It only sweetens the deal to learn that she was merely raised a Witness and was never baptized - thus she never agreed to carry about the Name.
  8. TrueTomHarley
    If you would maintain that we are not children and advocate challenging everything and everyone under the sun, especially within the theocratic realm, then you must take ownership of the world such thinking has collectively produced. Look around you. Are you proud of what your thinking leads to? Unfortunately, though you revel in independence, you will find not everyone likewise reveling agrees with you - and the situation inevitably deteriorates to the one you love to describe ad nauseum - to one where MEN struggle for GLORY AND GUTS AND HONOR, feeling the HOT BREATH OF DEATH and they stare eyeball to eyeball with one another, locked into BATTLE, and ....well, you can complete the rest. The 'dad' in the car is not just the GB, or even primarily so. It is God and Christ, who both make clear they grant authority to men. For every verse (NONE actually come to mind) that recommends overturning authority, there are twenty that say we ought to acquiesce to it. Even villainous secular authority we are advised to submit to, for the king paves the roads and it is 'not without purpose that he bears the sword.' The Hillary-Trump turmoil, unabated months after the election, is a godsend for American Witnesses. Not that we take part in it, but we can point out that it demonstrates how people froth and lose their minds over something having nothing to do with religion - I've even heard cautions of looming civil war - therefore perhaps they can appreciate how some might get worked up over God, who offers more than any human king does. In fact, Russian officials (and Chinese) must shake their heads in astonishment, that their old Communist predictions are coming absolutely true, and that the West is succumbing to its own decadence and celebration of speech without restraint. They offer an alternative model and there are many persons who prefer a level of security even at the expense of some freedoms. Of course, they do not merely offer it - they OFFER!! it and they will off you if you complain about it too much. Don't think I am advocating for it. I'm just observing that the Western alternative is not exactly nirvana either. Railing on endlessly about disfellowshipping the way you do is to maintain, as you have, that our personal happiness is the issue before all creation. It is the approach of the churches who say it is all about us - about our own personal salvation and relationship with Jesus. That's where you belong, for that is your thinking. Does God want a clean people, since a soiled one - physically, morally, or spiritually - is a reflection on him and makes him 'fake news?' FUGETABOUTIT! You would have us believe that it is primarily about not stepping on the toes - EVER - of any individual.
  9. TrueTomHarley
    Careful. You have up till now suggested that from Putin on down, Russians all watch 'Leave it to Beaver' - that family ties mean EVERYTHING to them, and this is why they positively lose it - and rightly so - when they hear that a Witness family has been disrupted by a disfellowshipping. Are you now painting them as cold and uncaring? Putin knows where you live, you know, as PeterR reminded me - you provided him your address 'details' when you wrote in about the ban. Even if the purpose of your letter was to say 'attaboy!' he still has your address. Did you also cheer on the Jewish pogroms in Russia? If I recall my 'Fiddler on the Roof,' Tavye's Jewish religion made he and his family shun the third daughter for marrying a Gentile soldier. It's outrageous!! Even Jehovah's Witnesses would not do that! What choice did the Czar have but to beat up every last Jew in sight and to leave it to another tyrant later on to take care of the ones he could not get to?
  10. TrueTomHarley
    No, there was not a conclusion to the matter, and don't think there will be by switching to another thread. It is a fallacy to think that when you put persons in a room and let them loose, even if they deem themselves thinking persons, they are going to arrive at a conclusion that will not be summarily rejected by the person who didn't think it in the first place. It is classic human self-rule. JTR's comment is just above mine. Do you think he is ever going to come around to a consensus view? I don't think so. He has said what he has just said for 10,000 posts. And was there a consensus view over 1914? Or did JWI eventually wear everyone down with posts as long as the phone book? When I was a kid squabbling in the car back seat with my siblings and whining 'are we there yet?' my dad - everyone's dad that I know of - would eventually whirl around and yell: 'if you kids don't stop crying back there, I'll give you something to cry about!' It's undignified to think we have not outgrown that model, and we all hate to be undignified. But that does not mean we have outgrown it. All this incessant sniping at the GB is little more than the back-seat kids of yesteryear responding to dad's rebuke: "do YOU like dad?' 'No, I don't like dad at all -he's mean. If only dad would go jump in a lake. Then we could be like Howie Hoodlimm next door and Willie Watever down the street - their dads let them do whatever they want.
  11. TrueTomHarley
    Write them. Ask them to explain it, unless the context of the article does.
  12. TrueTomHarley
    Just for that, lady - you so much as breathe and I'll downvote you. You will never get TOP PRIZE again!
  13. TrueTomHarley
    Parting is okay, just like Abraham and Lot did. I once said I half-suspected this entire forum is apostates playing good cop - bad cop to wreak havoc on newcomers. I'm still not 100% certain that's not the case, though I'm getting there.
  14. TrueTomHarley
    On the other hand (and I do NOT know which persons you refer to) we all know how there are movies that, if you see them, you feel you ought to take a shower afterwards. The internet can be like that, too. Nobody should be coerced to keep up the fine fight here because it isn't that fine. Often it is better to stick to the field where the likelihood of finding a 'listening ear' is far higher and the likelihood of finding a honed hating ear is far lower. Nor do I agree that anyone 'bit the dust.' More likely, he was Mary who 'chose the better portion.'
  15. TrueTomHarley
    In the end it is about not stumbling 'one of these little ones who believe' so as to avoid having a millstone thrown about your neck. If upvoting villains on the rare occasions they behave can trigger someone's stumbling, should I assume the right to do it? It doesn't matter whether I've figured it shouldn't trigger stumbling. It only matters that it does, or can. Should I give the impression that I am having a most pleasant party here with characters who loathe everything Jehovah's Witnesses stand for? Isn't this an "if eating meat causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again" situation? JTR will shed many a tear, but hopefully he will understand as my upvoting dwindles. No WWI 1914 Christmas truce here, I think it must be..
  16. TrueTomHarley
    I am rethinking it.
  17. TrueTomHarley
    I mentioned once that I assume up front that everyone is a liar. You have to do that online. It's takes a while to sort them out here, and some you never know for sure. It's probably best just to stay off the darn thing, but I'm not the most balanced guy in the world. Besides, new or naive ones come along and play here like kids on the street. Villains are trying to run them down, swerving like ISIS to take out as many as possible. Sometimes I can flatten their tires and thwart them, or at least slow them down and cause them to pull out their air pump to imbibe more hot air. Not to mention that I suspect some here don't have both oars in the water.
  18. TrueTomHarley
    You do. This is not a great place to be for most Witnesses, and maybe none of them. You've brought a lot to the table. Thank you.
  19. TrueTomHarley
    (Gulp!) I have done this on the rare occasions that they behave and say something worthwhile. Remember, even you-know-you says a good word every now and then. Besides, there is a certain air of comedy about this entire forum. Going for the jugular of your nemesis no matter what he says only lends it a ridiculous flavor.
  20. TrueTomHarley
    in
  21. TrueTomHarley
    I try not to be condescending. I don't think I am. Everything is subjective, though. Apparently, you think it.
  22. TrueTomHarley
    I may have expressed something inelegantly but, in general, if it goes back from before I was born, I lose interest. If it also it requires eyestrain - I am not an eagle-eyed kid anymore - it disappears almost entirely. You have to be an historian for something that long ago, and that's not my thing - not for the sake of some piddly item that may have been no more than a bad hair day. If the man says he can't translate, what do I care? The fact is, it is translated by someone, they all remain anonymous there, who knows what was farmed out and to who? Of maybe God wrote it himself. (sigh...I'm being facetious here) The fact is, the translation exists and it get high marks. Not by Trinitarians, for it messes with some verses that cannot be rendered literally because it louses up their teaching. And there are some academics who look askance at the Name in the New Testament - inclusion of which is explained in an appendix. But other than that, it's well thought of. If you have to go back 70 years to dig up dirt, there can't be much dirt to dig up. Statements play differently at different time periods - just watch a movie from that time, or reflect that John differs so much from the other three gospels because times had changed and the foremost needs of the congregation had changed with them. So I don't necessarily want to unravel mindsets back then that accommodated statements that today's mindsets do not, especially if I think an opponent simply wants, and cannot get his head around anything but, a sound byte. Anyone can go back and have at it debating events back and forth and I'm not suggesting they can't or that it is a waste of time if they do. I'm just saying it it should hardly be considered mandatory after many decades, and a perfectly valid possible response is: 'who cares?' Even were a report from that long ago completely true, in our times complete scoundrels overhaul their image in far fewer years. So it doesn't interest me much to go there. Others will differ. More power to them if they do. But it's not mandatory. Similarly, I have little taste for things having to do with chronology, because even if opponents were to be absolutely correct, it amounts to little more than misreading a bus schedule. In athletics, runners jump the gun all the time, and they simply restart the race; nobody makes a big deal over it. It's the runner sitting on his rear end at the starting blocks that you wonder about. Grumblers here ought to specify whether they still even believe we are in the last days. Some do. But some have gone atheist, and dismiss ISIS as just one of those things - why, there have always been bad people. i like the truth also because it makes you nicer over time, when applied. I follow many sources on Twitter, which is the best way to get news, because you can choose your feeds. I choose all kinds of villains, along with the agreeable, so as to keep tabs on them. Few persons are as openly condescending and contemptuous than certain prominent atheists. Sometimes I worry that their cherished evolution is true and that they are the end result. If so, it's good-bye to the human race, for they do not suffer fools gladly. And a fool is anyone who disagrees with them.
  23. TrueTomHarley
    I'm afraid you'll have to explain this one for me. I don't know what you mean.
  24. TrueTomHarley
    Or you could just say 'it was 70 years ago. Who cares? Even if it was 100% faithfully reported, they've had plenty of time to shape up.' Everyone knows the world 70 years ago bears little resemblance to today. If someone insists on acting as a 10-year old, there's no need to go there with him.
  25. TrueTomHarley
    When you get old and fat and it stretches into something unsightly.
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