TrueTomHarley

It is a strange passage that appears to upend notions of lives in the present system being incredible important to Jehovah. We usually respond to such passages with a “Moving on, here.”

What if Gordon Lightfoot’s feet really are light?

That could be. A very dear friend of mine lived in Serbia for a time and called them the best people on earth. It also may be that lawyers are prohibited from media advertising in many countries, maybe there is even a professional code that considers it too crass, as the case year many years ago. Last I heard, pharmaceutical companies are only allowed direct-to-consumer advertising in the U.S. and New Zealand. Trust me, it is an excellent reason to move to Croatia or anywhere else.

They don’t have to advertise. The state does that for them. (did you hear on account the country’s enthusiastic embrace, some are call Israel “Pfisrael?”)

You should get over your obsession on this. Unfortunately, lawyers are a byproduct of living in the modern world. You and I both remember when the premier sponsors for TV news programs were manufacturers or merchants. Now they are lawyers. With no exaggeration I can count over a dozen lawyers who regularly advertise on local media, some a dozen times a day. If you have pockets, someone will find a pretext to try to empty them. It Is a societal transfer of funds for every reason under the sun, with barristers netting a third. Don’t misunderstand. There are wrongs to be righted. We live in a society that views money as the way to right wrongs. It’s not to say that every lawsuit is just a money grab. But when lawyers replace manufacturers and merchants as the premiere advertisers, well—it’s one crazy way to run a planet.

About as many who wish he’d never spoken of eating his flesh and drinking his blood.

I think the way I should have put it is that the doctrines don’t change. Once you’ve dealt with them, you’ve dealt with them. Accordingly, in any given year, our publications will barely mention trinity and hellfire beyond a reference or two to how they are “trash’ that interfere with building a relationship with God. Very seldom are there specific paragraphs on trinity, let alone an entire article. Mostly they just refer people back to the Trinity brochure, or whatever has replaced it. My own blog is the same way. In sixteen years I have maybe 5 or 6 posts specifically on the Trinity. In the Enjoy Life Forever interactive brochure there is almost nothing on trinity or hellfire. All I found was something in the Explore section of lesson 13, How False Religion Misrepresents God: “For generations, religions have told lies that make God seem distant and cruel. Learn the truth about three of those lies.“Lies That Make God Seem Unlovable” (The Watchtower, November 1, 2013)” It was even a little frustrating to me because I did have a Bible student from fundamentalist background, a very studious guy always wanting to ‘dig deeper.’ So I dug into how all renderings of hell stem from just 3 original language words—sheol, hades, Gehenna, (with a single exception of one ‘tartarus’), and that all renderings of hellfire come only from Gehenna. I didn’t see where that was specifically dealt with in depth and I ended up going off on my own tangents—Insight book material, and so forth. It is not part of the basic study guide. Few people seriously believe these doctrines anymore—people have “moved on” from doctrines—and the ones who do, fundamentalists for the most part, are seldom persuaded no matter how much you quote scripture. They are the people who “accepted Jesus” in a flash. Some preacher said “come down and be saved” and in an instant they did, having had no intention of doing so before. They get their “truth” by revelation, not by Bible study. They thereafter cherry pick the Bible to find verses that back up what they believe. Where they find passages that don’t, they dismiss them as poor interpretation, corruption, bad translation, the Bible is too complicated to know, and so forth. Their minds were made up at their “conversion” that happened in an instant. “I’ve never convinced one” my favorite circuit overseer said, an old timer now deceased, on arguing with people over the trinity. If we are oldtimers ourselves, and we remember a time when these doctrines were important to people, we can easily fall into the mindset that they still are. But they rarely are. The approach of the Enjoy Life Forever is not to teach people doctrines they don’t believe in anyway only to thereafter tell them they are wrong. Instead, it just teaches Bible truth, and reserves the ‘Lies that Make God Seem Unlovable’ article for anyone still attached to those beliefs. Of course, if you happen to be surrounded by people who do love and cherish these doctrines, then lots of time spent disproving them may be just the ticket. But those people are becoming rare, they are rapidly dying out and being replaced by persons who don’t give a hoot. I think that’s way the Watchtower devotes relatively little space to the “false doctrines of Christendom.” They try to keep up, not with how people used to be, but how they are now. They focus on teaching the positive things of the Bible, rather than disproving the negative

Yes. We need you. There’s no end to the outrageous things they’ve been saying in your absense.

Maybe it’s that “Patiently waiting for the Truth” is exactly the opposite of the course Jesus recommended: ““Keep on asking, and it will be given you; keep on seeking, and you will find; keep on knocking, and it will be opened to you;” (Matt 7:7) Though most modern Bibles have removed the next verse as spurious, some versions read: ”And some of his lazy disciples said, ‘Isn’t it enough to patiently wait?”

I may not have expressed myself well. It wouldn’t be the first time.

It’s Calvin. You haven’t been speaking with Mrs. Patiently Sitting on her Hands, have you?

Kant was stopped dead in his tracks on this dilemma when his church told him he kant ask that question. (sorry)

Inasmuch as he can be ‘the messenger preparing the way,’ preparing the ground for a great building project—well, the first thing you do in preparing the ground for any project is to cart out the trash, in this case hellfire and trinity. That’s why I always find it puzzling when individuals go on and on about how the Bible disproves these doctrines. A little bit, yes, but—it’s trash. Why would you obsess over it?

What about those verses that say God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and God struck Nabal dead, and in both cases we bend over backwards to say he didn’t, that he allowed the lout’s own stubbornness to kill him? Sometimes I think the Bible writer meant it exactly as he wrote, in the vein of ‘the light gets brighter as the day dawns.’ Sometimes in Twitter you will read of a given tweet removed with the note that this user limits who can read his tweets (though other tweets of his will be visible). I know of no such setting to do that. That’s why I’m inclined to believe the explanation I read that they ‘limit’ their tweets by going against something Twitter doesnt want them to say and so has removed it.

The BEST THING about my spanking new dishwasher is that it has just a common basket for silverware. It does NOT have those pissy separators that made loading the machine an all-afternoon job, and my wife is so disappointed on that account.

Oh, I stopped worrying about that ages ago.

For someone who is the bee’s knees in so many places you sure do like spending time in a place where you aren’t.

The topic itself is easy as pi. I did enjoy that movie, quirky though it was, or maybe I enjoyed it due to that reason.

There you go, JWI—ye of little faith. You just need to learn patience.

Why do you tweet so much, they asked Elon Musk. ’Because tweeting is fun!’ replied. Nothing profound. Nothing analytical. Nothing eggheaded. I tell you, I like the guy. Describe yourself in one tweet, someone else said. ‘I put the art in fart’ he replied. I love it. It is better than my own description of Pearlsnswine: “He puts the dog in dogmatic.”

No….bring it back. Really…just try…and see how long it lasts. All true prophets here. That’s what I’m talking about! Sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you don’t.

Wrong again. These days, at the urging my wife. I have become a dishwasher repairman. In fact, I am busy as a beaver (very clever animals, all of them graduates of Dam U.) reworking the Beatles’ Paperback Writer into something more personal: ’It’s a steady job but he’ll be a dishwasherrepairman….. DISHWASHERREPAIRMANNNNNNN.” Did you know if the fill pump goes you might as well buy a new unit, since even with self-install you’ll pay over 40% of a spanking brand new machine that doesn’t require you to start and wait 12 minutes to add the soap in because the automatic dispenser doesn’t work and now you are vindicated in not fixing it like your wife wanted you to because if you had it would all be for naught?

It is not a terrible idea. It was me who caused him to erupt, it was easily foreseeable (did I even do it for that reason?),and I have reverted to the same treatment I did for Dmitar in order to forestall additional temptation—but it is my own fault. To be sure, it takes almost nothing, but it was me who poked with feigned surprise that the ‘new guy’ doesn’t like JWI and who ever could have seen that coming? My own fault. If I had any sense I’d be repenting in sackcloth and ashes. But I don’t. But I do enough to ‘make my foot rare’ in the house of paranoia. Yeah, sure. So says you.

Oh wow. Where is the old hen with her ‘ban’ button?

Did I mention that, inspired by current events, I’m buying this forum? All you people had better start kissing up—that’s all I can say.