TrueTomHarley

39 minutes ago, George88 said:

There is no need for me to display my personal experiences. Would someone like "Pudgy" make light of my suffering? 

Buuaacck buck buck suawaaack, cluck, cluck.

It’s a way of earning the respect you crave. It is not as though you are not plenty nasty to him.

5 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

[George]: there may be individuals here who lack empathy and would make light of my experiences while showing sympathy towards others like a coward would

Come, come, George. I showed you how not to be a coward. Show a little backbone, won’t you?

1 hour ago, George88 said:

Does the truth unsettle you? It appears so. Are you one of those individuals who dislike being questioned, and proven wrong? … you unjustly criticize me for supposedly rebuking…

Are you sure you are not a bot stuck on an unhealthy setting?

45 minutes ago, George88 said:

1 hour ago, TrueTomHarley said:

It will help if I can have a clue as to what you are talking about. Is Xero on your naughty list, too?

Is that all you get from those passages? However, should I befriend people that insult me?

Now, now—not so prickly, if you please. It is not so much an insult as it is a request for clarification. Have you ever befriended anybody online? Even fine Xero you appear to find fault with.

23 minutes ago, JW Insider said:

he had already been asked to stop giving that talk

He may yet be vindicated. Search phrases such as ‘after heart transplant changes in personality.’ A lot comes up, most of it quite recent.

44 minutes ago, George88 said:

If you align with Xero, I suggest a thorough understanding of 1 Corinthians 2. Before disputing other's actions or understanding, we must first examine our own. Ultimately, we must consider who truly garners God's support: those who reject the teachings of scripture, or those who earnestly strive to follow them.

It will help if I can have a clue as to what you are talking about. Is Xero on your naughty list, too?

32 minutes ago, xero said:

I was thinking how (I mean I don't know because I'm not privy to the GB's private thoughts, but I can imagine them being frustrated at) some who have the desire to worship the organization.

I’ve often thought that, too.

17 minutes ago, xero said:

This is why it doesn't surprise me that there are some who see changes in certain areas to be faith shaking because these have equated certain practices of the past to have been unequivocally scriptural, and if the GB ever suggested we should adopt pattern A, rather than pattern B, then that was as good as scripture to these.

It is why I’ve in the past made my own little witticism, as though G .K Chesterton himself:

It is hard to direct a large group of people. One says, ‘Thanks for the new rule!’ whereas his neighbor says, ‘Huh? Did you say something?’

15 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Some of those who never celebrated their birthday may soon be celebrating Beard Day. Mark December 15th on the calendar. We don’t have that many holidays.

In France it could be known as the Day the Beardstile fell.

9 hours ago, Many Miles said:

Honestly it saddens me to see men following men. Just plain petty. Which version of "the organization" are folks supposed to follow?

Maybe if they are doused with water they will melt away like the wicked witch, leaving the rest of us frrreeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! 

Then you would not be so sad and could instead be happy.

9 hours ago, Many Miles said:

Worship God by living decently. . . . . If this is done sincerely it is enough

Next thing you know, my spiritual life will have come round full circle, back to ‘Be good so you can go to heaven when you die and meet the Man Upstairs.’

21 minutes ago, Many Miles said:

Honestly, it saddens me . . . Some folks need us to worship "the organization".

You may be missing something here.

2 hours ago, George88 said:

The attitudes being expressed here mirror those of the Pharisees and false religion, enabling a select few to align with the organization without acknowledging their hypocrisy in attempting to dictate when they refuse to be dictated to. The sources of knowledge being embraced by individuals here are indeed intriguing.

Precisely! 

1 hour ago, George88 said:

think it's time to go back to criticizing the Org for the beard thing and leave science to those who truly understand it.

Some of those who never celebrated their birthday may soon be celebrating Beard Day. Mark December 15th on the calendar. We don’t have that many holidays.

6 minutes ago, xero said:

 

I dunno. This looks a lot like Vic Vomodog who, years after he left the faith, would continue to show up at hospitals, bare his arm, and order, ‘Fill ‘er up!’ just to show Jehovah’s Witnesses what he thought of them. Doctors invariably tried to shoo him away, but he would always return.

7 hours ago, Pudgy said:

have the complete DVD set of “Have Gun, Will Travel”. Excellent series about a gun for hire who preferred to settle disputes without violence.

It was a show well ahead of its time. Occasionally an episode is so surreal as to resemble a Twilight Zone. I like the running bit about the Chinese bellhop (is he really named ‘Hey boy?’) routinely reading Paladin’s telegrams and the gun for hire can do nothing about it.

2 hours ago, George88 said:

Oh, the advent of Cable TV! Witness the allure of vice on a compact display. Now, behold the rise of the internet, which transferred this depravity to an even smaller screen, but one that can be amplified by a projector. The disparity lies in the clarity, Ha ha!

Still working our way through the ‘Have Gun Will Travel’ shows

25 minutes ago, George88 said:

I was going to laugh until you added Eddie Murphy. Now, who is the comedian? Ha! Ha!

It is hard to go wrong with an Eddie Murphy movie. Unless it is too foul to watch.

I feel a duty to screen movies for Many Miles who hasn’t seen that many.  The Amazon Eddie Murphy movie ‘Candy Cane Lane’ is okay and pretty funny, assuming you don’t spaz out over Christmas.

There is about a 20 year period of my life where I saw almost no TV, my ‘righteous years.’ There are shows that everyone speaks about of which I’ve never seen an episode, though a few I’ve caught up with afterwards, such as Psych.

Public television was unlimited and free for my kids, but for commercial TV they had to redeem ‘TV tickets’ we issued them weekly, and it didn’t allow for much. To be sure, I believe they found a way to counterfeit them, but the practice still served to shield them from much rubbish. 

1 hour ago, JW Insider said:

Uh oh. I had no idea. So much for fine relations with @xero.

2 hours ago, Many Miles said:

It's just beginning.

Many this kind of nonsense has to be hashed out before another leg of influx can begin. Sort of like the hundredth year anniversary of hauling out the nonsense that was trinity and hellfire. After all, Pudgy has pointed out that, given that this is the truth—that is, the collection of teachings so that the Bible makes sense, you would people would be beating down our doors to get it, rather than the reverse.

Somewhere on social media there is the list, counting time—crossed out, no-beards—crossed out, and next on the list is ‘ties.’ I can’t see these ever being crossed out, but maybe we can reach the point of not insisting upon wearing them in the jungle (rain forest).

8 minutes ago, xero said:

1 hour ago, Anna said:

By the way, since this is a beard thread I thought I would mention that so far we have one elder and two MS with a full beard, one elder with a soul patch, as of the midweek meeting. 

Soul patches and hair donuts should be grounds for immediate disfellowshipping and so should those with man-buns.

I’ve taken advantage of my new freedom to wear a skull & crossbones, eyepatch, and cut off my leg for a peg leg.

1 hour ago, Many Miles said:

Anyone seeking a downfall of the society is in for a long, long wait. It can change. But fall is not in sight.

To hear the crazies on the exJW site, you’d think it might happen any second.

5 minutes ago, Many Miles said:

So, I brought up a 1/100 fraction (white cells of your circulating blood) and asked you about it. Suddenly crickets.

Judging from your down-home profile photo, you’re used to them.

58 minutes ago, Many Miles said:

I/2 is a fraction. Right? Is 1/2 the parts that constitute "soul" soul?

It is only you that has fractionalized soul this way. This is why when you first gave your convoluted breakdown of ‘soul,’ I countered, ‘You wanna say that in English?’

I learned, as first explained in the Truth book, that ‘your soul is you.’ Yes, of course it has prerequisites. When you start qualifying any noun you utter as the sum of many fractions, then I’ll acknowledge you have a point.

Meanwhile, there is a timeline we operate on. We are finite beings and must take things as they come. We don’t have the luxury of overseeing the past, present, and future as though they are equally plain. Occasionally, to be sure, we get around that inconvenience by condemning yesterday’s things in the light of today’s standards, but most fair people recognize that as a cheap shot. Go back to the philosophy professor, the great donkey, who speaks of ‘temporal omniscience,’ how we can view all events as real, even those that haven’t happened yet—and God knows the idiot surmises his fellows draw from that. 

Originally, blood was blood. Then, doctors began to separate it into ‘main components’ that might individually be transfused, and we said, ‘Who are you trying to kid? It’s still blood.’

Then they said, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ whereupon they came up with so many additional components, most quite tiny, that the HQ brothers threw up their hands and said, ‘We can’t figure it out. Leave it for every individual to hash it out best they can.’

You have already indicated the probable resolution with that form you cited several days ago. Things are settling down. It is only the hypercritical or vengeful who seek to keep them stirred up. Sure, it would be great to correct any missteps of the past. But that is the nature of the past: it is not the past when it first occurs, but is the present, and as such it is not so easily corrected. Best that is to be done in the overall world is to throw every such possible error into the laps of the lawyers, who will extract 1/3 of the involved wealth for their inconvenience in sorting it out.

2 hours ago, xero said:

hours ago, JW Insider said:

but just don't go around claiming that you are still abstaining from blood. You are accepting blood, because your conscience has allowed you to take a risk that such a use of blood, even though technically not abstaining, is potentially life-saving.

This reminds me of a TV show the GC philosophy professor cited. ‘You couldn’t be more wrong!’ one character insisted, which prompted the reply, ‘What do you mean, more wrong? Wrong is wrong! How can you be more wrong?’ But then he went on to reason that you probably could. You could be wrong about something for a fundamental reason. Or you could be wrong for a picayune reason.

He then cited some survey indicating most people are satisfied with being ‘mostly right’ as opposed to ‘absolutely right.’ This seemed to disturb him, as his conception of philosophy is that it searches for ‘absolute’ truth. It sinks his entire endeavor, for I don’t think humans are capable of knowing ‘absolute truth.’ ‘Mostly truth’ will probably have to suffice. I am suspicious of those who insist upon more. As a hobby, it is okay, but as a discipline upon which consequences hang, no.

There are too many things like ‘the sum of all positive natural numbers is -1/12.’ Sounds crazy, no? Yet it is deduced from human reasoning on concepts of infinities, specifically ‘divergent series of infinities.’ Because they can yield such weird results, they have tongue-in-cheek been called ‘of the devil.’

You needn’t get overly technical on most things.

A favorite line of mine is, “You don’t have to know everything.” It is not original. I read it in a context involving today’s failing schools. (Ours was a homeschooling family) But it packs a lot of punch. You don’t have to know everything. Yet most of contemporary society carries on as though you do.

The Chesterton quote applies: 

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

3 minutes ago, Srecko Sostar said:

Do all cake ingredients have the same importance (in general and for you)?

Do you believe there is a God so that your interrogations would have any relevance here?

31 minutes ago, Many Miles said:

The irony of these two disparate treatments of parts versus whole is that the society also teaches that blood is considered to be equivalent to life (soul). Yet it treats what makes up the two disparately.

Most people can see that denominator makes a difference. Thus, while 1/4 and 1/100 are both fractions, most people can appreciate a difference.

For that matter, whole blood is technically a fraction; 1/1 

46 minutes ago, JW Insider said:

but just don't go around claiming that you are still abstaining from blood

I’m not sure why not. As much belly-aching as there is about GB being ‘pharisaical,’ here we seem to want them to be Pharisees.

Three things govern my thinking on fractions: 1) you shouldn’t have to be a microbiologist to serve God, 2) you can’t serve God when you’re dead, and 3) if they can’t figure it out, neither can I.

I’m been surprised to find I am apparently in the minority in my position. This is why I queried about a breakdown of Bethelites regarding fractions but nobody seemed to know. ‘It’s not a cake until you mix the (minute) ingredients’ works for me but it is apparently the minority view.

I was especially amazed that people could spin fractions as a money thing. It just made so much sense to me that blood is blood, yet fractions can be so minute as to liken them to those traces remaining when you drain an animal, that I never thought to go beyond that obvious comparison. ‘Eyeball it’ is what you said previously. To insist people go beyond that seems to me pharisaical.

Beyond the dilemma to booze it up or not booze it up before the teetotalers (or alcoholics), this matter of fractions is the other ‘approved, (in the sense of being publicized,) use of conscience. We kind of gravitate to rules, even though we know rules quickly get out of hand. I think of the brother who quipped about the ‘Letters from Readers’ feature in those old Watchtowers:

“I just read the question,” he said, “then skip to the bottom to see if I can do it or not.”

He did quip. Honestly and truly, it was a quip. But there is also some truth in it.