All Eight Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses members are now individually named on two New York Child Victims Act case documents

[Arauna]

17 hours ago, AlanF said:

is just old-time creationism in a tuxedo, as one critic said.

And this is just a punch line.  The proof  is the eating of the pudding...... so solid proof is needed.  

 

16 hours ago, AlanF said:

Animals killing animals for food goes back 550 million years. Is that "good"?

I have a problem with their dates...... but this will open up another subject.  So I leave at that.

 

17 hours ago, AlanF said:

Her reliance on creationist sources

Wrong again!   I look at both sides. You assume that all JWs only drink at mommies JWs  breast..... how silly of you. Some of us grow up and mature.  On the other hand you only drink from the extremely  deceptive bottle of evolution.. and have scorn for anything that points to anything other than that....... now that is NOT smart.........just another religion masquerading as a science. 

[TrueTomHarley]

10 hours ago, AlanF said:

This guy really does think he's funny and astute!

I admit that there is limited value to bringing in Kirk and Picard. But I have sort of been on a kick with them lately elsewhere. Not long ago I flew back from Florida, where I had attended a wedding, and I found myself in the Shatner seat overlooking the wing, but there were no incidents.

I confess that I am having a hard time adapting to Alan. I need some punctuated equilibrium in the worst way. I simply can’t enter that anal world of his and debate him over every syllable, which is plainly his purpose in life. I see what happens to those that do. They hold their own very well, and make powerful points, but it does them absolutely no good. I know he is not a bot (I think I floated that possibility long ago) but he behaves so much like one—impervious to any thought not his own, his replies regularly and machine-like laced with insults and taunts—that I think I could even be forgiven were I to say it again.

10 hours ago, Arauna said:

As I have said before - what is a person like you [Alan] doing on this forum if not  with the single purpose  to irritate

Yes, it would appear that is his purpose. And so he threatens to destroy it will his ill-manners no less than AllanSmith did. Enter a discussion with Alan, and discover that he simply becomes like a hurricane over warm water, yielding nothing, spewing insults, crowing over his intellectual superiority, dismissively uttering the most pompous and overconfident nonsense—that he has “disproved God,” even baiting and laying traps: “Tom, you’re killing me!!!” hoping that I will hurl back something inadvisable about “killing.” He is so transparent as he carries on as though so clever.

I mean, I should ignore the idiot. I know I should. But I come on the forum that I have come to regard as mine and I see his ugly puss doing all the above ugly things and I overshoot. It is good to view life as discipline—whether it is intended that way or not is immaterial—but by viewing it that way you can benefit from the curve balls that it throws at you. So it is with Alan. I will learn to adapt. Or else the Librarian (that old hen) will once more tell me to knock it off and then I will see if I am capable of that or not, or maybe I will hand the torch to Robert Cumulus. He’s plenty smart, let me tell you, and he is waiting in the wings right now.

Man, what an odious character!

[AlanF]

The following narrative was recently posted to the website of a JW critic. It shows that, in addition to the Governing Body's continued inadequate policies regarding Child Sexual Abuse, it continues to practice Adult Emotional Abuse.

 

<<
I was brought into the “truth” in 1969. When married & wanted children I was advised by the else’s & others that now (1973) that because we were so near to the end of this system that it was a really bad idea. I was told how hard it would be to care for a child on the lead up & also through Armageddon.  I was brow beaten, & bullied by many of the brothers & sisters, all bar one, an elderly sister who had also been told back in the 50’s exactly the same thing. Her son & daughter would never have been born if she’d listened to the elders back then, so her advice was this, if you really want children, you must have the faith that Jehovah will see you through.

I went on to have 4 children, who have all left the truth because they were bitterly disappointed in the organisation as a whole. I was a sister for 34 years. I was abused by my husband, witnessed many kinds of terrible things that were covered up, including incest, slander,adultary many forms of dishonesty & thieving . The hypocrisy was rife. One day, sitting in a meeting I looked around me. There was more than 60 witnesses attending. I looked at each in turn & thought of what they were truly like & out of all of them, I knew in my heart that only 4 were truly decent, genuine, honest & loving people. I was just so disgusted that I got up & walked out. I didn’t return for years, then one Sunday, I decided to go to a meeting just to see if anything had changed. After the meeting several sisters gathered around me, telling me how much I’d been missed & how pleased they were to see me because they cared so much. I lived only a few minutes walk from the Kingdom Hall. My street must have been worked many times during those years & yet, not a single member of that congregation, none of those “loving caring sisters” none of the elders, no not a one had ever picked up the phone to talk to me, knocked on my door when they were in the street, NOT A ONE bothered to ask me why I’d left. Bear in mind here that I’d committed no sin, id not been disassociated,, or disfellowshipped.
 
So, total hypocrites  forever.

This religion is nothing but a brainwashing, hierarchical, cult, for people who get off on having a holier than thou attitude. Their teachings can be pulled apart with ease by anyone with a questioning mind. The trouble is that those within the organisation are not ALLOWED to question, or to have an open mind.

MY ADVICE........ STAY WAY, WAY AWAY . I wasted 34 years of life & was treated badly the whole time. I now have bitter regrets that I was ever involved.
>>

 

[TrueTomHarley]

45 minutes ago, AlanF said:

There was more than 60 witnesses attending. I looked at each in turn & thought of what they were truly like & out of all of them, I knew in my heart that only 4 were truly decent, genuine, honest & loving people. I was just so disgusted that I got up & walked out. I didn’t return for years

This is true in my congregation, too. None of them are any good—not even four. They are all villains. They are so hypocritical that they smile at me and say Hello but their scheme doesn’t work. I know they are all backstabbers. It used to stymie me but I have learned to whirl around like Chuck Norris and take them out with a kick to the head when they are doing this, which is always.

 

45 minutes ago, AlanF said:

I was told how hard it would be to care for a child on the lead up & also through Armageddon. 

Today I read that the US population is not having enough babies to reproduce itself, so those pushy Witness elders you speak of must have influenced a lot of people!

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10439803/babies-born-30-year-low-america-fertility/

Every time I meet someone who says, “I would never bring a child into this crazy world,” I curse those Witnesses—making so many people think (through “mind-control!”) that this world is a hotbed of problems when everyone should know that there are none to speak of.

 

45 minutes ago, AlanF said:

I was a sister for 34 years. I was abused by my husband, witnessed many kinds of terrible things that were covered up, including incest, slander,adultary many forms of dishonesty & thieving . The hypocrisy was rife

This is why cop shows are so prolific on television for the last 40 years. Viewers cheer at cops chasing down all those wicked Witnesses who are doing evil things.

(Notice how the above reproduces as: “AlanF said: ‘I was a sister for 34 years.’” Notice how I refrained from saying, “So THAT is your problem! Notice the commendable self-control.)

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

.... as usual ... today's DILBERT Cartoon exactly highlights anything anybody is talking about, today.

... a seemingly endless supply of "cartoons at the proper time".

... eat your ink filled hearts out, Caleb and Sophia!

6 hours ago, Arauna said:

But the Cambrian explosion was too short  and sudden  to produce / originate such a variety of complex animals..... which  brings us back to the " origin" of all species"   

It's turtles .... all the way down.

1 hour ago, TrueTomHarley said:

I admit that there is limited value to bringing in Kirk and Picard. But I have sort of been on a kick with them lately elsewhere. Not long ago I flew back from Florida, where I had attended a wedding, and I found myself in the Shatner seat overlooking the wing, but there were no incidents.

I love it when I recognize an obtuse, arcane reference ... like visiting the Twilight Zone, on an expense account.

[TrueTomHarley]

25 minutes ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

I love it when I recognize an obtuse, arcane reference ... like visiting the Twilight Zone, on an expense account.

Okay. Genuine smile at that one, thank you. I remember that episode. And there is a brother in the hall who recalls how terrified he was at the beautiful woman waking up to see the goons that had done the plastic surgery reconstructing her face. 

You might know that Rod Serling was from Binghamton NY, not too far away from me. I follow his daughter on Twitter. Recently we visited the town, and wrote up all the Twilight Zone memorabilia there:

https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/10/searching-for-the-twilight-zonein-binghamton-ny.html

[The Librarian]

I love tacos.....

 

I'm about to give up on this entire site.

Or....

Maybe there should only be one thread... called Jehovah's Witnesses .... and we have ONLY one singe topic for everybody?

Let's try that....

I'll ask the @admin if we can start a club like that and freeze this one.

Oh... and @TrueTomHarley aka... a million other usernames....

Could I have the address to your blog again? I seem to have misplaced it.... in EVERY SINGLE THREAD ON THIS SITE!

 

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

Sounds good to me .... I had hoped that "The Archive" would really be an archive, but it has changed formats so many times I have no idea how to access postings from five or six years ago. 

[TrueTomHarley]

10 minutes ago, The Librarian said:

Could I have the address to your blog again? I seem to have misplaced it.... in EVERY SINGLE THREAD ON THIS SITE!

Look closer. It’s in there.

(sorry)

Still, many posts on controversial things I have also posted here, word for word. (Not this one about the Twilight Zone, but you must admit it does perfectly fit in with JTR’s comment.) I have no problem retrieving them from your site, and not mine, but I can not find them so easily on yours. The “Content I Started” tab includes all comments on those threads, even AlanF telling me that I suck. If I readily find a list of my headings, I would link from their. Sorry, ma’am, I really am trying to comply

[The Librarian]

2 minutes ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

Sounds good to me .... I had hoped that "The Archive" would really be an archive, but it has changed formats so many times I have no idea how to access postings from five or six years ago. 

Yes... between WT, Google, Tumblr..... This has been the most stable platform yet that I have been able to land on in the last decade.

Sadly though... the "archive" is in Google's hand now....

And the threads don't offer an easy way to find stuff without going through the search feature...

I feel your pain.

I'm open to ideas guys...

[TrueTomHarley]

18 minutes ago, The Librarian said:

Maybe there should only be one thread... called Jehovah's Witnesses .... and we have ONLY one singe topic for everybody?

Let's try that....

I'll ask the @admin if we can start a club like that and freeze this one.

This is just your librarian sense of order kicking in. Far more preferable is the current system, where the topic is adhered to for a time, and even revisited, than a giant-magamall site where nobody will be able to keep up.

[AlanF]

It's painfully clear that Arauna, despite her blustering overconfidence, is an especially unclear thinker. This appears in her posts in many ways, such as responding to things that were never said, all manner of sidestepping and ignoring of arguments, bringing in non sequiturs of various sorts, and even outright lying.

Arauna has also complained that I've not answered her challenges, but anyone who reads my careful and detailed responses knows that's not true. True, I've not responded to some posts, but I've usually commented that those are simply too ridiculous to bother with.

This post will be a case in point. Arauna will ignore almost all of it.

And of course, I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't, with hypocrites like TrueTomHarley complaining that my detailed debunkings are too long, and hypocrites like Arauna complaining that I don't respond at all, with both of them hypocritically failing to respond to most of the content of my posts.

One of the clearest proofs of unclear thinking is Arauna's propensity for cutting out important parts of what she responds to, and only commenting on the misrepresentations that are left. Below we'll see several examples.

Arauna had said, among other nonsense:

Quote

    . . . The argument that atheism can provide morals is false. . .

I responded, in part:

Quote

    As usual you're so far off the beam that you're not even wrong.
    
    Where do you get all this nonsense? Do you just make it all up?

    
Rather than giving an actual answer, Arauna immediately descends into the ad hominem:

Quote

Not much of a thinker are you? Your dismissive attitude proves my point..... You have never thought of these issues in your life before? Just dismissal? .....

But I've given much thought to issues like these. And as I've pointed out before, Arauna really has no idea what atheism entails. She has a grossly skewed view of it, borrowed from her reading of non-JW Christian apologists. To clear that up, note what I told James Thomas Rook on page 50 of this thread:

<<  And while I'm at it, I'll state for the record that almost no religious apologists seem to understand what "atheism" means. While it can mean "belief that no gods exist", most of the time self-described atheists like me mean that "I do not believe in any gods". Do you understand the difference? It's a big difference, because it's not logically possible to know that no "gods" exist in the entire universe, but it's quite reasonable not to believe in any gods, just as it's reasonable not to believe in the Tooth Fairy without being able to prove that it doesn't exist. Remember that most religious people are atheists with respect to all gods but their own. Real atheists just go one god further.

For more on that, read Dawkins' The God Delusion, where he proposes a scale of belief from 1 to 7. Total belief in God rates a 1, total disbelief a 7. He and I claim to be about 6.5. >>

Of course, if Arauna reads that, her eyes will glaze over and she'll pretend she didn't read it, in line with her usual Orwellian crimestop.

Since the most common form of atheism -- non-belief in any gods -- has no precepts about morals or anything else, any more than non-belief in the Tooth Fairy does, statements like "the argument that atheism can provide morals is false" are completely off the beam. It is a complete non sequitur and a straw man, because no atheist claims that his atheism can provide morals. That false claim comes from various Christian apologists who also fail to understand atheism, usually deliberately. It's obviously deliberate because the loudest of them, like William Lane Craig, have all been repeatedly corrected by atheist clear thinkers. But these apologists, like Arauna, are not interested in dealing with facts, but in bashing the critics of Christianity.

Arauna has clumsily confused atheism with humanism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism ) and other philosophies ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_morality ) but these are quite different things.

The fact is that most atheists are a good deal more 'moral' in most rational senses than are most Christians. Atheists do not go to war against one another over differences of opinion about atheism, nor do they kill one another. Indeed, some of the most violent wars and acts of aggression in history have been committed by certain Christian groups warring against other Christian groups. And we all know about the Catholic Inquisition against 'heretics'.

By the way, don't bother trying to claim that Stalin, Hitler, Mao and others committed their atrocities in the name of atheism; this has been debunked hundreds of times.

It's also clear that Jehovah's Witnesses as a group don't morally oppose war and killing. Rather, they oppose taking part in war by anyone besides JWs. The Watchtower Society even argues that JWs are not pacifists, but are neutral in secular affairs. Plenty of JWs would happily take up arms against anyone the Governing Body set them against.

Quote

In  the Seinfeld show the female character used to comment about someone being " spunge-worthy".  By your dismissive attitude of important questions surrounding evolution and atheism..... you are proving yourself  "unworthy " of my time and attention.

I've not dismissed any such "important questions". Rather, I've given detailed explanations on all manner of your false and misrepresentative claims. This is easy to prove:

List four examples where I've dismissed "important questions surrounding evolution and atheism".

You'll never do this, and you'll have proved my charge: you're a hypocritical liar.

On the other hand, I can list dozens of examples where you've ignored or summarily dismissed what I've posted regarding evolution and atheism.

Quote

The most important atheist debaters of our era have taken the time to consider these questions. You are obviously too smart for your own good .......you do not even consider them and give replies like the above......

LOL! Look at the blatant hypocrisy and lying!

Quote

As I have said before - what is a person like you doing on this forum if not  with the single purpose  to irritate...

Not to irritate, but to goad nearly braindead religionists into thinking for the first time in years. JWs have their own echo chamber and rarely go outside it.

Quote

The subject originally was about child molestation and people going to court for perceived negligence.

So? Conversations evolve, and most of this evolution was started by JW apologists like you bringing in other topics in attempts to bash critics.

Quote

Atheists inherited their morals from the Christian-judeo traditions.

In most Western lands, of course.

Wow! A true statement!

Quote

As I demonstrated before - if one believes purely that  there is no God and we come from a soup by chance ..... no amount of logic will give you any morals.

False. See above.
You're confusing morals in general with Judeo-Christian morals, morals that include genocide against unbelievers. Do you really believe that God-dictated genocide is moral?
     

Quote

 

    23 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

    in seeing in all life on Earth the directed hand of God.

At least you acknowledge the design component ......

What is your thoughts on the second law of thermodynamics?   

 

Ah, another reference to the arguments of young-earth and IDish creationism. Rather than detail the reasons why creationist claims about thermodynamics and evolution are completely wrong, I'll refer you to the article "Creationist Misunderstanding, Misrepresentation, and Misuse of the Second Law of Thermodynamics" here: https://ncse.ngo/creationist-misunderstanding-misrepresentation-and-misuse-second-law-thermodynamics