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If Bethel Was in the East and Not the West


TrueTomHarley

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If Bethel was in the east and not the west:

Maybe theocratic warfare would not be so much like John-Wayne—hardening your forehead so the lout throwing a punch breaks his fist on it, a la Ezekiel:

“Look! I have made your face exactly as hard as their faces and your forehead exactly as hard as their foreheads. Like a diamond, harder than flint, I have made your forehead” (Ezekiel 3:8-9)

Why should everyone have hard heads? Maybe they should be more like those of eastern martial arts—duck the punch and the big slob’s own momentum sends him hurtling off-balance, and as he stumbles by you kick him in the rear.

You’re better off yielding than resisting. “Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but yield place to the wrath,” says Paul at Romans 12:19.

Take for example, the charge—detractors say it all the time—that Jehovah’s Witnesses have the highest rate of mental illness of all Christian religions. How in the world are you going to prove or disprove that—at a time when pharma has succeeded in putting 1 out of every 3 Americans on some form of anti-depressant? Drive by the psych ward of the hospital and look inside. Are they all our people in there? No. Usually, there is nobody at all, but sometimes there is one.

Don’t be the western scrapper who says it couldn’t possibly be so. Be the eastern scrapper who embraces it. Say: “Well, maybe you have a point,” and then observe that, if true, Luke 5:31 would account for it: “In reply Jesus said to them: ‘Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but those who are ill do.’” Is he speaking of tuberculosis? Or is mental distress, such as might accompany anguish over the ills of this world and the blame assigned to God for it more to the point? The ones you should worry about are those who are not greatly troubled by the stressors of life today—those who sail blithely through the injustices and cruelties without a care in the world.

What about when the scoundrels say: “If you look at the ‘turnover’ among JWs, you find it is one of the biggest turnovers of all religions.” Don’t say: “No way!” Say: “What do you expect? There is a cost to being a disciple of Christ. Why bother leaving a faith that asks very little of you? Besides, a high attrition rate is easily offset by the high participation rate of those who stick. After all, with many faiths, people might not actually leave, but how would you know if they did?”

Use the blaggard’s weight against him—it is key to every Eastern martial art—it can work for us, too. Take the origins of Christianity. It is plainly a working-class religion, and as to it’s early leaders? “Uneducated and ordinary,” says Acts 4:13 (“untaught and ignorant”—KJV) This is embarrassing to Western religionists. If acknowledged at all (I had never heard it before becoming a Witness) it is treated as an obstacle overcome. “They may have started low, but look how they pulled themselves up!” is the attitude, thus taking for granted that more secular education is what everyone needs. 

The clergy of many faiths bristle with degrees—considered essential as a qualification. The degrees require a broad command of the “humanities.” They often even require an examination of their own topic through the lens of critical thinking, ensuring that faith will lose out, since the two are opposed. A case in point is a series of talks I have been listening to from the Great Courses company entitled: “From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity.” The speaker is Bart Ehrman, Chair of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he with a Masters of Divinity degree. You’d almost think that the Chair of a Religious Department would believe in God, but he does not appear to. If I took a science course taught by one who thought Newton and Einstein were well intentioned but misguided zealots, I would smell a rat.

Questions for Study at the conclusion of one lecture includes: “Why do you suppose such people as Perpetua or Ignatius—who presumably had so much to offer people in this world and who could have no doubt led happy lives here—were so eager to sacrifice their bodies and leave this world?”

Thus he indicates that he does not have a clue as to what he teaches. The entire motivation of a Christian appears to be a totally foreign concept to him, notwithstanding that he is recognized as the smartest person in the room.

Another case in point, which I have not yet expanded upon, though I mean to, is the New York Times review of Amber Scorah’s book—a review written by a faculty member of Harvard Divinity School. It seems pretty clear that she is an atheist. Don’t you go to Harvard Divinity School because you want to learn about God?

https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/08/a-review-of-a-review-of-the-scorah-book-leaving-the-witnesses.html

A third case in point—and a minor one—is those few elective courses I took in religion from my own college days. The professor was a retired Baptist clergyman. I can still hear him chuckling about how at Divinity School, the Gospel of John was called the Gospel to the Idiots on account of it’s simple language. The early disciples might be “untaught and ignorant,” but these characters meant to run rings around them.

Another project for one of his classes was to write a paper about “entering into God’s rest” and how there “remains a Sabbath for the people of God,” as written in Hebrews chapter 4. What was that passage supposed to mean? I ended up taking most of my paper from Watchtower publications. I didn’t want to. It was against the rules to rely on any one “sectarian” source. But I found that I couldn’t help it. None of the other suggested sources made any sense to me. They all struck me as pointless pontificating. 

This would have been in my senior year, and during the summer recess before, I had been introduced to the Bible study of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I had the sense of the puzzle picture coming together and was beginning to glimpse the mountain vista on the box cover. I had no patience for the logical machinations of those whose presentation made clear that their puzzle lay unassembled in the box on their closet shelf.

No. Don’t go groveling over the education that those early Christians didn’t have but which is now thought essential. Tell them to show us the magnificent world that their brand of education has collectively produced before we start fawning over it. Christianity started off as a working class religion. It still is and the leaders of the faith among Jehovah’s Witnesses are still as they were then—“untaught and ordinary.” Don’t hide your head in shame over it. Embrace it. When the “educated” people come along and say: “Okay, here we are, we’ll take it from here,” tell them to take a hike.

(to be continued)

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That doesn't make sense. I repeat what I'm having for dinner at least every month. Doesn't make it rubbish. Just means that it was still useful. Besides, I think he meant that some of it was from his

If Bethel was in the east and not the west: Maybe theocratic warfare would not be so much like John-Wayne—hardening your forehead so the lout throwing a punch breaks his fist on it, a la Ezekiel:

Go back and read it again with more meditation.

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@TrueTomHarley You write a lot of words, as story tellers do, but you say nothing of importance.

Quote "that Jehovah’s Witnesses have the highest rate of mental illness of all Christian religions."

Well I've no idea but it's a shame to know when some commit suicide. Very sad indeed.

Quote "There is a cost to being a disciple of Christ. 

Yes but it is different to the cost of being one of Jehovah's Witnesses. 

Quote " Don’t go groveling over the education that those early Christians didn’t have but which is now thought essential. "

The early Christians were Jews that had a basic education about God and how to serve Him. Then Jesus built on that basic education and taught them what they needed to know for that time. 

Life now is far different and we each live in different lands. Christians are Earthwide. 

As for further education well it may be that some folks need it to earn a living. Life is not as simple as it was in the first century.

This has all been said before but :-

Basic education never taught Hebrew or Greek to working class English folks, nor probably American folks.

Basic education never taught working class folks about how to make Blood Fractions or how to discuss medical procedures, or how to build cell salvage machine. 

Basic education for working class folks never taught how to design and build massive structures such as a 1.6-million-square-foot headquarters in Warwick, New York.

Basic education is just what it says on the tin. It is a foundation. A beginning of learning. 

Quote "Christianity started off as a working class religion. It still is and the leaders of the faith among Jehovah’s Witnesses are still as they were then—“untaught and ordinary.” "

Does that include the Lawyers in USA that represent the Watchtower / GB / JW Org ?

In the first century they said simply 'We must obey God as ruler rather than men' 

BUT Now they consult their lawyers / solicitors / accountants  et al, BUT you try to pretend it is still the same. 

 

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On 12/27/2019 at 12:52 PM, TrueTomHarley said:

“Look! I have made your face exactly as hard as their faces and your forehead exactly as hard as their foreheads. Like a diamond, harder than flint, I have made your forehead” (Ezekiel 3:8-9)

Why should everyone have hard heads? Maybe they should be more like those of eastern martial arts—duck the punch and the big slob’s own momentum sends him hurtling off-balance, and as he stumbles by you kick him in the rear.

Everybody today are pansy studded sheep, at least among our contemporaries ... but back then, it was common knowledge that if you were in hand-to hand combat with another person for your life, that the forehead is the hardest bone on your body, and you do not stand off and do fisticuffs.  You get in close, and you get in fast, and you have daggers in your hands, and you fight with your weight, smashing their face with your forehead. Do it hard enough and you can smash the nose through the bottom of the skull, into the brain, and hopefully blind your adversary with his own blood.  ALSO, you fight with your elbows, being MUCH harder , and harder to damage than your fist and fingers. For massive blows, fingers often break before the other guys jaw, but an elbow is stronger than a jaw.

Also, an edged weapon, such as a sword, or a cudgel, such as a bat, is ineffective at contact distances ... but if you are fighting with your forehead, elbows and two daggers,  you want the combatant's blows to hit your arm at a glancing angle, not at 90 degrees, where either a bat or sword can sever your arm off, more readily.

The rest depends on divine providence, and pure dumb luck.

Now... go out and have a nice day !

.... and be sure to floss regularly.

 

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5 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

smashing their face with your forehead...smash the nose through the bottom of the skull, into the brain, and hopefully blind your adversary with his own blood...Also, an edged weapon, such as a sword, or a cudgel, such as a bat, is ineffective 

Of course! Everybody knows that.

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9 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

Also, an edged weapon, such as a sword, or a cudgel, such as a bat, is ineffective at contact distances ...

When you selectively edit to change the meaning of reference material, you may qualify to get a job with the FBI to create dishonest FISA Court warrant applications.

Swords and bats can be very effective at arm's length.

But then again, both perspectives are only general rules, and can be disproved by any one example, in a specific instance, depending on divine providence, and pure dumb luck.

I was basically trying to show WHY the scriptures quoted above about having a hard forehead made instant sense to a person that understands the context of the times, which quite often survival depended on being GOOD at hand-to-hand combat, and today most people would not understand what the Bible writers were talking about.

 

 

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On 12/27/2019 at 12:52 PM, TrueTomHarley said:

at a time when pharma has succeeded in putting 1 out of every 3 Americans on some form of anti-depressant?

Hey, just skimming quickly, but I use my anti-perspirant 1 out of 3 three days, too.  

On 12/27/2019 at 12:52 PM, TrueTomHarley said:

hardening your forehead so the lout throwing a punch breaks his fist on it, a la Ezekiel:

This reminds me of something. Last month, I contacted one of the brothers in the Writing Department who was dismissed in 1981 or so, due to his friendship with R.Franz, and his work on the Aid Book. This brother was dismissed, not disfellowshipped, but it was inconvenient to keep him at Bethel when everything that had been near R.Franz was considered tainted. But the most proficient writers had 'cut their teeth' on the Aid Book project, and were the primary ones being assigned anything Biblical. In fact, this brother and one other brother were the only two who were producing the great majority of all Watchtower study articles. He had reached a point where you could just give him a topic and he could produce the entire ready-to-go typewritten article in just a couple of hours, with all the scriptures cited and it would come back with ZERO marks from proofreading. So Brother Swingle had given him a Special Pioneer monthly stipend and asked him to keep working on some Writing Dept projects, even though he had been dismissed from Bethel.

When I was talking to him last month, we talked about the current state of the Writing Department, and how so many of the older respected writers were "out to pasture" as it were, and no longer active as writers, and how the newer department has more researchers, but even less writers. He is still in contact with some of the writers from the old 1980's team. He claims the newer writers are sometimes too cautious to make any comments about scriptures that haven't been made previously. This makes their output very slow, he says. 

And he has also noticed that a lot of his older work is being re-used, verbatim, which is fine with him of course, but he says it makes him worry about the volume of writing that will need to go into some ambitious video projects he has heard about, many of which will need to include Bible commentary.

I told him I thought that video doesn't need as much writing because it's so visual and the speaking pace is usually very slow. And a lot of dialogue, just like the convention dramas, can just be made up as filler, and most of the audience would be able to easily tell what was Biblical and what was dialogue filler.

I had mentioned that the Spanish-speaking churches have done very well with the children in their churches by producing a lot of Bible story video, but I wonder how much of it is "good" as video fodder for children. They can produce cartoon-like battle scenes, or David killing Goliath, etc., but so many of these videos are full of death and destruction. Some of these Bible stories have become cartoons on local Spanish-speaking stations.

At any rate, JTR's and your own comments about Ezekiel, the MMA fighter, make me wonder how some of these anticipated video projects will work out. In other words, how careful will they be to avoid the imagery that JTR just made me consider?

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@JW Insider  The way you write about the Writing Dept' is as if you were writing about a worldly Newspaper office.

I see no sign of spirituality in it at all.  And, re-using old Watchtower material ?  Just feeding the sheep any old rubbish then. Or, completing a new Watchtower article in less that two hours, scriptures included ? Wow, I'm glad I don't go to the KH anymore.

And i can further see the need for the true Anointed remnant to put in place by God through Christ. 

 

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13 minutes ago, 4Jah2me said:

I see no sign of spirituality in it at all.  And, re-using old Watchtower material ?  Just feeding the sheep any old rubbish then.

That doesn't make sense. I repeat what I'm having for dinner at least every month. Doesn't make it rubbish. Just means that it was still useful. Besides, I think he meant that some of it was from his unpublished files, which is why he thought it was curious, but not in a bad way.

13 minutes ago, 4Jah2me said:

Or, completing a new Watchtower article in less that two hours, scriptures included ? Wow, I'm glad I don't go to the KH anymore.

Look at the old Bible Commentaries and Bible Dictionaries by Gesenius, Strong, Elliott, Albert Barnes, Matthew Henry, Vine, Thayer, etc. Now look at how many pages these men must have produced per hour to finish some of these works in their lifetime. Are you saying that anyone who could produce 24 paragraphs in two hours must be doing it wrong? Was it the fact that the supporting scriptures were so well remembered that they got the citations exactly right without having to double-check them? Imagine trying to write a thorough concordance of the Bible in the days before there were any computers or automation to help you out.

13 minutes ago, 4Jah2me said:

And i can further see the need for the true Anointed remnant to put in place by God through Christ. 

Who says they weren't true anointed? All of the persons I referred to claimed to be anointed.

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Quote "Who says they weren't true anointed? All of the persons I referred to claimed to be anointed."

As do your GB, but, by their works you will know them.  

And as for repeating the same stuff, well the JW Org is definitely in the wilderness, so I suppose it's like giving them manna. Problem is it's poisonous manna. 

It used to take me more that two hours to study a Watchtower article, so I would have thought it would take a whole day at least to write one. I suppose there is no relevance as none of it is inspired and therefore only the opinion of the writer. 

 
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6 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

When you selectively edit to change the meaning of reference material, you may qualify to get a job with the FBI to create dishonest FISA Court warrant applications.

Oh, keep your drawers on. I was not trying to offend you (this time)—it’s just that fascination violence that gets me every time.

Proof that my senses are right on this is found in that new manuscript recently unearthed in the dessert—a portion of 2 Chronicles 20, starting with verse 15, that included additional verses never before revealed:

“Pay attention, all Judah and YOU inhabitants of Jerusalem and King Je·hoshʹa·phat! Here is what Jehovah has said to YOU, ‘Do not YOU be afraid or be terrified because of this large crowd; for the battle is not YOURS, but God’s.  16 Tomorrow go down against them. There they are coming up by the pass of Ziz; and YOU will be certain to find them at the end of the torrent valley in front of the wilderness of Je·ruʹel.  17 YOU will not need to fight in this instance. Take YOUR position, stand still and see the salvation of Jehovah in YOUR behalf. O Judah and Jerusalem, do not be afraid or be terrified. Tomorrow go out against them.

”Do not listen to JTR, who says:

15 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

Everybody today are pansy studded sheep, at least among our contemporaries ... but back then, it was common knowledge that if you were in hand-to hand combat with another person for your life, that the forehead is the hardest bone on your body, and you do not stand off and do fisticuffs.  You get in close, and you get in fast, and you have daggers in your hands, and you fight with your weight, smashing their face with your forehead. Do it hard enough and you can smash the nose through the bottom of the skull, into the brain, and hopefully blind your adversary with his own blood.  ALSO, you fight with your elbows, being MUCH harder , and harder to damage than your fist and fingers. For massive blows, fingers often break before the other guys jaw, but an elbow is stronger than a jaw.

Also, an edged weapon, such as a sword, or a cudgel, such as a bat, is ineffective at contact distances ... but if you are fighting with your forehead, elbows and two daggers,  you want the combatant's blows to hit your arm at a glancing angle, not at 90 degrees, where either a bat or sword can sever your arm off, more readily.

The rest depends on divine providence, and pure dumb luck.

Now... go out and have a nice day !

.... and be sure to floss regularly.

 

An amazing find. Do you know that stuff holds up virtually forever in the dessert on account of the dryness?

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