Conscience individual and collective

[xero]

15 minutes ago, JW Insider said:

There are other ways --for free-- to get names tied to addresses tied to phone numbers, and these are usually about to 90% up to date. When you sort them by address you can get entire apartment complexes. My son is an attorney and merely requested them through FOIA and has on separate occasions, obtained the entire counties of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Nassau (Long Island). You can't legally use the data for any specific non-political purpose, and you definitely can't use it to look up specific people one might wish to know about. But, if I looked at it closely, I could even tell you whether a specific Witness voted in a previous election.

Of course voting even from a secular perspective as an individual is statistically meaningless. You'd be better off becoming your own lobbyist, influencing through campaign funding efforts and the like, and even that is generally not worth the time unless you're going to try to make a living off being a parasite on the beast.

[Pudgy]

.... most dogs have an IQ of about 120, but remember that you have to divide that by seven.

[TrueTomHarley]

2 hours ago, JW Insider said:

But, if I looked at it closely, I could even tell you whether a specific Witness voted in a previous election.

Uh oh.

So much for the mystery of how Dr Max “Ace” Inhibitor landed that vote for County Coroner.

[Pudgy]

In Finland the government considers any suppression of the right to vote to be a violation of basic human decency and God-given rights of dignity and self determination. As such as they threatened Jehovah’s Witnesses with revocation of the charity status if they were involved with anything and violated basic human rights. Jehovah’s Witness charity status entitles them by law to siphon off tax money in relationship to how many parishioners they have and in this case it’s about $12 million a year. The Society does not want to lose that money, so they have made a dispensation for Finnish Jehovah’s Witnesses, and there’s no congregational sanctions of any sort if a Witness wants to vote in Finnish elections.

I know of one brother locally who the Elders called him up and ask if he had voted because they saw he was a registered voter. He related the incident above and they had nothing to say.

[JW Insider]

2 hours ago, César Chávez said:

People can charge you for stocking or harassment. Funny, how your son, doesn't give you good advice. Thanks for the photo image.

That's why, when I have taken on any consulting work that makes use of VRDB, DHCR, RSA, BLS, Property Tax rolls, Census data, etc, I always jumble any names to be unreadable before collapsing to tables or linking the tables for queries and analysis. Legally I don't have to, but this is done to reduce liability in case a laptop is stolen or I need subcontractors.

Also, that wasn't a photo image when I shared a part of the data file layout here. It is editable text, but it only shows some of the 200 or so fields.

[JW Insider]

25 minutes ago, Pudgy said:

they saw he was a registered voter.

Many communities in the US have websites where one only needs to type in a name and address and if you are a registered voter it tells you where to vote and displays some information about your registration. No one else but the voter is supposed to use this information. In the US, it should be very unusual for elders to "know" that someone in the congregation is a registered voter without misusing data.

[TrueTomHarley]

46 minutes ago, Pudgy said:

for Finnish Jehovah’s Witnesses, and there’s no congregational sanctions of any sort if a Witness wants to vote in Finnish elections.

Nor is there anywhere else. 

[Pudgy]

Of course, neither Dogs or Jehovah's Witnesses vote.

For Dogs it is because of the failed French Poodle rebellion of 1870, and we have had to eat from dishes on the ground, since then.

[Anna]

10 hours ago, xero said:

 

A person can be faithful and quite frankly bored by material which is repetitive and containing nothing novel. It's not surprising that when you are truly interested in the material, that you eventually "make the truth your own" and strike off in some ways exploring areas not of interest to the average.

This doesn't mean you're a "bad person" or "unfaithful" or even "unappreciative". It just means that you're not learning disabled or perpetually fascinated by spiritual milk

Yes. I think this is pretty much the reason some of us like to come here (and even more so the closed club where we can discuss deeper things without the distraction of opposers). If one has been in the truth for a long time, and has had much experience in the truth, then the basics just repeated over and over are not enough for some. There are always new things to learn! And sometimes these things can be a bit controversial and frowned upon by others, but I don't feel bad, in fact I feel positively enlightened 😀

[Anna]

12 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

since I took Anna’s counsel (Do not feed the troll) to heart and blocked him

Well I didn't say you should block him, just not respond. But I guess you have no self control Tom, so if blocking is what it takes then that's the way to go 👍😀

[xero]

24 minutes ago, Anna said:

Yes. I think this is pretty much the reason some of us like to come here (and even more so the closed club where we can discuss deeper things without the distraction of opposers). If one has been in the truth for a long time, and has had much experience in the truth, then the basics just repeated over and over are not enough for some. There are always new things to learn! And sometimes these things can be a bit controversial and frowned upon by others, but I don't feel bad, in fact I feel positively enlightened 😀

I see a problem in isolating ones thoughts from those around us, however. On the one hand we could be exploring areas which are faith-building to us, but not touched on in any depth by the society and there are some who have controlling personalities who view with a jaundiced eye this sort of thing.

I remember years ago when I took the Bible tapes the society produced and with the aid of the Aid Book and the societies other materials, I spliced the recordings of all the synoptic gospels into one long, but completely chronological account. Then when I was running or driving about I'd listen to these.

The brother who was my book study conductor at the time submitted that this "de-canonized the scriptures". I ignored him of course.

But if no one knows what we're thinking and reading and we have no parity with others with whom we share common beliefs we could easily become lopsided. We are also engaging in a hierarchical judging of sorts w/regard to our brothers and sisters, rating some more highly than others because these share our viewpoints on these matters.

Quite frankly I'm not sure there's a perfect solution to any of this. I know from experience that there are things I think about that others would  consider off, and even wrong, but I can't help thinking what I think when I think what I thing to be true. I can't "un-believe" or "un-think" or "un-see" things I've come to see. But because I don't feel comfortable in sharing does that say more about me or about them, or is this just the human condition that we'll always have to contend with on this side of armageddon? I don't know.

It does feel a bit like sneaking around though. I've found myself even annoyed at times when listening to some brothers insert their own opinions which are simply one of many ways of applying a given scripture as if there was only one right way during meetings and madly scribbling my annoyances in detail in my personal notes (good thing no one has found them - instead it may simply be that others would see Bro X furiously taking notes and imagining these were notes of approval, when at times it's just the opposite, especially if it's when there's some idolatrous worship being given of organizations or men in certain positions as I've never held anyone in high regard as I know Jehovah could "raise up children to Abraham" from the dust of the ground and as Jesus said "no one is good, but God" so any hint of creature worship gets me pissed off. )

[Pudgy]

9 minutes ago, xero said:

I know Jehovah could "raise up children to Abraham" from the dust of the ground and as Jesus said "no one is good, but God" so any hint of creature worship gets me pissed off. )

..... I know ... I feel the same way about cats.