Charles Taze Russell: Dates, Expectations, Predictions, Apologies, Response, Relevance

[TrueTomHarley]

11 hours ago, Witness said:

Really?  Maybe you or JWI can tell me the person's name.  No one here knows me personally.  

….

Just because the GB continually blow it, in their understanding, doesn't mean God hasn't sent a "faithful" slave to get it right.  By the way, Pearl was also tossed out/disfellowshipped 

No surprise there. She has made some converts here though, PSomH, Srecko, and KickFace, for example, fall all over her. @Patiently waiting for Truth,your TrueAnointed has revealed herself. However, I’m not sure she has any doctrine other than expressing jealousy over those who have a bigger stage than she does. And she channels. Where does that come from?

3 hours ago, Thinking said:

Anyone who admits they do not study the scriptures at all but sit with pen in hand and writes answers to questions..not knowing what they will actually write is engaging in automatic writing…or channeling …it is not fromJehovah…

Yes I knew Pearl Personally..and she is a lovely lady….also known by her website….woman in the wilderness…...but nevertheless…what she teaches is without doubt  demon inspired …..and highly dangerous as is anyone who follows her or teaches what she teaches…

I have incorrectly called her ‘woman from the hills.’ My bad.

Seriously, it is such a weird and obsessed sort of writing—I don’t know how anyone can fail to spot a rat. @JW Insider @Arauna @Anna @The Librarian @Pudgy

Given the ‘channeling’ concerns Thinking raised, one would think conversing with a bot would be more productive, not to mention spiritually safer.

[Witness]

1 hour ago, TrueTomHarley said:

No surprise there. She has made some converts here though, PSomH, Srecko, and KickFace, for example, fall all over her.

Such sarcasm, when you have 8 men whom 8 million people fawn over, and who plead for funds to build their empire.  When you have thousands of elders demanding the attention of 8 million people on zoom meetings.  When your thousands of elders like vultures, gather your "service time" over the years.  Who label you as "inactive" if after 6 months you haven't given them anything. ("oh, did you hear that so-and-so is inactive??") Who will send you  behind closed doors if you begin to say anything public about the 8 men, and their falsehoods, that 8 million people fawn over. 

Sarcasm - has a Greek root - “to tear flesh, bite the lip in rage, sneer.”

You are so good at that, and so is A. Morris.  I wonder how the both of  you sleep at night.  

 

 

 

[Arauna]

1 hour ago, Witness said:

thousands of elders like vultures

Such blanket hate-OCD..... such Christ-like language......... definitely NOT anointed! ! !

[Srecko Sostar]

What WTJWorg and JW members think of C.T. Russell? Maybe they think like this: Some things he understood and interpreted well, and in some he made mistakes. To which category of people does CTR belong according to WTJWorg? Inspired? Guided? Analytical? A seeker of truth? Altruistic? Businessman? Or a little of everything?
It is claimed; The Bible was inspired by God because Bible writers were inspired by God as they wrote.
Does a Bible reader need to be “inspired” to understand the Bible? What kind of biblical text can a Bible reader understand without being “inspired” or even “guided” by God or by the spirit?

Why did Russell come to the conclusion that he understood his position as God’s “FDS”? Because the Holy Spirit told him he was? Why did Rutherford come to the same conclusion for himself? Why did the members of the group of Directors, and later GB, start claiming that God chose them to be "FDS"? Because they were; Inspired? Guided? Analytical? Truth seekers? Altruistic? Businessmen? Or a little of everything?

Question number one is: Do you have to be “inspired” to understand when God says, “Do good, do not kill, help another, go build an ark, flee the city, preach about Jesus, etc.?
Question number two is: Do you have to be “inspired” to interpret events as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy? Do you have to be “inspired” to explain the prophecy and say it will be fulfilled one way or another at specific time period?

To the first question, it would be logical for me if the answer is, "no". You don’t need to be inspired to understand inspired tips/counsels/advises, commandments, prohibitions, and the like.
The answer to the second question is no longer so simple. If you are not “inspired” then you will be mistaken in your interpretations. And, since so many mistakes have been made, it is less worrying to know that those people who run WTJWorg are not "inspired", but it is worrying why so many people allow themselves to be "led" by those people who are not able to understand the Bible well, those people who studies and prayers addressed to God that He “leads” them without “inspiration”.

[Arauna]

17 minutes ago, Srecko Sostar said:

Do you have to be “inspired” to understand when God says

No - you need the spirit of Jehovah to understand and obey.  We must pray often to understand scripture better and to obey - do you?  Do you also ... obey?  Do you gather together with people who worship Jehovah and understand the position of jesus and what his kingdom wll do for us.  Do you regularly preach as we are instructed in scripture to do.  

Criticizing Gb on this forum is not preaching....  I mean talking daily to people about your faith..... 

[Anna]

4 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

it is such a weird and obsessed sort of writing—I don’t know how anyone can fail to spot a rat.

Most of the time I don't read it, and the rest of the time I just skim over it. It's just the same old I've heard a hundred times before......

[Srecko Sostar]

2 hours ago, Arauna said:

2 hours ago, Srecko Sostar said:

Do you have to be “inspired” to understand when God says

No - you need the spirit of Jehovah to understand and obey.  We must pray often to understand scripture better and to obey - do you?  Do you also ... obey?  Do you gather together with people who worship Jehovah and understand the position of jesus and what his kingdom wll do for us.  Do you regularly preach as we are instructed in scripture to do.  

Criticizing Gb on this forum is not preaching....  I mean talking daily to people about your faith..... 

Well, sounds confusing. You feel and claim how spirit of JHVH is requirement for understanding, but in the same time concept of been "inspired" by this same JHVH is something you and other JW members consider as "inappropriate" way and "not possible" way, .... because even FDS is not inspired ... so how would/how could any rank and file member be in this privileged position at all. 

WTJWorg really need to think more about terminology and meaning of specific words that they use and put on opposite sides ... "inspired by spirit and/vs guided by spirit". This two sort of words, that GB put in two sort of concepts that are not same, as they say, speaking about same think in fact. Influence of HS is needed for both models. Or, influence of different sort of spirit.  

When JW's go on to preach uncertain and inaccurate doctrines, by what spirit are they "guided" or !inspired"?

[JW Insider]

8 hours ago, Witness said:

And here is the video.  If the man he spoke to had “notebook after notebook of this stuff”, why does he keep his “knowledge” to himself?  Why doesn't he share it with the GB? 

It was 4:45 am and I decided to watch this video. Very strange. It's the first I ever heard of such a "brother" at Walkill Bethel. While I was at Brooklyn Bethel I never had an opportunity to go to Walkill but once, and that was only to look at a piece of typesetting equipment being designed by some brothers up there. I couldn't believe anyone there had been given so much freedom to work on their own projects, and here was a group of several brothers doing just that, and that particular project (electronic typesetting) turned out to be a great success soon adopted by the WTS.

If someone knew the Walkill Bethel family during the years in question, it wouldn't be too hard to figure out who this man with the notebooks was. If I heard the video narration accurately (at 2.5x speed) it sounds like he had a brother and a wife also at Walkill, and he implies perhaps even another relative. Even at Brooklyn, during the time I was there (1976 to 1982) the turnover rate was very high. A complaint in the Home Office was that Elders all around the country were quick to approve their "problem cases" from their local congregations in the hopes that Bethel would "fix" them. Even the group I came in with had a brother who kept asking me to join his new study group because he realized he was now anointed. I assume there were others. In fact, I knew several brothers who were involved in private Bible study groups usually in the room of a brother from the Writing Dept, or Service Dept, and who were very upset (myself included) that a "crazy" brother was going to ruin this wonderful opportunity to study with highly experienced brothers, because this one "crazy" one was spreading strange ideas that might end up getting all of the private study groups closed down because of "one bad apple." I knew about 10 brothers who had come from my home state in nearby circuits, and three of them returned with serious mental problems, which may not have been in evidence before they were approved to be accepted to Bethel.

So I don't doubt that brothers who had strange ideas about themselves could have existed, and might have been protected to some degree by a close friend, roommate, wife or relative, who was there with them.

But I think the video narration breaks down in accuracy when he talks about Brooklyn Bethel's tunnels as if they were something secret. I was on the tour guide list, so every week or so, I was called away from work to handle one of the tours. Fairly often, I would hear the visitors ask, "Are you really going to show us the secret tunnels???" Or, "Is it true that Bethel has secret tunnels?" And my response was that of course we are going to see them, we'll use them to get between 124, 107, and The Towers Hotel. The main reason for the tunnels was to avoid airing Bethel's dirty laundry. And to avoid airing the clean laundry, too. That's because the laundry room was connected to the tunnels between the buildings, and this way all deliveries of laundry to and from the residence rooms could be rolled through the tunnels and never have to go through the otherwise quiet and up-scale neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. The neighborhood thought it was bad enough that Bethel factory workers crossed back and forth after breakfast, at lunch and dinnertime. (No tunnels to the "117 Adams" factories or "25 and 30 CH Squibb bldgs.") Imagine 1,000 people all crossing the street level at once around 6:55am to be seated for 7:00am text and breakfast!

There was absolutely nothing secret about the tunnels. No places for sinister meetings. They were at least 7 feet high, at least 10 feet wide, well-lit and constantly traversed.

I don't know if or care if "Pearl" begins to respond to people without thinking what she is going to say in advance. That description might be something odd as @Thinking has said, or it might be a lot like the way some of the brothers in Writing or Correspondence (part of Service Dept at the time) answered questions. When a question came in by letter, they were expected to just start writing without referring to notes or any preparation, and I knew brothers who could write pages and pages with scripture references and never prepare for the question specifically. One brother in Writing, who had written large portions of the Aid Book also wrote Watchtower articles and convention material this way, even the study articles. He'd be given a theme to write about and often just started typing at about 70 wpm and ended up with the entire study article, scriptures and all, requiring no edits.

The idea that there were "channelers" at Bethel who were given any credence at all, might be a conflation of mixed up information about the Seola book which the WTS rewrote as "Angels and Women" and actually promoted it as a "channeled" book. There were also the "Radio" therapy machines promoted by the WTS, which were NOT promoted as any kind of spiriitism, but non WTS versions of these machines sometimes were. Then there were opposers of JWs who made much of the admissions by the editor of the Golden Age magazine that he was once demon-possessed which he says caused him to disagree with Russell on an important matter. (It's in a WT-printed letter and a Convention Report.) And, it's a long shot, but some of the conflation could have come from Rutherford himself who had claimed that since 1918, Jehovah's holy spirit was removed from "his holy temple" and now "lightnings" were made to "flash and shine" through direct communication with angels. (That teaching didn't last for too many years.) And then there was one GB member from about 1974 to 2000+ who sometimes (but rarely) suffered from a kind of epilepsy apparently and would appear to be in a kind of trance, which affected his speech patterns. His wife would tell him, "Back to earth, [name removed], come on down back to earth."

I could see how one or more of these things could be twisted into a rumor of the kind that results in stories.

[Patiently waiting for Truth]

23 hours ago, Thinking said:

Im guessing witness and some others will respond to this…waste of time if it’s for my eyes as I don t read any thing written by you….or some others…

That would seem to make you a coward. Push forward your own opinions but frightened to read the opinions of others.

As for being inspired by demons, maybe you should take a closer look at your GB. they prove themselves to be the 'wicked slave' and prove themselves to be saying 'the master is delaying' 

The GB tell the Anointed not to gather together for prayer and Bible study and the GB tell the Anointed that they 'would be working against the Holy Spirit' if they did meet together. Um, so where does your GB get this inspiration from ? 

They admit that they are not inspired of God's Holy Spirit. 

Who would want to stop the True Anoined ones from meeting together for prayer and the study fo God's word ????? 

 

[Arauna]

12 minutes ago, Patiently waiting for Truth said:

Who would want to stop the True Anoined ones from meeting together for prayer and the study fo God's word ????? 

Do you believe you are one of them? Just asking, because you overlook all the other principles in Jehovah's word to champion a cause which is not scriptural. Nowhere in the bible does it say that anointed must be separated, circumcised and uncircumcised be separated, or any other separate groups allowed. It speaks of all brothers and sisters meeting together to build one another up.  There is nothing about separate clubs forming etc.

Actually, the bible says that those who separate themselves are promoting self-interest. 

[Patiently waiting for Truth]

21 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

No surprise there. She has made some converts here though, PSomH, Srecko, and KickFace, for example, fall all over her. @Patiently waiting for Truth,your TrueAnointed has revealed herself. However, I’m not sure she has any doctrine other than expressing jealousy over those who have a bigger stage than she does. And she channels. Where does that come from?

Oh dear Tom. Get well soon. You have a problem in your heart it seems.

I said it so many times before but it seems I need to say it again. TOM loves to groupe people together and then put one big label on them. It makes him feel good, gives him a 'kick' of some sort.  The reason seems to be that just because Tom is part of a flock of misled sheep, he thinks that everyone else has to be. So dear old Tom finds the need to put us in a flock. This this he's chosen @Witness. Previously he'd chosen @JW Insider. Who will you group us with next time Tom ?

The True Anointed will prove who they are when Christ choses to make it happen.  The remnant are part of His body, and HE will give them 'power' to do what needs to be done.  I'm quite happy to be mocked and laughted at whilst I remain patiently waiting for truth.  The other option would be, to be active IN TELLING LIES. 

 

[Arauna]

8 minutes ago, Patiently waiting for Truth said:

Oh dear Tom. Get well soon

We know this person's writings better than you.  Do now write about what you do not know - you come across as very gullible!