United Nations and Watchtower plus 92nd class of Gilead

[Srecko Sostar]

 

[Pudgy]

If there are any “dots to connect”, an isolated tourist tour to the U.N. is not one of them. 

I visited Disneyland once.

That does not make me a Mousekateer.

[Pudgy]

… I would be more concerned about that E.T. addressing the United Nations Security Council ….

[Pudgy]

Yeah …. i remember Eric Wilson …. he played a soccer ball in the Tom Hanks movie “Castaway”.

Central Casting wanted to use a golf ball named Robert Titalist, but as it turned out he could not swim.

 

[JW Insider]

On 8/20/2023 at 6:40 AM, Srecko Sostar said:

 

I've mentioned before that I was a "Gilead Tour Guide" from 1978 to 1981 for several different classes. I wasn't assigned the UN visit (and I don't recall that there was one at that time) but I took them on tours of NYC including the Financial District (Wall Street area) and Midtown: Rockefeller Center & Central Park & 42nd Street Library. That tour included an old St Patrick's cathedral (Prince & Mott) downtown, and the huge "new" St Patrick's cathedral in Rockefeller Center. We didn't go in the smaller one downtown to avoid attracting attention as a conspicuously large group of JWs in a relatively smaller church, but we always took the entire group into the much larger St Patrick's cathedral in Rockefeller Center (5th & 51st).

The fact that there were tours of the UN doesn't mean anything. Just like going into St Patrick's church didn't mean we were turning Roman Catholic. I do remember that there were sometimes one or two who wouldn't go in to the church. They were free to wait in front for the rest of the group to finish. The more vocal of the Gilead students would ask why we were going in: "What if Armageddon comes when you are inside?" One of them once tried to convince a couple others that this might be a test to see who would "fall for it" and go inside. What was most memorable to me was that some wanted to wait directly across the street so they wouldn't even be on the same block. They ended up standing under and next to the large statue of the Titan "god" Atlas, as if he would be strong enough to save them, while Jehovah somehow would not be able to protect anyone who had chosen to look inside a cathedral.

[Pudgy]

AND … nobody had to wear Mickey Mouse ears …. either!

[JW Insider]

[Srecko Sostar]

13 hours ago, JW Insider said:

The fact that there were tours of the UN doesn't mean anything.

Does this mean that this post from another channel is not a forgery or an exaggeration or a fraud? That the picture and the letter are authentic?

13 hours ago, JW Insider said:

go in to the church.

I remember that even in my time (70s) there were controversies and questions about entering the churches of "Babylon the Great". From the fact that "real Christians" have nothing to look for there, and especially not to listen to their sermons, to the fact that it is just a visit to artistic and historical monuments and that it has no significance. Although, on the other hand, JWs run away from everything that has "pagan origins". It means somewhat contradictory and uneven thinking.

[JW Insider]

39 minutes ago, Srecko Sostar said:

Does this mean that this post from another channel is not a forgery or an exaggeration or a fraud? That the picture and the letter are authentic?

I don't think I ever saw a Gilead tour letter for a U.N. tour. But the ones I have seen are very similar, and there is nothing in the writing or format of this one that looks odd. It's very much like the other letters that came out of the Gilead office in the 70s and 80s. When I pull out some of my old boxes of papers, I can post an almost identical memo/notice that was given to all Gilead students.

[JW Insider]

1 hour ago, Srecko Sostar said:

to the fact that it is just a visit to artistic and historical monuments and that it has no significance.

Most Witnesses would agree that just visiting a church for the artistic or historical significance is not a problem. When I worked in NYC (1984 to 2014) I worked at 787 7th and then for about 2 years in our auditing department offices at 30 Rockefeller Center (aka "30 Rock"). From my window you could always see St Pats church on the next block and an even closer xmas tree for about 2 months out of every year. On my lunch hour I'd go to various free operas and classical musical performances at St Patrick's, or even a couple blocks further up 5th ave to a large Presbyterian church for its lunchtime concerts. These weren't religious at all, although some Witnesses wouldn't even listen to Bach or various operas because of religious backgrounds and overtones. The acoustics and echoing make many types of music sound amazing inside one of these cathedrals. Choral especially. It might be wrong, but I'll take my Gregorian chantses.

[TrueTomHarley]

17 hours ago, JW Insider said:

The fact that there were tours of the UN doesn't mean anything. Just like going into St Patrick's church didn't mean we were turning Roman Catholic

Do these ones who allege a conspiracy re Watchtower and the UN ever posit a reason for such a NGO registration beyond a snafu?

[JW Insider]

3 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Do these ones who allege a conspiracy re Watchtower and the UN ever posit a reason for such a NGO registration beyond a snafu?

For some, I think it must be like the reason they tie C.T.Russell somehow to Freemasonry. There is absolutely no reason to think that CTR was a Freemason just because he was familiar with some of their terminology and dabbled in silly pyramidology. But to a lot of people, Freemasonry means "demon" and "demon-control" and therefore it means something much worse than it would have meant, if Russell had been an actual Freemason. 

The same goes for those anti-JWs with a 'no-better-than-average' sense of pareidolia (people who see people and faces in everyday objects). When they look at pictures in the Watchtower of clouds or trees or bushes or patterns on cloth or in woodwork or this or that or the other, they see deformed faces and think of demons. I think these same people are a bit paranoid, too, so that when a real cloud in the sky looks like a puppy they wait for the cloud to grow and change and shift and distort and only notice it when it looks like a werewolf to them. 

I have a sense that they want to dismiss the success of JWs and assign it to demonic forces and this somehow rationalizes it for them. (Seeing Jehovah's obvious blessing in something and then trying to say it was from Satan and his demons is, in my mind, the primary definition of 'sinning against the holy spirit.')

I say this because the answer is yes, they often do posit a reason. I just got sucked down a reddit-hole last night looking for the answer to the same question. And it's sometimes related to the idea that if the UN really is a [demon-inspired] beast of Revelation, then the Witnesses are sucking up to the beast for whatever favors the beast would grant them. 

For the most part, however, it's just mentioned as a show of hypocrisy and sloppiness (as opposed to faithfulness and "discreetness"). I saw a comparison of the directive by the WTS that Malawians not buy a 25 cent national ID card over which Witnesses were killed, and the nonchalant sign-up to a 1991 NGO application that said the NGO participant would 'support the mission' of the UN. 

Some posited that it was for free international flights to troublespots (I highly doubt it), higher visibility when getting involved in humanitarian aid, a way of highlighting support for UNICEF (for children) at the same time that trouble began brewing over child protection in congregations. 

Ciro Aulicino is the guy who signed up for it along with GB member Lloyd Barry. Several on the forum know these brothers and know that Ciro, at least, was prone to lapses in judgment, but always with a good heart and for a good reason. When he first moved from the Service Dept to the Writing Dept he immediately began setting up a regular schedule where he was at one of the major libraries for nearly a whole day at least once a week. He had no qualms about taking material for his public talks directly from 18th and 19th century authors and commentaries. His Awake! and Watchtower material would often start out with statistics from outside sources. He must have thought that the UN had the best statistics about various nations and international data. 

Personally, I absolutely believe the WTS's explanation that it was all about access to the library. Any non-profit organization could already have standard access to the UN library, but the library was also a pre-Internet source of information about past, present and future UN backed seminars and reports, and therefore the advantages of becoming an NGO would have been seen as tempting. Those seminars are related to world health, world crime, natural disasters, religious persecution, holocaust memorials, etc., and are attended by writers, researchers, journalists and other religious and political organizations, too. In fact, the WTS still attends seminars that are backed by UN NGO's because it can help highlight the WTS's own involvement with some of these same issues.