Juan Rivera

Why do a re write….its good and truthful….it would help others who have been hurt…..

There could never have been a Mission Impossible without him.
 
No, but organizing does seem consistent with giving God a lot rather than giving him a little
It may be that as long as you don’t work to sabarolf organization, as though a freedom fighter, you’re okay—even as you stand apart from it yourself. Or it may not be okay. I’ll err on the side of sticking with what my experience tells me has worked to a reasonably fine degree, given that ‘we have this treasure in earthen vessels.’ I remember giving that talk on ‘Unified or Uniform,’ contrasting the unity of the earthly organization with the uniformity often demanding by nations, which goes so far as to stuff people into actual uniforms.
Yeah—I always figured it was something like that. You said it well:
It makes a difference, doesn’t it? It’s a little bit like coming back from the dead when you finally get back on your feet.
I put the following in ‘No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash,’ a book I took down pending rewrite that I haven’t gotten around to, so now it is nowhere:
“After studying one book seemingly written for no other purpose other than to harp on dress and grooming and harangue about field service, the conductor said to me: “Tom, why don’t you comment? You know all these answers.” It was a turning point. He was right. I did know them all. It was time to stop sulking. From the circuit overseer on down, they had stirred up major chaos in the family. They had been heavy-handed and clumsy - but never malicious. And it had never been Jehovah. I had read of ill-goings-on in the first-century record. Congregations described in Revelation chapters 2 and 3 were veritable basket cases, some of them, but that did not mean that they were not congregations. Eventually things smooth out. Eventually 1 Timothy 5:24 comes to pass: “The sins of some men are publicly known, leading directly to judgment, but those of other men will become evident later.” “Later” may take its sweet time in rolling around but it always does roll around. Should I stumble when it becomes my turn? I’d read whiner after whiner carrying on about some personal affront or other on the Internet. Was I going to be one of them? 
 . . . Recovery didn’t happen overnight, for I have a PhD in grumbling. Indeed, I was so good at it that few noticed I grumbled, for I had never left the library – I had only strayed from the same page. Now it was time to get on the same paragraph. Was that book truly a dog? They’re not all dazzling flashes of light, you know, for the treasure is contained in earthen vessels. Or was it the conductor? Or was it me? No matter. If life throws you for a loop, you thank God for the discipline and move on. “For those whom Jehovah loves he disciplines, in fact, he scourges everyone whom he receives as a son,” the Bible says Tell me about it. “Half of those at Bethel are here to test the other half,” the old-timers said. Yeah – tell me about that, too.”
Everyone has a mid-life crisis or two, during which they have to reassess. It doesn’t even matter if it is a servant of God we’re speaking of. Everyone has a mid-life crisis.

I’ve been there and experienced such pain that lead to a death….you are speaking with a sister that was engulfed with a huge amount of anger and resentment and righteous indignation which led to my two ears of inactivity…….its a long story but eventually I had to reason out that I came into the truth knowing all these things existed within the org….why do you think we have the Judas types….the haughty…the cruel even amongst us.
Unfortunately they tend to have a lot of power within congregations.
Jehovahs people are no different to his people of old times….once I got a grip on that..and working on my feelings .( which I might add they caused ) …I guess I was and still am being refined by fire….and I am NOT going to let those sorts of men push me out where I know Jehovah led me.
 
 
 

Yes. True. An unavoidable observation. We should all learn from one another.

I can assure you, that's not the majority reason.
 
This is closer to the majority reason. Just how many brothers has the GB fail to 'back up' over the years for trying to do right, even going to far as to beg for their help to understand why the GB is teaching certain things it teaches and imposes under pain of being ostracized by close family and friends? You tell me. 

He was playing with words when he said this…because the question was addressed to the GB specifically….he could say such a statement because he knew within the org there were many others who claimed to be anointed and the great crowed who were speaking on behalf of jehovah/ bible ….at this time the witness followed the GBs understanding that you had to be baptised witness to survive.
That has now changed,,,,as it should be.
nearly everything he said was nullified later by the rest of the GB.
he was caught on the hop….he didn’t expect to be part of the commission.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was lying..more like acting like Abraham when he claimed Sarah’s as his sister….technically he wasn’t lying as they were actually closely related ( cannot remember how close ) .
I think when he got back to HQs he got into hot water over some of his statements.
But  I also think the GB acted cowardly and it was an embarrassment to us that one of them didn’t willingly take part in that to back their brothers up.
We have a great shortage of brothers to take the lead over here ..they literally begged them to step up to the mark…..I cannot but think….it was fear as to what the courts could do to them.
 

…. there is no substitute for victory.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Yes. I’m familiar with those merry-go-rounds. I don’t ride those rides.
Here I have no goal of settling or resolving any disagreement(s). Were that to happen? Fine. But I’m here to share and learn. 

I think it would seem to be quite presumptuous to say that we are the only spokesperson that God is using. Not my words. But I agree with the sentiment.
The early Christian church found it difficult to think there were people whose worship God accepted outside Judaism and outside Christianity. But God showed them different. There's no reason to think these worshipers were particularly organized. They were just living life in a way God accepted. How we live our life is our worship, not what organization we do or do not belong to. Just think about all the good that came from how Job lived his life, and this despite him having no advertised affiliation with any organization.
Asserting we must be organized to get things done is a slippery slop, and oftentimes the sentiment has ended up hurting people because too late folks discovered an organization had an underlying operating arrangement different than they were either allowed to or led to believe. God is not dependent on humans organizing to get His will done.
Because people organize to get things done does not mean to get things done you have to be organized. Because someone does not organize does not mean they don't care about getting things done; it just means they don't organize. That said, unity within an organization is not because of uniformity. To the contrary, unity is continuing within a common cause despite holding differences.
I'm not anti-organization. I am for rationality and transparency. Any organization whose primary purpose is to help people follow Jesus should be completely transparent and rational in all things. We find these attributes in the early Christian church.
 

To be fair, I have ADD, and a 77 year old with ADD really needs to write with crayons.

Whoa! once again! Georgie, I fear you will not believe this, but I really did not know @JW Insiderhad employed the trick in the very message he was speaking of it! I even wondered why the quote box appeared too big for the words contained. Ah, well, it’s just some sort of pesky technical snafu, I told myself, and manually shortened the box.
I mean, this is like finding a decoder ring in your Cocoa Puffs. I’m taking the next month to comb through all too-long text boxes in search of them.

Whoa! It’s sort of like discovering, not only that the hand really wrote, “Mene mene tekel parsin, You fink!” but that Belshazzer clandestinely downvoted the remark.

Just to show @Thinkingthat we are thoroughly attuned to ‘down under,’ here are some pictures we took at the Columbus Zoo:


No. He is probably more like this guy:

Yes koalas are very cute but they have a big problem with STDs which I think they are trying to eradicate …..I wouldn’t hold one ..but one day ..it’s a sure thing….i don’t think pudgy looks as cute as that when he awakes…

You blockhead. I mean, Duh, if anyone discards belief in God they necessarily focus on only the inconveniences of being Christian in the present system, which no Witness would ever deny there are some, but they are compensated by realities to come.
If there really is a God, and if there really will be a new system in which He rules unopposed, then he will enforce his own standards. Just like during that circuit assembly in the early 70’s in which two resurrected ones were bellyaching over everything under the sun, impervious to the correction that the loving elders (who weren’t packing guns) were pouring on like syrup, then the lights went out, there was a loud zap and a flash from heaven, and they were gone! Oh, yeah—a ‘dramatization’ it was.

When I wake up from a nap, I get dressed, and take myself for a walk ….

Well, there’s plenty in Australia worth fighting for, like this guy:

Be honest. Doesn’t this remind you of Pudgy awakening from a nap?
I dunno. I think of that verse where Jesus said God hides things from the wise and intellectual, while revealing them to babes. Can a babe understand the above? I’m not sure I can myself.
 

I tend to break Juan’s and even JWI and their writing up in paragraphs at a time..just cannot do it in one hit …but it’s usually worth it even if I don’t understand everything…

I have not a clue as to what Juan Rivera was trying to say, and individually, I understood every word. 
It was hard work trying to stay focused, perhaps because I was well aware that that style of writing, and length of writing, is often deliberately used to induce hypnosis. 
I did try.
HEY! This calls for a CARTOON! 
 

Within the Christian tradition, there is nothing inconsistent about these two statements. Except for a few scattered early mentions—no more than mentions—in early history, there is no place in which one can learn of Christianity but the Bible.
The ‘lies’ and ‘false teachings’ of the vast bulk of Christendom can immediately be identified as such. That the ‘soul’ is mortal and dies when the person dies, that with a single exception, ‘hell’ come from one of three original language words, none of which mean eternal suffering. That Jesus’s followers should be ‘no part of the world,’ whereas most Christian churches are fully part of the world—that God is not one-in-three persons, that the grand overall theme of the Bible is not, ‘be good, so you will go to heaven when you die,’—these teachings can be instantly identified by scripture as ‘false.’
Such ‘false’ religious teaching unfailingly paint those who espouse them into outrageous moral corners—such as ‘comforting’ bereaved parents that the reason their baby died was that God needed another angel in his garden, which is why he picked the very best—your child.
Most of the main teachings of churches are not found in the Bible. It is the attempt to read them in that causes persons to throw up their hands in frustration and even disgust. Deprived of nourishment, flooded with junk spiritual food, inquiring minds are left to scavenge elsewhere. Some settle for atheism, some for agnosticism, some settle on churches that pay scant attention to biblical things in favor of a social gospel, even a political one.
So, they are not just lies. They are harmful lies. They are lies that are near-universal in the church world. The GB has mounted a successful sustained, and worldwide assault on them. To ignore this and instead flail away about mistakes they may or may not have made is astoundingly small-minded to me.

@Many Miles Rationalism does not recognize a higher authority than one’s own reason. Faith based epistemology/fideism, by contrast, makes faith destroy nature by squelching or suppressing the pursuit of truth through reason. Genuine faith is neither destroyed by reason nor destroys reason. Faith is based on the truth, because faith builds on nature, not on a vacuum and because Jehovah the true God we love and pursue is also the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
If a JW is not convinced that the GB to which he is submitted is the teaching authority that Christ established, he cannot exercise faith in Christ through trusting that GB. Faith, to be faith, requires that it be built on the truth. That does not mean that we must understand everything we are believing,  that would be rationalism, and would rule out our faith seeking understanding. But we must have good reason to believe that the GB we are trusting to speak for Christ is, in fact, the GB that Christ authorized to speak for Himself.

@Many Here's just one example of a question determined by the arbitrary choice of regulating texts, when an authoritative interpretative framework is not recognized. See link
 Experimental Theology: Universalism: A Summary Defense
The biggest objection to universalism involves the passages regarding hell in the bible. However, there is no doctrinal teaching that doesn't have contradictory tensions within the biblical witness. Witness the hermeneutical and exegetical diversity within the Christian tradition. In short, universalists are not in any unique position. This is the way it is with just about any doctrine.
The issue, then, ultimately boils down to which biblical texts will regulate doctrinal choices. For example, which of the two passages regulates your doctrine regarding female leadership in the church?

"I do not permit a woman to teach, nor have authority over a man." (1 Timothy 2.12)
"There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3.28)
If you are a Complementarian Passage #1 regulates your understanding of Passage #2. If you are an Egalitarian Passage #2 regulates how you understand Passage #1. And there is no way to resolve any debate between the two camps as these are meta-biblical choices.
A similar thing holds for the soteriological debates. Universalists have regulating passages that frame how they understand the texts about hell. Here are four regulating texts for universalists:

"God is love." (1 John 4.8)
"For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross." (Colossians 1.19-20)
"When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all." (1 Corinthians 15.28)
"For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all." (Romans 11.32)

As with the gender texts one has to choose regulating texts about hell. And these are meta-biblical choices. People who believe in a classical vision of hell will read the four passages above through that lens. Universalists, by contrast, will read the texts on hell through the lens of these four passages. That is, they will teach that hell must:

Be a manifestation that "God is love."
Be a means to "reconcile all things" to God
Allow God to be "all in all"
Provide a way for God to "have mercy upon all"

@Many Miles Sorry for the delayed response. I was out of pocket most of these past few days. I’ve been following up during work, but I hadn't really thought about your responses. When I open the forum, I feel as though an entire river is washing over me. I hardly know where to find my feet and focus; everything seems to be coming at me at once😂. All I can hope to do here is focus as narrowly as possible on the issue I previously raised, so that we can have some chance of picking out and fairly evaluating what's most relevant. Please note I'm not so sure I will succeed doing that. 
I do agree that Scriptural statements should not be a wax nose that can be turned any which way by those interpreting or that Scripture become in effect whatever one wants to it say.
 
I believe the Scriptural text does possess meaning that we can access. But accessing that meaning requires bringing the proper interpretive framework to the text. It seems the first two options you have listed here do not exhaust the possibilities. From my view, we do not have to choose between a self-appointed authority and someone who can make a reasonable case for his interpretation. A third option is that we could choose to submit ourselves to those with teaching and juridical authority. According to Scripture faith is a different stance, believing not because we can see for ourselves that it is true or because we ourselves witnessed it being delivered directly from God or because we independently verified that these claims were directly delivered by God, but because of the divine authority of the ones speaking. This is how the people in the Hebrew Scriptures believed Moses. And so likewise when Jesus said to Thomas in, John 20:29 and then in John 17:20.
So my submission to a divinely authorized Governing Body depends on the truth that this GB is in fact divinely authorized, just as a our faith in what the Bible teaches always depends on the truth that the Bible is the word of God written. Cults (in that manipulative sense of the term) often take the faith-based path, by forbidding their members from investigating the authority of the cult. That’s not the epistemic state of a JW I believe . Our submission to the GB does not shut us off from the possibility of inquiring into the basis for the authority of the GB. It can’t. Our entire submission to the GB is based on it being actually divinely authorized. This is why there can be (and are) so many rationalist in our midst( I am concerned about this type of rationalism, that if one cannot verify for oneself something that Jehovah or Jehovah's spokesman reveal (Jesus), one does not have grounds to believe it, let alone an obligation to believe it. There's many things we cannot verify to be truth or that are falsifiable when dealing with divine revelation).
Yes, for the Congregation's claims to authority to make sense they have to be reasonable and consistent and faithful, but their authority does not come from their claims being reasonable and consistent and faithful. Epistemology (how we come to comprehend the authority of the Congregation) is not ontology (how the Congregation receives and possesses her authority). The Congregation does not lose her authority when her claims do not make sense to us, otherwise it would have authority only when we agree with what she teaches. Rather, when the Congregation, exercising her teaching authority, teaches something that does not make sense to us, it is we who must trust and seek to grow in our understanding, not the Congregation that in such cases must instead conform to our understanding.
So our continuing openness to the pursuit of truth through reason doesn’t make us rationalists, nor does it mean that we are not really submitting to the GB . Our submission is first to Jehovah , who is Truth, and who has revealed Himself in His Son, through the Congregation . And therefore, our submission is based on the Congregation truly being what and who she claims to be, the Congregation Jesus established.
 

@Many Miles Rationalism does not recognize a higher authority than one’s own reason. Faith based epistemology/fideism, by contrast, makes faith destroy nature by squelching or suppressing the pursuit of truth through reason. Genuine faith is neither destroyed by reason nor destroys reason. Faith is based on the truth, because faith builds on nature, not on a vacuum and because Jehovah the true God we love and pursue is also the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
If a JW is not convinced that the GB to which he is submitted is the teaching authority that Christ established, he cannot exercise faith in Christ through trusting that GB. Faith, to be faith, requires that it be built on the truth. That does not mean that we must understand everything we are believing,  that would be rationalism, and would rule out our faith seeking understanding. But we must have good reason to believe that the GB we are trusting to speak for Christ is, in fact, the GB that Christ authorized to speak for Himself.

Juan,
I just saw your response. I haven't read it yet. But at first glance I saw this, and I want to say how much I respect a person who's willing to give a straightforward answer to a straightforward question.
Now, based upon the above response, I'll read your thoughts on how:
We should believe teaching "x" because of some other reason other than because it's "rational" or "the society says so".
Should be an interesting read. But, I already respect the straightforward answer and wanted to put that out front!