Jack Ryan
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In an act of self-determination, the Wiwa tribe expelled the religious organization for contributing to their “cultural and spiritual extermination."
The Wiwa Indigenous community in Colombia has expelled a group of missionaries from a church built by Jehovah's Witnesses inside their territory, which had been perceived as a threat to the culture, traditions and beliefs of the group.
The Wiwa have internal counselors called "mamos" who have deep influence in their communities and decide on relevant matters affecting them, including religious groups that may threaten local beliefs and customs.
Jose Gregorio Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the community, said the Wiwa are worried about religious organizations wanting to indoctrinate them.
"Religion advances in our territories, our children are losing our customs, they don't want to hear about our traditional law," Rodriguez said in an interview in September for RCN.
The Wiwa are mainly located in the northern states of the country and the name means "warm," which in "damana," the group's language, is used to describe those who come from Colombia's warmer lowlands.
The group ritually use coca leaves as a means of purifying the blood and increasing energy levels throughout the workday. Both religious groups ousted from the territory claim the tradition "abhorrent" and "satanic."
In 1998 the Wiwa expelled a group of evangelicals after they set up a Protestant church on their land in the 1950s, aggressively teaching the community to stop following their traditional deities and embrace the Christian faith.
The United Pentecostal Church of Colombia, who have also been expelled by the Wiwa, also targeted the area and began a program of indoctrinating the Indigenous population.
In 2014, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos signed an executive order that bestows a degree of autonomy on the country's Indigenous peoples, enabling communities to manage their own financial, health, educational and religious issues.
According to Colombia's Ministry of Culture, the Wiwa are a population of just 13,627 people, of which 6,872 are men and 6,755 are women. Seventy-nine percent of its population are under 30 years, and only 2 percent are adults older than 60 years.
The Wiwa mainly work in agriculture and grow and harvest cassava, yams, taro, bananas, corn, beans, sugar cane and coca for family consumption. Coffee is their main source trade.
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BARRINGTON, R.I. — Women clad in yoga pants plan to parade through a coastal Rhode Island town in protest of a man who said the attire looks tacky and ridiculous.
The women plan to hold a parade Sunday in Barrington to show they can wear whatever they want.
Their outrage is in response to a letter that town resident Alan Sorrentino wrote to the Barrington Times about his dislike of yoga pants. He said women over age 20 shouldn't wear them.
"Yoga pants belong in the yoga studio," he wrote. "What's next? Wearing a "Speedo" to the supermarket? Imagine if men did that. Yuck!"
Sorrentino wrote that it's "bizarre and disturbing" to see the outfits on "mature, adult women," noting that it's "usually paired with a blousy top and a pony tail hairdo." He said it's the worst thing to happen in women's fashion since the miniskirt. He said women should wear a "nice pair of tailored slacks" or jeans instead.
He told women who wear yoga pants that he's struggling with his own physicality as he ages and said, "I don't want to struggle with yours." He didn't return a call for comment Friday.
Women in the town and around Rhode Island have called the comments sexist and are planning to parade down his street.
In a Facebook page to promote the parade , women from as far as Texas and Australia said they'll wear yoga pants on Sunday in a show of solidarity.
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Eveline was 6-7 years old when her father first touched her in a way he should never did. This continued all the way until she was an adult, while her father still was a Jehovah's Witness in a good standing, preaching the Bible door to door. She lived in a constant fear for her mother, who he abused mentally and threatened Eveline he would continue doing so if she is not submissive.
When Eveline learned she is not the only victim of pedophiles in Jehovah's Witnesses congregations, she decided to speak up. She told everything to "elders" of her congregation and to her mother. Unfortunately, her mother and siblings not only didn't believed her, they actually started shunning her because she spoke out against the organization.
Her father will now testify in the court, but he still is a Jehovah's Witness and still preaches door to door about God, love and the Bible.
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Follow the monks' white path through the unending plains of Kalmyki
Kalmykia is a steppe region in the south of European Russia and the only European Buddhist republic. An international Buddhist festival is going to take place in a temple in the Kalmykia’s capital, Elista. Monks are preparing a sand mandala. It is a palace that may serve a temporary abode for an enlightened deity. Colored marble sand is applied to the canvas through a cone-shaped tube. -
Brother Nathan Fuel delivers a talk entitled Depression Is A Part Of This Life.
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25 New Dead Sea Scrolls revealed including never before seen Nehemiah - 586 B.C.E. destruction of Jerusalem... oops...
Nehemiah
A highlight from the newly published Museum of the Bible collection is a fragment from the Book of Nehemiah (Nehemiah 2:13-16).
The fragment tells of a man named Nehemiah who lived during the fifth century B.C., at a time after Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. The Persian Empire had taken over Babylon's territory and the Jews, who had been forced to leave Israel by the Babylonians, were allowed to return home.
The fragment records Nehemiah's visit to a ruined Jerusalem, finding that its gates had been "consumed by fire." According to the fragment text, he inspects the remains of the walls before starting work on rebuilding them.
Scholars have noted in previous studies that archaeologists hadn't found any copies of the Book of Nehemiah in the Qumran caves. How this fragment came to America is unknown, and scholars say they can't be sure it's from Qumran.
"It is assumed to come from Cave 4 [at Qumran], but in the final analysis it must be said that the provenance of the fragment remains unknown," wrote Martin G. Abegg Jr., a professor at Trinity Western University who led the team that analyzed the fragment, in the book "Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments in the Museum Collection."
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Does becoming (or remaining) one of Jehovah's Witnesses result in Poverty?
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Someone found an app called Watchtower Reader, I have the 2006 version in Spanish, and it seems like it's a special edition of the WT Library app that has much more than the regular WT Library.
For example, it has:
Awakes up to 1960 (this is not even found in the English WT Library). WT up to 1960 (found up to 1950 in the WT Library in English but only up to 1970 in Spanish).
Organized to Accomplish your Ministry (2005).
Anyone here know or could get this in the English version and the latest they can find??
Does anyone know if there is an English version of the WT Library Bethel Edition?
Does anyone know if it even exists???
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The WT teaches that there's no part of a human being that survives the death of the body. If the anointed do not have an immortal soul/ some immaterial part of them that survives death, then whoever will be in heaven won't be the original anointed person but their CLONE since once a person dies, according to WT theology, they cease to exist; so God will have to create a spirit body FROM NOTHING for that person and that created body by definition will therefore NOT be the original person but their CLONE.
So it will be a person's CLONE that will get to live forever in heaven and rule with Christ, and NOT the original person.............one can now see why other religions teach the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
- deegee
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CTV Montreal
Published Saturday, October 15, 2016 6:46PM EDT
The Quebec coroner is investigating the death of a 26-year-old new mother whose Jehovah’s Witness faith may have kept her from accepting a blood transfusion.
Eloise Dupuis suffered a hemorrhage during childbirth which nearly cost her baby its life earlier this week and would ultimately cost her own.
Dupuis’ aunt Manon Boyer said her niece had dreamt of being a mother.
“I spoke to her the night before she delivered and she was so excited to realize this dream she had since she was a little girl,” said Boyer.
The Jehovah’s Witness religion does not permit blood transfusions and lawyer Jean-Pierre Menard said the right to do so is protected by law.
“A person has the right to refuse any kind of treatment for good reason, bad reason or any reason at all,” he said. “Religions is only one of the grounds on which a person makes that decision… If the patient is an adult and fit to consent, even if the decision will bring the patient to the worst situation.”
Boyer said she believes Dupuis would not have chosen to die.
“It was like she was a hostage,” she said. “No one was allowed in her room who wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness.”
A representative for the Jehovah’s Witnesses church declined to comment but referred CTV Montreal to their website, which outlines what they believe about blood transfusions. The site said the policy stems from bible passages calling on believers to “abstain from blood.”
Patient’s rights advocate Paul Brunet said more safeguards need to be put in place to ensure informed consent.
“Any influence can affect voluntary consent, whether it be religious, financial, family, whatever is the influence can certainly contaminate the consent,” he said. “That is certainly on the medical staff to make sure that influence is not at stake with consent.” -
The Watchotwer Tract Society, commonly referred to as the Jehovah's Witnesses, is asking a San Diego Superior Court judge to return the bond money it posted as a result of an August ruling from a California appellate court which found the $13.5 million dollar sexual assault judgement against the church was too harsh.
The church filed the motion to return the bond money on October 7.
Jose Lopez, now aged 38, filed his lawsuit in June 2012 alleging that elder church member, Gonzalo Campos, of the Linda Vista Spanish Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses molested him during bible study sessions when he was seven years old.
Campos had been accused of molesting young boys before. According to Lopez's complaint, senior church officials were aware of his behavior before the incident with Lopez had occurred. Three years before Campos allegedly assaulted Lopez, a 12-year-old boy who shared a room with Campos accused the then-18-year-old Campos of trying to have sex with him. During the following years, seven other church members lodged similar accusations against Campos, as well as the church for trying to bury the allegations. Now, only two complaints remain; Lopez's case, which will be sent back to the trial court for a new judgement amount, and a lawsuit from former Linda Vista congregation member Osbaldo Padron.
Padron sued Campos and the church over similar molestation charges in 2013. In that lawsuit Padron claims that Campos molested him on numerous occasions in 1994 and 1995. In June of this year, superior court judge Richard Strauss, as reported by the Reader, imposed $4000 per-day sanctions on the church for failing to turn over documents to Padron's attorneys during discovery. The church has since filed an appeal over those sanctions. The appellate court has yet to rule on the appeal.
In Lopez's case, the church appealed the $13.5 million judgement, as well as additional sanctions against the Jehovah's Witnesses in August of this year. In its appeal the church claimed judge Joan Lewis should have imposed less severe sanctions.
The appellate court's August 2016 ruling: "We conclude the court erred in ordering terminating sanctions because there was no evidence that lesser sanctions would have failed to obtain Watchtower's compliance with the document production order and because there were other possible sanctions that could have effectively remedied the discovery violation. On remand, the court has broad discretion to start with a different sanction that does not wholly eliminate Watchtower's right to a trial."
According to court documents, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of America issued two bonds to the court on behalf of the Jehovah's Witnesses in 2014. One of which totaled $20.2 million while the other was for $56,698.
The two sides will be in court on October 20 to discuss the motion.
http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2016/oct/15/ticker-jehovahs-witnesses-relief-appellate-court/#
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A woman is suing a Jehovah's Witnesses church in Weber County after, she says, one of its instructors repeatedly raped her when she was a minor and the organization's leadership forced her to listen to an audio recording of one of the assaults.
The woman filed the lawsuit Wednesday in 2nd District Court, accusing the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses church in Roy — as well as naming the alleged perpetrator, several church leaders and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (the religion's headquarters located in New York) — of knowingly allowing the "unfit" instructor to rise to a position of authority without warning members of his "dangerous propensities" and past sexual transgressions.
No representative of the Roy church, 1950 W. 4400 South, responded to a voicemail from The Salt Lake Tribune requesting comment Thursday.
The Tribune generally does not identify alleged victims of sexual assault. Because the man accused of assaulting the woman in this case has not been charged with a crime, The Tribune is not identifying him. It is not clear whether she reported the alleged incident to police, but members of the faith are encouraged to bring problems to elders in the church, rather than to outside authorities.
The girl's interactions with the instructor began in summer 2007, the lawsuit states, when she attended a movie with him. When driving her home from the theater, the instructor took her phone and told her she had to kiss him on the cheek to get it back. When she refused, he kicked her out of the car and drove off, returning a short while later to pick her up.
The purported assaults escalated from there, according to court documents, as the man three times bound the girl's wrists and ankles with duck tape, placed a sock in her mouth and covered her head with a pillowcase, leaving her alone in the backseat of his car for one to two hours each time.
Beginning in December 2007, the lawsuit states, the man took the girl to a parking lot several times and "aggressively" kissed her and touched her despite her protests. After that, she says, he raped her and forced her to perform oral sex, with at least three such encounters in or about January 2008.
He allegedly lured her out of her home by threatening to harm her family if she did not comply. It is unclear how old the man was during the purported assaults, but she was a minor.
In April 2008, the Roy church formed a judicial committee to investigate whether the girl engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior — "a serious sin" in the religion. During the meeting that included her mother and stepfather, the lawsuit states, church leaders played a recording of one of the purported rapes, obtained from the instructor, for four to five hours "repeatedly stopping and starting the audio tape ... suggesting that she consented to the sexual behavior."
The church, the woman says, acted irresponsibly by knowingly allowing the instructor to serve in a position of authority overseeing underage members. She believes the organization did not do enough to warn adherents of the man's "dangerous and exploitative propensities" and instead promoted him as being "in good standing and trustworthy."
A leader from the congregation apparently warned the girl's parents in November 2006 that the instructor — who previously attended church sessions in Ogden and Oregon — was a "bad kid" who had "engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior with a female member of the Clearfield congregation." The plaintiff says that warning wasn't enough.
The girl suffered physically and emotionally after the nonconsensual sexual encounters, the civil suit states, especially having to relive them through the audio recordings.
She is suing over intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence and failure to warn.
She's asking for a jury trial, as well as damages to exceed $300,000 to cover medical care, lawyer fees and general damages.
The girl was a member of various Jehovah's Witnesses congregations until shortly after the assaults. Her case was dismissed in November 2015 for failure to serve the defendants in a timely manner. She was able to refile because the dismissal was not based on the lawsuit's merits.
http://www.sltrib.com/news/4465861-155/utah-jehovahs-witnesses-church-forced-woman
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http://www.glowm.com/pdf/PPH_2nd_edn_Chap-72.pdf
TA more recent (2009) study from The Netherlands16 concluded that: ‘Women who are Jehovah’s Witnesses are at a six times increased risk for maternal death, at a 130 times increased risk for maternal death because of major obstetric hemorrhage and at a 3.1 times increased risk for serious maternal morbidity because of obstetric hemorrhage, compared to the general Dutch population.’
The article highlights how J.W.-women are managed.Source: Appeared in the Global Library of Womens medicine
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This has nothing to do with u/mormondocuments' leak.
An anonymous Redditor sent these to me and asked me to share.
HERE is where all of the videos are.
There are 15 videos in all.
For the most part they are just briefings on various matters in the world. The most interesting part of the videos is the comment and question time at the end. This is when the Apostles start to talk.
THIS is my favorite one. Here they get a short briefing on the potential threats that Wikileaks poses to the church. A subtext of the briefing is that Julian Assange helped Chelsea Manning in a major leak.
When it comes time for the Apostles to ask questions (about 4:30) all they care about is Manning's sexuality and whether or not Assange is gay. Oaks also mentions that there is a vast conspiracy between the media and 'Homosexual Agenda'.
Anyway...enjoy.
EDIT: I hope everyone likes my shout out to Arrested Development in the titles of the videos...that was intentional
EDIT 2: thank you to u/Gileriodekel for backing these up HERE
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They want to protect the elders and protect the organisation. What they should be wanting to protect are the children, and Jehovah's name. A very revealing sentence.
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Spain 2016-10-03 BOE Re: Minors
3 de octubre de 2016 A LOS CUERPOS DE ANCIANOS Asunto: Menores de edad
This has been passed to the Spanish Ministry of Justice.
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http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2016/08/113_212343.html
Korean ex-JW brothers contacted the police and hinted to them that this murder could be related with WT's evil policy of shunning because
- Father was an elder (ministerial overseer)
- Mother was a regular pioneer
- Son was a ministerial servant focusing on Chinese speaking territory
- Killed daughter was an inactive JW
I can't be sure that her inactivity triggered family shunning and that shunning was the cause of that day's quarreling which ended as a murder, but I believe the police should consider alleged probability. All they said can be just faking an alibi. We all know the 21st century's JW is not such a religion believing in VooDoo things.
- intropist
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Oliver Lewis, a Guyanese native who was found guilty of six counts of gross indecency with a 13-year-old boy, has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.
He also has been ordered to compensate the family of the victim $10,000 or spend an additional six months in prison.
Elaborating on the compensation order, Magistrate Ayanna Baptiste DaBreo stated that it is for the victim to get counselling as a result of the ordeal he faced.
She made it clear that: “No way is this court saying that any monetary sum can make up in any way for the [offences].”
Breakdown of sentence
The magistrate handed down a prison sentence for each count of the offence.
When those sentences are combined, Lewis would have served a prison term of 162 months (13 and half years).
A break-down of those years is as follows: 12 months for the first count; 18 months for the second count; 24 months for the third; 30 months for the fourth; 36 months for the fifth; and 42 months imprisonment for the sixth count.
But the Magistrate ordered that the sentences run concurrently (at the same time). Effectively, this means Lewis will only spend 42 months in prison.
He will only spend an additional six months if he does not compensate the family of the victim.
‘Prison is not for me’
Before hearing the judgement, Lewis – who has been in custody since December last year – told the court that prison is not for him.
“Throughout my entire ordeal in prison, it was not a good experience. Prison is not for me… [and] I’m sorry for wasting the court’s time.”
Lewis – who the court heard is a Jehovah’s Witness – also added that he was praying for the court and the family of the young victim.
During the trial last year, the boy’s father stated that he knew Lewis, as they both were members of a Jehovah’s Witness Church.
He said they were friends for about three years.
The father told the court that Lewis became a friend of his 13 year-old son, and would often pick him up from school to take him on various job sites.
He added that Lewis would explain to him that he was giving the boy job training, and that he (Lewis) needed the help.
The father also told the court that he trusted Lewis and never expected ‘anything like that (molestation) to happen’.
The father said he started to realize that something questionable was taking place between Lewis and the boy after the boy and one of his brothers had a dispute and certain things were said.
“[My son] told me everything that was going on between him and Mr Lewis,” added the father.
Some days later, the father confronted Lewis and told him he knew what was going on.
According to the father, Lewis asked: “Can you forgive me?”
Describing Lewis as a psychopath, the father further told the court that he (Lewis) wanted them to treat the matter as one that could have been settled religiously.
He however opted to take the matter before the court, noting that a crime was committed against his son.
END OF ARTICLE - Comments are interesting.
http://bvinews.com/new/lewis-gets-42-months-for-molesting-boy-to-pay-10k/
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Escondido, California, USA - A Jehovah's WItness father looks down on his smiling daughter as he baptizes her.
Later she will potentially be disfellowshipped from the congregation and her entire life will be thrown into chaos because she supposedly made this choice of her own volition.
Ask yourself, Can a minor legally enter a contract?
All minors baptized and later disfellowshipped that have received damages may one day decide to form a class action lawsuit against the Jehovah's Witnesses after a court decides to "pierce the corporate veil" by allowing suits against the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania as the controlling corporation above many subsidiaries which is ultimately controlled by the Governing Body itself.
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Pope Francis visited Azerbaijan on Sunday, addressing the Catholic faithful and reaching out to Muslim people in the second largest Shiite Muslim nation.
The pope spoke to religious leaders at a mosque in the capital city of Baku, and celebrated Mass with Azeri Catholics, who make up less than 1 percent of the country's population. A 2015 state department report on religious freedom around the world cited Azerbaijan's tightening of restrictions on some religions, including Christian denominations such as Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses, as cause for concern about religious discrimination.
Pope Appoints Commission To Study Possibility Of Women As Deacons
NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports the pope visited Georgia to address Orthodox Christians before he stopped in Azerbaijan, but that he was "met with loud protests by orthodox hardliners" in the Georgian capital of Tiblisi.About 84 percent of Georgia's population is Orthodox Christian. Although the leader of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilia II, agreed to meet with the pope during his visit, so few people showed up for Mass in a Tiblisi stadium, most of the seats were empty.
Sylvia reports for NPR's newscast unit:
Quote"The highlight of the trip so far was off-the-cuff remarks the pope made to Georgia's small catholic community. In response to a question, Francis said, 'There is a global war trying to destroy marriage... not with weapons but with ideas.' He said the great enemy of marriage is gender theory and 'we have to defend ourselves from ideological colonization.'
"Francis has used that expression before to criticize what he says are rich countries' attempts to link development aid to the acceptance of social policies such as contraception and gay marriage."In a 2015 speech in the Philippines, Pope Francis told tens of thousands of people gathered in a Manila arena "God calls upon us to recognize the dangers threatening our own families and to protect them from harm," adding "We must be attentive to the new ideological colonization," according to an English transcript of his speech published by official Vatican Radio.
The pope went on to explain his choice of words:
Quote"Beware of the new ideological colonization that tries to destroy the family. It's not born of the dream that we have from God and prayer – it comes from outside and that's why I call it a colonization.
"Let us not lose the freedom to take forward the mission God has given us, the mission of the family. And just as our peoples were able to say in the past 'No' to the period of colonization, as families we have to be very wise and strong to say 'No' to any attempted ideological colonization that could destroy the family."In his homily on Sunday, the pope did not focus on the family as he spoke to Azerbaijan's Catholics. "Here," he said, "the faith, after the years of persecution, has accomplished wonders," and delivered a message about the duty of the faithful to serve. "Stay united always, living humbly in charity and joy; the Lord, who creates harmony from differences, will protect you," he said.
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The young ones are already adopting this idolatrous practice: