James Thomas Rook Jr.

Could be worse .... when women are substituting for men in a church, instead of a head covering, they COULD have to wear Ronald McDonald shoes.

Guess which Sister is the Substitute Congregation Coordinator?

5 hours ago, Srecko Sostar said:

6 hours ago, Space Merchant said:

our church father are rolling in their graves

so after all.... there is a life after death :)))))

I checked ... they are being rotated on a brimstone rotisserie.

Or, in Iranian Kingdom Halls at the Water Parks, the Burkinis.

When the Iranian Brothers see these ankles, we have to throw buckets of cold water on them ... and the buckets!

Anyone that EXPECTS fairness  as THEY define it, is a sanctimonious sensitive supercilious Snowflake, completely divorced from Reality.

The ants that I kill by the millions, if you could hear their thoughts, might also think that is unfair. 

I mean .... after all ... they have been on the Earth a LOT longer than either Homo Sapiens, Homo Erectus, or Homo Theocraticus (direct creations of God), and it would be FAIR that they should rule the world and do whatever they want, wherever they want.

.... if you think like an ant.

Tough Noogies!

They should have stayed away from my house.

As far as ants are concerned, because I actually CAN manage it ... Ah decides what is fair!

.... As for the example in question highlighted, a man sees your wife has the most beautiful thing ever but does not know you are married to her, what you have done if you were A'bram or Issac, let alone another situation whereas a man took your wife in the night, not knowing she is your wife.  - Space Merchant

God caused to be all specifically created (Homo Theocraticus) people.

Samuel Colt made them equal.

 

It is my considered analysis that the Egyptian Pyramids were constructed by persons having the ability to manipulate the Quantum states of matter, to circumvent the normal classical Physics of which we are familiar.

To this day, no one knows how the gigantic stones of the Great Pyramid were lifted into place, and placed.

The effort staggers the imagination, but it did happen.  I seriously doubt any engineering and construction company in the world could duplicate that effort. Make them use the tools seemingly in use then, and it would be impossible in less than a thousand years ( you pick a better number ...).

Likewise, although we can ACTUALLY manipulate the "Quantum World" now ... and can make entangled particles that can communicate with others instantaneously across ANY distance, and make tunneling diodes where electricity can get across gaps ... NOT ... traveling the distance between points, (color TVs have them), we cannot make something out of nothing.

Apparently SOME Egyptians had telekinetic, and transmutation skills we do not have today, whether it be Pyramids, or Snakes, or some other things, which seem to bypass physics as we now know it ... and so did Moses.

Remember ... he was part of the Egyptian ruling class ... and educated in Egypt!

Your analysis and results may vary.

Do not try this at home.

The reason these guys are not being shut down, is that there are 1500 FBI agents down at the edge of the "Sea of Trump", very very busy fishing for dirt.

I actually went to an FBI field office here in Charlotte with a complaint, and interviewed with an agent, explained a case of Internet fraud, and was told if it wasn't $5,000 they were not even interested.

32 minutes ago, Witness said:

11 hours ago, Srecko Sostar said:

Picture of Abraham and Sara came to me. What spirit guided Abraham when he lied about Sara, how she is his sister and not wife? Is his lie in red field, or he has "theocratic warfare" and not told privileged information to person who is not entitled to hear/know it? :))   

This always bothered me too, until I kept reading...

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+20%3A9-18&version=NKJV

¹¹ And Abraham said, “Because I thought, surely the fear of God is not in this place; and they will kill me on account of my wife. ¹² But indeed she is truly my sister. She is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife. ¹³ And it came to pass, when God caused me to wander from my father’s house, that I said to her, ‘This is your kindness that you should do for me: in every place, wherever we go, say of me, “He is my brother.” ’ ”

It seems to me Abraham married his step-sister?  Or would that be a cousin?

If you pick up some kind of virus, ransomware, or just if your programs get buggy  .... what has always worked for me is to reset my computers to a previous date where everything was good. The name escapes me for the moment what that function is, but it works even better than paid for virus protection programs.  Kapersky has a free Rootkit virus killer. If you can, run that first.  I don't know if that will help, but it's good practice.

Just keeping my computers clean with CCleaner's registry cleaner solves 95% of problems.  And that is also free.

Space Merchant:

... obviously you expect to be paid by the word.

What you are writing about is a complete mystery.

DUH!

A man is on a tree covered island in the middle of the river ... and the water is getting higher and higher.

He prays to God for help.

Rescue Squad shoots a rope over to him, with a life jacket attached and he disconnects it and lets it go, proclaiming "I have faith that GOD will save me"

The water is higher, and he is in a tree.

Police power boat crew tries to save him but he waves them off proclaiming "I have faith that GOD will save me!"

Coast Guard helicopter drops a line with harness to him and he throws it away, proclaiming " I have faith that GOD will save me !!!!"

Just before he drowns he  screams "OH GOD, WHY DID YOU NOT SAVE ME?"

God replies: " I sent the Rescue Squad, the Police and the Coast Guard ..."

That is why in our Congregation, when we all go to the beach once a year for a two week mini-assembly camping trip, when the Sisters swim in the ocean, they all wear canvas tents.

Some Brothers do get overly excited when the gals ankles show.

We have to throw buckets of sea water on them ... including the buckets.

I will agree with JW Insider that Jack Ryan's question is a good question... and go further to state that in my not so humble opinion it is neither blasphemous, inappropriate, or other wise "bad".

I am going to propose something in this post that may be controversial, and you may not "like" it, but if so, please provide hard facts to counter my following supposition.

I have noticed that when some disaster or crime or other "bad thing" happens, the survivors thank God for saving their lives .... when perhaps, in a plane crash, 274 others died, etc. 

What were the OTHER people, chopped liver?

Bad analogy, because in that case, some were.

Nevertheless, it is my supposition that Jehovah God does NOT single out individuals for divine protection.  I may be completely wrong, as I have escaped death, and crippling injury more than many dozens of times, when much better people than I am in many or every way have died early deaths, and I am heavily inclined to believe that PERHAPS Jehovah God is keeping me alive for some unknown, inexplicable reason.

Based on what I know is ACTUALLY real ... it's probably only an emotional indulgence.

That is why when I pray, I thank Jehovah for my life ... the fact that "I" was ever born, and for the chance and circumstances that I have enjoyed at this time, and in this place. ... but I do not "give him credit" for it.

To do that would, IMNSHO would mean that he has it "in" for many others, and deliberately makes their lives miserable ....  short .....  or both.

So here is my supposition that I hope someone has hard evidence, to disprove, to wit:

In modern times, Jehovah God has not in any way interfered with the will of the Nations, or of any individual person, and has not changed in any way the normal outworking of any person, place or thing.

Chance and circumstance DO befall us all ... and completely, and without any interference from God whatsoever.

(YET?)

There are no actual real-life exceptions ... based on fact.

The ONLY possible exception, based on probability observed from actual factual information, in my mind, was Jehovah God protecting Sgt. Alvin C. York, an American soldier in World War I.  But that is only a guess, based on my understanding of impossible things that actually do happen, and the depth  of Alvin C. York's true righteous inclinations in his early years. 

You would have to read several biographies to understand that.

Based on what I know is ACTUALLY real ... it's probably only ANOTHER emotional indulgence.

I hope that someone here has a verifiable actual fact to disprove my theory ... but in the absence of actual hard, verifiable data, I will go with what I at this point in time, firmly believe to be true, based on everything I know, have read,  and 71 years of life experiences.

We are on our own ....

.... be CAREFUL out there !!

FOXNEWS FLASH!!! :

July 28, 2018  5:50PM EDST;

I had reported earlier that the Brother who told me he heard that membership had dropped to 7,500,000 was going to check with the Branch Office,  to see if that figure was correct, and this afternoon he told be he did in fact check, and the folks at the Branch told him (of course) that the Speakers at the Assembly are only allowed to state what is on the outline for each part on the program ... so the Branch guy checked the outline, and according to that, there are 8.5 BILLION people on planet Earth, now ..... and 8.5 MILLION Jehovah's Witnesses.

According to the Branch representative, the closing speaker at the Assembly used the wrong figure of 7,500,000, twice, as reported to me by a local Elder.

I suppose only a recording of the session could resolve what was really said.

I like it when someone else does the "heavy lifting"  FOR me !

.... it's quicker than reading Robert A. Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", about life on Mars.

Yep:

I could not give it proper attribution ahead of time or it would have ruined the combination of straight news and Onion absurdity !

I used to tell "Shaggy Dog" stories ... the goal of which is to get the listener to completely believe the premise and get sucked into the story, so when I sprang the "punch line"  their heads would spin around on their necks ... uh... so to speak.

But people got used to me telling these tall tales, and would interrupt me with "Is that a true story?', which disrupted the whole thing, and I had to stop and answer "Well... um... no."

... at that point you lose your "straight man", and any peripheral audience.

I suppose comedy should be left to the professionals ... but hey .... sometimes a JW Insider type shows up late enough to complete the schtick, tip the waitresses, and exit ... stage left!

Jellyfish have lived for over 300 million years ... with no brain whatsoever.

Perhaps there is hope for us.

Wednesday's headline-making announcement from Italian scientists about a possible lake underneath the Martian south pole adds to a growing list of other worlds we believe have liquid water. But it also adds to a deepening mystery about what it all means – especially to us on this lonely Blue Planet teeming with life and strife.

About 70 percent of Earth’s surface is covered by water, most of it in oceans. The rest is found in rivers, lakes, frozen in glaciers, and inside the bodies of every known plant, animal, and micro-creature on the planet.

Life, it appears, is not possible without H₂O – and for good reason. Among its many unique properties, water is an extraordinary solvent that greases the wheels of life’s biological machinery.

It’s exciting, therefore, whenever we discover evidence for liquid water “out there” somewhere. For instance, beneath the surfaces of Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus, whose phenomenal geysers shoot more than 100 miles into the air. Some research suggests even lowly Pluto – demoted in 2006 to the status of a dwarf planet – harbors subterranean pockets of water, kept fluid by tidal forces from its five nearby moons.

Above all, there’s our storied neighbor Mars. It has polar caps – both north and south – made of regular and dry ice (i.e., frozen carbon dioxide). It also has surface features that look a lot like dry river beds, suggesting the elixir of life once flowed abundantly and freely there.

And now this latest headline: bright reflections detected by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, a ground-penetrating-radar-equipped spacecraft that’s been orbiting the Red Planet since 2003. The Italian scientists interpret the signals to mean there’s a twelve-mile-wide lake of salty water several feet deep sloshing around one mile beneath the Martian surface.

Surely, this now raises the possibility that, at the very least, Little Green Microorganisms dwell there. After all, exotic, insanely hardy, methane-eating bacteria live in sub-glacial lakes in our own Antarctic.

Ah, if only it were that simple.

For starters, the inferred lake beneath the Martian south pole might be nothing more than an aquiver of sludge. Both brine and sludge produce bright radar signatures.

It’s also possible the reputed lake is just an optical illusion. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is also equipped with ground-penetrating radar, has been circling Mars since 2006 and sees no reflections implying the existence of a subterranean lake.

Even if the announcement is substantiated by future missions – and I personally hope it is – water is not a smoking gun. Where there’s water, there’s not necessarily life.

Still, every alleged discovery of water on other worlds represents an invaluable experiment that tests the veracity of biology’s current notions about how life came about on Earth. If we keep racking up evidence for water out there, but no life, it will deal a serious blow to the belief in abiogenesis – that life arose from scratch in a primordial soup of ordinary, inorganic chemicals. That would be a big headline.

If, however, we do find life inhabiting far-flung, water-borne venues, it will strengthen the abiogenesis thesis. That, too, would be a huge headline.

It’d also be a very sobering one. Why? Because, if water and life do prove to be abundant throughout the cosmos, then we’ll be forced to ask: “Where, then, is everyone??”

It’s a question I addressed in a recent opinion piece and that leads to many disquieting possibilities. One of them is this: simple water-borne organisms that develop into complex, intelligent life forms inevitably self-destruct.

The late writer and futurist Sir Arthur C. Clark had that possibility in mind when he stated, “It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.”

With every passing year in our search for extraterrestrial water and life, we are getting closer to finding, if not outright proof, then a resolution to Clark’s assertion.

Shortly following a transmission sent by the Mars Express spacecraft verifying that its instruments had detected a subglacial lake a mile below the planet’s surface, the European Space Agency confirmed Thursday that the orbiter’s surface-penetrating radar had disturbed the eternal and unspeakable dreaming of an aeons-old, world-ravaging malevolence, waking it from its 500-million-year slumber in the underground Martian reservoir.

The abhorrent trans-dimensional beast then rose from the stygian depths of its lightless subaquatic lair, unleashing a hideous ululation that caused the red planet to fissure and burst into billions of molten fragments, an event recorded as a magnitude 18.5 quake by ESA scientists. The terror-struck astronauts of the International Space Station, evidently drained of their sanity by the sight of the accursed, star-spawned abomination, managed to inform ground control through increasingly incomprehensible transmissions that Earth’s moon had been devoured by the ravening behemoth before all communication with the crew was cut off suddenly and completely.

ESA administrators, initially optimistic about the discovery of liquid water on Mars and its positive implications for future colonization, changed their message to one of warning earlier today, shrieking barely comprehensible messages of doom as they clawed their living eyes from their sockets in a vain effort to escape contemplation of the vast horror descending upon the world at this very moment to drink our insignificant lives as it will one day drink the light of the stars.

Is intelligence ultimately a blessing or a curse? Surely, the answer will make for the biggest headline of all.

On 7/23/2018 at 4:39 PM, Gone Away said:

As for Abraham, I wonder how much influence he had in teaching Jacob about sheep breeding? Gen30:37-42. I am sure he will be as interested in our "six honest serving men" as we will be in his.

I myself  wonder,  if when Able was offering his sacrifices of roasted sheep or goats to Jehovah,  if they had invented anything like Bar-B-Que sauce, or had potato salad and cole slaw back then.

Remember that after the Jews offered bar-b-qued sheep on the alter of Jehovah, that they were allowed to eat what Jehovah did not, and even sell it in the meat market.

Think about it!

If you find a video you want not to "disappear", on Youtube, or many other sites .... and want to keep a copy, before someone removes it .. there is a free software that I use "Freemake Video Downloader" which I have downloaded  on my computer to permanently capture stuff that is politically volatile.

You just open "Freemake Video Downloader in one window, and the Youtube video in another window.  Then you copy the URL address as it is playing, and push the "paste" button on Freemake.

It will download the video you are currently watching to your hard drive.

A few minutes ago, I downloaded the full length movie from Youtube "On the Beach", and saw it for the first time.

The Society's Bethel sexual orientation  "Pillowgate" videos were available for awhile on Youtube, then the Society's lawyers had them removed.

The "Pillowgate" videos were also on the Russian Rutube, for about a week before they were removed from there.

I anticipated that, and copied them to my hard drive, before they "disappeared forever".

"Freemake ..." is a very handy tool to have to capture to your hard drive thousands of streaming video sites ... and completely free is a very good price!

I HIGHLY recommend it.

etc.

If "souls" were immortal, every McDonalds would be surrounded by a thick dark cloud of angry cow ghosts.

3 hours ago, Gone Away said:

You did say this in another post about the 700,000:

"So, have we actually had that much decrease, and does anybody have any "official" numbers to verify what I heard today from the platform?

Did you get that figure verified? 2016 peak plus 2017 baptised comes up about 168,000 short (not unusually) but this in an overestimate particularly when based on peak figures as some of last years will be included in the baptism figure. We don't have average pub. figures for 2017, (or I can't find them).

Last Saturday I verified with the Elder from our Congregation that he heard TWICE from a speaker at the Assembly the "fact" that there were now 7,500,000 active Witnesses, and the previous number I was aware of was 8,200,000 .  He said he would call the Branch to triple check that number, but I have not gotten back with him to find out what he found out ... but the "published" number through official channels (the Assembly speaker) agrees with my gut feeling, information gleaned from all sources, and the fact that we are now making up excuses for why "that" happened, with the referenced Watchtower article that we studied.

It sounds very reasonable, agrees with my general knowledge and personal observations, and the Watchtower's reaction to "something" that would cause them to generate another "overlapping generations" type fantasy explanation, and attribute it to Biblical wisdom.

3 hours ago, Gone Away said:

Anyway, it sounds a bit similar to that recent report on the forum of a brother announcing at the assembly that the GB think the preaching work has now been completed. I believe he got "beamed up" somewhere after that!

There have been quite a few Brothers "disappearing mysteriously" in the past year, without any explanation.

Your observation "... a brother announcing at the assembly that the GB think the preaching work has now been completed", although officially specious shows others "higher up in the theocratic food chain" possibly have information or observations that leads them to conclusions considerably out of the "mainstream" dogma.

As always ... I could be completely wrong, but until I have better information, I have to "go with what I know" .... at any particular point in time.

With better information I can stop on a dime, and give you nine cents change.