James Thomas Rook Jr.

It looked to me like there was more to the government's case. Apparently the brothers assigned to do the HLC work in Spain were creating a database of doctors sympathetic to bloodless surgery. But it was done by compiling information gathered from questioning doctors, questioning staff, and questioning the experience of Witness patients with those doctors. The amount of cooperation in the way they answered questions, and the patient experiences were all used to produce a list of those assumed to respond well in situations listed. The data from both patients and doctors was used to make assumptions about how those doctors would treat cases assumed similar by the the HLC. It was being shared without permission. This had come up before and the HLC had been called out for this in 2014 and 2017. So the HLC promised to destroy the database. A followup shows that the HLC is still making use of the database that they never destroyed, and they are still collecting data.
I think the penalty is especially for lying about the destruction and (dis)continued use of the database.

This is not History ... this is current events.
The previous plane was a Vietnam Era "Prowler", the EA-6B.
For obvious reasons, I am a big fan of the EA-6B, and squadron VAQ-137.
The Northrop Grumman (formerly Grumman) EA-6B Prowler is a twin-engine, four-seat, mid-wing electronic-warfare aircraft derived from the A-6 Intruder airframe.
http://www.ea6bprowler.org/squads/vaq137
 

There’s a guy I’ve heard about that wants to build a big wall to keep the undesirables out.  He’s changed the design a few times, even the cost to build it.  He’s been caught lying about his plans, including who will foot the bill.  Even at the inconvenient sacrifices of thousands, he still doggedly pursues his goal to procure enough money to build his wall.   
It all sounds very familiar to me.   How much does it cost to build a wall of fabricated stories?  Apparently, a LOT.  Ezek 13-1-23

Actually, the sentiment is not accurate.
We all have the right to TRY to live in security and peace.
This NATURAL RIGHT is sometimes protected by whatever laws a country has .... sometimes not ....  but the right itself is a NATURAL right, that precedes all human law .... and sometimes needs  valor, a sharp knife, and a fully loaded handgun to be able to actually have that NATURAL right become what really happens.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled ( If memory serves...) that the Government has no obligation to protect your peace and security.  Their obligation, having police power,  is to enforce the laws .... whatever they are.
The President's highest priority is to preserve, protect, and enforce the Constitution of the United States..
That is the oath of office that he took.
There are subtle, but very real differences.

It's my impression that we both enjoy the back and forth. I hope it's not just me.

LOL. I got so confused when both TTH and I used the word "shrill" within a couple days of each other. I started thinking maybe Allen Smith was right after all when he used to say I was the same person as TTH, among several others. I think Allen could have tried to convince me that it was just him and me running the entire forum.
I never said it doesn't matter. You either forgot what I said, or made it up, or I forgot what I said. Or I could have said something you misunderstood. Even so, I accept that it matters very much to me that we don't "do dates." But I would only impose this on myself, I don't think it matters so much that I should impose my view on others in the congregation. But I'm happy to present how much it matters to me if called upon to do so.
The "Clarification of Our Beliefs" does not have anything to do with what I was referring to. I was referring to specific admissions of past errors about dates in several other specific places in the Watch Tower publications. In addition, I was also referring to specific things that the Watchtower admitted can be dangerous and un-Christian, including 'serving with a date in mind.'

Mr Felix.
John Butler and other ex-JW people are Gained their right to speak openly about WT (to share Critical Thoughts) with a Day of Personal Awaking and with a Day of leaving JW community !! 
I have to remind You how every "faithful member" aka JW member does not have and will never have any "Right", Permission and Free Will  to "criticize" WT. Because of reasons:
1) he/she is "faithful member",
2) JW member will be disciplined if would dare to "criticize" or to put complain about WT,
3) hierarchical structure and Doctrines in WT gives no space for "criticizing" or for Critical Thoughts.
 

What bothers me is that every year, I am looking more and more like a fat Dr. Emmett Brown who lost his DeLorean.

What bothers me is that every year, I am looking more and more like a fat Dr. Emmett Brown who lost his DeLorean.

He does that too

I did. 
 
I have read not all of it but enough of it to formulate my opinion and make a good comment in good conscience.
 
Tom, you have written with a passion and a poise from your true belief and heart. I cannot deny that fact. I commend you for the amount of what you put into words and can honestly say that it truly takes a writer to write as much as you have in this, and the other books you have written. You have given the reader a solid grasp of the topic you represent and that is something I struggle to see here in this forum at times. While I understand that everyone writes for different reasons, some want to provide facts while others want to present missed information and many more reasons. The only thing I can say about your book that is relevant to this topic on this forum, is that it is a  opinion piece. There is nothing wrong with that, it just is what it is. I appreciate the fact that you let me read it, it gives me more understanding of who you are and where your thoughts reside. Thank you Tom. 

YES !

I agree ...........

 

Yes. This goes all the way back to Russell's "Photo-Drama of Creation" which emphasized the 49,000 years of creative days. I don't think anyone here has denied that this is what we taught. But in the 1970's, the cracks in this view were already beginning to be seen. It had become a way to put more emphasis on 1975. But it was also realized that 1975 could become an embarrassment. And the Aid book, produced by a team led by R.Franz, had provided evidence that the very foundation for all this emphasis was built on sand.

Typical out of context comment from you cat.
I said "Well I personally don't want to judge anyone as to the resurrection."
Of course we all judge people in everyday life. BUT I said AS TO THE RESURRECTION. 
But you are only a cartoon cat, i can't expect any better from you can I ?  
 

*Loophole 1* - A woman has a miscarriage, or in many cases, various miscarriages. How will those unborn babies be resurrected? And before you say that their god will bless her with those children like he did with his main man, Job, let's assume she is bird food at Armageddon. How will all those babies that died during a miscarriage (or, even an abortion) get resurrected?
*Loophole 2* - A 15-year-old girl became a JW martyr and died while giving birth to a girl due to not accepting blood. The girl lives for 40 years and then Armageddon comes. New System (lol...funny name) is in full force and the 15-year-old girl pops out of the ground (resurrected). She will be greeted by her daughter who is more than twice her age?
*Loophole 3* - A 10-year-old boy from an Amazonian Indian tribe dies one day before the Big A (lucky). His whole tribe and everyone he knows are slaughtered during Armageddon. Who will greet him when he is resurrected? If the JW interpretation of the Bible were real (for the record, I don't follow any religion), I would imagine that their will be a ton of orphans, scared with no one familiar to hug them or care for them. What a sad prospect....
...on the other hand, at least they will be able to hug a panda.
via BrianFofinho

I recalled a comment from last year where you commented positively on the new way of referring to these days as aeons or epochs, rather than literal days, and then added the following comment:
1975+43=2018 (last year). This old reckoning might seem ridiculous now, especially after the Watchtower once argued that this period could be a matter of weeks or months, but could not go beyond 2 years. But there are still some Witnesses who haven't kept up and believe there must be some validity to the 6,000 year theory. (A partial salvage of the theory, without any reference to 6,000 or 7,000 years, was rewritten in a much better way in a 2011 Watchtower:
*** w11 7/15 p. 24 God’s Rest—What Is It? ***
God’s Rest—What Is It?
During the time that Fred Franz was still alive and still working on his last prophetic book "Revelation -- Its Grand Climax at Hand" an article was written dealing with the Jubilee year and how the 49th year was related to the 50th:
*** w87 1/1 p. 30 Questions From Readers ***
Second, a study of the fulfillment of Bible prophecy and of our location in the stream of time strongly indicate that each of the creative days (Genesis, chapter 1) is 7,000 years long. It is understood that Christ’s reign of a thousand years will bring to a close God’s 7,000-year ‘rest day,’ the last ‘day’ of the creative week. (Revelation 20:6; Genesis 2:2, 3) Based on this reasoning, the entire creative week would be 49,000 years long. . . . According to Romans 8:20, 21, Jehovah God purposes to liberate believing mankind from this slavery. As a result, true worshipers on earth “will be set free from enslavement to corruption and have the glorious freedom of the children of God.”—See also Romans 6:23. . . . While the small group selected to be taken to heaven have had their sins forgiven from Pentecost 33 C.E. onward and thus already enjoy the Jubilee, the Scriptures show that the liberation for believing mankind will occur during Christ’s Millennial Reign. That will be when he applies to mankind the benefits of his ransom sacrifice. By the end of the Millennium, mankind will have been raised to human perfection, completely free from inherited sin and death. Having thus brought to an end the last enemy (death passed on from Adam), Christ will hand the Kingdom back to his Father at the end of the 49,000-year creative week.—1 Corinthians 15:24-26.
So although the 1969/1971 Aid Book, as you pointed out, had said that we don't know the length of the creative days, this probably came from the idea that a Bible Dictionary should not contain esoteric beliefs that are not actually based on the Bible, but are just a traditional interpretation. R.Franz must have recognized this fact, while preparing the Aid Book, but apparently there was a faction that thought this "reasonable" approach was very dangerous. It admits that we don't know everything. I have personal anecdote that let me know that this is exactly what at least two brothers (Greenlees and Schroeder) thought would, initially, be the way to get R.Franz removed, by exposing the non-dogmatic approach in the Aid Book style that tends to erode dogma. I'll save the anecdote for another time, but I think it is easy to recognize that this kind of approach to the Bible takes a lot of power away from the interpreters. (The anecdote did not concern the length of the creative days.)
Even in the lead-up to 1975, there was a need, probably influenced by the Aid Book, to start using words like "evidently" rather than just speaking dogmatically:
*** w73 2/1 p. 82 Will Your Days Be “Like the Days of a Tree”? ***
Since each of the creative “days” or periods was evidently seven thousand years long, the whole creative “week” takes in 49,000 years.
Compare that with the dogmatism in the previous decades:
*** w51 1/1 pp. 27-28 The Christian’s Sabbath ***
Since the sabbath was a part of the law and the “Law has a shadow of the good things to come”, of what was the sabbath a shadow? Of the grand rest day for all mankind, the 1,000-year reign of Christ, the seventh 1,000 years of God’s rest day. For six thousand years mankind has been toiling and suffering under “the god of this world”, Satan the Devil. In that antitypical sabbath Christ will free men from the bondage of Satan and his demons . . .
*** w63 8/1 p. 460 par. 14 Religion and the Nuclear Age ***
We could continue verse by verse through the entire period of the six creative days, periods of time that other Bible passages show to have been each 7,000 years in length.
Of course, no other Bible passages were shown to indicate this, just a footnote to see the book by F.Franz, Let God Be True, 1943.
Hebrews 3 & 4 does connect Psalm 95:11 to Genesis 2:2, but without any connection to a certain number of years and without any reference to the millennium of Christ's reign.

Without getting too bogged down in this matter, I presume the discussion is around the length of the creative epoch/age/day we now find ourselves in?
Discussions on this apect of speculative chronology indeed have their fascinating side, (if you are in the mood for it), and there is no shortage in the contribution made by various Bible Students to the debate, even if it does venture into realms of reminiscent a Pyramidology type mentaliity at times. But as far as JWs are concerned officially , we do not seem to have ventured very far from the statement made in the old 1971 Aid to Bible Understanding, on page 392:  "The Bible does not specify the length of each of the creative periods ."

I have absolutely no obsession with the 6,000 years. Pointing out that F.Franz had an evident obsession with something unscriptural, is not the same as having an obsession myself.
I see that the only support you offered about the 6,000 years was not from the Bible, of course, but from "HA 1423." (For anyone who is not aware, this is from Horae Apocalypticae, an infamous source of several of Nelson Barbour's chronology mistakes, that he passed along to a chronologically naive Charles Taze Russell.)
HA1423
Similarly the pseudo- Barnabas, a very ancient though Apocryphal writer: "Consider, my children, what that signifies, He finished them in six days. The meaning is, that in 6000 years the Lord will bring all things to an end," &c.
The same expectation as to the six days of creation typifying 6000 years, as the term of the present world's duration,
continued, as we have seen, (see p. 230, &c, supra) even among the anti- premillennarian fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries. Only they explained the sabbatical seventh day as typical, not of a seventh sabbatical Millennium of rest, but an eternal Sabbath: - - a view generally adopted afterwards.
An apocryphal writer, from the era of apostasy, as @Outta Here has elsewhere pointed out, had an obsession with numerology and gematria. He clearly misinterprets scripture by claiming that the words "he finished them in six days" means that in 6,000 years, the Lord will bring all things to an end. I'm not saying that Barnabas did not get some things right, or that the anti-premillennarian fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries did not get some things right. But it's never a good idea to depend on a non-Biblical, apocryphal misinterpretation to impose an idea on scripture when absolutely no support for anything like it is found anywhere in the Bible.
It's actually a good thing that you pointed out that this is ultimately where the Watch Tower Society got this unscriptural idea from.

It is understandable for me to see your disappoint about R.F. or similar characters inside JW. Yes, perhaps your view about him is correct. But for many of us is of less concern why he wrote a book about GB and WT. We can feel sorrow for him or we can say he is/was hypocrite. Nevertheless, information's we get from his inside insight about WT GB mechanism are more important then he alone. Because "The Truth" is in question, not he, not me, not you. 
He was the one who has must struggle with HIS conscience why he stay inside and support all wrongs he knew about, despite knowledge he had. He was the one who has been responsible for covering this too long and so on. I do not care, in final stage of matter, what was his motive. Only important thing for me is;  Is it that or this, what he said, true?      

Can we also say you don’t have proof Fred Franz didn’t? Try not to overreach and backtrack on your earlier sentiment about knowing the GB when it’s obvious that’s an exaggeration.

I’m not mentally challenged spiritually to accept apostate literature that you seem to want to promote. Sorry.

“A final reason, resulting from the previous two, is that of conscience. What do you do when you see mounting evidence that people are being hurt, deeply hurt, with no real justification? What obligation does any of us have—before God and toward fellow humans—when he sees that information is withheld from people to whom it could be of the most serious consequence? These were questions with which I struggled. What follows expands on these reasons.”

How convenient to all of a sudden develop a conscience to justify his own actions as a member of the 18 Governing Body. Not only is this untrue but disingenuous as to his motive.

Perhaps you fall for sob stories, but it takes time to know a person. This person angered over being overlooked for president is a classic case of narcissism.

If you’re a person that is looking for excuses to fade or leave, promote this book if you must, just keep the Watchtower and faithful followers of Christ out. Perhaps JW only would be more suitable to discuss this among yourselves since no one will be able to refute misguided understanding.

So it appears that you don't have any evidence to give for your claim that the book was "challenged" by Fred Franz or others who knew him.
You didn't even say what claims about the organization that you reject. You should at least be able to point to one inaccuracy. Or someone should.

I should mention that these comments I had made were never made to defend R.Franz. In fact, as I recall, these comments were made under a different topic, and someone apparently moved them here because I happened to mention R.Franz in my response.
But back to your question that starts out with the words, "So if Raymond was a proven liar." I'm not sure what you are referring to. I've never heard anyone claim that R.Franz was a proven liar. If anyone ever said that, I'd be very interested in what they were referring to. It might be very useful to point to something inaccurate* in his book. I'm sure the average Witness who never knew him could easily get the idea he was "liar," but I have never heard anyone who knew him at Bethel ever say that anything in his book was inaccurate. Quite the opposite in fact.
[I found a couple inaccuracies, by the way, such as when in CoC, he mentioned that the Pope and bishops can speak as if they are "infallible" in the minds of Catholics. He should not have said "and bishops" unless he was referring only to previous "bishops of Rome," which are the popes.]
And by the way, R.Franz was an apostate. So if there was even one inaccuracy in any of his books, don't you think the Watchtower Society, or someone at least, should have pointed it out? What he exposed caused a lot of controversy. Pointing out even one inaccuracy would have helped quell the controversy and defend the Society.
But the problem, as best as I can see it, was not that he said anything untrue, but that his motive was to expose the human side of the organization and its decisions. It was to show how the Governing Body worked together at that time, and examples of how decisions and changes were made. And it showed its very human side, with its faults, mistakes, and interactions of personality. If you worked inside Bethel at that time and worked closely with several of the people he speaks about, you'd already know that his descriptions made perfect sense as they matched everything you could know about these persons. What none of us could know about, however, was what it was like inside any of those meetings of the Governing Body. And it turns out that it, if he is correct in his descriptions, then this is exactly what we would have expected anyway, knowing the personalities of these brothers as we saw and heard them acting and speaking on a daily basis. He speaks very kindly and respectfully of many of them. You can tell they were friends, just as you already knew if you were at Bethel at this time. But it becomes easy to understand how key decisions could be delayed or swayed by more outspoken and stronger personalities on the GB.
I don't know what you might mean here. No accounts were ever challenged, as far as I know. At least not by anyone who knew him. Especially not by Fred Franz, who knew him very well. If you have evidence to the contrary you should share it, especially because, as Witnesses, we don't want to be known for making false accusations.
Not at all. I just share what I know and what I think. And you can share what you know and what you think. That's how we learn. That's how forums such as this work. I would never want someone to trust my words and my words only.

What part of the sun?
The coronal mass ejections (CME's) are several million degrees hot, as they are heated, not by fusion but by electricity, to where there is no upper limit.

This is silly ... and as valid as Monty Python's "Life of Brian",  or other "documentaries".
Everyone KNOWS the entire trip to the moon, and moon landing was done on a movie set and sound stage on Mars.