James Thomas Rook Jr.

Not!!! He is with his wife looking with lustful eyes at another woman

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.
 

The above quotes from David Splane, reiterated by Witness show that the younger AND older members of the Governing Body are proudly progressive.... enough to call it to our special attention so we do not miss it and are encouraged that even THEY are becoming  more and more, and in fact ARE more  and more politically correct, and "with it".
Being conservative or "progressive" has strong political overtones, and with all of humanity outside of Jehovah's Witnesses, "progressivism" is causing the collapsing of civilization by people who melt at the slightest pressure or mental stimulation they don't see ...and having conversations with them is like trying to walk on egg-shells without crunching them.
I see no difference inside Jehovah's Witnesses.

Soon after I was born, this came out in the AWAKE! magazine .....
As Dorothy said (paraphrased)  "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto"
 

 

WHY would Jehovah's Witnesses reject Government  calls for Independent Inquiry into sexual abuse?

I took that as a joke ... but then again ... if the Governing Body through its "s-POKES-people", their "Helpers" declare that if two people are naked in chairs, facing each other, and masturbating WHILE WATCHING EACH OTHER is NOT pornea ... WHICH THEY DID ... that is enough to make your head spin and exclaim "What the HELL is going on up there! ?"
... are they COMPLETELY and TOTALLY divorced from reality?

2 CHAIR pORNEA .mp4 Gravity Electricity Wind .mp4

Hey! I wasn't the one doing the "lifting." ?

Yup.

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!

I must admit my confusion at the two different writing styles. Turns out that almost the entire post was a verbatim copy from the FoxNews article from the start, right up until the sentence just requoted (without attribution, I might add).
[ http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/07/27/water-on-mars-does-sciences-theory-about-origin-life-hold-up.html  ]
Then you threw in a couple paragraphs just before the end from The Onion, of all places, before finishing with Michael Guillen's last sentence again:
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. Is intelligence ultimately a blessing or a curse? Surely, the answer will make for the biggest headline of all. Michael Guillen  Ph.D., former Emmy-winning ABC News Science Editor, taught physics at Harvard and is now president of Spectacular Science Productions. His thriller, "The Null Prophecy," was released in July, 2017. His upcoming book, "The End Of Life As We Know It: Ominous News From The Frontiers Of Science," is coming out October 16th. The Onion article was where all this paragraph started:
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. etc. etc.  [ https://www.theonion.com/world-eating-leviathan-awoken-from-500-million-year-slu-1827928509 ]  

Don't talk wet!!!

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.

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!
 

Dear Nicole, 
How is it that they are “mentally ill”, these “professional” apostates?  Was their language foul?  Were their stories insincere?  Were they physically aggressive?   Did they personally abuse anyone?
It would seem to me that one is mentally ill when an elder or elder body chooses to harbor a pedophile in the organization; deliberately ignoring the large chance that another innocent one may be victimize, because of their insane decision to handle the matter ‘in house’.
We know where that leads, don’t we. 
Just saying.  

OOOh....Look what a Google search on heirogrifics reveals......................   @James Thomas Rook Jr.

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

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.
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.
 

Of all the comments on here....You, Mr.Rook and Queen Ester are the only SANE ones in this forum.   

@James Thomas Rook Jr. On the contrary, any contact and or touching/or simulation of the male and or female reproductive organs is sexual contact. It is considered as pornea, it is also in the same category of masturbation.
As for tight pants in Christendom, a lot of folks has taken issue with tight pants, just a few days ago some Christians went off on tight pants - unhinged, one of them even made a few, in addition to mainstream pastor gestures when on stage.
I myself take issue with inappropriate clothing for both male and female. You cannot praise God and appear as though you should be on stage with a K-pop girl group and or wear tight pants like a rock boy band of the 90s.
If I recall, the tend began when punkers began to wear the pants/jeans of girls, eventually the trend took flight from there. Now we have men wearing things like Rompers, you don't want to know what that is - but since it is public, it is obvious to everyone.
That being said, tight pants, is said to not be good for males anyways, it can cause problems for one's health -  ironically.
As for the joke about Caleb and Sophia dolls, truth be told, there are robot dolls in the works that resemble adult man and or women, as well as appear as children, hence Japanese slang. If you are familiar with the movies such as iRobot, Matrix and or perhaps the Terminator, expect in the next couple of years robot dolls will soon be a replacement for males and females who lack a romantic partner, the very reason why there is a war going on for people who are [A] against this stuff, be included because it would pose as a problem in the future, as it is now doing, for every dollar being made in production and selling of such things for ill purposes and a sole intent - brazen conduct  People who are for this stuff and think this is a future and they honestly believe they can relief the sexual cravings of such persons, even the likes of pedophiles, again, of what is being made by the Japanese, hence the Jap. slang used.
So in short, we see this in movies:

 
Now something of which has become a reality, as seen here (some robots more realistic than others for the one below is an early one):

A picture of this robot up-close shows that the intent of the creator is to make said robot look like the Actress, Scarlett Johansson.
Other than that, stuff like this is very serious. And someone like myself is very against such things mainly when it comes to what is being discussed via this topic and as to what Matthew have said.
It can get worse, outside of people using robotic dolls for brazen conduct, you also have the ones who will soon be taking your job:
A.I. and robots can and will be dangerous, in this sense, not only they will be taking jobs very soon and being 10 times if not more steps ahead of you, they will eventually replace even mates and or partners, at the same time encourage people to do ill intent, rapist, pedophiles, and a list of other things, thus promoting said things, which is can very, very bad for any and everyone.

I took that as a joke ... but then again ... if the Governing Body through its "s-POKES-people", their "Helpers" declare that if two people are naked in chairs, facing each other, and masturbating WHILE WATCHING EACH OTHER is NOT pornea ... WHICH THEY DID ... that is enough to make your head spin and exclaim "What the HELL is going on up there! ?"
... are they COMPLETELY and TOTALLY divorced from reality?

2 CHAIR pORNEA .mp4 Gravity Electricity Wind .mp4

Man the gb is getting desperate for money.

Yeesh.
Commitment - "Show your commitment by displaying photos of your spouse on your desk at work"
Teamwork - "Do I keep my distance from my spouse’s relatives, even though he or she is close to them?" ...Yes, if they're not JWs...
Respect - “To respect my wife means that I appreciate her value and I don’t want to do anything that would damage her or our marriage.”—Micah." ...In spite of her smaller brain...
Forgiveness - Lots of talk about forgiveness, but damn little talk about giving a sincere apology. That's certainly the WT's response to questions about their 1975 fiasco. From the blurb: "‘Am I overly sensitive?’ ... ‘Is the offense so serious that I need an apology, or can I just overlook it?’ Yeah, they'd love to dump the responsibility for "forgiving" onto their members....
Communication - "Genuine communication takes place when you and your children share a two-way exchange of thoughts and feelings." ...That's strange. That certainly isn't Tight-Pants Tony's method of communication - nor of any of the other Governing Body members, either.
Discipline - ...That's weird... The entire blurb only mentions CHILDREN as needing discipline. Doesn't mention the fact that the parents often need as much if not more discipline (like self-discipline) themselves.
Values - as in Bronze/Iron Age Middle Eastern Male values. Nothing more needs to be said.
Example - "Children and even teenagers are influenced more by their parents than by anyone else..." - and parents are influenced more by "Mother" Watchtower than by anyone else, so it's no surprise that highly dysfunctional parenting is terribly common among JWs.
Identity - "When you have a strong sense of identity, you stand up for your beliefs instead of allowing your peers to control you." No, no, no, let me fix that. "When you have a strong sense of self, you stand up for your innate existence instead of allowing a cult to control you." There, that's better...
Trustworthiness - (Couldn't stop laughing at that title!) "Whether you want to earn more trust or regain lost trust, the following steps can help. Be honest. Nothing will shatter others’ trust in you quicker than lies. Conversely, when you are open and honest—especially about your mistakes—you can earn the trust of others." ...Too bad WT Society has completely shattered alert peoples' trust in them with false dates for "Armageddon", terrible miscarriages of 'theocratic zeal' when Malawi JWs were subjected to horrific mistreatment over a basic I.D. card while Mexican brothers were given permission to bribe officials, and more.
Industriousness - "Industrious people do not shy away from work. Rather, they enjoy working hard to provide for their personal needs and to help others—even if the work they do is not glamorous." But don't you DARE go to college or seek promotions at work or develop your own profitable company or monetize your talents or try to be successful!
Goals - (Ah, HA HA HA HA HA!!) "A goal is more than just a dream—something you wish would happen. Real goals involve planning, flexibility, and good, old-fashioned hard work." What is NOT stated, is that the ONLY acceptable goals for JWs are those which enrich the Watchtower Society. As mentioned in Number Eleven above, NO developing talents into hugely successful careers (but if you're already a successful rock star, they'll happily take your money!), no higher education (unless you're willing to slave for the WT Society), no seeking promotions or overtime at work, and so on.
Now I need a shower...
- Zactly

Well Delaware after all is a tricky state when it comes to law, order, rules and regulations, they are for Child Marriages at one point and suddenly turn the tables on themselves, even though on the low-low such is still done, when all 49 states maintain all legal thought of such a practice, mainly when it comes to young girls. Another thing is anyone caught within the realm of child abuse and or within the circle itself, those individuals tend to end up going to training sessions in this regard.
If anything, though, the US tends to have a problem with abusers who are of the opposite sex, women, and tends to let them off easy at times, granted on the levels of child abuse that takes place in Delaware, as well as parts of the US.
Another thing to also look at is the number of interactions both of these individuals had until the day of discovery.

What some also fail to see is that Child Abuse is all over, at the same time, people are trying to make Pedophilia legal, and the firestorm that will ensues should such ones succeed in their conquest for such a thing will cause quite the chaos in the states, we already have the drag-queen situation among children already and they have won.
The same way we teach kids about strangers, we do the same on teaching them about Child Abuse early, for this is something of high importance, for even children teach others on the matter. But it would seem instead of fighting the issue in itself, people will often gun for the a whole community for the actions of a single person.
As I always have said, no one is immune to child abuse, even Jehovah's Witnesses for Pedophilia is common and is unexpected, and it is known that abusers always, 100% targets religious and education institutions as well as clubs for the majority of the abuse case is done by a member of the family and or a close friend of the family. If the abuser is a woman, they tend to get not a strong of a sentence vs. an abuser who is a man, mind you, there have been some abusers that have gotten off the hook or a very small sentence depending on how good they look, for if said abuser looks like a Barbie, expect the judge to obviously take it easier on her, which sparks conversation of double standards within the justice and legal systems, this also goes for the race of the individual as well at times.
Learning of the signs and to teach it to others if they are not well equipped for this is the best course of factions, mainly when it comes to finding a way to mix this in a way of out a community already operates, but sadly to others, they would have to learn after the crime was committed. Weeks ago a man whom people looked up to be a hero among children and helping them out, turned out to be a a man who took a very uneasy interest in kids, turned out to be a Pedophile.
But the thing is here this is among the states that have quite the rules for age of consenting ones, another factor, mainly for this case is if the minor victim is male and the older person is female, cases in this sense whereas the abuser is an adult female tends to be tricky ones because of double standards in sentencing.