James Thomas Rook Jr.

there is no evidence of that.
There Is No Evidence of That
THERE IS NO EVIDENCE OF THAT
THERE IS NO EVIDENCE OF THAT !
There is only one reason the concept of the Governing Body was developed.  In the midst of many lawsuits for all sorts of reasons it was deemed necessary to separate the assets of the WTB&TS from it's spiritual direction ... for the same reasons that Mexico for over 50 years was a "Charity" where at the meetings they did not sing, or have Bibles, to pretend that they were not a religion.
REAL ESTATE!
 

“ Gigantic dinosaurs frolicked and splashed some 170 million years ago in the lagoons of what is now Scotland. That’s what a team of paleontologists has determined after discovering dozens of jumbo-sized footprints belonging to long-necked sauropods on the Isle of Skye. .......  We’re actually seeing these dinosaurs interacting with each other and interacting with their environment,” he said. The team reported their findings Monday in the Scottish Journal of Geology. "

Nothing like sitting down after a big meat meal, with a big jar of mustard, and a straw.

AllenSmith:
Ever heard of the concept of an "emotional bank account"?
It goes something like this:
You cannot just walk up to someone in a casual setting and say "Who are you?
You might go up and say " Hi!, My name is Allen Smith, and I am from such-and-such congregation, and I am in town visiting relatives ...
That is the deposit in the "emotional bank account".
You now have something you can withdraw from that "emotional Bank account".
Now, you  can ask someone's name, because they have information on you that is meaningful.
"May I ask you name?" (That is the "withdrawal".)
Try it sometime.
They are not going to use that information to target North Korean missiles to your house, or send the Mafia by to kneecap you.
I go by my real full name, and tell many tales on myself, many disparaging and personal ... No. 1, because it doesn't really matter ... I will be quite dead too soon, the Universe will not even notice, and No. 2,  sans actual missile attack, anywhere around me is a "safe space".
This is not hand to hand combat with bayonets ... this is conversation via photons on a monitor ... NO MORE.
We can battle to the death in the Arena of Ideas ... sigh if we win or lose ... get up from our chairs, and go have dinner.
Lighten up.
You will live a lot longer, and be a LOT happier.
 
 

@TrueTomHarley Something else I've been looking into slightly, but not yet deeply is this :-
The Jews practised 'pikuach nefesh' and possibly still do. It means that life is more valuable than obedience to the Law. So in many cases the Jews were / are allowed to break the Mosaic Law to help someone to stay alive. 
Jesus said at Matthew 12 v 9 -12,  After departing from that place, he went into their synagogue, 10  and look! there was a man with a withered hand! So they asked him, “Is it lawful to cure on the Sabbath?” so that they might accuse him.11  He said to them: “If you have one sheep and that sheep falls into a pit on the Sabbath, is there a man among you who will not grab hold of it and lift it out?12  How much more valuable is a man than a sheep So it is lawful to do a fine thing on the Sabbath.” 
Jesus also said 'I want mercy not sacrifice'.  Jesus was quoting Hosea 6 v6. 
But it got me thinking about Blood transfusions to save life. If Jesus himself said 'So it is lawful to do a fine thing on the Sabbath. 
Was he saying it is right to go against Bible law and principles if it means saving a person's life ? 

AllenSmith:
I bet you are a LOT of fun at parties!
... sorta like a bipolar clown with Tourette's syndrome.

AllenSmith:
I bet you are a LOT of fun at parties!
... sorta like a bipolar clown with Tourette's syndrome.

I am not even sure what you think I have a problem with. But it doesn't matter. Often I do not know where you are coming from. I don't have to. On the list of seven things that God hates, that as by  miracle, expands to eight, is "any one stirring up contentions among brothers." I will not do it. And I don't think you are doing it with me, unless you think that I am not a brother. 
Maybe some of our miscommunication lies in the fact you have battled the villians in many nasty places, and I have not - and for over a longer period of time.  You have a terminology of internet lore unfamiliar to me. (Space Merchant is even more so that way)  I have been online for most of 12 years, but until recently I did not stray from my own platform, where I would take comments from opposers if they wished to make any, but I did not let them hijack the site.
About a year ago, as an experiment, I briefly forayed into an apostate site, being a very bad boy, but once they discovered I had no plans to defect, they were so unfailingly nasty that I soon withdrew. They were effusive in their warm welcome until they discovered I planned to stay where I was. 
Because I am playful maybe you think I am sometimes attacking you. I am not. Ever. If I say you are "abrasive," as I have, it is not said to put you down. It is just playful. Come now, would you have anyone believe here that you are not? You would probably be well-served to attend to that to the extent you can, just as I would be well-served to speak with less hyperbole, because it does get misunderstood. Not that I will do it. Not that you will do it. But I will nudge in the proper direction. You should too.
Otherwise, to the extent that you believe it about me, we are brothers. We must not fight. But if you do not believe I am a brother - well, I guess that's okay. It is not exactly the Kingdom Hall here, is it?

Hi, James!

Would you say I am getting the hang of it?   

AllenSmith:
I bet you are a LOT of fun at parties!
... sorta like a bipolar clown with Tourette's syndrome.

My guess is he is a Lawyer, working for the WTB&TS ... who would view valor and courage, and integrity as spiritually immature, as it does save money by denying Justice, and not preserve your life at any cost.
I have asked him about that, on the last page, before, but he so far has declined to answer.
It would be interesting to see if he will answer BOTH of your questions, and my suppositions.

@TrueTomHarley  you were Vic Vomidog too?? You got me fooled there,  I thought he was an evil apostate 

@AllenSmith what were you trying to say with the Spartacus clip? Have you seen the movie?

The reason Superman's cape is so different from Jesus' cape is that when Jesus ascends, its fairly slowly, but when Superman takes off at hyper-sonic speeds, if he did not have the cape he has, the wind blast would rip his red "tighties" off.

( But he does have a nice shave !  In the old Superman comics he had to cut his beard growth in a mirror with his X-RAY vision.
When he looked his best, about a 150 people in the neighborhood behind Clark Kent's Apartment, at 344 Clinton Street, in Metropolis,  would get acute cancer.)

DefenderOTT:
In response to your "confused" emoticon above, on AllenSmith's  and my post.
Having one's "head shrunk", is an American euphemism for psychiatric sessions. A Shrink is a euphemism for a Doctor of Psychiatry.
For a male, swimming in cold water causes the scrotum to shrink in size dramatically, and testicles to rise up unto the body to keep the sperm warm, and is optically referred to as "shrinkage", colloquially.
...don't get 'em mixed up.
 

I'm guessing that there is a 98.4572% chance that DefenderOTT actually is AllenSmith. (Do you ever go to that part of the forum that shows who is logged in at a given time and therefore, indirectly, who just logged out, and what post they are currently looking at at any given time?)
 

Whatever @JW Insider's motives may be, by throwing certain things back in my face he has more than once caused me to reevaluate and even retract some errors I otherwise would have made - errors that I would not have wanted to see go into print.
He was also kind enough to acknowledge that I had succeeded in giving him correct counsel on an occassion or two in the past.
If anyone is playing me like a fiddle, to use @tromboneck's phrase, it is he, but I tend to accept him at face value, and he is among the relative few here who consistently back up their statements with facts, even if I am not sure that the facts are good to broadcast to all and sundry in the first place. He pursues a model that I do not like, but I cannot say that I have not benefited by it.

You rang?

Get out another bottle of Schnapps and drink some more.

Allen:
You may be laughing, but you have absolutely no reading COMPREHENSION skills that I can observe..
To assist you ... think of my post of the above two lines as separate subjects ... and  THEN think of how inebriated a person can get by stretching out a half gallon of Peach Schnapps over a period of two years.
It is obvious that you have NO sense of humor, so you may want to talk to a Shrink about that laughter
 
... and if you need a vomit bag when viewing cartoons ... we are talking about some REAL shrinkage here !
..... not to be confused with swimming in ice-cold water .....
.

I do see a reason not to run with it. Even if it turns out to be correct, there is no 6.3 figure from any study or anything like a study, just as there was no 10-times-better or 18-times-worse figure. Imagine just a couple of tweaks to account for what are currently unknowns. And, most importantly, you can't draw any conclusions that are based on the 12-13% CPS figure without some idea of how many of the JW cases would have also been "confirmed" using the same criteria that the Australian CPS uses for confirmation. (Which as was said before, should never come into the calculation for any reason, because all of the JW reports were already filtered for sexual abuse, and the Australian CPS only reports the 12-13% after all types have been confirmed or non-confirmed.)
Remember that we can only compare the number of children confirmed to be sexually abused in the CPS data with the number of children that would have been confirmed to be abused based on the JW cases.
For example, lets look at 1 possibility out of thousands of possibilities based on what a confirmation might look like from the "17 cases." (I'll use all 17 cases here based on the likelihood that these cases actually run from a report on the period from about September 1, 2015 to July 31, 2016, or 11 months, although I am rounding to 12 months.)
8 out 17 cases: dismissed as false or unsubstantiated claims against these 8 perpetrators. That's about half. 1 out of 17 cases: the JW only molested non-JWs, which has been true of known cases elsewhere. (effectively making JW children safer, at least around this predator) 1 out of 17 cases: 2 JW children were molested in a public school setting, through no fault of any Watchtower process or negligence. 2 out of 17 cases: confirmed to involve only one child each 2 out of 17 cases: confirmed to involve two children each 2 out of 17 cases: confirmed to involve three children each 1 of 17 cases: confirmed to involve 7 children. Remember, that this does NOT include an unknown additional number of cases that slipped through the cracks, where molestors are no longer JWs, having left or been disfellowshipped in the past but who molested JW children, unreported, while they were in the congregation but whose activities continue to add to the CPS numbers. I say this because of JW "turnover." While currently one out every 352 Australians is a JW, it is probably true that one out of every 140 Australians either is now, or has been a Witness.
But, for simplicity, we are ignoring any kind of old or new numbers from JWs already included in the CPS data.
So, even after dismissing 10 of the 17 cases as having no effect on the safety of JW children, we still could potentially have 19 children confirmed to have been sexually abused. Of course, more JW cases would be dismissed for non-confirmation because they are probably based on reports, accusations, or confessions that are probably 10 years after the crime, on average. On average, we are therefore measuring how many 10 year old cases might come to light against a time when public awareness and new civil laws for teachers, hospital workers, etc, require every potential or suspected case to be reported. We will not even attempt to account for that, but it would clearly skew the JW numbers to appear much better than they would be in actuality. Also, we should keep in mind that CPS must count children who did not wish to report, and whose parents may have wished not to report. But the process works much quicker with CPS, and helps to confirm more cases because they were usually much more recent.
Remember that since we should only be comparing the number of "confirmed" children abused, we can now compare our 19 confirmed children (out of 68,000) to the 5,559 confirmed children (out of 24,000,000). That alone would create a comparison of .0279% for JWs and .02313%. which would mean you would be 20% less safe as a JW than you would be in the general Australian population.
Of course, another person might think that 0 of the 17 cases would be confirmed. And using CPS methods on such old cases this might even be true. Or you might think that only 5 of the cases would be dismissed, and the remaining 12 would confirm sexual abuse on a mix of one, two and three children each (averaging 2), for a total of 24 confirmed cases. That small difference from 19 to 24 would result in a calculation that says you are 54% less safe as a JW.
Because we still have those intent only on creating contentions among brothers, I will add again that I do not believe these numbers mean anything. I'm just showing what could likely happen if there were a real study based on apples to apples numbers. There is no study, and I still believe children are safer among JWs than the average population, and much safer as JWs than among many other religious groups and institutions. And, as I've said before the changes the Watchtower has been making to the process is 100% better now than it was. (But I don't believe that the 100% is a real statistic.)

Legally, this is quite understandable, and is true .....but there is a "rest of the story", and it has in the case of the WTB&TS already been sporadically adjudicated to reflect the uniqueness of the way we do things, and the rational goes something like this:
A pastor has a duty to hold in confidence any information obtained during a counseling session. A pastor who violates this trust might be on the losing end of a suit for an invasion of privacy or defamation - but if he tells ONE OTHER PERSON, that confidentiality is not then protected by law ... as the clergyman HIMSELF violated it.
Like the old Italian saying ... "Two can keep a secret ... if one of them is dead !"
In the case of the Society, there are THREE judges that run a Judicial Committee, and then a synopsis is made including names, dates, and offenses (real or imagined) and the specific details and investigations, and results are discussed with the Society's legal department by telephone.
In letters back and forth to the Branch Offices, with explanations, clarifications, and policy directives in that particular case.  THEN forms are filled out with the pertinent details ... the accused and/or convicted "sinner", (which may include blatant criminal activity), and that is sent to the Branch office.
If appeals committees are formed that is ANOTHER three people on a different Judicial Committee, and of course the Circuit Overseer who sometimes has to bring in others from other congregations.
Including mail routers at Bethel, secretaries, and other legal staff, there might be 20 people that have intimate details of whatever was confessed ... or not confessed, but adjudicated with prejudice.
So you can see that as long as only ONE "clergyman", and only ONE person is the "penitent" ... yes that conversation and possible confession is protected by law, pretty much everywhere in the English speaking world, but for the reasons stated, those laws, however stated and formulated ... DO NOT APPLY TO JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES.
Not one in a thousand lay people understand this (a WAG), and perhaps not one in a hundred lawyers, and perhaps not one in ten Judges.   It is arcane information that is not in the experience of most, about JW "Groupthink".
This does not include Elders wives who through "pillow talk" want to know EVERYTHING that goes on ... and do  find out, or a herd or gaggle of  Elders themselves gossiping around steaks on a grill, and lots of beer.
You might as well post a transcript in the Kingdom Hall Newsletter, if we had one.
...except no recordings, stenographers, or observers,  or representation is/are permitted, so that would be impossible, as in any Star Chamber proceedings.
 
 

As I stated before on this thread ... but it has been confirmed by REAL numbers (.02% thesis of JW Insider ...)
MY MAIN concern is the institutionalized tyranny of silence where Brothers and Sisters are disfellowshipped, and THREATENED with disfellowshipping,  to keep the child abuse covered up.
The family is ALREADY traumatized ... then the victim is threatened  and/or disfellowshipped, and this travesty is compounded by the victims family being held hostage in "Coventry" ... and if this combined trauma overwhelms them ... they have been thrown away ... forever.
THIS is why we have a 77% loss rate of those who leave.
I have PERSONALLY seen much too much of THIS  modus operandi .... year after year after year after year ... and been threatened myself about 13 times in the past 55 years.
It USED to shock me, and hurt my feelings and discourage me like carrying heavy, heavy bags of rocks ... but I got used to it as a survival mechanism.
You may have noticed that I am not exactly "Brother Watchtower".
The JW "spiritual paradise" operates under the same style as the old Soviet Union's "Worker's Paradise", where the main newspaper PRAVDA ... which when translated means "TRUTH",  was nothing but a self-aggrandizing puff piece for the Communist Party.
Think I am hyperbolic?
Go to the JW.ORG Web Site, and under "Legal", see how much of all the legal things we have discussed here show up as honest reporting.
Last time I checked, it was ZERO.
The Brotherhood is DELIBERATELY being kept in the dark, as an institutionalized policy, pretending the "Elephant In The Room" is not really here.
 

I love irony !
otherwise that would be an upvote.
Hey! that quote is an "Elephant" AllenSmith could chew on !

I LOVE IT when somebody else does the heavy lifting ... like taking a Grand Piano up a three floor spiral staircase ... and gets it RIGHT!
I did that with a refrigerator when I was a young man ... but worrying statistics and data until they yield TRUTH ... is HARDER.
That's a LOT of work JW Insider, and I wish I could write you an appropriate check that would not bounce.