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A concubine is a kind of "sex slave."

The word resolution is being used in a more general sense these days. We can always talk about our resolve to resolutely watch our conduct, ministry, etc. At the end of an assembly we can still "resolve" to send a certain amount of contributions to the overall www (word-wide work), or even resolve to use funds for another specified purpose. But the old use of "resolution" was highlighted because there was a time when Rutherford (especially) fought very hard to keep us from being a "religion." (Religion is a snare and a racket!) His terminology called the congregation a "company," and the ministers were "publishers" and Jesus Christ was even referred to as the Chief Executive Officer (really!!). This is why the old Kingdom Ministry/Kingdom Service was called Bulletin and Informant. When I was baptized we still spoke openly about placement quotas, and shortly before that it was about "selling" the publications, and "sales quotas." A pioneer, opened new "territory" just as door-to-salesmen were offered "territory" in "circuits" and "districts" and "zones" for things like encyclopedia sales, insurance sales, vitamins, Avon, Tupperware, Fuller Brushes, vacuum cleaners, and Carter's Little Liver Pills. Even the old term "colporteur" had no religious connotation, but was the term used by people who sold lots of different things. The book "Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America" by Alison J. Clarke says this: Fuller Brush salesmen were encouraged to view themselves as idealistic pioneers . . . The book SELL previously sold under the title Professional Selling: A Trust-Based Approach by Thomas N. Ingram and others, says this (p.27): They sometimes follow a pioneer salesperson and take over the account after the pioneer has made the initial sale. ... We use the case of the territory manager's position with GlaxoSmith Kline Consumer Healthcare We have Halls instead of Churches. We give door to door presentations, and practice them with demonstrations, and there are dozens of small examples that add up to show how we have historically tried to remove vocabulary that sounded too religious. But there are still examples documented in older WT publications that directly copy ideas about sales techniques and approaches that can be found in parallel literature about selling all types of products. I remember a Bible Study that said our Service Meeting reminded him exactly of Amway meetings with all the sample presentations, offer of the month, how to get the householders attention, when to be brief, when to answer questions, how to overcome objections, etc. So the point was that resolutions were always an imitation of secular conventions of corporations which asked convention "delegates" to "vote" on resolutions. Secular conventions always had those propositions built on a long list of legalistic "whereas" clauses. Our resolutions always did the same but were usually the envelope for a more religious statement or agreement to stay clear of religion, steer clear of false doctrines of the clergy, uphold Jehovah's standards, declare neutrality with respect to some political idea, declare a condemnation of some religious or political idea, etc.

She was soaked by the end of the match.

Depends on what you mean by the question. I am using the term "experiences" loosely, and might even be using the title "Sister" loosely, (as opposed to her "tony" tight pants, of course). Her "field" experiences were only about some of the highlights "on the field of play" and these were to ESPN reporters, not anything I heard privately. (I have never met her.) In Federer's game, I learned that "derision is a swear at a racket."

And I got to listen to Sister Selena Williams give her experiences. And a lot of recent "court" cases were discussed by everyone who had a chance to speak. There were even a few experiences about how to use the Net. P.S. The tickets were free. My old company is a major sponsor, but as a retired person, the best I can still get are tickets up to the quarterfinals. When I was still at work, we could take a whole day off including the finals and sometimes even get a courtside seat. High up executives also had skyboxes at the major baseball stadiums and Madison Square Gardens.

I’m at the convention right now and they told us not to use our phones at all. But a lot of people are still taking pictures and texting. Also they haven’t finished painting the jw.org logo yet only the background color at center court

I'm finding less and less of that "standard stuff" when you search on names of denominations. There was and still is a lot of talk in some countries of treating the Catholic Church as a "criminal organization" due to the high percentage of child abuse accusations. There were some schools and insitutions within the church where the percentage of accusations was so high that if it were found in any other institution, the entire organization would have been seen as a sex trafficking ring. But the Catholic Church gets a pass because of a traditional, historical reputation of promoting faith and peace (in spite of some pretty big lapses: Inquisition, Trinity, Hell, Purgatory, Hitler, and nearly half this world's wars). Also, as you mention, religious charities and "life improvements" take the strain off the institutions that try to govern. This is what keeps the beast from turning on those who ride on its back, tax-free. And, of course, the ability of a religion to make an immoral war seem moral to its constituents is a cozy form of payback to the beast, in lieu of taxes. The symbiotic relationship between beast and rider has saved her so far. But there have been exceptions when the religion apparently offers nothing useful in return to the state: no charities, no strain relief, and no help in military recruitment. This is why the Watchtower was one of the religious organizations picked on by the FBI back in 1918. This is why the Scientologists barely escaped the clutches of the beast a few decades ago. With Islam in the last couple decades, too, it's the nature of the beast to overreact.

My wife has a cousin who is SDA and she still drops by fairly often, because she travels a long way from her home to a church in the town neighboring ours. She enjoys the religious discussions, although I find her to be a bit sanctimonious about health issues, especially. (She's mostly a vegetarian.) And she seems like she gets it when we speak of their unfavorable E.G.White-related history, and several untenable doctrines (Sabbath, "Trinity," alcohol, etc.). But then she gets re-energized by her church to ignore it all, and she goes right back to how well they are doing in their charities, and growth. Her SDA church seems to have taken a strong interest in Hebrew/Messianic Jewish outreach, and has several Hebrew-speaking converts. But she also point out that they started at a time (and place) very similar to the Watchtower and yet they have grown to twice as many active members. 20 million vs our 8+ million, she claims. I don't know exactly how they measure activity, but they do have a lot of people who are active in outreach to poor people, "missions," etc. Most of her church attend more than one meeting a week.

How could Russell have said this if the great crowd were getting a heavenly resurrection according to Russell? Is this an actual quotation of some kind?

Officially, the Watchtower's answer to @Bubba Johnson Jr is NO! Newly anointed persons would NOT necessarily be included in "this generation." If there was a person who was anointed prior to 1914, and who is still alive today, then it's possible that newly anointed persons today are still therefore overlapping with that first group of anointed. (Technically there are not overlapping "generations" in the same sense as "this generation that will not pass away," there are only overlapping "groups" within that generation. In the natural sense of the word "generation" there are, of course, as many as 6 or 7 overlapping generations already since the generations alive in 1914, but those are NOT the type of generation the Watchtower is attempting to define here.) It seems rather unlikely that there are still anointed persons alive now who were around to "discern" the events of 1914, and who were anointed at the time. Even if one could be said to be anointed at say, 8 years old, that would mean the person was born in 1906, and is already 113 years old. The most likely "known" example of a "group one" person was F W Franz who died a few days shy of 1993. Brother Splane made clear (in his chart) that Franz was only an example of "group one," and that there may be more examples. If we assume a person could be anointed only as young as 18 instead of 8, then the oldest possible person in "group one" would be 123 years old, and this seems like too much of a stretch. The definition as explained by Brother Splane, makes clear therefore that newly anointed persons are NOT necessarily a part of "this generation" because their anointed life does not necessarily overlap with persons from group one. (Assuming all the "candidates" in group one have already died, and that these conjectured 113 to 123 year old candidates are not around today.)

Your diversionary attack on me does not explain why you indicated above that you are ashamed of the quotes from the Watchtower. I put the quotes there because it's so clear how we can learn from these, how they can apply today, and why it's so important to be honest about our past assumptions and conjecture. By merely indicating your shame and embarrassment about the Watchtower, you do nothing to show how we can learn from it. If we are merely ashamed, we will be more likely to hide the things we are embarrassed about, or try to claim that they should not be brought up. As you admitted earlier this is a kind of dishonesty when we fail to present key points. Oh, look, here's some more vote spamming that I missed, just in this topic alone, just in the last few minutes, and just on MY posts here: That doesn't even include a few other examples of vote spamming. Like this one from just a couple minutes ago, when I agreed with @Space Merchant here about how the JWs will soon hit the 9 million mark in peak and average publishers. I don't think it's just your shame and embarrassment about things the Watchtower has said. Surely you are not fighting against increased numbers, too. I really can't tell what you have against my statement to @Space Merchant above. If you are not too busy with your ongoing vote spamming campaigns, perhaps you could take some time out of your busy life to explain.

@BillyTheKid46, I thought you mostly just employed @Foreigner for vote spamming. I see you are doing some of the dirty work under your own name. And I also see you are nowhere near done yet, because you have added several more just since I copied the two images below. What's odd, however is that "both" of you have now voted down posts that contained nothing more than scriptures quoted from the NWT, and just above in this same topic, only 4 posts back, you (and Foreigner, of course) downvoted a post that does no more than introduce 3 Watchtower quotes about how long it took Adam to name the animals with surrounding context. Are you really that embarrassed by quotes from the Watchtower that you found it necessary to give two down votes to these Watchtower quotes????

On a novel, you mean? It's already written in my head. Maybe someone will find this and build a season of "Ozark" for Netflix, or maybe it fits the type of chemistry-teacher character they used for "Breaking Bad." The title can be "AL, CHEMIST" as in "I, ROBOT." Don't know if anyone else ever came up with this idea, but if anyone wants to use it, it's all yours. Don't even need (or want) credit for it. 😎

I agree, although technically, not exactly. It could be extremely expensive to alloy tungsten with the right amount of say iridium, osmium, platinum or rhenium to fool anyone. (And it doesn't alloy well with platinum.) But osmium is fairly cost effective, and makes a good tungsten alloy. Also, although this is true, the atomic weight of an atom is different from its density in solid matter. You can have a very heavy atom, but in its "solid" state, certain metals weigh more per cubic cm than their atomic weights would lead you to expect. Notice from a chart below that Tungsten is already nearly a perfect match to gold in terms of density/displacement. 19.25 vs 19.30, a difference of less than three thousandths of the total. There is about twice as much osmium on earth as there is gold, and you only need enough to mix a small percentage into the tungsten, a much more common and cheaper metal. The osmium will cost you $400 an ounce, the tungsten will cost you about $1.71 a troy ounce, and the gold about $1,500 an ounce. If my math is right, the mix is going to be about 98.50% tungsten and 1.50% osmium to create a total density of about 19.3004 (to equal gold) So make 98 ounces of the mix for just over $38,600, and add a thick 2 ounces of solid gold plating for $3,000 and my total cost is $41,615 for a gold bar that weighs in at a value of $150,000 for 100 ounces. Smelting, plating and assay equipment is paid for after I pass my first bar. ---------------------------------------references----------------------------------- Snippets from several sources: The abundance of gold in the Earth's crust is estimated to be about 0.005 parts per million. (Currently around $1500/troy ounce.) Osmium is .001 ppm. As of 2018, it sells for $400 per troy ounce (about 31.1 grams), and that price had held steady for more than two decades, according to Engelhard Industrial Bullion prices. The current price of tungsten is approximately US $19.85 per pound. (454 grams) The abundance of tungsten in the Earth's crust is thought to be about 1.5 parts per million Tungsten-heavy metal alloys and tungsten alloys with titanium, tantalum or rhenium and dispersion-strengthened tungsten composites. Rhenium is even cheaper ($250/troy ounce) but might be harder to isolate as a separate metal. Some molybdenum contain from 0.002% to 0.2% rhenium. More than 150,000 troy ounces of rhenium are now being produced yearly in the United States. Metal Density (g/cm3) Iridium 22.65 Osmium 22.61 Platinum 21.09 Rhenium 21.02 Neptunium 20.45 Plutonium 19.82 Gold 19.30 Tungsten 19.25

I doubt it ever gets that far.

I guess a person could mix two other metals (Lead Osmium and Tungsten or something like that) to get a very similar weight/displacement, and then coat it with gold. But that isn't even the problem here. This is pure gold, through and through. No problem with the metal, only the stamp.

[I'm separating this post from the one it was combined with above:] Back in 1956, when Armstrong's "1975 in Prophecy!" magazine was written, the Watchtower was still teaching that 1976 was the end of the 6,000 years. Note the words highlighted in blue and red in the following three Watchtower articles, especially the part about how long it took Adam to name the animals. The first link is to the Feb 1, 1955 Watchtower "Questions From Readers" on jw.org. https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1955089 According to Genesis 1:24-31 Adam was created during the last part of the sixth creative-day period of 7,000 years. Almost all independent chronologists assume incorrectly that, as soon as Adam was created, then began Jehovah’s seventh seven-thousand-year period of the creative week. Such then figure that from Adam’s creation, now thought to be the fall of 4025 B.C., why, six thousand years of God’s rest day would be ending in the fall of 1976. However, from our present chronology (which is admitted imperfect) at best the fall of the year 1976 would be the end of 6,000 years of human history for mankind, 6,000 years of man’s existence on the earth, not 6,000 years of Jehovah’s seventh seven-thousand-year period. Why not? Because Adam lived some time after his creation in the latter part of Jehovah’s sixth creative period, before the seventh period, Jehovah’s sabbath, began. Why, it must have taken Adam quite some time to name all the animals, as he was commissioned to do. . . . The very fact that, as part of Jehovah’s secret, no one today is able to find out how much time Adam and later Eve lived during the closing days of the sixth creative period, so no one can now determine when six thousand years of Jehovah’s present rest day come to an end. Obviously, whatever amount of Adam’s 930 years was lived before the beginning of that seventh-day rest of Jehovah, that unknown amount would have to be added to the 1976 date. When the 1955 article was updated in 1968, 13 years later, note how the line about the accuracy of the chronology remains the same (almost verbatim in blue) but the line about the animals (in red) has changed: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1968602#h=59 Our chronology, however, which is reasonably accurate (but admittedly not infallible), at the best only points to the autumn of 1975 as the end of 6,000 years of man’s existence on earth. It does not necessarily mean that 1975 marks the end of the first 6,000 years of Jehovah’s seventh creative “day.” Why not? . . . This time between Adam’s creation and the beginning of the seventh day, the day of rest, let it be noted, need not have been a long time. It could have been a rather short one. The naming of the animals by Adam, and his discovery that there was no complement for himself, required no great length of time. The animals were in subjection to Adam; they were peaceful; they came under God’s leading; they were not needing to be chased down and caught. It took Noah only seven days to get the same kinds of animals, male and female, into the Ark. (Gen. 7:1-4) Eve’s creation was quickly accomplished, ‘while Adam was sleeping.’ (Gen. 2:21) So the lapse of time between Adam’s creation and the end of the sixth creative day, though unknown, was a comparatively short period of time. By October 1, 1975, the Watchtower changed back to the 1956 style statements about Adam and how long it might have taken to name the animals: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1975720 During that time, God had Adam name the animals. Whether that period amounted to weeks or months or years, we do not know. So we do not know exactly when Jehovah’s great “rest day” began, nor do we know exactly when it will end. The same applies to the beginning of Christ’s millennial reign. The Bible provides us no way to fix the date, and so it does us no good to speculate when that date may be.—Gen. 2:18-25; Matt. 24:42, 44. However, the Bible’s time clock does indicate to us that 6,000 years of human history end in this year 1975. Early in God’s “rest day” Adam became a rebel against God-rule. Thus, for the most part, the first 6,000 years of man’s history have been marked by man-rule.

Legislators seem to have been oblivious to sexual abuse partly because so many have been distracted by their own appetites. Last year I clipped this from a Southern newspaper. The date of the paper is November 21, 1877:

Original version of 1975 in Prophecy! (link to PDF) Some good points there @BillyTheKid46, about Armstrong and Taylor. (I hadn't heard of Taylor back then.) I remember hearing Witnesses talk about how closely Herbert W Armstrong sounded like the message of the Witnesses, and how elders from the platform had to mention that we don't listen to such programs even though there might be a lot of good information that draws us in. Just like "The Plain Truth," this brochure "1975 In Prophecy!" from which I copied pieces above, speaks with similar language. The message had many differences, but it was styled much as our own teachings: the 144,000 as spirit begotten ones. The 6,000 years of trying man's rule as a test of whether man can rule himself. It mentions the Great Tribulation, and Armageddon, and the New World (called The World Tomorrow). It speaks of those who know the "Truth" surviving During the millennium, those with the Truth will teach those others who come through the Great Tribulation. Matthew 24 was often used to point out the greater number of earthquakes, famines, pestilences, and wars. The fulfillment on Jerusalem in 70 was only the "typical" fulfillment. Authors and experts were quoted about 1975, just as the 1968 version of the "Truth" book had done. The repetition of phrases like "IT'S LATER THAN YOU THINK" and "Time is running out for this world," etc., were nearly identical to covers of the Awake! that put them in the form of a question: IS IT LATER THAN YOU THINK? Is Time Running Out For This World?" The pictures of destruction at Armageddon with buildings toppling and dead bodies are shown before pictures of a new world society of survivors building things new, and then a paradise completed by the end of the thousand years. Back in 1956, when the above magazine was written, the Watchtower was still teaching that the end of the 6,000 years of man's existence would be in 1976, not 1975.

I think it was one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books that had the phrase: If at first you don't fricassee, fry fry a hen. Or was it: Whistling girls and crowing hens, always come to some bad ends. Maybe, it was both. I've never read them myself. Our teacher read them all to us when I was in a 2-room schoolhouse in Missouri -- when I was in the 5th and 6th grades. It was really a one room schoolhouse with a divider down the middle, and one teacher handled grades 1 - 4 on one side, and another teacher handled grades 5 - 8 on the other. When I got to grade 5, we were supposed to be doing our schoolwork while the teacher teacher taught the other grades. Very distracting, but you get used to it. At any rate, all 4 grades at once had to listen to L.I.Wilder's "Little House" series for an hour a day.

At least you understand the point that, as you say, "omitting a strong fact is another way of lying by them." I agree 100 percent, and it's really the ongoing theme here. The article you mention is exactly what I had in mind when I said: Yes. We've also discussed this exact idea before. We've also discussed the typical life cycle of these predictions. For example, Russell made a lot of predictions about October 1914, then the November 1913 Watch Tower began hedging because it just didn't look like everything that was supposed to happen still had time to happen. So Russell began writing and saying that it looks like he had been wrong -- that it might be another year or so, or that people might look back on this prediction 100 years from now and wonder what it was all about. Another article came out in early 1914 that also expressed Russell's strong doubts about 1914. It's almost as if he was prepared to think that people might look back and laugh about this 100 years later. Similarly, there were a lot of expectations that F.W.Franz had regarding 1975, and he began to give talks in late 1974 that still created excitement, but also asked the question about whether all the things that might be expected to happen first could still happen in time. In one of Franz' talks you can tell he is trying to do the right thing, but he is being a bit ambiguous and the audience doesn't really get it. It's as if it's a little too late to dampen the excitement, and the audience responds as if they think he is being "slick" -- saying one thing but meaning another. I heard one of these 1975 talks in LA. The audience starts to laugh and snicker when he says: "And don't any of you go around saying . . . " He was beginning to hedge in 1974, and the summer assembly talk was a reflection of that. It was an October 15, 1974 Watchtower that reflected the talk from the 1974 convention. It was timely, and it finally admitted that it was IMPORTANT to start strongly considering why "no man knows the day or hour." This is why I said that the scripture was sometimes brought up, but it was almost too little, too late. The genie couldn't be put back in the bottle until the expectations apparently fell through. After 1976, there was hardly another mention even of the "mid-70s" anymore. And this shows you how the Witnesses are not the type of persons to create speculation on their own -- because as the mid-70s started to close out, you would expect even more and more speculation that the time was now approaching so much closer. After all, it was about what the mid-70s would bring, not specifically 1975. Yet, when the Watchtower and representatives from Brooklyn stopped mentioning it, it died out at a time when you would expect it to gain even more momentum, if it had been a "grass roots" speculation. You can therefore tell it was a top-down speculation.

They were afraid he might take A-FENCE!

@TrueTomHarley, You know why the Philistines at Gaza were so afraid when Samson carried off the doors of the city gate and two posts to the top of a mountain?

I don't know what a "hen" is, in this context, but as far as I can tell @ComfortMyPeople is from Spain, while I am in New York. I have never seen him or any of his research. You show the idea that many Adventists gave up on dates after their expectations failed. What would you expect? There are not many other options, when you are at the end of the possibilities that your particular date system allows. A die-hard Second Adventist might just try to make some new adjustments to the "system" to figure out why the expectations might have been off by just a few months, or a few years, or even a matter of decades. They keep looking for a way to get the system to work because they can't give up after they invested so much in the beliefs. After Miller's failures, he himself decided against setting more dates, but thousands of people were ready to listen to the next predictions for the 1850's, 1860's, 1870's, etc. This makes the continuing date-setters even MORE of a die-hard Adventist. And these are the types of persons who influenced Russell to continue date-setting. Russell continued date-setting, and adjusting his date predictions from 1879 to 1915. Of course, there is one other solution, and that is to say that your date really was right all along -- that Jesus really did come to be present in 1874, but that it has been an invisible presence. This was the very solution that fit Russell's ideas, and it kept Barbour's adjusted dating system unchanged, except for that one detail. Russell expected the visible manifestation of Christ's kingdom to begin around 1914, and ultimately this was also changed to an invisible "manifestation," so that all those other dates 1874, 1878, 1881, 1914, etc., could remain unchanged. Of course, over time, 1881 was dropped, then 1874, then finally 1878 had no more prophetic significance (around 1961) and it was completely dropped, too. So that we only have 1914 remaining. (And I think this date, too, will be dropped in about 15 years barring any earthshattering changes.) But we still believe in the imminent manifestation of Jesus advent based on our interpretation of various prophetic time periods that we have tied to the present time period. Therefore we are still under some of the influence of adventists, in that general sense.

LOL. I saw that coming as soon as I asked the question: In what sense do you believe that there are two periods of 1,260 that make up the 2,520? Nearly the same thing happened when I asked Allen that question. You haven't shown where. A proposition given without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. I know you made that claim. But without evidence. The problem with your theory is that when Russell and Barbour continued the Herald, it was still very much an Adventist publication. That didn't change. The book "Three Worlds" that they published in 1877 was steeped in Millerite Adventism, so much so that you see the way they concluded it with a defense of Miller in the section on "William Miller's Dream" above. It even copied the "seventh month" movement. But it was a date-adjusted Adventism with very similar interpretations of the same time periods. With Barbour's MINOR adjustments to make Miller's end dates move 30 to 45 years further into the future, Russell kept these very similar time period interpretations throughout the entire series of Studies in the Scriptures, and these doctrines were generally kept until 1927, with a few of them remaining until 1943. Even before Russell influenced him, Barbour, still a full-fledged Second Adventist, had already moved Miller's start date for the 2,520 years from 677 BC to 606 BC (based on Bowen/Elliott/etc). This made the period nearly the same as John Aquila Brown's use of the 2,520 years. Your theory that Barbour was done with Second Adventism apparently has no evidence, unless you know of some that you are not sharing. But there is plenty of evidence that indicates your theory is not true. I actually agree with you that Russell's ongoing work in the Watch Tower was based on "new light" that progressed further and further toward clearer truth, and further away from Barbour's influence and the influence that other Second Adventists had on Russell. But this couldn't happen completely until 1927 (to about 1933) when the WTS was finally finished selling off the remaining stocks of Studies in the Scriptures. It seems likely that you are able to keep your claim alive only by changing the definition of Adventism to a special definition that works for you. If this is the case, then you are only arguing semantics. It's probably another one of those cases where anyone else is a liar "with Satan in their head" if they use a word the way a dictionary or Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, uses it, instead of a way that you need them to use it to fit your own ideology. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Adventism I don't point to that article to say they are right about "Jehovah's Witnesses" but to give you an idea of the "definition" of "Adventism" and "Second Adventism."