Anna

@Pudgy With respect to the so-called "overlapping generations," John A Brown had "solved" this (in 1823) by saying that Jesus was referring to the literal, physical "Nation of Israel." Curiously, his arguments also count on the fact that the natural nation of Israel would NEVER pass away, but would be restored at Armageddon in 1844, and would become a world empire, surviving the attack of Gog and Magog in 1873, and would reach its full and glorious realization in the entire world by the time of the second judgment in 1917. Some of this is similar to C.T.Russell's view in the Watchtower, and even Rutherford's view up until at least 1925, that the nation of Israel would gradually become the only surviving nation in the world, ruling from Jerusalem in Palestine.
A lot of Witnesses are not aware that C.T.Russell was a "world famous" Zionist according to some current Zionist historians. But Rutherford's last major support for Zionism was the book "Comfort for the Jews" in 1925, containing teachings that Rutherford dropped completely by 1930 (in the books, Light I and Light II).

Sorry if that was misunderstood. When I said "that's funny" I was thinking about the fact that TTH was trying to get this Lincoln/Grant discussion away from JW Only forums and finally put in a general non-JW forum. On this "third" attempt to remove it from JW references, TTH mentioned John Brown, and I wondered if someone might confuse this John Brown with John Aquila Brown. I was afraid someone would say: "Wasn't John Brown the man who wrote about the Gentle Times?"
For anyone who isn't aware of how this ties to JW beliefs, John A. Brown is mentioned in the JW "history" book, that we often just call "Proclaimers," quoted below:
*** jv chap. 10 p. 134 Growing in Accurate Knowledge of the Truth ***
As early as 1823, John A. Brown, whose work was published in London, England, calculated the “seven times” of Daniel chapter 4 to be 2,520 years in length. ... He did, however, connect these “seven times” with the Gentile Times of Luke 21:24.
That brief and only mention of him in our publications has confused some into thinking that John A. Brown mentioned 1914. He never did. Based on the above "Proclaimers" quote, some Witnesses have also thought that at least "he did, however, connect these 'seven times' with the Gentile Times of Luke 21:24." He never did that either.
So far, the WTS has not corrected the misinformation.
To see what John A. Brown actually said, one can find the primary book about the topic here:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/BakZr75kBvYC?hl=en&gbpv=1
That's volume 1 of Even-Tide, above. Volume 2 is on Google Books, too, but it goes on to other topics:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/FokAQDtWwQgC?hl=en&gbpv=1
He also wrote this book:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Jew_the_Master_key_of_the_Apocalypse/NKPhpB9uKEUC
If anyone wishes to discuss his books, I can join. I've read two of them, and that discussion will be moved to a JW-related forum.

I received this joke today from my sister in Afrikaans - I hope it translates ok. 
Peter passed his driver's license and said to his father that he would like to have his own car.  His father said: "fine",  if you push up all your school marks from a symbol C to an average of B; read the bible daily; and have a haircut.
A few months later his son comes back and says that he had pushed up his school marks and read the bible daily.  So his dad said: what about the haircut? 
Peter started talking about his bible studies and mentioned all the Bible characters who had long hair: Samson, Absalom, Moses, John the Baptist and said that he is just about sure the disciples of Jesus also had long hair.....  so could he now have the car?
The father replied:  Did you notice in your bible studies that all of them walked where they wanted to go?🤣
 

Now you are taking on my role - missing the joke!  
It is a list of impossible and absurd tasks designed to make you guffaw!  

MEDICINE: You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze and a bottle of scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until your work has been inspected. You have fifteen minutes.
                       What?!  Do you think we are suicidal maniacs?
PUBLIC SPEAKING: 2,500 riot-crazed aborigines are storming the classroom. Calm them. You may use any ancient language except Latin or Greek.
If you had only allowed either Ancient Greek or Latin, my daughter could have come up with something great… (professional author and college degree in Classics, Greek tract, but earning a living as a stock broker for Fidelity Investments. Knows several types of Greek and Latin.
Knows, but does not obey, Jehovah 💔

This is nuts! This is crazy! Who do you think we are…… Elon Musk?

I was cleaning out old papers today and came across a final exam. I'll post a picture in a minute.
 

I don't think we use those forms any more....at least I haven't for years...

This shows, how an opposing view can be seen as a false assumption in the eyes of the beholder. If the reference is about 1914, and 1975 for example, then, people that deny Christ, denies written knowledge found within the pages of scripture. That in its self is a slap in the face of Christ, since God would guide any future generation to a better understanding. 
The proposition that recording territory was beneath Christ, and a waste of time, is a modern false equivalency. Christ travels along the apostles were recorded and entered, in the bible. Can we not see, similarities with "Judas" being a treasure?
Failing these understanding, is in support of men, and have an independent ideology. Something JW's do not submit to.

 
 

Hmmm…… they don’t have a column for smartphone screen time!

I just realised this may sound like I was inferring that JWI is stupid. Of course I don't mean that. If you live in the USA, you don't have much choice, especially not if you don't live close to a gruff German grandma! 

I agree. Things that used to be simple, have been made ridiculously complicated and commercialized. That's why I like the former soviet countries, they haven't caught on to this rubbish yet, or at least they have bigger fish to fry for now.....OR they know they wouldn't get the customers because people aren't stupid enough, yet* 🤪😂 OR, these kind of enterprises are not the best type for money laundering
*they go to grandma's orchard and pick their free apples for free, or pick the apples that grow on trees lining country roads...
 

Mathematics is a very pessimistic exercise. Perhaps we should stop teaching it in schools. (If one reads some of those energy headlines you'd think that they already stopped teaching math in all schools that teach business or politics or social sciences.) 

I only like to set up the cart in a nice clean place where there is very little car or foot traffic because I already have its dirty wheel marks all over my car's back seat.

We let the ones with fertile hearts come to us!  We talk to them only if they are interested in something they see on the cart. 

If there is one thing we have learned about Mathew 4 5784, it is that he bitches no matter what. Before the days of cart witnessing, he was saying, ‘Geez—you keep visiting people who aren’t interested. Why don’t you set up carts so that anyone who is can approach you, leaving the rest In peace?’

I haven't seen Nicole on the forum in a long time. But I'm glad you noticed this 6 year old post. It seems that churches who believe they are on the true path (which I would think should be a given) must sometimes speak out of both sides of their mouth, when they try to endorse ecumenical movements.
The link where you quoted the footnote also says the following in the main paragraph:
In this connection, it needs also to be recalled that if a non-Catholic Christian, for reasons of conscience and having been convinced of Catholic truth, asks to enter into the full communion of the Catholic Church, this is to be respected as the work of the Holy Spirit and as an expression of freedom of conscience and of religion. In such a case, it would not be a question of proselytism in the negative sense that has been attributed to this term. As explicitly recognized in the Decree on Ecumenism of the Second Vatican Council, “it is evident that the work of preparing and reconciling those individuals who desire full Catholic communion is of its nature distinct from ecumenical action, but there is no opposition between the two, since both proceed from the marvelous ways of God” ( https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20071203_nota-evangelizzazione_en.html#_ftnref49 )
And, of course, it's nearly impossible to find the right "compromise" between two things so distinct, without noting the opposition between them.
Part of that Vatican "Decree" said the following, which shows the real problem in that ecumenism can also be a scandal, "damaging the holy cause," in that it makes the Christ "divided."
https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19641121_unitatis-redintegratio_en.html
The restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the principal concerns of the Second Vatican Council. Christ the Lord founded one Church and one Church only. However, many Christian communions present themselves to men as the true inheritors of Jesus Christ; all indeed profess to be followers of the Lord but differ in mind and go their different ways, as if Christ Himself were divided.(1) Such division openly contradicts the will of Christ, scandalizes the world, and damages the holy cause of preaching the Gospel to every creature.
But the Lord of Ages wisely and patiently follows out the plan of grace on our behalf, sinners that we are. In recent times more than ever before, He has been rousing divided Christians to remorse over their divisions and to a longing for unity. Everywhere large numbers have felt the impulse of this grace, and among our separated brethren also there increases from day to day the movement, fostered by the grace of the Holy Spirit, for the restoration of unity among all Christians. This movement toward unity is called "ecumenical." Those belong to it who invoke the Triune God and confess Jesus as Lord and Savior, doing this not merely as individuals but also as corporate bodies. For almost everyone regards the body in which he has heard the Gospel as his Church and indeed, God's Church. All however, though in different ways, long for the one visible Church of God, a Church truly universal and set forth into the world that the world may be converted to the Gospel and so be saved, to the glory of God.

In a mellow mode, I strolled into a tattoo parlor. Seeing the fellow at work, on the spur of the moment I asked if when one of his trade tattoos an intimate part of the body, whether he gets a charge out of it, or is it just art. 
‘It’s art!’ came the firm rebuke.

We picked about as many bad apple-related puns as we did apples that day. That's because there's always a cornucopia of corny puns to cope with. They're like low-hanging fruit. I do remember one really dumb "pear" joke I made on the hayride when we passed up the rows of out-of-season pears, and I saw one still on a tree:  I started singing:  ". . . And a Bartlett in a pear tree."  [wrong crowd?]
But I made an unrelated but even odder "pair" joke on the way back home. Unfortunately, it was kind of an off-color joke, for my wife's ears only, that I shouldn't repeat here.
So here goes: 😮
It was based on an actual experience from a couple of days earlier when my wife didn't have the cash at the time to tip the nail salon people and she sent me back there with the tip a couple hours later. I was to find two people, Tina and Lee-Lee, the owner and the "nail-doer," respectively. It was my first time in a nail salon, surrounded by women, and I played up that part of the story when my wife asked me if I had found everyone OK. (Wives won't always admit it, but there is a certain kind of tension when they've just send their husbands into a bevy of women to represent them.)
So all that background of the story had almost nothing to do with the joke. Almost. I thought it would be fun to tell my wife about a certain woman I saw in the nail salon who was just finishing up getting intricate designs put on her nails by the same nail-doer, Lee-Lee, and I had to interrupt them. In excruciating detail I described to my wife how the woman getting her nails done had these extreme upper body elements that reminded me of when Dolly Parton once described her bra with the words, "It's like trying to put 100 pounds of mud in a 50-pound gunny sack." 
But I also mentioned to my wife that, waiting out in front of the salon, was another woman in a car who had almost exactly the same figure, and the same mode of displaying it with a lower-than-low-cut blouse. (Or maybe it was a dress; I don't remember looking.)
I said to myself: I bet that woman in the car is waiting for the same woman I just interrupted. And I'll bet she is going to get in the same car with her. And sure enough, as I was getting back to my own car, that other woman left the salon and got in the car with her, right there in front of the salon.
"How do you think that I was able to predict that this was going to happen?" I asked my by-now-thoroughly-exasperated wife.
 

I just realised this may sound like I was inferring that JWI is stupid. Of course I don't mean that. If you live in the USA, you don't have much choice, especially not if you don't live close to a gruff German grandma! 

I agree. Things that used to be simple, have been made ridiculously complicated and commercialized. That's why I like the former soviet countries, they haven't caught on to this rubbish yet, or at least they have bigger fish to fry for now.....OR they know they wouldn't get the customers because people aren't stupid enough, yet* 🤪😂 OR, these kind of enterprises are not the best type for money laundering
*they go to grandma's orchard and pick their free apples for free, or pick the apples that grow on trees lining country roads...
 

Oh, C’mon! Show a little backbone, why don’t you?
Next thing you know you’ll be agreeing with that anti-cult whack job Korelov who calls the United States “the spiritual garbage dump of humanity” and who paints Jehovah’s Witnesses foremost in advancing that cause. I distinctly remember in the 70s working with the tract “Jehovah’s Witnesses—Christians or Communists”—designed to counter just the opposite impression, that Witnesses were agents of Russian communism.
https://bitterwinter.org/russia-sensational-revelations-jehovahs-witnesses-prepare-an-anti-putin-coup/
 

The gruff German grandma down the road loaded me up with enough pairs from her tree to last weeks. I was just walking by with headphones on, the way I do, and greeted her as she was crossing the street. Turned out she had just returned from giving a load to people there, also. 
My greeting was enough. She pulled me into her yard and made me take some of her pairs. However many I took, it was not enough, and I left with a bag as heavy as I could carry. So I brought them to the congregation get-together where several young children who had never eaten pairs before dove into them, found them delicious, and probably had the runs for a week.
My wife has called on this women before in the course of her ministry. ‘I don’t think she’s interested,’ she says. ‘She’s gruff, but underneath pretty decent.’ So I told her my wife’s verdict, which I agree with. I’ve been back since for more pears and even some apples.
(I should have told her that city-slicker @JW Insiderwould pay her $40 a bag for whatever came off her trees, even $80 if she serenades him with an accordion band.)

I agree. Things that used to be simple, have been made ridiculously complicated and commercialized. That's why I like the former soviet countries, they haven't caught on to this rubbish yet, or at least they have bigger fish to fry for now.....OR they know they wouldn't get the customers because people aren't stupid enough, yet* 🤪😂 OR, these kind of enterprises are not the best type for money laundering
*they go to grandma's orchard and pick their free apples for free, or pick the apples that grow on trees lining country roads...
 

“And I heard a voice as if in the midst of the four living creatures say: “A quart of wheat for a de·narʹi·us, and three quarts of barley for a de·narʹi·us; and how do you like them apples?”