Anna

Not paying you. My mum already gave me that advice. And she and you are right, reading quality books and classic literature educates you and broadens your mind like nothing else, not disregarding our Bible based publications which fill in the gaps that secular authors fail to fill. In saying that, college education does help train the mind to think analytically as well, which is useful.

Jehovah allows many testing situations to happen.  He will only intervene in this wicked world when the time is ready.  Satan is in control of this world and many bad things may still come to pass before Jehovah steps in. We can pray for our brothers and sisters to remain faithful and be wise so as to avoid problems which it is possible to sidestep.  If they are discreet (which we know they are), they will survive this oppressive regime.

Furthermore, while I am more well-read than many, college had nothing to do with it.
I once calculated I had read 55 of the 100 'most important books in history' on a list put out by the BBC. Nobody I encountered had read more.
I read almost all of them via 'Books on Tape' while working a humdrum job in which only my body had to be engaged, but my mind remained mine. Possibly I can credit college with stimulating an already existing appreciation of reading. But it's a rather expensive route just to take away that lesson. I'll share it for free: Read.
(that'll be $5.99, please)
And even with all that reading, I have found Bible-based literature to be the best framework for evaluating everything else, simple though that writing is.
 

I never have supported a false claim about the Watchtower's statements in 1989. And I don't plan on starting to support any such false claims now.

Hi JR. 
I am liking @JW Insider 's anecdote re the "Millenium bug" as it relates to my own experience. I was handsomely paid to be on call for Yr 2K problems in my workplace although I had demonstrated months earlier that the relevant systems were unaffected.
I provide no support whatsover to those who make false claims about the Watchtower of any year. I am quite happy to observe errors, ommissions, and anything else that the muck-rakers care to dredge up. Apart from historical interest, it provides for me evidence of the  active involvement of the Head of the congregation.
Oh, and while we are on false claims, neither do I claim to be a computer genius with a degree. I, (thankfully), am one of those under-educated, college dropout JWs highlighted in another thread. Funny, it made no difference to me financially on comparison with siblings and peers who availed themselves of "the king's shilling". On reflection, maybe it meant I didn't reach the top 1% income bracket.....but then, neither did they. 

This is strange. Everything else you said in the paragraph that this quote came from is very true. But this particular sentence quoted here is false. It would also be completely irrelevant to a printed document or an electronic version of a printed document. The Y2K problem (which the Society cared nothing about in 1989) would not have made a 2017 CD-ROM a 1917 CD-ROM any more than it would have made it a pre-Gutenberg 1317 CD-ROM. Your claim is meaningless. The CD-ROM programs from the Watchtower that came out in 1993 can still be made to work today. I think 1993 was the first one. 
There never was an impending disaster coming from Y2K. And there will not be one arising from the 2038 Unix Millennium Bug either. (An upgrade to the operating system can make over 99% of the 2038 bug go away immediately without changing software.) The original Y2K bug could cause problems in a whole range of areas, and most of us in IT had to waste several years of our careers becoming our own QA departments, certifying that all our programs were going to work without a glitch. My own department's programs were mostly in C during those years (and a little bit of dBase+Clipper, Turbo Pascal, Excel Macros) but relied on mainframe feeds mostly through SQL+DB2. But I was also surprised that so many of the COBOL programs we checked had already worked around the Y2K problem even without storing 4-character years. That even goes for solving financial range problems that crossed January 1, 2000 and/or February 29, 2000.

Here's an interesting article on what might become the 2038 problem, oh, and isn't that about the same time the overlapping generation is due to come to an end?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
 

Nice phrase. This sums up nearly the entire story of the world since nearly the beginning of the world.

I find it interesting the very ones making the calls for peace and security are the very ones making things 'shakey'... It's all a ruse that will backfire on them. I don't think many who believe the Bible realize just how this is orchestrated. Basically what I am saying is it is not the results of organic natural behaviors. It is about Elitists arranging chaos so they can present the 'solution' to something that just does not exist. They will be the aggressors against God's people as well. They will try to maneuver God's people and force them to react. These fake events involving JW's will be what will make witnesses make a public stand to deny the untruthfulness of the reality spoken about them. Otherwise the option is to stay silent which would make them complicit. The acts of deceptions in the name of the witnesses is what I believe the thing that will force the 'truth' to take a stand. Ultimately it will spur on Christs 'standing up'.. The nations will be the initiating force.  But they will be surprised when Jehovah disturbs them by 'reports'.

I'm trying to sell my obsolete neckties to the Society, who brought this all on.

Can't tell if you are trying to solve the Society's "generation" crisis, or trying to sell books, or just don't want to throw out your obsolete neckties.

That's even worse! You think that the real reason the correction was made was because they understood the potential that a software glitch would have made us revert back to the end of the 19th century, doomed to repeat the last 100 years like a "Groundhog Day" for centuries instead of days. All I can say is what you said . . .
 

They do this full time, so when would you expect them to go to work to earn money for a living?

Never know with you, are you actually being serious?

I can get my head around that without much effort.

Misled? What specifics do you have in mind?
 

Various histories seem to indicate so. Not sure what detail there is in the WT yet but the consensus appears to be that:
"Because of their intensive study of the Bible, the Russell family (Charles, Margaret, and Joseph) concluded that they had finally gained a new and clearer understanding of what a Christian is called to do in laying down their earthly life in sacrifice and service to God. All three renewed their consecration (vow of dedication) and decided to be re-baptized in 1874."

It has everything to do with it since we are talking about the generation that was anointed before 1914. (Jesus talking about the signs of the last days which began in 1914 and THAT generation not passing away). Therefor the person would have to have been baptised before 1914. So it's that generation.  .
Which is where we encounter the problem because THAT generation is all but dead now and it does not apply to M. Sanderson, since he was baptised and became one of the anointed well after 1914 BUT, and this is the whole point of the overlapping generation, his life OVERLAPPED (between approx 1977 when Sanderson was baptised and 1992 when Franz died) with the life of one of the anointed who was baptised before 1914 (Franz).

He is at the museum in London getting so smart and sucking up so much data I hate to think what he will do with it. 

First of all, that is nonsense. These are legal professionals with no personal stake and if they are in any danger of getting hurt financially, they quit. The world today is a lawyer's playground - we all know it - and lawyers seek out culprits with deep pockets, so that they may transfer some of the contents therein to their own pockets. Sure, it is possible that the aggrieved party got his barber who does lawyer work on the side to represent him. More likely though, he responded to overtures of lawyers with deep pockets, like the ones who advertise on TV to sue a myriad of causes. 
I'd also appreciate if you didn't slobber over the civil courts as the ultimate font of justice. The justice it delivers is as much a by-product as it is the main event. If there are no deep pockets, the system does not bother. I'm not saying it is wrong to use the existing system, or that I wouldn't do it myself if aggrieved, necessarily. I just don't like to herald it as the ultimate source of justice. It is the source of wealth transfer which sometimes parallels    justice.
Because we are about the same age and our religious background is the same and even in some other ways our inclinations are not dissimilar, I think you will agree with me that true justice demands such a person be put to death when his heinous crime is uncovered. The world has managed to persuade most that the transfer of money is the same as justice, and a rising star legal profession eagerly pushes that new truth. Even the criminal system - by the way, why isn't this fellow in jail? - cannot deliver 'justice,' sentencing a rapist to a not overlong prison term, the last years of which  are appearances before the parole board, and the victims kin, who should be left to heal - are dragged into pleading why he should not be released, a battle that they face repeatedly and eventually lose. 
Lay off on the praise for the human court system, will you?
*the movie is a John Grisham novel, probably. If you knew as much about Bible principles and the new personality as you do about pop culture, you'd be a lot easier to take.

There is such a thing as modesty and so I rarely spill. But for some time I have been the model for photos such as this.

Actually he has a pretty fit body, as I remarked to my husband, much to his amusement

I don't know, but has it occurred to anyone that because the Romans were pagan, and it was the Romans who executed Jesus, that perhaps they may have used a pagan symbol, or at least the type of torture device that was popular in those days for THEM, and if the cross was what was popular in those days, then there is no reason why it couldn't have been a cross. Really, it is irrelevant whether it was a cross or something else since it wasn't Jesus or Jehovah who were deciding.

Thank you! Duh, why didn't I just think of doing that! I know, I must have thought you needed some work to do

That's the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral, of course, which is also the primary picture under the Wikipedia article: "History of the Catholic Church in Mexico." The relationship of the Catholic Church has gone through strained periods in Mexico (also in Spain, of course where some parallels occurred.) There were many years when the Catholic Church could not own property, but they had this idea that their "civic associations" such as Catholic schools could be owned by the Church. (I have read that this was one of the ways they fought legally for privileged exceptions.) Even this caused problems. But it seems a reasonable guess that the Watch Tower got the idea from the Catholic Church that declaring yourself a civic association instead of a religion was a good way to be able to own property, as I think Catholics had done with their schools. The Wikipedia article starts out as follows:
The history of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico dates from the period of the Spanish conquest (1519–21) and has continued as an institution in Mexico into the twenty-first century. Catholicism is one of the two major legacies from the Spanish colonial era, the other being Spanish as the nation's language. The Catholic Church was a privileged institution until the mid nineteenth century. It was the sole permissible Church in the colonial era and into the early Mexican Republic, following independence in 1821. At some point in the twentieth century, Eastern Catholic jurisdictions were established in Mexico,[citation needed] but Roman Catholicism remains the largest religious group. In the mid-nineteenth century the liberal La Reforma brought major changes in church-state relations. The Mexican state challenged the Catholic Church's role in education in Mexico, property ownership, birth, marriage, and death records, in anticlerical laws. Many of these were incorporated into the Constitution of 1857, restricting the Church's corporate ownership of property and other limitations. President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) pursued a policy of conciliation with the Catholic Church, keeping the liberal anticlerical articles of the constitution in force, but in practice allowing greater freedom of action for the Catholic Church.[1] With Díaz's ouster in 1911 and the decade-long conflict of the Mexican Revolution, the victorious Constitutionalist faction led by Venustiano Carranza wrote the new Constitution of 1917 that strengthened the anticlerical measures in the liberal Constitution of 1857. With the presidency of Northern, anticlerical, revolutionary general Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–28), the State's enforcement of the anticlerical articles of Constitution of 1917 provoked a major crisis in Mexico with violence in a number of regions of Mexico. The Cristero Rebellion (1926–29) was resolved, with the aid of diplomacy of the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, ending the violence, but the anticlerical articles of the constitution remained. President Manuel Avila Camacho (1940–1946) came to office declaring "I am a [Catholic] believer," (soy creyente) and Church-State relations improved though without constitutional changes. A major change came in 1992, with the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994). In a sweeping program of reform to "modernize Mexico" that he outlined in his 1988 inaugural address, his government pushed through revisions in the Mexican Constitution, explicitly including a new legal framework that restored the Catholic Church's juridical personality.[2][3][4][5][6] The majority of Mexicans in the twenty-first century identify themselves as being Catholic, but the growth of other religious groups such as Protestant evangelicals, Mormons, as well secularism is consistent with trends elsewhere in Latin America. The 1992 federal Act on Religious Associations and Public Worship (Ley de Asociaciones Religiosas y Culto Público), known in English as the Religious Associations Act or (RAA), has affected all religious groups in Mexico.[7]