TrueTomHarley

JWI is very close to losing possession of his own thread, with a dozen different yo-yos taking it in a dozen different directions. I am ashamed of us all. Usually it does not take almost 5 pages for us to knock him off the roller derby track and into the stands.

Are you concerned that the Sermon of Srecko did not make the cut?

It can be overdone. Still, one never hears of people swearing off watching the news because they are sick and tired of the chipper reports and the unceasing upbeat tone.

What! You mean no one even leaves the light on for them? What a shabby way to treat lawyers!

If you would read the spiritual food provided instead of just endlessly bellyaching about it, you would know. https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/02/the-reproach-of-child-sexual-abuse-falls-on-the-abu.html

Given that any hesitancy to report CSA for fear of causing reproach on the congregation has been removed, it is hard to see that anything damaging is “still in place.” https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/02/the-reproach-of-child-sexual-abuse-falls-on-the-abu.html

This never happens. Everyone who is an elder remains an elder unless some are seen to no longer qualify. Judging from what you have written, that would have been the case where you hail from. It often takes a big blowup of some sort because elders are like people anywhere—they tend to give others the benefit of the doubt, disinclined to judge the “straw” in their brother’s eye, on account of the “rafter” in their own. It is not an easy thing to delete a colleague or to persuade one to step down in the absence of some big blowup. In times of great blowups, it sometimes takes a circuit overseer or two to sort things out.

I’m just sitting here minding my own business, thinking up new insults for The Librarian and our “house” discreet slave, JTR.

I know of no other instance of any organization being successfully sued when the above conditions are so. Usually it is the rule that one of the leaders/clergypersons perpetrated the abuse and/or that it happened in one of their facilities. I wrote about this at the time, saying: “Do I understand this correctly? One child abuses another within a family, and it is the fault of the congregation elders?” https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/03/a-class-action-suit-in-quebec.html

I think not. The contexts are completely different. The superfine apostles that Paul fought with in Corinth were men very impressed with the wisdom of that Greek culture that Paul deliberately set aside. The first three chapters of 1 Corinthians makes that clear. Paul determined that he would know nothing among them except Christ impaled. He probably could have gone toe to toe with them in “wisdom” in a way that most others could not because he was educated as a Pharisee. He decided not to. Consequently he came to them with “fear and trembling” since he effectively approached them with “one hand tied behind his back.” Does this in any way fit the GB? They never have such “wisdom” of the educated world and are roundly derided for it. Their formal education stops at high school in almost all cases. The superfine apostles were that way, but the telling circumstance is that they hadn’t done anything to merit it. The GB are not that way, in my estimation, but the telling circumstance is that they have done something to merit it if they were. The superfine ones were comfortable men who wanted Paul’s authority but not his work. The GB have taken on his work. Paul almost loses it in his second letter comparing how his record bests the superfine ones in every way. So this, too, doesn’t fit the GB at all. They do have circumstances approaching that of Paul, as the superfine apostles did not. They have usually served full-time for decades, often in circumstances more lowly than of those that they would later lead. In no possible way can they be compared to the armchair superfine apostles of the Corinth area.

I will offer them moonshine from your still if I can get you to part with any. By the time kids are sent away to college, they are considered no longer children and capable of interacting with the adult world. If that is not so, then what parent would be so foolish so as to send them away?

what I meant is that I don’t plan to pursue it. However, JWI himself responded, so I will. He has extraordinary powers granted him by the Librarian (that old hen). He can divide into a separate thread if he wants to. One college kid asked, when I proposed coming back, “To what end?” It was a question I’d not been asked before. I explained that in my ideal scenario I would return 100 times and engage in 100 different conversations and on the 101st I would ask him if he wanted to be a Jehovah’s Witness like me and at that time he should say ‘No.’ I even asked him to rehearse. “Let me show you how it would work. I am going to ask you to become a Witness like me and I want you to say “No.” Would you do that? He agreed. “Would you like to become a Witness?” I asked. “No,” he said. “You see? Nothing to worry about. It’s just conversation. You’ll learn your way around the Bible in the meantime. The moment you tire of it, just let me know. No one is easier to get rid of than Tommy.” The anticult people try to spin our calls as “recruiting.” That’s why the outrage some have over the recent letter expressing condolences over someone’s loss. If they just took it at face value, they’d be okay with it. We should not let those scoundrels define the game. Are we “recruiting?” I suppose so, but in the most non-threatening way possible, so that only by really stretching the point could we be said to be doing it. And it is not an immediate goal—telling the good news of the kingdom is. College is far more indoctrinating than anything having to do with Jehovah’s Witnesses. The typical student is separated 24/7 from his or her previous stabilizing routine and people—a classic tool of brainwashing. (I didn’t actually go through the rehearsal with him. Our best lines always occur to us too late. But that does not mean that I won’t do it when the situation is right.)

I like the online study feature on the website. I like the cart witnessing. I do wish that we were not so all-over-the-board with the door-to-door but would more-or-less settle on a consistent presentation, like working with the Good News brochure—‘15 chapters, 15 hour discussions, after which you have a working knowledge of the Bible—not everything, but a foundation. It’s what we offer—do you want it or not?’ This incremental doorstop study approach doesn’t work for me. I have little patience for it. It’s too hard to find people home to string several together. In view of the new privacy laws taking effect, the method is even going to be harder to pursue. And I like the idea that once you engage with people in any way and that they come to learn of your faith, everything that you do becomes a witness. Not to divert from you thread, though (as I sometimes do) Continue.

We are not exactly a seamless team. Take it, Billy.

My dad worked at the nuclear Ginna plant on Lake Ontario from its inception.

I don’t think I have ever been distracted in a prayer by rounds of ‘Poor Jud is dead.’ And folks are feelin' sad Cause they useter treat him bad But now they know their friend is gone for good Curly: Good. How can a guy seriously pray, as one ought to do at a memorial, with that playing over the sound system? It wasn’t good at all that my friend was dead. Still, I should have expected it, attending the memorial of 92-year-old Barbara, who had once played in the musical Oklahoma. She had been in Lil Abner, too, as the back-up Daisy Mai, and also a few other venues. After show business, she served as an administrator at NYU. After retirement she became one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and moved to upstate New York, probably because her youngest daughter lived there. She was 27 years as a Witness and became known locally as one of ‘the Golden Girls,’ pioneering with some other oldsters, none of whom had been show girls. “We have someone in our audience today who once worked with Mr. Rogers” [of Rogers and Hammerstein], said the program director at Hochstein Music School. Barbara used to attend all the violin concerts of one of the elder’s children—the same elder who gave her memorial talk, as it turned out. Everyone made a fuss over her after that announcement, and for a brief time she was transported back to the day. Only the Pioneer Service School conductor had been able to get away with calling Barbara (who never had a hair out of place) Babs—as in “So that everyone can have a share, please try to keep your comments to under 30 seconds. Except for you, Babs—15 seconds for you,” and by this tactic he managed to restrain most of her comments to under three minutes. After recalling a few anecdotes of Babs’ life, the speaker presiding said that “We are here because she is not.” He went on to let the air out of a few suppositions that invariably fail under stress—such as ‘she is in a better place now.’ She is not. Death is an enemy, not a friend, he pointed out, and cited 1 Corinthians 15:26. He went on to recall how death had not been God’s original purpose, how it had come about in the first place, and how the resurrection hope would one day undo it. She is unconscious in the meantime, as though asleep. I didn’t overlap with Barbara as much as had most others at the reception afterwards—people who had worked with her in field service for years. Probably the reason I struck a chord with her is that when she heard that I blogged, she did not say ‘Why in the world would you do that?’ (as many of the friends might) but she was very encouraging over it. Her son, too, was a writer, she said—the researcher and author of a book on a topic almost totally unknown to Western audiences, but the Eastern equivalent of Hitler’s concentration camps—Unit 731 in China under Japanese WWII domination. To this day relations between the two countries are strained. It became the subject of another of my blog posts. The son was there at the memorial talk and reception, looking very much an author, with two satchels hung around his neck—whereas everyone else had managed to stow their gear elsewhere. “Oh, he just talks and talks—you have to interrupt him,” his sister had told me, so I did, briefly, to express condolences and to say that his mom had been very proud of him. The three daughters were there, too, and only the Witness one had I known, so I made a point of meeting the other two. They are both retired professional women and both lit up at my mention that a shared interest in the arts is what had attracted me to their mom. We even spoke some of Barbara’s 2nd husband, Lloyd Barenblatt, whose professional career as an academic was ruined because he wouldn’t name names during the McCarthy era. Babs didn’t have a background typical of most Witnesses. More typically they have been raised on a farm out in the prairie or worked on a ship in the Atlantic or a workshop in Boise. I refrained from telling these refined daughters about Mickey Spillane, another writer who became a Witness, and who had observed of the ‘great’ authors: “What these guys could never get is that you sell more salted peanuts than caviar.” I wasn’t sure how they might respond to that. The resurrection hope to an earth made paradisiac under God’s kingdom rule is something very real to Jehovah’s Witnesses, and is what attracted many of them to the faith to begin with—most other religions either being disheartenly vague on the topic or promoting everyone to heaven, where they will float around and—well, who knows what they will do there? I don’t think that I have ever heard a Witness question the resurrection hope. I look forward to seeing my old friend there again someday.

He can hit a paragraph with the phrase ‘Governing Body’ at twenty paces, I hear.

Is it? I have not. They barely know I exist. It’s a wonder those three brothers of yours didn’t leave the planet. Lest you howl again, I do not suggest that you are dangerous. I do suggest that you either present that appearance or in some other way are FAR outside of any elder’s normal experience. Cops shoot people all the time. Usually they get to keep their job as it is concluded that they had reason to make the quick judgments they did, even if those judgments later proved wrong.

While it is possible to discover their names—the reporters always manage to do it—for a deranged lunatic supposed capable of even extracting revenge, their identities are kept secret. Perhaps that accounts for this unheard of situation with your hearing that you are trying to pass off as an everyday occurrence. I mean, “Maybe it is ME,” does not seem like a ridiculous idea for you to entertain. Just like usually in a courtroom, the defendant just sits there. But once in a while they have to put him in some sort of restraints.

Oh? And we were honored guests at one time? Reread the post. She didn’t say that the writer was a pest. She said ‘thank you from the bottom of our hearts.’

Indeed it is not, but since you constantly compare the two, all that I have said is appropriate. The ones at a court trial who decide guilt DO NOT EVEN HAVE TO TELL YOU THEIR NAMES!!!!!! Where is your outrage about THAT? Yes. That was the problem. Were it anyone else it would have been the sort of committee procedure that we all know about. What was there about your behavior (the reader might make an educated guess by reviewing your outrageous posts, but no more than an educated guess) so that they resorted to methods that nobody else has ever heard of or can imagine?

We have been through this before. For this to be true, there would have to be unimaginably extraordinary circumstances, for all of Jehovah’s Witnesses know that there are committees and all know how they work, and none of them have ever heard of such a thing. The premise of the complaint is not even true. As justice is dispensed in the adversarial justice system, the judge pronounces the verdict. But the ones who actually decide guilt are members of the jury, who “do not even have to TELL YOU THEIR NAMES.” You big baby.

Any task of any sort is made easier if you don’t have other parties screwing you up, even if only through ineptitude. This is all that GJ was saying. You deliberately misrepresent his statement to suggest that he couldn’t care less about the problem. You should be more ashamed of yourself than even you usually should be. What is he asking for? That laws about reporting CSA be consistent. That way he, as representative of one of the very few faiths that have attempted to monitor this evil, so as to mete out discipline and prevent miscreants from slipping unawares from one congregation into another (as they can anywhere else) does not have to do his job as though in a legal minefield. Why has what he pleaded for not been done? Given the seriousness of the problem and the stated priority of fighting it, seemingly no task should be easier.

There it is again. An experience of writing letters containing “some comfort from the Scriptures.” Here is from the recent Watchtower article on ‘Show Fellow Feeling in Your Ministry.’ A letter was well-received in this instance of a family whose child had died. “‘I was having a horrible day yesterday,’ wrote the bereaved mother. ‘I don’t think you have any idea what impact your letter had on us. I can’t thank you enough or even begin to describe how much it meant to us. I must have read your letter at least 20 times yesterday. I just could not believe how kind, caring, and uplifting it was. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.’” And to think that there are some on this forum of malcontents who have all but popped a vein over this venue. I can’t quite recall whether I have ever done this or not. I don’t think so, but it is possible. What I do recall is that in the mid-seventies, when the Awake! devoted an entire issue to the subject of depression—back when the topic was seldom breached in public, as though it were something shameful—that I was so impressed with it that I sent a copy to all the psychiatrists in the phone book. One of them responded—to point out that his own research had been included in the magazine.

The apostles did not “compare themselves to God’s high standards,” for they knew that to do so would be smug. They tried to keep them. They knew very well that they fell short. Instead, they said things such as with Paul: “I find, then, this law in my case: that when I wish to do what is right, what is bad is present with me. I really delight in the law of God according to the man I am within, but I behold in my members another law warring against the law of my mind and leading me captive to sin’s law that is in my members. Miserable man that I am! Who will rescue me from the body undergoing this death?” Romans 7:22 You really did manage to miss a lot during your time as a Witness. In your own way, you are no less judgmental than Billy—perhaps even more so.