TrueTomHarley

On 7/25/2016 at 0:37 AM, JW Insider said:

With such rumors all around, don't know why this one would have not have been making the rounds if it were true.

It's all interesting. But now I have to go watch Perry Mason on ME TV

I, too, have been victim of an injustice that beats them all - a certain old hag that won't let me sell my books in her library.

Though some carry on about it more than you think they should, nobody can ever say that in a lifetime of service to God, you won’t experience some injustice. It is not business-as-usual routine, but when it does happen, it can be serious. All the more so because you expect trouble from the general world, but not from the brotherhood. When it comes, it throws you for a loop. It is like the verse quoted in the Watchtower study this week, Psalm 55: 12-14:

“For it is not an enemy who taunts me; Otherwise I could put up with it. It is not a foe who has risen up against me; otherwise I could conceal myself from him. But it is you, a man like me, my own companion, whom I know well. We used to enjoy a warm friendship together; into the house of God we used to walk along with the multitude.”

The study article was illustrated with one real-life injustice, and one from the scriptures. A Brother Diehl from 1949 is mentioned. He caught all kinds of heat when he decided to marry. Brothers were all serious back then about single persons in the circuit or Bethel work remaining single, a situation that was not resolved, legend has it, until Brother Knorr himself married. Now THAT’S human! Let nobody say that these guys aren’t. Diehl could certainly be understood if he bellyached about it, but it wouldn’t do him any good. All he could do was get others stirred up. So he waited it out. He was right, but he didn’t make a big deal over it. Eventually, everyone came around. He took it on the chin for a while.

The example from scripture is more serious. Joseph was sold out by his brothers and ended up in slavery. A silver lining eventually materialized and he became a big cheese in Potipher’s house, then he was slammed again and sent to prison for 13 years. Believe me, I would whine plenty about it, but if Joseph did, there is no record of it. What the record shows is that overall he allowed it to mold him:

But now do not be upset and do not reproach one another because you sold me here; because God has sent me ahead of you for the preservation of life … So, then, it was not you who sent me here, but it was the true God, in order to appoint me as chief adviser to Pharoah and lord for all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. (Genesis 45:5-8)

He didn’t know he would be appointed chief adviser to Pharoah until he was, and had he moaned forever about his kidnapping and later imprisonment, he wouldn’t have been. Everyone could have understood him bitching, but it wouldn’t have done him any good. People screw things up. Usually, their motive is not bad, but sometimes it is, as in Joseph’s case. Often, you don’t have the power to fix things. You do have the power, however, to make them worse.

(‘The Judge of the Earth Always Does What is Right;’ the Watchtower, April 2017 – study edition)

The next day, ISIS, too, went out to clean up a park. City leaders showed up to give them an award. As they got close, a bomb went off and killed them all, and ISIS staff ran snickering to the bushes.

This happened because ISIS is an extremist organization.

The taking of innocent life is despicable. I have heard the rationale, however, that since citizens of the Western world vote, they thereby empower the leaders whose military policies may have claimed their innocent children (or other relatives). Thus, terrorist attacks are a twisted form of 'payback.' 

But had I a dead father in my hands, or a dead mother, brother or sister, a victim of foreign actions, perhaps I would not think it so twisted. It's a vicious world, that turns us all into mad dogs.

Curious what @James Thomas Rook Jr. might think about this. He has weighed in strongly on family ties.

Could it be that someone thinks the place has become a terrorism magnet?

On 6/9/2017 at 9:31 AM, Micah Ong said:

I haven't sensed one iota of love

Micah logs onto a site that bills itself ostensibly as a meeting spot for JWs. He hurls incendiary charges about everything under the sun. When he finds some find him unwelcome, he carries on above love! - the love he has positively oozed from his pores.

He even charged that the WTS tries to dictate what ones do in the bedroom. What in the world is he talking about? He provides no backing for his charge.

On 6/9/2017 at 9:31 AM, Micah Ong said:

My job is done here, I won't waste my time around this anymore.

Yes, it is only his time that matters. It is only his time that is too valuable to squander. Let us see if, having declared his mission over, he can resist appearing for an encore.

1 hour ago, HollyW said:

What JWs went thru in Malawi seems doubly horrendous

Somehow my comment got put before this remark, and not after, where it equally fits.

2 hours ago, Eoin Joyce said:

What's going on here......

Caution, my brothers. There is a FALSE APOSTATE in our midst. I know Vic Vomidog. We once pioneered together, before he went bad. He's as bad as they come now. If I am checking out a book from @The Librarian, he shoves me aside, me and all the other patrons!

If some, like me, have, for whatever reason, chosen to hang out where there are apostates,  it should at least be TRUE apostates. Vic Vomidog is a FALSE apostate!

31 minutes ago, bruceq said:

Lets see 

In the end, the analogy of swatting flies is spot-on. You do it for a variety of reasons - to demonstrate your technique, and because you hate flies. 

You do not imagine that in so doing you are eradicating flies. In fact, one must be careful not to trigger a local brother's illustration: "Kill one fly, and 50 come to the funeral."

36 minutes ago, Micah Ong said:

Goodbye!

It works for me.

In CLAM material last night, bans in Nicaragua and Zaire were discussed in back-to-back paragraphs. In one case, it was challenged and overturned promptly. In another, the Branch chose to ride it out for 7 years before mounting a challenge. The reason? It is not explained. That would entail analyzing reports received from the respective traveling overseers regularly reporting to them, and the feel of hundreds of mature ones sniffing out the current lay of the land, sniffing which way the wind is blowing. The Branch has sources. They are not merely shooting in the dark. Like any driver anywhere, they are in position to see more than do the passengers.  Imagine if participants here were to haggle over those countries. Surely, they would follow the same pattern they would follow here. Making up the facts they do not know, which is almost all of them, they would launch inflammatory accusations as readily as Serena Williams launches tennis balls. “At that point the Branch Committee had to make a weighty decision,” the Kingdom Rules book says. Nasty participants like @Micah Ongwho would pee their pants if called upon to make a weighty decision do not hesitate to condemn those who do. They have no clue how to build anything. They live only to destroy.

Even @James Thomas Rook Jr., of whom one vainly hopes better things will emerge, pours gasoline on the fire, though he is qualified to put it out. ‘It can only be racism,’ he charges, telling us of white, brown, and black people. JTR, who goes livid when the Western media, motivated solely by hatred of the man, declare Trump a racist, resorts to exactly the same tactics in dealing with the ones he hates.

The one person who knows anything, @JW Insider, because he rubbed shoulders with all concerned, says ‘Look, nothing is impossible, but racism is the last motivation one should imagine.’ No matter. To vicious persons, character assassins at heart, for whom slander goes down as smoothly as fine wine, knowing only there is a target they must destroy, it only interferes to have someone who knows what they are talking about.

6 hours ago, Micah Ong said:

I know how these articles snake around the vital issues and hide the truth

You are falling down on the job (though I may not have read everything) You have not carried on about birthdays nor miracle wheat.

They said nothing of the sort. The 'Bible reading' they speak of is in quotes. It denotes a Bible reading in which a person goes orgasmic over a few formula texts and ignores the greater context.

4 hours ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

King David of Israel, coming home after a hard day of slaughtering the enemies of God in close hand-to-hand combat, his clothes covered in blood and pieces of sticky gore, and globs and smears of their stomachs and intestines stuck to his armor, as he ripped them open with a sword or spear,  and their guts fell out in a steaming mass on the ground, and they screamed and cried in agony, or after chopping a Philistine in the throat,

and enters his front door, and hollers "Honey? I'm home!"

"and when I can, I even take spiders outside, so they do not go hungry"

I can understand this, too.

3 hours ago, Micah Ong said:

No man has monopoly over peoples relationship with God.

"Not that we are the masters over your faith, but we are fellow workers for your joy..." 2 Corinthians 1:24.   The verse was discussed but a week or two ago, presented by the very ones you accuse of trying to monopolize persons' relationship with God.

3 hours ago, Micah Ong said:

The WTS promote good bible principles

You apparently do not believe your own statement, judging by what you say two paragraphs later. 

Just why are you here?

2 hours ago, Micah Ong said:

The WTS try to dictate you're entire life including the bedroom. 

I have not found that to be true. Have you found it to be that way?

2 hours ago, Micah Ong said:

they also use mind control

I have not found that to be true, either. It is only the conclusions the Christian organization has reached that you object to, not the means of reaching it. 

An almost universal element of mind control is that the target is separated from all that is familiar. In the year or so it takes to qualify for baptism, the prospective Witness is 95% in the same surroundings he has always been in, at home, at work, among those with whom he is familiar. He goes to two JW meetings a week and has a personal home Bible study.

How does that stack up against, say - college, which is never presented as mind-control but which serves to plant many a foreign notion into the mind of emerging graduates? College, where students are completely separated 24/7 from all that is familiar - made to live in dormitories. 

Don't misunderstand. The point here is not to down college. The point is to show that your allegations of Watchtower mind-control are juvenile nonsense.

2 hours ago, Micah Ong said:

You don't have to buy into that.

Fortunately, I have never been asked to.

Unfortunately, I missed them all. Would they have done Mike Hammer proud?

1 hour ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

and although many will not be able to understand why I think so ... with his personality he HAD to be one of Jehovah's Witnesses,

I believe I do understand this. He possibly was not unlike you, only he died having made peace with leadership of the congregation. His name is spoken of gingerly by some. He was in and out a time or two, I think, but ended up in. About the time I wrote the tomsheepandgoats.com posts, I wrote him, having read a few of his books just prior. But I had only an address found online somewhere - it came back undeliverable.  Shortly afterwards, I heard he had died. 

You cannot but love his lines. Such as, (not a direct quote) "[such and such] may be my last book. I can't sit for eight hours anymore. My rear end gets sore."

Finally, Finally, Finally I may be able to relate to JTR on something.

1 hour ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

and by today's standards, his writing was quite tame.

Was it?

"I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone. I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel ... and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling."

14 hours ago, Micah Ong said:

The truth comes out

 

One can never say that God is not using other groups of people. Some he is using as toilet paper.

I rarely view any apostate source because hatred skews objectivity. It is like expecting CNN to give the lowdown on Trump, or Breitbart to do the same on Obama. At most, you say "Alright, just what 'fact' do these liars think they have uncovered?" Usually it is better to skip it entirely and wait for something from an impartial source.

A sound byte with no context, followed by reams of cherrypicked quotes? It reveals the mind of a 10 year old. 

These are exactly the same idiots who insist the Gospels are full of contradictions because they are too infantile (or deceitful) to realize the effects of time, perspective, purpose, and audience. The entire Bible is rife with contractions to persons of similar intellect, and especially ill motive.

On 6/2/2017 at 9:06 PM, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

I especially liked your treatment of Mickey Spillane

The reason I wrote about Mickey more than I ever intended to is that, the more I learned about him, the more I thought he would make such a cool Grandpa. He had that irresistible combination that typified so many old-time Witnesses of the previous generation: an unfailing good nature - he liked people, plus and absolute lack of pretense.

I put him in the Tom Irregardless book, too. It was Ivor E. Tower's (George Chryssides) favorite part:

“My favourite part of the book was the parody of Mickey Spillane near the end, where Tom Harley envisages a house-to-house publisher acting like one of Spillane’s macho characters. For those who don’t know, Spillane was a novelist whose books were renowned for their sex and violence, until Spillane converted to become a Jehovah’s Witness in 1951 – a decision that drastically changed his writing style."

On Twitter, I follow his wife, who was much younger than Mickey. She is intensely political and a strong supporter of a certain blond politician who is in the news a lot. (she says Mickey was that way, too)

4 hours ago, Eoin Joyce said:

 

 

C'mon James...don't be so hard on yourself!

 

This is outrageous! It is an ad hominem attack. I strongly discourage tactics like this.

I have also heard allegations that some sign in a k a by another name. It is not right to do this.

7 hours ago, Micah Ong said:

It's good to see everyone doing solid research here.  I'm glad to see you all share your convictions and to have free open dialogue.

Actually, I think that few do. Most shoot from the hip. I do it myself.

de Vienne and Shultz's book is a chronicle for posterity. This is a here today, gone tomorrow thread. Unsurprisingly to participants here, I notified the author about this thread. Perhaps surprisingly to some, she remarked she had no interest in commenting, and made no further statement. 

Just because you can debate does not mean you do it at every opportunity, as though it were the essence of life - especially when it is with ones who have already demonstrated that they have minds like concrete - all mixed up and firmly set.

19 hours ago, JW Insider said:

It's very, very good. I have both books by B. W. Schulz. I love the style. 

Participation here has a long last jarred my conscience to write the review I promised. I left this one with Amazon today:

This book resonated with me. I once lived within 100 yards (but also 100 years) of Nelson H Barbour’s Church of the Strangers. The tiny gazettes of the tiny towns surrounding Rochester, New York, from which the authors extract quotes as readily as a child extracts popcorn from the bag, vanished ages ago, and even some of the towns with them. Others have been assimilated into Greater Rochester.

These are the days when ‘many would rove about,’ as Daniel 12:4 states, free to explore biblical doctrines, free from the disapproving gaze of national European churches that they left not that many decades ago. C.T. Russell, ‘founder’ of Jehovah’s Witnesses, emerges as the main character by sheer force of output, but nobody of that era is ignored, both individuals the authors came to regard as likeable and those otherwise.

These are serious, no-nonsense researchers who dismiss Wikipedia as an “online ‘encyclopedia’ of doubtful worth.” Potential for disaster abounds, the shoals are treacherous here because most who have written of Russell and crew have beliefs, and in most cases their beliefs dictate their scholarship. The authors make no such blunders. As to religious motive, or who had God’s blessing, they don’t go there. “I question everything including commonly believed ‘facts,’” the co-author says. “many of those proved absolutely true. Some proved false.” It is clear that she savors separating the sheep from the goats and she thanks with gusto those who helped her in her quest.

The Watchtower organization cooperated to a degree with this book but ultimately declined to comment on it. The authors speculate it is because they are ‘incurious about their own history.’ As a practicing Witness today, I would agree with that. It is a ‘look forward, not backward’ type of thing. Broad strokes are enough when it comes to the past. Though I relish the detail exhaustively researched here, I am essentially that way, too. No matter. It serves as a reference work – and there are none better, IMO – even for the “incurious.” ‘A Separate Identity’ is a work I highly recommend.

Having reviewed their work, can I depend upon them to review mine? Will they, better yet, mentor me as a new author - show me the ropes? I'm not holding my breath. They have already said they would not do it, before I unconditionally said I would review theirs. They display little taste for the light style of writing that is mine, and none whatsoever for the zany. The few times I have corresponded with de Vienne, she answers me one word for every ten of mine. I think they even groused about Smashwords.

3 hours ago, Micah Ong said:

 has freedom of choice, so good on you if it's working for you but don't act like everyone else is doomed for not getting on the WTS bus.

At first glance, it is not a bad answer.

However, it 'works for me' in the same way an actual bus works for me. I arrive at my destination, which I will not do in a timely way, and likely not at all, if I walk.

Knowing this, even if I choose to get off the bus, I do not hang out at the bus terminal haranguing boarding passengers about getting on board, I would have a screw loose to do that.

It is not as though the driver does not have a notable record of where he has driven, sights he has seen, deeds he has done.