TrueTomHarley

Back in the day before Brother Libraria threw me off the BOE for selling my books during congregation meetings, this did occasionally happen. My wife never knew nothing, as was the pattern, but there was one wife who sometimes knew more than I did. She eventually stopped prying for information when her husband died. I suspect the continual elder training schools squeezed that leakiness trait right out of whoever was doing it because I, who know a lot, have not heard of that problem in 20 years.

Listening to Jack Fluen’s funeral talk, I began to wish I was giving it. In time, I realized this is the internet – I can do what I want: “I hope that when I die I have as many who will say nice things about me as I have heard in the last few days talk about Jack. They’re here tonight, people he hung out with. Also here is his immediate family, and especially his daughter. This talk is for you. Jack’s parents are here, too. Comfort the parent who has lost a son to death, for it was not supposed to be that way. The parents are supposed to go first. This talk is for you, too. Present, too, are many from the Jehovah’s Witness faith that Jack was raised in. This talk is not for them. They won’t be left out in the cold, of course, for they have the scriptures and the scriptures bring comfort. We must be true to the scriptures, but the scriptures are a multi-faceted gem. Turn them just the right way according to your audience. They'll understand. We must be true to Jack. Jack left behind his Jehovah’s Witness roots long ago and if I carry on as though he were a regular pioneer in the faith, people who knew him well will say ‘who are you trying to kid? he wasn’t that way at all.’ So I won’t do it. But he never turned against the faith, so far as I know, he just didn’t stick with it. You know how it is with Witnesses when someone leaves the fold: they keep saying ‘come back, come back.’ Some do come back. But some do not and the constant refrain becomes tiresome. So we won’t say that either of Jack. Who’s to say he would have been better off back in the fold? Long term, I guess, I would say it, but who’s to say short term? Sometimes life is a broncing buck and it does it’s best to throw you, whether in the faith or not. Our purpose it to give comfort, not to rehash might-have-beens. When we get to the offering comfort part, we will start with 1 Thessalonians 4:13 – we’re only going to do 3 scriptures tonight,write them down if it interests you to look up later." It would go something like that. I won’t flesh it out more because it’s but a dress rehearsal for a talk already given. I would have included a few anecdotes about Jack early on, perhaps two from the present and one from his childhood. The second scripture would have been from John 11 about how Jesus resurrected Lazarus. We would have taken our time here, because it describes the true nature of death. Jesus said Lazarus was asleep. When asleep, you can be woken up. Jesus woke him up. Imagine the implications for one who dies today. I don’t know what the third scripture would have been. I would have thought of something. The reason you don’t want to do more than three is because some don’t want you to do any. And more probably don’t care one way or the other, but they will if you bowl them over with excess. Your JW cohorts may say ‘well done.’ but you are not talking to them. The third would have something to do with resurrection, or maybe the paradise. Many things you briefly explain without scriptural support. You would do scriptures for the brothers, but not for his chums and family hear. If you explain it briefly and clearly it is like a jigsaw puzzle coming together that they always thought was an unsalvageable mess. They can track down the rest on their own dime if they want or approach anyone of the brothers in the audience, who will hopefully mill about and not just talk with each other. “So are you saying, Tom, that he is on your JW paradise waiting list? The obvious answer is ‘how would I know?’ but we do know that if you’ve made any mistakes, your death pays for them. And we know that Jehovah is a good God who wants the best for the person who’s decent at heart. And then we would have thanked everyone for coming, invited them to hang out for a while so as to comfort one another, and have some pizza. If there was any hesitation at that point, I would have helped myself to the first slice.

In the unlikely event the GB asks me to join them, I am going to decline.

We had people from Texas come into town to work on a Kingdom Hall remodel nearby and they needed a place to stay. Sight unseen, we handed them the keys to our house while we were heading away. Many people would kill for such a brotherhood where you can place such trust in total strangers. At the Independence Day church, Mr. and Mrs. O’Maly heard of this and decided to do the same. The first guests who stayed at their house broke their TV. The second set of guests tracked mud throughout the house. The third set found the Go Packs and raided the funds set aside. The 4th set emptied the house completely and the O’Maly’s returned to four bare walls. Steamed, they contacted the other Independence Day church. ‘Oh, yeah, that happened to us, too. No, they’re not congregation members – they’re imposters. But we have such a half-assed organization because that crazy Witness person insists that God loves it that way, that any scoundrel can pull the wool over our eyes in a twinkling.’ ‘Besides, O’Maly hates us because we don’t handle pedophiles the right way. Stop it! she says. You’re screwing it up! Hand those perverts over to us so that WE can screw it up, like we screw up most of what is already in our laps.’ (sorry, Eoin. I admit, I'm not being overnice here. But we are dealing with some who HATE God's organization, which organization says it's not a great idea to be trading words with them in the first place, and this thread is demonstrating why. I will allow, though, that loyal ones have made some excellent points, perhaps spurred on in effort to shut up the scoundrels, and that your input has been among the most valuable of all.)

" and not just supply posts like that from a certain apostate who blasts us with a dozen irrelevant Bible verses and then tries to hook us into his own blog where he presumably has many more. " I'm sorry, Witness, do you do that, too? i was thinking of someone else.

We had people from Texas come into town to work on a Kingdom Hall remodel nearby and they needed a place to stay. Sight unseen, we handed them the keys to our house while we were heading away. Many people would kill for such a brotherhood where you can place such trust in total strangers. At the Independence Day church, Mr. and Mrs. O’Maly heard of this and decided to do the same. The first guests who stayed at their house broke their TV. The second set of guests tracked mud throughout the house. The third set found the Go Packs and raided the funds set aside. The 4th set emptied the house completely and the O’Maly’s returned to four bare walls. Steamed, they contacted the other Independence Day church. ‘Oh, yeah, that happened to us, too. No, they’re not congregation members – they’re imposters. But we have such a half-assed organization because that crazy Witness person insists that God loves it that way, that any scoundrel can pull the wool over our eyes in a twinkling.’ ‘Besides, O’Maly hates us because we don’t handle pedophiles the right way. Stop it! she says. You’re screwing it up! Hand those perverts over to us so that WE can screw it up, like we screw up most of what is already in our laps.’

Well, it's all anecdotal and I don't pretend to be dropping the 11th Commandment. But IF you have been trained by Bible education, which can be found you know where, and IF your life has not been made so important so that your present demanding career makes it unthinkable to interrupt it for such a duty, you are more likely to provide personal care for your aging parents. Look, don't argue with me on this one because I will give up - you'll never see a white flag go up so fast. But I had some fonts lying around the house and I had to use them before they went bad so I used them here. Besides, as far as I'm concerned, if you want to go to college, go to college. If you get some peer-pressure heat because of it, just accept it as a price that must be paid. That's how it is with any human organization. Not everything goes your way. But you accept it because you know that the Lord's will can be magnified here on earth if his servants are organized, as opposed to as if each person is his own wandering planet. Nor should you be too quick to blow off the circuit overseer who said of his former fancy pants circuit that there were 100 that went to college and only 3 who remained in the truth. Atheistic, humanistic professors, sexually avant-garde students and faculty alike, see your naive offspring coming along with stars in his/her eyes and say 'It's Game On!' just like I do with the Librarian whom I fear. And don't miss the organization's counsel, which arguably could be given more strongly, that it's not just what you should not do, but what you should. Prepare your youngster well ahead of time to choose from career paths available to him and learn what options are available and at what cost. If you are all thumbs yourself, make sure he knows that one can't make a living in all-thumbs. Or maybe it is given. Despite their counsel to familiarize yourself with whatever comes down the pipe, I am drawn to what primarily concerns me. I like CMP's point, too, that where he comes from, the ones who get to university are serious minded but the ones who take the easy stuff are riff-raff, generally speaking. It's not that way here. Here they just party and malign Trump and take absurd curriculum that has no practical application anywhere. But it is different where he is, apparently. Bernard Strawman pointed out that Tom Irregardless wouldn't use his word so much if he had some education. But Tom has focused on education that trains morally, the kind of education God's organization specializes in. You can always hire out for smarts when you need them.

When you are caring for your father with dementia and you must blow off a stick of dynamite under him to get him to shower or acquiesce to be cleaned up in any other way, and when you tell him for the 500th time where this one or that one member of the family is, and you have even moved in with him because his house is bigger than yours and in your smaller house he would drive you absolutely crazy with his constant requests for information you gave him 5 seconds ago and besides, he is just about blind, but in his own house it doesn't matter because he knows where everyone is, and in spite of all the upheaval in your life you are still grateful life worked out that way so that you could care for him.... it occurs to you that life would be less likely to have worked that way had you immersed yourself in the type of career that is generally only possible with a fine university education as its underlying base, for with a simple life, you can maneuver it, but with a complicated life, it maneuvers you, and you say 'it's the nursing home for you Pop!' where he will die very quickly disoriented and demoralized, and perhaps even as a pin cushion for whatever Pharma wants to send his way to make him more pliable. Please don't give me the 'buts' or the 'what ifs,' for I will immediately acknowledge there are a ton of them. Nor is this to lay any guilt upon anyone who has placed parents in the nursing home, for sometimes it must be done. Nor is it any reason in itself to not choose university. It is, though, a reminder that the university course can 'trap' you into doing things or not doing things that you may regret deeply afterwards, since 'this life' today is not the real life, but failing to take care of your parents to the fullest degree you can perhaps is. (Pop is in the second book. He doesn't know it, but then, he doesn't know anything. He was, however, once a vigorous man who did many things for his children, some of which they appreciated at the time and some of which they appreciated only later)

Ann O'Maly: I am all for protocols. i have no issue with them. But not as a substitute for theocratic procedures, but as a supplement only. The congregation is not an extension of the world's social systems. This is not to say that you ignore them, and it seems that our guy is trying hard to reconcile the two. But you can't flush the Bible down the toilet just because the world has come up with a cool new idea. I might feel differently if such outside protocols worked, but abundant evidence has been given in this thread that they do not work in the sense of making any appreciable dent in the endemic rate of child abuse. Though it is crass, I am tempted to plug a book where an author I know well has written extensively on pedophilia, but I am afraid to do it because I am as scared of the librarian now as I was in grade school. But I hope the trick to stay in her good graces is to consistently supply value-added content - if it doesn't work, it doesn't work - and not just supply posts like that from a certain apostate who blasts us with a dozen irrelevant Bible verses and then tries to hook us into his own blog where he presumably has many more. I mean, how crass is that?

A childhood friend of my son died the other day and he is not the first one. This system has not been easy on the younger generation, though it is easier on them than it is on the younger generation still, some of whom have hung themselves and streamed it live on Facebook. It’s a little hard for adults to reassure their children that all is right with the world when they see their classmate on the internet doing that, even though some apostates who have gone atheist try to let on that the world is just getting better and better. Anyhow, he had strayed far from his Bible roots, though I did remark that I hope when I die I have as many people saying what a good guy I was as he did, and I worried somewhat how the speaker would handle it since it is a bit dicey and I found myself wishing I could give the talk myself, for I am good at that sort of thing, if not much else. What you must do is carry on not too much about his ‘bad decisions,’ (which the speaker did not, though it depends upon whose eyes you view it through) but you must keep an eye upon his non-Witness buddies and his daughter particularly and say: ‘this talk is for them.’ Of course, you cannot be untrue to the Scriptures, but the Scriptures are like a multi-faceted gem – you must search for the proper facet with which to let the light shine through. And you don’t have to avoid ‘bad decisions’ entirely – after all, no one can say that crashing your snowmobile through the ice when it had been warm lately was a good decision. When you break into the Bible, 1 Thessalonians 4:13 is a fine place to start. ‘For we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, about those who are sleeping in death, that you may not sorrow just as those do who have no hope.’ Who can argue with that - Witness or non-Witness? Everyone hung about at the lodge afterwards, and I approached members of the lad’s biker gang, who were visibly taking his death hard. “My son played with him as a kid,” I said, ‘but you would know him better than me – what was he like?’ ‘Better grab yourself some pizza,’ I said later on. Commish said no, for they had to ride and if they ate they might fall asleep. I said don’t take it the wrong way, but that strikes me as humorous and it reminds me of how my ancient Dad now has a lot of Westerns playing in the background, some featuring Ronald Reagan! in which the good guys are always ready to ride at the end of the show. I also told him about the days long ago when I was in the doghouse with my wife and I looked for some grandiose gesture to try to rectify matters so I visited the Dinosaur Restaurant where Hell’s Angels were reputed to hang out to see if I could recruit them to visit her on twenty choppers and the head guy get out and hand her a dozen long stem roses. The waitress thought it was a really cool idea, and she would tell the guys, but I never heard back. “You should have called us,” the biker at the funeral said, “we would have done it.” I walked away to chat with others and he approaches me to hand me his well-worn biker card – I mean, think of the places it must have been! Believe me when I tell you, I am sorely tempted to pick a fight with my wife deliberately so as to land in the doghouse again so as to hire these guys. Though it will probably happen anyway for I am not the easiest guy to be around long-term and my wife occasionally gets fed up. Others in the congregation say: “that Tom Harley is a great guy, but imagine if you had to be around him 24/7!”

Thanks, JWI. It makes perfect sense. But it's still Game On. Hopefully, I will not get tossed out on my rear end if I can manage to use discretion. Perhaps the trick is to be considerate of readers and always give value-added contact. Whatever you ask about the book, do it off-grid through the Message feature. There it will be like whispering in the library. After all, I once successfully set up an after-school necking session with SuzieQ through whispering in the library, all the time with the librarian imagining she had everything under control.

It is the age-old dilemma: You desperately want to misbehave in the library, but how do you do it with the Librarian watching you like a hawk? She's just as mean as she was in grade school. One must be as resourceful as we used to be in grade school. After all, she is sometimes on the phone or doing her nails. As Sherlock says, it Game On!

No. You are not rambling. Your points make perfect sense and show good heart. Look, there are some who are genuinely aghast at child abuse and participate with good thoughts. But there are also some liars whose concern over chlld sexual abuse is probably not a sham, but it is clearly secondary to their greater goal. They use it to further that goal. It's greatly time and energy consuming to battle the liars on what is a here today - gone tomorrow internet thread. They're all welcomed here, which I find - odd. Unless I am up for a brawl, I, like you, will not do it. (But sometimes I am up for a brawl) Eventually, it's all going to go against us. We know that. Jesus followers will be hailed before courts. Why? So they can receive Good Citizenship plaques? Or will it be so as to defend themselves before persons 'lyingly saying every sort of wicked thing' about them? (Matthew 5:11) But the bad guys will always win in this system of things. When Jesus appeared before Pilate, he didn't sweet talk his way out of it, did he?

At the Independence Day Church, they keep no records of child molesters. When they spot a bad one, they show him the door. He leaves and goes to another Independence Day Church in another city. Doesn't the first Independence Day Church warn the second? No. It doesn't have to. In fact, it cannot. Though they sound like branches of the same Church, they are not. They are Independence Day Churches, each an entity to itself, with no central oversight. A responsible organization, on the other hand, structures itself in a way that this cannot take place. When a slimeball leaves one congregation, he cannot readily enter another with a clean slate, for there is central oversight and the new congregation is alerted. They warn the second congregation. Why do they not warn the whole world? Because the world has such a confusing and inconsistent and ineffective muddle of policies that they cannot get their heads around it. Besides, when one considers Eoin's cited sources, one begin to suspect that perhaps the world is incapable of properly monitoring abusers is because the latter outnumber the former. I mean, they haven't exactly hit a grand slam in their efforts to stem child sexual abuse, have they? So the responsible organization muddles along and does the best it can with regard to the outside world. They report where mandated - it would be so much easier if it were universally mandated - for there are no doubt repercussions if they report when not mandated. I would sue their pants off were my (hypothetical) ill deeds reported when they were not required to be. The responsible organization sometimes stumbles sometimes with regard to the world's requirements, for the world is such a shambles (that is why they left it in the first place) that ones can easily misstep. When the responsible organization discovers, to its dismay, that it has some shit-stained underwear in its midst, its reluctance to broadcast the shit-stained underwear to the world is misunderstood by a world where folks routinely strut about in their shit-stained underwear. As though child sexual abuse has been snuffed out everywhere except in the ranks of congregation members, liars feign outrage that the organization thwarts what would otherwise be a perfect world. Child sexual abuse is bad, and the organization must work hard to conform to the world's oversight of these matters, though the world has thus far found itself completely emasculated in doing so. No matter. They run the show. The organization will work harder. In the meantime, their efforts to safeguard, at least their other congregations, makes them a perfect target for the great and the small. Especially the small.

'Cats only get fed once a day,' says Pop. He is recalling the barn cats back when he was a boy. They got unlimited cow's milk, but solid food just once a day. Let them get off their rear ends and catch some mice if they are yet hungry. This statement thoroughly alarmed the cat, which immediately tried to mitigate the damage. 'Objection, your Honor,' it said. 'I demand that remark be stricken from the record! It is irrelevant, biased, and prejudicial! Cat lives matter!' But his Honor was just as fed up with his own cat, which harasses him 24/7 for more food from the moment he walks in the door. He takes off his robe, hollers 'Honey, I'm home!' takes a step forward and falls headlong over his cat, which has positioned itself to call attention to its own hungry plight. 'Objection overruled!' he said. 'Don't touch that transcript! In fact, underline those words!'

Imagine – threatening to ban a brother after correctly perceiving he has sometimes used your forum to plug his pro-JW book. It’s a reasonable policy. Nobody has any issue with it once they understand what it is. Why should your forum become a bookstore? I don’t allow it on my own blog, either. But when a brother is threatened with banishment for plugging his pro-JW book AND the same forum lays down the Welcome Mat for apostates – well, perhaps there are some who would have an issue with that. Don’t you agree? It isn’t hard to screen for apostates if one has that desire.

When you choose to engage a determined opposer, you must be sure about your goals. Your goal should not be to persuade him, for that is impossible. He hated Jehovah and/or his organization long before you came along and he will hate it long after you are gone. The specific topic under discussion has little to do with it, for if is resolved he will immediately move on to something else. And when you have gone away, he will return to his original topic. That is why you seek primarily to address, not his topic, but his motive. Your goal is to improve your internet discussion skills, to teach other like-minded ones and to be taught by them. A secondary goal is to see if you can personally apply the counsel in Romans to keep yourself restrained under evil. Sometimes you find that you cannot, and then it is back to Bible 101 for you. Much earlier I stated that I would not read supplied links presented here because I was willing to accept that the kernel of them might be true. I said I also knew that the presenting source would underline and bold anything culpable, and would ignore anything mitigating. In fact, this happened. Our brother pleaded with authorities to mandate reporting everywhere, for it would make their job so much easier. Thus it is clear that, if there have been missteps, he feels terrible about it and wants to comply with State requirements. He only pleads that they do what non-Witnesses find almost impossible to do – cooperate, and pass a unified system of requirements for all territories. Opposers carefully hide this fact, for it is favorable to Jehovah’s organization, which they hate. It took Anna to bring it out. But should said opposers start another thread, either here or in some other forum where they roll out the red carpet for them, they will again carefully hide this mitigating circumstance. I mean, I think we have allowed them sufficient promotion of their cause without banning them as apostate spammers, don’t you agree?

Anna said: I know, but no one will notice that really, because the first thing they will see is the topic title followed by "started by Anna"... That Anna's a real troublemaker.

The contest that presents itself here is not that of two organizations that have obeyed Jesus and built a massive infrastructure to enable, encourage and coordinate humble persons in fulfilling the Christian instruction to preach and teach, the leaders of one organization which farts and the leaders of the other that never does. If that were the case, I would choose the second organization, for who in their right mind will countenance farting? It certainly disgusts me. Instead, the contest that presents itself here is that of an organization that has obeyed Jesus and built a massive infrastructure to enable, encourage, and coordinate lowly persons in fulfilling the Christian instruction to preach and teach - an organization whose leaders fart, and another group that doesn't want to build anything at all but wants to roll in the farts, closely scrutinize and advertise them. One must never lose sight of the big picture. Without godly organized direction, God's people quickly become like the greater religious world. They quickly come to resemble this forum, where participants bicker about topics anyone raises without ever reaching agreement on anything, or they choose other, lighter threads. There will be no spiritual food in such an arrangement, for whoever offers some will be instantly confronted with those who disagree. Jesus' will will not get done, but participants will have a fine time. The ones who don't will disappear. Witness and Ann would seemingly love it that way. Look, even Trump does not say he is going to repeal Obamacare alone, for he does not want a country full of dead bodies. He says he is going to repeal and replace it. So you who would take down coordinated Christian activity, get busy and replace it. Move! for it will take a while. Get the job done and I will instantly side with you, since I am sure there will be no farts in whatever you create.

The children's mother specifically tells the children "even if it is someone you know or trust."

JW insider: Child sexual abuse is bad stuff - nobody argues it is not. We're agreed. But one can't help but shake his head at how fragmented this system is. The same society that puts the physical welfare of children on a razor's edge of alertness sells them down the river in so many other ways - by sticking them with poor education, by fleecing them for $$$$$$ and lifelong debt when they go for higher education, by spying on them with AI toys so as to sell them more stuff, by promoting policies destructive to families, thus depriving children of an emotional foundation, by embracing every new sexual model of living, by saturating them with violence on TV and internet, by not effectively punishing bullies. Somewhere i read that a child can more readily survive sexual abuse than they can persistent bullying, yet that goes on all the time. The outside world is very selective in its zeal to protect children. Would that even a fraction of the wrath of those who would defend children in one arena be applied to the others. Suicide of youngsters is endemic today. Please don't tell me that even eliminating child sexual abuse would solve the problem. This world collectively couldn't care less about children - if it did, it would remedy the above concerns. Ironically, the JW organization that some would love to take down does much to promote the interests of children in most of these other areas. Even on sexual abuse, they have produced one of the best videos out there: Protect Your Children. I mean, C'mon! - an organization that does that is going to wink at child sexual abuse?

http://www.nccpr.org/reports/mandatoryreporting.pdf (from Anna's post) Wow. It was actually considered to make every American a mandated reporter? If there was suspected child sexual abuse anywhere, everyone would legally bound to report it with legal consequences if they did not? It is the ultimate Hail Mary proposal from persons besides themselves that they cannot make a dent in child sexual abuse. And to think there are some in this forum who would have us believe that the JW organization is the lynchpin holding child abuse together. They ought to preface their every comment with their mission statement: eliminate Jehovah's Witnesses - and then go on to make their point.

"No wonder Geoffrey Jackson pleaded with the Australian Government to make mandatory reporting the law in every territory!" Did he really? If so, that should have been the first fact highlighted in any discussion of this subject, for it is the obvious answer. It goes back to a point raised earlier in this thread: If going beyond the law is so important, then why doesn't that become the new law? Even human governments, hopelessly disunited on every topic, ought to be able to come together on this one. Is there anything more reviled today then pedophilia? Nothing in the world should be easier than to pass laws mandating reporting in every jurisdiction? Why have they not done it? I hope I am not being too cynical if i suggest that it is because some like it just the way it is. The way it is is confusing and it allows for Monday morning quarterbacking. It allows for political grandstanding. It allows for sermonizing about failure to 'go beyond the law.' It allows for imputing motives - invariably bad ones - to anyone who is perceived to have fallen short in the fight against pedophiles. Careers are built on being "tough on pedophiles," but they are all undermined if the course is made simple. It could be so simple and straightforward. Brother Jackson apparently pleaded for it to be so. It's obvious he wants to eliminate sources of confusion or ambiguity. He wants it straightforward. There is no reason it should not be, as he and any other person of common sense asks. That is - unless there are parties that find it to their advantage for the situation to be less-straightforward, so as not to deny them the opportunity to rail against those they hate. Many times I approach situations embarrassed at being cynical, only to find I have not been nearly cynical enough.

I've tried to take the post down. Please remove it.

No. But I will do whatever I do in accord with your rules. It is for you to tell me what they