TrueTomHarley

Wrong again. These days, at the urging my wife. I have become a dishwasher repairman. In fact, I am busy as a beaver (very clever animals, all of them graduates of Dam U.) reworking the Beatles’ Paperback Writer into something more personal: ’It’s a steady job but he’ll be a dishwasherrepairman….. DISHWASHERREPAIRMANNNNNNN.” Did you know if the fill pump goes you might as well buy a new unit, since even with self-install you’ll pay over 40% of a spanking brand new machine that doesn’t require you to start and wait 12 minutes to add the soap in because the automatic dispenser doesn’t work and now you are vindicated in not fixing it like your wife wanted you to because if you had it would all be for naught?

It is not a terrible idea. It was me who caused him to erupt, it was easily foreseeable (did I even do it for that reason?),and I have reverted to the same treatment I did for Dmitar in order to forestall additional temptation—but it is my own fault. To be sure, it takes almost nothing, but it was me who poked with feigned surprise that the ‘new guy’ doesn’t like JWI and who ever could have seen that coming? My own fault. If I had any sense I’d be repenting in sackcloth and ashes. But I don’t. But I do enough to ‘make my foot rare’ in the house of paranoia. Yeah, sure. So says you.

Oh wow. Where is the old hen with her ‘ban’ button?

Did I mention that, inspired by current events, I’m buying this forum? All you people had better start kissing up—that’s all I can say.

Huh! This new guy doesn’t like JWI. Who would have thunk it?

Nat King Cole was dead and up there when he wrote his song: ”Roll out those lazy hazy crazy days of summer….Dust off the sun and moon and sing a song of cheer.”

Yes….the next time the brothers are rummaging around for ‘new light’ I hope someone will gaze in this direction. Here our mutt was so indignant upon spotting a JWI crew installing 1914 Interpretive Apparatus on our front line. I mean, he had no right! (I think a hint (still haven’t read it) is that JWI’s running with same type of dating and formula approach that he’s dissed in the past.)

Here I know I will garner Pudgy’s sincere sympathy—one dog lover to another—when I reveal my own friend took that route not three weeks ago:

I did a quick skim and kind of assumed that it was a joke only because I can’t imagine JWI doing a 180. Was it not? I may have to read it through to find out.

WHAT!!?? After I have overhauled my entire theology?! Thanks a lot, bub! I’m sending Pudgy over to pee on your leg.

Probably so. But not without consequences. The book ‘Secular Faith’ (Mark Smith) reassures its secular audience that religion comes around to secular trends. It may take a bit longer, but it happens. And that is the goal of such policies as this in Denmark. He examines five contentious issues in America’s past (slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, woman’s rights) and concludes modern church members have more in common with contemporary atheists than they do with their own church counterparts of long ago. In the absence of firmness, spiritual values erode. Thus far, the ECHR has declined to reinterpret religious interpretations of scriptural text. If you tax-exempt one faith, you must tax-exempt them all. (You don’t have to tax-exempt any of them.) With the Ukraine war raging, they may even remind the Danish governments that invading troops are drawn from virtually every background of religious belief and secular disbelief except Jehovah’s Witnesses, and that perhaps if the latter were forced to accommodate dissenting views that might not be. They would learn to ‘modernize’—look to secular direction rather than ecclesiastical direciton, and thus in time be talked into anything by the ‘king,’ who can always mold the consciousness of his citizenry.

Not a chance. (unfortunately) When you drift away, sometimes. When you stomp your feet leaving the sheepfold, less often. When you thereafter turn your flamethrower upon it….

I admit this is true. “What does Patiently Sitting on his Hands really have to say?” I ask myself 20 times a day. But every time I pick up my phone to call and elder glares in the window. “Don’t you even think it, TrueTom!” he orders. “And to the congregation in WorldMedialand. What can I say? You put up with dodos, imposters, and saboteurs! What on earth is wrong with you?!” Not even God? Where’s the faith? Just today at the Watchtower Study we met someone (Uzziah) whose downfall he caused. Seems to me the authority of the GB looms far larger to you than it does to any of the JWs you squabble with. The latter simply know that any project needs headship and feel overall that they’re doing an acceptable job. They don’t occupy anywhere near the place of prominence in our minds as they do in yours.

Agreed! That said, you flea-bitten mutt, if you ever downvote me I’m calling the pound.

No. They upvoted because you are a dodo. You can’t even get the reason for your unpopularity straight. It looks from this .like they bent over backwards to make things easier for you. The endless bellyaching you do about being shunned—they would have spared you that. But no—you made it clear you no longer wished to be one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. So later an announcement is read at the Hall: “Patiently Sitting on his Hands is no longer one of Jehovah’s Witnesses” and the brothers treat you accordingly. You brought it all on yourself, not necessarily by lapping up ill reports, but by your hastiness to assign wicked motives to your brothers. You could have avoided your shunning, with no stain on yourself. Were you convinced some great injustice was being done, you could have waited on Jehovah to rectify things. He’s God, you know. He can fix things. Possibly had you found something better…well, then I can see a departure. But no. In your quest to prove yourself more righteous than anyone else you put yourself in a place where you can no longer remember how the death of Christ benefits humanity, nor how God’s name is universally pronounced in the Western world. You willingly put yourself in a place where you don’t expect to survive, separating yourself from your former brothers who do expect to survive based upon their faith in Christ’s sacrifice. No wonder they want nothing to do with you.

It hardly matters, does it? You can fart all you want and as along as there is plenty of space between you and your neighbor, there are no real consequences. But when population, technology, and competition for resources bring people shoulders to shoulder, your unpleasant ways provoke strong reaction. So it is with the world today. At any time, applying godly wisdom would have been beneficial. In our time it become crucial.

Drop the ‘Jesus’ because the name is definitely anglicized and you offend him when you say it. Or join the ranks of reasonable people, acknowledge that names adapt when translated into different languages, and say ‘Jehovah.’

A club is so you don’t have to suffer an endless torrent of dodos, saboteurs, and serious malcontents.

High on the clouds of heaven appeared the avenger to downvote them all, great and small.

Oh for crying out loud, Dimitar! Why would you downvote that one?

I like this. I like this too. It is just Human Relations 101. There are some cultures in which ‘saving face’ is so important that if you don’t do it you might as well flush your words down the toilet. But even when not in one of those cultures, it is good advice to heed.

With regard to the first: ‘Child Protection.’ https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/pedophiles/ the second: Medical Treatment: https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/blood_transfusions/ and the third: Disfellowshipping and Disassociation https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/01/in-defense-of-shunning.html Apologies to the old hen, who gets antsy at too many redirects. (you dodo)

Well, you do have to turn your obnoxious boom box down after midnight.

Almost in the same breath you’ve answered your question: Any number of times you’d said how you don’t expect to survive Armageddon. Why don’t you repent and turn around from whatever is causing you that little problem? If you have faith in Christ, and unless you are a practicer of sin, the ransom is supposed to give you confidence. They teach about the ranson sacrifice of Christ at the Kingdom Hall. Will you even be doing the Memorial this year? Or will you be holding out for the really big holiday two days away involving the Easter Bunny? If I was on a boat drifting toward the falls which I did not expect to survive, I would not be using all my energy hollering to those on shore how they are doing everything wrong.

Yes. If you don’t forgive and put it behind you, you never heal. You are forever rehashing your injury. In close to 50 years with Jehovah’s earthly organization, the supportive benefits have far exceeded the abrasions that can come from working closely with people. But that does not mean that abrasions have never occurred. In No Fake News, I wrote: “After studying one book seemingly written for no other purpose other than to harp on dress and grooming and harangue about field service, the conductor said to me: “Tom, why don’t you comment? You know all these answers.” It was a turning point. He was right. I did know them all. It was time to stop sulking. From the circuit overseer on down, they had stirred up major chaos in the family. They had been heavy-handed and clumsy - but never malicious. And it had never been Jehovah. I had read of ill-goings-on in the first-century record. Congregations described in Revelation chapters 2 and 3 were veritable basket cases, some of them, but that did not mean that they were not congregations. Eventually things smooth out. Eventually 1 Timothy 5:24 comes to pass: “The sins of some men are publicly known, leading directly to judgment, but those of other men will become evident later.” “Later” may take its sweet time in rolling around but it always does roll around. Should I stumble when it becomes my turn? I’d read whiner after whiner carrying on about some personal affront or other on the Internet. Was I going to be one of them?” When a circuit overseer years later—he was a good guy—tried to soften matters – saying how God sends just the right personality at just the right time, I said “Look. I know the line. I’m perfectly willing to spin it and even view things that way - God works with people. I get that. But I also want to call a spade a spade. The guy was an unbalanced nut.” Later when my daughter asked the circuit overseer about his conversation with her dad, the latter replied: “He was…frank.” Jesus makes exactly this point in his illustration of the slave not forgiving his fellow slave for a debt after his master had forgiven him for a huge one. It’s a matter of looking at things from his point of view, not our own. “That is why the Kingdom of the heavens may be likened to a king who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves. 24 When he started to settle them, a man was brought in who owed him 10,000 talents. 25 But because he did not have the means to pay it back, his master ordered him and his wife and his children and all the things he owned to be sold and payment to be made. 26 So the slave fell down and did obeisance to him, saying, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay back everything to you.’ 27 Moved with pity at this, the master of that slave let him off and canceled his debt. 28 But that slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves, who owed him 100 de·narʹi·i, and grabbed him and began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay back whatever you owe.’ 29 So his fellow slave fell down and began to beg him, saying, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’ 30 However, he was not willing, but he went and had him thrown into prison until he could pay back what he owed. 31 When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they became greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all the things that had happened. Then his master summoned him and said to him: ‘Wicked slave, I canceled all that debt for you when you pleaded with me. 33 Should you not also have shown mercy to your fellow slave as I showed mercy to you?’ 34 With that his master, provoked to wrath, handed him over to the jailers until he repaid all that he owed. 35 My heavenly Father will also deal with you in the same way if each of you does not forgive your brother from your heart.” (Matthew 18)