TrueTomHarley

2 hours ago, Arauna said:

Now that is SA humor!

It is much like a spat of Polish jokes that made the rounds years ago. 

Tracking down the origin of such joke, one prof of Eastern European history said they came from hostile neighbors trying to justify their aggression against Poland in the late 1700s. Poles were too stupid to rule themselves, was the slander, and so outside powers had no choice but to rule them. In the aftermath, some Polish nobility fought for the colonies in the American Revolutionary War. If they were driven out from their own country for wanting self-rule, might as well fight for someone else pursuing the same thing (much as some outsiders are fighting in Ukraine today). Casimir Pulaski was one of them, who organized and directed American calvary 

Fortunately, most ethnic jokes are freely interchangeable—simply change the ethnicity. Or they need not be ethnic jokes at all. Say how the scientists of PSomH’s family declared their intention to land a spacecraft on the sun. Fellow scientists mocked them for this. It’s too hot to land on the sun. The PSomH scientists replied that of course they had thought of that—they were not dodos! They planned to land at night.

Or why is so-and-so’s mother so strong as muscular? From raising all those dumbbells. 

Alas, only one ethnic joke does not work if the ethnicity is changed:

Scientists crossed a Cohoe Salmon with a Walleye and got a Cowal. But it wasn’t a fighter. So they crossed the Cowal with a Muskie to get a Cowalsky. But they had to teach it to swim.

I broke off ethnic jokes when I told one to a friend who happened to have that ethnicity in his background and took great offense. In today’s environment, I’m sure they come across as ‘spreading hate.’

14 minutes ago, Patiently waiting for Truth said:

I do also wonder if any of the True Anointed ones will show up. 

Oh….this is so tempting to me who has started up many aliases, second only to Dimitar……sooooooo tempting.

”You have not spoken correctly of me as has my servant TrueTom! You dodo.”

3 hours ago, Pudgy said:

As you may or may not be aware TTH, in the Truth there is no means to address grievances

Yes, I know, Pudg, but it appears that’s the way it is and always has been, even in the first century, and you should try to get your head around it. Pray to God for intervention and he says, “I’ve got people who handle that stuff.” Point out to him that some of those people are pieces of work, and he says, ‘Well—you’re no cream puff yourself. Do you have any idea how much you try me? You’ll just have to work it out.”

I say ‘always has been’ because the Bible does not celebrate the ‘free speech’ that is axiomatic in the West. Sometimes it celebrates shutting people up. Certain ones have to be muzzled because they are stumbling entire households. The tongue is even more damaging than actions since ‘see—how little a member can set the whole forest ablaze.’ Few actions you could do will have that effect. Even if you chased after the lithe and tantalizing young prostitutes of Thailand like Lloyd it would not have that effect.

So you do well to practice self-control, and chalk certain things up to discipline, even if they weren’t meant that way. Sort of like the kid Mark Twain wrote about who complained to his dad about getting punished for something he didn’t do. Well, the old man replied, in that case its for something you did do for which you should have got punished but didn’t.

3 hours ago, Pudgy said:

As you may or may not be aware TTH, in the Truth there is no means to address grievances

Strictly speaking, the statement is not even true, though it certainly is true by Western standards where people argue their grievance to the nth degree and don’t give up until the other side is bludgeoned submission, and since that doesn’t happen, they don’t give up. You get to blow off steam but little more is accomplished. Come come. We must not be like the obstinate politician who just prior to hanging is asked if he has any last words. “Yes! This is unacceptable!” he cries, as the trap door swings open and the rope snaps taut.

I suspect there’s a small local consortium of those who know you personally who hold you in high regard as they should—upholder of justice, defender of the widow, the downtrodden, and so forth. But online it takes some time to realize you’re not a spiritual terrorist. You might be better striving to be one of those ‘watchtower brothers’ you once said your life would have turned out better had you been one of them. Strive to be ‘one of the boys’ and from that position influence them to be better. You piss away your talents making common cause with ones who are resolutely opposed to the 15% you cherish. I mean, the day one of these characters likes a post of mine, I will take it as time to do a swan dive off the Golden Gate Bridge.

1 hour ago, Pudgy said:

Wow!  

Come, come, don’t gloat over an absentminded typo. You are not PSomH. She has many times said her eyesight is terrible.

11 hours ago, Pudgy said:

If it wasn’t for Jehovah’s Witnesses my entire life would have been much worse, and I may have killed innocent people in Vietnam, the Congo, the Middle East, or Peru.

If I had been saved from massive bloodguilt and my entire life been markedly improved, I would not continually find cause to bite the hand that fed me.

8 hours ago, Pudgy said:

You have presented no evidence to stand on

This calls to mind the legal case of a man whose healthy leg was amputated due to medical error in the hospital. Of course, the gangrenous one then also had to be amputated. He sought legal advice for a lawsuit but was told he didn’t have a leg to stand on.

12 hours ago, Patiently waiting for Truth said:

AND I NOTICED AS SOON AS YOU MENTIONED THIS, THE WHOLE TOPIC WENT POLITICAL, JUST TO DISTRACT FROM THIS IMPORTANT PIECE OF INFORMATION YOU UPLOADED. 

You dodo! Bolded, all-caps, and in red!?

12 hours ago, Patiently waiting for Truth said:

“This is just the start,” former Jehovah’s Witnesses member Patrick Haeck told Het Nieuwsblad. “We are going to the European Court. This has to stop everywhere.”

He may find this not the cakewalk he imagines. The ECHR has repeated found that the tension between JWs and vocal ex-members comes from the latter group, who refuse to accept the views of their believing relatives. That court has a sound track record of righting the wrongs of lower faddish and/or populist courts.

In a separate recent ruling from the ECHR toward Belgium, the Court ruled that country out of line in discriminating against JWs. Moreover, it did so in “a surprisingly quick decision compared to its usual standards.” One can almost picture the justices saying, “Oh. Belgium, is it? They may not know law but they know what they like.”

Why do you not spot the obvious misrepresentation?

7 hours ago, Patiently waiting for Truth said:

“Jehovah’s Witnesses state that ex-members should be shunned like the plague,” said lawyer Pieter-Bram Lagae, who assists the ex-witness who started the case.”

All one must do to cut through his hyperbole is read published Watchtower counsel that humanitarian concerns do not terminate with disfellowshipping. One need not run from a DFed one “like the plague.”

7 hours ago, Patiently waiting for Truth said:

“We act, for example, for a man whose wife is still a member, and he is ignored in his own home.”

This will be because the man has become a fanatical crazy who will not leave his wife in peace but works 24/7 to undermine her belief system so that she tunes him out to preserve her sanity. It has to be something like this because, again, Watchtower published counsel is that normal marital relations continue in the aftermath of a disfellowshipping, minus only the spiritual component.

No, they will not have an easy go before the ECHR. Probably the case will be reversed by a higher court before it ever gets there. It is possible the case was poorly defended. More likely, though, the local court already had its mind made up with regard to ‘anti-cult matters,” like the Russian Supreme Court of 2017, and were ready to slap down a guilty verdict on any pretext. 

From BitterWinter: The general principle that “ostracism” per se is not justiciable, and teaching “ostracism” is not forbidden has been affirmed by a large number of precedents, including at the European Court of Human Rights and in cases in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. It was confirmed last year by the Court of Rome.

https://bitterwinter.org/disfellowshipping-ostracism-jehovahs-witnesses/

7 hours ago, Patiently waiting for Truth said:

James oh James, you just cannot decide which side of that fence to be on can you ? 

You know they are wrong but you are still frightend they just might be right  ....  

Well maybe they are half right, but oh dear, that means they are half wrong tooooooooooooooo  

Well, he’s not stupid. And he sees what your newfound belief system has done for you. It is you who puts the dog into dogmatic, not he.

X

1 hour ago, Pudgy said:

If Elon Musk was a “closet” JW, that too, would have been news,

I have it on good authority that he should be.

2 hours ago, Pudgy said:

All Belgians?

The trouble is, Belgians waffle.

45 minutes ago, Pudgy said:

I suspect it is

Can I borrow $100?

17 hours ago, Pudgy said:

AND ! … for each $100,000 you invest in PudgyCoin, you get a FREE rubber football squeaky toy, while supplies last.

At long last, Pudgy recovers from an African debacle of long ago. Give it a month or two and I’ll be able to hit him up for money.

7 hours ago, Pudgy said:

Last week, to commemorate April 2nd, I posted THIS, which was meant only to satirize our “flame wars”, which the Moderator properly deleted.

It was NOT A THREAT to kill you with thermonuclear weapons.….. merely an attempt at humor …. to lighten things up.

It was me. “Change the air on TTH robot tires” sent me into a rage.

I’m not exactly sure what it means, but I didn’t want to miss any possible cause for offense. I worked the phones all evening. Don’t even try to get on social media platforms—I’ve banned you from all of them, even ones you’ve never heard of. Even Elon Musk agrees. You’re lucky the military didn’t descend upon your home.

”Aren’t you furious?” I said to Dimitar over the phone when I read the insult directed his way. “Nah,” he replied, “life is too short [even shorter if the words for him mean anything] You should be more mellow, TrueTom. Chill—like I do.”

2 hours ago, JW Insider said:

There is no doubt that 1914 marked a very important point of change in history. I have seen ex-JWs and non-JWs try to deny this,

I recently had someone try to undermine this is a completely novel way, by claiming that WWI was nothing unique, that many wars in history could be classified as “world wars.” He pointed to a published book to that effect. Remember, he told me, WWI was initially called the Great War, and was only renamed later. 

Yeah, when there proved to be a sequel, I replied. That would have been the perfect time to rename it World War VII if there was anything to this theory of yours. I swear, let Jehovah’s Witnesses take a stand on anything and a cottage industry of retro-scholars arises to torpedo it.

36 minutes ago, xero said:

It could be that such "anointing" is just the eggs hatching.

 

Oh dear.

49 minutes ago, Arauna said:

If I had the slightest inkling that you [the mutt] would listen to me to try to understand a different point of view than your own - I would have taken the time to prepare an explanation.  You are ready to taunt.... so stick with your attitude.

Not to worry. God always supplies the spiritual food at the right time and I have just done my weekly Bible reading:

“he disguised his sanity in their presence and acted insane while among them. He was making marks on the doors of the gate and letting his saliva run down his beard.”

 The proper viewpoint to take is that of scripture: “You see that this man is crazy! Why bring him to me?  Do I have a shortage of crazy men that I need to have this one acting crazy before me? Should this man enter my house?”

Do you know I can almost see the saliva now?

Of course, he’s not really crazy. He’s just a mutt that needs a muzzle, grabbing issues by their parkas and shaking them like a raged dog with a rat. In a way he’s like PSomH himself, intolerant of human foible and error, best suited to being a being a loose cannon, forsaking all the obvious benefits of organization due to the sometimes abrasion of working with diverse others. Of course, if one has ever been the victim of chowderheads, moving on is not the easiest thing to do. But it is good when someone does it. 

7 minutes ago, Pudgy said:

It was not meant as a taunt to make you angry, it was meant as a challenge to make you think.

That’s what The Godfather said when he left that horse head in the other fellow’s bed.

28 minutes ago, Pudgy said:

My gut feeling is that when Jesus was talking about “ …. This generation will not pass away until all these things occur … “, he meant HIS generation .. not the death of Fred Franz, as shown on GB Bro. David Splain’s chart. ( if memory serves …..)

Though I know you’re not approaching it this way, this view is consistent with the theologians trained in critical thinking who automatically reject anything prophetic since “it is impossible to know the future.” Similarly, most of them reject miracles, since “such things that violate the laws of science don’t happen.” They almost reject God himself, and a far number of them do.

15 hours ago, Equivocation said:

My Dad is similar in a way but he learned Trades at an early age so he eas able to manage

I would have given a lot to be taught a trade at a younger age. My dad, who was raised on a farm and was reasonably handy, fixing own cars, building additions to the house, never taught or directed me that way. I’m not really sure why. It may be that he bought into the new hoopla that college is the way to go so that you can hire “underlings” to do all those things while you live the life better than that of your parents.. I did not particularly do well in college, having no idea why I was there. The lack of a specific skill caused me difficulties much of my life.

“How come you never taught me how to fix things?” I said to him when he was near 90. “I did,” the amiable fellow replied. “You just weren’t paying attention that day.”

29 minutes ago, Witness said:

 

It really might be you clearing your throat, since Pudgy was asking this question to Arauna. 

Nonetheless, the very next comment in the thread is you answering it.

2 minutes ago, Patiently waiting for Truth said:

My sins are many and i see no reason why Yeshua should chose to give me life. However that does not stop me from wanting to warn others about the Watchtower and JW Org. 

What I think is that you should focus on your own spirituality and relationship with God.

I mean, if I were on a boat approaching the falls that I thought would lead to my certain death, as you have said about your present life, I would not be hollering to those on shore that they’re doing things all wrong.

1 hour ago, Equivocation said:

There is actually more. I think we're at 8.7-8.8 now. A lot of people also tune into ou meetings via zoom as well. I think before 2020 we we're at 8.4 or something, I remember someone brought up pews research about it.

All in all, it is actually good to be back, but I don't think we can do door to door anytime soon.

I wasn’t sure how I would feel about returning to the Hall. I’m starting to get up there in years. Zoom is convenient. You don’t have to travel. You don’t have to worry about the attire of your lower half. 

But no sooner did I walk through the door than I knew it was the right move. Our attendance was very solid and enthusiasm ran high. The hybrid Zoom tie-in was seamless. 

The speaker read that familiar passage of 2 Timothy 3:1-5. Though he did not dwell on “not open to any agreement,” it resonated with me. There is scarcely any point today, no matter how trivial, that people to not debate over and even argue to the nth degree. I can see why some avoid the news, though I am not one of them. It’s exhausting. 

It was so refreshing being in that Hall where not a trace of that contentious spirit was to be found. It is not even that everyone agrees—they just know enough how to yield and not to squabble. Given the state of Covid in our community today, I personally think the strong mask recommendation is a bit dumb. But the majority apparently does not feel that way. I’ve been asked to wear one, so I do. It’s not that big of a deal.

Of course, given the size of the crowd I did begin to think maybe its not such a bad idea after all. I have not been in such close proximity to large groups of people in two years.

I also wasn’t sure how easy it would be to avoid handshakes. I like not having been sick in two years and I had resolved not to do it. But some in-your-face people are very insistent and the alternative elbow bump just seems too stupid to initiate. But it fact, a forearm glance proved pretty easy to do. Some shook hands with others. Some didn’t. It wasn’t any big deal.

14 hours ago, Patiently waiting for Truth said:

This totally contradicts my posts where I have stated that in my own opinion I WILL NOT be in that New world. 

Yeah, you did. My bad.

But it that case you ought be smart enough not to comment at all, since whatever you have you think leads to death.

It’s rather like Srecko, who plainly admits his latter years and outlook is unhappy. I admire him for the admission, for few people will admit such a thing. But at the same time you would think that realization would check him from spreading the drivel he does as though it were gospel.

At least Witness thinks she will be sitting up high and pretty in heaven. Disquieting though that prospect may be, at least she doesn’t think her present course is leading toward calamity.

9 hours ago, Pudgy said:

Can you please explain to me from the Bible, about the “overlapping generations“?

Gotta wait for the fat lady to sing to see how that works out. She’s not doing it just yet but she is clearing her throat for a mighty bellow.

6 hours ago, Witness said:

That hasn’t worked out well for them yet. 

Isn’t this true with anything that is challenging? It doesn’t work until it does.  You can avoid the whole problem by doing nothing, but the nature of those “panting on to the end” is they tend to chomp at the bit.

And, no, you don’t get around it by saying we entered our last days with Christ’s resurrection. 

I mean, the sun is in it’s last days too. We know it will burn out. But you don’t see warnings over it of how that burnout will come as a thief so we must keep on the watch with vigilance.

Don’t give me grief over this, you crazy woman. I would remind you that the software dishes out ranks and rewards and my rank is higher than yours—to say nothing of that flea-bitten mutt who makes outrageous comments from time to time.

2 hours ago, Pudgy said:

May I make a request please.

If you have to use that flowing script, would you please make it two times larger and change the color to a darker color. For some reason I can’t read it.

thank you.

Keep it small and illegible. It reads better that way.