TrueTomHarley

Are you sure they’re on your side? Hard to believe it is the Devil.

Satan—the great anti-typical hacker! Nah, I think it just means your computer is a piece of junk, like mine. Mine wheezes like the Tardis—pull the plug & it instantly dies, for the battery died ages ago. The cord must be secured with duct tape because I ripped it out too many times moving and catching it on things. Long ago I learned to compensate for the squirrelly touchpad with keyboard workarounds. And Windows & security software grows exponentially complicated, so that the ‘engine’ is overwhelmed and sporadically & unpredictably moves quite slowly. I have to shut down each application after using it in hopes the entire machine will not freeze up. Sometimes it does anyway, and then it is a hard reboot for me, which may take 15 minutes to find my place again. It is not the Devil. (Unless Bill Gates is the Devil, which some people think for other reasons.) Fortunately, most of what I do, such as right now, I do on my iPad, on which I can leave 20 apps open and 20 webpages with barely a hiccup. Laptop repairs are too costly. I should just get a new laptop. I will in time. But the Harleys have a long history of not discarding anything until the last tiniest vestige of life has expired in it and I don’t mean to be the first one to break family tradition. Besides, even with cloud storage, there are always some aggravating (if not devastating) hassles in moving from one machine to another.

Our cat was never quite the same after spending a few seconds with head inside the dog’s mouth. Later, he auditioned and actually became the moniker for Top Cat O’Malihan, one of my aliases here, employed to mess with astoundingly obnoxious people like Alan F. Since the dog and cat did not get along (I thought I could keep them out of each other’s sight, but did not reckon on sense of smell), while the dog stayed with us (it was a temporary resident that later became permanent), I brought it to stay with my dad who had dementia. He took it for one of the barn cats that he had grown up with and left bowls of milk for it everywhere, which it did not touch. “Pop!” I grumbled later since I staying with him overnights for a few months before he died, “I want to pour myself a bowl of cereal but I can’t because you’ve poured out all the milk in saucers throughout the house!”

My bad. Though they are my words, they are meant as an extension of PSomH’s request to JWI. (Sort of an inside joke) He will beg him for advice, His reply will be concise, And he’ll listen very nicely then go off and do precisely what he wants. (which is to tell JWI he’s wrong)

Tinkering with the transistors that became the internet has been the source of much income for Al Gore and myself.

I’ll give PSomH an upvote for this. He doesn’t get that many from me.

I was. I did. He wasn’t. You’re wrong. It’s his heart that it never came up into, his center of motivation. It is the furthest thing from what he would ever do. It’s not that he can’t imagine it. There is division among translators over this verse. Someone want to spend some time looking into this? I’ll take the NWT any day in this case. It dovetails far better with everything else we know of God. https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Jeremiah 7%3A31 One translation best captures the “mind” sense with, “I never entertained the thought,” which is not the same as being “surprised.”

so I can tell you you’re wrong about it.

but it still qualifies me to be premier spokesperson for those who don’t like Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ring Ring. ”TrueAnointed Taxi Company. It’s your dime—start talking.” “This is Patiently Sitting on my Hands! I just heard the Armageddon Express left the station. I didn’t want to miss that train. You were supposed to send a cab by. Now I’m in a terrible fix, and it’s your fault!!” “Look, you dodo, we did what you said. You said send a cab over once they hired perfect personnel at the station who didn’t make any mistakes. We monitored just like you asked, and they never did! They made do with the guys they already had! Blame yourself! ”There’s another train leaving tomorrow on the WeepnNash Yurteeth line. If you want, we can send a cab by and pick you up for that.”

Yes. The plan to demolish earth to make way for the new intergalactic highway has been on the books for 10,000 years. There has been plenty of time to speak out against it, and if you can’t be bothered to participate in civil affairs, its a little too late to be unsporting about it at the last minute.

I don’t know of any forum besides this one that is not fully skewed one way or the other. Are there any? There are many sites run by those who unabashedly oppose Jehovah’s people. These I would never take part in, for I would feel like a troll if I did. You have to let someone else’s point of view stand on their own website. That’s not to say that I have never done it. I have in the past, on an experimental basis, to see what would happen. Never so much as to be thought of a ‘regular’ anywhere. I don’t do it anymore. I even owe @Pudgy’s friend an apology, for I told him I had commented on a hostile site maybe 3 or 4 times. It was at least 12 times, he said! No, it was 3 or 4–why on earth would I lie about that? He responded that he used to be an engineer for the municipality, and as such, he learned to be precise. I told him that if he used to be a municipal engineer and no longer was, possibly the reason was that he could not count!! Furthermore, I would hate to visit whatever city he was the waterworks engineer in, for no doubt under his stewardship there wasn’t a single toilet there that flushed! However, much later I realized he was right. There had been over a dozen, but only 3 or 4 recently. The rest were so long ago and on another website that I had forgotten about them! So maybe the toilets are okay after all. Since then I have been on the Reddit site a few times, but no longer. That began when i found the Philly.com reporter wrote a front page anti-JW article and then returned to that forum where he was hailed as a hero! If he goes there for his “facts,” I figured, maybe I can go there and present a few that are more balanced. But I stopped. I was being a troll, and I don’t like to be a troll. The downside of handling apostates the way we do is that we almost create an aura of mystique about them that they do not deserve. On some level, they are no more than Demas, who left Paul because he loved the present system of things. Plus, if someone, often a youth, falls for the oldest trick in the book—going somewhere because he has been advised not to—he or she comes across material that they are completely unprepared for, and may be stumbled. Thereafter few are able to help them because they don’t know what is there themselves. That’s originally why @Annabegan familiarizing herself with ‘apostate’ thinking. She had a teenage son, and did not want to find herself helpless in the event he came across hostile material & was troubled. (Last I heard, he is now an adult, doing just fine, has never displayed such curiosity, and is bemused that his mom keeps up with weirdos on the internet.) I wrote ‘TrueTom vs the Apostates’ with the recommendation not to read it unless you were one troubled by all the bile opposers throw our way, that if you were one who could shut off the TV, pull the plug on the computer, or stuff the newspaper in the trash at a anti—JW presentation without ever giving another thought to it, then there’s no reason to read TTvtA,, but if not, well—that’s why I wrote it. They have a mystique they do not deserve and part of that reason is we lend it to them by such insistent direction to STAY AWAY. It is good counsel, and it is scriptural counsel for sure, but everything is a matter of degree. I think it can be observed that if apostates were a huge issue in the first century (and they were—no NT writer does not deal with them, and two Bible chapters are exclusively devoted to them) then they should correspondingly be a huge issue today. Nobody has apostates so vitriolic as do Jehovah’s Witnesses. What if we didn’t have any? Wouldn’t you have to wonder why, since they are so plainly in the NT? ‘Our’ apostates exactly pattern themselves after the pattern of the first-century, and they thereby validate us. I am almost proud of ours. Ours are the best. The chapter ‘Who are the apostates?’ has quotes from a few scholarly types who point out that ‘apostates’ almost have to attack their former faith with brainwashing and mind-control memes, otherwise they have to explain how, if it is as bad as they now maintain it is, they could have been so stupid as to follow it in the first place. I wrote the book to forward a response with views that I had never seen presented before. I forget what the free download section is. At first it was the standard 10%, then I made the whole book free, then later 1/3–I forget what it is now. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/917311 At long last I’m getting books into print. Don’t Know Why is available now on Amazon, Tom Irregardless will be very soon, and TTvtA after that. Alas, it is already time for TTvtA—Round 2, but it will be a long time before that sees the light of day. I think we have a “good” assortment of “apostates” on this forum in that some of them are flat-out crazy, and the ones that aren’t are over-the-top in their venom—‘hate OCD’ is how Aruana puts it, and it is hard to argue with regard to spiritual things that it is not so. Might some be persuaded by them? I’m sure some are, but I haven’t seen it happen here. With but one negligible exception, nobody here, good guys or bad, has budged one iota in basic orientation. Surely people can see that there is not the tiniest amount of spiritual food provided by ones here who oppose, even ones who claim anointed status. Maybe you can argue that the spiritual food provided by God’s organization is not without a pebble here and there, necessitating revisions as “the light gets brighter,” but there is none whatsoever from the hostile ones here. Some of them are broken people. @JW Insider considered one of them not long ago and felt terribly for her. That doesn’t mean that they can be fixed by human hands. Horrible suffering is endemic in the world today, and some of it has happened in a Witness context. Hopefully they will respond to present reach-out efforts from the Christian organization, but just how, or if, they will respond must remain in their court. I am reminded of a Bashevis Singer short story in which a 19th-century Jewish settlement in Poland is paralyzed because the priest (rabbi?) cannot bring himself to sacrifice animals. He just loves them too much; he is too kind and gentle. Finally one settler tells him that it’s fine to be merciful, but he doesn’t have to be more merciful than God.

It is a great nuisance, let me tell you, but it has always been. Here I am trying to do nothing but think about God and they keep batting eyes at me.

Exactly. And you Arauna, do not come off as emotional at all. You come off as passionate, to be sure, but never at the expense of clear thinking. He, on the other hand, makes so many contradictory, nonsequitur, and ridiculous statements, his thinking is so muddled that, despite my nobler instincts, I am drawn in again and again to kick him in the rear end. Accusing others of being sexist and then proving it true of himself in spades is just the latest example. (Not to mention, no doubt, his subsequent crying like a baby that merely quoting his words is “misrepresenting” hm.) For crying out loud, you dodo, just tell me what you mean to say and I will say it for you. (though perhaps not with the same malignant spin)

Oh sure, says the dodo who has accused me of being sexist. All that remains is to tell the little women to leave the thinking to us menfolk, who know how to do it.

Throw this dog a bone. There is something to what he says. I went years on my own blog without ever mentioning our belief that Jesus died on a stake, not a cross, because once you come forward with something like that, people latch on to it as the definitive Jehovah's Witness belief, whereas it really is only a detail for us. “What do you know about Jehovah's Witnesses?” they'll be asked, and their reply will be “well, I know they don't celebrate Christmas, and they don't take blood transfusions, and they don't believe Jesus died on a cross.” All true, but it's as though someone asks you at a party, “what do you do?” and you say “well, I brush my teeth.” So I hadn’t made a big deal about the point. That all changed when ABCNews.com made a big deal about it. “Jesus Christ May Not Have Died on Cross” ran the headline of July 2, 2010, followed up with: “No Evidence in Ancient Sources Backs Up Defining Symbol of Christianity, Scholar Says.” Well, if a angel or a scholar says it…. It all goes to show what matters is not what is said. What matters is who said it. Buttressed by a scholar, I wrote a fine post on the topic, and had a lot of fun in the process: https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2010/11/did-jesus-die-on-a-cross.html

How can you not upvote a bro whose banner is “Listen to Your Wife?” My wife has been trying to get me to adopt that logo forever.

Just as I stated. It has become ‘all roads lead to heaven’ with him. That didn’t take long. I’ll bet already with him Jesus has died upon a cross.

And what were people smoking in those pipes?

Not if Witness is ‘channeling,’ it doesn’t. You may choose to attach ‘likes’ to her anti-GB diatribes that she emits through auto-writing, as though product of a seance, untroubled by her admission that she does not study the Bible at all (and then wonder why anyone would lump you in with her) but Thinking, wanting to take no chances with maybe eating “from the table of demons” ought not be condemned from staying away on that basis. Look, if it truly is channeling, the very best face you can put on it is that of being instructed by a bot. And the worst face you can put on it is considerably worse. Particularly when you do nothing else. I wonder how many of Jesus’ disciples would have remained with him if his every utterance was as a Matthew 23: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees….” Gather around for a Srecko or a Witness ‘sermon on the mount,’ and that’s what you get. It is not even clear that they believe in anything else. Anyone who ‘proves’ his points by saying ‘With God all things are possible!’ Is open to that criticism. First it was God’s name. Now it is the paradise earth. It didn;t take long. Tomorrow, if not already, it will be “all roads lead to heaven.”

No surprise there. She has made some converts here though, PSomH, Srecko, and KickFace, for example, fall all over her. @Patiently waiting for Truth,your TrueAnointed has revealed herself. However, I’m not sure she has any doctrine other than expressing jealousy over those who have a bigger stage than she does. And she channels. Where does that come from? I have incorrectly called her ‘woman from the hills.’ My bad. Seriously, it is such a weird and obsessed sort of writing—I don’t know how anyone can fail to spot a rat. @JW Insider @Arauna @Anna @The Librarian @Pudgy Given the ‘channeling’ concerns Thinking raised, one would think conversing with a bot would be more productive, not to mention spiritually safer.

Oh, hogwash. He is all the time. Both aspects of his life have instructional value and both are often referred to. It is true that someone here who claimed to know you personally described you as “demon-possessed” I admit that the thought had never occurred to me. JWI, to his ‘educated’ credit (or possibly naivety) restated the description (if true) with medical terminology.

He hedged his own call by saying if they are not called to account in this life, they will be in the afterlife.

Several years ago we visited San Diego for a few days. It was atypically cold and the locals were all apologizing for it. I did learn something about % chances of rain there. If the weather forecaster said 80% chance of rain, and thereby you thought the day would be rained out, what it meant was that the day would be pure sun expect for about 15 minutes when it would rain like a monsoon, after which it would be pure sun. Where I come from if they say 80% chance of rain, that means it will rain all day today plus all day tomorrow plus all day yesterday. When the sun at last appears, those who are superstitious will be terrified at the ball of fire from the sky. The doctor who wrote the White House with the medical regimen that quickly cured Trump when the latter came down with kiss-of-death Covid thinks there will some day be the equivalent of Nuremberg trials for those who let hundreds of thousands of people die by discrediting and even withholding treatment of an eminently treatable disease.