TrueTomHarley

Whoa! Look at this: I’m smartest.

Notice, you five dummies, that he did not include me on the list. If only he had included JWI. Then my ascendancy would be complete. Why on earth would CC downvote this? Is there something about smiling he doesn’t like? It is a true account. It is verified more than I have let on.

Ben Hur was no dummy, that’s for sure. Still, the prophet Trump said that he preferred slaves who weren’t captured.

As usual, you have it backwards, in your cloying acceptance of how the world categorizes things. Physicians were not necessarily bright. A few years ago the Wt publication stopped using the phrase Luke, “the respected physician” upon realizing that they weren’t. Often they were freed slaves with no particular training at all. A contemporary news item of the time refers to one man who used to be an undertaker, was now a physician, “and does the same for his new clients as he used to do for his old.” (not the exact quote) Tax collectors were glorified thugs who simply beat money out of people. Fishermen, on the other hand, ran a business, which easily might call for more intelligence than the other two examples. In this case the mentally ill might be those who carry on and on about the True Anointed soon to manifest itself out of nowhere, a phrase the Bible itself never uses, much less Capitalizes. (Rise, for I too am a man)

Yes and no. Obviously the head is not nothing, but it is the heart that recoils at a trinity making God unknowable and a hellfire doctrine making him cruel, someone you would not want to know.

I know where you’re coming from, but I agree with Anna. I think it is not good to describe the brotherhood this way. I think it because the scriptures lay no emphasis at all on this “deficiency,” if it is one. Instead, they goes out of their way to show favor to such ones. They pay no attention to the head. They only pay attention to the heart. “Wisdom cries aloud from the street,” the Bible says. “Hogwash,” comes the answer from the learned ones. “It cries aloud from the quadrangles. Only ignoramuses are to be found in the street.” It is their bad, for it cries aloud from the street. I like the counsel to Philippians to keep regarding the other as superior. If it seems to me that I truly am superior towards another with regard to smarts, I look for another way in which he truly is superior to me. I usually don’t have to look too hard.

I am told of a certain brother in a developing land who has had great responsibility and is always smiling. “Yes, brother,” he says to this with the local friends, and “Yes, brother,” he says to that. It is only if you ask him if he thinks the course you are about to embark on is a good idea that he will say, “No, brother,” still smiling, and not offering a better course. unless specifically drawn out.

I think it’s pretty intriguing. You state the benefits well. Can’t go wrong when you leave things in the pipeline, for others to pick up on or not.

This final sentence should have ended with a question mark but did not. I’m stumbled.

Long ago I was on a committee to explore building a new Kingdom Hall. A brother as you describe, also on the committee, carried on and on about how we would put a baby changing table in the men’s room! Why should it be just sisters who have to change the infant? Times were changing! Equal work for all! And it was not just work, it was part of the privilege of rearing children—spread the joys and the drudgery evenly! It shouldn’t only be the sisters who have to.....” He discussed brands, the fold=down type, which were sormewhat new at the time. On and on he went, so enthusiastic. For crying out loud, we hadn’t even located land yet!

That’s too bad. You would have hit the nail on the head in that event. As it is, go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Finally you are talking sense. I am starting to foam at the mouth all over again.

Well, you have a point there. That remark didn’t make any sense to me at all. I rolled my eyes and scrolled on.

Exactly. I have this is the metadata of TrueTom vs the Apostates: Apostates of that time would “despise authority.” How could that become a problem unless there was authority? They loved “lawlessness.” How could that become a problem unless there was law? They favored acts of “brazen conduct,” had “eyes full of adultery,” and were “unable to desist from sin.” How could that become a problem unless there was someone to tell them that they could not carry on in that way? Not only is the nature of apostates revealed in the above Bible verses, but also the nature of the Christian organization. If apostates were huge in the first century, and they were, they should correspondingly be huge today. And they are. In our “apostates” we are validated. It is almost as though I am proud of ours. What if modern day JWs had no apostates? Wouldn’t you have to wonder why?

I have no idea how he conducted himself later in life. Nor have I read either of his books. Doesn’t that make me less “apostate” than you?

Why would this be? This is because it constitutes art fraud in the manner you use them. I wipe the phony pigment from your application and I see the painting of the cigar-smoking dogs at the poker table.

No. As measured by the number of doors they have knocked on over the course of a lifetime, each one in order to present the good news of God. Some of your “true anointed” have barely knocked on any.

I have to admit I have never looked at it that way.

The point is that all you have to do to be ‘anointed’ is to say that you are. 1 Corinthians 14:33 has it all backwards in that event—if anyone can stand up, say “I’m anointed,” and thereby command authority. “For God is [a God], not of disorder, but of peace.” Switch it around assuming teaching capacity over others is so easily done. “God is not a God of peace, but of disorder,” better fits this new scenario. Do I know that he is anointed? No, of course not. But I don’t know that of anyone, least of all you, who so immodestly terms yourself a “genuine anointed.” At least with him, I can see many decades of full-time service, making it unlikely, after such sacred service, that he would lie. But with you? I see a Facebook page, and three or four bitter diatribes per day at those who you accuse of upstaging you and your cohorts.

It will show through when I begin offering True Anointed sweatshirts on my website. It is a phrase completely of your own devising. Even your fellow yo-yos have not used it. The more you repeat it, with your expectations of how it comes along just in the nick of time to save the day, the more ridiculous it sounds. Don’t get me going on this. Already I can picture a fellow lounging on the beach, relaxing, enjoying himself through and through, not doing a thing, with the logo: “Chill, man, I’m waiting for the True Anointed.” I have never heard anyone use the expression but you.

JWs do not fret about these things as much as you may think. You are not the center of their universe. If you want to leave a place of Bible education and religious unity for a place where any huckster might say anything, there is only so long your fellow congregation members will cry about it. They do not remember you as the One Who Flew Over the Cookoo’s nest. After all, it was not me who asked you about pedophilia/vs homosexuality in the scriptures, was it? Any JW could have put their finger on that information quickly. They would not be bamboozled by what bamboozled your son—gay “Christian” revisionists attempting to redefine scripture to back up their lifestyle. Does it bother you that you have put yourself in a place where scriptural answers are so intertwined with garbage that for all practical purposes they cannot be found? It doesn’t seem to. You kick the can down the road with expectations that the True Anointed will explain it all. That being the case, I don’t know why you ever expound upon anything. Just wait for the True Anointed to tell you what’s what. “Then the Master said to the third slave, “and what have you been doing?” and the third slave replied, “Nothing! I was waiting for the True Anointed! What took you so long to send him?”

Viola! You have discovered my reason for being here! Look before you came along, of course, I mean, you are not among them. Many aren’t. But many are.

Now you’ve got me going. I’m getting to be an old fart who just likes to hear myself talk. (though, to be sure, I file away much of what I write for possible use elsewhere). This same supervisor was on a large job involving all the supervisors. You were supposed to download your machine into one area before entering her far-away area. One fellow forgot to do it, and she proceeded to lite into him. ”Honestly, I don’t know what is wrong with him!” I harrumphed. “I’ll take him back there myself to be sure it gets done!” I had forgotten it, too. I didn’t fool anybody, of course, and my allies, who included almost everyone but Gladys, all collapsed in laughter.

I like this. Same here. Several times in my life I have run across people—for the most part, not in the truth, but sometimes they are—who I disliked intensely. But I forbid myself to say it. In time, I came to have regard for some of them, even becoming friendly with some. One is a non-JW supervisor I sometimes worked under, a real dragon, but she had other struggles. I got away with a lot on a part-time gig at a certain company, because I was overall a force for cohesion. “Don’t worry about Gladys,” I told one newbie leery of her reputation. “She is a horrible shrew, but if you just do your job, you should have little problem.” She was right behind me! I didn’t back down. “Well, come on! Gladys—you know how you are!” In time we got along, even if I didn’t work under her very often.

@PudgyHe also came across as damaged, but never hateful. He didn’t forgive, but at the same time he lauded almost brothers as upright and honorable. In the end, I think he came to forgive even those ones he thought were not—individually, if not collectively, and maybe even collectively.. He is an example of Proverbs 19:3 - It is the foolishness of an earthling man that distorts his way, and so his heart becomes enraged against Jehovah himself. And yet, not entirely, because he felt it was the organization that had run him over roughshod, not Jehovah. It calls to mind a statement of the Memorial speaker, a circuit overseer, in the talk I linked to above and will so again because it fits. (Oh, wait—I didn’t put it in the post, but he did say it)—he said it later, in the ‘men—what should we do?’ concluding section...wait, I’ll insert it): “If you’ve been hurt, and you know that you shouldn’t have been, but deep down inside you know it wasn’t Jehovah...” https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2021/03/object-lessons-at-the-memorial-talk.html People get hurt. It is what happens in any large assembly of people. Most humans handle matters in the Abraham/Lot manner: “you go this way and I’ll go that way.” JWs continue to bond together as a family, however I note that two separate circuit overseers have recently used such expressions as: “one large, happy, united, somewhat dysfunctional, family.” Nobody in the faith for any amount of time would ever say that we are not. But the entire human family is dysfunctional, and the Witness organization strives to address it, overcome it, and has succeeded to a far greater degree than most.