TrueTomHarley

22 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

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.

Whoa! Look at this:

2 hours ago, César Chávez said:

The stupidity of JWI, he refuses to see

I’m smartest.

1 hour ago, César Chávez said:

Even a hamster, and Gerbils which I own, display more intelligence than Anna, Comfortmypeople, Kick, John, Xero put together.

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.

On 4/10/2021 at 7:30 PM, TrueTomHarley said:

I am told of a certain brother in a developing land who has had great responsibility and is always smiling.

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.

2 hours ago, JW Insider said:

But slaves (before capture, during, or after being freed from captivity) were not necessarily less bright than their captors

Ben Hur was no dummy, that’s for sure.

Still, the prophet Trump said that he preferred slaves who weren’t captured.

1 hour ago, 4Jah2me said:

I wonder if fishermen in Jerusalem had a fantastically high IQ ?  Maybe a Tax Collector did. A physician yes. 

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.

1 hour ago, 4Jah2me said:

It links to the ideas from the GB about people being mentally ill too.

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)

1 hour ago, Anna said:

Yes, true indeed. On the other hand one has to use the head to be able to distinguish the truth from non truth. Evangelicals are led by the heart, but they are obviously misguided. 

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.

6 hours ago, xero said:

Let's face it, some of our most faithful brothers and sisters have IQ's about the level of a hamster.

 

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.

10 hours ago, xero said:

Even at work sometimes you have to let people screw up when you really do know better. This way they actually learn

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.

2 hours ago, ComfortMyPeople said:

I don't know what you think.

I think it’s pretty intriguing. You state the benefits well.

2 hours ago, ComfortMyPeople said:

I'm sure that I left things in the pipeline

Can’t go wrong when you leave things in the pipeline, for others to pick up on or not.

59 minutes ago, xero said:

that I assessed to be a function of his unwarranted enthusiasm and exuberance.

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!

5 hours ago, 4Jah2me said:

i wasn't sugesting CC was you Tom. 

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.

35 minutes ago, César Chávez said:

You insult me for thinking I can ever be that pathetic TTH

Finally you are talking sense.

36 minutes ago, César Chávez said:

He was infuriated enough to get me deleted that time.

I am starting to foam at the mouth all over again.

8 hours ago, César Chávez said:

WOW!! Reverse psycho garbage!!

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

6 hours ago, xero said:

A quick look at reddit (type in "ex-whatever") and you'll find plenty of people who are complaining about their experiences. It makes me wonder what a 1st century reddit would look like in this regard.

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?

2 hours ago, César Chávez said:

Sounds familiar to me, with how Raymond Franz conducted himself later in life.

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?

3 hours ago, Witness said:

I know I'm the last person you want hear from again,

Why would this be?

3 hours ago, Witness said:

Okay, I'm leaving scriptures which I know bother you.

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.

1 hour ago, 4Jah2me said:

Full time service to other GB members and to a couple of Orgs W/t & JW. 

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.

6 hours ago, Pudgy said:

I think a "noint" is something like a "tuit".

Getting a nointing is something like getting a round tuit.

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

33 minutes ago, Witness said:

I personally don’t believe every man on the GB are genuinely anointed.

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.

8 hours ago, 4Jah2me said:

And once again your jealousy of the True Anointed shows through.

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.

1 hour ago, 4Jah2me said:

Of course JWs do not like my faith in God and Christ. JWs do not like my onging confidence in being able to 'survive' without the Org.

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?”

3 hours ago, xero said:

One thing which has been helpful for me is to spend as much time as possible with people who annoy me.

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.

2 minutes ago, xero said:

Good save on that fumble. Always double down.

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.

18 minutes ago, xero said:

One thing which has been helpful for me is to spend as much time as possible with people who annoy me.

I figure the solution to my not getting along with someone is to spend more time with them.

 

(edited to say it's like they say, some people only spend enough time in service to hate it)

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.

32 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

A former mainstay here who abruptly disappeared. We thought he had died, but it turns out he got consumed in troubles of his own making, and I hope he sorts through them. I came to call him (with his approval) “the ol pork chop.”

@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.