TrueTomHarley

You certainly do not want to do that. It’s a horrible habit it be afflicted with. If I take a swipe at you as regards the moniker, I can hardly not expect a jab back. I don’t know why I did it, really. Cocky, I guess—it’s as good a verdict as any. The pieces fit together together for a diatribe I was cooking up. I forgot that the pieces have feelings. My bad. I apologize. I have no beef you whatsoever, never have, and your remarks are among my favorites. They do represent—well, “thinking.“ I might even encourage more of them, except that then you might have the experience, as I do from time to time, that in the abundance of words there does not fail to be transgression. “Aw, shut up, with your Kentucky-fried Foghorn Leghorn drawl!” the villain says to Benoit Blanc. it’s about time someone said it to me. (If you see the movie ‘Knives Out’—it is free on Amazon Prime—you must be prepared for a bit of language. It is by no means filthy, by today’s standards—I don’t recall a single f-bomb—but no way is it pristine like in the Kingdom Hall. It is an Hercule Poirot parody, with Daniel Craig playing the Christie-like eccentric, brilliant, and world-renowned sleuth, Benoit Blanc. There is nothing funnier, to my mind, then when he opens his mouth to speak an overbearing combination of French/Southern Redneck accent. He routinely says things that, at first glance are profound, but at second are just plain stupid.)

Whether his is narcissistic or not is for others to say, but there is clearly something squirrelly about him. Why he would throw away the brotherhood to absolutely no purpose is beyond me. To throw it away because he thinks the religion JWs practice is all wet is one thing. But he presses the point that his religion is the true one. So why publish an indictment of the GB as you reaffirm everything else. He knows it will cost him (something I myself did’t know, nor some others here). He has counted the costs and is willing for the brotherhood to be severed from him, for something he knows will do no good! He submits his work to Bethel, but when they “refuse” to engage him, he publishes it to make Reddit’s day. The Witness organization will say, “One more bit of opposition? Throw it on the stack,” and he knows they will say that. 4Jah, odd even in a menagerie of oddballs, says: “I bet your sweating that Rolf wrote his book. I bet you’re sweating that my friends are scheming up other mischief.” Of course I am. But I also keep it in perspective. Could he really have been a Witness at one time, for he seems to have forgotten everything. Wasn’t that his ancestor that was saying to ancient worshippers of Jehovah: I bet you’re sweating that your buddies are “tortured because they would not accept release by some ransom, in order that they might attain a better resurrection.“ I bet you’re sweating that other have “their trial by mockings and scourgings.” I bet you’re sweating that for others it will be “by chains and prisons.” I bet you’re sweating that some will be “stoned, they were tried, they were sawn in two, they were slaughtered by the sword, they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, while they were in need, in tribulation, mistreated.” I bet you’re sweating that my world has consigned them to “wander about in deserts and mountains and caves and dens of the earth.” Wasn’t that his cousin, 4Jahovich, who taunted Dennis Christensen, “I bet you’re sweating that we’re going to throw you in the hoosegow” or two the Russian branch: “I’ll bet you’re sweating that we’re going to declare you illegal extremists.” He has forgotten everything he ever knew about Christianity. It’s as though he thinks Jesus and the twelve are in the “Roman Empire Hall of Fame.” The trick to doing what I am doing online is to know that I will lose. The villains will have their day in the sun before the Great Day arrives. So am I sweating? I wouldn’t put it that way. Does it cause me concern? Yes. To say I am sweating would be putting it too strongly. I think of the line besieged mothers sometimes use on their offspring: “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.” So it is with Jehovah’s visible arrangement. They brought me into this spiritual world. Of course, they cannot take my faith from me. I have assimilated that and it remains unless I damage it myself. But if it seems that their direction should “take me out,“ I think of that second part of the saying. I know how Christians fared in the first century. They didn’t win the respect and honor of their fellow humans. They were reviled by the general populace, parallel to how JWs are reviled by the general populace today. I will say it is not because of overall GB doings; it is par for the course. As for Rolf trading away the brotherhood—If I suffer misfortune and vanish from the internet, (as recently happened to a long-time player here) none of my online acquaintances will ever know why. Was I hit by a bus? Did I suddenly go gravely ill? Did I have a bad conscience over confronting the villains? Did I empty my pockets and still not have enough for my ISP bill? Nobody will ever know. But because I stick with the brotherhood, people will know my distress within a few hours, a day or so at most, and they will be people disposed to do everything they can to remedy my problem. All that Rolf throws away to no purpose other than making a statement. Narcissistic? Maybe not, but the symptoms resemble it closely enough that JWI can be forgiven for not knowing the difference. I run the risk of seeming anti-scholar here, and I am not. I like books. I have read more than most. When the BBC ran a list of the 100 greatest books of all time, I found that I had read over 50 of them—“read” them via Books-on-Tape while working as a janitor. But too many things are phrased as though matters of scholarship, matters of the head, as though “Wisdom puffs up, but not in my case.” Forgive me, but I would not choose ‘Thinking’ as a moniker, even though I do a lot of it—and “Scholar JW” as a handle leaves me cold. There probably was nobody less scholarly than the twelve who accompanied Jesus, perhaps excepting only Judas, who was not from the hills, but from “metropolitan” Jerusalem. There were plenty of scholars at the time, but Jesus bypassed them all—he was looking for those who would do God’s will, as opposed to just studying it—to shake it down in its components with a heady goal of instructing others. “What is desired in a steward is to be found faithful,” Jesus states, not “analytical.” Of course, the head trains the heart—we all know that. But much more does the heart train the head, so that to overemphasize the head seems to be missing the point. There are brothers who wish to be known for their critical thinking, and even by their eagerness to be “led by the science.” It makes no sense to me. The first thing that contemporary scientists will do is to tell you where you can go with your quaint little notion of Adam and Eve. Science is THE tool of those humanists that would defy God. It is enough to keep up with it—we don’t have to venerate is as they do—as the be-all and end-all. Scholarship is a great thing—pour me a double-shot of it—but it ranks somewhat low in Christian qualities necessary for approval before God. To hear some carry on here (not you), it is the ONLY thing that matters.

I just got tired of saying “the divine/human interface” and was searching for a substitute. What I hit upon was sloppy. You are right. I should have stayed with what I had, but I didn’t want to wear the phrase out—a phrase that I never intended to mean anything more than providing leadership. Sure. That’s what I think, too. I don’t like to split hairs on these matters. I am pragmatic. Moses said that Jesus will “raise up a prophet like me.” He obviously didn’t if we insist on a parallel in each and every respect. Jesus was perfect, Moses was not. Jesus was put to death. Moses was not. So with the GB being like Moses, it is the same—in some respects they are, and in some respects there are not. Of course. It is organizational leadership I speak of. Even in Moses time, are we to imagine that Israelites could have no relationship with God when Moses was not around? Could they not pray? Did Joseph act as he did because he learned from prior writings, but his counterpart living under Moses would have had to clear it with the prophet first? Of course not. It is perfectly fair game for the GB to refer to the murmuring Israelites under Moses so as to encourage obedience today among God’s people. No, they are not like Moses in every respect, but they are enough like him for the comparison to work. God does lead his people, and there has always been something visible for them to hang their hats on—though at no time does this “something visible” preclude one’s own relationship with God or one’s own study of the scriptures. Of course they are just men. Paul and Barnabas were just men, too, though the crowds concluded differently and it was hard to restrain them. Even when the man behind the curtain says “Here I am,” the crowd wants to put him behind the curtain again and believes he is other than what he has just said he is. That’s all the GB is doing today, saying “Yes, I am a man. Yes, I am behind the curtain manipulating the machinery of organizational lead which is awesome, but I am still a man,” and some of the crowd will still say, “I think he is more than just a man, I think God gives him special spirit, I think....”—that’s just the way people are. We can overthink this and in doing so become obtuse. In some way Jehovah leads his people today. Since the restoration of pure worship 150 years ago, leadership has been in connection with those supplying the printed spiritual food. There is no reason to think that should change, any more than you change horses midstream in the Jordan. This, too, is not rocket science. It is simply common sense. The men who brought the truth to us in the first place are the ones to defer to. If there is the occasional incidence of roller derby there at Bethel it does not mean that the answer comes from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, or however Rolf gets the word out these days. When people say of the GB, “They’re no Moses,” is is mostly because they want to rebel. I write supportively, as a apologist. Rolf writes as an investigative reporter—blowing the cover off what he thinks is THE top story. At most I will say, “There is a downside to this or that practice.” It’s not my place to “propose reforms” as Rolf does via Amazon. As you know, you are my heroine, for doing the most commonsense thing in the world: familiarizing yourself with apostate reasonings so that should your loved one come across them one day and be stumbled, you are able to do more than say: “DON’T READ THAT STUFF!!!” an answer that you know as well as I will almost always work to your loved one’s disadvantage—once the toothpaste is out of the tube it does not go back in again, and your loved one’s newly discovered information source will certainly say: “You see? What did I tell you? They want to keep blinders on you!” We have elevated the ‘apostate’ practically to the status of bogeyman. “Run!!!!” we say, at the first possibility that he may rear his head, and all but throw a brick through the TV should he appear there—and it runs so contrary to the spirt of boldness that Christians are supposed to cultivate, and a willingness to always be ready with a defense of the faith, that people are nearly stumbled over THAT. It is a little like when Satan challenges Jehovah in the garden of Eden, and people say, “Why didn’t God just beat the snot out of him?” Because it is a moral issue that has been raised, not one of who has greater power. So when we verbally beat the snot out of ‘apostates’ and insist ones not go there on any account since they do nothing but lie—well, are not there some parallels? Now, the counsel not to hang out with ‘apostates’ is good, as is the counsel not to ‘engage’ with them. There is no mystery as to why people go ‘apostate’—like Demas they loved the present system, they “went out because they were not of our sort,“ they refused counsel to focus on the rafter in their own eye rather than the straw in another, they beat up on their fellow slaves when it seemed the master was delaying—there is no mystery at all to these things, and my spirituality has only grown in seeing, not just why people accept the truth, but also why, after accepting it, they reject it. Just why does “the sow that was bathed return to the mire?” The answer is no less edifying to me now than it would have been in the first century when it was written. There is no mystery in why people go apostate. There IS mystery in how virulent they become, and how persistent. It takes your breath away. With some, it is as though they have found a new purpose in life! even though, in every case, they have nothing better to offer! They can only bellyache about what they don’t like. It is especially so of ones who go apostate to become atheist, which seems to be true of most of those on Reddit, or at least the most visible ones. They have reassessed life and now feel that the remaining few decades until death, with nothing beyond, is a great bargain! It’s like the fellow who saws off the branch he is sitting on and grins as he goes crashing down to earth. It is like the fellow who loses his millions in the stock market, says “they were only paper gains, anyway,” and celebrates the few thousands he still has left. So obviously you don’t want to hang out here—what a corrosive atmosphere to let these malcontents hammer you day and night, and if you answer them, they just rephrase their beef and run it through again. Engage with these characters? It’s a little like masturbation (something I have never done, of course, but I am told about it). Sure, there is a rush that comes with answering a fathead, but the long-term effect is subtly undermining and corrosive to personality development. So it is a matter of degree. Of course you limit exposure and if some will eliminate it entirely, more power to them. But our track record of being unmarred by apostasy is so poor that at times, I wish we would re-examine that counsel to avoid at all costs even a whiff of it. When Amber Scorah sails through her life, ends up a missionary in China, and her faith and entire life is upended by one chance encounter there, something seems out of whack. Why did she cave so easily? Why wasn’t she better prepared for the contrasting view? When the Russian brother asks about his old friend and learns that one has left the faith because he read literature critical of the organization—literature that we are strongly advised not to read, it exaggerates the power of this crap. It is nothing more than the “sons of disobedience” at work, but it creates an almost superstitious horror among brothers that one chance encounter with an ‘apostate’ can upend a lifetime of dedication to God. I think it even works against zeal in the ministry—we work tirelessly over months or even years to make a disciple, with the underlying “knowledge” that it can all come to an abrupt end if that person so much as talks to an ‘apostate’—how can it not sap our willingness to go through the process in the first place? Our cure is worse than the disease, and often leads to worse cases of the disease. If Amber is “not of our sort,” let her learn that before she marries and goes off to China. Then hopefully she will take up a life in indifference to her former faith, and it will just be indifference—not hostility. I will at most detail a downside. I will not do a Rolf and call for an overhaul. What a tremendously immodest course that is! The GB is taking the lead, and they can amass scriptures to support what they advise regarding interaction with those who willfully leave the truth behind. Who am I to say those scriptures are invalid? Who am I to say I know better? For every iron I have in the fire, they have 100. I can only reflect on what appears before my own two eyes. They can reflect upon what appears before thousands of eyes. Highlight a downside and move on. Bring your gift to the altar. Maybe someone will say, “You know, that talkative yo-yo has a point.” But if they don,t, they don’t. They don’t have to tell me why they don’t. The expression “There are too many chiefs and not enough Indians” is one of the most under-appreciated bits of wisdom in the world. I think a significant tell came early on—when Rolf commented how he had submitted his work to Bethel, but they “refused” to take him up on it. How does he know they “refused?” And even if they did, what makes him think that they cannot? They offered no comment on Shultz and de Vienne’s book, either, and the latter issued no beefs about being “refused”—they speculated (I think correctly, in the main) that they were “incurious as to their own history.” They didn’t comment on my books, either, even after I asked them too. Did I carry on about how they “refused” to address my work? I would never dream of such a thing. I’m perfectly willing to accept JWI’s verdict, when he said (more or less): “It’s because they think you are a loose cannon and they don’t want to provide the spark that sets you off.”

Maybe it is “Hell hath no fury like a scholar scorned.” “Wisdom gives forth its voice in the very quadrangles! Only dolts are to be found in the streets.” It makes no sense at all the to say that the JW religion is right except for the accepted method in which God communicates to man—and then run that complaint before the ones most singularly unqualified to be judges of it. I think of the verse that says the physical man can not get to know the things of the spirit, for they are foolishness to him, and yet he writes, by and large, to the physical man who is not wont to believe in God at all, and if he does, thinks he is a Trinity that watches over our immortal soul I don’t think this is best phrased as a matter of scholarship—as though he is loopy when it comes to ethics and understanding. Better to phrase it as simply not being one of the “sons of disobedience” that wants to hijack the plane. Whoever believes will do even greater works than these present ones, Jesus says. In expanding a preaching campaign around the globe, keeping it specific enough to be meaningful, and also as though speaking with one voice, there will plainly be some innovation of organization involved—just as Moses was given 70 assistants so that the job would not wear him out. That’s what “taking the lead” means—you devise things to keep up with expanded activity. He would say as regards the accepted way that God leads his worshippers, “The way of Jehovah is not adjusted right”? Why cannot they turn around and say (as they have), “Is it not your way that is not adjusted right”? Maybe this is just a power grab on his part—a call-to-arms to the renegade “elders“ he speaks of. Does he even believe that “God leads his people” or is it all like human politics with him, so that he should lay his beef out before all and sundry? At some point, even if one does not believe on account of what is said, one should believe on account of what is done—the “works of my father” says Jesus at John 10:37-38) It would have been nice had he focused on what has been mentioned here before: an entirely new publishing and distribution channel invented so that “Big Business’ does not control the flow of God’s word, so a translation daring to defy popular but untrue “formula translation” does not tank in the marketplace, and so that the poverty-stricken fellow in a developing country is not stuck with some archaic translation that he can neither afford nor understand. It would be nice had he focused on the unheard of measures to fulfill 2 Corinthians 8:14 on a worldwide scale—that surpluses here might offset poverty there. Instead, he seems parochial over such things, clinging to notions of what is “his.” Does he think the GB has “dumbed down” the Bible with the 2013 edition? They themselves have said as much—not everyone is a scholar, and in Asia, they think Sheol is a geographical place. The older more literal versions still remain—there they are readily summoned up on the app. If we do our Bible reading daily as we are relentlessly encouraged to do, those studious by nature will go there for comparison or even prime instruction. Reading of all type has been dumbed down in the course of my lifetime.

I hear that he foreclosed on his mother in the dead of winter and the poor woman would have froze to death for sure, but the wolves ate her first. I am. That’s how I know.

The guy doesn’t even know how to go apostate properly. You can’t sing “The Kids are Alright” as you’re doing it. He could have at least dug pits of bitumen for elders to fall in when they came calling. Where is that article about there being Jehovah’s world and Satan’s world, from which arose the cute saying that you can’t sit on the fence because Satan owns the fence. Does that not precede the GB so presumably he has no issue with it? So, what? Does he think that—yes, Satan my be misleading the entire inhabited world, but not at the university—they are far too smart for him there. After the wheel is invented, nobody says it was invented wrong unless they are prepared to invent another one. It may be that all the “improvements” I have in mind, were they ever adopted, would blow everything to Kingdom come. You get your head around the way things are, unless you see a parallel bunch doing everything just so, minus the things he gripes about. Since there is none, it is only modest to conclude maybe that is part of the package—maybe the package is the only way it can be. Maybe if his “reforms” were adopted of a kinder gentler package, the wolves would thank him—“All the better to eat the sheep, my dear,” perhaps they would say.

Rolf should have come here to sow his oats. Why didn’t he? I can think of at least one that he would have gotten on with just fine—there are others, too, I am sure—and indeed, even I would not append laughing emojis to his each and every post like a rat in a Skinner cage. Instead, he wrote a book. What is wrong with the fellow? He is now hero to people he cannot abide, since his problem is with the divine/human interface and nothing else whereas they, by and large, want to scrap it all. I mean, who is his target audience? The enthusiasm of ex-JWs at his “new scrolls’ is surely tempered by his staying “true to course” in his own eyes. “Maybe his expulsion will cause him to ‘wake up,‘” someone says hopefully. I don’t think so. He seems to have counted the costs beforehand. He is content to revert to the fellowship of “scientists” and the (they must be relatively few) “elders” who will still chum with him. Maybe the latter are here. The next newbie that I assume is Allen but doesn’t really sound like Allen I will give due scrutiny to. Does he write his book because he is trying to trigger “reform?” From who? From the airy world of academia that the GB pays no attention to other than to observe that the more prestigious the university the greater the contamination? The guy’s got a screw loose. Jettisoning the brotherhood for the sake of getting in good with the scientists and renegade elders? I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and my brothers would find out about it to lend support in a matter of hours. Billy the Kid, nice as he is, would not learn of it until he read my obituary.

I don’t know why this is so hard. Nobody gets everything they want. The U.S. political system of calling the leader of the other party a jerk works so well that he wants to bring it into the congregation.

He didn’t really introduce a sect, did he? He just blasted away at the existing arrangement so someone else could introduce a sect to fill the vacuum he created.

Obviously, I meant historians in the new system, looking back on that wicked year of the old. They will be a hounded lot, because they will be trying to recall the things that God say will no longer come up for remembrance—a little like Nimrod’s boys building the tower so as to not be scattered the way God said they should.

The quote is not mine, but I wish it were: Future historians will be asked what quarter of 2020 did they specialize in.

Didn’t someone say of them that they were the enemy of the American people?

Research from the University of Maryland and Michigan State University confirm the results of a more limited study a couple years ago of the Philly Police Dept—that the race of the officer is not a factor in who gets shot. Yet the MSM would all but have us believe that the entire purpose of the police is to shoot back people. One can only wonder at their motive. https://research.msu.edu/the-truth-behind-racial-disparties-in-fatal-police-shootings/

If you say, as Rolf does, that the GB has lost their way, are you not implying that you know the way? Otherwise, how do you know that they have lost it? Maybe it just turned out a little more convoluted than you had anticipated. It seems a very bold claim to make. Everyone has a wish list. I do. On some of the items, I think they are knocking it out of the park. On some other items, I say “I wish they wouldn’t keep doing....” But never in 1000 years would I frame it as, “the GB has lost its way.” I would confine myself to saying “I didn’t get mine.” Hopefully for Rolf, he will one day read an article about how “certain well-meaning, but indiscreet, brothers who have....” and nothing further.

I also just noticed that it is the prosecutor’s appeal, not the defendants. That pretty much guts my theory, but it adds another quandary. I hadn’t realized that the prosecutor could appeal his own victorious verdict.

I didn’t even know that it was within the power of an appeals court to do this—to harshen the sentence. I thought the only role of an appeals court was to determine if the preceding trial had been error-free and fair. Is the real message here that once a Witness is convicted, they had better not think they have the same right to appeal as anyone els.?

Yeah, yeah, yeah—tell me about it.

I know the original lyric. And I also know something of women. I once told JTR that I would love to hear from his kids. I begin to think that I would love to hear from yours as well.

If the homeowner knew which Wednesday the thief was to come, he would fold his hands and fall fast asleep.

hehehehe :)))))))))

I like the account in which Paul’s accuser gushes on and on about Felix—showering him with insincere praise. When it becomes Paul’s turn, he all but says “Well—you’ve certainly been around for awhile.” Felix was a rotter through and through, and everyone knew it. “When the governor nodded to Paul to speak, he answered: “Knowing well that this nation has had you as judge for many years, I readily speak in my own defense.” Acts 10:24

It’s not to the point of hatred—nor even close.

He’s on your thread, JWI, not mine. If it is not important to you, then why ask it? Look, it is not a bad question.** No need to act as though so pious that a “worldly” thought would never cross your mind. Obviously it has, and it is not a sin to ask about what’s going on. If you don’t know what is going on, then you are ever inclined to say stupid things. Tom Irregardless may have been right, but his knee-jerk response was annoying nonetheless: “And to think that Tom Irregardless, when confronted with some news report he didn’t understand, which was almost anything, would dismiss it all with ‘it just goes to show we need the Kingdom!’ How long had he been saying that?” **I won’t answer it, of course, because I am too pure for that sort of thing—I only think of God. But maybe “worldly” JWI will.

“Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins.”

Would it be fair to surmise your post as a “conspiracy theory?” I am working on a post on that topic now, a few separate items having gelled together over the last few weeks. Maybe, depending on the action here, I will even put it on this thread—not as a competing idea, nor dovetailing—just the same topic as seen from another angle—with focus on how it relates to our people. When push comes to shove, all is a manifestation of the whole world lying in the power of the you-know-who of 1 Jn 5:19. It is odd that Tom Irregardless’s remark (quoted from Willie Whitepebble’s recollection) comes across as so stupid on the surface and so spot-on overall: “And to think that Tom Irregardless, when confronted with some news report he didn’t understand, which was almost anything, would dismiss it all with ‘it just goes to show we need the Kingdom!’ How long had he been saying that?” I’ve known plenty of people apt to use that quick retort. I becomes exasperating. Still, that does not mean that it is wrong.