TrueTomHarley

It may be that you do not, but what you do so closely resembles it that no one can tell the difference.

In my opinion JTR you are both! Now you’ve stepped over the line. JTR is NOT a Democrat!!!

Several times you have likened yourself to Mickey. Now you are proposing a trinity of sorts—you, Mickey, and Joe. It holds in some surface ways. All three would stand up for the little guy and be angered if that one is treated unjustly. All three have thick hides—they can take it as well as dish it out. All three have a personality that might chafe at the “corporate” nature of the theocratic organization—though I have no evidence that Joe ever did not easily work it out. Similarities end after this. I can’t imagine Mickey indulging the same complaining spirit as you. One reason that I cannot imagine it is that he had the perfect stage on which to do it and never made use of it. Disfellowshipped at least once, he humbly worked his way back towards reinstatement. Why? Unlike you who carries on ad naueum about how the Mighty Eight can ruin someone’s life forever, they had no power to “ruin” his. His 2nd wife was not a Witness (she is intensely political—I follow her on Twitter—my guess is that she has no high regard for JW, and may hold it responsible for sabotaging his best work), no family members in the truth so far as I know, professional success and thereby lots of friends—he was a close friend of John Wayne, for example....He could have told those brothers to kiss off—he had no need of them. They couldn’t “ruin his life” at all. Still, he submitted to congregation discipline and took steps to get reinstated. I believe that he feared God and realized that such fear included treating with respect those taking the lead for the work they do. I think he was able to “man up” and not cry when discipline came his way, even if it was not discipline spot-on in every regard. Certainly Joe and probably Mickey was able to overcome any distaste for “organization” to appreciate that it affords far more benefits than liabilities—particularly since the earthly organization strives to refine itself. I think Mickey, and certainly Joe, would see the disrespect you show for those taking the lead and become fed up in a hurry. Joe was familiar with the ways of the mob—speak out against their headship and you lose your life, though they might on first offense merely cut out your tongue as a friendly warning. So we may imagine him seeing your rabid maligning and ridiculing of theocratic headship today, coupled with whining should you receive any kickback. “What does the idiot expect?” he would say, and Mickey, too. That’s one dissimilarity I see. There are more.

Joe knew dirty rotten lowlifes well, to use one of his favorite phrases. “You know that car dealer on TV?” he’d say, speaking of certain commercials. “I know him. He’s a dirty rotten lowlife. I’ve seen him at the auction. He always has a woman in one arm and he holds a drink in the other.” Joe knew dirty rotten lowlifes because he had been dirtier than any of them. When he muscled in on the mob’s territory, the mob came to pay him a visit. He emerged from his shack with a live grenade in each hand! “Now, what is it that you boys wanted?” They suddenly remembered that they really hadn’t wanted anything at all. Years later, after Joe had become one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, my son began to sweat when police stopped the car his friend was driving. The two had some fireworks inside—not exactly legal at the time. “Watch this,” the friend said as the policeman approached. The cop asked for his license. “Officer,” the friend asked, ‘“do you know my dad, Joe Markow?” A pause. “This doesn’t say Markow,” the cop said, examining the license. “It says Sanchez.” “Yeah, Joe married my mom. He’s the one who raised me.” This got the officer thinking, and presently he bid my son and friend a good evening and let them go with a friendly admonition to drive safely. “See that fellow over there?” one cop said to his buddy at the coffee shop, pointing to Joe. “He used to be the meanest SOB around and he turned out better than all of us.” At a committee meeting over an elder who turned out to be a real stinker and Joe saw it before anyone else—in fact, he spotted it instantly, mostly because he had traveled in the same circles—Joe stated what he had seen and that elder called him a liar. Joe reached across the table and half yanked him out of his chair by the lapels. It was all the other brothers could do to persuade him that “we don’t do it that way here, Joe.” “How can you brothers be so naive!?” he said astounded to those ones, who could not believe the evidence unfolding right before their eyes. But after the dust finally settled, one of them approached to say: “You’re right, Joe. We are naive.” Sometimes elders are naive. He also told off a certain overbearing traveling overseer. His body of elders had worked and worked and had a huge number all pumped up excited during the month over auxiliary pioneering—people that hadn’t done it in ages or even ever. They had rearranged priorities and were all hopped up. The visitor came along and said: “Well, it’s a good start.” “Way to crush the spirit of the congregation,” Joe told him. Besides my sympathies to the family, his death made me sit up and take notice. It didn’t shake me to the core—that would be too strong to put it that way—but it drew more attention than the deaths of most people for whom I am inclined to pass off as ‘another one bites the dust.’ Sounds callous, I know, but I really am one who believes in the resurrection—death is just the beginning of a long but temporary leave-of-absence and I know that I will not see them for a long while but in most cases I was not seeing them anyway. I have said before that “nobody wants to die—it’s inconvenient and it makes people feel bad,” but other than that—so what? The resurrection will undo it all. Joe’s death was different. He really wasn’t that old—maybe just two or three years more than me, I think. He might even have been younger. Your definition of what is ‘old’ increases as you get older yourself. I am of the age where I think that I have 20 good years ahead of me, plenty of time to get everything down in writing. But you never know. Maybe life will throw a me curve ball and I will be gone tomorrow. What is that verse about how we are a mist appearing for a little while and then disappearing? Ah—here it is: James 4:14. “Tell your dad you love him,” Davey-the-Kid said to me after his dad died unexpectedly, for which notice they had paged him at the Pittsburgh Special Assembly. I have said once or twice—no more than that because I really liked the man—that Joe was the originator of 100 stories, each one of which he was the hero. Ordinarily this would be an extremely tiresome quality, but in Joe it was not—I think because I never doubted (and still don’t) that each and every story was true, unembellished, and he really did act as a hero. One can tell when something has the ring of truth and corresponds with experience and known fact in every conceivable way. Having seen it all, he had turned all his energy and empathy towards the congregation and the ones within it. I have fond memories of our family camping with his at the campground In upstate New York. The two of us would talk for hours by the campfire and then continue while walking the grounds. Sometimes the most trivial details are the ones that survive. Joe used an expression that I had never heard before (or since). I asked him about it. I found it humorous and thus it became a running joke—“throw one over the hoop.” It means taking a leak, and I suppose it is a reference to slobs too lazy to put the toilet seat up. “I’m off to throw one over the hoop,” we would tell each other throughout the weekend.

No, you misunderstand. That is Hailstone Massage. It’s the latest craze in health care fads and many of the top Bethelites have gone in for it whole hog. It is so embarrassing.

If it wasn’t so much work, Hoss would come around and do that for him This reminds me of the court musician in Amadeus who presents to Mozart a clunky little ditty and Mozart instantly transforms it into a masterpiece.

My wife has them both. To be sure, I watch her closely.

Well....he WAS a bad dude, you must remember. This would be wasting a perfectly good tent pin. Besides, it was a “crime” of opportunity. Do you really think that every woman has a jar of poison just lying around, held in reserve in case any unpleasant characters come calling? You know, I think this says a lot about the inordinate confidence some have in their “human wisdom” and the power of their ‘science’—never doubting that their allies can unravel the psyche and techniques of those who lived in cultures and times thousands of years old. And...not to extend the point TOO far, and granted that I do not follow all the ins and outs of points that @JW Insider raises, this overconfidence may even extend to archeologists so ready to declare that this or that ancient date could not possibly be so. Even the fellow who cut up his concubine into twelve parts and delivered her to the tribes to make a point, I recall from some secular source I came across, (not in WT publications) was not unheard of, maybe not even unusual, for the times.

The picture below addresses a fundamental problem with women, as many men have pointed out.

The picture below speaks to a fundamental problem with women in the minds of many men.

Well, he DOES raise an excellent point here. How about “Math is a subject as easy as pi”

I’m sure you made their day.

Seeing that dog fingering the trigger gives me paws

There is an expression in math: “Divergent series are the work of the devil.” Maybe the same is true of chronology.

Thank you for this, Jack. Doubtless the Prince that most music fans would be eager to see resurrected is Prince Nelson, who actually went by the stage name Prince. At the wedding reception of a non-JW nephew, I mentioned to some that I was a Witness and the first thing that came from their mouths was appreciation for the most famous Witness of all in their eyes, Brother Nelson. Chapter 1 of ‘Tom Irregardless and Me’ consists entirely of Prince’s JW experiences as found online. I beat CBS to the punch by two years in what they said about the Oxycotin pharma fraud. It is in the Prince chapter, there because Prince died a victim of that fraud. Since the Prince chapter is the first chapter, it is even in the free preview section. See how I am saving you money, Jack? In the flurry of reports about the supposedly unaddictive painkillers that turned out to be extremely addictive, my book quotes a Dr Johnson, who is “forced to paint an unflattering picture of the industry that I have been a part of for the last 15 years. I wish I could tell you that this epidemic was due to an honest mistake. That the science was unclear or had mixed results that only later became evident. But I can’t. I also wish I could tell you that the only reason the problem persists is a ‘lack of physician awareness.’ But I won’t. The reason this opioid problem started and the reason it continues is sadly for the most American reason there is - business.” At one time, Dr. Johnson points out, American doctors prescribed opioids as did doctors everywhere: for pain relief from cancer or acute injury. He then tells of a drug company [Perdue], introducing a new opioid product in 1996, that swung for the fences. It didn’t want to target just cancer patients. It wanted to target everyone experiencing everyday pain—joint pain and back pain, for example: “To do this, they recruited and paid experts in the field of pain medicine to spread the message that these medicines were not as addictive as previously thought...As a physician in training, I remember being told that the risk of addiction for patients taking opioids for pain was ‘less than one percent.’ What I was not told was that there was no good science to suggest rates of addiction were really that low. That ‘less than one percent’ statistic came from a five-sentence paragraph in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. It has come to be known as the Porter and Jick study. However, it was not really a study. It was a letter to the editor; more like a tweet. You can read the whole thing in 90 seconds.” The book doesn’t go into further detail on opioids because Prince was the topic, not the drug that killed him. However, from a blog post I wrote two years later: “In fact, not only was the drug far more addictive than doctors and reps were led to believe, but the pain relief it delivered only lasted a few hours, not the 12 that was advertised. Yet, when complaints of such were received, the company would not permit reps to advise patients take it more often, since that exposed the fact that the much more expensive drug was no better than what was already being used for pain. Instead, the advice was to increase the dosage, and that obviously served to intensify the addictive quality. Prince and millions like him got hooked on a drug that the doctor prescribed, and when doctors started to get squirrelly, withholding supply for fear of what they were unleashing, these ones were driven to the black market to find substitutes.” Find the experiences in Chapter 1, Prince, which, to my knowledge, is the most complete, and perhaps only, published collection of the artist's JW experiences and interactions. And it is in the free section. Be a sport Jack. Download and read it. You don’t want to piss away your whole life digging 90 years back in efforts to diss your former faith. Stay up to date with the contemporary Prince. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/686882

A recent circuit overseer spoke about how Jehovah has gathered people into one “large, unified, happy, somewhat dysfunctional family.” “Dysfunctional” is the key. Nobody of Jehovah’s Witnesses would say that they are not. It is still head-and-shoulders above the greater world, which is not described as a family at all, and when it is, it is only by the most ridiculous exaggeration. The governor of New York State has been known to refer to “the family of New York.” It is a tough sell. One “family member” wins the Nobel Prize. Another family member gets life in prison for knifing his fellow family member to death. Jehovah’s Witnesses are very much a counseling organization, taking a cue from verses such as Proverbs 22:17—“Incline your ear and hear the words of the wise ones, that you may apply your very heart to my knowledge.” God though his written book counsels us. Christ counsels his disciples. Elders, as shepherds in the congregations, counsel the flock. Parents counsel their children. Older men counsel younger men. Older women counsel younger women. It can even work in reverse, as when young Elihu counsels the three men each old enough to be his father. It is all based on God’s message and it all stems from the fact that when we draw close to God, it is not he that is going to benefit from our example—it is we that is going to benefit from his. The trouble is, the only ones who give the exactly correct counsel at just the right time and to just the right degree are God and Christ Jesus. Everyone else misses the mark—sometimes by a mile. Usually the counsel itself is not wrong, but it may be too strong, too irrelevant, too clumsily stated, too diluted by our own imperfect example, and so forth. Everybody feels free to have a go at it, and Anthony Morris has described the challenge of making your magazine presentation with a critic by your side. Also, it is extremely difficult to counsel a worldwide body of people, as the Governing Body does. One person says: “Thank’s for the new RULE!” and his neighbor says: “Huh? Did you say something?” Finding just the right balance is tough. Where they are strong, it is because they don’t want to find themselves in the shoes of Lot—whose son-in-laws thought he was joking. They take their shepherding role seriously. At an elder school I attended—for at one time I was one—an instructor led around a string on a table with forefinger firmly applied to one end. “See how the rest of the string follows so nicely?” he asked. He then reversed course and tried to “push” the string. “See how it bunches up when I do that?” he said. A pause followed during which he tried to make it work. “It’s really not too smart of me to do it this way, is it?” The lesson, of course, was to lead by example, and not by being “pushy.” Lots of Witnesses are “pushy”—not necessarily elders, but anyone. People take it as akin to bullying in some cases. Sometimes we “counsel” each other and it would be better to just let things ride. Sometimes we “counsel” each other and we forget to examine the rafter in our own eye. Peer pressure can be a good thing, encouraging us all to hold the course, but our imperfection can make it stifling. Sometimes we have to tell people to mind their own business. Much of this abrasion has been and is being refined out of us but it will never vanish. I wrote a post about spiritual progress over the last 50 years, addressed to someone inclined to be critical: “I would say the numerous schools that exist now that did not 50 years ago fits the bill. For elders, ministerial servants, traveling reps, etc. Intense and reoccurring instruction lasting anywhere from a weekend to a few weeks. I have attended some of these schools. Almost all content is on imitating Jesus’ manner of dealing with the flock, dealing with those in the ministry, showing tenderness, not lording it over, leading by example, and so forth. Very little is on what would be called ‘doctrinal.’ [I then included the above paragraph about the elder and the string] “These schools have a cumulative effect of refining those exercising any authority. That they are needed can be inferred from Jesus’ dealings with those to whom he granted the greatest authority. Even on the eve of his death he interceded in an argument they were having as to which one of them was the greatest, the same as you might do with children. (Luke 22:24) “Take that into account for anyone carrying on about how inspired, unerring, and pure the leaders were back then and by extension ought be today. Grown men are capable of behaving like children. It happened then, it happens today. Refresher course training in which students will focus on scores of scriptures—and if they prepare as they ought—hundreds of scriptures, go a long way towards training those in authority to lead and shepherd as Christ did. “And, far from the Governing Body dreaming up a school that they ride above and apply to everyone else, when such a school is formulated, they put themselves through it first. They do not imagine that they cannot benefit from intense review of how Jesus dealt with people.” So Jehovah refines his people. The benefit of elders being refined is that it trickles down to everyone else as well. Jehovah unites a people that would not otherwise be united. To the contrary, many would be at each other’s throats, squabbling over issues of class, economics, education, political leaning, race, nationalism. If you were not in the truth, you would choose as friends those with whom you naturally get along, but as congregation members, our friends include ones with whom getting along is not a natural for us. Two verses help me immensely. Both have been expounded upon in our program recently. Philippians 2:3,4—“...doing nothing out of contentiousness or out of egotism, but with lowliness of mind considering that the others are superior to you, keeping an eye, not in personal interest upon just your own matters, but also in personal interest upon those of the others.” I love that point. At first glance, it might strike one as ridiculous. How can I think you superior to me and at the same time you think me superior to yourself? The answer was supplied in a recent study article. Everyone is superior to the other in at least one way. Find that way and hone in on it. When you see that person, make sure that’s the first thing that comes to mind. It works wonders for human relations. The other verse is 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 about love. It...”does not keep account of the injury....bears all things...endures all things.” At the Regional Convention, these verses were given their standard application how we keep this in mind as we view others. But what was new—at least to me—was the idea that they will do the same with regard to us. We might really be outrageous in one or more aspects, yet if we are known for love, people will overlook it! Listen—I know the temptation. They will pour on the syrup from Bethel and you just want to scream: “Enough! Call a spade a spade! This guy’s an idiot!” But it has to be that way—or at any rate it is that way. It is the only way to bind a people of infinite diversity, barring just one item, into one.

I propose that they change from 1914 on April 1, primarily to get Allen’s reaction. The next day they change it back. April Fool. Who cares, if the word is not translated properly? It seems to me that you have fallen a long ways. A) you don’t trust JW’s, but B) you don’t trust anyone else, either, since Holy Spirit hasn’t gotten around to inspiring a true translation that can be trusted. You have a very strange view of Holy Spirit and what it is supposed to do. It sometimes seems to me that the day you stopped believing in Santa you started to believe in Holy Spirit as a one-on-one substitute. Throw another window in his Kingdom Hall, and the spiritual wuss will be stumbled and out by the evening.

How large is the library in your town? Have you ever been there? I’m not so sure. There is little sign of it here. I didn’t either. And with some, I will rise to the occasion and try to figure it out. But with the ol pork chop I cannot even be sure that there is an occasion so I rest from my labors

You must forgive me on this, but the more I think about this remark, the dumber it appears. As already stated, if he was so obsessed about leaving a positive note on the end, he would not have supplied his negative note at the beginning. It gets dumber. It is not just a fact that he has offered in your eyes— it is a FACT! But his opinion? Obviously he doesn’t know what he is talking about and he may even be lying. Yet when it comes to chronology you are like a child at his feet, lapping up every word—never doubting for a second his judgement, even while admitting it is over your head because you don’t really dig into things. His grasp of Witness lore and governance is so unequaled that his opinion might be more of a fact than his FACT. I don’t doubt what he says, but the point is to you he is just an uncorroborated single witness. People are notoriously unreliable in relating even their own experiences, where emotion can easily taint memory. There are people who stumble over the trees, but their grasp of the forest is unhindered. There is nothing but your own prejudice to say it is not that way here. You are sort of a screwball who appears to assume that the very purpose of this site is to supply you with dirt on the faith that you were once a part of and now can’t see a single point that is upright—to the point where, if fresh dirt is not supplied, you chide participants here for not adding anything of “value.” You are like the antitypical nutty farmer diligently cultivating weeds, ripping out any wheat that raises its nasty head since that is NOT what you are looking to harvest.

I would not call it “dumb” if I were you. The four windows reminds us of the four angels on the four corners of the earth holding tight the four winds of the earth. The carpet covering the dirt of the floor reminds up of the love that is to cover the sins of others. The blue reminds us of heaven where those 4 angels hang out on a nice day. ”You were running well. Who hindered you from keeping on obeying the truth?”

Of course! That is why I know that Trump is a slaveholder. Because George Washington was. Historians just try to top it off with a positive note on the end. They don’t fool me. Those abused slaves may not have been revealed, but I know that they’re there. Think hard about THAT, Mr 4Jah2Me. You dope—if JWI was so concerned about “a positive note at the end,” he wouldn’t have given his negative note in the first place!

How it really WAS. Or to be more specific, how it really, on occasion, was. You have a way of zeroing in on just a single sentence without regard for ones just before and after. Did you overlook this one?

There is some piece of information not supplied. What it is I have no idea. But one would not be disfellowshipped for leaving one’s husband, whether he was violent or not. Add adultery into the mix and that might well be. I do not say that adultery IS the missing piece here, but there is a missing piece. Where you read that was in one of several post from detractors critical of an article in the December 2018 study edition of the Watchtower. I wrote up a reply to that on my own blog. It may also be here—many posts like that I also put here—but I cannot locate it: https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/01/did-the-watchtower-give-women-bad-advice-.html

No question that the Jewell family would like it. It’s the reporter’s family that’s grumbling. I am told that the Mule family liked that one a lot.

If that’s the case, I’m painting my entire house that way and I’m making everyone jump in front of it.