TrueTomHarley

@Many Miles I haven't fully read your above response, but I will follow up. 
Can you disclose or tell me a bit more what is your relationship with the Congregation and if you consider yourself a Witness? I’m intrigued in learning where you are coming from? I don’t mean to be nosy, and fully understand the repercussions. 
To give you some background. And please don’t take this the wrong way. I am of the belief of using your real name, unless doing so would risk your career or livelihood. Real names makes us accountable for our words, by tying our reputations to what we say and how we say it. Transparency contributes to authentic dialogue, anonymity detracts.  I’ve said in the forum before that I am not a fan of anonymous internet dialogue because it artificially separates persons from ideas and arguments, and in this way it assumes a false anthropology, as if we are mere intellects, and not embodied beings with feelings and biases and emotions, character, histories, etc. In my opinion, so long as a person remains anonymous or hides his or her identity behind a moniker or an avatar she remains incapable of entering into authentic dialogue, because authentic dialogue requires the personal authenticity by which we reveal who we are, where we stand, and take responsibility for our words, by allowing them to be connected with our personal identity by those who we enter into dialogue. Maintaining anonymity, for example, hinders the development and expression of sociability. I don't think that ideas and persons can ever be fully separated. All dialogue is between persons, and it involves the character of the participants.
My reason for including some biographical facts here and elsewhere in the forum is not to persuade other Witnesses, but only to explain that I don't think that ideas and persons can ever be fully separated. The more I know about you, the more I can determine your credibility, your sincerity, your authenticity, and likewise the same is true the more you know about me.
I'd be glad to learn more specifically what your position actually is from a JW framework. Feel free to write me privately to discuss your thoughts.

The Great Courses professor (David Kyle Johnson: The Big Questions of Philosophy) says that it does makes sense. It alone is logically consistent. He traces it to Augustine and says, ‘Maybe God permits evil because it is essential to his pursuit of his greater goal of allowing free will.’ This is essentially what the Watchtower says, though they develop it more.. Moreover, you who sniff because uneducated ‘dumbbells’ say it today might not sniff upon learning that a highly esteemed and educated philosopher also said it.
Johnson extracts a similar lesson from the Book of Job, in which God finally weighs in but doesn’t answer any of Job’s questions, much less his charges. Instead, he says ‘Where were you when I did such-and-such?’ Whereas Carl Jung (Answer to Job) just thinks God is being a bully, Johnson rightly draws the inference that maybe there are greater questions at work to be settled that Job doesn’t know about.
That doesn’t mean that Johnson accepts this ‘theodicy.’ He is atheist. 
People speak of weighty issues as though they are in vacuum, but atheism changes one’s outlook on everything. If you do damage, or allow damage to happen, and you can fix it, that makes huge difference from one who does damage, or allows it to happen, and cannot fix it. Thus, a doctor who breaks a child’s arm and sends you his bill is different from a doctor who breaks a child’s arm in order to set it properly, and upon doing so, sends you his bill. Holocaust is horrific—not to minimize the human suffering involved, but if you can fix it, even that memory in time becomes like a bad dream, a former thing no longer called to account.
But if you’re atheist, there’s no fixing anything. Any damage done is this life is damage done permanently, since this life is all there is. That’s why, while I can understand people falling to atheism, I can’t see them embracing it as though, it, too, is ‘good news.’ It’s a great tragedy, if true. You ought to be sad about it, as H.G. Wells was when he cited the demoralizing lack of faith that ensued in the wake of rapid acceptance of evolution. It’s not good. It’s bad. But eventually, when they accumulate enough, perceptions flip, and it becomes yet another instance of what’s bad is good and vice-versa. That everlasting life you once envisioned? It’s like paper gains in the stock market; they were never real anyway. The sooner you awake from that notion to ‘live fully’ the two or three decades you have left, the better. ‘Imagine’ that, as you are dying of Covid on a ventilator, there is ‘above you only sky’—and learn to find comfort in that prospect.
You should always ask, in any forum where one is critical of the faith, ‘Has this fellow gone atheist or not?’ Criticism of the human the organization to declare the genuine good news may really just be attacks on the belief in God. Nobody would deny there are flaws in the earthy organization, to the point where one may unexpectedly take one on the chin, but if you don’t believe in God, they are everything, whereas if you do believe in God, they are merely painful, like that sliver jabbing you in the butt when you slid over in the lifeboat to make room. Atheist critics come around and say, ‘Do you realize you could wake up one day and say all your life has been wasted?’ Of course you do. It’s called ‘shipwreck of the faith’ when that happens. It’s not as though the notion has never occurred to a believer. “If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are to be pitied more than anyone,” Paul says at 1 Corinthians 15:19
Although black and white thinking in general is not a great thing, and one does well to banish it in most day-to-day considerations, certain issues, such as belief in God, are indeed black and white. This is true even when such belief results in inconvenience, such as when a car group of sisters was rear-ended by a cop in an actual black and white who was insufficiently focused on his driving. Had they been atheist, it wouldn’t have happened.
 

He did confront God and that might read shocking to some. In the end, though, all was forgiven and he was cut considerable slack due to the agonizing stress he was under. His three interrogators, on the other hand, were cut less slack, since they used their good health to pound their fellow into the ground with their ‘holiness’ and assumed ‘theology’ which held that if you suffer, it serves you right. You must have done something wrong.
The scripture from Job that makes our day as Jehovah’s Witnesses—you can almost hear the cymbals crash at Kingdom Hall when it is cited—is “until I die, I will not renounce my integrity.” Right it is that it should be highlighted, for it demonstrates that man can, under the worst of circumstances, maintain integrity to God.
But it is part of a package: The full verse reads: “It is unthinkable for me to declare you men righteous! Until I die, I will not renounce my integrity!”
Part of keeping his integrity lies in not letting these three bullies gaslight him, not ‘declaring them righteous.’ He knows who he is. He knows he is not what they say, a hypocrite who fully deserves his own downfall. Defending himself before these three louts is part of ‘not renouncing his integrity.’
Apparently, not renouncing his integrity even involves challenging God. Job begins his speech with a preamble just 3 verses earlier: “As surely as God lives, who has deprived me of justice, As the Almighty lives, who has made me bitter.”
Of course he ‘dares challenge his Creator!’ Unless there really is a hellfire, he couldn’t possibly suffer more than he is doing at present! What’s he got to lose? What’s God going to do—kill him? That’s exactly what he wants. Although we go on and on about Job’s faith in the resurrection, even writing a song about it (and it’s a good song, too), the context of his remark appears to show he doesn’t have any faith in a resurrection at all:
He says: “For there is hope even for a tree. If it is cut down, it will sprout again, And its twigs will continue to grow. . . . At the scent of water it will sprout; And it will produce branches like a new plant. But a man dies and lies powerless; When a human expires, where is he? Waters disappear from the sea, And a river drains away and dries up. Man also lies down and does not get up. Until heaven is no more, they will not wake up, Nor will they be aroused from their sleep.” (Job 14: 7-12)
so that the verses we like, the verses that follow, read as though something he would like to see, but fat chance that they will! Wishful thinking they appear to be, no more: 
“O that in the Grave you would conceal me, That you would hide me until your anger passes by, That you would set a time limit for me and remember me! If a man dies, can he live again? I will wait all the days of my compulsory service Until my relief comes. You will call, and I will answer you. You will long for the work of your hands.”
It’s a little hard to tell for sure, but those first verses hardly seem a preamble for a speech lauding God for the resurrection hope.
Nonetheless, God makes it all good at the end. Job makes no accusation to God beyond what can easily be explained by the suffering he undergoes. His companions, under no stress at all, go well beyond anything Job says. ‘What does God care if you do what’s right? It’s impossible to please him. Even the angels can’t do it!’ — they revisit the point several times. ‘The very heavens are not clean in his eyes,’ say they.
While one might come online and chew out an Eliphaz, Bildad, or Zophar, one does not do it with a Job, condemnatory though some of his reasonings were. That role must be reserved for God. Even Elihu, who has words of correction for Job, makes clear his motive: “If you have something to say, reply to me. Speak, for I want to prove you right,”  he says to Job. (33: 32) In the meantime, he’s not going to take advantage of his health to bully a sick man, as the other three fellows do: “Look! I am just like you before the true God; From the clay I too was shaped. So no fear of me should terrify you, And no pressure from me should overwhelm you.” (33: 6-7)
He’s not going to be a Zophar. No one wants to be a Zophar, who to put it in modern terms, visits a patient on a respirator with COVID-19, who has lost his entire family to that plague, has lost everything else as well, who says something rash in his agony, so Zophar responds: “I have heard a reproof that insults me—my understanding impels me to reply.” (!) You almost expect him to challenge Job to a duel! It’s his mission to defend God from any ill talk, regardless of circumstances, but there are times to give it a rest.
You can’t tell a person that their experience is not theirs. No one should try. Everyone will have their say until God debuts with 70 questions to make you say, as did Job, ‘maybe I was a little rash.’ They’re not going to say it to me, or you, only to God after he makes an appearance. Meanwhile, nobody wants to be a Zophar.
 
 

So here I am plowing through some Great Courses professor lecturing on the great questions of philosophy and I’m getting madder and madder because it just seems a primer for atheism. I don’t recall philosophy historically being on such a mission. Imagine being a student in this fellow’s class, where you have to spit back some variation of what he told you, otherwise you get a failing grade. 
The litmus test for the problem of evil, he says, is the Holocaust. He cites some scrawling on a barracks wall from a prisoner who soon thereafter died to the effect that if he meets God in the afterlife, God will have to beg his forgiveness. It’s not hard to empathize.
Sometimes when your back is up against the wall and you’ve got nothing to lose you take a few shots.
Nonetheless, there were hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses also consigned to the camps. They were unique among the prisoners—actual martyrs rather than victims—in that they alone had the power to write their ticket out. All they need do is renounce their faith and comply with the war effort. Only a handful complied.
In the context of reviewing Carl Jung’s ‘Answer to Job,’ written in the early 50s, I explored the topic in a certain blog post, quoting first a Watchtower article, then adding my own comments: 
“From the Watchtower of 2/1/92:
'In concentration camps, the Witnesses were identified by small purple triangles on their sleeves and were singled out for special brutality. Did this break them? Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim noted that they “not only showed unusual heights of human dignity and moral behavior, but seemed protected against the same camp experience that soon destroyed persons considered very well integrated by my psychoanalytic friends and myself.”'
“Why didn't the well-integrated psychoanalytic-approved prisoners hold up? Probably because they read too much Jung and not enough Watchtower!! Not Jehovah's Witnesses! They weren't hamstrung by having been nourished on Jungian theology. Job meant something to them. It wasn't there simply to generate wordy theories and earn university degrees. A correct appreciation of it afforded them power, and enabled them to bear up under the greatest evil of our time, a mass evil entirely analogous to the trials of Job! They applied the book! And in doing so, they proved the book's premise: man can maintain integrity to God under the most severe provocation. Indeed, some are on record as saying they would not have traded the experience for anything, since it afforded them just that opportunity. (another fact I find staggering)”
https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2011/02/carl-jung-job-and-the-holocaust.html
 

I far prefer the term ‘Golden Rule’ to ‘Human Rights’ as the former preserves all that is noble about human rights, while discarding all that is pretentious. Our own bodies do not respect our ‘human rights,’ crapping out on us when we need them the most and finally shutting down altogether.
Moreover, it really seems that if they are ‘rights’ you ought to be able to do something about it when they are violated. Instead, rights are all-but violated with impunity today. We are reduced to saying people ought ‘take responsibilty’ and be ‘held accountable,’ neither of which happens with any reliability. Utter such lofty terms all you want; not much changes.
This years favorite word: ‘Unacceptable’
Use in a paragraph:
They finally hung that slippery politician that everyone knew should be hung. ‘Any last words?’ they asked him on the scaffold. ‘This is unacceptable!’ he cried, as the trap door swung open and the rope snapped taut.
Unacceptable or not, off he went, every bit as much as if it was acceptable.

It is a little like the signs we saw posted repeatedly at the Columbus Zoo reptile house.
”How do you know if an animal is venomous?” they say, and then answer: “If it bites you and you get sick, then the animal is venomous.”
Pretty much the same answer applies here, I think. “How do you know if God has the right to rule? If Armegeddon comes, and you’re not around afterward, then he has the right to rule.”

It is good and truthful, but not all of the book is satisfactory. I’ll put it in my next one, perhaps—which may be an exploration of ‘theodicy’ (why bad things happen). Does @Many Milesor anyone else know the origin of our ‘universal court case’ theodicy? I’d love to track that one down. @JW Insider once put me on the track of a Great Courses university professor exploring the subject and it was well-nigh insufferable. Not that I won’t have to plow through it again if I proceed, but I am reminded of a newly discovered and instantly favorite G K Chesterton quote: “The first effect of not believing in God is that you lose your common sense."
I have no idea what you are talking about. Why be so hard on yourself? 
It’s like when a car group of friends drove near a certain industrial complex. Surrounding blocks had been snatched up for parking, but here and there were some stalwarts who hadn’t sold their properties. Thus, there were a few rickety houses completely surrounded by blacktop. “These people are so stubborn!” Sam (who had worked there) grumbled. “The company needs that property. They pay good money for it.” He reflected a few seconds, then said, “I’m stubborn—but these people are more stubborn!”
Now, you know how brothers like to razz each other. Instantly, it started. “No! You, Sam—stubborn?! Don’t be so hard on yourself! How could you say that??!! Not you!”
Sam was probably the most stubborn person to have ever walked the planet.

There could never have been a Mission Impossible without him.
 
No, but organizing does seem consistent with giving God a lot rather than giving him a little
It may be that as long as you don’t work to sabarolf organization, as though a freedom fighter, you’re okay—even as you stand apart from it yourself. Or it may not be okay. I’ll err on the side of sticking with what my experience tells me has worked to a reasonably fine degree, given that ‘we have this treasure in earthen vessels.’ I remember giving that talk on ‘Unified or Uniform,’ contrasting the unity of the earthly organization with the uniformity often demanding by nations, which goes so far as to stuff people into actual uniforms.
Yeah—I always figured it was something like that. You said it well:
It makes a difference, doesn’t it? It’s a little bit like coming back from the dead when you finally get back on your feet.
I put the following in ‘No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash,’ a book I took down pending rewrite that I haven’t gotten around to, so now it is nowhere:
“After studying one book seemingly written for no other purpose other than to harp on dress and grooming and harangue about field service, the conductor said to me: “Tom, why don’t you comment? You know all these answers.” It was a turning point. He was right. I did know them all. It was time to stop sulking. From the circuit overseer on down, they had stirred up major chaos in the family. They had been heavy-handed and clumsy - but never malicious. And it had never been Jehovah. I had read of ill-goings-on in the first-century record. Congregations described in Revelation chapters 2 and 3 were veritable basket cases, some of them, but that did not mean that they were not congregations. Eventually things smooth out. Eventually 1 Timothy 5:24 comes to pass: “The sins of some men are publicly known, leading directly to judgment, but those of other men will become evident later.” “Later” may take its sweet time in rolling around but it always does roll around. Should I stumble when it becomes my turn? I’d read whiner after whiner carrying on about some personal affront or other on the Internet. Was I going to be one of them? 
 . . . Recovery didn’t happen overnight, for I have a PhD in grumbling. Indeed, I was so good at it that few noticed I grumbled, for I had never left the library – I had only strayed from the same page. Now it was time to get on the same paragraph. Was that book truly a dog? They’re not all dazzling flashes of light, you know, for the treasure is contained in earthen vessels. Or was it the conductor? Or was it me? No matter. If life throws you for a loop, you thank God for the discipline and move on. “For those whom Jehovah loves he disciplines, in fact, he scourges everyone whom he receives as a son,” the Bible says Tell me about it. “Half of those at Bethel are here to test the other half,” the old-timers said. Yeah – tell me about that, too.”
Everyone has a mid-life crisis or two, during which they have to reassess. It doesn’t even matter if it is a servant of God we’re speaking of. Everyone has a mid-life crisis.

Whoa! It’s sort of like discovering, not only that the hand really wrote, “Mene mene tekel parsin, You fink!” but that Belshazzer clandestinely downvoted the remark.

Whoa! It’s sort of like discovering, not only that the hand really wrote, “Mene mene tekel parsin, You fink!” but that Belshazzer clandestinely downvoted the remark.

Ha! I remember that exchange between you and pudgy…I found it amazing that pudgy could do that…IT and those who know how to really work it are fascinating…all these young kids and anyone around forty is young to me but the younger ones just whip out their phones and like Jack Flash organize my whole world in a few minutes…..amazing !,

Not at all. But if find that when my writing takes me into a tunnel, by continuing to write I eventually come out the other end..

Whoa! once again! Georgie, I fear you will not believe this, but I really did not know @JW Insiderhad employed the trick in the very message he was speaking of it! I even wondered why the quote box appeared too big for the words contained. Ah, well, it’s just some sort of pesky technical snafu, I told myself, and manually shortened the box.
I mean, this is like finding a decoder ring in your Cocoa Puffs. I’m taking the next month to comb through all too-long text boxes in search of them.

Whoa! It’s sort of like discovering, not only that the hand really wrote, “Mene mene tekel parsin, You fink!” but that Belshazzer clandestinely downvoted the remark.

Whoa! once again! Georgie, I fear you will not believe this, but I really did not know @JW Insiderhad employed the trick in the very message he was speaking of it! I even wondered why the quote box appeared too big for the words contained. Ah, well, it’s just some sort of pesky technical snafu, I told myself, and manually shortened the box.
I mean, this is like finding a decoder ring in your Cocoa Puffs. I’m taking the next month to comb through all too-long text boxes in search of them.

Whoa! It’s sort of like discovering, not only that the hand really wrote, “Mene mene tekel parsin, You fink!” but that Belshazzer clandestinely downvoted the remark.

Whoa! once again! Georgie, I fear you will not believe this, but I really did not know @JW Insiderhad employed the trick in the very message he was speaking of it! I even wondered why the quote box appeared too big for the words contained. Ah, well, it’s just some sort of pesky technical snafu, I told myself, and manually shortened the box.
I mean, this is like finding a decoder ring in your Cocoa Puffs. I’m taking the next month to comb through all too-long text boxes in search of them.

Whoa! once again! Georgie, I fear you will not believe this, but I really did not know @JW Insiderhad employed the trick in the very message he was speaking of it! I even wondered why the quote box appeared too big for the words contained. Ah, well, it’s just some sort of pesky technical snafu, I told myself, and manually shortened the box.
I mean, this is like finding a decoder ring in your Cocoa Puffs. I’m taking the next month to comb through all too-long text boxes in search of them.

Let’s just call him Soco and move on. You Goo-wi-dat? Lol 

Yes. For me, if you pronounce Socrates with two syllables, thus making in shorter, I will appreciate the consideration. So-crates works just fine for me.

Step over into Macedonia, Mr Many Miles, and help us.
”No thank you, 
Having made that irresistible (to me) little quip, 
 
yeah. Me too.
 
Ta da! Now we don’t either, just like you!
Oh, I guess we still put converts on a slip, they won’t mind, I am sure, but not the time it takes to make them. 
Any time you change a practice dating back 100 years, it’s a gutsy move.
I think counting time for so many years is a reflection of the lowly roots that Christianity came from and so far still is. It is the mark of the plebs who were accustomed to the factory model in which when there was nothing to do you’d better nonetheless look busy if you didn’t want the boss to fire you.
Now that the model has been discarded (and good riddance!) probably all the educated people will come in.who were offended by the old way. Trouble is, when they do, they may say to the uneducated and ordinary, ‘Okay—you’ve done well. Amazingly well, really, considering your lack of education. But the smart people are here now. Step aside.’
We’ll have to see how it plays out. One thing for sure, dropping time requirements removes all sense of being ‘on duty’ or ‘off duty.’ It will vastly aid efforts to informal witness, as people will do what makes sense, not press on come heck or high water so that whoever is being spoken to ‘receives a thorough witness!’
 

Wouldn’t this put the materialist atheists who are scientists in the realm of spiritual men? Not only do they want to examine all things, but they insist that their tools, the tools of science, are the only means with which to do it. 
You spoke highly of acupuncture a while back.
Practitioners of acupuncture will say it works by releasing/rebalancing the body’s chi, which they will describe as a life-force or energy. You will not be able to run this by the champions of science. They cannot detect any ‘chi’ with their science, so they insist it is pseudoscience. If you tell them of benefit of acupuncture, they will say that it is placebo. If you insist it is not, they will call you stupid.
Do you think the spiritual man should look into what is described as ‘the deep things of Satan’ in the spirit of examining all things?
Thus far, I’m a little partial to @George88’s two preceding comments. If I didn’t fear their mix / fortification with ChatAI functionality, I would upvote them. I don’t want to get stuck upvoting, only to find I have upvoted a  ‘Danger Will Robinson’ robot. But I should probably work to overcome my phobia, as @Alphonse has.

Huh! Nobody has ever come to that conclusion before.  
(It is truly discouraging that ones should come here on the Open Club to advance that viewpoint, thereby revealing their lack of education in the scriptures, as though refugees from the Closed Club where all sorts of odd characters hang out.)

Wouldn’t this put the materialist atheists who are scientists in the realm of spiritual men? Not only do they want to examine all things, but they insist that their tools, the tools of science, are the only means with which to do it. 
You spoke highly of acupuncture a while back.
Practitioners of acupuncture will say it works by releasing/rebalancing the body’s chi, which they will describe as a life-force or energy. You will not be able to run this by the champions of science. They cannot detect any ‘chi’ with their science, so they insist it is pseudoscience. If you tell them of benefit of acupuncture, they will say that it is placebo. If you insist it is not, they will call you stupid.
Do you think the spiritual man should look into what is described as ‘the deep things of Satan’ in the spirit of examining all things?
Thus far, I’m a little partial to @George88’s two preceding comments. If I didn’t fear their mix / fortification with ChatAI functionality, I would upvote them. I don’t want to get stuck upvoting, only to find I have upvoted a  ‘Danger Will Robinson’ robot. But I should probably work to overcome my phobia, as @Alphonse has.

Wouldn’t this put the materialist atheists who are scientists in the realm of spiritual men? Not only do they want to examine all things, but they insist that their tools, the tools of science, are the only means with which to do it. 
You spoke highly of acupuncture a while back.
Practitioners of acupuncture will say it works by releasing/rebalancing the body’s chi, which they will describe as a life-force or energy. You will not be able to run this by the champions of science. They cannot detect any ‘chi’ with their science, so they insist it is pseudoscience. If you tell them of benefit of acupuncture, they will say that it is placebo. If you insist it is not, they will call you stupid.
Do you think the spiritual man should look into what is described as ‘the deep things of Satan’ in the spirit of examining all things?
Thus far, I’m a little partial to @George88’s two preceding comments. If I didn’t fear their mix / fortification with ChatAI functionality, I would upvote them. I don’t want to get stuck upvoting, only to find I have upvoted a  ‘Danger Will Robinson’ robot. But I should probably work to overcome my phobia, as @Alphonse has.