Yes I understand, thank you.
The things that are about to come on the human family will be very misleading, and cause many to turn away from Jehovah. Knowing what these things are, and why may help someone.
Here is an example: Now I have no idea if the end will come in our life time, but if it does, here is one of the things that will happen…We are warned not to take the mark of the beast…and I don’t know what that mark will be? The scripture says, “No one will be able to buy, or sell anything without the mark.†How will those who have not taken the mark live? How will they feed their kids? Would parents let their kids starve to death? I think many will take the mark. If a Christian knows what is going to happen, and why, don’t you think their trust in God and knowing what is, and why would help them? The scriptures say,†God choses who he wantsâ€â€¦he will not lose one of his sheep who trust in him. But yes you are right….to talk of things people on this forum do not want to hear, is spitting in the wind.

 

Hi Domenic

I notice that you’ve been a member of the forum for one month. When a member first registers, I know that sometimes they need a little time to settle in. I don’t mind making some allowance for that initial time period where people are new members.

I’m going to write about the purpose of this forum. Some of these points I have written about on previous occasions but I’m going to mention them again.

A few days ago, I wrote that I was a finance buff. Among other interests, I’m also a psychological buff, too. I could fill the forum with threads that feature examples where the Watchtower Society has used loaded language. The literature is full of it and if I chose to, I could hammer the forum with threads like that. (Occasionally, I see an article which I feel is significant and in the past, I’ve written on a topic if I feel that it stands out from the usual information presented.)

I balance that ability with the purpose of why this forum was set up. It is the home of other brothers/sisters. Now for some of them, this may be the only outlet that they have where they can come for encouragement and support. We don’t know all of the circumstances and situations that the brothers/sisters face. I try to keep that in mind and I would like brothers/sisters here to feel upbuilt and strengthened when they visit the forum. Over time, the need for that will become greater, particularly when the Watchtower Society’s so-called prophecies do not unfold in the manner that they have told the congregation in the past. There are going to be a lot of confused brothers/sisters out there and they will need to have a source of strength and encouragement.

One of our wise brothers here gave you a wise piece of advice: “Focus on things that are faith building and faith strengthening.†I think that is a very good suggestion.

There are going to be times when what you post will be challenged by others. That is life on the forum – it happens. The forum provides an opportunity for members to bounce ideas off each other. It should be possible to present a viewpoint with supporting explanations and scriptures in a respectful manner. If you happen to cover all of the supporting explanations and scriptures in your posts and if the debate on that subject still continues, then it would be wise to let the other posters know that you need to do additional research. There is no shame in doing that.

From my own experience in the workplace, I know that when people resort to name-calling and character assassination, that is a sure sign to me that the person has run out of facts.

It should not be necessary for a poster to have to rely on name-calling or character assassination in order to get a point across. I don’t want to see anymore statements on the forum that carry the sentiment of: “You’re disagreeing with me, therefore, you must be following Satan†or “You’re disagreeing with me, therefore, you must be a genetic descendant of Satan.â€

It may be that we might have to agree to disagree on some topics. The forum contains several examples of where that has occurred. I will mention 2 of those examples.

One occurred just recently on the forum. It was in the thread where the Society’s finances were being discussed and I raised a question about off-shore accounts. Another poster thought that my viewpoint was “out there†and thought that this was unlikely. The poster is entitled to their opinion and I have respect for that. I think differently on the matter. I’m a finance buff, so what should I do? Take my copy of the Australian Financial Review and beat him over the head with it? No, of course not. That would not be a loving way to treat the brother. I am also aware of the fact that these are just opinions and that Jehovah will reveal in His own time, the operational aspects of the Watchtower Society.

Another example of a thread where posters had to agree to disagree was in a thread that discussed the United Nations.

http://e-jw.org/showthread.php?983-...-8th-king-again&highlight=united+nations+king

It stands out in my memory because it was a lengthy thread and also a thread where the posters hardly agreed upon anything because everyone had their own viewpoints on prophecy. During the course of the discussion on that thread, often people were enthusiastic and animated about writing about their ideas but nobody tried to “bite the other one’s head off.â€

Please be advised that your posts will be under surveillance and moderated (aggressive content will be removed if that is necessary.)

Wallflower

 

Wall flower,
Thank you for taking the time to put your, and the views of the forum in writing. I value all the gifts my God has given me, known, or unknown. I value those gifts with my life, and would not give any of those gifts away in the face of death. The gift of freely expressing my feeling is one of those gifts. After 30 years as a Jehovah’s Witnesses I came to understood I would have to throw that gift aside to be counted among them. I would never insult my God by throwing away any gift he has given me…nor will I start now.
I leave your forum, and its rules in peace.
Domenic

 

Dear Domenic,

The only issue Wallflower was talking about is your lingering propensity to call others names and treat them like crap whenever they disagree with you or don't match your personal yardstick of righteousness (through knowledge-related issues, to boot). We kindly and repeatedly called this to your attention by asking you to tone down and stand back from your feelings; telling you eventually that your posts would henceforth be moderated but you keep behaving the same and even dare answering that your God-given gift of freely expressing your feelings is threatened by our plea.

I think that your slip of the tongue here is pregnant with meaning. You might have feelings you need to apprehend, tame and come to terms with before being able to set forth the fruit of your thoughts and deal with contradiction in a peaceful way on a forum like ours or elsewhere. We never impeded you from putting forth your beliefs, even though you seem to blame us for it, whereas you talk about your feelings being under threat.

It reminds me of the self-fulfilling prophecies : The worst that you expect from others happens because you react right away as if it were befalling you, and as the people don't know what the matter is with you, they leave you alone, which you may finally consider as lack of love and disdain. You only make happen what you expect from others. We are not what you fear we are. We've seen beautiful aspects of your heart but you're so in desperate need of validation that you overact whenever people contradict you and that you switch into a defensive and protective mode.

For the moment being, as no decision of banning you has been made, I don't see the need to delete your account and we keep hoping that you will come around and back here one day.

We love who you are and admire your love for Jehovah, which you demonstrated so beautifully here on this db, but we don't like being treated like crap...

 

Hi Walflower and Utuna,

I really appreciate the wording of your reply to dominic.

More in regards to your intent to not chase him off but rather emplore him to get along with the other kids. Are we not all in a way children growing and learning?

Domenic please listen to this advise that is meant to help all and not specifically hurt you.

May you all have a blessed day.

Joe

 

Joe,
Thank you for your post. Over the last month I have read almost all the post on this forum, I have even read some of the old threads. I don’t know one person on this forum; I only know them by what they have written. And yes I understand I don’t fully know them by their writing, because I can’t hear the tone of it? I am a writer. I have studied for years how to express the feelings of characters to give expose their tone….because I want the reader not to see the words, but to feel who the characters are. My views on the subjects I have expressed on this forum are what I hold to be true. The directions of subjects I have posted are as real to me as is Jehovah. Let me be very clear; I do not post anything to prove I am right, nor to change the direction of any other. I often try to come across as the kid just out of the hills who doesn’t know what shoes are, and when it rains thinks the sky is falling. Please do not be misled by that. I live under the knowledge of this, “I can do nothing without Jehovah, not one breath into my lungs…nothing. With him, I can do anything.†That includes understanding. I reject false teaching of Jehovah’s word. Do I use the bible as reference of that word? Yes, more times than not. Do I believe the bible is inspired of God? No I don’t. I believe the scrolls men claim to have taken the bible from are inspired by Jehovah God, and the bible is a poor copy of those scrolls.
I have many different bibles. The last one, a KJ printed by D & H Brothers Ind. Page two, not even 1’4 down the page two, two different words. They used the word, meet, for mate. Sure it’s not a big thing. It does warn, “What else will I find wrong?†The NWT has added a single letter word, A into the bible. Hebrew does not have the letter A. Both Hebrew, and Greet are very different than English. As JW’s we learned rather than one word for love, there are four, each with a different meaning. When I use the bible it must match the scrolls it was taken from, or I put it aside. If it does not match the scroll, it cannot be Gods word, and can have no more value than an out of date ticket to Disney Land. Men have translated what they believe scripture is saying, and built a book of what they believe…is that not what men do with the Watch Tower?
Am I upset with the forum? **** right I am. I’m not a stupid person. Josh 7 ‘s questions to me, many were posed to see if I would trip. He did throw insults my why. He knowns nothing about me, or what I do…he even attacked me as a writer? Why would he do that? What I posted had nothing to do with my being a writer…and just for the record; I have been a writer for two newspapers. Josh claimed I said things about him I did not. He said I called him SATAN. I did not. I said a person who says this, and that is not a Christian, but is working for SATAN. I think he is upset with me because I do not believe he is a prophet. He claims to be able to make prophesies. There are no prophets after Jesus…not from Jehovah anyway.

I’m on a warning: All my post will be monitored. If what I say is not liked, or believed by those controlling the forum, my post will be removed. That looks like Watch Tower control stuff?
I am a follower of Jehovah God, under his son, my Lord Jesus. If you don’t like what I post, maybe you should look to yourself for your direction…I will not be a part of anything that demands I say what they want me to say, in their way...If I don't agree with you, you call it crap.(that was your word.) I don't need to leave my crap at your door. You should post a warning at the heading of the forum.
If I can't speak freely, or defend myself from attack, I will have no part of this forum.

Domenic

 

no prophets after Jesus , where would you place all the Greek and Aramaic Scriptures letters and Revelation , as given
to his servants the prophets ..

Revelation 1:3 Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.

normally I would not bother but thought mayhaps you had written too quickly to ascertain what would be implied by
your above statement that no prophets came after Jesus ..I expressly understood that was part and parcel of one
of the gifts.

1 Corinthians 14:26 [ Good Order in Worship ] What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Everything must be done so that the church may be built up.

Acts 21
7 We continued our voyage from Tyre and landed at Ptolemais, where we greeted the brothers and sisters and stayed with them for a day. 8 Leaving the next day, we reached Caesarea and stayed at the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven. 9 He had four unmarried daughters who prophesied.

10 After we had been there a number of days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. 11 Coming over to us, he took Paul’s belt, tied his own hands and feet with it and said, “The Holy Spirit says, ‘In this way the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem will bind the owner of this belt and will hand him over to the Gentiles.’â€

Rev 19

10 And I fell at his feet to worship him. And he said unto me, See thou do it not: I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony of Jesus: worship God: for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

As far as I recollect it's JW's who don't believe this kind of prophetic word exists today ...I do not believe that the pen of
truth has ever passed out of existence ..and indeed will become very powerful in the not too distant future .

 

Do you have a link to the scrolls Domenic? Or are you referencing the Dead Sea scrolls?

And, if this is true, then it seems there are some necessarily following conclusions that need to be hashed out:

1) God didn't want people to know about the truth, rather, he hid the truth in a tangled web for the .000001% to find after the internet was invented?

2) The prophecies replete in the scriptures about Jehovah calling people out of the nations, since the death of Christ and anointing of spirit is not true, within your framework. That strikes me as highly illogical.

3) How is this different than deism, where God is an abstract being that doesn't communicate with mankind, except through the chosen few 'high priests' who find these scrolls?

Think of these verses within your framework:

There came a man who was sent as a representative of God; his name was John. 7 This man came as a witness, in order to bear witness about the light, so that people of all sorts might believe through him.

John 1:6-7

So my word that goes out of my mouth will be. It will not return to me without results, But it will certainly accomplish whatever is my delight, And it will have sure success in what I send it to do.

Isaiah 55:11

Don't let them waste their time in endless discussion of myths and spiritual pedigrees. These things only lead to meaningless speculations, which don't help people live a life of faith in God.

1 Timothy 4:1

---------

It seems to me that the Catholic system attempted to destroy the Bible from the minds of man, but were unable to contain Jehovah's will, and after they lost their grasp on the scriptures the Western world exploded with science and the enlightenment.

Doesn't that fly in the face of a 'conspiracy' about the Bible being incomplete?

 

Muslims use the Qur'an. If you have ever read that book, which I have, it uses many scriptures found in the scrolls...yet it has Jesus, not as the son of God, but just a good prophet.

Morons added a full book to the bible, the book of Mormon.

To a Christian, neither of these books are inspired by God. There are many Christian religions, and many have their own translation of the scrolls, and they call their book the bible, inspired by God...is their God Jehovah? no, in most religions it is Jesus. They have even built a back door for help, Jesus mother Mary?

The people who translated the first bible into English...who were they these? If JW are the closest to the truth, were these first translators JW's? No they were not. The were part of major false religions. They left things out, and made their own translation of other things. Sorry, but the best example is Genesis 3:15. In the scrolls the word seed in not in that scripture. It is a Greek word that does not translate into seed. It translates into sperm'a, which in Greek also means off spring. That one word changes what the whole bible is about.

You say, "WOW?" Well, that is what I say when people try to tell me, Adam, and the women ate a fruit from a tree, and blame God for the human family falling to death. Adam, and the women never died from eating a fruit...they died from a judgment from Jehovah...so you figure out why the whole human family dies?

 

The New Testament documents are among, if not the world's foremost, historical documents.

See Gary Habermas' work demonstrating that as for closeness and accuracy there is literally nothing as evidentiary as the New Testament in ancient documentation.

 

My brain just works on simple basic logic. “If the Bible(s) were taken from the scrolls, why would anybody reject the scrolls?â€￾
If a person wrote a letter, and I made a copy, the two should match. If they don’t match, which would you trust, the copy, or the original?

 

No I am not saying that. What I said is, "If the bible is taken from the scrolls, the two should match. if they do not match, than the copies have error.
Man has not found any original scrolls...all the scrolls found, even the dead Sea Scrolls are not original. If anybody does have originals, they not talking.

Have scrolls been left out of the bible? Yes, some fifty. Are those fifty inspired by God? I don't know, maybe...but I don't trust the men who reviewed them, and left them out. One I believe should be a part of the bible, the book of Enoch. Why? Because we believe the book of genesis that was written by Moses. The story Moses wrote about the beginning matches the same story Enoch wrote. Moses wrote about how Jehovah loved Enoch. If Moses is correct in his writing of Genesis, it shows be believed in the scrolls of Enoch. Who would you trust, Moses, or the men who copied the scrolls into a book form?
And yes, when Moses wrote Genesis 3:15 he wrote the Greek word Sperma, not seed.

 

Satan is pretty smart. Alongside him I have the brain of an grasshopper. But I can still reason whit the help of Jehovah. "If I was Satan, I would set up false things...the old gold miners, when they dug holes in the earth and found nothing, would plant flakes of gold in the hole, and sell the hole...it was called, "Salting the mine." Some business people do the same thing today when trying to sell a business that will soon fold...they doctor the books.

I know the scrolls are inspired of God. The only think I know Jehovah put into stone was the ten Commandments. I don't expect others to reason as I do. I hope they don't expect me to reason as they do if see things different?

When you use the word, "WOW," on my comments, it's like saying I'm full of it.
.

 

What I believe in that area is not for publication.