Sheep and Goats

Category: Field Service

  • The New European Data Law as it Applies to Jehovah’s Witnesses – My Take

    Yikes! No “data-gathering” according to the new privacy law. What to do?

    As far as I am concerned, this is a blessing in disguise. Jehovah’s people will adapt. They always do. 

    I even think it will be beneficial for us, overall. We have some people who become obsessed over records, the way some people do with regard to records of any sort. We have some who call back repeatedly if the householder does so much as give them the time of day—training them not to, in my opinion. Working with this new European law will force more discernment and maturity, though initially inconvenient in some respects. I wouldn’t mind if it spread to here in the States.

    This law will alter the logistics of the Matthew 28:19-20 aspect of Christianity— “Go therefore and make disciples of people of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the holy spirit, (Mathew 28:19) but it will not impact the Matthew 24:14 aspect at all: “And this good news of the kingdom will be preached in all the inhabited earth for a witness to all the nations; and then the end will come.” (Matthew 24:14) It will probably even enhance it. 

    The more I think about it, the more I like it.

    Most of the suggested field service presentations I don’t like. I don’t like them because they do not work for me. Of course, it is “different strokes for different folks,” but from what I have seen, they don’t work that well for others, either. They are incremental in approach, and many, when implemented by anyone less than an expert, come off as passive-aggressive. Sometimes I wonder where they come from, because they do not necessarily dovetail with each other. Probably they are the products of various full-time evangelizers who are brainstorming. Since many start with floating a question that will seldom be on the typical person’s mind, such as “Where are the dead?” you pretty much have to record the response and hope that you have laid the foundation for furthering it or starting another topic. All that requires you write stuff down, which is now illegal unless the person has authorized it.

    Better—or at least it works better for me—to bring up something more all-encompassing. The circuit overseer last visit made much of the 1-minute (and six seconds) video “Would You Like Good News?” Invite people to hear it—it only is one minute (and it is good to say literally one minute) The video ends with a plug for the Good News from God brochure and that brochure has a table of contents:

    “Which topic interests you most?” It says. They include

    Who Is God?,

    Who Is Jesus Christ?,

    What Is God’s Purpose for the Earth?,

    What Hope Is There for the Dead?,

    What Is God’s Kingdom?,

    Why Does God Allow Evil and Suffering?,

    How Can Your Family Be Happy?, and

    How Can You Draw Close to God?

    The video is here:

    If the person registers any interest, you can set up something then and there. If not, off you go with a sincere thanks for their time—after all, we call without appointment, which is becoming a rarety in the West, nobody is required to listen to what we have to say, so whenever someone does, I thank them for their time.

    Some all-encompassing verses that also work for starters—just offer to read a verse, give a brief statement as to why you read it, ask what the person thinks about it, and then offer to disappear. Such as:

    Jeremiah 29:11 – “For I myself well know the thoughts that I am thinking toward you,’ is the utterance of Jehovah, ‘thoughts of peace, and not of calamity, to give you a future and a hope.” (The reason I like the verse is because some people think God is out to rake us over, or judging from the current state of things, that there is no God, and this verse says not only that there is, but he thinks good thoughts towards us.)

    Or Matthew 5:3 – “Happy are those conscious of their spiritual need, since the kingdom of the heavens belongs to them.” (The reason I like the verse is because we all have a spiritual need, but we are not necessarily conscious of it—it is more like vitamins, that if neglected, may lead to sickness and we never know quite why.)

    There are no end of verses that can be used. It just takes adjusting to the idea. All work except for the verse Tom Pearlsandswine latched onto in my first book, ‘Tom Irregardless and Me’: Revelation 21:8: “But as for the cowards and those without faith and those who are disgusting in their filth and murderers and fornicators and those practicing spiritism and idolaters and all the liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur. This means the second death.” “The reason I like that verse,” he would say, “is that it shows sinners are going down and you’d better shape up.” He is such an idiot. 

    With a flat response to any chosen verse other than his, off you go. With a favorable one, you can even go to a longer video, with the intro that I find works well, “This video runs almost four minutes, but you don’t have to listen to it all. The minute it gets boring, hand it back.” It puts the control in the householder’s hands and defuses any impression of being pushy. I hate being pushy and try hard not to give that impression. There are few people in the world easier to get rid of than me.

    None of these presentations require the use of memory-jogging records. If the response if favorable, there is no difficulty in exchanging contact information if desired.

    As for keeping track of who is not-at-home—JWs do this—I even know one person who writes down every address beforehand and crosses them out as she finds them home, completely reversing how it is intended to be done—one might respond by forgetting all about it. Put the angels in charge of that one. Call when the majority of persons are likely to be home in the first place, which we do not always do.

    As for keeping records of those who have requested we not call on them again—well, I don’t know. Tell them we’d love to comply but the new law is screwing us up.

    Not to mention that we have long been moving in that direction anyway. That’s what the mobile cart witnessing is all about. That’s what the website is all about. They are two forms of advertising the good news without going to anyone’s door at all. On the home page of jw.org is a new Bible study feature. A series of studies that are multimedia, self-guided at one’s own pace, and require no registration or entry of info—“I’ll never know if you do it or not,” I tell people. In fact, I am looking forward to the time—the timing and circumstances will have to be just right, you wouldn’t do it just with anyone—when I tell someone, “I don’t want to study the Bible with you. Do it yourself.” We spoon-feed people too much, and it is hardly necessary with the majority. I even think being constantly obsessed over presentation of the very basics keeps us from pressing on to maturity, in some respects.

    They have done us a favor with their new law, is my take.

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    Photo: DSC00212 by gauge opinion

     

  • “We Are Wise and Learned Adults, Far Too Clever to Be Sold Adam and Eve. What’s Next – Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck?

    I like the way Paul deliberately dialed back on the ‘wisdom.’ Most of his contemporaries would have had to because they didn’t have it. Not so Paul, who was highly educated, and could have gone toe to toe with these characters. He deliberately chose not to. 

    And so I, when I came to you brothers, did not come with an extravagance of speech or of wisdom declaring the sacred secret of God to you. For I decided not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ, and him impaled.  And I came to you in weakness and in fear and with much trembling; and my speech and what I preached were not with persuasive words of wisdom but with a demonstration of spirit and power,  that your faith might be, not in men’s wisdom, but in God’s power. (1 Corinthians 2:2-5)

    The upshot is that you treat a highly educated person pretty much like anyone else, with only minor adjustments. They just as much as anyone else, have no clue as to why there is suffering, why people die, what happens when they do, why governments suck & so forth. The explanation for them too will lie in discerning what "Jesus Christ, and him impaled" means in practical terms. People do not understand this. Even religious people, as they say to you "Christ died for our sins" are almost always unable to explain just how and why that works.

    Show the high-brow people something about Adam & Eve from Genesis, for example, and there is no reason that you can not present it as a metaphor, its underlying message to be deciphered. Let me tell you, there are many people who will be intrigued, rise to the challenge, and even be flattered that you count them smart enough to figure it out. Whereas if you said from the get-go that it was all literal to people conditioned to reject the idea, you know what the reaction would be: “We are wise and learned adults, far too clever to be sold Adam and Eve. What’s next? Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck?”

    Focus on the meaning of the account itself (Genesis 3:1-5) without regard to whether it is literal or not. Sometimes when people see how much sense something makes, they reappraise their initial assumptions. 

    For a concise explanation of the subject itself, without regard for whether it is metaphor or not – in fact, taking for granted that it is not – I don't think you can do much better than the short clip presented on the JW website:

     

     

     

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  • Witnessing on the Airplane

    I did not take my first commercial flight until I was in my 50's. It was very exciting. Successive flights increasingly became a pain, mostly for things having nothing to do with the plane but for the hassles in boarding. In the old days, you could pull up with 15 minutes to spare, and nobody at all wanted to strip-search you. 

    Sometimes, witnessing helps pass the time. I don't always do it  but sometimes I do. Like one flight where I laid the contact card down on the armrest midflight and said to the man traveling next to me: "Everyone has a cause, and this is mine. We don't have to talk about it. We don’t have to talk about anything. On the other hand, there is time to kill, we will never meet again, and if you want to, okay."

    It was a while before he said anything, and I began to figure that he would not. However, he presently opened up on the purpose of his trip and on his background. He was a microbiologist at some university in Iowa. He said he liked the power of faith, but of course, he was a scientist. We exchanged some boiler-plate remarks, and somewhere along the line, just so that he would know that he wasn’t talking to some donkey, I mentioned telemeres. He took up the topic but pronounced the word differently. "You mean I've been making a donkey of myself all these years, saying it wrong?" was my response.

    It was just idle conversation that ensued, not particularly going anywhere. Then, out of the blue he brings up that his trip has another purpose. He is traveling to get his daughter out of her latest jam. He doesn't know what happened to her. He did his best to bring her up right, but she takes up with one lowlife scoundrel after another and has made a hopeless hash of her life. 

    I didn't say: "Too bad she is not a Jehovah's Witness. Then all of her troubles would be over." I mostly just listened and asked a few questions to draw him out. Who doesn't like to be reminded what can happen to kids in the absence of Bible principles and sometimes even with Bible principles? But he didn’t know me from a bag of beans, and yet he turns to me as though I was Father Confessor. It was likely because he had NO spiritual component to his life, and when he at last came across one, the dam burst.

    The time flew with the plane and we landed in no time at all. I'll never see him again, most likely. But you never know. Perhaps he will be like the man who accepted a few magazines, but eventually told me he would do so no more because his wife was allergic to newsprint. 'Look, just tell me if you don't like them,' I said to myself. 'What a stupid excuse!' Years later I met them at a convention, both baptized.

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  • One Thing We Know About Jesus: He Does Not Go Through Channels

     

    It took the religious leaders of Jesus' day no time at all to hate his guts and to put out schemes to kill him. John chapter 11 is very frank as to why. Starting with vs 47:

    So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the Sanhedrin together and said: “What are we to do, for this man performs many signs? If we let him go on this way, they will all put faith in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” [Protecting their turf is what is was all about with these guys.]

    But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them: “You do not know anything at all, and you have not reasoned that it is to your benefit for one man to let one man die in behalf of the people rather than for the whole nation to be destroyed.” [He's a contemptuous character, isn't he?] 

    He did not say this, however, of his own originality, but because he was high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was to die for the nation, and not only for the nation but also to gather together into one the children of God who were scattered about. [And he's a schemer.]

    So from that day on they conspired to kill him.

    Imagine! Issuing his own prophesy that Jesus will "die for the nation and gather the children of God, yada yada yada," so that when he killed him, he could put a happy face on it.

    During that time, the high priest was not installed in the usual way that the Torah says it should be done. It was a political appointment from the governing authorities. He was serving as high priest "that year." You are not supposed to do it that way because you forget all about God and instead focus on covering your rear end. That is why you don't want a 'house church,' under government control.

    For (prime) example, there is the house church in Russia, the Orthodox Church, snuggling up to national leadership and that leadership in return granting it exclusive status. And isn't the result more or less the same as it was back then: the ones closely reading, studying, and applying God's word of instruction and counsel, find themselves, from an organizational point of view, killed?

    I like how one of those leaders broke ranks, having come to Jesus previously by night, as covered in John chapter 3:

    There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This one came to him in the night and said to him: “Rabbi, we know that you have come from God as a teacher, for no one can perform these signs that you perform unless God is with him.”

    He's not exactly of the same heart with his buddies, is he, and he sticks up for Jesus later on (to no avail).

    In response Jesus said to him: “Most truly I say to you, unless anyone is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him: “How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter into the womb of his mother a second time and be born, can he?” Jesus answered: “Most truly I say to you, unless anyone is born from water and spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. What has been born from the flesh is flesh, and what has been born from the spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed because I told you: You people must be born again. The wind blows where it wants to, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it is going. So it is with everyone who has been born from the spirit.”

    Now you know, you just know, that Caiaphas and the boys would have snapped: "What is it with these riddles? I don't have time for this nonsense!" But Nicodemus said: “How can these things be?” and he even suffers through a little reproof from Jesus as the latter replies:

    “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet do not know these things? Most truly I say to you, what we know we speak, and what we have seen we bear witness to, but you do not receive the witness we give. If I have told you earthly things and you still do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? Moreover, no man has ascended into heaven but the one who descended from heaven, the Son of man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of man must be lifted up, so that everyone believing in him may have everlasting life.

    He is speaking awfully plain now (for him) and he goes on to reveal to the unpretentious ruler the most compact, though complete, statement yet of just how God adapts his purpose to the present and future, a purpose he revealed long ago, when he says:

    For God loved the world so much that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone exercising faith in him might not be destroyed but have everlasting life. (vs 16)

    It is too cool. He doesn't go 'through channels' because if he did, he would have run this by Caiaphas first (who would have told him to zip it). He never goes though channels. Always he goes over the heads of the pompous ones and speaks straight to the ordinary ones. And this next bit is certainly true (skipping only a verse or two):

    Now this is the basis for judgment: that the light has come into the world, but men have loved the darkness rather than the light, for their works were wicked.

    And what about this beaut that follows? 

    For whoever practices vile things hates the light and does not come to the light, so that his works may not be reproved.

    Nobody wants to be reproved and a fine way to reach that end is to shut down any channel that might do it.

    Nicodemus doesn't fare well (John 7:51) when he tries to defend Jesus before his co-rulers: “Our Law does not judge a man unless it first hears from him and learns what he is doing, does it?” he says.

    But they tell him: “You are not also out of Galilee, are you?"

    Yep. Rural, backwards Galilee, home of the bumpkins, far from the sophisticated city that they hail from. Galilee, the armpit of the world, and Jesus probably smells like one, too, even if he does raise some lowlife people from the dead every now and again.

    See: I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses—Searching for the Why

     

     

  • Jesus Dragged His Feet for Two Days

    Martha sent for Jesus. She knew where he was. He dragged his feet for two days before coming (John 11:6) and her brother Lazurus died.

    Martha knew it was Jesus‘ ‘fault‘. She said ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’

    Wouldn’t a more ordinary Martha have said ‘What in God's name took you so long?!’

    Instead, she said: “Yet even now I know that whatever you ask God for, God will give you.”

    John 11 is the go-to place if you are trying to explain the condition of the dead and the resurrection. I like that you can read a long passage and discuss it as you go; you don’t have to cherrypick here and there. It is always better if you don't have to hop around.

    I learn something more each time I read the chapter, and I never noticed this little item about both Martha’s temperament and faith before.

  • Update #2 From Pawdaymu

    First of all, here is Part 1

    Pawdaymu is an American sister serving as a need-greater in Myanmar. I know her parents well and I have watched her grow up. As is frequently the case with our young, particularly our zealous young, she got so many followers on Instagram that she had a hard time keeping up. She wanted to jettison some, but she didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Particularly trying to her were some who had left the faith, some of whom, in time, began to post pictures of themselves such as might appear in the Watchtower magazine depicting ‘the world.’ It’s up to them if they want to go that way, Pawdaymu is not judgmental. She is not wound up to tight because her dad is not wound up too tight, and when a student asked her: “Will only Jehovah’s Witnesses be saved?” she said, “Well, I’m not Jesus, and I don’t know.” No, they can go there if they want, but they do put themselves lower on her Instagram priority list, which is already too long. So she vanished as a person under her own name, but resurfaced as Pawdaymu, a not uncommon name in Myanmar, which means ‘little sister flower. It didn't really fool anyone. Her ruse was discovered in no time at all, word got around, and she may now have more followers than before.

    Her American friends come to visit in Myanmar and the husband is a sensation. Of Edward, the host Karen brother travels to the friends’ homes and announces: “Negro American coming! Negro American coming!” Presently Edward tells him that it’s not how they do it in America, it’s not considered polite. ‘Oh,’ the brother says, much distressed that he has done it wrong. ‘Well, what do you call yourself?’ and Edward says ‘black.’ It is not a consonant sound employed in that language and so the brother draws it out, try to get it right. “BLLLLAAACCKKKKKKK American Coming! BLLLLAAACCKKKKKKK American coming!” he says. “Negro works fine,” Edward finally tells him.

    Edward is also huge and he towers over his Karen hosts; the Karen are a tiny people. They typically have bamboo ladders leading up to their homes on account of monsoon season, and he breaks a rung while climbing. Much abashed and apologetic, he takes to clambering around on all fours to better distribute his weight, and he carefully chooses the support beams. One can only imagine what they do with that image.

    Is it only black brothers who create a stir among the humble people who rarely see anyone not their own? Pawdaymu and her husband ride a crowded city bus which stops to pick up yet another passenger. On spotting them, he cries out: “Hey, there’s white people on this bus!” Pawdaymu’s husband is not shy, and he instantly hollers: “White people! Where?” This sets the place in stitches and causes the man much embarrassment; never did he dream that a white person would speak the language. But Pawdaymu’s husband is personable and he puts the fellow at ease. In the end, he places him a brochure on family themes and the man passes it throughout the bus.

    They are immensely appreciative there that outsiders would willingly accept much lower standards so as to dwell amidst them in order to teach the Bible. As Pawdaymu conducts one Bible study with a woman, her husband melts in the corner, for it is almost 100 degrees. This alarms the woman, who insists on fanning him. Next, they must go to a nearby village where he will conduct the study and the woman insists upon coming along, fanning him all the way. “The teachers are here!” she cries as they approach, and she fans him throughout the study. You cannot break them of this, treating visitors like kings. It harkens back to Pawdaymu and her husband catering to the same ethnic group in America. They enter for the pre-arranged study and sit on the floor, like their hosts. This sends the latter into a panic. “No!” they cry. “You must sit here,” pointing to the chair. “That is where the leader sits.” No amount of protest will dissuade them. So Pawdaymu and husband sit on the chairs and slide down onto the floor during the course of the study.

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  • No Direct Mention of the 144,000

    The new online Bible study lessons on JW.org does not directly mention the 144,000. Instead, it says of God’s kingdom with Christ as King: "God also selects others to be associate rulers with Jesus" and adds that "anyone who obeys its laws can be a citizen."

    Good. The 144,000 is a yawner. Nobody cares. I never go there.

    To clarify a little, some care, but it is analogous to the wonks on media absolutely obsessed over the doings of government and all its machinations, imagining that they reflect the interest of the ordinary people whose greatest hope towards government is that it will pave the roads, jail the bad guys, keep a few of its promises, and otherwise stay out of their hair.

    A handful throughout history go on to rule with Christ in heaven. Good. It means the heavenly government has more of a feel for humanity than it would otherwise, first indicated by the fact that the King himself did time as a human.

    That's all anyone really cares about, as they envision how God's Kingdom will bring relief from the incessant woes and travesties they suffer on earth. I barely go further with the 144,000 unless someone insists on it.

    It is even now as one might explain ‘the Lord’s prayer’: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” ‘Sure, God’s will is done in heaven,’ one might point out. ‘I mean, I assume he’s got everything running smoothly up there. But it is ‘on earth’ where we hope to see God’s will be done, as it will be when his Kingdom comes.’

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  • It’s Because We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses – A Respite from Monsoon Living

    When the border guard asked my daughter's friend from Canada, recently Honduras, how she knew her companion from Australia, recently Myammar, who both had come to visit American friends and camp in the Adirondacks, she, caught unawares, said the first thing that popped into her mind: "We're Jehovah's Witnesses." The guard accepted that as the answer, and he pursued the topic no more.

    Did he do so because he knew that with Witnesses, national divisions mean nothing and they routinely hop all over the globe? Or was he a scaredy-cat who feared they might witness to him?

    The two had stopped by the house to pick up the Aussie's suitcase, which through some crazy sequence of events that I did not even try to get my head around, yet another friend had stored at my house for safekeeping, they being in and out too much to reliably be at home for pickup and subsequently taking for granted that I was a stick-in-the-mud who would be. I learned long ago that I am no longer TrueTom but my childrens' dad. I do what I am told and I don't open my mouth; it just complicates things.

    California was burning up on the TV with the state's greatest fire in history when they arrived and they were dismayed at the sight, but there were no mentions of the 'last days' on that account. Their dismay was tempered by the fact that they get around and see and hear of such disasters all the time. For the most part, American TV news cares only about what is happening within the country, and if calamity strikes people elsewhere, it is barely a footnote, unless it is kids trapped in a Cambodian cave.

    Certain numbers of Jehovah's Witnesses' youth have long volunteered to serve as missionaries abroad, being trained at a school called Gilead to do this. About 20 years ago, the general invitation was sent out to just about anybody, young or old, who could work it into their lives, following the example of Paul ('step over into Macedonia, and help us') to relocate temporarily or even permanently anyplace on earth where there was a preaching need. A sizable minority of our youths take them up on this. My daughter has done so.

    Though grueling in many ways, she and her husband love the experience. The Branch, she says, takes substantial care to ensure that the experience will be a good one and that no one arrives unprepared. They know that the volunteers are stepping far outside of their comfort zone and they bring them up to speed on cultural, political and safety climate, so that these produce as few surprises as possible.

    When my daughter experienced severe dental problems, a resurfacing of injuries suffered as a teen, it turned out that she could hardly have been in a better place. She flew to nearby Thailand, which has dental clinics so excellent and relatively affordable that Americans halfway around the world line up to fly there. She did it discreetly, conscious that for most of her new native friends, if they suffered such injuries, they would simply go toothless. However, the locals asked her husband point blank about where they had been, and when they learned the answer, they bore no one any ill will. There is a general gratitude that outsiders would willingly accept vastly lower standards of living, and they are not expected to "go native" in every respect.

    Not all can acclimate. One friend, of slight build to begin with, became quite ill in her new home and had to leave. I figured she had caught some horrid disease and perhaps her goose would be cooked, even back in the States, but she promptly put the weight back on and thrived. "Some foreigners simply can't hack the change," nod the locals, as they wade through eight inches of routine monsoon water in pedal-to-the-metal humidity.

    My daughter had sufficient lead-in to her new life and learned how to handle herself long ago. Working with a congregation in the Dominican Republic, the young boys would surround her lodging and yell teasingly: "Hunnah! You are oogly!" But she would reply: "Thank you! That is so nice of you to say that!" and they, unsure of their English skills, would walk away confused. All dads can be relied upon to overstate their children's attributes, but suffice it to say that she is, by no stretch of the imagination, ugly, let alone oogly.

     

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  • World Without War

    On the ‘What’s New’ tab of the JW Library app is a re-release of ‘Will There Ever be a World Without War.’ I thought it was an update of the 1992 tract, and it may be in some minor areas, but for the most part it seems the same.

    I always liked the paper brochure. That is not to say I used it much. It presents our Bible view such that it would more likely appeal to someone of Jewish background. For some reason I cannot quite put my finger on, that appeals to me. The Bible is like a prism, and you can turn it this way or that way so that it sheds the most light to different ones according to their background.

    The reason I thought it might be updated is paragraph 2 of the last chapter: “As bright as the prospects are for the future, they are not bright for all. Jehovah will not wait endlessly for all men to beat their swords into plowshares.” It is the rare Watchtower publication that says “as bright as the prospects are for the future;” most just harp on darkness galore, and Witnesses in the U.S, at least, will comment at length on “wars and rumors of wars,” as though you cannot throw a stone in any direction and fail to hit ten of them. In fact, they are rare today. That is not to say there is peace—peoples and societies everywhere are violently crumbling, but actual flat-out wars are not plentiful. The modern atheists come around and point to the dearth of real wars as though that were proof that all is improving, and the brochure inserts that line to counter it.

    The reason I thought the brochure was not updated at all, or if it was, it was just a little bit, is that the science quotes are all quite dated, from the 1980s or even before, as would have been at time-of-publication. Especially what caught my eye is a 1977 quote from New Scientist, that the “view that commonly expects scientists to be nonbelievers…is a view that is widely wrong.” And “as many as eight of every 10 scientists follow a religious faith or countenance principles that are ‘non-scientific.’”

    Is it my imagination or is that greatly changed today, just 30 years later, almost to the point of reversing the percentages? Judging by when these characters go online, one would think they are almost all atheist. Are they? Or is this a case of ‘the squeaky wheel that gets the oil’…the simply scream louder than anyone else.

    I call them ‘scientist-philosopher-cheerleader-atheists.’ They overlap with scientists but are not the same. The latter just do science. The former ram it down everyone’s throat as the be-all and end-all.  There are some areas in which science is absolutely terrible as a way to look at things, such as quantifying things that are essentially unquantifiable, due to possessing an astronomical and non-replicable number of permutations. Most ‘living things’ are like that.

  • The Wicked and Sluggish Slave Strikes Again

    I like the parables of Jesus where every word may convey meaning and none of it should be quickly dismissed as "filler" For example, the excuse proffered by the wicked and sluggish slave, and the master's rebuke:

    "Finally the slave who had received the one talent came forward and said: ‘Master, I knew you to be a demanding* man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not winnow.So I grew afraid and went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’ In reply his master said to him: ‘Wicked and sluggish* slave, you knew, did you, that I reaped where I did not sow and gathered where I did not winnow? Well, then, you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my coming I would have received it back with interest." (Matthew 25:24-27)

    The master does not deny the slave's allegation that he 'reaps where he does not sow,' letting pass without comment only the slave's perception that he is thereby 'demanding.' The slave has a bad attitude, for the master does not expect to make his own disciples personally – he expects his slaves to pull with him, and the slave ought to have gotten his head around that.

    Nonetheless, it seems that even with that bad attitude, the master could have worked with it. All it took was to deposit the money with the bankers – essentially a one-time only trip – and the master would have rolled with it. He may not have jumped for joy, but he would not have rebuked the slave – who worked up a sweat to thwart what would have occurred automatically.

    So there are be ones today who don't have the greatest attitude. They don't have to. It is better if they do, for immersing oneself in the kingdom work as it exists is the best way to strengthen faith and be happy, they surely build up the brotherhood more, and they may be heading for shipwreck if they do not, but it is only by actively opposing and 'beating his fellow slaves' (from Matthew 24:48) that the master gets riled - burying the money in the ground, which is the exact opposite of setting the lamp on a lampstand so all will see the light.

    Still pondering if I have the right read on his one. I am not sure it has been commented on in detail.