Growing up as a jehovahs wittness my parents used to rationalize or have a urban ledgends reguarding WHY we could not do something or why something was evil/bad. Some of these I have heard in various forms around here in the forums. here are some expamples of what I mean.
TROLL DOLLS ARE EVIL....
back when I was young we had these small troll dolls become popular and so I wanted one after all the COOL worldly kids could have one so I asked mom.
MOMS URBAN LEGEND REGUARDING TROLL DOLLS
you cant have a troll doll those troll dolls are demonic some little boy had one and it caused all sorts of demonic activitys to occur in their house so you cant have one.. oh and heres the kicker they took the doll to a elder but he couldn't burn the doll. OoOOoOoOoOoo this scared the living hell out of me. (Oh and I have heard another version of this involving the smurfs doll? are we being invaded by demonic dolls?)
KARATE... SPIRTIUALISTIC
I wanted to take karate class for physical fittness reasons.
MOMS URBAN LEGEND ABOUT KARATE...
You can not take Karate classes becuse a brother that became a black belt after becoming baptised quit practicing karate and tried to get rid of his black belt but it just kept re appearing so the elders where summond and could not burn the black belt ... ( notice a pattern here ) also very strange is the fact that the brothers cant burn anything thats demonized?
PLANET OF THE APES (action figures)
You can not have any planet of the apes action figures becuse it supports the "Theory of evolution" and of course if it supports evolution then it will be a source of magentisim for the demons to attack you by. just like the troll dolls!
Please add to this and lets start a list! lol somehow I feel theres more out there!
JW Urban Ledgends - Fact or Fiction?
by clear2c 37 Replies latest jw friends
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clear2c
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TopHat
I found an interesting article in the WSJ on how we humans perceive God. Thought you might like to read it. I am not promoting anything...click on the link dogfeathers.com..intriguing!
To See Only the Good,
Leading Some to God
October 28, 2005; Page B1Life is full of surprises, but it's rare to reach for a carafe of wine and find your hand clutching a bottle of milk -- and even rarer, you'd think, to react by deciding the milk was actually what you wanted all along.
Yet something like that happened when scientists in Sweden asked people to choose which of two women's photos they found most attractive. After the subject made his choice, whom we'll call Beth, the experimenter turned the chosen photo face down. Sliding it across the table, he asked the subject the reasons he chose the photo he did. But the experimenter was a sleight-of-hand artist. A copy of the unchosen photo, "Grizelda," was tucked behind Beth's, so what he actually slid was the duplicate of Grizelda, palming Beth.
Few subjects batted an eye. Looking at the unchosen Grizelda, they smoothly explained why they had chosen her ("She was smiling," "she looks hot"), even though they hadn't.
In 1966, Time magazine asked, "Is God Dead?" Even then, the answer was no, and with the rise of religion in the public square, the question now seems ludicrous. In one of those strange-bedfellows things, it is science that is shedding light on why belief in God will never die, at least until humans evolve very different brains, brains that don't (as they did with Beth and Grizelda) interpret unexpected and even unwanted outcomes as being for the best.
"Belief in God," says Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, "is compelled by the way our brains work."
As shown in the Grizelda-and-Beth study, by scientists at Lund University and published this month in Science, brains have a remarkable talent for reframing suboptimal outcomes to see setbacks in the best possible light. You can see it when high-school seniors decide that colleges that rejected them really weren't much good, come to think of it.
You can see it, too, in experiments where Prof. Gilbert and colleagues told female volunteers they would be working on a task that required them to have a likeable, trustworthy partner. They would get a partner randomly, by blindly choosing one of four folders, each containing a biography of a potential teammate. Unknown to the volunteers, each folder contained the same bio, describing an unlikable, untrustworthy person.
The volunteers were unfazed. Reading the randomly chosen bio, they interpreted even negatives as positives. "She doesn't like people" made them think of her as "exceptionally discerning." And when they read different bios, they concluded their partner was hands-down superior. "Their brains found the most rewarding view of their circumstances," says Prof. Gilbert.
The experimenter then told the volunteer that although she thought she was choosing a folder at random, in fact the experimenter had given her a subliminal message so she would pick the best possible partner. The volunteers later said they believed this lie, agreeing that the subliminal message had led them to the best folder. Having thought themselves into believing they had chosen the best teammate, they needed an explanation for their good fortune and experienced what Prof. Gilbert calls the illusion of external agency.
"People don't know how good they are at finding something desirable in almost any outcome," he says. "So when there is a good outcome, they're surprised, and they conclude that someone else has engineered their fate" -- a lab's subliminal message or, in real life, God.
Religion used to be ascribed to a wish to escape mortality by invoking an afterlife or to feel less alone in the world. Now, some anthropologists and psychologists suspect that religious belief is what Pascal Boyer of Washington University, St. Louis, calls in a 2003 paper "a predictable by-product of ordinary cognitive function."
One of those functions is the ability to imagine what Prof. Boyer calls "nonphysically present agents." We do this all the time when we recall the past or project the future, or imagine "what if" scenarios involving others. It's not a big leap for those same brain mechanisms to imagine spirits and gods as real.
Another God-producing brain quirk is that although many things can be viewed in multiple ways, the mind settles on the most rewarding. Take the Necker cube, the line drawing that shifts orientation as you stare at it. (A cool version is at dogfeathers.com/java/necker.html .) If you reward someone for seeing the cube one way, however, his brain starts seeing it that way only. The cube stops flipping.
There are only two ways to see a Necker cube, but loads of ways to see a hurricane or a recovery from illness. The brain "tends to search for and hold onto the most rewarding view of events, much as it does of objects," Prof. Gilbert writes on the Web site Edge. It is much more rewarding to attribute death to God's will, and to see in disasters hints of the hand of God.
Prof. Gilbert once asked a religious colleague how he felt about helping to discover that people can misattribute the products of their own minds to acts of God. The reply: "I feel fine. God doesn't want us to confuse our miracles with his."
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Mary
The rock group KISS stood for Knights In Satan's Service. When some rebellion teens bought their latest album, the parents told them they had to get rid of it so they threw it out but it kept reappearing in the house. Finally, the father took the album outside and tried to burn it but it wouldn't burn. So he had to douse it with gasoline, said a prayer and lit it on fire. It was burning really really slooooowly (as it it really didn't want to burn) and then a big black puff of smoke that looked just like a demon came out of the midst of the smoke, screeched it's head off and then it was gone. After dat, there were no more problems with demunz.........
The best one though of course is the one where some sister had to work by herself in service one day (this is in the 1960s) and came across a house where she started witnessing to a guy that had just murdered the Avon lady and some other unsuspecting soul. When they finally caught the guy, they asked him in court why he never murdered the Witness and he said because there were "two big guys with her", (no doubt the spirits of Rutherford and Knorr). This sister insisted that she was working by herself so the only "logical" conclusion was that these were angels sent to make sure her latest copies of the Watchtower and Awake magazines weren't used in an unworthy way.
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kid-A
ACDC = anti-christ, devils children.......of course I had ALL their albums!!! LOL
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Jourles
There were a couple I personally made up for Rush(the band). As far as I know, Rush was never considered demonic or anything. But once I told my mom that Rush was being used as an acronym for the following phrases, she freaked.
Riding Upon Satan's Horse
Rulers Under Satan's Hand
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Jourles
Ack! Speaking of "rush," way back when I was around 16 or so, a sister in the congregation made a comment during the WT study or service meeting. It had something to do with a particular radio station - a rock station - KGB-FM in San Diego(when it used to be a rock station). Anyways, she says something along the lines of:
"We really need to watch what our children listen to on the radio. Even the DJ's are bad. For instance, there is one DJ who calls herself, Anita Rush. What this really means is, 'I need a rush.' We really shouldn't let our kids be influenced by this garbage."
I remember us kids looking around at each other and thinking WTF?? I guess it was her own little way of telling the elders that they needed to police our musical tastes better. Afterall, her family(named after one of the largest cities in TX) was the wealthiest in the Alpine congregation....
That was no legend btw. That actually happened.
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jula71
The deal with RUSH, one of my favorite bands, was the album cover to 2112. Should have seen my mom's face when she came across it.
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clear2c
Mary lol The whole rock music and satan thing ... used by so many parents... hehehehe I remember buying that AC DC album and also KISS lol. Whats more interesting to me is the whole idea that the brothers try and burn things that are some how DEMON posessed. But to no avail the items just wont burn!!! WOT is that not kind of backwards if the brothers are trying to remove a demon or whatever shouldn't the urban legend make them the HEROS for destroying the demon. I have heard many many accounts of this burning process. Anyone around here former elders or whatever can anyone actually substaniate that the brothers ever did this or that the items could not be burned. lol
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minimus
Smurfs ran up and down the Kingdom Hall and the elders ran after them but one got away.
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Mary
There was also the legend that some Witnesses went to a John Denver concert and in front of the whole audience, John Denver said that he could "sense" that there were Jehovah's Witnesses in the audience (with the earpiece that Satan gave him for Christmas no doubt) and asked them to leave.
Funny thing is, I knew many Witnesses who attended his concerts and none of them were ever asked to leave!!