How did you choose your avatar or board name? (page 4)

poppers

My screen name is a variation of my last name. My avatar references a background in meditation.

Gregor

Gregor is the name my father picked out of the Russion novel he had read called "Watch on the Don". His first choice was "Lightfoot" from Last of the Mohicans, but my mother said no way.

November 1978 my wife gave birth to our 5th child, Abigail. A few days later the horrible mass suicide at Jonestown became the biggest story of the year, on a scale similar to 9/11. It happened at a time when I was begining to have questions about the "Truth". The innocuous soft drink Kool Aid was used to mask the bitter taste of the cyanide. Since then of course the term "Drink the Kool Aid" has become a shorthand term for people who give their lives without question to an ideal they don't really know or understand - blind obedience.

My avatar represents the Kool Aid man waving good bye to me as I walk away leaving the jug still full, I refused to drink it.

tetrapod.sapien

black swan, i like your avatar.

hi new boy!

my screen handle is what i realized i am in essence, one day, whilst on that most bumpy of rides we call: "leaving da troof". and that is, a four-limbed sapient-minded organism. it struck me because i realized that biological knowledge had given me an insight into myself that i would have gone without in that old religion. by way of free association, i thought of the tree of knowledge, and the serpent, and how snakes are actually from the tetrapod family, but they lost their limbs through millenia of evolution. and how the serpent had stood for freedom of thought in the original conflict between man's dreams and man's fears (the tree of knowledge and YHWH respectively). and i was proud to be a tetrapod because i saw that our time of greatness on this planet had been forseen a long time ago, and misread horribly. but ultimately this thought was inspired by the very book i had used as a tool to destroy my faith in that old religion: genesis. and it (the experience) told me that knowledge would be my adventure into duality, but that ultimately i would come home again to "oneness", back to eden, via power over my dna, or more poetically, the cosmic serpent. back to the tree of life so-to-speak, this time turning the guardian angels of my fear-ridden mind away because i had become as strong as the metaphor that they are themselves. the interpretation is so liberally metaphorical, it almost has a tinge of plausibility.

not that i propose a new classification system for members of my species who have gone through this experience. i believe all life forms are sapient in their own ways. but for me, tetrapod is a broad enough umbrella, and sapien is the designation of the "thing", the human being, who has highly abstracted sapeince as a point of noteworthiness. it's not self flattery. it's self organization.

my avatar is a pic of me in croatia last summer. my hair is longer now, in dreadlocks. so i could just be a "crazy hippy" too. :) and if that is how people like to label me, then all i can say is that i hope the labeling system is working well for them. ha! irony of ironies!

peace,

tetra

AllAlongTheWatchtower

More or less on a whim, I chose Jimi Hendrix's song title as my name, because I couldn't think of anything better, and for the line "there must be some kind of way out of here", as in, out of the JWs for my wife, who was getting caught up in their webs at the time I joined here. I later wished I had chosen something better or at least shorter, because many others found it too long and unwieldy to type, so I end up being referred to as AATW by most other posters. But then I decided it was even more appropriate than I first thought, as I began to learn more about the (B)org, and other lines of the song took on a second meaning to me.

Like in the second line about confusion-how many JWs actually understand or struggle with the various doctrines, like 607 BCE, 1914, etc? And businessmen drink my wine = GB and WBTS sucks up the money of the rank and file, while none of them know what it's worth = how little the members actually know about the vast real estate holdings and other finances of the society. A parallel could also be seen in the line life is but a joke; as in most JWs think "this worldly existence" is just a prelude to paradise, not to be taken seriously...don't go to college, etc.

There must be some kind of way out of here, said the joker to the thief

There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief

Businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth

None of them along the line, know what any of it is worth

No reason to get excited, the thief he kindly spoke

There are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke

But you and I we've been through that, and this is not our fate

Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late

trevor

My real name and face. After all truth is stranger than fiction.

new boy

Many of you have really put a lot of thought in your handles............For me I think its time for a new avater....one with more air brushing, I'm getting no calls from any of the single ladys on the board .........

OnTheWayOut

I lurked and thought I needed an appropriate name for my circumstances.
It still is- and also explained in my profile (but self-explanatory)

I used to have a picture of a sign with an arrow that said "Way Out"

I changed the avatar when I felt that my circumstances were starting to
change. I was no longer "in" searching for the exit. I busted thru the
wall of the Watchtower Organization while trying to do a slow fade-
I still can be seen near the wall as I cling to my (now quick) fade.

I want to change to a new picture where the wife and I are walking away
with our backs showing, indicating that we made it away from the Watchtower,
but so far, the wife is inside the wall, and I may not have that picture for awhile.

Kaput

I'm getting no calls from any of the single ladys on the board .........

Probably cuz you look like a 'young' Ted Jarascz standing in front of Rosslyn Chapel....a scary combo, I might add.

exwitless

Exwitless - self explanatory.

My avatar is a nurse because I'm a nurse.

You know what really confused me when I first started posting here? It was when male posters would have a picture of a woman as their avatars or vice versa. It took me awhile to figure out that "Stillajwexelder" and "Legolas" are actually male and female, respectively.

new boy

Kaput.................Your right but a lot of people think I look like and old Mel Gibson....LOL

How did you choose your avatar or board name?

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