I never joined but while I studied they talked with me, they listened, they took time with me.
Something that was missing from my life.
Maybe that's their secret - they identify a need and meet it.
Give us your explanation of what personally drew you to the JWS.
by Brain Dead 29 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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icyestrm
It was my first experience with organized religon and they answered my questions on 'the purpose of life'. I'm not totally athetist at that time but it took like 4 years of convincing me that there was a creator. At that time I was foolish to think they got the right answers.
If only I miss my bus back home from college (yes to the horror of the elders, I got post-secondary education), then I miss those two sisters and none of this crap would unfold. We all got screwed over by the WTS -
brinjen
Born into it, third generation. Started questioning it around the age of 12, when an elder started harassing me. It didn't make sense to me how people with minds so 'pure and chaste' could always arrive at such a perverse conclusion from the most innocent of situations. The average elder could make a nice living writing scripts for porn movies (theres a scary thought ).
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juni
They used the Bible and gave a reasonable answer as far as what the purpose of life is and the hope of a restored earth. This was in 1970 back during the time of "hippies" and the mother earth movement.
I was a Methodist before. At that time they hardly ever opened the Bible. My husband was a former Catholic and he too wanted to know the Bible.
Juni
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Brain Dead
Yes Juni I think allot of people were brought in by good intentions, you certainly sound like one of them, it's true that allot of Christan religions don't
study the bible with their followers, I guess the secrets of power are within the pages so best not to have all eyes on them I suppose
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greendawn
I was young when I joined at 18, I thought they were a spriritually oriented group which was very appealing at the time since most of society was not spiritually inclined. How many people come to talk to you about the Bible? They seemed to have the right answers but eventually they proved very disappointing.
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Brain Dead
Hi Greendawn nice to read your comment
It's me Handsome Dan, you know the good looking guy with a button on his chest, hows it going ? good I hope, by the way your one of my favorite posters you know
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BLACKRACER_NYC
I was born on the family farm down on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi river. We lived in the Baptist Church, daddy was a man of faith in God and the Bible not in the church per se. At about 5 or 6 I learned how to read, by the @ 9,10, 11, I was reading Bible commentaries and different Bible translations, and listening to religious radio programs that I found interesting. I was baptized @ 12, in Mount Calvery Missionary Baptist Church. I joined the Jr Choir and the Boy Scouts of American,Troop 209, Marianna Arkansas.
I had discovered thru private study of Bibles and Commentarys that God the Father / Jehovah, alone is God; that Jesus is the Son of God / not God the Son; that the human soul dies, that there will be a resurrection, a Kingdom of God and a Paradise Earth.
I learned these teaching on my own between the ages of 6 to 12, without having heard of Jehovah's Witnesses.
When I was 14 we moved to another town were I met Jehovah's Witnesses and studied for about 4 months out the book Life Everlasting in the Freedom of the Son God's. Chapter 1 of this book is where the Society began pushing the 1975 doctrine, I didn't believe it, I did believe that most of the other teaching were Bible based. We moved to another state and I continued studing the Bible and Bible commentaries, Catholic, Protestant, Adventist, and Watchtower Publications from the age of 14 to 17, then I got baptized as a Witnesses.
(Before I was baptized I read all of the anti-witness literature that I could find, Thirty Years a Watch-tower Slave, Armaggeddon Around the Corner, etc.)
The reason I got baptized was that the Witnesses taught the basic Unitarian Christian / Second Advent beliefs that I had discovered in before I met the Witnesses ( I still hold to those beliefs). They also provided the best Biblically sound explanation of the Atonement/the Ransom/Redemption Doctrine; that a perfect fully human - Jesus - had to willing to lay down his life to atone for the perfect Adam, who willing sinned and rebeled against Jehovah in Eden.
From my studies in prophetic interpretations of Daniel and Revelation from the various churches I did not believe that any person, persons, church, etc was nor is capable of interpreting end time prophecy correctly. I believe that since the writing of Revelation to the present that ALL prophetic interpretions / specualtions are probably incorrect/false.
I do not view Jehovah's Witnesses as a cult, I have never in 40 years of knowning Witnesses met 1 that was brainwashed.
I believe that Watchtower Organization is aggressively authoritarian, excessively coersive, I believe that most of the disfellowships are unjust and unscriptural, erroring persons should be help not punished and discarded, intentionally humiliating people wickedness. Just as they eliminated the practise of shunning in the late '70 they need to eliminate it again.
I also believe that the teaching on blood transfusion is not Scripturally sound and if they cannot find their way to discard it, at least make it a matter of conscious. Personally if I need surgery I would prefer bloodless, all of the many Witnesses that I have personally known in NY/NJ who have had bloodless surgery from the 1970's to the present survived and recovered.
I believe that the field ministry, meeting particapation, etc., should be a matter of person choice. However the Governing Body has no compelling need to reform, so they probably wont.
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restrangled
My fathers right arm! (born in)
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FreeFromWTBS
I trusted my boyfriend (dumb dumb dumb)
I married him and I love him. Neither of us go to meetings since I got so sick there I spent two years in therapy and on medication. The biggest lessoned I learned from the Watchtower is NEVER TRUST ANYONE.
And to think I was a happy Liberal Catholic before that.