I popped up to Perth on Saturday during the convention. It's been nearly a year since I've seen the JWs in action (I quit meeting attendance immediately after last year's DC) and I was struck by how 'cookie cutter' they are and also how very unhappy they looked.
I listened to about an hour's worth of talks on the FM transmission (I was the guy sitting in the Honda CR-V in Tesco's car park around 2pm on Saturday. Hi!) and it's still the same stuff they're spouting. They love to talk about worship, but there is absolutely no worship of anything other than their own teachings taking place.
One thing that jumped out at me was the stressing of not doing anything other with your free evening than "worship". This equated to studying WTS publications. One demonstration featured a brother being offered some short-term overtime over a few evenings. He reasons that he could do so now that he had 4 evenings free per week, but then rationlised that it would eat into his 'study time'. Offering this sort of advice during these economic times can't be a good thing...If you're getting offered overtime that doesn't interfere with you being at the BIG meeting during the week, my advice is go for it; you don't know when you'll need be offered it.
I spoke to some people in the Christian Outreach centre in Perth and they commented on the special pool being brought into the stadium. Well, Saturday was cold and rainy in Perth, so the 50 being dunked would have had a gay old time.
