Watchtower's new entrants get to hear the Governing Body share their qualifications (page 7)

Dogpatch

Mum sez,

I thank MY GOD every day,that they threw me out!

Ha ha!

Thaty's the first time I've ever heard anyone say that.

Merry Christmas Grace, love you!

Randy

One story I forgot to tell. One day Tom Cabeen was in Dan Sydlik's office shooting the bull (they are/were both clowns at heart :-)) and Sydlik's door was half open, but not enough to notice that someone was in Sydlik's office besides him.

Karl Klein comes rushing in proclaiming in a loud voice, "I made it! I made it to the Governing Body!" and as he steps further into the office, he noticed Tom was in there as well. He was quite embarassed by that one.

Tom also told me that Klein had a copy of Mein Kampf in his office. That doesn't surprise me at all, considering he acted the part of a German confidant during the witch hunt.

It's just power - its all about power to them.

People ask me all the time, "What's in it for them?" thinking they volunteer their whole life to something like this.

Power

OnTheWayOut

They were encouraging newbies to consider making Bethel a lifelong career. There must have been a ton of people layed off in the next 20 years who were encouraged that same way. They sure called these Bethel worker people "family" quite a bit. You are supposed to take care of family way better than that. They should have kept all of them if they wanted to stay. So what if it cuts into profits? They are family.

It seems that this was a overly-large corporation that promoted incompetent suck-asses to a place where they could do less harm. Governing Body member that worked there only prove that point to the highest degree.

Heaven

Well, I was only able to last about 6 minutes into the video.

It strikes me that this is an old boys club but then, so does the Bible (as well as the other existing male-dominated, monotheistic faiths) and as a female, it doesn't interest me. They are all unbalanced and disharmonious.

As a teenager, many things bothered me about the Watchtower. One of many was that the "Kingdom Interests" never seemed to involve doing the work Christ spoke of regarding helping those less fortunate and healing the sick. Their interests are actually creating a result that is the direct opposite of this.

BluesBrother

Thanks Randy........Fascinating.

When I was young I really wanted to go to Bethel, which would have been in London. Looking back, if I was kept away from "apostate" thinking - I might have found the way of life O K , for a committed person...

I could never make a success of pioneering though, so I never got the chance to find out

jookbeard

Randy;

I always thought Klein/Swingle/Sydlik/Barry were very moderate members of the GB and almost came close to sympathizing with Ray during the Great Aposasty of 1980, your testimony's of Bethel life make such compulsive reading , you really should release your memoirs.

agonus

I remember reading a while back on this forum that towards the end of his life, Sydlik became very sad about the state of affairs in the organization and asked Jehovah to "forgive us" in many of his prayers (many times close to tears). Can you vouch, Randy?

VoidEater

Thanks for the perspective...to be free of this claptrap...and yet to still be revolted by it...

Dogpatch

Jookbeard: I always thought Klein/Swingle/Sydlik/Barry were very moderate members of the GB and almost came close to sympathizing with Ray during the Great Aposasty of 1980, your testimony's of Bethel life make such compulsive reading , you really should release your memoirs.

Swingle was probably the only other GB member who might have been convinced fully that Ray was right. He was with Ray almost up to the end, and stood up for him, then something turned his heart black and he switched sides. Very disappointing to me.

Sydlik was probably more sympathetic because of his relationship with Cabeen, and I'm sure they must have talked about some of this privately. You'd have to ask Tom how much they shared on these matters.

Barry was always more moderate, being in the Writing Department, but a lot of private wars went on between Barry and a couple of others. I think Barb Anderson wrote of this somewhere on my site. Barb? Where are you my dear?

The others on the Writing Committee that wrote the AID book were also pretty convinced, but they were not on the GB, like Reinhart Lingtadt. (sp?) But they were cowards.

I don't think I would write a book - no one buys books anymore except Crisis of Conscience, and now I am the only source of that book since Ray passed away and there is no one to run Commentary Press right now.

My story is all on www.randallwatters.org in 4 parts, but especially the Bethel Files http://www.randallwatters.org/Bethel/bethel.htm has more info. I have written most all of what I know already, it's just scattered about. One day if I get time I'll put it together in a better chronological format, but there are so many files already on my sites with the info it's hard to even THINK of finding the time to start that project. Just getting freeminds.org working right with over 2000 files and gigs of material is driving me batty. Thanks so much to Paul Morrison, dear friend, for his help. He has done so much to get the new site up and running. And now, even after switching to a server that cost 7 times as much it still shares CPU time with other sites, and it sometimes crashes their system when I post something like this tome. It did this AM for 2 hours.

What I need most of all right now is a dedicated server, but they are like $150-$200 a month. Anyone know where I can get a deal on a dedicated server that is Joomla-wise? Our traffic is really going up, especially with the Spanish and Portuguese countries. They have been in the dark for decades, and this stuff is like a time bomb to them - and we have a lot of it already in their own language. THEY NEED TO HEAR THE TRUTH.

Other languages: http://www.freeminds.org/languages/

Spanish in particular: http://www.freeminds.org/languages/espanol/

Look at the number of hits on the articles.

My goal for 2011 is to make freeminds.org as JW-friendly as possible now, as I think we are going to see a lot of lost little puppies out there real soon when this org splits up. I don't want to scare them off with scary stuff, just make them feel at home, and as my new motto is "Reinvent Yourself", I want them to read a variety of viewpoints from mature writers who are over the angry/lost/suicidal/gotothisreligion madness.

I risked losing everything by changing the look and feel of freeminds, and allowing (gasp!) even atheists and gay people to tell their story and what they believe. I got letters from long-term friends and financial supporters telling me how disappointed they were that I allowed others to speak out besides Christians. (I thought, if God was so weak he needed to censor people to trick them into believing, then he's lame.) When they found out that I have always believed in evolution, and that I had never been an inerrantist, that shocked many. I didn't change my thinking, they just never asked. My response was, "Why do you think I named it FREE MINDS??" (duh!)

I am SIMPLY a hippie that loved Jesus from my youth, that's all. It took me nearly 38 years to realize that my Christianity was EXPERIENTIAL and I learned to separate it from the organizations of men who "apologize" for God. I have never denied my born-again experience from my youth, before the JWs, I just don't trust the minds of pastors and theologians with strong agendas. Been there, done that. Look at Acts chapters 1-3. It was ALL EXPERIENTIAL at Pentecost, like a memetic jump in thought in a moment of time. Theology is man's puny efforts to explain it, and you take it all with a large grain of salt.

Teach people to think for themselves and to stop letting others whom they admire think for them. I am not a respecter of persons, but I will listen to what they say. I know what I'm doing because I was an exit-counselor, trained by Steven Hassan, and have a lot of experience as an elder, then as a Christian pastor who spoke to other pastors and leaders in various parts of the world for years after leaving Bethel. I've pored over the ruins of old Jerusalem and all over Israel up the the Sea of Gallilee and down to Egypt all the way down to Abu Simbel, to Corinth, and learned from some pretty good experts who know Hebrew and Greek. I've spoken at many Bible colleges and know their dark doctrinal doubts. I know why the German theologians are more honest than their American counterparts.

If you think you are free but are not really acquanted with the healing that comes from exit-counseling, you are not. You need to see a number of cults and ex-members and that will break you out of the JW mindset forever.

This is really all I care about in life anymore; my motto is to love people more and believe them less. :-)) Friends are everything to me.

Randy

Dogpatch

Agonus, I can't recall that, but it sounds kinda like Sydlik. But men can be duplicious in high places. I don't doubt he struggled in his soul. Tom could tell you that.

Watchtower's new entrants get to hear the Governing Body share their qualifications

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