"We are not allowed to have credit cards."

by OnTheWayOut 17 Replies latest jw friends

  • OnTheWayOut
    OnTheWayOut

    I was traveling and used my credit card to buy a gift at the airport.

    So the lady behind the counter flips my credit card over to look at the signature and it says "SEE I.D." where my signature belonged. She asked for the I.D..

    "Do you expect trouble?"

    "Just being cautious. Most people actually don't even look and don't ask for the I.D.. But no, no trouble. They never turn me down, they just let me spend, spend, spend."

    "Well I am a Seventh Day Adventist, and we are not allowed to have credit cards."

    I noticed she never stated anything about a personal belief. She clearly had a neutral tone about what she said, neither agreeing or disagreeing with it.

    I said "Well, I don't let any group decide matters for me. It is a good idea to avoid debt, but a person can keep a credit card at a zero balance."

    She said absolutely nothing about it. "Thank you, have a happy new year." (It was New Year's Eve.) There were no other customers, nobody else in the store. I guess she didn't want to comment on the rules imposed on her. I wanted to say how difficult it would be to travel, rent a car, get a hotel, or purchase things like airplane tickets without a credit card, but whatever.

    I cannot find a rule against credit cards by my search of Seventh Day Adventists. She might be old school. Or it might be an unwritten rule. I do notice that Adventist websites encourage donating to the church via credit cards online but discourage going into debt to use them. Maybe they have realized they need money and credit is the way to go.

    Anyway, I always find it interesting when someone says "We are not allowed.." JW's pretty much have that trained out of them, but the kids do it a lot.

  • cult classic
    cult classic

    Interesting OTWO. I've never heard of the cc ban either. Growing up about 50% of our neighbors were Orthodox Jewish. One year a Seventh Day Adventist family moved in. We thought they were even more strange than the Jews in the neighborhood. Although they weren't that different from us.

    So crazy.

  • stillajwexelder
    stillajwexelder

    News to me - never knew that.

  • MrFreeze
    MrFreeze

    I'd like to know where they base that in the Bible....

  • truth_b_known
    truth_b_known

    The Mosaic Law prohibitted charging interest on loans. That's all I can think of.

  • GromitSK
    GromitSK

    Maybe they just can't be trusted with them

  • keyser soze
    keyser soze

    You need a credit card to call 1-900 numbers.

  • out4good3
    out4good3

    There have been several announcements of "______ is no longer a jehovahs witness" in my wife's congregation. She seems to revel in this supposed effort in "keeping the congregation clean", the thought that this is discipline, and that nobody in the congregation is not allowed to talk to that person.

    She often laments the fact of the hard life and difficult circumstances she faced coming up where there were several times where her family didn't want to have anything to do with her. All of their reasons stemmed from how it would impact peoples perception of the family or thier position in the congregation.

    I wonder would she be so forgiving of them and stop complaining, even now, about how she was treated if they told her that their actions against her was discipline from jehovah and that nobody was allowed to talk to her.

  • blondie
    blondie

    I couldn't find anything on the official website or manual.

    http://www.adventist.org/ChurchManual_2010.pdf

  • Alfred
    Alfred

    Blondie... maybe the credit card rule was supposed to be "sribbled in" on one of the page margins of that church manual (for legal reasons... like the JW elder manual)...

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