Lack of reading material provided by the Watchtower

by baltar447 9 Replies latest jw friends

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  baltar447

  Ok, so sseveninches made this comment on another thread got me thinking:

  Concerning reading books (life is to short): I read many 'secular' books, and my sister reads even more than I do. We're very open about it - in our house we have a giant bookshelf of books we've read, textbooks, and some movies. It's very prominent...anyone who visits us will not miss it. My mom always has this argument against it, saying "we have too much to read from the organization, so why would you get some other book to read?"

  And I have no problem defending someone who needed time to study for school. I myself have missed days where I would normally go out in field service so I could study, but no one has said anything about it. I guess some JWs feel more strongly about it then others. What that elder's wife said was out of place and none of her business.

  So, I know that more people are becoming aliterate these days. But there are those that are soon going to have 50% of their JW reading time free since the new mags are going to be half sized. My question is, for those still in that are rapacious readers what do you think they will do with that extra reading time? Novels? More TV? More Internet time? Will it matter?
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  Nambo

  Just read the Watchtower twice!
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  JWOP

  It's hard enough reading it ONCE.....
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  puffthedragon

  How many of them actually read more than is required to study for each meeting anyway?
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  WTWizard

  Better to read this site. You get plenty of insight on what actually goes on.
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  Aware!

  When I was active I felt the same way as your mom, and felt guilty whenever I read a 'worldy' book when I could've been reading a WT publication. Now I can't even stand the litterature as it only makes me feel sick. What do I do with my newly found free time? I peruse this site. It certainly made time fly when I had my DC weeks ago.
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  nugget

  Reading the societies literature is like taking tranqulisers for the brain. I read all the time novels, fantasy and mystery books. Psychology text books historical research. Once you start reading proper research you realise how weak and poor the research and writing in the watchtower publications is.

  A lot of Witnesses rarely read more than the title and the contents list in the magazines it has always been the same.
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  Phizzy

  I was a constant reader of non-WT stuff, still am, but I never bothered to do more than speed read the WT while the conducter was doing his intro-waffle, same for the Group Study almost, speed read and then look up some info on a point that interested me.

  I did like to appear a smart- arse.

  For years I never read the Awake and its banal offerings, so like the Readers Digest without the fun bits, I only read asupplementary article in the WT if it interested me.

  If I was still in it would simply be a case of less crap available to not read.

  For years I felt the WT was a spiritual desert, no water of the kind that Jesus promised, now the lack of any substance to their writing is even worse.

  Pity the poor Jehovah's Witnesses, poor in Spirit.
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  I quit!

  I don't think that there is a lack of reading material in the Watchtower its just that most of what they have written is a bunch of crap. Even the Watchtower knows that most of their publications are a bunch of crap. Why else would they only want you to read their latest works? Which are soon to be outdated pieces of crap not even fit for JWs to read. There were many great works of literature that came out of the 19th and 20th century but not even one came from the Watchtower Society.

  In the congregations I went to reading outside of WT publications was frowned upon. Being unread was consider somewhat of a triumph. Most of the JWs I knew never read anything if it wasn't printed by the WT except maybe a newspaper. You never heard a converstation at the back of the KH about so and so latest book.
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  Quendi

  Some years ago, while I was still a Witness, I introduced a young man in the congregation to C.S. Lewis' celebrated "Space Trilogy": Out of the Silent Planet; Perelandra; and That Hideous Strength. His reaction after reading them was very gratifying. He couldn't stop talking about the stories, the ideas Lewis presented in them, the wonderful characters and writing style, etc. What was even better was his desire to expand his reading to other writers and books he never would have considered otherwise.

  We'd have conversations at the hall where I would talk about some passage of a book I had read or would ask him what else he wanted or planned to read. He had decided that the life of his mind was more important than listening to the banal talk from the platform or reading the insipid content of WTS literature. I got a great deal of joy out of 'seducing and corrupting' him!

  I'm enjoying something similar with a friend who is "fading". He is in his early sixties, and while he was much better read than the average Witness, he hadn't delved into much great literature. He is currently reading Moby Dick and discovering that the novel is much more than a whale hunt. Melville's writing style, plotting, characterization and maritime knowledge have completely blown him away. He now regrets all the years he neglected feeding his mind and soul because of subsisting on WTS fodder. When I sent him Tolkien's "Ainulindalë", the myth of Creation from The Silmarillion, he told me that he now understood why Tolkien was considered a genius, and that he never would have touched this if he were still a staunch Witness. I told him he was no different from most of us who were deep in this religion, but that at least he had awakened to what good and even great literature was. Better that than not to have read anything like it at all.

  Quendi