I've been reading the thread about children and brooding over the whole issue of kids-n-cults for a couple of days now. Yesterday I had to outwait a group of immovable Amish youth blocking the doorway out of the local grocery store(To many local Amish, 'English' are generally invisible unless they want to sell us something.), and they got mixed into the brain stew with the JW kids and the recent moral self-righteousness of certain JW posters here. It's not a palatable potion.
Since I was cookin', I went back through some material I had collected for an article, including from a JW parenting message board. (I stopped working on the article because frankly I couldn't step back enough to view the material objectively; any article I tried to write would be hopelessly colored by my outrage at my own indoctrination and that of countless other scarred people who maybe got the Paradise book as the last gift they remember from their parents. (In my case, I was given the book during our last Christmas season together. Merry Christmas, little Mommie D!) .) Today I'm still trying to settle the feathers that I let get all disgruntled yesterday during the Attack of the Idiot Christer Spammers, and I still don't think I've recovered all the gruntles. I feel restless. So...
...I decided to cut some of the raw quotes I collected from a JW parenting message board and paste them here. Misery loves company, so enjoy the feeling of a festering abscess as we share the love of JW moms discussing their disciplinary styles:
"As for meetings, whatever you have to do so as not to disturb the meeting. Taking a child
outside, or to the rest room or using the wooden spoon. (I always carried that spoon & it
worked wonders! Then we graduated to the belt & that works wonders, even now at
home!) But, that's also a personal decision on how we discipline our own kids."
"Sometimes children need to be whacked for their own good. My children don't get
whipped in meetings but know that if they don't behave they will get it on the bare
backside with a switch when they get home. It is loving to discipline our children. Even
Jehovah disciplines those he loves. If we don't get our kids into line they will soon be out
of our control - that is why society is what it is like today."
I cannot BELIEVE people can think such things of Jehovah's Witnesses! People have their
own ways of disciplining their own kids. If you feel that talking your way thru a problem
& never hitting (even with a small child that doesn't even really talk yet) is going to work,
so be it. But a wooden spoon works best on other kids. "To each his own", as they say. As
for this nonsense of touting every piece of physical discipline as "child abuse", I can
certainly say that is NOT a Bible teaching! If I was given a beatin' when I was growing
up, I would have had more respect for authority & would have not been such a
smart-aleck, as Mom always used to say.
" "To each his own." Since there is nothing Scripturally WRONG with such discipline,
then
where's the argument??? There really isn't any. And as I mentioned before, the difference
may be
just a cultural one. Maybe some here never thought of it in that way. So, maybe we
should think
again, yes?)"
Now this is one of Mommie D's faves:
" That was the picture of the babies being placed in the burning sacrifice to Baal,
showing how evil those pagans were. When my kids misbehaved, I would show that
to them, and it would straighten them right out. Also, the picture of the earth opening
up at Armageddon and swallowing up the sinners was a great motivator for them. "
!!!!!!!!!
Moridin's web page with the scans of the gruesome Armageddon pics got chucked into my brain stew this morning and there is so freekin much of the stuff burbling through my veins that I just HAD to share the soup lest it explode....
my....
breaking heart