by NotFormer 13 Replies latest jw friends
I remember some loyalist JWs were fucking terrified of the occult back in the day.
I didn’t realize until much later that they were likely…
a) …ex-hippies who’d had really bad trips…
b) …undiagnosed schizophrenics, or…
c) …poor anxiety-prone folks who were dealing with sleep paralysis and had no idea what it was.
Vidiot, in my old Pentecostal church in the 80s , there was a girl who "went" schizophrenic (the change was dramatic; she went from being a bit odd to being diagnosed with schizophrenia pretty well overnight). A friend of hers was helping her parents purge her bookshelf of all the books that were influencing all her spiritual fears. There were the predictable and well known ones, such as Pigs in the Parlor; A Practical Guide to Deliverance. It basically said that all people are influenced by demons in varying degrees and need to be delivered from them, that demons are in and around everything, harkening back to the similar WT fear of objects bought in garage sales.
He Came to Set the Captives Free was her main go to tome. It was by the above mentioned "Doctor" Rebecca Brown, about witches and demons infiltrating the Christian church to render it ineffective. It was the main one that probably set her on the path to madness.
I mentioned to the girl who was doing the library clean up a book I had had the misfortune of reading, Christian Set Yourself Free. It was in the vein of Pigs in the Parlor: a demon behind every bush, fear everything and everyone as a possible source of demonic contamination. She said she'd keep an eye out for it, and sure enough, she found it.
I sometimes wonder if that girl would have succumbed to the eventual schizophrenia if she hadn't been stimulating herself with all those fear laden and fear inducing inputs.
On a finishing note, for some reason the 70s and 80s was a very fearful time for parts of Christendom, including, it seems, the WT branch of it.
Back to the cartoony whimsy: I just remembered Hong Kong Phooey. Surely, with its martial arts background, it was verboten! 😸🥷🥋
Oh man, as a child of the 80's (born in '79) I remember all this fear-mongering bullshit well!!!!
My paranoid parents were all up into this. I'm surprised we even had a TV! Here's a list off the top of my head:
Smurts
Dungeons and Dragons
He-Man
Any Disney or similar with any kind of magic or talking animals
Imagine my surprise when I learned on here that even at Bethel, they watched Disney's "Fantasia" on a movie night. Fuggin' hypocrites!
In fact, the only time I got to watch Saturday morning cartoons was when my parents slept in and didn't go in Service. (which was 50/50, since my mother was an RN and worked night shifts her entire career)
I was also not allowed to have ANY video games or console until I absolutely begged and pleaded and was finally rewarded with a Sega Game Gear in 1993, which I loved.
Sports and any extra-curricular activities were strictly forbidden to me. I wasn't allowed to own tapes or CD's until I was old enough to work and bought my own. I was allowed a radio, so I could listen to music, but only thru headphones cause I liked METAL and we all know that's S-A-T-A-N!
Here's how paranoid my JW parents were:
In Kindergarten we were given a box of felt letters, upper and lower case to practice making words and sentences. One day I was home with it and playing around making words and my parents saw the lower-case "t" and threw a an absolute FIT claiming that it was attempting to introduce the pagan Christian CROSS into our house. They took the "t" and destroyed it. It was so crazy that I remember it to this day, and was probably my first real "Red Flag" moment and made me think how CRAZY my parents were and that something was very very wrong here. It was all downhill from there honestly. Being forced to place to the blue "School" brochure with teachers all thru Elementary School and sitting out of every holiday assembly and put into the library. A kid gets sick of feeling like an outcast and weirdo REAL QUICK and starts being resentful, lying to cope, and two-faced (double life) just to escape the madness. No wonder 70%+ leave the instant they turn 18.
NotFormer - “…for some reason the 70s and 80s was a very fearful time for parts of Christendom, including, it seems, the WT branch of it…”
A “Demon-Haunted World” (props to the late Carl Sagan) was a quick and easy explanation for what was - to repressed, ultraconservative religionists - a radically (and rapidly) changing environment that felt increasingly hostile to them, and where it seemed like everything they valued and spent their lives defending was being flushed down the toilet.
Not to mention the potential loss of cultural dominance that they (correctly) anticipated.
