Quality of newer membership (page 6)

westiebilly11

30 plus years ago when I 'joined up', the material being studied was really quite meaty and required reasonable intelligence. My first study with an elder was the Freedom as Sons of God book....! Subsequent books/subjects such as Babylon the Great book, and Types and Anti-Types, Shadows etc etc..really deep stuff, but somehow more satisfying than the watered down, keep ears tickled, propaganda passed off as the word of God these days......In hindsight though, what added to the depth and feeling for meetings was the presence ,in our congregation at least , of an elderly lady and man of the Annointed class...Every meeting was flavoured by their 'deep spiritual' comments...

megaboy

Wanted to say that I while I think JWdaghter's post is good I don't think it is the definite scenario to the situation. Intelligence has nothing to do with being pulled into a trap, you can just be ignorant or lack information. Being stupid comes from willfull ignorance or having no desire to learn at all, failing to apply any level of critical thinking. From what I read the old format of the org created the illusion of this, but today it seems they don't bother. And just go straight to the brainwashing tactics convincing people to come via conditional displays of love. There seems to be nothing to develop them into reasonable challenge in debate, these guys would be eaten alive by first century opponents like Celsus.

By comparison, I'd say besides the cult like destructive nature of the org, its illusion of psedou intellectual strucure that it seems to have had in the past is a bit better than most Western Christian platforms today. If they got rid of the glass wall blocking independent research (which would obviously destroy them), they would deffinitely 1up most western christianity education structures.

Going deep into ancient studies on my own, I've found that a lot of "Gate Keeper" scholars for Christianity in the west will actually blantantly lie, and use their PhD title as an excuse to trust them, from there, they can omit the need to fully site sources and will do as the org does and take sources completely out of context, and hope you are too stupid to fully read the source that they do bother to give you.

No different than the WT really, only its not constrained to the cult and anyone can go to it. The WT org is just an isolated case of a bigger issue.

nicolaou

If the quality of JW's is going down then, logically, the quality of exJW's will also deteriorate. Hmm, I guess we're about as good as the apostate community is ever going to be!

schnell

It is an interesting shift that at this point in the game, they are not open for debate. They don't even prepare for it or recommend it. Instead, they just assume they are right, look for pre-disposed interest or circumstantial weakness, and move on. They attack any source of criticism within their ranks like an immune system. They isolate themselves in an echo chamber and congratulate each other for doing so.

They're like a population that has become isolated and incestuous. Growth has stagnated. Food has diminished in quality, quantity, and variety. Sexual partners are to be found only in the group to keep up identity and integrity, but this has limited growth and solidified the identity as weird to everybody else. The main source of water for this population has been a steady stream of bad news about the outside world. They love bad news, but now that stream is rising and threatening their own infrastructure. They hold the flood waters off with levies here and there, and they attack any of their own who speak out about the dire situation. Eventually, the levies will break, and the population will break up and evolve. And the world spins on.

Phizzy

I left a good few years ago, but the only new converts we had in the previous decade were people with real problems, mentally or marriage or family problems, sometimes all three.

These troubled souls were low hanging fruit for the JW's, and once in, if they found some sort of a social life etc they stayed.

None were the sharpest tool in the box, far from it.

Lostandfound

Since starting this thread about a year ago I have seen some evidence that the population of younger ones seem obsessed with Facebook, computer games, smartphones etc, the paraphernalia of this age. I have also noticed a downward trend in the education attainment of youth, night school was considered normal when I was young, yet today it appears to have vanished. The vocabulary and spelling of younger ones in a lot of cases is appalling e.g.; wove u woads, c u tonite, and many more similar examples. My children were brought up with books in the house, not just WT stuff, books we read to them, now, it appears normal for people to read nothing in print, have no interest in world affairs, do not look at newspapers. Education achievements in this area are dire. My old headmaster would weep at the current standards. Psychologists tell parents not to chastise children, in some schools here the words 'boys' and 'girls' are banned to be replaced with 'children' . Playing games outdoors does not really exist, I looked at some newspaper archives on line from 50s and 60s, boys and girls playing outside together and having real fun, The major Toy retailer is to stop identifying areas of store with gender names.

So not just intake for JWs that is dumbed down, vast areas of population appear to have no knowledge of history, science, current affairs, or anything 'boring'

Locally Church of England has said it is a social organisation now primarily, arranging food banks etc.

Someone like slimboyfat could describe this situation far more elegantly than I am able and draw conclusions as to the end result of this apparent accepting of different standards, maybe not lower, just some sort of progress of society.

Not much help really, open for others...........

Quality of newer membership