new religious wave of young? 90 baptized at assembly

by prologos 19 Replies latest social current

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  smiddy

  prologos , with all due respect my friend , I find it curious why you don`t name the country , I cant see how that would expose you or your source .?

  just saying

  smiddy
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  Crazyguy

  This is to be expected. Most people that are raised in the religion will get baptized because its the social thing to do. Once their baptized as children then move on to young adulthood and the real word hits them, that's when I think people start to fall away. Am I wrong?
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  Ruby456

  prologos, this doesn't surprise me as Eileen Barker (In God's Name practicing unconditional love 2009) suggests that it is often young idealistic people who join nrms and cults not passive drinkers of koolaid (in my own words). EDIT: One thing young people do have in common is - OVERBEARING FATHERS

  she further suggests that there is usually a push from the environment in which they are immersed. So here, in the example, somehow their being engrossed in internet activities seems to have pushed them towards Jehovahs witnesses? Imagine overbearing fathers always knocking on the bedroom door shouting - get off the internet now or else

  but even then as you say crazyguy, many do leave, but there are enough who stay.
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  slimboyfat

  Eileen Barker was talking about NRMs like the Moonies. JWs are classified more as an established sect in sociological terms. I don't think the dynamics of NRMs apply much to JWs and conversion to JWs. For example the young people Eileen Barker has in mind who join NRMs are typically alienated from their family and encounter the NRM for the first time as a young adult. Whereas young people getting baptised as JWs generally do so having been brought up as Witnesses and as an expression of conformity to the norms of their family rather than rebellion against it. I say generally because there will be exceptions of course.
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  Ruby456

  slimboyfat, please give me a reference as what you say may have been the case in the past and I do remember what she used to say and how her research was used. Nowadays her research is being applied to lots of movements that ask for unconditional love and she does so herself.
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  Ruby456

  wow google has become more aware of what I read and post - makes it easier to find stuff

  here is a source that shows that Eileen Barker views jehovahs witnesses differently from what you suggest and that how much more complex and shifting labels such as nrms and cults are

  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/may/29/cults-new-religious-movements
  

  Perhaps most significantly, throughout history new religions have been treated with fear and suspicion – they are, after all, challenging the status quo with their new beliefs and practices. Early Christians were thrown to the lions, Cathars were burned at the stake, and Jehovah's Witnesses were gassed at Auschwitz. Today, Krishna devotees are imprisoned in Kazakhstan, Falun Gong practitioners are being re-educated in China. And, one might argue, unpopular religions can be discriminated against with relative ease throughout the world when they are labelled, and thus made into, "cults".
  
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  prologos

  Jehovah's Witnesses were gassed at Auschwitz., The Guardian. it might have happened, but not because they were devotees, rather such individuals, were caught up as members of another group. I can think of one lady from my youth, who could have been a witness, married to a jew, and who refused to divorce him according to the demands of the Nazi race laws, both had to wear the yellow Star of David in the 1930s and were gone by 1945. gone.

  About this story of 90, mostly --46 boys, 44 girls baptized, family, or an "organized" wave could have be factor, we will not have heard the last of it. The sources have never lied to me.
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  slimboyfat

  I don't know that Barker has ever discussed JWs at any length. She's interested in NRMs rather than JWs or Mormons.

  A typical way for NRMs to get converts is to target young people who are at university away from home for the first time and isolated from their family.

  By contrast young people who get baptised as JWs tend to have grown up in Witness households and avoided leaving home and going to university.

  NRMs also tend to be characterised by charismatic leadership whereas JWs at this stage in their development are thoroughly routinised and bureaucratised.
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  never a jw

  Prologos,

  do you think I am revealing my identity when I say that I am from the U.S. Try asking more than 300,000,000 people who are willing to tell the truth and you will find me.
  
• 

  Ruby456

  slimboyfat

  Eileen Barker acknowledges that her sociological, psychological set of observations can apply across the spectrum of religious movements (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwR4Otwewqs) and it is from this perspective that I pointed to the article In God's name practicing unconditional love 2009

  I've read the article and in it she points to what makes a person susceptible to undue influence to the extent that some may eventually take part in violence that they never would have if they hadn't been so influenced although she does not think they were brainwashed.

  On a slightly different note my conversation with you has made me wonder that the changes that the Jehovahs witness heirachy made during the fifties, sixties and seventies may not have made them much more coercive and that this time period could be made the subject of a detailed scrutiny to see whether or not they became more "cultic" by perhaps borrowing from or resonating with the "official nrms and cults" of that period.

  prologos, over and out, sorry to derail your thread - I'll say no more on this issue