It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

by Newly Enlightened 11530 Replies latest watchtower scandals

  • Simon
    Simon

    This demonstrates my earlier point, that some believe that to reject the WTS means they have to act opposite to everything the WTS said.

    It's basic set theory - they have lots of do's and don'ts, some of them are invented but others overlap with general society. Cheating on your wife, killing people, stealing money - these are all widely recognized bad and "immoral" things, and don't make you a JW or WTS adherent. Likewise, you don't have to do any of these things to demonstrate how non-JW you are when you leave.

    You can be a good, decent, honest, loyal person when you leave the WTS. The people who claim you cannot, that it's some unreachable level of perfection (e.g. suggesting someone who doesn't visit prostitutes has "saintly mastery of their penis"), are simply bad people.

  • Las Malvinas son Argentinas
    Las Malvinas son Argentinas

    Indecent Proposal: you have to spend the night with one to win $1,000,000 or €1,000,000. Choose.


  • Simon
    Simon
    What he believes is way off. You get kicked out for suggesting child abuse is being covered up. Or telling the elders they are behaving in an unchristian manner and being cruel. Or saying WT's 1914 doctrine is wrong.

    You do, but I think the vast majority who are df'd are for more traditional human failings of sexual immorality. So no, I don't think I'm "way off" if you were referring to me.

    The mistake people who leave because they stopped believing is to think that everyone else who left also thought the same way.

    You only get disfellowshipped for wrong doing if it is affecting the status quo. If you want to stay in you just say the right words to the elders.

    Well, there is the "sincere repentance" thing and you know what they say about sincerity - once you can fake that, you can achieve anything. But it's complex - some people may be genuinely sorry but quite rightly unwilling to submit to intrusive questioning, others aren't sorry at all but play the game or have elder daddy to clean up their mess and get to do it again (we had some who were stuck in the revolving door of membership like that)

    Something else to remember: just because someone was kicked out of the WTS doesn't make them a good or nice person that we should want to be around. This is another mistake people make. Not everyone is like us.

    Some people are snakes and take advantage of others. There are lots of naive, overly-trusting, inexperienced people in the WTS. Some will take advantage of those people. Sometimes the people being taken advantage of will be underage with parents who are also too trusting of others in the congregation because of their propaganda. I doubt the WTS has a blanket 100% record of covering up abuse, but the ones that are rightly shown the door don't get the same publicity by people seeking to show the evils of the WTS.

    Imagine if someone was regularly cheating on their wife with "girls" and was eventually shown the door ... we wouldn't want to make a hero of such a person would we?!

  • Simon
    Simon
    you have to spend the night with one to win $1,000,000 or €1,000,000. Choose.

    Is this the Office meme where it's Pam or Jim saying "it's the same picture ..." ?

  • CalvinistEmily
    CalvinistEmily

    Watchtower's moral standards are abhorrent, there's many examples of that, but that doesn't mean people should have no moral standards. In general, "treat others as you would want to be treated" is a good one. There doesn't even need to be any theological component for that, Richard Dawkins and other biologists have written about how that sense of altruism and collective responsibility evolved in social animals (like us!) to help with the group's cohesion and survival - if everyone is only out for themselves with no regard for others' wellbeing, then the whole troop/herd/flock/colony/society collapses and they all die out, but if they work together, they all thrive.

    Nobody wants to be sex trafficked and abused. So it's wrong to use prostitutes by that moral standard.

    Lots of people's own personal moral standards would say that it's okay to do a lesser wrong for the greater good, like stealing to feed the poor or killing to defend yourself or someone else, and yeah, there's a lot of debate to be had there. But what possible justification could there be for sexual abuse? Nothing's gained from it that you can't get from just having a wank, and it does so much damage to the victim and keeps the whole trafficking industry going.

  • GabeAthouse
    GabeAthouse

    But I think the general population views "cheating on your wife with prostitutes" to be immoral and low.

    I agree. I also feel that is immoral. But I doubt "cheating on wife with prostitute" makes up a very large percentage of disfellowshippings for 'immorality'.

  • Yooters
    Yooters

    What if Djana is on the take as well? Wouldn’t that be an interesting plot twist? I started thinking about that scenario as soon as I seen her reflection in the YT award clip. {wondering}

  • Vintage
    Vintage

    Anna Marina, ... remembering a case long ago... A pretty, young sister in my congregation, a daughter in a large JW family, fell in love with a “worldly boy”. They committed fornication, but wanted to be married. She confessed and repented, intending to marry him after confessing to the elders. The elders consulted the Society. The elders were willing to accept her repentance on condition that she not marry the “worldly boy”. Well... no. They were madly in love and wanted to be married. She married the young “worldly boy” and was immediately disfellowshipped for at least a year.

    She wouldn’t otherwise have been disfellowshipped for marrying a “worldly boy”. But the Watchtower Society leveraged her sin of fornication into a way to keep her from marrying the “worldly boy”. When that didn’t work, they disfellowshipped her. Watchtower’s control over its members is complete. I, along with the rest of the congregation, didn’t speak to her until she was reinstated.

  • Diogenesister
    Diogenesister
    AM I agree Vintage. I was told that one of the worst kept secrets is that many of the elders are alcoholics not Christians.

    I've met quite a few JW elders in rehab for alcoholism. Some were very nice people and definitely considered themselves Christian. Interestingly I've never met any ordained people from other religions. That's because they put their people in private facilities (and I was NHS). Only Watchtower cares so little for their "ministers" they're thrown out on their ears and expected to cope alone

  • Nathan Natas
    Nathan Natas

    Vintage, there are MANY things I did while in thrall to the Watchtower that I now regret. I wonder, do you now regret the way you treated that young girl? Did her marriage endure?

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