old timers, or careful readers of the proclaimers book, are familiar with the "testimony card" used in the early days of rutherford-era door to door witnessing.
the jw would traipse up to a house, knock, hand the card over to the householder, and wait while he read it.. well, it seems that "everything old is new again".
here is an excerpt from a recent boe letter:.
If they try to get me to hand these things out, I'll have to go to vista print and order some similar looking cards that instead direct people to the "Why Jehovah's Witnesses need your help" PDF on jwsurvey instead
http://jwsurvey.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Help-JWs-English-Letter.pdf
number one- fact-it was dangerously overcrowed.
ok its one thing dropping the ball on this one.
or they just didnt care.
I think a lot of the problem has to do with how they're using the venue. Most stadiums are designed for use by people in good health, and they're designed for people to arrive, get to their designated seats, sit, then leave. At a convention you have probably 10-20% of the people in wheelchairs, morbidly obese or otherwise impared, and you have thousands of people milling around before, during and after each session. Everyone has to find a seat since there's no way to reserve a seat, so everyone heads for the best seats first, even when the best seats are already full. So now you've got (in the case of the ICs) 50000 people who all head to the same group of about 10000 seats first, then upon seeing that they're full they go search somewhere else (and often find that those are full too, and have to go another level up). This creates a TON of unneccessary foot traffic (since people can't just go straight to their eventual destination) which just makes the whole process exponentially worse. The stadiums aren't designed for it.
And all the same, they'll claim that their being able to get 50000 people into a stadium that has frequently held 100k+ people is somehow proof of divine guidance. We can fill a stadium to 50% capacity, and only 10% of the people attending had anxiety attacks! Truely we are blessed by god! No other organization on earth today could achieve such wonders!
a nice recruitment training package is to be rolled out this weekend at meetings.
but it can be applied to making and keeping friends once you leave.
i found it very good i can even use it for dating too.
All through the WT study today, I kept going back to: "If I applied the golden rule in my ministry, I'd never go D2D again"
i believe the organization is already easing up on disfellowshipping people for apostasy.
they know most doubters just want to be left alone.
disfellowshipping them turns them into martyrs.
They may informally (or through some hand written note in the secret elder's book) ease up on DFing for appostacy, but only in cases where the appostate is not spreading his views. There's no way the org would survive if they let the R/F talk to people who've stopped believing the BS.
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/10/richard_dawkins_defends_mild_pedophilia_says_it_does_not_cause_lasting_harm/.
He seems to be the victim of two (of his own) oversights here.
1. He's smart enough that he should've known that saying anything that has any twinge of a failure to demonize pedophilia is going to leave him very unpopular.
2. He seems to have made the easy, common mistake of assuming that one's experience is objective, and therefore common. He was unaffected by what happened to him, but he's only one of a huge number of individuals that will all have a slightly different experiences that can color a common experience.
This is the problem with any great advocate of a cause finding too much time in the public eye. Everyone's flawed, and everyone makes mistakes, but when a well-known leader of some cause makes a mistake, it damages the cause even if the mistake has nothing to do with it. In this case, his statement in no way discredits him in the field of evolutionary biology, but people will react to it as though it does.
i just wanted to get a feel for how many here have awakened to ttatt but are still carrying on some jw activities to pacify them and keep the peace.
also trying to hear from those who have left, but whose spouse has stayed in the wt and in the marriage.. for me it comes down to my own mental anguish.
i am mentally tortured by attending the meetings, yet i feel compelled to because my wife would kill me with her personality if i had her drag 2 small girls by herself there.
3rdgen -
I think you're probably on to something, and thats kinda similar to the idea I've been slowly coming around to. The problem is that the JW system forces anyone to hide any and all doubts for fear of retribution (aka DFing). It forces any doubters into a situation where they don't even feel they can discuss it with their spouse. At least, that's how I felt. Then, one day, your doubts reach critical mass, and the scales tip and all the doubt goes out of your mind. Except the doubt that leaves is the doubt in yourself, and you become certain that the JWs are all completely misled. This, I think, is at least somewhat by design. The tendency when this happens is to want to explode all your realizations over anyone who'll listen. There's a huge disparity between your experience and everyone else's perception of your experience. For you, it's been a long transition into being 'awake' but to everyone else it will appear as though you've been possessed all of a sudden, or perhaps you ventured off to a website created by one of those "mentally diseased" appostates and you caught yourself some mind-flu. The system is designed so that anyone who 'turns appostate' appears insane. You can't share much TTATT while still appearing to be fully 'in' either because it'll out you, and again makes it look like a sudden change.
It seems the only way to go is to reenact your slow awakening (but likely in a somewhat accellerated fashion) but do it out in the open, at least to those you hope to reach. Then you'll come to that same critical mass point in your reenactment, and you are now free to act as you wanted to the first time, since the process has been visible externally. It's no longer a sudden possession or a whim that can be dismissed by others, it's part of something that is truely a long, arduous journey that you clearly didn't take lightly.
At least that's where I'm currently at with my strategy. I feel like there may be more I can do to win my wife from the outside than from the inside. As the 'spiritual head' and as the more studius of the two of us, I can't very well start asking her to explain doctrine to me or anything like that without bringing extreem suspicion upon myself. I'd rather demonstrate for her the reasons why I leave and the amount of consideration it took me to get to my decision to leave then trying to plant seeds that will never get watered. My wife is pretty clever, but she's not much for research and due to lifelong indoctrination she seems to be happy to accept most things at face value.
At least that's where my situation seems to be leading me, though I know many others are very different.
Yep, this was from the latest convention, and indeed lacking in substance. I was up and about while they played the video, but I sorta watched on one of the monitors, and knew what to expect based from info here. When I got back to my seat she asked if I saw it and said everyone was crying. My response was, "Yeah...I remember the days when they actually had things of substance, not just emotionally manipulative videos." She wasn't too pleased with that...
I think all the depictions of luxurious living is just meant as a subconscous visual to entice people to stay in the org for their desire to live like that. Either that or it's how the GB lives, and they just think it's normal.
i really wonder about that.
.
just like they say in prayers, that they "love" the governing body---do they really??
I don't think I ever did. I tried to, sure, but I couldn't make sense of too much of the OT's needless violence and the punishment of the children for the sins of the father stuff.
Left me in a weird place for my entire (if relatively brief) adult life, where I was going along because the only way for it not to be the truth was for my parents (both pretty smart folks) to have completely missed that they'd been systematically lied to for decades.
don't know if this has been covered before, but who noticed that at every talk at the district convention (mine anyway), every speaker was introduced by name and then 'brother x has been serving for 25 years as a pioneer" or "he has served on the branch committee" etc etc.. what is it with these credentials?
i've been an elder on and off for most of the last twenty years.
big deal.
Wasn't just yours. Being the first DC I've been to while completely awake (in more ways than one) it was difficult to tell if it was new or just something I only noticed now that I was paying attention to all the hypocricy. There was a lot of "helper to the GB" introductions, as well as introductions for COs and COBEs.
Good thing we're in an organization where people aren't seeking recognition or titles!
it was entitled earth's new ruler - who really qualifies?
given by brother mark neumeyer*, "who has been a full-time servant for nearly 35 years, and is a helper of the governing body of jehovah's witnesses.
" it was his second talk of the convention.
Some guarentee, too. Is everyone else here still waiting on their refund, or is it just me?
