Posts by OneEyedJoe

27

GB member Anthony Morris mentions concerned JW letter at RC

by Acluetofindtheuser in

gb member anthony morris mentioned a letter that was sent to bethel by a concerned jw fearing the gt.

he mentioned it on the last sunday talk.

i always wondered if any letter sent to bethel ever reached gb eyes.

OneEyedJoe

This was definitely in the outline. The german one said the exact same thing on the RC tie-in.

13

CO position going away

by OwnAccord in

so i heard this on another site just throwing it out there because there's been talk about it here.

i'm sorry i can't answer any questions i'm just relaying the information.. the branch is considering replacing all circuit overseers with 3 brothers per circuit to oversee needs.

24 congregations per circuit with 1 brother each assigned to 8 congregations each on a yearly rotation.

I think the training video you mention is out. I got an update to the JW app yesterday and in the "what's new" description it mentioned a video that sounded like what you're talking about. I'm not going to bother watching it, but it seems to be there.

Wouldn't surprise me if they 86'd the CO, especially now that we're not having an extra mid-week meeting during their visit. They're clearly making the CO less 'special' while at the same time giving them more authority (read: liability).

Business cards as placements is only a matter of time. It would be interesting to see if they start making the cards with unique QR codes for each publisher, so that they can automatically count any time someone scans one of your cards as a placement for you.

48

Surreal experience last night.

by objectivetruth in

recently a jw friend that my wife & i knew 3 years ago added me on facebook, after i accepted the request she invited me to a dinner that her and her husband are holding next month.. i imagined that she was unaware of our apostasy, so i declined the invitation on the basis of not wanting to ruin her dinner after the rest of her guests fled at our presence.. i'm never sure how old friends will react when i tell them that i'm no longer a jw.. usually their response is "..... permanent-silence......".

her response went something like this, " we are all out!

everyone that is coming is out we all look forward to seeing you guys so much" it turns out that there will be 6 people at the dinner all friends of ours from a congregation that we attended a few years back.. they have all left the organization recently.. pretty crazy experience..

OneEyedJoe

Thanks for sharing your good news! That's certainly encouraging.

18

Is the number of JWs leaving increasing?

by dozy in

i don't mean jws getting stumbled or bored or getting dfd for immorality- there always have been a certain number of those all the time.. i've been out for a few years now but am curious to know from "still ins" if there is any evidence of increasing numbers of people leaving for classic "apostate" reasons - ie either fading or getting dfd because they have done research & realise that this isn't "the truth".. when i was a jw occasionally i would hear of someone suddenly stopping going to meetings & hearing through the grapevine & jw gossip mill that the person no longer believed it was the truth or had expressed doubts in the "slave" etc.

but it didn't happen very often ( though it was increasing somewhat in the years before i left).. one would imagine with the internet & increased information available to all that this would be happening more often.

any evidence of this , anecdotally?

OneEyedJoe

I can't remember the last time I heard someone announced as DF'd. To be fair, though, my mid-week meeting attendence has been quite spotty. There's been one particularly nasty divorce in our congregation recently, and I think the husband was DF'd, but I have no way of knowing if it's because he found TTATT, or if it was just because he couldn't put up with her crap anymore and started cheating on her. (I'm certainly not typically a 'blame the victim' type, but in this case I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.)

Anyways, it's really difficult for me to objectively estimate the general mood and level of meeting attendence since I've only been awake for about 4 months.

Interestingly, the CO did seem happy with meeting attendence last time he came by, but I did hear that the elders were somewhat displeased that he didn't make a bigger deal of meeting attendence than he did. My (wishful) thoughts are that the CO may be more aware of a general decline, so he may see the small decline in our congregation as a positive thing (if most other congregations are experiencing a larger decline) while the elders just see that there's been a decline and are upset about it.

There's a good JW facts article, though, that demonstrates that there's definitely a signficant decline in growth, and from the trend it seems likely that there will soon be a year over year shinkage. That's using the official numbers, even, and those could easily be cooked to give the R/F a false impression of the wonderous work that's going on.

It's also been about a year since the local elder who's a bigwig on the RBC has been absent to work any new projects. I can't remember the last time a local congregation split, and that used to be something that happened once every 3 years or so. Our hall is also 1 or two congregations below it's capacity for the first time in probably 15 years.

So there seems to be circumstantial evidence of decline, though it's managed in such a way that no one really seems to notice. The memorial attendence has also peaked in 2011, which is also likely to be indicitive of a new trend.

6

Does anyone live by any Bible stuff?

by punkofnice in

this is not meant to be a slag off the bible thread.. i had a question asked me the other day and it was: 'do you live by anything from the bible?'.

i had to think about that one because i was force grown in the filthy, disgusting cult of the paedophile loving watchtower(r).. you know what?

i really don't know if i just naturally am a great bloke or if any 'nice' bits in the bible influenced me......or has western culture been influenced by the bible for good and bad?.

OneEyedJoe

The bible has so much contradictory stuff in it that you'd be hard pressed not to live in accordance with one part or another. You can justify almost any action with the bible, so almost any action could be said to be 'living by the bible'

42

Weird crazy rules imposed by your local Elders.

by stuckinarut2 in

we all know the sort of thing..... in many congregations, specific "rules" creep in...introduced by the local elders that become set in stone.. years ago, i heard of a congregation that sat down during the first song of the evening but stood for all others (the co changed that very soon after).

then there were the older accounts of congs that had rules to make the public speakers wear only white shirts.... in one cong now, i heard that brothers can only be used for sound or microphones if they do a minimum of 5 hours per month in the ministry!.

another cong has ruled that all appointed men must pioneer for at least one month each year in order to remain qualified.. .

OneEyedJoe

There was never anything quite on the order of what some of you guys went through in my congregation(s). Though I've only been in 2 for any length of time.

My childhood congregation did have rules regarding a minimum time in the ministry if you wanted to carry the mics (which, at the time, I saw as a disincintive to go in the ministry - you mean if I don't go out 6 hours this month, I don't get to stand for the whole meeting instead of sleeping/daydreaming in my seat?)

Oh, and one brother in my childhood congregation once proudly related a story about how he and 2 other elders continually denied a study who wanted to get baptized because he didn't wear a suit jacket to the meetings. They also refused to tell him why he'd been denied, but when he asked one of them would simply remark "you know, I don't think I've ever shown up at a meeting without a suit jacket on." He seemed pretty proud of how he handled the situation. That's one mindset I'll never understand - the elders who want to make a rule for some reason but realize that there's no scriptural backing so they have to mistreat people and subtly imply the rule until people fall in line. Do people really have so little going on in their lives that this level of effort is justified?

I've heard of other congregations that had rules on sport coats on the stage, cowboy boots were also a no-no there.

Apparently there's a rule at my current congregation that you have to give lots of comments in order to be used as a reader on the stage. Bummer for me, I just loved getting asked last-minute to read that weeks indoctrination material!

4

Interesting experience at work re: convention invite

by sd-7 in

so, a guy i know and would sometimes chat with briefly at work came to me recently.

he said he'd been invited by his neighbor to attend the upcoming jw convention.

apparently, he had heard that i used to be a jw and wanted to get my thoughts about whether he should go.

OneEyedJoe

Wow, good job on the informal (un)witnessing!

Even if we can't pull many out of the cult directly, preventing them from getting new members will eventually destory it. Growth is the only thing that encourages anyone, and if they lose that, it'll be a runaway reaction of people getting discouraged and dropping out, leading others to get discouraged, on and on.

32

Would You Care If You Were Disfellowshipped?

by minimus in

jw
friends

just curious.

OneEyedJoe

I've thought about that, but don't know how to segue into the blood issue. I've never known anyone who's been affected by the blood policy, have no children, and both my wife and I are in good health. It's not something a 'good' JW thinks about, and it seems the WT is slowly backing away from it anyway, so it's not like I can expect an article on it again soon. Also, due to some of the specifics of my wife's family dynamics, it wouldn't endear me to her at all if I did something like that.

I've already laid some groundwork, though, by discussing the misquotes in the creation book with her. I'm thinking about asking her something like "do you think it's a DFing offense for me to personally believe in evolution?" and explaining to her that I continued to do research after finding the errors in the creation book and I found that I cannot argue against evolution. I don't think I'll ever convince her of evolution over creation till she's otherwise out of the cult (at which point I don't know if I'd care to try) but if it becomes known that I harbor personal feelings about evolution I can see that being an issue. Then, getting DF'd because I'm honest about my personal beliefs (not trying to gather followers after myself as they always aledge that apostates do) might do the trick.

3

A biochemist explains his faith

by OneEyedJoe in

after venting's recent thread on the article on jw.org about the expirimental physicist who became a jw, i figured i'd post up my analysis/rebuttal of another similar article.

when i was going through the process of cleaning out the last bits of doubt from myself, i read a few of these and wrote down my thoughts just because it felt good to actually express it all somehow.

maybe some here (maybe even a lurker or two going through early doubts) will find some value in it.. link to origonal article: http://www.jw.org/en/publications/magazines/g201310/davey-loos-science-researcher-explains-faith .

OneEyedJoe

Billy,

Yeah, that was probably one of the first questions I asked my parents on the topic of god when they told me that he created us all. I was definitely pre-teen and probably closer to 7 or 8 at the time. It continued to be a huge source of cognitive dissonance for years after I got the answer that god always existed and we as humans just cant understand. Nowadays, I almost feel like I'm cheating if I bring up such obvious flaws as that and prefer to defeat the false reasoning further down the line (i.e. even assuming you're right about x, that leads to y, which is demonstrably false). Even giving the benefit of the (enourmous) doubt, you can demonstrate that their beliefs are deeply flawed.

I think the whole creator of the creator thing is something that just about everyone who believes in creation has come up with some personal way of dismissing it, and they now view that argument as somehow invalid (but can't provide any explanation) so it doesn't seem to get you anywhere.

55

for those still "in" what's the mood

by lastchance in

in my area the general sense is bleak.

many are in survival mode.

even at the convention the appearance of the majority was unhappy and tired.

OneEyedJoe

TE- It may well be a pivotal year, just not in the way that most expect. With any luck it'll mark the beginning of a significant decline as the manufactured excitement wears off and people realize that there's been 100 years of nothing.

As for my congregation, there's a few zealots, but they're all either very old (70s or 80s) or their immigrants who found JWdom upon coming to the states, and would otherwise be somewhat lost and on their own without it. No one cares about doctrine unless they can spin it to manipulate someone into doing what they want. I'm not anywhere near the center of the social scene, but I don't think there's much spiritual discussion...

I've noticed a pretty significant drop off in meeting attendence in the last year or so too.