Posts by OneEyedJoe

16

I had a Tarot card reading

by LisaRose in

jw
friends

so, i am in washinton state visiting my son and his family and we went to a concert that had a fortune tellers booth, actually a gypsy wagon.

i decided to do something no jw would ever do, have a tarot card reading.

i wasn't really expecting anything, as i don't believe they are connected with the satan, but i don't believe they can actually read your future either.

OneEyedJoe

I feel like I just had a reading. All that applies to me as well (not the specifics you gave, but the generalities of what the reader gave you).

11

D2D Visit - The 'Preaching' Lives On?

by Joe Grundy in

just had an interesting (?

) visit.. 1.30pm, i was outside the front of my house on a small housing estate doing man-stuff on the car.

three young guys (maybe 16-18 or so) wearing long-sleeved shirts approached.

You clearly knew too much about the org, which is scary to a JW. For some reason (I'm not really able to put my finger on why, exactly) any time I talked to someone D2D who responded like you did (i.e. clearly knew who we were, but was polite and kind and wanted to talk) I'd always get a weird feeling and want to get out of there. Maybe that was just me being afraid of my own doubts though, I'm not sure it's a universal thing.

One thing was always certain, no one who knew right off the bat who we were ever wanted to take the literature or start a study...that was always suspicious too.

15

Have you ever given CoC to a JW to read? Or any other "red pill" book?

by Captain Obvious in

jw
friends

i recently ordered a copy of coc for my wife.

she doesn't know it exists, but i'm hoping she's ready to read it.

it seems to be the best red pill out there.

OneEyedJoe

The point of no return for me was the JWfacts article that clearly laid out the misquotes (and some associated outright lies) in the creation book. Everything else I was able to dismiss because it meant that the GB had lied to millions of people, and I couldn't accept that. Once I saw their lies in black and white, I knew that all my other doubts where founded.

I don't know where your wife is in her journey, but I suspect that someone would have to already have some pretty persistent doubts in their minds before they'd be able to read and accept that book. If they have no doubts, he's just going to be an angry manipulative appostate speaking in half-truths like the devil himself. Definitely report back on how it goes, I wish you nothing but the best!

66

Will the JW.Org Site make a difference ?

by Phizzy in

it will obviously make a difference to how jw's obtain their literatrash, they will have to download and print it all themselves before long.. it will make a small difference to the dtod work, they will now refer even genuine questions and interest etc to the site, not taking the opportunity to "witness" on the initial call at all.

this has been happening already to a degree.. the difference i am mainly interested in is the capture of new suckers in to the borg.. we will be able to see when we get 2014's figures, sometime next year, what the rate of increase was over the last ten years.. phizzy the prophet predicts that the rate of increase over the next ten years will not be significantly up.

probably down, but certainly, i feel, not so different from the last ten.. should i be around in ten years to do so, i will wish to ask jw's:.

OneEyedJoe

Unique requests for a bible study might not even be a really useful number. They've not got a captcha on the request form, and I'm sure there's a few "requests" from appostates that aren't genuine. You'd have to filter those out first.

Actually, now that I think about it, the lack of a captcha could be taken advantage of if anyone wanted to make the "request a bible study" feature essentially useless to them. All someone would have to do is write a script that submits tons of requests. Ideally, with unique legitimate addresses (doesn't have to be residential...just something that'll come up on google maps) and names, etc so that they would have no way of filtering out the genuine requests. They'd then have a choice on their hands, either treat them all as legitimate and have people in the local congregations follow up on every one, or throw them all out. Either way, there'd probably be a useful effect. If folks in the congregations keep getting a request to follow up from "mother" and they're always BS, they'll probably stop following up. At the very least, they'll be forced to acknowledge that the org isn't as innovative and efficiently organized as they once thought.

If they throw out all the requests, then at least it might prevent a few people from getting sucked into the cult.

39

Poignant Statistics Summary for Comment at This Sunday WT Study! (Aug. 3, 2014)

by SAHS in

jw
friends

the watchtower study to be considered this sunday, august 3, 2014 (using the magazine dated may 15, 2014), titled are you moving ahead with jehovahs organization?, in paragraph seven (on pages 27-28), talks about the number of people baptized in recent years:.

7 where do those making up the great crowd come from?

they are being brought together because of what jesus foretold as part of the sign of his presence.

OneEyedJoe

This sort of thread always makes me think of a elder that used to be in my congregation. The more I think about a lot of his talks and comments, the more I think he was fully awake, but stuck in for family (he was older and in poor health). He would often make comments that were completely contrary to the WT article being discussed (ie when the article demonizes education, he'd make a comment about how a man is obligated to support his family and sometimes an education is the best way of doing that). Since his passing, I've also learned that he often would raise issues in elder's meetings, creating an unwanted discussion that would last an hour or more, only to drop any objection when it comes to a vote. In his talks he seemed to either take the WTS's stance on such a hard line that it would demonstrate how absurd it is to anyone who's really paying attention (one of his talks like this was a source of continued distress and doubt to me, and helped me to wake up) or sometimes he'd give a half hour talk that was a reasonable explanation of scritures that completely (but subtly) contradicted the WTS's official stance.

The result? asside from one brother that knew him best (who i once heard describe him as "almost appostate") everyone in the hall thought he was so smart and was just the deepest thinker and most knowledgable witness there was. No one immagined that anything he said was anything but a raving endorsement of the WTS's policies.

15

Communication with minds of people (alive or dead) is possible!

by exWTslave in

there are people who mock at the reports of ndes and communication from the dead and so on.

things are changing now!

a new finding has discovered that the whole universe is intimately interconnected.

OneEyedJoe

Your metaphors are a little off. A great, every day (ish) example of the principle of emergence (in the sense that I'm talking about) is a flock of birds or a school of fish. When you watch a huge group of birds in a field (usually happens during migratory season) it often seems as though the entire flock (or school in the case of fish) is performing a very coordinated complex action, but when you actually analyze the bird's movements, you can find that each member is actually following a very simple set of rules, and this results in the complex behavior of the entire group.

The brain is just doing the same thing, but on a much larger scale. instead of a few thousand members the human brain has 100 Billion neurons, and each of these neurons typically has about 7000 connections to other neurons. These connections can be thought of as the individual members of the group, so there's usually about 7e14 'members' in the group, all following relatively simple rules. The result is the appearance of conscioiusness, which is an emergent property.

Anyway, all of that is more or less irrelavent to your premise, except to demonstrate that while we humans want to make ourselves feel special, there's really not anything all that special about consciousness. It's certainly not the result of some exotic form of energy. Its also quite unlikely that quantum entaglement will be used to establish meaningful 2-way communication with people in the past or future in our lifetime.

15

Communication with minds of people (alive or dead) is possible!

by exWTslave in

there are people who mock at the reports of ndes and communication from the dead and so on.

things are changing now!

a new finding has discovered that the whole universe is intimately interconnected.

OneEyedJoe

MG: your post had me rolling. Great way to start my morning. Thank you.

exWTslave, you're definitely reaching for things that aren't there. Don't feel bad though, it's an easy trap to fall into. "conscious energy" isn't really a thing anywhere outside of pseudo-science and scammers selling worthless crystals for a pretty penny. Conscioiusness is really just an emergent property of a complex system of macroscopic, microscopic, and quantum interactions.

15

Communication with minds of people (alive or dead) is possible!

by exWTslave in

there are people who mock at the reports of ndes and communication from the dead and so on.

things are changing now!

a new finding has discovered that the whole universe is intimately interconnected.

OneEyedJoe

I think you're reaching a bit. While it's interesting stuff, actually making application of it in the way you're talking about is almost definitely several generations (and we know that each generation is well over 100 years long ) away. Even if it's possible to have 2 way communication into the past, you'd almost certainly be limited to communicating to a time after the 'telephone' you're using was built, which means that communication into our current past would still be impossible.

66

Will the JW.Org Site make a difference ?

by Phizzy in

it will obviously make a difference to how jw's obtain their literatrash, they will have to download and print it all themselves before long.. it will make a small difference to the dtod work, they will now refer even genuine questions and interest etc to the site, not taking the opportunity to "witness" on the initial call at all.

this has been happening already to a degree.. the difference i am mainly interested in is the capture of new suckers in to the borg.. we will be able to see when we get 2014's figures, sometime next year, what the rate of increase was over the last ten years.. phizzy the prophet predicts that the rate of increase over the next ten years will not be significantly up.

probably down, but certainly, i feel, not so different from the last ten.. should i be around in ten years to do so, i will wish to ask jw's:.

OneEyedJoe

sir82 - I'm sure facebook would've been glad to do that, if they could get the workforce for free.

I'm not sure how much of a difference the website will make in either direction if they're going along with their current methods. I doubt many are finding the webpage without encountering the literature first (though, this could change if/when the WTS starts buying google ads ala the mormons and scientologists) so they're not really increasing the number of people who are contacted. Since there's a fairly limited set of cirumcstances that make people susceptible to indoctrination by a cult (usually some sort of very emotional event) if they're not already involved via family/friends/whatever, the only way they'll get more people is to broaden the net, which they're not really doing.

Now, if they start buying ads online, that could really change things.

On the other hand, you've now got JWs searching the web for JW.org, and most importantly they're searching for the kingdom ministry since apparently that's not something that should be distributed to the public under any circumstances and can't be put on the public web site. The problem is that people aren't going to wake up until they're ready. I experienced this myself...I'd been getting my KMs from jwleaks and here for months, making sure to loyally avoid reading any information that might be defamatory. I saw stuff about child molestation, but that was easy for me to rationalize away. It wasn't until I'd more or less realized that I'd been lied to (yay for the overlap doctrine!) that I actually started to believe anything that I read online. I'm sure it'll help some (as it did in my case) just because those who stumble upon 'apostate' material will know where to look once they're ready, but I don't think it'll make much difference in getting people to that first step, where they're finally able to accept contrary information.

It's often said here that their greatest weakness is the baggage of their past, and I think that's true when recruitment is concerned. I don't think it's true (or, at least not as true) as far as retention is concerned. The reason I think this is because the truth of the WTS's past is so absolutely absurd that no one who's fully in will accept it if you tell them. The WTS banned organ transplants then backtracked? You're lying, I can't trust anything you say! They used to ban vaccinations? Get out of here you lying appostate! They where a member of the UN? There's no way, its not even worth my time to look it up! The absolute insane level of the hypocricy of the org is almost an advantage, because it sounds so unbelievable, especially if your only picture of the org is the nice people that you go to meetings with. Its not until you find that one thing that hits you in just the right way that all the rest becomes believable.

IMO it may backfire slightly in that people will feel a little safer in leaving once they're ready, but I don't think it'll make a huge difference in getting people to take that first step and open up their mind. That said, its definitely possible that that little push may be enough to create a chain reaction where the absence of a few causes the rest to get curious. This is one of those things that's just insane to try and model and we're just going to get 10000 different pieces of anecdotal evidence that all points in different directions. That doesn't mean it's not fun to talk about, though.

10

If there were no shunning ...

by bemused in

a lot of members of this forum are still notionally active jws, in many cases because of worries about the loss of contact with family and friends if they were to leave.

i was never in so it's hard for me to judge, but it seems to me that if the watchtower org were to announce tomorrow that shunning is wrong and jws should keep contact with family and friends who leave then the effect would be devasting for congregation numbers.

if so then obviously such an announcement is highly unlikely, but is my view correct?

OneEyedJoe

Yeah, I wouldn't be surpised if I lived to see the day when the WTS ostensibly ends shunning (probably to comply with a law that would put their charity status in jepardy) but would instead make it a "conscience matter" and quote a bunch of scriptures (out of context) in support of continued shunning.

There's no way they'd actually fully back away from shunning, and even if they did, anyone who's ever shunned anyone already would almost certainly continue to do so, just because they'd be unable to bear the realization that they inflicted so much pain upon themselves and others for absolutely no reason.