Posts by OneEyedJoe

43

How old were you when baptized?

by Coded Logic in

i was baptized at the age of 11. like most of us, my commitment wasnt to honor god but rather i was gang pressed into the service of the wtbts.

and, at such a young age, it was impossible for me to appreciate the enormity of my actions.

honestly, how could i possibly have known any better?

OneEyedJoe

a watcher - Do you mind if I ask if you where coping with an emotionally trying event when you were first contacted or when you first decided that it was 'the truth'?

31

My neighbor is a return visit. Should I say something?

by Zoos in

jw
friends

i stayed home sick from work the other day and noticed a car group pull up to my neighbor's house.

she's a stay-at-home mom.

i decided it was time to retrieve something from my truck to see if i could recognize the visiting sisters.

OneEyedJoe

I think you should say something. Personally, I don't know how I could live with myself if I didn't say something and they ended up getting sucked in to the cult.

It's all about delivery, though. I wouldn't approach them right after the JWs leave. Ideally, it should be a chance encounter where you say hi and then just ask sorta off-the-cuff if you'd seen JWs there. Then ask questions to get a feel for where she is mentally, and maybe tell her that you had a bad experience with the group once, and would hate to see it happen to her and refer to jwfacts.com. Make sure that it's clear that your concern is for her, not for sticking it to the JWs.

250

Biblical Prohecies That Came True?

by Viviane in

recently there have been several claims made regarding prophecies that came true.

i've not personally seen a prophecy that i would consider as having come true.

i would consider the following as the requirements to say something is a prophecy and evaluate whether or not it came true:.

OneEyedJoe

As a non-believer I offer the following Psalm 111:7-9; the promise that god's word essentially will be enduring.

First off, you could never say that's fullfilled because it doesn't have an end date. The best you could say is that it hasn't failed yet. But that's not even the best argument against why that's not a good indication of divine inspiration.

If this prophecy wasn't fullfilled, it wouldn't matter anyway. This prophecy fails the 3rd rule in the OP because it does not require special knowledge. To illistrate: I will go on record, right here, right now in predicting that this post will endure forever. I'm now a prophet to anyone who ever reads this post. As long as someone knows this prophecy, the prophecy appears to be true. The only way for the prophecy to fail is if the prophecy itself is no longer around to be considered, so no one would be point it out as having failed. I'm sure that similar prophecies have been made in the past by other (failed) religions, but because the prophecy failed, no one can point them out.

43

How old were you when baptized?

by Coded Logic in

i was baptized at the age of 11. like most of us, my commitment wasnt to honor god but rather i was gang pressed into the service of the wtbts.

and, at such a young age, it was impossible for me to appreciate the enormity of my actions.

honestly, how could i possibly have known any better?

OneEyedJoe

I was born in (3rd generation, even) but managed to hold out until I was 18. My sister was baptized at 11, and confided in me that it was only because a bunch of her friends where doing it at the time. I resolved then that because it was always said to be an important "decision" I wanted to make sure that I only did it because I loved Jehovah. I never had any long-term friendships (inside or out) so I never quite got pressured to get dunked by them, so it wasn't much of an issue. I think after a certain point, people just assumed I was baptized.

The problem was that my father started pressuring me to get baptized before each assembly/convention starting at about 12. I held out for 6 years with one of my major reservations being that I felt unlikely to ever find a girlfriend/wife in the organization (all the girls were just out to get married, and they all seemed shallow and stupid to me, as did many JWs in general). Then I met a girl that wasn't shallow and stupid, we dated for a while (she was my first love) and she broke up with me (probably pressure from her parents) and in my heartbroken state my father one day came into my room apparently with one thing on his mind. We had the following conversation:

Him: Did <ex-gf's name> know you weren't baptized?

Me: I don't know....we never talked about it.

Him: How do you think she would've reacted if she'd found out you weren't baptized after you'd already started dating?

Me: I don't know....

Him: well that's something to think about.

And that did it. I thought I was being punished for not being baptized, and god was dangling a carrot in front of me to get baptized. I actually resented Jehovah for a long time due to "his" tactics to get me to be baptized. It makes me sad to think about now, because it's really the only time that my father betrayed me, and it was such a deep betrayal to take advantage of a heartbroken teen to pressure them to join a cult. I know he had good motives, but it's still hard to forgive him for it.

10

You're Wrong

by looter in

jw
friends

i guess you can tie jehovahs, and any other organized religion with this:.

"if your religion makes you think any people are spiritually inferior to others or.... if your science makes you think some class of people mentally inferior to others or.... if your politics makes you think some people should be politically inferior to others.... .

then you are doing it wrong and you need to rethink your philosophy from first principals.

OneEyedJoe

I've posted this here before, but I think it's somewhat relavent to the thread topic so I'll put it in here again:

http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong

Pretty entertaining TED talk about being wrong, with a different outlook on how we should feel about being wrong.

50

Question for the nonbelievers and atheists

by nykid in

what specifically made you stop believing in god and the bible?

was it a steady road of doubts or it was reading one book or one major event that made you realize the bible was not what it's claimed to be?.

.

OneEyedJoe

It was a gradual journey for me, and happened simultaneously with my initial walking up from JWism. By the time I was enough beyond the grasp of the cult to investigate it online, I was already an atheist. The funny thing is that I might've held onto a belief in good longer if not for the scathing review of christendom that I was raised with in the cult. I grew up heating constantly of the dishonesty and hipocracy of other religions, and long ago decided that I would never be a part of anything like that.

As I got older I became interested in science, and especially physics. This led me to learn a lot about cosmology, which led me feeling that it is just as likely that the universe could've come about without a god as with one. This kinda led me back to the question I asked as a child that never got a satisfactory answer: If the complexity of creation is proof that it was created by an intelligent designer, wouldn't that designer, in turn, need a designer? (I'll about I was probably less articulate when I asked my mother a variation of this question when I was about 8). It always felt hypocritical to me that we would ridicule scientists for a lack of understanding of what came prior to the big bang, but we ourselves responded with some variation of "it's not for us to know" when asked where god came from.

At the same time, I was learning about evolution and found that it explained things so elegantly (and predicted many things that were only observed later). Again, god was not necessary for any of it. Archeological evidence that humans had existed for well beyond 6000 years also had no refutation in the WTS publications. There was a period where I actually eagerly awaited an article that explained how carbon dating was flawed, this would've left me with that feeling I had in my childhood that I knew something these so called experts didn't. Oh how I had loved that feeling I got when I could don a superior attitude and explain to someone how Christmas was pagan or how mammoths where found with clover frozen in their bellies (which, somehow, was evidence for a global flood). Strangely, no article refuting carbon dating was ever published.

I also observed many other religious people making obviously flawed arguments for their personal interpretation of creation (particularly young earth creationists) and resolved never to tolerate such an argument, regardless of where it came from. Examining my own beliefs under this lens left me most of the way to atheism. In this stage, when confronted with anything regarding other religions, I often thought to myself, "if I wasn't a jw, I'd definitely be an atheist."

I was still left with years of indoctrination about the bible, that it must've been from god because of its scientific accuracy and fulfilled prophesy. I started with the scientific accuracy bit and this part seemed to boil down to a few things that I'm sure will be familiar. The commandment to the Israelites to bury their poop, the "circle of the earth" bit, and the water cycle description. Upon objective consideration, I found none of these to be evidence of special knowledge bestowed only upon Jehovah's servants. This left me with bible prophesy as the last bit of evidence for god. Upon objective observation, I found that the only prophesy that could not be explained without the supernatural was a few of the prophecies in the book of Daniel. A little research left me with the realization that the argument that the WTS always so vehemently fought against, actually had a lot of evidence behind it. Daniel was written after the events it professed to foretell.

At this point I was in the of position of being absolutely sure that atheists has it right, while still refusing to believe that I (and my parents, who I always considered to be quite intelligent) had been systematically lied to and fooled all our lives. After a period of soul searching I resolved that God would forgive me for checking out apostate sites of it was with honest motives to know the truth. About 3 days, and every article on jwfacts and a good bit of jwsurvey and others, I was finally free of any notion that god was out there.

So to make a long sorry short, it was a journey of nearly 20 years, starting before my teens. Since it was so slow, I did have the advantage of being able to consider a lot of the things that often seem to trouble people as the consider the possibility that there is no good or afterlife. I decided I was OK living this life the best that I could, and if that's all I got, then it was more than I deserved. After all I had done nothing to earn my birth. I considered morality without a god before I was sure of his absence. When I woke up to the lies of the cult, while still a shock, I suspect it had less of an impact on me than those who find themselves simultaneously questioning the cult and the very existence of god.

Holy crap, that was long. Sorry for the wall of words.

47

i was happy before i woke up

by losingit in

jw
friends

idk if waking up has been good for me.

i still have almost no friends.

im still waiting to graduate this december to qualify n b certified for my job.

OneEyedJoe

I'm still somewhat where you are. It's tremendously frustrating to have this in the back of my mind every time I look at my wife, and not be able to just explode with everything I now know. That said, I wouldn't unlearn TTATT if I could. I want to live in reality, even if it's not as good as the dream. I'm like you, though, in that I never fit in - so the dream wasn't that great either.

So while I don't have much useful advice for you, hopefully it will help to hear one more voice telling you you're not alone.

18

Will it someday be possible to read another person's mind, without his or her even knowing it?

by Pinku in

scientists transmit thoughts from one brain to another.

sep 7, 2014, 6:27 am et.

column by lee dye.

OneEyedJoe

You don't need technology to "read" someone's mind. There are so many outward cues as to what you're thinking that a skilled observer can make very good guesses as to what you're thinking. This is how some of the better psychics operate.

There've been huge advancements in technologies related to reading the brain's activity and interpreting it into something meaningful. Right now it requires invasive procedures, or you have to be in an MRI machine. It's probably possible, though, to read someone's mind without that, but it will be a long wait. There are obvious moral implications, but we have a lot of time to sort that out. There's also the limitation that they can only "read" what you're currently thinking about - the ability to read past memories without your cooperation will probably never happen safely. If we ever will figure that part out, I don't expect to live to see it.

250

Biblical Prohecies That Came True?

by Viviane in

recently there have been several claims made regarding prophecies that came true.

i've not personally seen a prophecy that i would consider as having come true.

i would consider the following as the requirements to say something is a prophecy and evaluate whether or not it came true:.

OneEyedJoe

I think he was saying that my reply had an air of arrogance.

250

Biblical Prohecies That Came True?

by Viviane in

recently there have been several claims made regarding prophecies that came true.

i've not personally seen a prophecy that i would consider as having come true.

i would consider the following as the requirements to say something is a prophecy and evaluate whether or not it came true:.

OneEyedJoe

Bible prophecies that came true are abundant. The prophecy about Babylons fall in one night, and the name of the person who would lead the charge to fell it - Cyrus. The prophecy of Cyrus has been verified as having been written long before his birth as well. You could argue that the name Cyrus was only used AFTER his taking down Babylon - but even that wouldn't change the means of Babylons defeat being prophesied and actually succeeding. To imagine that the Babylons of the time weren't aware of the prophecy is foolish, so even with knowledge of the prophecy against them they still were brought down by it.

We've covered this. The book of Daniel was written after the fact. Why would it be foolish to "imagine" that the babalonians where unaware of the prophecy?

The prophecies about Jesus were all fullfilled by his own chosen actions, true. But the sheer number of them make it improbable that he'd be able to do it, let alone the fact that free will was always a variable - what if they actually acceptd Jesus and didn't put him to death? That absolutely was a possibility because God has never and will never take away a persons freedom of choice.

I think you're underestimating how montivated someone might be to represent themselves as the son of God. He also was kinda a dick to the powers that be of the time (pharasees and romans) and considering the culture of the day, and how romans treated the folks they conqured, it's not hard to imagine that Jesus could've gotten himself killed if he was under some delusion that he was the messiah. That's all assuming that the Jesus (as represented in the bible) existed at all, which is questionable.

The flood is a questionable one I suppose, but when you factor in that every culture in humanity has a legend about a global flood it makes it far less improbable. Why would such a story span across cultures that were even separated by the oceans? Even the religions of old were built around the flood, the tradition of the easter egg comes from the Egyption story that a Goddess was preserved in an egg upon the sea, the traditions involving halloween are tied to the celebrated remembrance of the people who the flood destroyed. The fact that even the ancient pagan cultures held within them the FACT of the flood (in their minds), though from a different opinion of it being a vile evil thing, gives credence to the flood itself.

This has been covered numerous times here on the forum, and if you'd like to do some more reading, there's a great article on jwfacts about it too. The bullet points are that most ancient civilizations where situated around a body of water, because that was the easiest place to live (there's fish, you can get around on a boat, and in the case of freshwater rivers/lakes there's water for people, livestock and crops). Floods happen periodically around essentially all bodies of water, so it's not shocking that everyone has their own flood story. The details of a great many of these flood stories diverge almost immediately once you look at anything beyond the fact that it's about a flood. There's also evidence that many civilizations (the egyptians being the best known example) lived right through the time of the flood without noticing. How dare they! Then when you consider that the flood story in the bible is essentially a point-by-point retelling of the epic of gilgamesh (which, incedentally, was actually written prior to when the biblical flood was supposed to have happened) it seals the deal. The flood is bunk.

The fall of Jerusalem by Rome was foretold, and only those who listened to Christ's direction to, "Flee to the mountains" survived.

This has already been addressed in this thread.

Further, Daniel had his vision in which he saw the beasts which the angel then identified for him as certain world powers by name - this all came true, even down to the fine details of Alexander dying early and his kingdom being split in four.

Again, written after the fact.

There are numerous Bible prophecies that came true.

We're still waiting for one....