Posts by OneEyedJoe

74

GB Doesnt Believe in 1914 Anymore My reasoning

by thedepressedsoul in

i have heard a lot of talk over the last year or so if the gb will eventually ditch 1914 and some have even made the claim that most, if not all of the gb do not believe in 1914. ive given this some thought and in the past i wasnt sure.

this annual meeting puts 100%, without a doubt in my mind that the gb do not believe in 1914. id even go as far to say that they talked about that date and have a game plan in mind.. here is why i feel this way:.

there were a lot of changes with the parables at this annual meeting.

OneEyedJoe

On the topic of 1919, I'll repost what I said in another thread :

I don't think they really need the 1919 appointment, honestly. I'd be willing to bet that 90% don't even know the significance of 1919, nor do they care. They've already been doing without it in spirit for years. Here's how it works:

1. JWs are the only true religion (they're the only ones known for d2d work, they have brotherly love, etc, etc)

2. God is a god of organization (twisting the scripture "god is a god not of disorder but of peace")

3. Obey those taking the lead (Heb 13:17)

4. The GB is taking the lead in the organization.

And that's all it takes. The GB is to be obeyed, they don't have to deal with the pesky details of a 1919 "appointment" that can easily be demonstrated as false. Just unquestioning obedience.

I'll add that the small number that do understand the significance of 1919, are made up almost exclusively of those who would be loyal to the organization through anything anyway. Removal of 1919 would be a non-event to most, and just another bit of new-light to be accepted without thought to a few. The line of reasoning above is the only reasoning that I ever recall hearing as justification for loyalty to the GB. 1919 is only discussed sporadically when they do one of those "hard" WT lessons on it, and then it's only mentioned off-handedly in one paragraph.

I believe emphatically that the overlapping generations BS is just a stop-gap until they can get rid of 1914. If you've read CoC, you know that they often discuss things like this for years before taking action (they were discussing what to do about the generation teaching in the 70s, but didn't touch it till 1995). 1914 may remain in some form or other, but it won't be the start of "this generation" past 2034, and may well be gone much sooner. The overlap is fairly obviously designed to buy time until those that remember the emphasis on 1914 die off or at least are sufficiently senile or dependent on their JW children that they won't make waves.

The other possibility is that they're just buying time until they die, and they'll let GB 3.0 handle cleaning up their mess.

4

Evolution isn't happening right now?

by rebel8 in

jw
friends

woman: professor haldane, even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, i simply cannot believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body with its trillions of cells organized into bones and muscle and nerves, a heart that pumps without ceasing for decades, miles and miles of blood vessels and kidney tubules, and a brain capable of thinking and feeling.

.

haldane: but madam, you did it yourself!

OneEyedJoe

I personally think this type of argument for evolution does more harm than good because it has rather obvious flaws. Whatever works for ya though...

37

Most Jdubs are nice people, not really evil - give us all a break from this

by hamsterbait in

.

OneEyedJoe

I wouldn't say JWs are evil, because evil implies intent to harm. Most JWs indeed do evil things, but they're deluded and controled in such a way that they actually, deep-down, believe that they're being good people.

Everyone wants to paint the world in black and white with evil people and good people. The reality is that we're all just people, a product of our genes and environment. Given the right circumstances, you can get just about anyone to do evil things. It's a scary notion, but I think being in denial of that fact only leads to more evil in the world. If people are allowed to keep this black and white view of good vs evil, it only makes it easier for them to justify evil actions. If people are made aware of just how easily anyone can be made to do evil things, they may be a little more on gaurd to ensure that they don't fall into the pattern of rationalization and groupthink that seems to be the cause of most of the bigger attrocities.

46

Does money buy happiness and a longer life? You decide...

by Brock Talon in

i poured over time magazine's sep 8-15 2014 edition article "who we are" and put together this spreadsheet on the results from their poll.

i found the statistics quite fascinating.. most people would say that "money doesn't buy happiness", but this poll seems to me to indicate the exact opposite of that.

it also correlates education levels with higher earning that result in that happiness.

OneEyedJoe

The one failing that is usually present in these studies is proof of causation. Yes, there's a pretty undeniable coorelation between wealth and happiness, but as has been shown a number of times, if an unhappy poor person wins the lottery, they don't immediately become happy.

It's entirely possible that happiness and wealth just so happen to both be the effect of being successful in persuing one's dreams (which would explain, to a certain extent, the correlation with education). When people go after what they really want in life, they're more likely to be happy. They're also more likely to be passionate about what they do for a living, and that often yeilds better results, therefore more money.

while it's entirely anecdotal, I feel like that's what both my happiness and my money come from - i was lucky (especially for those born into the JW cult) to have parents that supported me in doing what I really liked doing. The result is that I'm reasonably well paid, and bad days at work are rare.

46

Does money buy happiness and a longer life? You decide...

by Brock Talon in

i poured over time magazine's sep 8-15 2014 edition article "who we are" and put together this spreadsheet on the results from their poll.

i found the statistics quite fascinating.. most people would say that "money doesn't buy happiness", but this poll seems to me to indicate the exact opposite of that.

it also correlates education levels with higher earning that result in that happiness.

OneEyedJoe

That's a much more detailed spreadsheet than I've seen from similar studies. I usually see the results of the studies like this summarized "Money buys happiness up to about 75K, where it levels off" which seems to be pretty close to what this shows. Maybe it doesn't level off entirely, but the coorelation drops off significantly once you've made it to the 60-100k group.

JWs would probably say that they're all just lying to themselves because they don't know true happiness (similar to their constant reference to true christians, i guess). Meanwhile, most JWs can't even attain the same, apparently fake, happiness that I see everywhere in the world.

31

The more people who leave the Witnesses, the more people will leave. True?

by ThomasCovenant in

jw
friends

if more faders stopped fading and just stopped,.

would more of the many closet unbelieving attendees just stop too, creating a momentum?.

.

OneEyedJoe

Also, EVERY CO visit used to complain about meeting attendance always being low when compared with number of publishers. When they count non-publisher children as attenders, that makes for a telling statistic.

This was always my experience too...oddly enough, though, our last CO visit was quite different. In the concluding talk of the visit, where they typically guilt trip you about service time and meeting attendance, he said that the elders had complained to him that meeting attendence was a problem, but he thought we were doing just fine. This is odd because we typically have maybe 60-70% attendence for sunday, and probably closer to 50% for the mid-week.

To me this indicates one of two possibilities. He might be the good-cop CO prepping us for the bad-cop CO. The other possibility is he could be seeing the greater trend of people leaving, and 50-70% attendance may strike him as exceptional these days. He's made lots of comments that sound very non-WT, like "even if we're not doing everything we should be, or even if we're not making all the meetings, we're still so much better in god's eyes than the rest of the world." In general he spends a lot of time saying things that seem to be aimed at making people feel less guilty, which I don't remember hearing ever before.

62

Roll call of those of us stuck in for our spouse or whos spouse is still in!

by BU2B in

jw
friends

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.

OneEyedJoe

BU2B's recent thread made me think back to this one. Bumping for the folks that have joined more recently or may have missed it.

31

The more people who leave the Witnesses, the more people will leave. True?

by ThomasCovenant in

jw
friends

if more faders stopped fading and just stopped,.

would more of the many closet unbelieving attendees just stop too, creating a momentum?.

.

OneEyedJoe

I saw or read something on sorta related a while back (I think it was a TED talk, but I can't find it) that discussed groups in which it is possible for everyone in the group to have serioius misgivings about whatever the group is doing, but everyone keeps it to themselves because there's a perception by all that everyone else is firmly in favor of the group. It's possible, at least in small pockets of the JW community, that this could be the state of affairs - everyone (or a large minority) going along because they think everyone else believes it. In such a pocket, a relatively small walk-out would have far-reaching effects.

That said, I don't think a grand appostate walk-out would severly criple the organization. Any positive feedback created would likely be isolated in small groups, and for everyone outside that group it would be easily explained away as a fluke, not part of a grander pattern. I've noticed in other threads that while 2/3rds of born-ins leave it seems that in many cases groups leave or stay together, for the most part. So there's many people who relate that all their friends from childhood are out, and many who say that everyone is still in.

This cult does seem to be dying a slow death in developed countries, though, so maybe in a few years such a walkout could happen and have a sweeping effect on the membership.

65

Tv.jw.org - Average Jdub reaction? I'm getting NOTHING but Silence!

by 4thgen in

jw
friends

hello all, as you know, when jw tv was announced, our board went wild.

many comments, much speculation and alot of negative feedback on the quality, etc.

well, what has me concerned is that i have not heard a peep from any of my connections left in kingdom-land.

OneEyedJoe

yeah, so far I haven't heard a single word about it, other than the letter being read from the stage. Such a bummer too, because I've got that '144000 club' joke locked and loaded

Like a lot of the changes, these things seem to take a while to fully sink in. I mean jw.org has been around for a while now, but the frenzy with the pins and such has only just started in the last 6-8 months.

28

January 15, 2015 watchtower 3 study articles about marriage.

by hoser in

couples having problems and getting divorced must be a problem in the jehovahs witnesses.

the articles are definately an interesting read.

they give plenty of bad advise as usual.

OneEyedJoe

Well, maybe divorce rates are not dropping for Jehovah's Witnesses. Indicators for divorce include young/teen marriage, and lower on the socioeconomic scale. Education makes a difference, too. College educated couples divorce less often.

Cult 101 - cause problems for adherents, then insist that any problems in their lives are because they are insufficiently devoted to the cult.