Posts by OneEyedJoe

39

What went wrong in your congregation?

by The Rebel in

jw
friends

the target is converts.. why does it seem such an outrageous aim for a congregation to recruit new converts?.

in my old congregation, the enthusiasm was there but the knocking on doors produced zero " baptisms" in my final years.. a) why so little interests?.

b) was it the internet ?.

OneEyedJoe

I admit to being a potential convert. The members whether they realize it or not have pretty much scared me away. Every time that I visited the hall, I would hear about not associating with worldly people that you are not to be their friend. I wanted to signal or raise my hand and say,"Hey, you know. I'm sitting right here. Maybe you should keep this kind of talk for another time". (Like, when worldly people aren't in the audience). Made me feel like a complete outsider. Another beef that I had with the hall was local needs night. A total gossip passive aggressive session for all to enjoy. (sarcasm), I admit to enjoying the the study articles. The only reason why I would attend, It seems to me that the members don't want outsiders to join.

Yeah, when I was in I always thought it was odd that we were trying to recruit new people and always encouraged to get them to come to meetings, but then in the meetings half of what went on was just badmouthing the people we're trying to convert or badmouthing their religions. Even on Sundays during the public talk. I would think to myself "they should at least save this stuff for tuesdays where it's less likely that potential converts will be there" and when I realized I was advocating deceptive recruiting tactics it made me suddenly uncomfortable. After that I started to notice many of the existing deceptive tactics that were already institutionalized, and that made me even more uncomfortable...

Edit:

Welcome to the site, Silvia! I hope you find it as useful as I have.

83

What woke you up?

by Israel Ricky Gonzales in

in march of 2014, i was a very active jw, a ministerial servant, gave a public talk, was an attendant for the memorial, and one of 4 cleaning captains for an international convention of 40,000+ attendees.

so what woke me up?

an innocent comment from a co-worker about the candice conti court case rang a bell that could not be unrung.

OneEyedJoe

There are so many small steps that woke me up, but I'd have to say that the overlapping generation nonsense was probably it. That's what finally made me uncomfortable enough to look online, and when I did and found the misquotes/lies in the creation book it was all over.

40

Sister attendants not able to give directions to a brother..Misogyny

by Theburstbubble in

at our recent rc i was advised by a sister who was an attendant that they have been advised not to be able to give brothers directions as this should be dealt with by the brothers.

apparently at the pre-convention attendants meeting, the sisters were asked to stay behind.

this was when they were given the news that the brothers should deal with brothers.

OneEyedJoe

When did this happen? I haven't been out that long...

I guess that's progress. Though I'm a bit torn, it's always much more validating when they double down on the stupid.

40

Sister attendants not able to give directions to a brother..Misogyny

by Theburstbubble in

at our recent rc i was advised by a sister who was an attendant that they have been advised not to be able to give brothers directions as this should be dealt with by the brothers.

apparently at the pre-convention attendants meeting, the sisters were asked to stay behind.

this was when they were given the news that the brothers should deal with brothers.

OneEyedJoe

Women can be attendants? That's news to me. Or are we just talking about the contribution box babysitters?

12

Jehovah's Witness Claims Surgeon Refused to Operate

by OrphanCrow in

jehovah's witnesses are unreasonable in the way they expect the larger community to respond to their no blood policy.

the medical community is too often held hostage by their insistence on adhering to tan erroneous interpretation of an old book.. jehovah's witness claims surgeon refused to operate.

(*full article at link).

OneEyedJoe

I can almost see both sides of this. Knee surgery ought to have a nearly zero chance that blood will be needed, so it seems like the doctor was probably overreacting somewhat. Unless there was something unusual in play here, putting the patient under anesthesia presents a greater risk of death than does the refusal of blood. I had 3 knee surgeries of varying levels of invasiveness as a jw and both doctors acted like it was weird that we were even bringing it up because the likelihood that blood would be needed was so low.

That said, if a doctor isn't comfortable with the parameters of a surgery, do you really want him operating on you anyway? Even if their discomfort isn't reasonable, I wouldn't want them to just ignore it and go on. Lots of people have knee injuries so it's not that hard to find a knee specialist and I'm sure the surgeon here would've been all too happy to provide a referral. Sometimes things don't go exactly how you want, it's not the end of the world. Why people can't just move on and instead feel the need to sue in cases like this just baffles me.

Hopefully this gets thrown out. Doctors ought to have their ability to follow the Hippocratic oath protected.

Edit: that's what I get for posting before reading the article fully... Apparently there were complications so the JW is clearly 100% stupid.

39

Are There Good People Out There?

by LaurenM in

even though i'm no longer mentally a jw (i still technically am) i do recognize that there are some benefits to being raised one.

for example, the first (and only so far) wordly guy i was involved with had to smoke weed every day and got drunk all the time and that was his idea of fun.

i couldn't help but feel bad for him.

OneEyedJoe

Don't judge the entirety of humanity outside the cult based on one person. There is a rich variety of people out there, and if you're patient you'll definitely find some you will consider to be "good." At the same time, though, I would encourage you to keep an open mind. There are a lot of things that you've been told are wrong all your life that don't necessarily make someone a bad person.

2

Fading Game of Thrones Style

by Rattigan350 in

jw
friends

i started watching game of thrones online back in april and watched all 5 seasons by june.. i wonder how my life would be different if i had watched it from the beginning.. if i had seen it over a year ago, i would have left the organization the way the hound left the capitol.. during a battle when sandor clegane, aka the hound, had lost half of his men and saw that the king was a coward, when told that he needs to protect the city, protect the king, he replied - f--k the king's guard, f--k the city, f--k the king and left.. i wish i would have done that.

f--k the elders, f--k the judicial committee, f--k the gb.. best if done during a comment or from the platform.

.

OneEyedJoe

When I saw the thread title I was certain this was going to somehow involve a beheading.

20

If jw's obeyed all of the bible commandments what would they be like?

by purrpurr in

the jw's cite abstaining from blood along with other cherry picked commandments.

but then ignore the others.

this is very hippocritical and if they are going to obey one commandment they should be obeying the rest.. just as a bit of fun then... what would jw's be like if they obeyed every rule in the bible?.

OneEyedJoe

It would be completely impossible for a group as a whole to obey ALL the commandments in the bible. Jesus command to have love of neighbor contradicts a good number of other commands (most of the mosaic law, really). The only way to make it work is to state, as JWs do, that Jesus' sacrifice made the law obsolete and they therefore are no longer bound by it. (I'm sure someone who cared more could probably find contradictions in commandments in the NT alone, but I'm not going to bother.) But when you start negating part of the bible, you get into the area of interpretation and then anything is fair game.

Anyone can behave however they want and they can find justification for their behavior in the bible if they look hard enough.

2

Funny encounter at work

by respectful_observer in

i just had a meeting with a client and we both paused to watch a group outside of the conference room present a cake to a group of colleagues.

i made the comment that it seemed to be a pretty frequent event in their offices.

his response: "yeah, it happens all the time here, but not in our group.

OneEyedJoe

Yeah, I love that for all the gloating about billions of hours spent preaching, the public's perception is basically "oh those are the weird people that wake me up on saturday morning and don't celebrate holidays"

A few years ago, while I was still an indoctrinated JW I worked for a company that got a lot of contracts for the USPS, which at the time was (probably still is) having some monetary troubles and one of my coworkers joked "They should just give the mail to the jehovah's witnesses to cut costs - they're coming through the neighborhood anyway!"

I was glad that I had never told them that I was a JW.

25

Do we have consensus that Mr Jackson was wearing a gold Apple Watch?

by StarTrekAngel in

i mean, we have discussed mr morris' "rolex" but many also pointed out to the potential for a knock-out.

i don't think there are apple watch knock outs out there, are they?

OneEyedJoe

If indeed he has an expensive watch, it is far more likely to have been a gift from some favor-seeking sycophant.
JWs have nearly perfected the art of under-the-table simony.

That's a possibility, but just the same it could be sold and offset some of the donations that were otherwise required, and indeed asked for in a recent broadcast. It seems neither faithful nor discrete to keep the watch for oneself in this scenario.

Though maybe he's just trying to imitate Jesus when he insisted that the fine perfume be used on him instead of being sold to feed the poor.