If I'd been honest with myself, I would've identified as atheist a decade before I left the cult. The cult mind control was the only thing that kept me believing in the possibility of a god for that long. The thing that made me atheist was just thinking and learning about the the things that are often given as reasons God is necessary. Morality, existence of life, the existence of the universe, and a meaning to life. I realized that not only is god unnecessary to explain or provide necessary answers to these things but in many ways the hypothesis of god limits us on all these topics. At that point there just wasn't any need for god in my life.
OneEyedJoe
JoinedPosts by OneEyedJoe
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56
What made you turn atheist or agnostic?
by LevelThePlayingField inif you were a jw and are now an atheist or agnostic, what was the tipping point that made you turn to it?.
the reason i ask is i have noticed that many who leave the jw's seem to turn to atheism, versus still having some form of a faith.
have many of you given up on god first or have you had atheistic views first and then found atheism to be true.
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No One Ever Thanks Police ??
by berrygerry inso, this week's sm has extracts from the yearbook.. the [police] chief turned to his assistant and said, in all my 32years of serving on the force, i have never heard anyonethank us for our work!.
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in our area, people thank the police daily, never mind in 32 years..
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Pictures in the Watchtower
by Sour Grapes inafter sitting through last sunday's watchtower i got so sick of seeing the bobbing/nodding heads when talking about the pictures.
they act like god himself took the picture.
there must have been 10 comments about the group in service and the one brother was looking at his phone with a smile, which is a dead give away that he was reading something interesting.. what got me was how the older brother in the posed picture had a bible in his hand had a stern look on his face looking at the young brother.
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OneEyedJoe
" They act like God himself took the picture."
Lol!
The reverence for the pictures in the watchtower is something that always bewildered me. They'd give a comment about a picture as if the act of someone drawing something or staging a photo makes the situation depicted not only real, but the only possible outcome. Picture of some jw boy being friendly with a worldly girl next to one of her holding a pregnancy test? Just goes to show you can't be nice to worldly people without having unprotected sex and someone getting pregnant. The picture showed it, so it can't go another way. Ugh. Idiots.
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If You Dont Disassociate Yourself, Are you Still Counted in Average Publishers on Annual Report?
by truthlover infor all the newbies and angry ones of the forum and other forums, is it beneficial to show your stand to indicate that numbers are dropping in the org rather than increasing?
this is to those who are in a position to do so.
i know many cannot due to family members in the org.
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OneEyedJoe
You might be counted in the "peak publishers" number for the year that you went inactive, depending on when you go inactive (i.e. you'll be counted if you turn in a report for August and that was the month they had their peak, otherwise you won't be). You'll be counted partially for that year in their "average publishers" number, i.e. if you turned in time for 6 months, you'll make up 0.5 publisher. After you've stopped turning in time for a full service year, you're no longer counted in any way.
The most important thing, though, is that nothing you do is going to change how you're counted. If you disassociate, you'd still be counted for the time that you turned in that year. So as far as tacitly bolstering their statistics you have nothing to worry about.
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Request for Research Help: WTS Views on Intersex Individuals
by Oubliette inrequest for research help: .
several recent threads have gotten me started on an essay and i need some research help.
does anyone have access to anything the wt has ever published on intersex people (they might have used the now-outdated term: hermaphrodite)?
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OneEyedJoe
I have not been able to find much of anything of merit that the WTBTS has published on the subject.
You could say that about practically anything.
I don't remember ever hearing anything about this myself...I wonder if they might've been smart enough not to dive into the topic.
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Local Needs part given after Ministerial Servant left the organization
by cappytan inhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbb8rt2bem8.
some crazy cult language in this talk.. some highlights:.
18:15 - obey.
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OneEyedJoe
Parts like these always left me feeling dirty. Almost felt like maybe I was in a cult. I don't think I ever heard a list of potential grievances given from the platform, but man that would've been the cherry on top for me - I could've related to a lot of those for a very long time before I actually woke up. When they tighten the grip out of fear of apostates like this, I think it ends up pushing away a lot of the fence sitters. -
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Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster ... Yes it's a REAL church.
by SecretSlaveClass innow this is a church an athiest would be really happy with.
hilarious!.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/flying_spaghetti_monster.
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OneEyedJoe
When I was still in, a ~17 year old kid gave a comment in which his goal seemed to be to point out how silly other belief systems (i.e. anything but JW) were. He illustrated his point by talking about one group that even believes that a flying spaghetti monster was the creator, insisting that it was a real religion that people believed. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the church he was using to illustrate his point was created to illustrate how foolish all religion is. This may have been the best display of unintentional irony I ever witnessed. -
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When you were in
by Esmeralda001 incoucou,.
i hope you are well?!
i have a few questions that i'd like to adress (if you don't mind of course).
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OneEyedJoe
I was born-in
I first started questioning when I was ~13 and my first question was why it seemed that JWs were generally less intelligent than "worldly" people and shouldn't it be the smarter ones that are able to find the truth? Shouldn't it be concerning that we've made the same choice that people of clearly below average intelligence have made? Obviously that wasn't enough to push me out, but it was a start. Thinking about their cult-like behaviors (independent thinking and education discouraged, shunning, etc) made me think "that's a rule I'd implement if I were to start a cult." Then the failed generation teaching combined with some basic knowledge of the failures of 1914 and 1975 was what really set me into questioning that lead to find TTATT online.
Of course the fact that I am what a JW would call an apostate has crossed my mind.
All the ones that I saw getting converted had serious problems (mental illness, addiction, recent death of a spouse or divorce, etc). This just made me doubt more because I never saw anyone joining because the doctrine was well explained and they determined it to be the truth, they were joining because they had problems and needed support.
I was always pretty strong in my faith, in a way. I thought my faith was backed by firm evidence, so I guess I didn't consider it to be faith at all. I always wanted my beliefs to be in line with evidence, I just didn't know the evidence I'd received had been filtered and manipulated. It wasn't until I knew TTATT that I was looking for a way out. Up until that point, I was mostly looking for a way to silence my doubts so that I could stay a JW in good conscience.
As a kid I was the holier-than-thou type because I had a penchant for memorizing doctrine and explaining it. I could beat most adults at that game by the time I was a teenager. Through college I started to become more moderate (the more I learned in school the more I realized I didn't really know anything) and then after getting married and moving to a new congregation where I knew no one I became "spiritually weak" only getting the minimum in service and missing the occasional meeting. I'd started to see that JW stuff really didn't benefit me in any way and I had a lot of new responsibilities that I was better off attending to vs going to meetings or wasting my time walking up and down the street trying to recruit people into something I wasn't sure about myself.
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Favourite Movie quotes...
by Tornintwo ininspiring, funny...you choose.... i'll start with inspiring: .
frodo: i wish the ring had never come to me.
i wish none of this had happened.gandalf: so do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide.
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OneEyedJoe
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people angry and has widely been considered as a bad move.
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Video: 607 & 1914 Why These Dates Matter to Jehovah's Witnesses
by LevelThePlayingField inthis is a great video.
i think it's his best work so far.
everything you ever wanted to know about 607 in 30 minutes.
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OneEyedJoe
I think ex-JW's care more about this than current witnesses do. I really can't remember caring about 607 / 1914 when I was in.
Well, the ones that really care about these dates become exJWs. I never really cared much about 607, but I was definitely invested in 1914. Towards the end of my time in the cult, WWI happening in 1914 was basically the only thing my faith was based on.
