Is there any precedent for materials making their way from the top secret elders school to general distribution? I wonder if this might be a sign that they're having trouble keeping up with the demands of content creation for the new meeting.
OneEyedJoe
JoinedPosts by OneEyedJoe
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108
Leaked Elder's Video: How to deal with a suicidal sister
by cappytan inthis video will be played at one of the clam meetings in march 2016.. the content is kind of old news because it is a recut version of a previous video produced for the elder's school.
however, it's still significant because it shows that the organization still has dissenting brothers in positions of leadership.. my thanks to the leaker.
feel free to claim credit here.
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34
My boyfriend is thinking of becoming reinstated
by gypsyvine ini'm not really sure where to post this.. i've been with my boyfriend for 4 months now and i've really never been happier.
i was brought up in the church of christ with an elder father and i really believe in my religion, although i will admit to being a lousy christian at times due to sheer laziness (not wanting to get out of bed on sunday).
my boyfriend essentially lives with me.
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OneEyedJoe
You're in for a difficult ride if you stick with him. You've had a short relationship, so I suspect that most here will advise you to run as fast as you can, but only you can make the decision regarding how much you want to try and potentially sacrifice knowing that there's a strong chance that this will end in heartbreak.
My advice would be to have a serious conversation with him to gauge his motivations and level of indoctrination. See if you can get him to review the content of jwfacts.com, the book Crisis of Conscience, or the book Combatting Cult Mind Control. If he refuses this is evidence that the JW indoctrination is still very strong. If he agrees, there's a good chance that he'll "wake up" and realize the extent of his indoctrination and the systematic deception that he has been subjected to.
If he's simply getting reinstated so that he can be around his family, then no big deal...if its because he believes in the cult doctrine then your relationship probably has an expiration date. The elders are often very snoopy and there's a fair chance they'll discover your relationship and he will not be reinstated if he's living with you while unwed. Between this possibility and the guilt he'll feel from meetings and the indoctrination about "worldly" people (which includes you) there is a fair chance that he'll end the relationship as he begins to rejoin the cult.
I hope things work out and I hope you're able to free him from his indoctrination. If he's saying that he's only getting reinstated to please his mother then I think you have a chance. Unfortunately getting reinstated (or making the effort to do so) can have some powerful psychological effects that may cause him to embrace the cult on a greater level. The social pressure he'll be subjected to will be strong as well. Your best chance is to try to free him from indoctrination before his involvement with the cult grows. It would be a good idea for you to read Combating Cult Mind Control regardless of whether he does. This will help you understand the indoctrination that he's been subjected to and it will give you a better chance of freeing him from it.
All that said, no one would blame you for simply deciding that this is all too much and moving on. This is a HUGE undertaking and a HUGE risk to your emotional and mental well-being.
Good luck! I'm wishing you all the best in this, whatever path you choose.
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EXJW's in Mensa?
by Luther bertrand inany exjw's or faders out there in mensa?
any online groups for this niche?
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OneEyedJoe
As for the ex-JW aspect, I never mentioned my flirtation with Mensa to anyone other than family, but I've been told several times that I'm "too smart for [my] own good." Whatever that means. I think it was just a way to avoid answering my questions that challenged the way they were told to think.
Yeah, when being intelligent is viewed as a negative, someone really needs to start reevaluating things. After I quit the cult my father-in-law came over to talk about my reasons. I was fairly open about many of the flaws that lead to my awakening. He called me "computer brained" and told me that he's known several JWs that he put in the category of being "computer brained" and all but one had left. Apparently my problem is I just need to learn how to turn it off.
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EXJW's in Mensa?
by Luther bertrand inany exjw's or faders out there in mensa?
any online groups for this niche?
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OneEyedJoe
For me the most stifling thing was having to hide my books. and being restricted on the types of conversations that I could have as a result of my "worldly" or "Apostate" sounding subjects
Yep. Being of even slightly above average intelligence leaves you very lonely in the JW world.
I looked in to mensa once. I didn't try to qualify, but I have a hunch I would. I couldn't see what benefit I would get from joining, other than perhaps being able to put it on a resume.
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Proof the GB changes scriptures in the Bible...really interesting
by MrsR-Awaken inhello everyone, this info below me is not mine it's from a user in reddit that posted it.
his user name is question_and_answer1 i was hoping he was in this forum too but i don't know if he is.
anyway the credit goes to him for researching this and it's really interesting what he found and i want everyone here to read, and it's proof of how fake the watchtower is and how disgusting the gb really is...it's sickening.
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OneEyedJoe
I don't see what the fuss is about on this one, but maybe I'm missing something. They didn't really change the meaning of the scripture much, they just sorta invalidated their previous "old light" interpretation. Since the old interpretation relied on types/antitypes and referred to the anointed slave class, it's completely full of "old light."
For my money, their addition of the word "public" at romans 10:10 ("For with the heart one exercises faith for righteousness, but with the mouth one makes public declaration for salvation.") is much stronger evidence of their changing the scriptures to match the doctrine.
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Do You Remember The First Time You Looked At "Apostate" Material?
by minimus ini was always fascinated by it.
as a kid, i used to go to the local library and secretly read books by so called apostates.
later, i would sneak into christian book stores and quickly buy a book or two.
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OneEyedJoe
My very first bit of apostate material was a small tri-fold tract that someone gave me and a friend when we were out recruiting one saturday. This was about 15 years ago, I'd say. One of the first times the two of us were allowed to go to the door without parental supervision. I still clearly recall showing it to his parents (we didn't read it by ourselves) after service was over. They read it to us and we all had a good laugh at all the insane lies they expected us to believe. Things like CTR sold his mensware business and made what would be milions in today's money to fund the WTS printing shop. I recall that there was something in there about miracle wheat, 1886, 1914, 1925 as well.
Then I didn't look at apostate information until 3-4 years ago. The next time I saw apostate stuff was on jwleaks about child abuse while I was trying to find a KM. That didn't really have an impact either though. I think the 100 year countdown on that site was probably the most impactful thing....it wasn't until I was 90% sure that I was in a cult that I really seriously looked at anything online.
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Overlapping "Kinds"...Coming soon to a Watchtower near you?
by juandefiero inputting on my carnac hat here.. let's say the evidence for evolution becomes so overwhelming that the society eventually has to accept it due to much turmoil in the congregations.
how do they do so without saying they've been wrong?.
why, redefine a word, of course!
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OneEyedJoe
I can't see the evidence from evolution getting that much stronger, really. It's already to the point where you can't ignore it if you review it with an open mind and an ounce of intellectual honesty. They're doing just fine by ignoring the evidence and picking little pieces here and there that they can appear to poke holes in via a misquote or something.
Besides, there's plenty of creationists out there actively trying to fight evolution, they're more likely to just use the best arguments/misquotes/fallacious reasoning that they find from there and steal it vs coming up with their own thing.
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The slow trickle has become a steady stream!
by freddo inin the last few weeks it seems that instead of one or two new posters a week we seem to be getting several every day.
many seem to be long time jw's who are troubled by the path of the organisation.
this is really encouraging to those of us who have been here sometime.. welcome!
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OneEyedJoe
The slow trickle has become a steady stream!
The org must be on some new prostate meds.
In all seriousness, it seems to me that this happens in waves, at least for the ~2 years I've been on the forum. Its possible that someone posting an introduction might move a few lurkers to do the same. It's also possible that it's just the streaks that occur in any random distribution. For as long as I've been here there'd be a period with no new posters, then you'd get 3 or 4 all at once and then someone posts a thread like this. Then the cycle repeats.
That's not to say the org hasn't reached a tipping point or that people aren't leaving more....I just don't see any evidence based on the tremendously small sample size of this forum seeing a few new members.
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Walking a thin line - Resigning Elder
by Sanchy inwarning of a long boring post ahead.
i feel like i need to vent my story out, as i feel quite helpless at the moment.. i'm 31 year old, married, father of toddler with another one on the way, due later this month.
i've been serving as elder for about 4 years now in a south florida congregation.
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OneEyedJoe
She also told me that I've made her life so much more difficult now, as she married me, knowing that I was a spiritual man; she never thought she would have to deal with this. Needless to say, this breaks my heart. I love her very much, and do not want to cause her, or anyone else pain.
It's almost as if I'd written this myself. My wife, similar to yours, has dismissed literally everything I've discussed with her. The things I talked to her about prior to "coming out" as being apostate, she dismissed so thoroughly that she will insist that I never spoke to her about it. Everyone's situation is different and nuanced, and often the advice is to take your time and go slow, in my case I think that may have been a mistake. I've given up on getting my wife to wake up, and the year I spent completely mentally "out" seems to have caused her to have a lot of distrust for me. You might consider being honest with your wife and how that might play out. It's a difficult decision, though, and one that can only be made reliably with the power of hindsight.
You're in a tough spot. Make sure to take care of yourself while you're dealing with all this - get rest, eat healthy, work out, get a massage, enjoy some recreation and de-stress. This will help you to deal with the elevated levels of stress that you've got going on. You'll have to be balanced with changes, though, as your wife will likely be threatened by them. Regardless of how open you are about your doubts, I would suggest you try to be open and reassuring about the reasons for any changes in your life. Try to make any changes you make have a positive element for your family as well - you've stepped down from being an elder, don't spend your extra time watching TV, spend it doing something that your family will enjoy. Make your stepping down the best thing that ever happened to them. This in itself may be enough to make them rethink things because the lie that the cult tells is that an elder family head is the best thing for the family's happiness...expose that string and maybe they'll pull at it and unravel the whole thing.
Like you, all my family and all my wife's family are JWs. I've started branching out a little and have made some friends at work, which is probably the easiest place to start (hopefully you don't work for JWs...) but even that is a balancing act.
Lastly, as you've discovered, you can't reason someone out of the cult. I wrote a post (link) a while back on this very topic. People don't believe or do things because of evidence and reason, it's because of emotion. Even your leaving the cult because of flawed doctrine and false prophecy can be traced back to an emotional motivation. I have yet to find an emotional motivation strong enough to cause my wife to reexamine things, but maybe you can.
Sometimes it works out and people can make a marriage work with a still-in JW after leaving, sometimes it just can't work out. I hope it does in your case. I'm still struggling with it 2 years after waking up and nearly a year after I've stopped going to meetings completely. So I might not be able to offer the best of advice, but at the very least you should know you're not alone in this by any means. I wish you the best of luck in your journey.
If you ever need to talk, feel free to PM me. Like I said, I might not be flush with good advice, but I can definitely commiserate.
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The fraud that is the WT member numbers
by Crazyguy inok i'm just thinking out load here so to speak.
but let say in the year 2000 the wt says they have 1 million publishers and at the end of the year they say they had 300,000 people get baptized so in the beginning of the year 2001 they show 1,300,000 publishers.
then in this new year they state another 300,000 get baptized but with 50,000 deaths and 50,000 disfellowshippings they stated at the end of year 2001 a total of 1,500,000 total members.
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OneEyedJoe
Crazyguy -
Regarding death rate - you're making a bit too large a leap. You can't connect the JW's membership with the global death rate since the JW membership is not a representative sample of the global population. It's heavily skewed to the US and a few other 'western' nations that have death rates drastically lower (roughly half) that of the global death rate.
Furthermore, you need only take a trip to your local KH to see that the JW population is not even representative of the community in which they reside. They're lower income, mostly female and older. Some of this makes the death rate go up, some makes it go down. In short, with the information we have available to us, it's very difficult to estimate the JW death rate. You could probably get closer by doing a weighted average of national death rates for each country (weighted by their percentage of the makeup of JWs) but even that would be flawed.
My guess, though, would be that the JW death rate would be far below the global death rate and would be something closer to 0.08-0.1%.