OneEyedJoe

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Posts by OneEyedJoe

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  44

  Baptised 52 years today!

  by Phoebe in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  january 29th - my baptism date.

  can you remember how you felt at your baptism?.

  i got baptised because my dad kept frightening me.

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  OneEyedJoe

  I remember how I felt quite clearly. It felt a lot like I was doing it at gun point, and jehovah was the one with his finger on the trigger. Of course my father's constant reminders that I needed to do it added some weight to it, and he's the one that planted the seed of the idea that god was withholding happiness from me because I wasn't baptized.

  The man that gave the talk prior to the baptism forgot to say "Amen" after the prayer, and since no one knew he was done until he just carried on talking normally (though I can't describe it, I suspect everyone here can relate to being able to tell by the tone of a man's voice that he's praying) so no one getting baptized said it either. I imagined that meant that it wasn't official, which quite suited me.
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  49

  Anti vaccines

  by blisterfeet in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  i personally feel that vaccinations are beneficial.

  there has been a modern movement that vaccinations are more harmful than beneficial to which i disagree.

  what is your stance as an ex jw on vaccinating your children?

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  OneEyedJoe

  No, many vaccines rely on "herd protection". Once enough people become susceptible to a disease or virus the protection for all can become compromised (but the unvaccinated are usually at much greater risk).

  As I said earlier, there are those who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons and who may have a weakened immune system putting themselves at much greater risk. Those who refuse vaccination for pure quackery and selfish reasons put those at greater risk than they should be.

  This is literally the only reason I've spent more than half a minute being mad about the idiocy of anti-vaxxers. If it only harmed their kids, I'd hail it as a triumph of darwinism and a valuable push away from a future resembling the movie idiocracy. The collateral damage - the immunocompromised and those with real allergies to the vaccines that are now more likely to get sick and die - is absolutely unconscionable in civilized society. If you want to be in public spaces you should be required to be vaccinated unless you have a real medical reason not to be.
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  49

  Anti vaccines

  by blisterfeet in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  i personally feel that vaccinations are beneficial.

  there has been a modern movement that vaccinations are more harmful than beneficial to which i disagree.

  what is your stance as an ex jw on vaccinating your children?

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  OneEyedJoe

  Even if vaccines caused autism at the rates found in the fraudulent study that started this nonsense, it would still be the rational choice to vaccinate your children. The likelihood of a child dying due to not being vaccinated is higher than the likelihood that the vaccine would cause autism that was found by the (again, fraudulent) study.

  Another interesting thing to note is that after the study was revealed to be fraudulent, the anti-vaxxer movement started talking less about vaccines causing autism and started focusing on other supposed problems with vaccinations - that they contain scary sounding chemicals, or that they contain a portion of the disease causing virus and are therefore likely to cause an outbreak or that they somehow prevent the "natural" development of the immune system, etc. Anytime you find yourself defending a belief that was founded on bad evidence (i.e. a fraudulent study by a later discredited scientist) with new evidence that conveniently seems to justify the exact position you came to on bad evidence, you need to look very carefully and honestly at your reasoning because it's far more likely that you're rationalizing a false belief than that you came to a true belief based on bad evidence.
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  18

  The stuff JWs get right

  by HowTheBibleWasCreated in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  since today there is a post about jws and science i thought it right to throw them a bone and see if they have anything right:.

  1. round earth (lol).

  2. old universe (13.7 billion years).

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  OneEyedJoe

  Have they ever actually come out and said #2 and #3? I thought they always just vaguely said that they were "thousands of years old." I remember a CO talking about the universe being almost 14 billion years old but I don't think I ever saw it in print. They used to teach that the universe was ~49000 years old (each of the days of creation being 7000 years) and they never officially retracted that, they just stopped saying it explicitly and always seemed to phrase things in a way that doesn't contradict that teaching but is still technically accurate (e.g. the universe is many thousands of years old).
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  23

  Coping with a change of heart

  by Strugglingrsa in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  after 24 years of active service as a witness my marriage came to an end causing massive trauma.during this tragic life event for a period of approx 8 months i went haywire.

  drinking.

  partying.smoking.i was disfellowshipped.i met a wonderful non witness along the way and am remarried.what i don't get is this.if an announcement was made that i am no longer a jehovahs witness then why does the bible principle in corinthians about not even greeting he who calls himself a brother still apply.

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  OneEyedJoe

  It sounds like you need to spend some time really coming to terms with what the cult did and the mind control that was involved. I suggest you check out jwfacts.com if you haven't already. freedomofmind.com is another good resource. I definitely found the book by Steven Hassan that I read very helpful when I was leaving the cult. Really understanding what has been done to you goes a long way toward taking away its power.

  Disfellowshipping isn't about helping people or anything like that - you're absolutely right that if the true motivation was to help someone who has stumbled the best thing in most cases is to continue to show love to that person. Disfellowshipping is about making an example of those that dare think for themselves and keeping an implicit threat in the minds of every JW as well as preventing anyone who realizes that they've been systematically lied to for their entire lives from being able to help those that are still under the spell. The bible is just used as post-hoc justification for the same sort of policy that all cults use to control their members.
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  22

  Service experiences

  by former2free in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i know what you may be thinking by the title but bear with me.

  have you ever reflected on past service experiences and think wow if only i had listened to a householder?

  two things come to my mind of personal experience.

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  OneEyedJoe

  There was only one time that I remember...I think I was maybe 14 (maybe younger?) and it was one of my first times being allowed to go to the door with a friend of mine of similar age without a parent. One person we met gave us a pamphlet about CTR and his Millerite origin story, how he sold his clothing business for a gigantic sum and started a publishing company and scammed people with "miracle wheat" among other things. Obviously we didn't obey the cult's advice not to read it. We actually gave it to my friends parents and they read bits of it to us and we all had a great laugh at those "ridiculous made-up lies." In some ways I think it's rather advantageous just how obvious a scammer CTR was, because it makes the truth seem just so silly and blatantly fabricated to any JW that's had the cult's side of things beaten into them for years.
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  13

  My brother is shunning me (but he's not a Witness)

  by john.prestor in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  i didn't know where to post this but it's been on my mind and i'm looking for support and advice from people who know what it's like being shunned.

  i was raised in a fundamentalist baptist church, so what i'm experiencing is a little different than most posters on this site.

  i've been out of that church for years, and my brother's been out for a while too.

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  OneEyedJoe

  The way we frame things goes a long way toward determining if (and how much) we suffer due to the circumstances we're in. It sounds like he might be doing you a favor. I know all too well how stressful and exhausting it is to be around people that can go off on you at a moment's notice. One lesson that I've learned from the distance leaving a cult has placed between myself and my family is that I'd rather expend my efforts on people that enrich my life than those that I just so happened to live under the same roof with for a time (and not by my choice, at that.)

  So your brother's 'shunning' is really his helping you to remove a toxic influence from your life. Now you can spend your time more productively - work on yourself, meet new people, volunteer, do things you enjoy. There's always a period of grieving as you become accustomed to things being a little different, but it diminishes over time until you'll one day wonder how you could've been so silly to waste so much time and energy chasing after someone that did little but make your life more difficult and stressful.
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  34

  What would make an Ex-Jw go back to been a full in Baptized JW

  by LOLS in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  i was just wondering , why would my jw husband return to been a full blown baptized jw after 20 years of fading?.

  he has spent 20 years of his life been a worldly person , with a worldly wife & kids & worldly friends .... to joining the borg full time , to getting baptized , to getting new brothers & sisters .... and to writing off most of his worldly friends (some his known his whole life ) , to trying to convince me & our children how wonderful this org is ......and anyone else who will listen :(.

  has anyone ever experienced this ...... oh and he seems to be in it 110% and no-one can say anything about this crazy org or show him proof that it all bs...... his such a clever independent , successful guy , why on earth would he go back to this , after been out for so many years & change into this domineering , opinionated fool ..... oh and his entire family also went back ... father , mother , brother & sister .

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  OneEyedJoe

  A failure to educate oneself.
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  22

  What do the Angels do?

  by LovingLifeNow in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  so what exactly have they been doing now , with the exception of intervening thousands of years ago, what exactly do they do in heaven?

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  OneEyedJoe

  I recall a JW (who happened to have a preexisting fear of dogs) telling a story at a meeting in which a dog charged at him while out in service only to be stopped dead by an angel. It was definitely an angel. Had nothing to do with the chain around the dog's neck that he was too panicked to notice.
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  5

  The One-Electron Universe | Space Time

  by Brokeback Watchtower in

  1. social
  2. current

  richard feynman's idea.

  that's the guy who said if someone claims to know quantum physics doesn't know quantum physics and just shut up and calculate.

  maybe everything is just one thing like the mystics claim.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtw9mslfk.

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  OneEyedJoe

  It's an interesting thought, but there appears to be some as-yet undiscovered asymmetry between matter and antimatter that has resulted in there being more elections than positions in the universe. This would preclude there being only one election, as that would require equal amounts of matter and antimatter. This was mentioned in the video, but it doesn't surprise me that you ignored it considering your history of affinity for using your misunderstanding of quantum mechanics to justify a belief in Deepak Chopra style bullshit.

  Also, that Feynman quote was from several decades ago. Using it to, in effect, say, "no one understands quantum mechanics so no one can tell me my nonsense ideas about it are wrong" is fallacious. People understand quantum mechanics now. Or do you also quote people saying that heavier than air manned flight will never be possible to conclude that airplanes must be lighter than air?