if you live in the twin cities in minnesota, come to the uu church in bloomington on sunday, july 27th.
i'm giving a presentation there about jws and about leaving, shunning, things like that.
one hour, 10:30, free on-site childcare available.. here's a link with more info.
DD - you got it wrong, the bees were already molested, you're just "beating them off"
If you really want to give a proper introduction to the cult, find one of the videos of a bunch of kids singing "listen, obey and be blessed." That should give them a pretty accurate representation of what the WTS is all about.
if you are a current or active jw, you cannot help but feel you are in a bind.
while you have discovered the truth about the truth and has continuously researched on it, you cannot help also but to regard the fellowship inside, add perhaps those encouraging teachings which build up faith and spirituality.. the reality is you cannot just turn a blind eye on the goodness in the organization too or shall we say some of its members who are also standing by you.
somehow, you felt the fds food is helping you in a spiritual sense.
Yeah, honestly they've never done me any good. For as far back as I can remember, I had questions and doubts about the cult, but they were always explained away and passed over by my parents, without actually doing anything to satisfy me. meanwhile I'm being told that everyone that's not a witness is evil. That's a lot to bear for a 10yr old. You feel like something's wrong but the only choice presented to you is to put up a charade or to be thrown to the evil people in satan's system. Fast forward a few years and it turns out that I was stupendously lucky to have been born at just the right time to start college before the WT cracked down on the evils of higher education again. That's the best thing the WTS ever did for me - fail to convince my parents that I shouldn't go to college. All the while I'm being indoctrinated with phobias of the outside world, evil spirits, being eaten by birds after armageddon, and told that mindless obedience is the highest of virtues. What help did the "FDS" provide me in a "spiritual sense?" I always heard from the platform "don't we feel refreshed when we leave our meetings" and it made me feel guilty like there was something wrong with me that every meeting just left me feeling exhausted and every missed meeting was so refreshing.
And once I realized that there was no point in letting other people tell me how I should feel about myself, once I realized that all that really mattered was to be true to my conscience, that left me sitting through every meeting miserable wishing I were anywhere but there, listening to logical fallacies and emotional manipulation. I recognized that it was mostly one-sided indoctrination, but I still had the fear of armageddon so deeply implanted that I couldn't fully break free for years.
Now, I've more or less freed my mind from their control, and what 'good' has come from my involvment in the JW religion? Now I find myself married to a cult member who I deeply love, and forced, once again, to put up a chrade or face loss of family and peace. So tell me what "healthy spiritual teachings" did I miss in my experience? What good was there for me to take away from this? I find your premise completely flawed. The organization enslaves people and convinces them that it's helped them. There's nothing that the WTS has ever done for anyone that they wouldn't get from any church, but most churches do far more good for their community than the WTS does. Basically the only good that the WTS does is help fix peoples homes after disasters so that they can scam insurance companies. Most of the houses would get fixed regardless, so I'm not sure how much help that is.
As for coping, it's one day at a time. Maybe I kept this from my time as a JW, but I just have to keep looking forward to the "new world." One where my wife is awake and we're out of the cult. Focusing on that goal is the only thing that's kept me 'in' for the time being.
this is one of the saddest articles in the wt library... just two years after the organ transplant ban... a jw decided to not donate a perfectly good kidney because of this doctrine... which was changed in 1980. .
*** w69 11/15 p. 701 appreciating jehovahs protection ***.
a difficult decision.
Why is it that they always fall back on asking the doctors to " guarantee" the outcome of a procedure? A defense of the blood ban is "they can't guarantee that blood will even save your life." same thing here, they make the doctor admit that the kidney won't "guarantee" that the kid will survive. Of course they can't! they'd be legally liable if they made promises like that and something happened. What they can guarantee is that without the kidney the kid's going to die and with one the kid has a chance.
Absolutely disgusting and reprehensible.
so talking with my wife last night...i was explaining to her about a conversation i had with a person at work about end times.
he has a strange belief that some scriptures in isaiah perdict something huge is going to happen in september of 2015. she then states that no one can predict the future only the father knows and he is in a cult.
lol on the inside.. i then stated "what about 1914 and the dubs perdiction and what it means today" she said no there was never any predictions.
JT:
The (absurd) math to get to 1914 is in the current daniel book (and i think the bible teach book too), I believe. Basically it goes like this:
the 7 times fortold the 7 years of Nebuchadnezzar's maddness, but it was to also have a second fulfillment
To calculate the time of the second fulfillment, they take the 2520 days (since apparently they used 360 day lunar years at the time, and because there's some random stuff in revelation about 3 1/2 times being 1260 days) and instead make it 2520 years. The basis for this is two random scriptures that cite the concept of a 'day for a year.' These scriptures have nothing prophetic in them, and it's just a complete leap to make the math work.
So, counting 2520 years from 607 (the contrived date of the destruction of jerusalem, which is wrong) you get to 1914.
Now for the problems with their accounting:
First off, the second fulfillment is assumed because daniel was a bit grandious with his "prophecy" (which was really an accounting of historical events to the person that wrote the book) and said that the time of the nations trampling on Jehovah's kingdom would end at the end of the 7 times (or something like that). Since that didn't happen (and since there's no way anyone in the bible could've gotten something wrong) there has to be a second fulfillment that actually happens like daniel said.
Next, there's no basis for the assumption that the 7 times should mean 360 day years just because of some random thing in revelation. If the prophecy was really for us, as they assert, wouldn't god have used a measurement for time that we recognize today? Especially considering it's more accurate? He is the "great timekeeper" afterall, so did he not know how long a year was when the bible was written?
So we've already got two questionable leaps, but now we've got 2520 days. So lets pick a random scripture that says "a day for a year" and use it as justification for the math that we've already put the end date on! Did daniel put a footnote in the origonal text pointing the reader to Numbers and Ezekiel to figure out how to interpret it? Why couldn't we use the scripture that a thousand years is as a day for Jehovah? That would put the end somewhere in the year 2519393 AD.
Continuing on, we've now got 2520 years. What is the length of these years? Well to get to 2520 we had to assume a 360 day year, so where does that put us? We've now got 907200 days, or just shy of 2484 365.25 day years. So, even assuming the date of 607 is accurate (it isn't) that'd put us at the end of 1877 or beginning of 1878 depending on what time of the year in 607 you start counting (BTW, does 1878 ring any bells? It wouldn't for a JW, but we know it was a "marked year" for CTR! He must've been just a hair better at math than the current GB) The only way to get to 1914 is to assume that god meant 360 day years for the 7 times, and 365.25 day years when he said "a day for a year." It's like god didn't want anyone to figure out what he meant!
june 28 1914 archduke ferdinand was killed by a serbian government sponsored assassination team.. this was the trigger event of world war i. actually some have called it world war (part 1) followed less than 30 years later by world war (part 2).. in retrospect this was a useful date for jw's.. it has propelled them for 100 years.. of course jw's have massaged their predictions about the significance of 1914 over the years.. do you feel that jw's would be what they are today without that great war?
do you think that the shooting down of the passenger plane over east ukraine will be an equivalent moment that pushes putin into a corner where he will have to fight the west?
in other words will we look back on that event as the beginning of world war (part 3)?.
I go back and forth on what the effect would've been if 1914 didn't see the start of WWI. Either way, they lost a lot of people in the years that followed, so I suspect that if WWI hadn't happened they would've just moved the date like they did with 1874, and kicked the can down the road until the date coincided with something significant and they would point to it as proof of their divine authority.
It seems likely that they would've eventually (mostly) fizzled out if they'd kept setting new dates that failed without having gotten one spectacularly lucky guess. However they might've also just morphed into a slightly different cult that could've actually been more successful because of not being tied to some absurd date setting doctrine (think mormons).
These days, though, it seems like they're really starting to regret the success they had with 1914. I thin they'd really rather move the date, but they're stuck with it because it's got so much importance. The GB's frustration with the date was evidence in CoC when Franz reported that they wanted to move some of the significance of 1914 to the 50's to coincide with sputnik and buy some more time. It can be seen today in tha they're having to resort to obviously flawed and unsupported teachings (the overlap) just to continue to buy time while maintaining urgency. In some ways 1914 has started to act as a 'sell by' date for people. That old milk is really starting to stink, now that we're 100 years beyond it, and I think (hope?) that it'll have a big impact on the cult and see many leave. The cult may end up being worse off in the (very) long run for having gotten lucky with their date setting.
so talking with my wife last night...i was explaining to her about a conversation i had with a person at work about end times.
he has a strange belief that some scriptures in isaiah perdict something huge is going to happen in september of 2015. she then states that no one can predict the future only the father knows and he is in a cult.
lol on the inside.. i then stated "what about 1914 and the dubs perdiction and what it means today" she said no there was never any predictions.
neverendingjourney - I had a somewhat similar experience. A householder gave me and a friend of mine a little tract (we were like 12 at the time so we didn't know better yet) and after service we reviewed it at his house. I think it was mostly about CTR, and I remember it said something about him selling his clothing business and making millions and starting the WT. We sat there together reading it and making fun of how obviously wrong it was on all counts. It's so weird how effectively the JWs are made to feel so superior to everyone else that any counter argument is either dismissed off hand as a lie, or deemed to be unworthy of their time to consider.
Oh how I wish the internet had been around then...I just might've googled something out of curiosity and I could've been out decades ago.
it seems that the more i research, the more i find that it's all just a big scam.
is there any evidence that even the bible isn't just another big religion/government scam?
would we listen to putin or obama if they told us they have verified new holy writings?
Maybe in my efforts not to seem like a rabid evangelical athiest, I overcompensated on some points. I guess what I was trying to say is that the bible should be read in a similar way as one might read Moby Dick. It has about as much value as Moby Dick too, but as I pointed out, it's cost society far more than any other work of fiction. It's got some stories (some of which are historically accurate) that teach lessons, just like Moby Dick teaches a lesson. The problem comes into play when people look at it as an inerrant directive and code of conduct. If people read it like fiction, they'd benefit from it the way anyone benefits from reading any fiction in that it can give you a different perspective on things and cause you to challenge your own beliefs, which is good for anyone from time to time.
As far as being the basis for the only true religion, it's definitely a fake.
so talking with my wife last night...i was explaining to her about a conversation i had with a person at work about end times.
he has a strange belief that some scriptures in isaiah perdict something huge is going to happen in september of 2015. she then states that no one can predict the future only the father knows and he is in a cult.
lol on the inside.. i then stated "what about 1914 and the dubs perdiction and what it means today" she said no there was never any predictions.
Focus, you're absolutely right. The true origin of the date is completely unknown to essentially everyone in the cult. The current teaching of how they get to 1914 is somewhat more known, but still only by a small minority.
so talking with my wife last night...i was explaining to her about a conversation i had with a person at work about end times.
he has a strange belief that some scriptures in isaiah perdict something huge is going to happen in september of 2015. she then states that no one can predict the future only the father knows and he is in a cult.
lol on the inside.. i then stated "what about 1914 and the dubs perdiction and what it means today" she said no there was never any predictions.
Yeah, there's definitely a great number that are in just because they were indoctrinated young, and now it's just all they know. Myself, I always knew where 1914 came from, at least to a general extent, but the problem was that I knew from such a young age that I was convinced of it before I had any critical thinking skills. The fact that my relatively intelligent parents were so gung ho told me that I could trust the WT, so I didn't look into it too much. The fact that WWI broke out in 1914 just confirmed in my mind that however the date was arrived at, it must have been correct. Once I realized that I'd been lied to, I looked at it with fresh eyes and realized how absurd it was.
I think most JWs would immediately reject any form of numerology, especially as applied to the bible. They don't realize that the most important doctrine in their religion is derived through the same BS techniques of other numerologists.
it seems that the more i research, the more i find that it's all just a big scam.
is there any evidence that even the bible isn't just another big religion/government scam?
would we listen to putin or obama if they told us they have verified new holy writings?
I suspect you know the answer you'll get from the athiests on the forum, so I'll skip that part.
I don't know if I would completely call the bible fake, despite my personal views on religion. It certainly has some accurate (and some otherwise) historical information, and it definitely has some useful (and some otherwise) guidance on how to live your life in a moral way that will make you happy. Many christians would point to the 'timeless guidance' that it contains as proof of divine backing, but I suspect that any sufficiently large book of personal stories that's been groomed for centuries would likely contain similarly valuable pearls of wisdom.
As the phrase goes, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. The bible has some good advice as well as some great examples showing how far humankind has come over the years. Like anything, read it with a grain of salt and a critical eye.
I would say, though, that the costs that the bible has imposed upon mankind (particularly the dark ages, as we'd be about a thousand years ahead technologically speaking if the church hadn't put such a damper on any scientific understanding) likely outweigh any moral guidance that it has provided.
