Posts by Alive!

31

Jehovah Misses Me

by Phoebe in

jw
friends

made the mistake of opening the front door today...i was expecting someone to service our central heating...oh dear, it was a sister instead :(.

she tells me jehovah misses me.

it seems god only sees me if i go to the meetings.

Alive!

Hi Phoebe,

It’s frustrating, but worse still...it’s somewhat threatening in its nature, this whole ‘Jehovah misses you’ ‘ She left Jehovah’ ....and so on.

I had a sister greet me in a public shopping mall a couple of years ago...after a quick and cheerful exchange...she then got close up and asked me ‘when are you coming back to Jehovah?’

I kind of gasped inside, that question, if you are a believer is huge in its implications.

And there we are, having just swapped some jolly and friendly greetings...news about our families...and she actually asked me this question as if it were as normal as asking if I’d got over the flu and was I going to feel better soon...

When you’ve had time to stand back, And really listen.....it’s pretty darn sad.

No thought for my feelings, as to whether it was OK to ask such an emotion packed question in such a silly way....in the middle of a shopping mall....

She’s a dear woman.

But, I confess I lost a little respect for her at that time, then I rethought it....she is caught in a cycle of thinking not of her own.

And I just don’t see God the way she does.

I just don’t.

17

Feeling pressure to attend the Memorial?

by Fay Dehr in

feeling pressure to attend the memorial?.

as a former elder i write this response to hopefully help those genuinely feeling “guilt” before their god.

if you are a jehovah’s witness or an “ex-jw” (for example, disfellowshipped or lapsed), then i hope that this will be of help to you.

Alive!

I felt I wanted to attend a service today....I went to a local church.....

The whole service was one big thanks giving to Christ and He was the absolute focus, His death, His resurrection.

His love, His love for every last one.

It was very odd. 😉

13

The implement of Christ’s death

by lastmanstanding in

simple physics.. the timber that was used to execute jesus had to be substantial.

thus, its weight could not have been carried entirely, but rather it had to be dragged.. get a log with no crosspiece, one substantial enough to nail a man to, and try to drag it through town.

try to get a hold of it without it sliding out of your grip.

Alive!

And yes, I reckon the WT just tried to be deliberately ‘different’ to ‘christendom’.

In retrospect, the whole idea that an entire stake was carried by the condemned across the city and up a hill....? It can’t be.

But the cross beam.....sadly yes.

13

The implement of Christ’s death

by lastmanstanding in

simple physics.. the timber that was used to execute jesus had to be substantial.

thus, its weight could not have been carried entirely, but rather it had to be dragged.. get a log with no crosspiece, one substantial enough to nail a man to, and try to drag it through town.

try to get a hold of it without it sliding out of your grip.

Alive!

A human could carry a cross beam....which would be ultimately attached to a grounded pole, which is already in position, in situ.

Carrying a whole post, a stake of wood?

And how long would it take to fix the stake in the ground and for it to hold steady enough to keep upright with the weight of a human on it?

No.

The ‘crucifixion’ stake was already in place surely, the victim carried the cross beam.

An unthinkably horrific death.

20

Make the Truth Your Own

by neat blue dog in

this is something that hit me just relatively recently.. the phrase "make the truth your own" is a very famous catch phrase in jw culture.

it was a pet philosophy of daniel sydlik and has been used and is used in talks, literature and song.

every witness knows this trope.

Alive!

One very important ‘truth’ in scripture is that Christ, and Christ alone secured victory over sin and victory over spiritual death for mankind....biblically, ‘He is our Saviour for all mankind, and especially for believers’ - well of course especially believers because they get to have a living Hope in this life....or a delusion if that is your perception of it all.

A marked variance of this core truth which a Witness may meditate upon given the Memorial ‘season’ is the Watchtower teaching that our own physical death releases us from our sins.

I’m not writing this to preach to the unimpressed 🙂.....just highlighting a blatantly sarcreligious distortion of a basic truth that is bound up in the biblical Christ.

Scripturally, Christ died for us. It’s a basic in the whole Christian faith.

We don’t get to absolve ourselves from our broken ‘missing the mark’ state by our own physical death.

Sorry, but that one Watchtower teaching alone is enough to make a ‘truth-seeker’ dig deeper and question.

20

Make the Truth Your Own

by neat blue dog in

this is something that hit me just relatively recently.. the phrase "make the truth your own" is a very famous catch phrase in jw culture.

it was a pet philosophy of daniel sydlik and has been used and is used in talks, literature and song.

every witness knows this trope.

Alive!

In the scriptures, the only truth is the Christ.

I never really felt comfortable with the expression ‘in the truth’ as used by JWs.

it always felt a little ‘off’ to me .....even as a fully committed JW.

23

Massive hints against alcohol

by purrpurr in

jw
friends

in the most recent assembly there were several heavy hints about not drinking alcohol at all.

saying that it doesn't give a good witness or would stumble others.. is this a new "unwritten directive?.

Alive!

My experience was that a large number of witnesses were/are extremely heavy drinkers, men and women.

And....I’m talking about fully approved Elders, Ministerial Servants and Pioneers...not just ‘fringe-dwellers’.

I dont mean this in a judgemental way....but as mentioned, the CD needed to be numbed, I’m sure.

When I look back, overall we just didn’t have a wholesome culture.....something was ‘off’.

To live in belief that the lives of billions depended on your ‘witness’, to know you failed time and time again to ‘win’ people over, many who were family, loved and known to be decent folk.....the emotional burden is heavy. One minute you are out under the ‘guidance of angels’ searching for honest-hearted ones in the most significant mission in the history of man, the next minute you were planning that evenings social activities....which always involved alcohol. Our conversations could be all about interior design, the latest plan for this and that...the next second we’d be straight faced ringing a doorbell, offering a magazine on Armageddon.

I look back....it was borderline insanity.

No wonder heavy drinking was prevalent.

15

The Red Headed League

by dropoffyourkeylee in

i am sitting here watching my pioneering wife get service time ‘writing letters’ to not-at-homes.

she has a long list of names and addressees where the jws in field service never got anyone home.

the letter is simply a word for word copy, handwritten on note paper, then sent in the usmail.

Alive!

One particular "special" drive to get us all auxiliary pioneering turned out to be a month of rain, lots of it.

So, I had my first taste of meeting at the KH and writing letters to "not at homes".

We brought our own paper, envelopes and stamps....and copied letters one after the other.

I looked around at the morning group, as we did our best handwriting, and I just KNEW this was wrong on so many levels. We were fleshing out our time, that's what it was all about. And it wasn't even about fellowship, as everyone quietly got on with their work and my occasional comments (which I thought were funny!!) were met in smiling silence, but not encouraged any further for chat.

So, the next time we all sat down, the Presiding Overseer was joining us. At the table, I asked if anyone had thought of word processing the letters, printing them out...and then we could just hand sign, with a brief sentence or two, to add the personal touch which seemed to be the argument as for why we were handwriting.

Clearly, it was not appreciated that a friendly good suggestion was put out there.....

This was yet another time where I felt the dark thud in my heart -because from the JW perspective, there are people out "there" who are going to DIE - where was our true urgency? In that room, I felt a certain chilled callousness about our work, sending tracts containing worrying illustrations and things, with no thought for the mental health of those who might receive them, or how their personal circumstances were when they opened the envelope.

And I DID feel that the personal handwritten touch was indeed creepy, and not something that a non-believer would feel very comfortable with.

Seemed to me, a word processed letter hand signed by a sister or brother was a nicer way - but no.

Oh no, no, no. It was all about getting in the hours. Madness, dont you think.

25

...and so it begins

by Phoebe in

jw
friends

i've had an email from a sister who tells me that out in field service this morning a long standing route call has told them she won't be taking any more magazines and doesn't want them calling on her again because she has heard about the jws child abuse scandals and cover ups.

she was quite angry with them and said your elders say there is nothing wrong but there is and it will all come out.. this is the first time anyone i know of has been challenged on the doorstep and they were absolutely shocked and also angry.

angry that the organization is not preparing them for dealing with this and for not being honest with the brothers about what is going on ie: lawsuits etc.. just thought i'd share that with you..

Alive!

That IS interesting Phoebe.

16

Session #8: "Bullet in the Head"

by Brian J in

so at the phd today with my wife and me, and in slowly getting to the heart of matters (like peeling an onion if you ask me), the dialogue in part went like this: .

phd: if it came down to it, would you take a bullet in the head instead of giving up membership in your organization?

wife: absolutely, i would die for my faith.

Alive!

Hi,

Your wife sounds like a very special person. You clearly love and respect her. She's a deep thinker, intelligent, loves and cares unselfishly. All these qualities and the family life you share add up to real blessings, real quality of life.

But, you've mentioned before that she lives with suicidal depression.

I also struggle with suicidal depression....and so much of that I trace to living twenty years of cognitive dissonance in the Watchtower pressure cooker.

Oh, I've got a history of trauma events...truly painful and not your usual 'life' experiences...and I accept that there is a knock on affect from that. However, I always outwardly presented well, my inner emotions were kept under guard, escaping now and then.

So, the organisation and my faith built structure into my life.....and I was a true believer, I seemed to thrive, my life was full on as a JW, for many years.

But, the tension of believing everything came from God via the Watchtower, whilst experiencing the reality that too many Watchtower scriptural interpretations were at best weak, at worst biased and convoluted...and somewhat dishonest....for a 'deep thinker' like myself, this was painful to the nth degree.

The depression comes and goes in waves for me, now I've been 'gone' for nearly 6 years.

Age is not on my side, being 60 and losing my life's investment in friends, faith and life structure.

Go carefully with her Brian - I'd suggest her declaration of 'taking a bullet' for her faith is more about 'taking a bullet' rather than lose everything that is her 'life' as she knows it.

Or at least tightly wrapped up between her 'life' and her 'faith'.

This isn't about her intelligence, her ability to think.....but the potential dread of the unknown outside of her 'safe' place as a JW. Terrifying for her likely. Terrifying.

I'd be inclined to understand her declarations as self protective screams against the Unknown. For her, protection and love from God, can only come through the organisation.

And whilst that is deeply comforting when one believes it to be 'true' - it is terrifying when cracks are shown......