I personally think one of the main reasons is the social paranoia in the dubland.
Many Jehovah's Witnesses with mental problems are much like the most difficult cases of paranoia: even when they decide on a therapy they think and/or they are reaffirmed by their spiritual leaders that they know better than their therapist.
When the therapist suggests the problem may stem from the truth, she/he is instantly perceived as part of the evil Satan's conspiracy. Tell me how it's different from severe paranoia.
Pole
Posts by Pole
-
35Jehovah's Witnesses and mental illness
by seattleniceguy ini just read an excellent article on the issue of mental illness and jehovah's witnesses by psychologist named jerry bergman.
the link is:.
http://www.premier1.net/~raines/mental.html.
-
-
Pole
-
18
Analyize this
by IP_SEC inanalyze this:.
i had a dream last night, that i was being tried by the congregation.
it was outside, in the woods, elders standing around me in a circle.
-
-
Pole
I agree with Dave - the dream probably "symbolizes" your plans of a slow fade and gradually not living up to the expectations of the elders. You think at some point they'll ask for a decisive move on your part, and that's what scares you.
They shoot you but you don't die. That's the best part, actually. At some point I realized (and wrote about it on this board) that the elders were like policemen with plastic guns. Ain't that similar? They think they have the power to condemn for eternity, but when you're mentally free their magic ceases to work on you.
Pole -
26
Service dodger
by IP_SEC inhey everyone,.
congradulate me for dodging service for 2 whole months!!!
yipppyyyy!
-
-
Pole
Oh ya 10 or 12 hours made up. I get plenty of time in on this board!!!
Do you report every post as a return visit? (Now, that would smell fishy - with 700+ posts over the last 2 months). I suggest a 1:100 ratio. Pole
-
36
Do You Believe A Person Has The Right To Die?
by minimus inor do you think that a person should continue to be made to "live" even though they are in a vegetative state?
-
-
Pole
Nathan,
Exactly my thoughts. The notion of "rights" has no application in such situations.
I had a close member of my family dying in awful pain for 9 long months. He couldn't say a word, but we think he was conscious to the end. It is simply cruel to let a person experience that kind of thing if they can and do express their wish to die.
Pole -
10
How does Google work so fast? Any techies with an inside track?
by AlmostAtheist ini'm banging on an oracle database with a table holding 200,000,000 records.
just getting a count of those bad boys takes several seconds.. it got me to wondering about google.
they index 8 billion pages.
-
-
Pole
I don't think anyone not working for Google is going to answer your question in a sufficiently informative way :-).
For my petty projects though, I try to follow these two rules generally which I'm sure you know too well:
1) Hardware (that's pretty obvious)
2) Powerful indexing and caching algorithms
The biggest database I've ever worked on developing has 120,000,000+ records served by MySQL. It is relatively fast only because we had to think really hard about proper indexing and caching results at some stage. You can kill any machine/farm without considering the issues of caching ans indexing.
Edited to add: Any improvement if you run the same query on your 200 million Oracle table for the second time?
Pole -
51
Were you invited to the Memorial?
by JH inhas anybody invited you to go to the memorial this year?
do you expect to be invited?.
usually elders come over a few days before to invite me, but they didn't come yet....
-
-
Pole
adelmaal,
It's like they think we are obligated to attend. How silly is that?
That's right. You can be a disfellowshipped pervert but that doesn't mean you can miss the memorial. The truth is many disfellowshipped folks are still mental slaves to the WTS and they take the whole blame. So many elders like to think they can exercise power over people who are technically not witnesses. That's what I think surprises them when they call a guy like me. "Spiritually weak" - oh yeah that happens? Not going to the memorial and not even lying about intending to go? That's just too hard to parse for the average elder.
Cheers,
Pole
-
51
Were you invited to the Memorial?
by JH inhas anybody invited you to go to the memorial this year?
do you expect to be invited?.
usually elders come over a few days before to invite me, but they didn't come yet....
-
-
Pole
An elder (my former book study conductor) phoned me yesterday.
Elder: Hi, Pole, I thought we might meet some day to discuss things.
Pole: What 'things'?
Elder: Well, you know. You haven't been to a meeting for quite a time now (10 months with one exception).
Pole: Well. Unless you have something very specific to discuss (and I meant a Judicial Committee - I think he got it), I don't really want to meet with you.
Elder: But you will show up at the Memorial, right?
Pole: Not really.
Elder: Well then, bye.
Pole: Bye.
Pole -
46
Latest "talk" by GB member being emailed around
by catchthis innot sure if this is a "made up" email or not -- sounds like any other talk you've ever heard..... .
>a talk recently given by brother guy pierce ... .
>safeguard your spirituality by training your perceptive powers .
-
-
Pole
Thanks IronGland. Yes. I got it that way too. I was just wondering what kind of rhetoric effect was meant, but apparently there was some, since even SNG got "kind of" enchanted.
Good job, brother GB Member.
SNG,Yeah, actually, that was the one point that I thought was kind of interesting. As a percentage, your age would slowly approach that of Jesus', so that at some point you would be 99.9999999% of his age.
Ok, I have another interesting point to consider for you. Assuming that Jehoovar is infinitely old, will we ever be 0.00000000000000000000000001% his age? Hmmmm. Ain't that interesting? Doesn't that simple fact make us want to spend more time in field service. ;@)
(Just messing with you).
Pole -
13
JW cd-rom availability?
by spider ini was looking for a watchtower cd rom, and as i can't go through official chanels, i looked at e-bay to see if they had it.
yes, there it was - but i found to my surprise that people are making copies and selling it - there is one here which is going for $31 dollars so far, and its still got a day and half to go.
check it out (paste it into address field).
-
-
Pole
PM me to "find out" about the 2004 one. :).
Pole -
20
Who owns the Kingdom Halls?
by No Apologies inon another thread ( http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/86931/2.ashx ) i saw these comments:.
think again, the kingdom halls are paid for by the local witnesses, and when its paid off, its donated back to the wt society, what an elaborate scheme!!!
when the construction is finished the congo finally has it's own kh, right?
-
-
Pole
First of all, it surely depends on the local law, and so it differs from one country to another. (In the thread quoted in the first post I refered to the situation in my country).
Secondly, no individual witness has any say on those matters regardless of how much time and money he/she donated to the construction. When you leave you can't say "give me my shares back".
So effectively it is the borg which controls the property. And my expectation is they may try to get even more control for fear of whole-congregation apostasy.
Pole