Awful experience. Thanks for sharing. If you have any emotional ire left you may wish to follow the advice here and seek justice however, it's a lot of extra pain in a dreadful situation and there is also honour in closing the chapter with a goodbye at the graveside and then getting on with living your life as best you can as a testament that terrible treatment by the deceased and the living will not dictate how you will respond to and share yourself with the world.
Posts by Qcmbr
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100My mother passed away this morning...
by Tatiana infor any old-school ex-jws here that remember my many posts about my abusive jw mother and my sister committing suicide because of it...she passed away this morning because she began to bleed out and refused a transfusion.
she had been in the hospital for a month.
it appears she suffered a stroke and wasn't found by the brothers & sisters for three days (they missed her at the meetings).
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452
Faith... and Trust: The Same Things?
by AGuest inin a discussion with some other dear ones, the question was asked as to what such ones put their faith in.
in response to one comment that"one can't function without faith," another disagreed, stating ones can, that "many do so every day... the ones who have trust" (in things like the sun rising in the east versus the west).
that trust extended to "faith" based "on nature and the natural order of things.
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Qcmbr
I'm more stumbled by Krishna. He's bl**dly blue. In fact I'm stumbled by all kinds of utter religious garbage. You can barely take a step before someone pops up to tell you some confusing, subjective and always made up concept that is of zero use but is always some form of social sorting ( with the teacher taking preeminence.) Reject them all, be stumbled by faith based woo and recognise that when it's tough walking through the cowpats that the answer isn't 'try harder' it's 'get out of the field'.
Does anyone but a JW naturally use the term 'stumbled' ?
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56
A Mormon becomes a JW in the Feb 2013 Watchtower...
by cedars inglancing through the feb 2013 "public" watchtower edition, an interesting article appears on page 8.. here is the pdf download link.... http://www.jw.org/download/?fileformat=pdf&issue=20130201&output=html&pub=wp&langwritten=e&option=trgchlzrqvnyvrxf&txtcmslang=e.
it's interesting how, in the story, the young man's jw aunt and uncle switch him from mormonism to the jw faith using third-party material (the nov 8, 1995 awake!
article), and he ends up becoming a jw after confirming on the official mormon website that the claims in the awake!
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Qcmbr
If you wanted to be purely mercenary and compare the life effects of being LDS to JW you might be tempted to be LDS based upon the wider family support ( normally excellent youth support ) , women's organisation , singles efforts and the more hopeful nature of LDS theology ( almost zero Armageddon and end times discussion , low focus on bible memorisation for debate purposes and a more confident place in the world - less of a persecution complex.) The modern LDS church has become a desirable place for faith and family based believers but it was not always so. Just as JWs have sacrificed many of the community based life of the members ( good food at conventions, birthdays, Christmas, large gatherings etc.) and replaced these with more 'purity' based concepts so the LDS church is swinging the other way. During the 70s the LDS church got caught up in a wave of end time talk and became much stricter ( my mum wouldn't drink coke or buy sweets called wine gums in case she became addicted to caffeine or got a taste for alcohol by taste association ) especially regarding sex and music ( reaction as well to the era!) but it's gradually winding back those elements to a more 'do what you want in the bedroom' approach rather than 'sex only for kids and force yourself to find it icky while doing it' default.
Tithing is a big put off but again , for the services provided, it's not too bad and some people , once they've given up tea, coffee, alcohol and cigarettes might even come out on top. With the LDS welfare net thrown in ( you can get your bills paid and shopping bought while you struggle - humiliating though ) and the free labour you get ( meals when you are sick , missionaries to help dig your garden and someone normally has a van to help you move house) it's possibly a net gain.
People are of course unique and different and just like lovers that which attracts and the straws that break the camel's back are different. I knew one old guy join the JWs from our congregation due to loneliness (neglect and cliques are still rampant in LDS world despite best efforts to avoid them ) and a deaf guy found the JW deaf program more useful to our naive efforts ( though he thought JW teaching was bonkers) , but I baptised one exJW myself and had another join our church. The latter mentioned how difficult it was to leave the JWs because she would be shunned. Her family have indeed cut her out of their lives. It seems the barriers to JW to LDS conversion are much higher.
There is a tsunami of intellectual disaffection within the LDS church right now that is breaking it from within. It is so blatantly untrue ( historically) that increasingly the core members admit they stay because even if wrong its still a very safe and fulfilling lifestyle and to be fair the people, when they aren't being dogmatic preachers , are pretty awesome.
I suspect the JWs are going to suffer the same problem offset by the level of intellectual maturity they have coupled with Internet access ( so the Westernised portion will die off followed in a few decades by developing world stagnation and then shrinkage.)
Intellectual deconversion raises obvious barriers to future conversion in other faiths.
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452
Faith... and Trust: The Same Things?
by AGuest inin a discussion with some other dear ones, the question was asked as to what such ones put their faith in.
in response to one comment that"one can't function without faith," another disagreed, stating ones can, that "many do so every day... the ones who have trust" (in things like the sun rising in the east versus the west).
that trust extended to "faith" based "on nature and the natural order of things.
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Qcmbr
I wanted to follow on PSacs ideas from a while back regarding the unknowable god.
If god is not detectable by virtue of his nature but can choose to modify / cloak / inhabit matter in such a way that he or his effects are detectable ( for example visions or walking on water ) then we can only suggest that people do not know about him because he chooses to remain undetectable. I do not have any truck with the illogical idea that we ( mere 100kg bags of animated star dust ) must look high and low for an unknowable being before he will decide the point at which he becomes perceivable, no that is rank stupidity, like expecting ants to have an appropriate attitude to us before we help them; the onus is completely on the father / teacher / master / creator / revealer figure to initiate the contact in an unmistakeable way.
Many people claim to have this revelation. They claim that the unknowable god has made himself knowable. The problem is that their subjective experiences with the divine are so different and utterly contradictory to everyone else's experiences and reveal so little regarding the real world ( its almost always useless info on how heaven works, how someone should worship or how a human chemical emotion such as love is an attribute of supernatural forces) that it is indistinguishable from and of as much use as a fairytale or a dream. The way to understanding claim those with the subjective experience is to put aside critical thinking and , as a child, believe and have faith while waiting for the arbitrary nature of the unknowable god to reach some tipping point and for revelations to occur.
The moment that information begins to flow between the unknowable and the material then often no further explanation is required / sought as to the source of this information, it must be the unknowable god! That the information is neither useful ( what does one do with a vision of a god on a throne?) or distinguishable from artistic imagination ( I saw a valley dry bones speaking ) and contains no information not already available to the subject experiencing the revelation ( no revelation ever reveals new laws of physics, new mathematical proofs, cures for illnesses etc.) is telling.
We have several well defined and well studied paths for how perception works and how it is a 'play' presented to our conscious mind normally after the subconscious decision has been reached and how that play can be altered to meet expectations ( we see things that aren't there, we continue to see illusions even when we have enough facts to explain them, we imagine the speed of events changing and so forth - examples on demand!) We know that a mendacious person can construct fantastical stories, authors can write fully realised worlds, mentally ill or abnormal brains can construct alternate untrue perceptions, emotion , lack of information , lack of processing time or actual brain wiring ( learnt mental filters) can produce imaginary experiences as the brain struggles to keep the 'play' going at all costs. This brain ability , perception constructed on the fly from imprecise inputs filled in with previous experience and expectation, is undoubtedly responsible for dreams, waking imagination and revelations ( unless we wish to ascribe all revelations, no matter how contradictory,how unique, how culturally apt , how immoral or fanciful as of equal weight and as manifestations by the unknowable god). In the light of this common human trait ( I'm switching to a more personal mode to avoid pricking egos) a believer such as I once was must explain:
Why is my supernatural experience (SE) more likely to be actually supernatural than simply brain induced?
Why does my SE reveal emotionally satisfying information but nothing else?
Why do I get a specific SE but other people get contradictory ones or non at all?
Why do I think myself immune to perception failures even if I can perceive myself having one (I.e. I can experience an illusion despite understanding it)?
Why do I share my SE when the only route to this knowledge is actually for someone else to have a subjective SE?
Why do I presume to understand the process to achieve my SE will work on another person when in fact I am perceiving a will driven being who provides SE according to his will rather than my process?
Why does my SE allow me to monopolise and redefine words I neither created nor own( like 'love', 'truth' or 'God') such that others can no longer use them unless they accept my ownership of the definition?
Why does my SE allow me to moralise that which is immoral ( killing, rape, slavery, child sacrifice, war, genocide, guilt, blackmail and so on.)?
Why am I unable to accept that others may have had an SE that generated similar behaviour patterns to mine but on investigation found it to be caused by something else and see how that is relevant to me?
P.s. to keep the thread on topic and to fulfill stereotypes - AG got away with it again!
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23
So ARE Mormons a cult?
by Found Sheep inhad a short, cuz i cut it off, conversation about mormons today.
she claims to be one.
before i knew she was my big mouth called it a cult.
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Qcmbr
Men and women wear temple garments. The only requirement is to be endowed in the temple ( a ritual ). Normally only people about 20 or older, new missionaries or newleyweds would be considered for the endowment.
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A truce between Atheists and Non-Atheists?
by palmtree67 inricky gervais tweeted this 11/14/12 and i totally agree with it:.
"there are good atheists and bad atheists.
there are good believers and bad believers.. no god has ever changed that.".
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Qcmbr
Thx EE.
Just in case anyone thinks I was being sneaky reading on the other forum and that they did not know I was reading I found the following from AG from a post there a while back:
SA, waving at dear Qcmbr
Seems they already knew.
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23
So ARE Mormons a cult?
by Found Sheep inhad a short, cuz i cut it off, conversation about mormons today.
she claims to be one.
before i knew she was my big mouth called it a cult.
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Qcmbr
By almost any definition they certainly were when they started ( charismatic leaders , cult of personality, new revelations, group rewards and group punishments and so on.) Now they have the veneer of history and the respectability that comes with adjusting to the society they reside in ( dropping polygamy and more extreme language against other faiths ) they are beginning to lose the tag cult and are edging into the skirts of orthodoxy. They will always be a fringe group but they aren't as extreme as they once were, they have too much money invested in the world to gain much from biting it ( same reason JWs have dialled back the more extreme anti UN stuff I presume.)
Do they still destroy people , steal time , alienate families, link sex to guilt, invoke tremendous peer pressure and cause immense emotional and practical issues for doubters? Yes. Even a loving group can end up acting like a pack of emotional wolves when they are trained to. My vote is - still a cult and all the more dangerous for their size, wealth and acceptance.
Just to add - look up Dannites to see what can happen even amongst self styled people of god.
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85
Did Life Originate By Chance or Intelligent Design? Or is There a Third Option?
by JimmyPage inwhen discussing the argument of how life originated the wt always boils it down to being chance vs. intelligent design.. no scientist in their right mind believes it happened by chance.
nor do most scientists believe that life is a product of god.. there is a solution that the wt completely ignores and that is... natural selection.. how many here who believe in a creator have honestly examined what natural selection really is?.
(i've been reading "the god delusion" by richard dawkins and was very surprised when i came to the chapter that actually mentions the watchtower society's arguments for intelligent design.
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Qcmbr
Oooo - looking forward to that Cofty!
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85
Did Life Originate By Chance or Intelligent Design? Or is There a Third Option?
by JimmyPage inwhen discussing the argument of how life originated the wt always boils it down to being chance vs. intelligent design.. no scientist in their right mind believes it happened by chance.
nor do most scientists believe that life is a product of god.. there is a solution that the wt completely ignores and that is... natural selection.. how many here who believe in a creator have honestly examined what natural selection really is?.
(i've been reading "the god delusion" by richard dawkins and was very surprised when i came to the chapter that actually mentions the watchtower society's arguments for intelligent design.
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Qcmbr
Some of those chemical globs seemed to be aware (though of course they were merely performing chemical interactions ) - is a cell aware? The more I find out about science the more I'm reminded that we aren't divided into neat boxes and how change is an inbuilt part of the whole. It may even be possible that we will one day undo ourselves and replace our biological self with a mechanical one; the definition of life will have to once again be redefined.
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Did Life Originate By Chance or Intelligent Design? Or is There a Third Option?
by JimmyPage inwhen discussing the argument of how life originated the wt always boils it down to being chance vs. intelligent design.. no scientist in their right mind believes it happened by chance.
nor do most scientists believe that life is a product of god.. there is a solution that the wt completely ignores and that is... natural selection.. how many here who believe in a creator have honestly examined what natural selection really is?.
(i've been reading "the god delusion" by richard dawkins and was very surprised when i came to the chapter that actually mentions the watchtower society's arguments for intelligent design.
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Qcmbr
There may be many paths to generating life. The difficulty is marking the transition between behaviour at the chemical level to behaviour at the replication and processing level - i.e. what is our definition of life? Chemicals can exhibit some behaviour normally associated with life http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcpcFL2hes8 meaning that we may actually have no start of life, merely an ongoing aggregation of chemicals in multiple places some of which have had enough time and energy to progress to the cellular level.
Even if we can replicate a process for chemicals to organise and can somehow speed up the process to acount for billions of years and we label that as an abiogenetic process we still cannot say with any certainty that this discovered process is what actually happened.
Also when we die as a complete organism it is absolutely incorrect to say that the individual lieforms that once collaborated to make us die, the only thing gone is the human brain activity. The bacteria in our guts goes into overdrive and parasites compete with incoming invaders such as fly larvae to utilise the food sources of the body just as surely as when our brains were alive we utilised the resources of the food we ate. We are not alone, we are a nation of combined , independantly viable, lifeforms collaborating temporaily for mutual gain. A corpse is not useless.