I find a little more clarity in the mechanism of shunning by configuring that WTS holds your family and circle of friends hostage, and will execute them (socially) if you make the wrong move. As far as analogies go, You cannot be dead to Them because You are permitted to speak back to Them, as if from the grave. But they are not permitted to speak back to you, if from the grave. There is no confirmation of afterlife, as it were, when your family and friends still in the cult are executed. The lever or moment arm that the WTS has over you is the power to prevent You from hearing Them. Not Them hearing You. Not much different from a Black Hole, out of which no information emerges. The threat they hold over you is to kick you out of that black hole, so that your family and friends are inaccessible and dead to you. If you are shunned, you are the survivor and they have executed all those you once loved. They did as they threatened for all those years - they killed your family. (I've had a lot of time to chew on how to think about this. ) YMMV
Posts by rmt1
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17Jehovahs Witness Shunning & the Crusades
by freemindfade inwhile discussing being mistreated by my own jw family last night with my wife, i wanted to try to make her think critically about what shunning really is, and at its root what how beneficial it is.
earlier in the day i sent her non-apostate scholarly article on religious shunning being tantamount to psychological torture.
and most witnesses don't think into much about why they do things, its more of a "this is the way we do it, don't over think it" process.
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rmt1
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shunning is so unloveing so unmerciful that it if practiced bible says you deserve death romans 1;;32 and entire chap
by poopie in2 the judgment is there stop shunning and jehovahs burning anger will turn back continue and you will fall into the judgment of romans chap 2 .
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rmt1
There's got to be a chart or table that lists the shunning, excommunication, banishment, etc practices in general feature against the sum total population of that particular religion. I cannot bet that the Catholic church with its version of excommunication can shine a candle to the general catastrophic mental, emotional, psychological and other damage that results from WTS disfellowshipping/disassociation practice. WTS is holding your entire family and circle of friends hostage at gun point. If you seek to jump the Berlin Wall, they execute them. At this primitive level, you do not even have the capacity for open-mindedness. They are 'not even wrong' because you are not even able -at this primitive level of coercion- to evaluate claims. They *could be "wrong" if you *could do independent research and then choose to stay out of a cost-benefit rationale. (Recalling the Terry 'not even wrong' thread. Wrong means testable. WTS prevents testing.) -
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The Walking Dead cocktail party reminds me of... me
by undercover inas fans of the walking dead know, our heros have found sanctuary (or have they) at alexandria, a seemingly normal safe zone from the walkers/rotters/etc.
this past episode had rick's 'family' invited to a 'welcome to the community' cocktail party, hosted by deanna, the leader of the community.. having entered alexandria, we're starting to see the different levels of ptsd in our little group.
rick, carol, and daryl trust no one.
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rmt1
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Walking Dead maintains a zombie equation of state or zombie equilibrium function that is finely tuned to provide maximum plot exclamation for minimal plot relevance. The WTS tasks itself, like the writers and producers of some fantasy show, to always populate its grand stage with just the right amount of appropriately timed appearances of demons, satans, smurfs, leprechauns, worldly people, spiritual vampires, ad nauseum. -
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Memorial Question?
by naazira inover the years, i've come to notice that some of the friends will not touch the plate with the bread or the cup of wine ,when the emblems are being passed around.
i remember a row of 3 people told the brother to skip over them.
every year i have noticed this behavior.
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rmt1
My automatic reaction was that they are wise to the fraud and are consciously or unconsciously telescoping their disinterest in sustaining the fraud. But they are not in position to apokalyptein their disillusionment, and must maintain a form of participation. -
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Effect of reading here.
by New day insaomebody mentioned in a recent thread here i think that the more they read here the more they feel angry at the wt.
personally, as an ex-elder (only resigned a few months ago) i feel that it is more like suddenly being on the outside looking in at a whole group of people playing parts.
the zealous pioneers answering all the time.
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rmt1
One of the most fraudulent roles to fill is that males are intrinsically a spiritual head. Males are not necessarily spiritual, nor necessarily interested in the religion's forms, nor necessarily ambitious in the religion's hierarchy. Implicit in this role is that any Thatcher is a Jezebel. I.e., competent female leadership is a concept that falls under thought crime, and cannot, or is not permitted to be represented, in expressible language. And yet, the women are the large army (on this cotton picking plantation) and they must be galvanized and calibrated by some intermediate, token, symbolic female authority. And so you get the ridiculous and contemptible picture of a pimple pencil neck in shirt and tie being walked through his paces by portly wizened ancient semi-divine elderettes who know that one must use the correct tool in the correct way, but are forbidden to address a congregation in a formal audience setting. -
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Devouring the Forbidden Fruit - Higher Education
by cappytan inwell, i told my wife over the weekend i was going to go back school to finish my degree.
she is 100% supportive of it!
apparently she doesn't think higher education is so evil either.. since my former major was computer programming and that was in the late 1990's, i was told i'd have to retake a bunch of classes since times have changed.
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rmt1
The highest revenge and offense you can offer to that fuming den of pestilent vipers is to educate yourself. No crime of the Watchtower is greater in maximum sum collateral damage to all victims of the cult than the categorical sataninization of education. -
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What would happen if life was found elsewhere?
by HowTheBibleWasCreated insee jws have said time and again jesus died once for all time... a quote from hebrews.
okay rule out humn-like aliens what about animals plants and microbes... i once had a hot fight with an elder when i still believed that here was no reason to doubt alien animals etc.
yet not based on any wt article witnesses reject this often.. lets suppose say in a month microbes are found on ceres (i doubt it will happen but let's roll with it) they are living as much as our cells are and reporduce... okay what would mother say in the magazines when millions of jehovah's witnesses demand to know why jehovah created microbes on a dwarf planet?.
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Why are we so hard on JW's??
by James Mixon ini was thinking about this last night.
what would happen if.
someone new check out this site, what would they think?.
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rmt1
Another thing. They claim Accuracy, as if accuracy was important, as if they supported a scientific paradigm where accuracy was important, as if they supported the habit of the Boereans to test out whether this or that emergent understanding (hypothesis) of their religious experience (data) was valid and consistent (true).
They can get a pass on not being Precise. They have repeatedly predicted end dates and failed, so they can claim that they are off the mark, in terms of Precision, of the future event they claim Accuracy on, end of the world. It could be tomorrow, in terms of lack of precision, and they'd be 'right' or 'accurate'. It could be another century, in terms of lack of precision, and they'd be 'right' or 'accurate'.
The claim of accuracy in (THE REAL WORLD) ordinary science carries with it an implicit invitation to all competitors, detractors, dissidents to go take their own data and use common standards and arrive at some conclusion that validates or modifies the previous finding. If the JW leadership implicitly invited its membership to do as the Boereans did, then the claim of accuracy would be about as relevant in a religious context as it could possibly be.
But they do not! They truncate that implicit invitation by issuing the superating claim of having divine knowledge that is necessarily untestable and unaccountable. It is a bait and switch, text book fraud, scam by the numbers, like every other of their many forms of bait and switch. They speak with a forked tongue, "Test out our hypothesis!", but then bite down with the fangs that only they have the fact because they are personally and individually informed by the Creator of the entire Hubble volume. One cannot contest a fact derived from a context greater than the context within which you may observe and hypothesize. And so, the member walks away with the thoroughly confused impression that this fact is accurate, and that you the member must accept this fact that is from an untestable source AS IF you had tested it yourself.
Why be so hard on them, indeed. -
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Why are we so hard on JW's??
by James Mixon ini was thinking about this last night.
what would happen if.
someone new check out this site, what would they think?.
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rmt1
This is trivially immediate to answer.
The degree of the answer depends on the degree of the individual's potential that was imprisoned, throttled in the crib, suffocated, chained up, squandered, starved of the least scraps of resource.
How can one be so hard on the JWs, indeed.
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rmt1
The graphic is insulting because with its stupid little arrows it apes the definitiveness of actual informational graphics in actual news media that actually communicate some measurable and graphable relation between two separately, repeatably observable and demonstrable data points.