Posts by slimboyfat

50

Pomo because of Proclaimers book, 1995 generation change and Daniel prophecy book

by Gorb in

jw
friends

have some time thinking about my recent and less recent personal history because of the summer holiday.. the 90's crossed my mind.

the years i became pimo.

a friend, a room mate during the 1993 moscow international convention, went to university.

slimboyfat

A lot fewer than used to. The conversation around the end is very different than it used to be. I’m still reeling from the fact that the summer convention released the first episode of a proposed 18 episode movie of the life of Jesus. What sort of message does that send about the nearness of Armageddon? It could be the 2030s before the project ever gets finished. I remember some JWs used to get twitchy if the speaker at the convention talked about next year’s convention without qualifying it with a comment about Armageddon coming first.

On the other hand, at least until the last year or so, JWs are still very active and engaged with the religion in other respects. There is a high number of pioneers and auxiliary pioneers and people still go on preaching vacations where the need is greater and all the kind of thing. Maybe participation in the ministry will begin to decrease because publishers no longer report hours. It would be remarkable if it didn’t have at least some dampening effect on participation in preaching. If it goes really pair-shaped then it’s possible to imagine a steep decline in preaching in the medium to long term. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

50

Pomo because of Proclaimers book, 1995 generation change and Daniel prophecy book

by Gorb in

jw
friends

have some time thinking about my recent and less recent personal history because of the summer holiday.. the 90's crossed my mind.

the years i became pimo.

a friend, a room mate during the 1993 moscow international convention, went to university.

slimboyfat

Yes, I worked out a couple of years ago that, judging by the baptism and publisher figures, there are likely now more JWs who were baptised after 1995 than before. That means that more than half the current JWs didn’t experience the generation disappointment the same way those of us who grew up around the JWs in the 80s and 90s did.

Having said that, I was actually baptised at fifteen years old in 1997, two years after the generation revision in 1995. I don’t know what that says.

9

Gaslighting older JW couples to avoid BLAME

by raymond frantz in

https://youtu.be/kvdqtookscu?si=fuqhj44cokmdzkt7.

one of the greatest issues facing the organization today is couples that sacrificed family life or businesses opportunity in order to preach the many dates the watchtower set in the .

past only to be betrayed in recent years as the watchtower is moving away from date setting.

slimboyfat

I was there. I remember working out that 80 years after 1914 was 1994 and that Armageddon simply had to come by 1995.

On the other hand, I don’t remember any fuss around the year 1999/2000 among Witnesses I knew, and I was at my most active in this period.

I did know one older JW who said Armageddon would come in 1999 because that was 120 years after the first publication of The Watchtower magazine and Noah had 120 to preach before the flood. She was very much an outlier and arrived at this opinion on her own steam. She was baptised in 1941 and rejected various Watchtower updates along the way, for example she insisted that the old teaching about the Great Tribulation starting in 1914 was correct and that we are still living in an interlude before the Great Tribulation resumes.

50

Pomo because of Proclaimers book, 1995 generation change and Daniel prophecy book

by Gorb in

jw
friends

have some time thinking about my recent and less recent personal history because of the summer holiday.. the 90's crossed my mind.

the years i became pimo.

a friend, a room mate during the 1993 moscow international convention, went to university.

slimboyfat

Thanks for your reflections Gorb! It’s interesting that you found the Daniel book too much, but presumably you sat through the multiple studies of the Revelation book a decade earlier. The Revelation book is way more out-there compared with the Daniel book it seems to me - I arrived at the KH too late for the Revelation book the first time round. Do you think it might be fair to say that the wackiness of the Daniel book was released at a time when you were ready to recognise its wackiness? Because on an objective basis I think the Revelation book is more extreme/eccentric/wacky, or however we want describe it, than the Daniel book. Plus coming on the heels of the generation change in 1995, maybe you were primed and in the late 1990s to realise that the organisation had problems.

I know one brother who claimed to have got baptised in the early 1990s as a result of a study of the Revelation book alone, nothing else. He is a rather odd individual to this day, quite old now. I know of another Bible study in the 1990s who was at the point of baptism but objected to the identification of the United Nations as the scarlet beast in Revelation and cancelled her study. A sister still called on her for years but she was not interested in joining after that discovery. This had nothing to do with the so-called Watchtower UN scandal of the late 1990s, she simply objected to the demonisation of an organisation that she perceived as attempting to do good in the world.

9

Gaslighting older JW couples to avoid BLAME

by raymond frantz in

https://youtu.be/kvdqtookscu?si=fuqhj44cokmdzkt7.

one of the greatest issues facing the organization today is couples that sacrificed family life or businesses opportunity in order to preach the many dates the watchtower set in the .

past only to be betrayed in recent years as the watchtower is moving away from date setting.

slimboyfat

The generation failure was huge, perhaps an even bigger deal than 1975, in my opinion. It wasn’t a specific date but it was a massive disappointment. I think the graph below shows it had a bigger impact on JW growth in Britain than 1975 did. You can see there was a temporary dip after 1975, but there was a much more prolonged decline and stagnation following the revision of the generation teaching in 1995.

9

Gaslighting older JW couples to avoid BLAME

by raymond frantz in

https://youtu.be/kvdqtookscu?si=fuqhj44cokmdzkt7.

one of the greatest issues facing the organization today is couples that sacrificed family life or businesses opportunity in order to preach the many dates the watchtower set in the .

past only to be betrayed in recent years as the watchtower is moving away from date setting.

slimboyfat

The only specific date that was set in the lifetime of anyone now alive was 1975 and that was a long time ago. It’s misleading to say anyone around now gave up opportunities to “preach the many dates the Watchtower set”.

16

Sad observation

by Gorb in

jw
friends

reading about jw.org rules changes these days gives me a sad observation.. everything what "is" today, can be gone tomorrow.. that makes it all worthless.

you were an elder, searching for evidence, and proof to df a person.

because he or she was not humble enough.

slimboyfat

Very gradually and with mixed signals.

On the one hand they have got rid of the word “disfellowship”, told elders only to remove people as a last resort, and then only for three months or so, and to say hello to them at the meetings in the meantime. That seems like a huge change.

On the other hand, apostasy is still viewed the same, all the procedures are still in place to remove people, and they haven’t technically rescinded the instruction from earlier videos to socially cut off relatives in an effort to incentivise them to return to the organisation.

How will the new instructions be applied by JWs and will further relaxation of the rules follow? Are they going to remove the extreme shunning videos of the past few years and disavow their message?

Things are a bit up in the air and we wait to see how things land. In the meantime there is still scope for elders to convince themselves that not much has changed, if they are included to that view, and so not condemn themselves for past actions. If the organisation spells out the changes slowly and sends mixed messages along the way then they will leave room for elders to make sense of the changes in ways that can sit more comfortably with their past actions.

25

Watchtower Used to Teach Jesus Was Not an Angel and was "the Lord from Heaven" Who Died on a Cross!

by Sea Breeze in

.

no wonder they instructed congregation elders to throw away old literature from kingdon hall libraries.

slimboyfat

Thank you for even acknowledging that early 1st and 2nd century church Leaders quoted 1 Timothy 3: 16 as "God" and not "He".

I didn’t say that. I said:

I agree that quotations from early church fathers is one of the strands of witnesses that can be useful for recovering the early text.

The situation seems to be the opposite of what you stated above. Metzger notes that early church Fathers read “who was manifest in the flesh” in 1 Tim 3:16 and “God manifest in the flesh” is not attested by any writer until the last third of the 4th century. (See pages from his textual commentary attached) Where did you get your information?

16

How many JW in the 1920's

by xaminewt in

i'm trying to find out how many jw there were globally in 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927 and 1928. the watchtower of 1926 says that there were 25,000 in attendance at the magdeburg convention for the public address, but the same watchtower say that one the last day of the convention there were 15,000 present, so i assume at least 10,000 were interested persons - non jw.

the watchtower 1955 says: "for this year of 1927 the number in attendance at the spring memorial internationally was 88,544, yet of these only some 18,602 were active as house-to-house kingdom announcers".

these statistics would seem to imply that the majority of jw in 1926 were at the magdeburg convention.

slimboyfat

I would like to know how many baptized JW there were globally in 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928

I doubt this specific information can be found anywhere. We don’t even know how many baptised JWs there are today because the publisher number includes unbaptised publishers, and not all baptised JWs are active, and some report preaching irregularly.

On the point about the number of JWs in Germany, it was indeed the country with the second highest number of JWs in the 1930s, but it was still behind the US, as far as I’m aware.

10

Olympic games/ jw.org keep on the watch

by Gorb in

jw
friends

the main article on jw.org is about the succesfull olympic games 2024 in paris.. many withness watch all the sport episodes of the games, but jw.org comes with a sour story about the games and not reaching real peace.. again jw.org is on the wrong side of history a d doesn't feel the public anx jw opinion.

the closing remarks of the ioc president bach, thaf the games will not reach peace but plant peace in the hart of people was a strong message.. the organization and message of the games is all that jw.org wants to, but can't.. very sad and narrow minded, as ever.

gorby.

slimboyfat

I hate the Olympics. I’m 100% on board with this, in fact they don’t go far enough in my opinion.

But I do realise that’s a minority view and many people, including JWs, will agree somewhat with your perspective.