funny title you might think but consider this point and apologies if i am covering old ground here...its not intentional.. i was raised by my mother who was and is a devout jw and as such until i was 20 (10 years ago) i was the same...trying my best to fit into the social environment i clearly was not made for but benefiting from good wholesome association with fellow brothers and sisters (note the sarcastic tone...make what you will of it).. althought at the time i didnt realise it but i was what others consider intelligent and quite academically able; i had a mind like a sponge and would spend hours in the jw library at the kh (which surprisingly enough contained non jw literature)...it was this that i read and would digest endlessly where i could.. one of those books (why it was there i dont know), was what i later undertood to be criminal law reports concerning cases that had gone before the courts.
my childish thirst for knowledge was intrigued...(i was then about 12).
the legal arguments i hadnt a clue what they meant but the facts surrounding these crimes were good reading.. i then knew i wanted to be a lawyer and that was what i said when an elder asked me what i wanted to do when i grew up; i mentioned trusting this man that i had read a book in the kh library and found it interesting...and that i wanted to be lawyer...i remember him smiling and saying that it was better to pioneer rather than seek a highly paid job...personally i didnt know what he meant properly but i felt a bit sad...and demotivated...i later in the week went back into the library and found the book had gone...!!.
Absolutely agree 100%.
Also they tend to focus on the fact you don't need an education to get the best things in life, because any day now is the new system and you will have everything you have ever dreamed of in a paradise. Less effort than spending years of your life on education, might as well just work part time and wait for this paradise to come along.
2 nights ago, i had a weird dream.
i dreamt that an angel named macaroni visited me with billy ocean and told me to spread the word about the god uranus.
it also told me that i will have a girlfriend in the future.
Because he said his visions were from God and people believed him. That's what makes it different. We don't believe your dreams are divinely inspired.
It's just like the people who believe that Mary was found on the glass building in FL a few years ago, it was a divine miracle.
Same people that believe that Mary was also in the 5 year old sandwich that was sold on Ebay.
Someone just has to believe it to make it true.
the only jw i still have contact with is my mother, mainly due to the fact that she is close with my 12-yr old son.
she is single (divorced actually), cleans for a living, if that's what you can call it and has no other children.
while she doesn't shun me per se, she certainly isn't overly friendly and keeps most of our communication limited to grandkid info.
I have real issues with this. I have a 61 yoa mother in okay but not great health and she is a very dyed in the wool JW, that doesn't bend rules. We don't socialize at all, she refuses to eat lunch with me, visit me, etc.
HOWEVER, she will email me and ask me to come and paint her house or something like that. In the past I always ran over and attempted to help her out thinking that she would thank me or give me a little bit of credit, but she never did always "thank Jehovah God I asked him for help and look my house is painted" while I am still standing there, and of course did all the work. Pissed me off to no end.
Finally I turned her down this year, I told her that she treated me more like slave labor, I was good enough to help her financially or physically when things needed to get done, but she couldn't speak to me or be friendly with me. She won't eat a meal with me. I really felt like the black slave that is sent to the kitchen to eat while the plantation owner eats in the dining room. It just wasn't right. There wasn't any way to justify her behavior in my eyes.
If you have ANYONE in your home and they help you, treat them like a human being, be gracious, show manners, offer to buy dinner, etc. I think the disfellowshipping thing is sometimes used to be cruel.
Anyways, I declined her request this year to go help her. I have always done it in the past and it felt good. I felt like I stood up for myself, I wasn't going to be USED and treated like a doormat. I told her anytime she wanted to treat me like family, I would be happy to treat her like family. But just because she's my mother doesn't mean I have to be free slave labor. I told her she could ask her "friends" in the congregation. Which I know means, they will never come.
.
george w bush is a god fearing christian, he says.. george w believes in pre-emptive strikes.. so why didn't god make a pre-emptive strike against satan before he got his claws into adam & eve and save us all of this hassle?.
englishman..
Because Satan raised a question and if God had destroyed him right away, then all the other angels would have always wondered if Satan was right and that question would never have been settled. (at least that was what I was told)
My question then was: If there was a question raised up in heaven, how many people do you need to be faithful or disobey until the you have proven your point? I mean seriously we have billions alive today, and there have been thousands of years of recorded history, how many people have to either prove themselves obedient or disobedient until we finally know the answer the challenge up in heaven????
When I play games it's usually like best out of 3 or something. What is this? Best out of 50 billion? Does the question actually justify human suffering for thousands of years?
so, if you handed a jw a copy of the un report on the wtbs involvement, how do they react?
are they able to explain this away?
just curious.. red
I emailed my mom about it and this is her direct quote,
"I know that the "Watchtower
Bible & Tract Society" is not a 'member' of any worldly organization.
They may have been 'listed' as a user, but not as a 'member'. The
fastest way for you to confirm this would be to call them in NY."
So I sent her everything printed directly from the UN's website. That has been a few days and I've had no response. But of course I could have just called the Watchtower Society in NY and asked them. LOL.
But I think with everything else, it will just be shrugged off, I do believe that some of the members are more like the wife that sits home with full knowledge that her husband is cheating on her with some tramp waitress or whatever, but chooses to ignore it and chooses to smile when he comes home and pretend like everything is just perfect.
Ignorance is sometimes a choice.
.
i have read ozziepost's post on those tasmanian elders who raided a sda church.. does anyone know of similiar behaviour by elders?
Alcoholism. I agree is a HUGE problem.
I have several very "faithful" relatives that will never quit the JWs and they tend to live their lives in a pickled state. If they woke up from the hazy state they were in and actually sobered up, they might realize what is going on. But until then, they continue to make their own wine, drink whiskey straight, and live their lives a little numb, it all works out for them.
before baptism, outsiders are never viewed as having quite made the grade of fully fledged brotherhood, in fact, when greeted in the kingdom hall, many of us, especially if not raised in " the truth", were often made to know this fact merely by the words we were greeted with, or how we were acknowledged in meetings, for instance, when commenting at the watchtower study.
"mr anderson" as opposed to "brother mitchell", was to me a sense of arrogance to be tolerated until having made the final cut from intrested person to non-baptized publisher to baptismal candidate and finally baptized brother.
are these word games that can be associated with cultlike phenomenom, that of being jw and the status received after baptism?
There are also the visual ques... if someone walked in the Hall with a green Bible they were instantly recognized as not being a regular.
Then came the hardcover black Bibles.
Then came the soft-covered marroon Bibles.
Then came the black reference Bible.
It was if you had a Bible wasn't good enough, you had to have the newest edition that had just been published. I don't know that the newest Bible fad is and I don't care.
lately something has bothered me as regards to many on jwd who wonder what to do, once they have found the organisation to be a destructive, mind controling sect.
aside from these ones deciding how to exit without causing a judicial meeting nor a stir among the publishers, it whether or not they want to risk their marriage and or family ties.. many on this site have related how their marriage fell to pieces because the dub mate could not accept their loved one "leaving jehovah", and they could never meet in the middle to save the marriage.
others who leave, push their dub mate away by their constant verbal expressions against the organisation...because they think they should....hence, the marriage falls apart.. here's the hard part i don't know the answer to.
There is nothing more valuable in life than simply LIVING YOUR OWN TRUTH.
Living a lie I think must be the most difficult thing to do to yourself.
by now, most of you will have seen the scanned images of the watchtower's service report for 2004. i do not have the feb 1st magazines, so i cannot speculate further on the reason for not issuing the report in the january 1st 2005 wt.
looking at the figures, there are some trends that should be considered very disturbing to the wt leadership.
although baptisms increased marginally by 3,571, the difference between the average number of publishers and the number of baptisms is eye-popping indeed.
and thinking of the congregations that are still there, many of them share a KH. I remember our hall had 3 congregations sharing the hall, 1 south, 1 north, and 1 spanish speaking. So actual building are fewer that that number.
When I think of the mortgage that each hall carries it takes some really dedicated people to keep paying the bills. I know a time when my mom and I lived in a 5 thousand dollar trailer and the KH at the time was something like a 200k hall. Where we didn't have A/C at home, my mom continued to contribute towards the power bill and such.
As people leave, so does their money. Money losses mean that fewer buildings will be around. The Society never pays the local KH's mortgage or power, water, phone bills.
honestly, are you a better person now or were you a "better" person when you were a jw?
I'm the same person. I have always considered myself a good person, however now the reasons for NOT doing certain things have NOTHING to do with not making it into a new system or fearing God. My reasons for being a good person are my own.
So I am better now, because my reasons are better, my motivation is better.
