Does the organization really lend itself to a healthy, happy, family unit? The husband/father is expected to be the head of the household according to the WT guidelines. In reality, every aspect of your life is governed by the WT and you spend every waking hour trying to live up to those standards. I did not abuse my children in any way. I personally don't know of any elders that abused their children BUT now that I am 'out' I can see how some actions of some of them could be damaging emotionally and mentally. I know of men who once married, took full licence over the term and ruled the roost with a mix of selfishness and pride. Taking the lead. Showing strength. And in those families where wives served Jehovah through obeisance, these men lived lives where they were never wrong in anything.....................None of it is healthy. How can it be? When an organization teaches it's members to cast off their own family members if they are not of the same faith, it teaches it's members to be cold and emotionless and encourages distance. The society teaches it's members to love with absolute condition so that it becomes easy for a mother to abandon her son, for a father to disown his daughter, for children to bury their parents - all in the name of the Watchtower and under the guise of doing whats right by disfellowshipping. Normal parents and children could not sever the bonds of love so quickly and so easily - the organization does not lend itself to strong, loyal and healthy relationships.
sammielee24
JoinedPosts by sammielee24
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How many here were mistreated by their "elder" fathers?
by hubert ini am starting to notice some posts about ex-j.w.
's being mistreated, abused, by their fathers who were elders.. i wonder if this is quite common?.
hubert
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How should the congregations be disciplined ?
by vitty ini dont think disfellowshipment itself is wrong, its the enforced shunning that causes the damage.
i think a lot of posters here agree.
personally i think the public reproof is just sick and when a person is marked!.
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sammielee24
I dont think disfellowshipment itself is wrong, its the enforced shunning that causes the damage
I take it you are asking wether or not it's the act of disfellowshipping or the act of shunning which hurts more? You can't separate the two since the disfellowshipping is nothing without the shunning. If I had been disfellowshipped only and my 'privileges' taken away then emotionally and mentally things would have been easier. The shunning, the death of your entire world by that one act, usually causes the most damage. This is not addressing the issue of wether or not it is biblical or not, it's just addressing the fall out from the application. The organization, if it had any common sense at all, would have looked at this issue logically. Most disfellowshipped/shunned people leave and never return. Those that do, often do so for complex reasons and not often because they believe it's the truth. As an elder I used to wonder about that..now I know why. It's because when you are cast out, from all of your family, shunned, dead - then you are forced to acknowledge and accept just how expendable you really were to an organization and how little you meant to any member of any family you belonged to. Being forced 'into the world' and surviving, means being forced to accept the real truth - the truth that your life was cocooned by belief in a lot of untruths...the word and act of disfellowshipping won't kill you but shunning sometimes will.
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JW Urban Ledgends - Fact or Fiction?
by clear2c ingrowing up as a jehovahs wittness my parents used to rationalize or have a urban ledgends reguarding why we could not do something or why something was evil/bad.
some of these i have heard in various forms around here in the forums.
here are some expamples of what i mean.
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sammielee24
As a past elder - no, I didn't personally burn anything but I was told of others who tried. Crystal Blue Persuasion was apparently written about the Truth book. I was told it's easy to figure out if you listen to the lyrics. Maybe if someone knows Tommy James they could go and ask him.John Denver - I heard this one too and it was apparently backed up by an episode on the Johnny Carson show where Johnny apparently asked Denver if he did this and he said yes. Johnny then apparently told Denver to leave his show. Denver apparently would not allow any Witness on his property. The Smurfs? Yep. Heard that one too. Of course, if a wee smurfie got into the KH then it was obvious that the demons were not in that particular one because everyone knows that demons cannot get inside the Kingdom Hall. Heard the one about the sister at the murderers door...ACDC was a new one for me.
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hello, i'm new :)
by MRSJG innew to the forum, new to the truth.
trying to get a better understanding of what i'm looking for.. .
i'm a young married mother of three beatuiful babies.
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sammielee24
Thanks for the clarification Cyg. The bottom line is that I recall the feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach when I was handed the book to read. Too many years of being told that he was an apostate and what association in any form, with one of them would do to me. That book was for me, the real eye opener and pretty well sealed the deal as far as recognizing the lies that I had been fed and followed.
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hello, i'm new :)
by MRSJG innew to the forum, new to the truth.
trying to get a better understanding of what i'm looking for.. .
i'm a young married mother of three beatuiful babies.
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sammielee24
Welcome. Run for the hills. I was born into the 'truth', raised in it and knew of nothing else. I have 3 kids that I raised in the 'truth' and because of the 'truth' they have no contact with me any longer. Ditto my mother, sister and brothers who are all JW's. As a previous poster (Jeff) said, your life will be nothing more than a set of rigid rules and once baptized you are doomed to following those rules or being shunned. Think long and hard about your husband, your family and your kids refusing to speak with you if you dare to question or fall out of the organization for any reason. Think long and hard about that. If I knew way back then what I know now, I would never have raised my kids in the org.
Witnesses will have an answer for everything you can ask them and will smile and wrap their arms around you and call you brother and sister..make you all warm and fuzzy. Realize that by calling you brother and sister, this is an attempt to emulate your family (brainwashing) - they have to do this in order to make you feel 'special' when you are forced to stop socializing with your non Witness family and friends. in order to stay loyal to Jehovah.They make themselves your 'new' family and 'suggest' over time that you discard your real family. But beware! When you fall out of favor, and all honest, compassionate people do, this phoney family will throw you out in the cold without a backward glance.
If I had one point I would ask you to research, it would be - did Charles Russel have the truth? did Rutherford have the truth? The society will tell you they both did and one built on the other. Read what they taught for yourself. You will find out that nothing Russel and Rutherford taught have anything to do with what the Watchtower teaches today. In fact, if you were to follow what the originators of this religion(?) taught, you would be disfellowshipped immediately. If you were baptized tried to discuss this you would be disfellowshipped unless you believe their answer of 'new light'. The bible is the bible - there is no new light.
Just remember, when you are baptized a Witness, you are not serving Jehovah - you become a member of a man made organization who will instruct you how to live by their rules.
Also, get a copy of the book "Crisis of Conscience" - written by Raymond Franz [former member of the Governing Body of Jehovah's witnesses]
A must read book. By the way - interestingly enough the Society pushed us to believe (and has us terror stricken) that Ray Franz was an apostate and thus the book was full of evil and we should run the other way at even the mention of his name......yet...he was never even disfellowshipped for apostasy, he was disfellowshipped for eating with a df'd person. Funny how the truth ain't the truth.
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Cost of my surgery
by littlerockguy ina couple of weeks ago i had a sebaceous cyst removed from my back; it was infected and almost the size of a baseball and went down to muscle.
it got infected.
it wasnt that big for a long time and i had to have it removed.
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sammielee24
Canada has a plan pretty well the same as NZ/Aust/UK - I think that the US is one of the last hold outs. I have family in Canada and when they get sick they go and get themselves checked out. My aunt spent 4 weeks in hospital last year for diabetes related illness and prior to that had a brain infection requiring a fairly long stay in ICU. She now has a brain tumor...had this happened in the US, she could not have afforded the medical care necessary. I've seen too many people I know here that don't have enough money to pay into the best health plans and who end up using credit cards to pay for their bills...then the credit card bills mount up because there isn't enough money to pay them off and so on and so on. According to the National Reform website for health care here, the cost of healthcare is higher per person in the USA than any other country. I know they have very good doctors and other health care professionals, but I think most countries do too - I'm not a proponent for private health care because it becomes mired down in money and often at the expense of the middle class and poor who can't afford the best they charge for that care. The site also gives a brief summary of medical bankruptcy - most of those hundreds of thousands who have declared medical bankruptcy are college educated, working middle class who do have health care.
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Cost of my surgery
by littlerockguy ina couple of weeks ago i had a sebaceous cyst removed from my back; it was infected and almost the size of a baseball and went down to muscle.
it got infected.
it wasnt that big for a long time and i had to have it removed.
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sammielee24
I'd be screaming "socialized medicine" if I hadn't heard horror stories from my friends in the UK.
I'd take Canada's healthcare over the US style any day! I know too many people who live their lives terrified of getting even a cold because they can't afford a doctor's visit. Forget about having to use the emergency room. Say what you will about socialized medicine but the number one cause (according to reports) of bankruptcy in the USA is medical....that's a crime..and now that the bankruptcy laws are changed, you apparently will be unable to dissolve those debts so easily. You may hear only horror stories from some people and often those will be people in the upper income brackets who can afford to pick and choose their care - but for the majority, it's a life saver.
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"No Apologies is no longer one of Jehovah's Witnesses"
by No Apologies insometimes i just don't know when to keep my big mouth shut.
today i think finally said enough to get da'd.. for those of you just tuning in, a recap: about 2-3 years i came to realize everything i had been taught as a jw was a load of steaming turds.
since then i have managed to fade away more or less, without incident.
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sammielee24
never trust a JW, even a marriage mate
....lol...can I relate!!! I was such a naive, trusting JW and I was an elder - my (soon to be ex) wife was coldly calucalating. I packed all of my things up and trusted her when she said I could retrieve them - only when I went to do that, she changed the locks, bolted the doors and then claimed she destroyed all of my things. She left me with absolutely nothing at all - no clothes, coat, boots, all my tools, my work files - everything. To top it all off, she removed every piece of personal data of mine and all of the photo albums - even went so far as to remove the family pictures off the walls of the house, and then hid them outside the house so I couldn't find them. In essence as if df'ing and losing your entire support structure, family and friends weren't enough - she made it abundantly clear that she felt obligated to destroy me emotionally, mentally and physically in order to make me realize that coming back to her was coming back to Jehovah. So incredibly sick and twisted. I ended up with nothing - not even one picture of my kids - when I left. Yeah...I truly believed that you could trust your JW mate implicitly.......
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Which aspect of JWs would you like to see a documentary about?
by Gadget inif you had a chance to make a documentary about some aspect of the jws, what would ou choose?
would you talk about shunning, the blood issue, explain how its a cult, or what?
unfortunately this would only be for an 8 minute segment on a current affairs programme so i need something that'll get peoples attention and make them think without having to go too deep into the subject.. what would you choose to talk about?.
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sammielee24
I would have to side with 'googlemagoogle'....I'm married to a df'd, ex witness - never been one myself - so my interest would be spiked by something that affected me directly or that I thought might affect me directly like 'the household report'. If there were only 8 minutes to tweak the public interest and hold it right off, I would go with something they can relate to and in this age of privacy concerns etc, I'd want to know what it is they write down and why.
Of course any good segment would only give you enough to get you interested and playing theocratic war games would only touch the top of the topic to get the public wondering and asking questions, then once the door blew open, I'd work my way up the ladder one step at a time. After the reports, I'd go for the jugular and hit the real estate and financial holdings - all the things tax payers like to know about...until I finally destroyed the mystic of disfellowshipping, doctrine, policy, jc's and so on and of course elaborate on the orders to kill issue of the GB when it comes to blood transfusions etc and their flip flops that have resulted in the death/sacrifice/murder of men, women and children all in the name of old and new light..
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The story of my life (part 7- Bethel, the end)
by onacruse inya know, it's odd how the "big" things just sometimes seem to bounce off your forehead, rather like seeing the trees instead of the forest.
well, fwiw, that was the state of mind (if you can call it that) i was in, after less than a year at bethel.
i was reassigned to the night-shift janitorial crew.
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sammielee24
A riveting story....twill be interesting to hear the rest of the stories....