You should never go to the same Kingdom Hall as your own family. That is a recipe for disaster.
Sorry to hear about all your troubles. Too bad your family can't be a little more understanding.
i was raised in the truth my whole life, my immediate family are jws and my moms mom is a witness as well as my fathers mom.
other than that the rest of my family are non jws.
i was raised very balanced, my parents never forced the truth on me or my siblings like most of my friends parents did getting baptized at ridiculous ages!
You should never go to the same Kingdom Hall as your own family. That is a recipe for disaster.
Sorry to hear about all your troubles. Too bad your family can't be a little more understanding.
at a recent one day assembly i walked away with the thought that the wtbts sure does not like witnesses who have the opportunity to make a good living.
there were, in one day, three experiences of witnesses who turned down "6 figure salaries" because there would be some traveling involved and some meetings would be missed as well as missing family worship night.
i thought it strange that the exact phrase was used of "6 figure salary".
Some people have to feel good about themselves for turning down a 6 figure salary, but that's just plain silly. I know plenty of brothers and sisters who have two jobs and miss meetings and service because they can't hold the fort down. That's okay, but missing a meeting once in a while if you make 6 figures isn't.
It's kind of silly if you think about it. And most people just ignore this kind of talk that doesn't apply to 99.9 percent of the witnesses anyway.
i have a serious problem that i cannot solve on my own.
i was born-in but am only in by a thread at this point.
i quit the tms a few weeks ago and wrote a post on it.
You are the head of the household. Bring this up to another elder. You're also probably feeling needlessly under the microscope. Plenty of brothers step down from the TMS and/or miss a few meetings. Maybe some judgmental dummy might think something, but not everyone.
Talk to another elder and tell them you don't feel comfortable not being in the loop and about decisions being made without your knowledge. It's not scriptural to do that.
i realised something today.... we all happily accepted something really ridiculous.....something that if worded how i will word it now, we would have rejected as ridiculous, but after a moments thought, would have to concede.. we once followed the governing body because we believed they had supernatural powers.
how ridiculous you may say, no we didn't!
of or relating to things that cannot be explained according to natural laws.
I was raise a witness and I was never taught anyone on the Governing Body had any special powers. If you thought that well that's on you my friend.
Weren't they supposed to mediate on the matter, study what the scriptures had to say, pray about it, and then come to a decision? That's what I was always taught by my parents. The GB don't have visions, special divine instruction implanted into their heads, or any special knowledge any other JW may not have. They are just in charge. I've never heard any modern GB member say they were Moses, although I'm sure a few thought it.
i didn't find this particularly surprising given jw indoctrination is all about how evil the non-believers are (and how deserving they are to be destroyed during the big a) and how the wbts is absolutely right and everyone else is absolutely wrong - so it is not a big jump to islamic fanaticism.
I think there is a huge leap from being a Jehovah's Witnesses to ISIS members who go around cutting people's head's off and throwing gay people off of buildings.
I don't see an intellectual comparison there. Sorry dude. I think you're letting your hate get the best of you. Believe it or not most of the world's problems do not stem from someone being a JW once. That's an insult to all ex-JW's.
positions of trusta jehovahs witness spokesman said: we have tried to educate families to try and educate and protect their children, so that children can protect themselves if they find themselves in a situation.if jehovahs were found to have abused someone if they are in a position of trust they would no longer have a position of trust.asked why about the claims sewell had not been kicked out of the jehovahs the spokesman insisted we cant comment on specific situations.we dont give out personal information, he said.http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/jehovah-cult-kicked-out---8891636
It doesn't quite make sense, because if you have been convicted of molesting/raping more than one person that automatically shows you cannot be repented.
So this guy was never disfellowshipped at all? Something seems missing in this story.
has the new june 2015 watchtower finally done away with 7000 year creative days?
the box the bible and proven scientific facts.
genesis chapter 1 uses the term day to set out the stages in the preparation of the earth for life in all its diverse forms.
The new understanding is that they were not days at all but "epics". And no one knows how long an epic is. And that each epic had a different length of time. So the 2nd epic could have been 100,000 years and the third epic could have been a million years. No one knows.
They've been way out of the mainstream on this for 50 years. They've simply gotten to the correct point that if the creation story in Genesis is true, no one knows how long the creative days really were and it would be wrong to speculate.
That's a lot saner than the rest of the idiots who still think God created the universe in 6 days.
i was reading the bart's answer to terry on th name "jehovah", and i remembered that when i did my personal study about the church fathers of the second century i found that justin martyr ignored the divine name:.
from the first apology of justin martyr:.
... and as many virtues as are peculiar to a god who is called by no proper name.
I'm not sure why this is an issue since all of Christendom believe YHWH (Jehovah in English) was God's name. This isn't a witness issue.
The founding fathers of America believed Jehovah was God's name. Thomas Jefferson did. George Washington did. Abraham Lincoln did. Jehovah is used in thousands of great pieces of literature throughout history to represent God's name. Go to Saint Mark's Cathedral in Venice and YHWH is right there on the tile when you walk in the building on the right hand side. Hemingway always referred to God as Jehovah.
It wasn't until the witnesses started really pushing the issue to differentiate themselves from all the other Christian religions that they all started pulling back on the use of using YHWH and Jehovah.
Jehovah and YHWH were around long before the Jehovah's Witnesses. They just used God's name like everyone else was doing in the 19th Century.
Or you could just ask a Jew to take some time out of his very Jewy day and he'll let you know what God's name is (so long as it's not in public, because they are not supposed to say it out loud).
But then again I'm not sure what the arrangement of the letters of God's name is supposed to prove. It's different in almost every language. If the text uses the original tetragrammaton then that's what should be translated. What vowels you use in between those letters is simply a metric of whatever language is being used. I think sometimes we overthink these things.
please pardon if this a repeated topic.
i have had virtually no contact with any witnesses beside my mother for the past few years.
she watches tv constantly and claims she has never seen anything on the watchtower abuse cases.
You know I have to say that saying child molestation is "rampant" in JW-land is going a bit overboard and makes one look hateful and bias instead of well-meaning and thoughtful.
I have several friends who were brought up Catholic and what happened in the Catholic Church I would call rampant. My friend was raped by a Catholic priest for 10 years. This same priest is known to have raped around 300 to 400 other boys in a three state area over thirty-five years. That is rampant. The rate of abuse in society in general is what? Around 30%. What is it in JW-land?
with satan's media and satan's internet the odds seem to be in his favor,while jehovah's earthly organization with all these multi-million dollar lawsuits waiting to be settled in or out of court it.. it seems that satan's multi-organization can claim the high moral ground while jehovah's earthly organization is left holding the bag full(in the thousands 23,000?
) of anonymous child molesters just waiting for another victim and more lawsuits in the making.
looks like a victory for satan demoting jehovah's organization to the shit can file of ancient history.. for a hundred years it looked like jehovah's organization was going to keep going strong then jehovah caused so many wrong dates for when the end of the world was coming and now with the invention of the internet where these big problems with jehovah can be aired in public seems to cast a spell of doom over jehovah causing him to hate to see tight pants on men and women and child like wizard toys and deaf people mastering the art of baiting ..
It’s grandiose thinking to believe that Martin Luther couldn’t bring down the Catholic Church, but the Internet is going to bring down any religion, whether it be Mormons, JW’s, Scientology, the Catholic Church, etc.
I hear this all the time, but wishing something was true isn’t going to make it happen, and having confidence in something is going to happen when it goes against all the empirical evidence of past history borders on hubris.
Let history play out before you start writing the history books.