(originally posted march, 2014)anyone who has awakened to ttatt and has conscientiously left the organization--especially a once-prominent, highly-regarded, studious believer from a prominent multi-generational tribe of jws-- after decades of devout, high-profile "serve-us," who continues to put in an annual appearance at the memorial thoroughly subverts and undermines, by this one act, any hope s/he may entertain that his/her departure will stir family or former friends to question the whole watchtower bamboozle.
by this one concession s/he assigns him-/herself by every single jw to their handy and dimissive purgatory: the "spiritually-weak.".
nothing blasts a louder, clearer, and more deliberate message to the jws who personally knew you and those familiar with your jw bona fides that you are not merely "not making the meetings," "inactive," or "spiritually-weak," but that there is a conscientious reason you have rejected the entire watchtower society life than choosing to forego what they know you once believed to be jehovah's must-attend, one-and-only, holy/sacred event of the year for his people, the lord's evening meal.. you hand them the very justification they so relish to self-righteously label you as a "submarine witness" deserving of jehovah's, and more importantly, their judgement.
People go for their families. It's rather silly to think every ex-witness or fader all has to be on the same plain of consciousness and if they are not there is something wrong with them. Every person has to live their life that best suits them. You can't ask people to leave the borg and then tell them, well you now have to exist in a mini-borg or there's something wrong with you or you're not doing the right thing.
Let everyone make their own decisions.
current u.s. federal judge is one of jehovah's witnesses - see more at: http://www.jw-archive.org/post/114109639783/current-u-s-federal-judge-is-one-of-jehovahs#sthash.pz6qywnk.dpuf.
I can't think of any scriptural grounds for someone not to be a judge. This would be a conscience matter. There are cases of witnesses still being police officers, too, even if it is not very common.
There are witnesses who own guns to hunt as well, although it's not common in the mainstream.
And you can't cherry pick out cases this guy may have presided over to somehow question his who he is. People's lives are not perfect yet somehow we act like all witnesses have to live only one type of life and if they are not perfect they are hypocrites. I personally am a work in progress and view everyone else that way too. I see ex-witnesses sometimes are as judgmental as witnesses and many times look for things to be wrong, because they want it to be that way.
None of us know this guy personally. There are enough bad people that we don’t have to make EVERYONE bad because of our emotional response to every witness.
http://www.cato.org/blog/religious-persecution-first-freedom-remains-under-global-siege .
march 19, 2015 10:05amreligious persecution: first freedom remains under global siege.
by doug bandow americans take religious liberty for granted.
if you answer 'yah', why do you so answer ?
Do you even watch the news or even know what's going on in the world?
I know that may be harsh, but the news is full of nothing but murder, beheadings, war, bloodshed, and ISIS is throwing gay people off of building tops and cutting peoples heads off for being Christian or not their being their brand of Islam. Do you know how long it takes to cut a person's head off with a knife? It's minutes. Not seconds. And you don't die until the very end when your spinal cord is cut.
You really need to do some inner soul searching.
if the witnesses have the truth and have been going to meetings for many years and every week they learn how to be effective in the ministry and learn about the bible on sundays and every week have a family worship night, why are they afraid to talk to anyone who doesn't agree with them or question their beliefs?
if they have the truth then nothing can refute it.
the truth is the truth.
There are strong minded people and there are weak minded people. Weak minded people can be persuaded into believing almost anything.
I think we can all agree that more people are weak minded than strong minded. Maybe it's 60-40.
And remember. Some people have a belief system because they truly believe it and those people are going to live by that system no matter what. You see that in Conservatives or Liberals or Communists and with Born Agains and with nuts like ISIS. No matter what you say to them nothing will change their mind.
Others are complete dummies or uneducated or easily influenced and they can be put off-balance by a leaf falling on their shoe. This is simply human nature.
my parents are zealous jecultah's blindnesses, but my sister and i are not.
because of this, we are limited in our abilities/opportunities in life.
mu parents hate my sister because she went to college and started a full time job and thus isn't able to go to meetings or service.
If you're not baptized you don't have a lot to worry about.
Do your parents realize that not going to college is a suggestion and not a rule? Many witnesses go to college. Just like anyone there are old school JW's and those who have a brain of their own. Ultimately, too many people who are JW's don't realize that there are only a few rules they have to live by, and everything else is up to their conscience. I'm not sure what it is, perhaps peer pressure, but people who are active JW's have the ultimate decision making power and not anyone else. You have to decide whether you want to go to school or not. If you don't go then that decision is on you no matter what someone else makes you feel. I personally don't care what others think. But I see that many witnesses and ex-witnesses have this belief that they are forced into doing everything they do and that it's the "religion's" fault for whether they went to school, who they married, or how they live. Ultimately, those decisions are yours and you're going to have to live with them. You can't blame someone else when you make a decision. If you are weak minded and you let others influence your decision making that is all on you. Please feel free to bash me, but that is my opinion. It's one thing to not believe in your faith anymore. It's another to blame all your poor decisions on somebody else. You can say you were pressured to do things, but ultimately you make the decisions.
If your parents are happy as JW's they are not going to listen to you and you're just going to alienate them by trying to counter-act what they believe in. Just my experience.
hi everyone, this may be the stupidest post ever.
i am stumped for an answer and would love to hear your opinions, though.
every week or two for the last couple of years, i have a dream--or at least that's what i'm calling it--that consists of me waking up or thinking that i've waked up, and seeing the ceiling of my darkened bedroom filled with algebraic equations.
Your brain stores everything you have ever seen or experienced. These memories are all stored there and when you dream your mind creates narratives from all your life experiences, ideas, emotions, and memories. For many people they dream about something they were recently thinking about or experienced, but for the most part your brain creates random narratives from your memories. This is normal and they have no universal or deeper meaning. Your brain is one of the most complex engines that exists. Random dreams are part of the normal lifecycle of REM sleep.
You're reading too much into what you're experiencing. Just because you cannot recall memories or experiences while you are conscious does not mean they are not all still stored in your brain.
am i alone in this feeling?
i wish i could muster the cojones needed to tell my husband "i want a divorce, move away, not be a jw anymore!".
i find myself screaming these same words over and loud inside my mind, several times a day, and yet on the outside my actions could not be more opposed to these inner feelings.. sometimes i worry that this internal conflict will cause me to go crazy.
I think it is normal for anyone to want to run away from their life at one point or another. It would be abnormal if you didn't feel that way. There is good and bad with everything and in every relationship. The question is: what are you going to do when there is more bad than good?
That is something only you can answer, because only you know your situation 100 percent.
Good luck. I really feel for you.
i am looking for any examples, preferably with independent news sources of any witnesses that have ever been:.
mugged.
raped.
I don't think it is the stance of Witnesses that God protects you, even from death, murder, or crime while you are out in the ministry and that you can go anywhere without consequence.
There was a case in Mexico where 4 Witnesses were murdered when they called on the house of a drug lord. Also, Al-Qaeda in the Philippines beheaded several witnesses and sent their severed heads to the local Kingdom Hall as a warning to stay away from their part of the island. These were the same zealots that had several Americans and Europeans kidnapped for several years and the finally the U.S. sent in Navy Seals to rescue them. Hopefully, they killed all those monsters.
great report by abc on the abuses in jw-dot-org land.... i hope it opens a "floodgate" of future news reports and exposes.
if you ask yourself, "why hasn't the watchtower leadership changed their policy on the 2 witness rule?
if one or more persons on the gb has victims out there that can't come forward because of the 2 witness rule, then that would explain the permanent road block to policy change that is obviously in place.
If you put your emotions aside you can see from a legal standpoint what a Pandora's box releasing files about every molestation case that has ever happened in a religion would be. It would open up the religion to even more lawsuits by those who were named--whether the accusation were true or not. Also, in the Conti case her lawyer was on a fishing expedition asking for that list. It wasn't really relative to her case from a legal standpoint. What was relative was what did her local elders do or not do. This wasn't a class action lawsuit.
Taking the emotion out of it no legal council would tell a company / religion / corporation to release a list of every judicial committee they've ever had in their history. That would cause chaos in that realm and you could never have judicial committees after that at all. So that isn't so unbelievable.
I think what often gets missed in all of these cases is the tragedy they all are. A person's life was ruined. What really isn't happening is that the perpetrator isn't really paying the cost they should. This is really a legal problem, because just like the two-witness rule the standard of proof in a court of law is very high and you usually need two people who were abused to get a conviction. This happens a lot in rape cases as well when a rape kit isn't taken right away. It's he said against she said and a lot of times the guilty person goes scot free.
All too often people comment on these issues with a bias eye--which is their right to do. But you have to look at things from all angles to come to a relative, well-balanced truth of things.
