Good work, truthwillsetyoufree!
Most people I talk to these days have more sense than to get involved with JWs. The best I've ever been able to do is advise people not to go to work for certain JWs...and this was when I was one.
Posts by luna2
-
7feeling like a true apostate today
by truthwillsetyoufree init was back in 2011 when i was convinced that jws dont have the truth.
i rejected so many teachings and was open about that to members of my family.
it took me another year to pluck up the courage to attend other churches.
-
-
-
42
Not on jw.org - comments regarding bad Jehovah's Witness employees
by jwfacts ini used to be very impressed with convention experiences regarding how worldly employers would hire jws because they were known as the most honest workers.
i was too indoctrinated to realise these were selective experiences, and there are plenty of experiences of jws being dishonest in the workforce.
i have received a couple recently by email.. i have cut quite a bit out of the following email i received so that the person and company cannot be indentified, but you will get the message.. .
-
-
luna2
In the past (the long distant past now), I worked for two different JWs. The first one had a small graphic design company and they employed both non-JWs and JWs. When their non-JW employee had to go into rehab, I was hired to fill the gap...and that's all it was. They had two other employees who were JWs and I was so excited, as a new JW, to be working with brothers and sisters. It was a disaster. I was laid off when the gal who I replaced informed them that she was ready to come back. I can remember being totally devastated. What I didn't realize is that Jehovah's Witnesses don't hold themselves to conventional standards when it comes to being either an employer or an employee. Any decision that they make is justified somehow because Jah knows what they need and he is the moving force behind their decisions.
I then got a job with an elder who owned a cleaning company. I continued to work for him and his wife for three years because I couldn't bring myself to quit. I thought that there must be some explanation for his poor business practices and bullying that I wasn't understanding. I was a fool. This man was an entitled, born-in JW who thought that he could do no wrong and he pushed people around, both in his company and in the congregation. I finally realized that I was never going to be able to justify how this "brother" treated people and I quit. He had the talking out of both sides of his mouth thing going on all the time. He'd make all kinds of pretentious comments about attending all the meetings and never missing a convention or special assembly day, and then he'd make me practically beg to get time off for those very things. After I moved out of that state, he started taking people's untility payments as part of the services he offered. He got into trouble when he misappropriated that money and didn't make these peoples' payments. Shortly thereafter, he sold the business and abandoned his family for a while. He was removed as elder finally, because not of the idiot elders in the congregation could hide their heads in the sand any longer about this guy. I believe he and his wife are back together, but don't know if he was ever reinstated as elder...he was never disfellowshipped. A real peach of a guy.
JWs, in reality, for the most part, don't make good employees or good employers; they aren't good associates or even good friends. I knew a sister once who rented a house and took in roommates. She told me that after a bad experience with a JW sister not paying her portion of the rent, she never roomed with JWs again. I was stupid enough to loan a sister money to fix her car. probably about 16 years ago now, and might as well have thrown the money down the toilet because I never got it back.
The Watchtower likes to print stories of how wonderful JWs are in every way, but that has not been my experience at all. JWs are just human beings. Some have an innate honesty and are good people, but its not due to the Society. Others are cheats and thieves, who justify their behavior by saying that they "aren't of this world" and somehow are able to stick to the letter of the law (so to speak) in regards to Watchtower morals. They are certainly no better than the world and are often worse.
-
65
October 1914? Really?
by sylvlef inkm august 2014, page 3 paragraph 6(article for this week's service meeting):.
"the month of october 2014 will see the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the kingdom.
for this occasion a special edition of the watchtower will be on this theme.".
-
-
luna2
The WTBTS has always been hung up on dates. There will be the occasional admonition from the podium that we are not to focus on dates and times and scriptures cited that no one knows the date and hour, but that is just lip service. The Watchtower is careful not to be too specific, but not out of respect for Jehovah, simply because dates that have been favored in the past have come and gone without any fulfillment of predictions and they don't want to predict a certain date and have it come to nothing....the sheep might start questioning their hotline to Jah.
I've never seen a group of people so ready to jump on dates. Wasn't the last one 2012? I no longer speak with any JWs in the congregation I used to attend, so I'm pretty much out of the loop now.
My life is certainly not perfect, but I can't tell you how glad I am to be out of that morass of guilt, congregation politics, and nonsense from the WTBTS that we are supposed to accept without question.
-
19
Do Witnesses still go door-to-door??
by MsShockJock injust wondering if they still go door-to-door?
i never see groups of people walking around the neighborhoods all dressed up or out in fastfood restaurants on saturday mornings or groups of people driving around in cars.
.
-
-
luna2
Ha! When I was still a JW and trying to get a little bit of time in between work and being a single mom, I used to get so frustrated at the amount of time spent in McDonalds when we were supposed to be handing out magazines and trying to find people who would allow us to come back to discuss them. Out here they seemed to spend less time on break than they did in the Midwest and McDonald's wasn't the favorite hang out, it was the bagel shops.
-
19
Do Witnesses still go door-to-door??
by MsShockJock injust wondering if they still go door-to-door?
i never see groups of people walking around the neighborhoods all dressed up or out in fastfood restaurants on saturday mornings or groups of people driving around in cars.
.
-
-
luna2
Good question. I live in the northeast and have been inactive for about 14 years. I don't ever see any groups going door to door either. There were a couple of women who were doing business territory that I ran into several months ago, but that's it. I'm not in touch with anyone at the old KH that I can ask.
-
38
Field Service time wasters
by xelder inlast saturday morning, i ran to the hardware store.
a former co (retired in a circuit provided house) was in the hardware store.
i stopped at starbucks....more jw's.
-
-
luna2
I stopped going out on Saturdays long before I finally got wise and left the organization for good. I was a single mother of two children and had more than enough to do on the weekends. Farting around, pretending to serve Jehovah, when in reality all we were doing was driving aimlessly around, knocking on a couple of doors and then going for coffee, was not something I had time for.
In those days, I was very consciencious and would have deducted all of the coffee/shopping time...which left maybe an hour, sometimes half an hour that I felt I could count as "service". If I had been smart, I would have started counting time from the moment I left my house until I got back home, no matter what stupid junk those in charge of the car group decided to do. There were mornings, especially when the CO's wife was in the group, when we'd hit garage sales, go to the bank, drive for ten minutes or more to get to some remote "call" or two and then stop for a full breakfast. It really bothered me, but I kept quiet because, obviously, there was something I didn't understand about the whole exercise. I was such a fool.
-
1
God's Unfolding Purpose-Illustrated
by LostGeneration inthe upcoming wt study this sunday is another doozy.
while the focus is primarily on making sure that jws shun the hell out of their dfd and faded family members, another incredible point is found in paragraph 7, which states in part:.
when representative members of the slave discern that our viewpoint on some point of truth needs to be clarified or corrected, they do.
-
-
luna2
This is how religions twist and turn trying to force "God" into their doctrines. It still pisses me off that I was so stupid as to accept it back in the 80s, when I got involved with JWs, and that it took me almost 20 years to finally see through their garbage.
-
66
To Dissassociate or just Fade into Inactivity ? Your Choice ? Reasons ?
by flipper inthis has been asked before, however i thought it may be good for newer members of the board to read some of our reasons on how we decided to exit the jw cult and why we decided to do it the way we did.. first off - i have been faded for almost 8 years.
essentially i decided to fade into inactivity and not da because i have elderly jw parents who would shun me if i did get dfed or daed myself.
also- i like keeping open the possibilities that some of my many jw relatives may in time start doubting and have questions and reach out to me in my inactive state.
-
-
luna2
I had been unhappy with myself as a witness and with the WTS as a whole for many years. I wasn't born in, I was recruited in my late 20's. I've come to see that I'm the type of person who wanted to be told what god wanted from me and how he wanted it, so I fell right into the JWs. The only thing I had a really hard time with right from the beginning was going out in "service" and trying to tell other people what they should believe and that they were destined for death and destruction if they didn't become a Jehovah's Witness. That never felt right.
I floated along, never making any real progress in the preaching work, but believing and attending meetings for about 10 years. The final 8 years, I was having more and more issues with contradictory teachings, uneven application of rules and principals based on how important a person was in the congregation, and the sheer amount of time the WTS expected you to devote to their stuff. I also didn't like the way they handled young people; how they were treated as favorite targets for the elders and constantly browbeaten to conform, but given no real encouragement or help.
I didn't plan to fade or disassociate myself. I finally just became so depressed that I quit the ministry school, stopped going out in service at all, and began to miss most of the meetings. A few noticed and would call, but most were happy to let me go. I've written about it before, but the final straw was sitting in the back of the Hall reading a Watchtower magazine (for the first time, hadn't bothered to study) and finding that it wasn't about anything. It was all 'do whatever your conscience dictates', with one paragraph dedicated to one point of view and the following paragraph all about the opposite. I felt kind of betrayed in that I'd always gone along with their hard line views on education, recreation, work and "worldly" friendships and here they seemed to be saying that you could do whatever your conscience allowed pretty much. I felt like they didn't stand for anything any more and what with the change in the meaning of "generation", which extended the time for Armegeddon indefinitely (just as time was running out), I decided that I'd had enough. I walked out of the Hall as soon as that stupid Watchtower study was over and never went back.
It was easy for me, though. I had no family in the religion. In fact, my family was delighted that I wasn't going any more. And its not like you have real friends as a JW. Everything is conditional. If you miss a few meetings or don't go out knocking on doors and drinking coffee with the "friends" every week, you're marked as weak and a bad associate pretty quickly and nobody wants to hang out with you anyway.
I never sent a letter disassociating myself and was never called in front of a judicial committee. If they disassociated me, they never let me know about it. What I can't believe is that I subjected myself and my sons to that crap for so many years. What a waste.
-
12
what, exactly, did we witness?
by stillin ini mean, in a passive sense of the word, to witness means that we saw something or heard something.
in an active sense, we share our experience with somebody who wasn't there.. ok, "witnessing for god's kingdom" means that we somehow know something about it that needs to be shared with others.
we saw something and now we are testifying about it; but i don't seem to be able to recall what it was that i saw.
-
-
luna2
The problem I always had as a JW was that I couldn't explain their more convoluted reasonings to anybody...and if the person asked any questions at all, I found myself in difficult territory. I found the experience of being a witness not only time consuming, but frustrating and frightening. With some of it, I couldn't even believe what we were being told to tell other people. These days, I look back and wonder how I allowed myself to get so caught up in something so stupid.
-
59
New to this site. Scared, Lonely and in a lot of pain due to shunning by my family.
by wonder*woman inthis is my very first post to this forum.
i am begging for some much needed encouragment and support by those who are kind hearted and know exactly the pain shunning causes.
i am a 30 year old former jehovah's witness and a mother of two beautiful girls.
-
-
luna2
I have not experienced shunning the way you are now so I can't speak to that pain. I do remember the pain I experienced when it finally sunk in that the WTS is not and never was the "true" religion. It was horrible to realize that I'd dedicated my life to a lie. I remember not being able to sleep and being so angry. I have no doubt that shunning is even worse, especially when it involves your parents and other relatives. I don't know if that pain ever really goes away, but like any other sort of pain, it does fade in time. Venting with friends (especially exJWs who know what you are talking about and going through), or here on the boards is one way to work through some of it.