Posts by AndersonsInfo

49

You just gotta read the story, Fade From the Truth, A Tale of Learning Then Unlearning the Beliefs of JWs

by AndersonsInfo in

jw
friends

every once in a while there's a story so well told that it deserves lots and lots of kudos and plugs.

here's that 124-book length story which is the first one linked from "exclusive autobiographies" on the home page of www.watchtowerdocuments.com.

read it free!.

AndersonsInfo

Every once in a while there's a story so well told that it deserves lots and lots of kudos and plugs. Here's that 124-book length story which is the first one linked from "Exclusive Autobiographies" on the home page of www.watchtowerdocuments.com. Read it free!

The story told by former Witness, Alan Miller, can directly be found at this link: http://www.watchtowerdocuments.com/stories/alan-miller.html

Alan's story is one of those narratives that once you start reading, you can't stop. I read all 124 pages in one sitting, except for a few brief breaks, and so did my husband, Joe. Then I sent it to a few other people to read before it was put on the WT Documents website. The consensus was the same as ours. "Wow, what a read!"

Barbara

24

Losing My Religion is a New Film being made ...

by sleepingbeauty in

theres a new film in production called ' losingmyreligion'.

its being produced by stephan mcguire who is a proper film producer who happens to have been brought up as a jehovahs witness.

think leonardo dicaprio got something to do with making it too :).

AndersonsInfo

The voice heard on the trailer talking about the destruction of gays and wicked people belongs to old time Bethelite and Writing Dept. staff member, Ciro Aulicino. Yes, this is the same person who went to the UN every Wednesday to their library on a so-called press pass and told me he could now attend UN meetings. What Ciro didn't tell me was that it was then that the Society had become an NGO to get that pass and other perks.

Oh, by the way, Ciro is the one who wrote the first Awake! cover series article extolling the UN that is found in the Sept. 8, 1991 Awake!

For what it's worth, I've had some interaction with Stephen McGuire over the past four years and watched how successful he's become as a film director. Stephen has been determined to bring to fruition this film, Loosing My Religion, for quite some time and I'm pleased to see that he's actively moving ahead. He's quite a guy and puts his money where his mouth is. And he certainly needs some of our money too to get this project moving. Personally, I'm not making an endorsement because that's sort of meaningless. Who am I to say where a person should donate money to. Each of us participates in activities after personal investigation and comes to their own conclusions in such matters. We all want our money to be well spent to accomplish the biggest bang for our bucks. I'm just saying that I'm happy that Stephen is so determined to use his medium to tell the world about the injustice of shunning.

One thing about Stephen and some of the other former JWs that hang out together-- there are lots of activists in this group who are shaking up the WT world here and abroad that most of us are not aware of. They go behind the scenes and do their thing to make the press and government understand what is really happening to the human rights of former JWs and they deserve our thanks. Sometimes we see the results but never think how many people it took to get to the final outcome.

Many people have the notion that Watch Tower will never collapse because they don't see anything transpiring in their world with regards to WT's control and power, or with their JW relatives and friends leaving the religion. But believe me, things are happening, many times quietly, unbeknownst to you and me that has put the fear in the WT, especially in the realm of their shunning policies. Their attorneys know that if the voices against shunning get louder and louder thereby influencing public opinion, they will be forced to change or disappear mainly through few converts or through a huge loss of members.

Internationally, human rights rules differ and the WT knows this, so how they handle what they say in press releases or letters about shunning situations are different. This means activists have to be aware of the laws of each area they protest in. This is not a simple undertaking, but slowly there is progress being made. I never thought ten years ago that WT's image would be so damaged over the expose' of their pedophile protection policies, but with the Internet and other media, it's a done deal. Now, with so many voices speaking up over shunning, just wait and see what the next ten years will bring. Nothing happens over night, but slowly, one newspaper article, radio or TV talk show, or news or documentary program, at a time, and the message will get out there that when a person ceases to associate with JWs for whatever the reason, they experience the tragic loss of their family and friends because WT demands that it be so. That's the legal key folks--Watch Tower demands that it be so. Not that individually a person decides to shun, because his/her religious conscience tells him to do it, but that it's a requirement of the religion to shun people whose name is announced at the KH as no longer one of JWs. Is that a civil right's infringement? Let's just be patient and wait and see.

Barbara

69

Our Stories and Why They Matter

by Farkel in

jw
friends

stories are perhaps the most important thing we can contribute to others in our short life on planet earth.. mind you, i am not saying that stories are the most important things in our lives, because they are not.

the most important things in our lives are experiences, which are moment-by-moment things.

the best we can do with our own experiences is to tell stories about them, which will never convey the actual living of them.

AndersonsInfo

Personal stories of the lives of those who experienced the Witness religion like we did are so important to me that I put a link to JW stories on my new Watchtower Documents website. http://www.watchtowerdocuments.com/jw-stories.html (There's some research findings there too.)

I also put a sub-title to the stories page on the home page and named it "Exclusive Autobiographies" and that's where Farkel's story will be linked from, that is when he finishes writing it! (Thank you, Farkel, for the honor of posting your story on the WT Documents website when you finish it.)http://www.watchtowerdocuments.com/index.html

Every once in a while there's a story so well told that it deserves lots and lots of kudos and plugs. Here's that story which is the first one linked from "Exclusive Autobiographies": http://www.watchtowerdocuments.com/stories/alan-miller.html

Alan's story is one of those stories that once you start reading, you can't stop. I read all 124 pages in one sitting and so did my husband, Joe. Then I sent it to a few other people to read before it was put on the WT Documents website. The consensus was the same as ours. "Wow, what a read!" (I think I'll start a thread to point the way to Alan Miller's story so more people will know about it.)

While I'm pointing out good stories to read on the WT Documents website, how about reading the Langbroek Family Story, about a family who lives in Australia. An interesting part of this story is that Anne Langbroek was a pioneer in the same congregation as my husband in the Bronx when he was in Bethel in the late 1950s. Anne went to Gilead and Joe went to West Palm Beach, Florida to marry me. His path and Anne never crossed again until last year when a letter arrived at our house from Australia. How Anne and her husband ended up in Australia and out of the Witness religion makes for good reading too, but wait till you read about the lives of their two kids, now well-known personalities: One is a radio host; the other a dentist-politician.

http://www.watchtowerdocuments.com/stories/langbroek-family.html

And to top it all off, read the Mary Woodard story: http://www.watchtowerdocuments.com/stories/mary-woodard.html

First you'll find the text of a letter that took the community by storm in 1990. Even though it was penned in 1989, it became so widespread it inspired the October 8, 1991 Awake! article "Healing the Wounds of Child Abuse." Mary is no longer a JW and the perspective given in the text is from before her leaving the Witness religion. Then Mary chronicled for me her departure titled: "A Meeting in Bethel to Exiting the Organization." This is the true story of went on inside Bethel's Writing Dept. after the Awake! editor and a staff writer heard Mary's story.

So if it's a snowy and nasty day where you are, and you've read just about everything on JWN, just relax and start reading some pretty interesting narrative, starting off with the Alan Miller story.

http://www.watchtowerdocuments.com/stories/alan-miller.html

Barbara

36

Anyone want to share emails that they wrote to the BBC about the program this morning?

by brotherdan in

jw
friends

i know many of you have sent emails to emma britton, who hosted the show this morning with our own cantleave and angus.

(btw, you guys did amazing!).

i sent my email to her as well and wanted to see if anyone else wants to share their emails.

AndersonsInfo

Using Firefox, I can see all of this thread, but using Windows Explorer, I can't. I've had this problem before so knew what to do. Anyway, here's my email to Emma Britton:

Dear Ms. Britton,

Thank you for presenting such a fair-minded and reasonable interview with former Jehovah's Witness, Nathan Phillips, and also the former Witness elder.

I'm writing from the US and live in the State of Tennessee. We were Jehovah's Witnesses. My husband, who held supervisory positions in the religion since he was in his 20s, and I were extremely active Witnesses for nearly five decades and know the religious teachings inside out, especially about the ramification of being disfellowshipped which is complete shunning by family and friends.

We were baptized as teenagers and disfellowshipped in our 60s for "apostasy" and consequently shunned by all the people who were previously in our lives. In fact, we have not seen our son (a JW elder for around 20 years), and his wife and child for 9 years due to the Watch Tower's shunning policy. Recently, a now former Witness, who saw our son in 2006 in Indiana where he lives, called us. During the conversation, we learned that we have another grandchild, a girl, who was born in 2006 but kept secret from us. We cannot even verify if the information is correct because of Watch Tower’s shunning policy.

The reason for my disfellowshipping was because of going to the media accusing the Watch Tower of harboring and protecting pedophiles by not reporting accusations of child sex abuse to the authorities.

My accusations were based on facts because when we were living and working as volunteers for eleven years at the world headquarters of JWs in Brooklyn, NY, I was assigned to the Watch Tower’s Writing Dept. where I was a researcher. In that capacity, I discovered that there was a world-wide problem within the religion of not reporting accusations of sexual child abuse to the authorities and nobody was the wiser. I consequently left the religion in 1998 when I could see that there were not going to be any changes in Watch Tower child abuse policies.

In 2002, just before I appeared on NBC's Dateline TV program discussing the problem, I was disfellowshipped and then shunned, and a few months later, my husband was disfellowshipped and shunned for speaking out too. Were we the sinners that the Bible said not to eat with or say hello to? Yes, if the Eleventh Commandment is, "Thou shalt not go public!" Our son told me before I was disfellowshipped that my concern and aid to child abuse victims was a noble thing, but that I should never have gone public. See http:// www.watchtowerdocuments.com /documents/2000-present.html Scroll down to the third or fourth document in the list. Both are videos of the Dateline program I appeared in.

To put it another way, I was a whistle-blower, not a sinner by the standard set forth in the Bible verse that the Watch Tower partially quoted in their letter to you. But in the eyes of the Watch Tower, because of what I did, I should be viewed as a sinner, and as dead or as if I never existed, by my son and his family and our now former friends, which did literally number in the thousands because of our positions within the religion.

Watch Tower claims in its literature that disfellowshipping is an act of love because shunning will cause “sinners” to realize what was lost and then change their ways and return to the religion. However, that's not true in my case because in 2007, I appeared on NBC once again, this time on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. The discussion was centered on the Watch Tower settling out-of-court, nine (9) lawsuits with sixteen (16) victims of child sexual abuse. From secret court documents I obtained, the settlement amount was for over twelve (12) million dollars. Watch Tower leaders did not acknowledge responsibility, but by settling these cases, they acknowledged their liability for not reporting molesters to the police; hence, they certainly were responsible for more children being molested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=AU&hl=en-GB&v=N9Xjw_sk7tA

In addition, both my husband and I appeared in a documentary produced in Geneva, Switzerland that aired in French, November 11, 2010, discussing the child abuse cover-up. http://www.tsr.ch/emissions/temps-present/2482487-grandir-avec-jehovah.html

Please don't let Watch Tower's persuasive and manipulative words explaining shunning be accorded any favor. The facts are that they spin and tweak their harmful beliefs for the press and expect everyone outside of the Witness religion to think that disfellowshipped folks are all liars when we say we are shunned by our loved ones. In reality, if Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t shun the disfellowshipped, they would be disfellowshipped and shunned too.

In the past, I actually wrote articles for Jehovah’s Witnesses Awake! magazine. I knew then how to spin the baloney because I was taught by the best, and I recognize Watch Tower's baloney when I hear it now!

Barbara Anderson

http://www.watchtowerdocuments.com

71

1984 WT cover, 1914 Gen That Will Not Pass -- How many of 16 alive today?

by FatFreek 2005 in

those people on that cover were supposed to represent a group of people that would still live on into the new order.

in your best guess, how old were most of those 16 people at the time the photo was taken, and how many do you suppose are still alive today?.

remember, that wt was printed in 1984, nearly 27 years ago.

AndersonsInfo

Len, perhaps we are getting side-tracked from the point. The purpose of the photo of these 16 elderly people was to show readers (hopefully, interested people in the Witness message), that these old folks may not die from old age but were a "marked generation" who would see a new order. As far as the Writing Dept. was concerned, it was not important for anybody to know who in the photo had the heavenly hope or the earthly hope or even if they were JWs, or maybe even Bethelites. The important thing was that they were born before or during 1914 and were of that generation. So for the WT Writing Dept. of 1984 to be on the safe side, each one in the photo had to be around their mid-70s or older at the time the photo was made.

The end of the last paragraph in the article puts it this way: "Yes, you may live to see this promised New Order, along with survivors of the generation of 1914--the generation that will not pass away." And the words by an illustration on page 7 of the article showing a young couple along with four children says it all: "You along with survivors of the generation of 1914, may live to see a New Order." The point was that the New Order was going to happen very, very soon and those presently living of the 1914 generation were not going to die.

Oh, by the way, any one of the people in the photo could have had an earthly hope, but knowing most of them, I think the majority, other than maybe two, claimed to be anointed. Anyway, I don't think that WT was parading the participants as poster-children of anything other than what I stated above.

Some have asked how were the 16 people picked for the photo? Well, they had to fit the requirements of the Writing Dept. specifically that the Photography Dept. had to use 16 elderly Bethelites, probably in their mid-70s and older, with good reputations who were willing to pose for a Watchtower cover photo. Why do I use the words, "good reputations?" Because some very old Bethelites did not have very good reputations. For example, a very old guy by the name of Peterson, who Arthur Worsley said was a drunk, lived alone, had a job assignment (I think in the Hanger Dept.) and hated everybody. No one even cared if he showed up for work or not. Why did they let him stay at Bethel? I have no concrete idea, but he probably came into Bethel in Rutherford's day, knew where all the skeletons were buried, and didn't have anywhere to go, so they left him alone.

Oh, by the way, the May 15, 1984 Watchtower featuring the cover with the words, “1914 Generation That Will Not Pass Away” was the last in a series of four Watchtowers that made a big deal about 1914.

The April 1, 1984 Watchtower cover was titled: “1914 A Marked Year-Why?”; The April 15, 1984 Watchtower cover was titled: “1914 A Focal Point of Bible Prophecy”; The May 1, 1984 Watchtower cover was titled: “1914 and YOU”; and, of course, the May 15, 1984 Watchtower, titled “1914 The Generation That Will Not Pass Away.”

Watch Tower prophets before and after 1914 were so sure about the year 1914, weren’t they? It was the date that their most important exegesis hung upon, but they were so wrong! We know, without a doubt, they were and still are false prophets. So I say to JWs who are reading this discussion board, “When in doubt, throw it out and join the land of the living.”

71

1984 WT cover, 1914 Gen That Will Not Pass -- How many of 16 alive today?

by FatFreek 2005 in

those people on that cover were supposed to represent a group of people that would still live on into the new order.

in your best guess, how old were most of those 16 people at the time the photo was taken, and how many do you suppose are still alive today?.

remember, that wt was printed in 1984, nearly 27 years ago.

AndersonsInfo

The Stemans , Steimans , Steemans came into Bethel in the early 1980s from Tampa, Florida. I think they arrived sometime in late 1983 and stayed about two years. I do know they were kindly asked by George Couch, Home Overseer, to leave Bethel. George told us, the chiropractor really didn't want to work and spent too much time socializing with Bethelite patients and Home personnel. Steman was retired from his personal practice for quite a few years when he came in, and wasn't exactly young. Both of them looked like they were in their early to mid 70s then. Around 1996 or 1997, when we were visiting with an old friend, a Tampa elder, he told us that the chiropractor in question was disfellowshipped sometime later after his return from Bethel to Tampa and it was not for apostasy, but for immorality. It seems to me that Dr. Stemens was deceased when our conversation with our friend took place.

69

Seriously Considering A Billboard Ad?

by laverite in

jw
friends

a full billboard ad in my area along a busy heavily travelled highway would cost about $500.

would probably get lots of attention and maybe even a news article, who knows.

$500 is cheap and easily affordable.

AndersonsInfo

dgp, I *seriously* like your "creative" suggestions for a billboard.

Barbara

69

Seriously Considering A Billboard Ad?

by laverite in

jw
friends

a full billboard ad in my area along a busy heavily travelled highway would cost about $500.

would probably get lots of attention and maybe even a news article, who knows.

$500 is cheap and easily affordable.

AndersonsInfo

Mad Sweeney: YOU HAVE A PM

69

Seriously Considering A Billboard Ad?

by laverite in

jw
friends

a full billboard ad in my area along a busy heavily travelled highway would cost about $500.

would probably get lots of attention and maybe even a news article, who knows.

$500 is cheap and easily affordable.

AndersonsInfo

I respect the opinions of others who have posted on this thread and I hope my opinion will be respected. I'm all for trying out billboards to see the reaction, not from JWs, but "from the man/woman on the street or in the car." These billboards are meant to inform the public about a human rights injustice, not to help Witnesses out of the cult. I've been asking some of my friends and close associates about the billboard idea and all the replies were in favor.

Barbara

3

Two articles: Jehovah's Witnesses disliked in Armenia & JWs suing Armenian Public TV

by AndersonsInfo in

http://www.armeniandiaspora.com/showthread.php?251999-murder-puts-pressure-on-armenia-s-minority-faiths.

http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/society/news/59668/ra_public_television_denies_accusations_of_jehovahs_witnesses.

AndersonsInfo

http://www.armeniandiaspora.com/showthread.php?251999-Murder-Puts-Pressure-On-Armenia-s-Minority-Faiths

http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/society/news/59668/RA_Public_Television_denies_accusations_of_Jehovahs_Witnesses