Funny that this is a current topic, I've just been considering such matters myself lately. Only in my case, I was wondering if the roadside assistance from my cellphone company is worth getting. I have Sprint, and on their website there's a link you can click to add it for $4 a month, AND you're covered no matter who owns the car you're broke down in-just have to have your phone and member card.
AllAlongTheWatchtower
JoinedPosts by AllAlongTheWatchtower
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34
Anybody a member of AAA? Would you recommend it?
by AlmostAtheist ini'm thinking about joining the aaa auto club.
my car is getting along in years and isn't going to get replaced any time soon.
i'm imagining that my stranded-on-the-side-of-the-road moment is imminent.
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Have you put your JW family behind you? Are you content with your decision
by nicolaou injust feeling a bit fed up.
it's not always like this i know but i'm wondering if life would be far easier for me and my wife if i just drew a line under all my efforts to maintain a relationship with my jw mother, brother and sisters.
all the rejection, judgementalism and condescension gets a bit much after a while.. how many here actually said 'goodbye' to their jw family and can honestly say they did not regret it?.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
I grew up in the WWCG, which is similar to JWs, they also practice shunning. My oldest sister to this day is the black sheep of the family and will never be able to reconcile with my parents. She commited the sin of marrying outside the WWCG, and later had a divorce. (Which my parents more or less took the attitude that it was just a natural consequence of not living right.) I myself left the whole family behind for a number of years, by choice and by happenstance, while I was in the military. I had been DFed from the WWCG when I was 13 for "not honoring your father and mother, and being a potential bad influence on the other youth". Too many details could potentially spoil my anonymity, so I will just say that I was involved in a court case and testified as a witness, when the church elders thought I should have shut the hell up. I ended up a ward of the state, probably the best thing that could have happened to me at the time. I cut all contact with my family.
Only after many years had passed did I go back to see them, and begin to mend old bridges. By then, unknown to me while I was off in the military, the WWCG had gone through a meltdown and no longer existed in it's form as I knew it. That is quite possibly the only reason my parents and I have been able to reconcile, even then it was a bumpy road at times. To this day, I just wish my father in particular, would just acknowledge that he was wrong, or say something about those screwy days of my childhood...I dunno...an apology? Something of the sort. But instead, the past is just ignored, and I let it be ignored, because the alternative is to destroy the fragile relationship we do have at this point.
I'm kinda left in the middle, as the only person in the immediate family who has contact with everybody... and sometimes I'm specifically told "you can't tell this to x person". It can be a hell of a balancing act. I sometimes wonder if it would have been easier to just stay away, terrible as that may sound. And had they stayed in WWCG/Armstrongism, we probably would not have even what little of a relationship we do have, today. I also had to put up with all the comparisons of being "the prodigal son" and other such BS. Though, as my father was quick to point out; the comparison wasn't really valid since I had no remorse for my "sins".
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Does anything think wts could become dangerous when it falls?
by lighthouse19something injust noticing what happened with waco, jonestown, heaven's gate etc.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
Most likely not...more of a quiet fade away than a burnout. Unlike the WWCG and Armstrong, there is no central, charismatic figure in the WTS because its run by the 'Governing Body'. This insulates them from having someone die and totally disrupt the organization. All of those people are getting older though... it wouldn't surprise me if they went more mainstream once all those people (or at least half of them) are gone and replaced with new ones. Despite it's many faults, the WTS has never advocated violence, so I don't see some huge meltdown happening...though I suppose a few postal-style watertower incidents are possible; there was one of those with the WWCG a couple years ago I heard-some guy walked into his congregation and shot up about 20 people.
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Is recovery possible?
by gcc2k inhi guys.
i haven't posted here in a year or so, perhaps more.
i'm not sure what i want to say, and i'm not sure that i want to put it down, since the more info you give here, the easier it is to be spotted.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
I find it interesting..or perplexing, as the case may be...that many people who still wish to be identified as having some type of religious faith despite leaving their religion, call themselves "god fearing". You see, that was one of the terms that even as a kid used to set off all sorts of red flags in my mind. It was only after coming to this board that I learned the term "cognitive dissonance". I could never make the equation equalize: "loving caring god + "true believer" = "god fearing". If god was so nice and loving and caring, why the need to fear him?
Then again, I suppose it depends on whether we're talking about the old testament god, or the new. The old testament god did things like flood the world for people being naughty or rain fire and brimstone down on cities that were 'sinful and wicked'. This god would be feared by anyone rational, if he existed. The new testament god is a horse of a different feather. This god, through Jesus, talks of forgiveness and mercy. Oh wait, then there's Revelations...back to slaughter and brimstone. Guess you better fear this one, too.
Conclusions:
1) God IS loving and caring and merciful-there is no need to fear him.
2) God is NOT any of those things, it's perfectly right to fear him. But if I have to be afraid of god...why would I want to worship him?
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Noah's Ark ....How did Noah......................
by KAYTEE inhow did noah put bitumen on the underside of the ark, did he get his family to lift it up allowing him to slide under and paint this on?
the underside being the most important face to be treated needed to be waterproof to make sure it did not allow leaks to occur, and had to stand up to extreme conditions for a whole year.
kt.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
I've been away from here for quite some time, but there used to be a person named Running Man who made some excellent posts debunking some of the old testament "facts". The series collectively was called "The Atheist's Book of Bible Stories". I don't know if he still posts here or not, though. One of his posts was about the ark/flood story if I remember right.
I'm willing to grant Noah his pitch...but the ark story is far more problematic than how to coat the timbers in waterproof goo:
Planetary expansion: If the whole earth was covered in water, that means the entire surface expanded enough to cover Mt Everest-over 5 miles high. Meaning an increase in the mass of the planet. Impossible.
PH levels: Ever kept an aquarium? If you have, you know how hard it is to keep fish alive. You can't mix freshwater fish and saltwater fish. Yet, if the entire surface of the earth were covered in water, all the rivers and lakes would cease to exist by virture of becoming one giant ocean. And the salt levels of this giant ocean would be drastically reduced by all the billions of tons of rain. Absolute global fishkill. Unless of course, we are to pretend that Noah had aquariums aboard the ark as well...
Room: Depending on which figures you subscribe to, between 1.4 million and 1.75 million species have been identified. Since at least half of these are probably microscopic, we'll ignore that. In fact, let's be really nice and just count mammals. *4,630 different species. And don't forget, Noah had instructions to save either 2 or 7 of EACH, depending on whether they were clean or unclean. So...if we assume half are clean and half unclean, that's 4,630 / 2 = 2,315 of each. *(Data as of 2004, current figures may vary due to extinctions and new discoveries)
2,315 x 2 = 4,630
PLUS
2,315 x 7 = 16,205
= 20, 835 animals crammed on the ark, plus Noah and family.
I don't care how much you use for the measurement of a cubit, there just wasn't enough room for that many animals. Even if you assume each set of 2 needed only a 10 x 10 x 10 stall on the ark, the number of stalls needed quickly outstrips the amount of surface area available. Unless of course, the ark had some extradimensional spaces...maybe it was a Holy Tesseract.
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Personal Ethics of XJWs
by NanaR inwhile reading on jwd last night and this morning, i was reminded of a situation that i had with my husband when i told him i was not ever going back to the kingdom hall (this happened in october 2006 so relatively recently).
this statement should not have come as a great surprise to him, as he knows that i now belong to the american legion auxiliary (in fact i am the local unit president), that i vote, and that i helped convince our daughter to have a blood transfusion that may have saved her life.
also i had told him in the past that he should not set up any meetings for me with the elders as i would not talk to them.. in spite of his knowledge of my present activities, his reaction to my "never going back" statement was severe.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
Your post really resonated with me, NanaR. I became an atheist as a teenager, and was constantly lectured by various well meaning people about how wrong it was to not believe in god. I could never get over the hypocrisy of some of these folks. One particular person who comes to mind was a Mormon sergeant I knew when I was a PFC in the Marines, who constantly wanted to "help" me, even gave me a copy of the Mormon bible (which I still have to this day, because one of my 'personal code of ethics' rules is that no gift may be thoughtlessly thrown out). He was determined to make a believer out of me, despite my insistance that it would never happen. It came out during one of many debates we had over various subjects that he was cheating on his wife who was back home in the States (we were stationed in Japan). Cheating is one of my big personal nonos, so he lost any chance of moral high ground with me right there.
One of my biggest pet peeves over the years has been the inability of many religious people to seperate morality and ethics from rules and religion. This inability seems most evident in the more fundamentalist groups, such as JWs, Mormons, WorldWide Church of God (my own background), et al, though it is present in other more liberal groups, too. I can't count the number of times I've had conversations with people where I (sometimes reluctantly, sometimes proudly, depending on my stage in life) brought up that I was atheist, only to be met with shocked dismay and reactions like "but you seem like such a nice guy" or "you're too normal to be a devil-worshipper".
In fact, I suppose if I were to analyze myself very deeply, it could be said that many of my personal rules and mottos are/were an effort to prove that I didn't go off the deep end all those years ago when I became an atheist. The Worldwide Church of God, much like the JWs, were always putting out pamphlets and such full of information and statistics on how terrible "worldly" people were. As a youth, I was determined not to be a statistic. Anything to keep from proving their points. I would listen to the dreaded rock n roll and NOT commit suicide or OD or die in a carcrash, I WOULD get married and NEVER father illegitimate children or get STDs despite having premarital sex, etc etc. In short, I was determined to do what I wanted and still prove I could be (as good? better than?) them.
I'd venture to guess that many on this board can relate to such feelings, similarly to how it is said that in business "women have to be better than men to be noticed", many ex-JWs or ex-(insert fundy here) had a need to strive; to prove they could go on, be successful in life, for some hope of reconciliation or approval with their families who shunned them (WWCG practiced disfellowshipping also, same as JWs).
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Belief Poll : Please Indulge Me
by Morocco injust sort of curious about this, i know it has probably been done a gazillion times but let me do it again.
1.do you believe in a personal god who takes interest in you as an individual?
2.do you believe that the bible was written by god?
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
Question 1, 2, and 3: NO
Question 4: The short answer is because I have, in my mind, disproved all these things for myself after having once believed them to all be yes. The long answer would involve a telling of my life story, which you probably aren't all that interested in, and a delving into psychology which I am unqualified for.
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Post your favorite saying
by Scully ini was just pondering how the wts has, for over a century, been able to convince people to do what is contrary to their best interests with fear tactics that armageddon is coming soon, and i came up with what is going to be my pet phrase for a while:.
"only religion has the power to compel people to embrace sheer stupidity in the name of faith.
" ~ scully, december 28, 2006. i googled it, and didn't see that anyone else has claimed it, so until someone else finds an attribution for it, i'm claiming it as my own.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
"I'm such a smartass I can sit in ice cream and tell what flavor it is" - gwyneth
*Jaw drops* I thought _I_ was the only one who ever says that!...only my version is somewhat different.
"I'm not a smartass; a smartass can sit on an icecream cone and tell you what flavor it is."
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The 613 Laws of JW's
by avidbiblereader inthe witnesses always say they are free in christ, i beg to differ, i don't know how many stupid unscriptural laws they have but lets start a thread on how many dumb witness laws you know and have heard of that make no sense or completely unbelievable, it is like they have a second talmud.
cant have walt disney movies or stuffed animals as this is magical.
cant have beards.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
I think the person who mentioned that meant this:
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Please help...lots of questions
by KanoasDestiny inquite a few of my family members are jw's, and i attended the meetings until i was 7 years old when my mom was disfellowhipped.
i have always had an interest in god but i truly don't know where i feel i belong church-wise.
i agree mostly with the jw, but there are still things that i don't agree with, and to attend the kingdom hall, knowing that i don't agree with them 100% feels wrong.
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AllAlongTheWatchtower
Heh...if you're a nonbelieving spouse begging for a little oral nookie from your mate, then I suppose tormented and nothing could quite well go hand in hand...