here in the northeast it is freezing.
a father and son team brought over the outside garbage cans from the end of the driveway and offered to salt my inlaws' driveway.
my f-i-l was very impressed and said they're very nice people.
They are taking their cues from the LDS who have been doing that kind of thing for years. OR they are just nice guys who knew there were older people living at the home.
When I was a JW I tried to get a few friends together to help an older couple who needed stuff done to their yard (for safety, it was overgrown). They took our mags for years very politely. I was reprimanded by the MS who was around when I asked for volunteers. We had better things to do, dontcha know!
anyone else bored with religion versus atheism or is it just me?.
i'm planning to go to greece in may.. i'm thinking about planting rocket and beetroot in my garden this year because they are getting rather expensive to buy.. this week i want to make chocolate refridgerator cakes.
some for my daughter who is coming home from uni this weekend and some to take in to work to give away with free tea and coffee because it's national libraries day on saturday.. i just finished reading the humans by matt haig which was brilliant.
I am busy trying to drum up some group business for my company. I sell LegalShield and enjoy working with small business, groups and truck drivers. Right now, I am working on some leads for groups of truck drivers (know any employee groups?- send them my way!) I am traveling to Florida and Vegas and Seattle soon.
My son is visiting his bio dad (for first time ever-in India) later this month. My MIL is ill and we may be travling overseas soon to visit her. We seem to be surrounded by a lot of dying people these days (watch out!) so my husband is feeling anxious about his mum.
i just learned to play a card game (gin rummy?-or something) that I seem to be pretty good at. Today my husband and I are shopping for a house here in Houston. we are still deciding whether we'd prefer a house or townhome kind of thing, but that is what today is all about. Sorting a bit.
My granndaughter is a year old and brilliant and gorgeous. She has big brown eyes, curly brown hair and she kinda looks like shes up to mischief-but that is cause she usuallly is!
So, that's what I am doing.
M
the beatles were on ed sullivan for the first time fifty years ago.
it blows my mind.
i gave them three months and i was a fan before they appeared.
In the war between the Beatles and the Stones, I am in the Beatles camp. My fave was George, but who doesn't love Paul, John and Ringo?
do you know of anyone who sucessfully dedicated time to charity without getting bad mouthed by witness elders?
we had a sister in creepside congregation who got a lot of lip when she was working for the food bank for free.
the jehovah's witnesses elders hinted, used the watchtower study to say "jehovah's people are ambassadors to satan's world and know the real solution is god's kingdom".
I don't know about how all JWs think, but my mom volunteers at a dog fostering job and works with dog shelters. Her thought is that she is helping God's creatures, not wicked human beings who will perish. Seriously. My mom is, apart from the cult thing, a really nice woman. I think this is the only kind of nice she can justify in the world. She does not really like wicked humans who will perish so much anyway, so I guess it works out great.
Honestly, I think she is basically good hearted, but she looks at non JW humans as if we are pretty much something that crawed from the sewers. But that is 70 years of training
what did you imagine would happen?
did they react the way you expected?
how did you bring it up?.
JeffT and his wife hiding their COC's from each other-that really tells us all we need to know about the organizational mentality, doesn't it?
I was a young girl in a mixed family. My mom had been long assoc. with witnesses and had only recently gotten baptised when she finally quit smoking (mostly). She was actually brought to meetings as a baby by a neighbor and really considered herself a JW since birth (her mom was friendly to the JWs, but not baptised or committed in any way). Soon after my mom was baptised, I realized that asking questions was verboten. I told the lady I was having a book study with about some of the issues I had and of course, I was reported to the elders. Stubborn cuss that I was, I didn't back down on my questions. I didn't go preaching about my issues to anyone, but I wasn't mature enough to understand the politics involved. I was 15 at the time and unbaptised. I was DA'd (for those who say that can't happen and I am lying, I will just say that you are ignorant).
It was kind of like Valdemorte in my family. Just don't speak about it and it will be ok. Mostly I was quiet, but sometimes my mom triggered me with her JW santimoniousness-like when I went Christmas shopping for an aunt and uncle and my mom made some stupid comment about how they were not going to have a present for me. . . as if that is what gift giving is all about!!! Just ugly attitudes constantly from my otherwise kind hearted mom. I don't like what the WT does to minds and hearts. It is twisted in every way imaginable when it can take the nicest people of normal intelligence and get them to say such ugly, cruel and/or ignorant things in support of the WT agenda. Uggh. Glad to be out.
BTW, I came from a mostly nice congregation and remember 90% fondly. Not one of them spoke to me after I was DA'd. Not one elder tried to encourage me back in. Not even the nicest lady in the whole org-Esther M. Sister M. didn't even call. She is dead now and I still regret that I didn't know her anymore after that. She was a dear person in my life for 15 years.
M.
i have just spoken to a brother who is part of a group of single brothers and sisters who meet together once a week to discuss bible topics and he has been told by and elder that the organisation "banned" these private meetings years ago.
i told him i remember that article but he is adamant that the society would never do that (!
) now i am fairly sure i remember that article whether it was in a km or one of the mags i cant recall but i am sure i remember them saying we needed nothing more than the food that the slave class provided (another means to control us),does anyone have the details of that article because i have said i will find it and let him have it.
We had groups of youth get together to study,usually at elders homes, but always at homes with responsible adult supervision. There was usually a MS or elder watching over the whole thing. Nothing egregious morally ever happened. We would study the WT, then eat and play games-all very wholesome stuff. It was the WT article in the early 8o's about 1975 that killed it. An elder WAS there with us and he shared HIS own experiences (we were all old enough to remember, but were mostly just preadolescent at the time. He washonest. Soon,the meetings ended and Bro N. was exiled somehow (don't know the whole story, but he was no longer elder in that congregation). That was a big wake up call. I already knew too much. I left shortly thereafter.
i was a junior borgite in 1975. i remeber looking at the calendar at work in october and thinking: 'armageddon isn't here yet.....and it doesn't feel like it will be here anytime soon either!'.
i was surprised that jehovah hadn't obeyed the superior command to bring the big 'a' as instructed to him by fred franz.
how dare god disobey the jw leader!!!!!.
I was 9 in 1975. I remember a lot of feelings from then, some conversations, some situations. Basically, there was a sense of fearful anticipation. My mom was not baptised yet (couldn't quit smoking for the life of her!) and my dad was a non believer. However, I was raised to understand that I was a JW from my earliest memory.
Disappointment and confusion in 1976. Several families disappeared (or parts of them), others became those folks that just show up for the memorial and maybe an afternoon of the assemblies.
Mostly, I remember years later when we did the mea culpa WT study in the early 80's. An elder told us some truths about his memory while we were in a youth meeting. Poor Brother North. . . he soon relocated far north of the congregation he had been in for my whole life. I think he was run out. I know that the youth WT mtgs were stopped right after that. The truth destroyed him-he finally spoke it and he was deleted.
I had been getting skeptical since I was 8 or 9. I had kind of a "show me the money" attitude. . . and the more I investigated, the more I realized how speculative their statements were. FORTUNATELY, I was a bookworm and my mom had the entire library of WT materials right at hand (until sometime in the 80s when she got rid of all her old WTs. . I imagine at the behest of the 'brothers' ) We had just about every book. They were NUTS.
I left when I was 15 and they all liked to chalk it up to teenage rebelliousness. It wasn't. I left because they were not only wrong (I could actually handle being wrong) but they were mean and arrogant and self righteous while they were flat out wrong.
Michelle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmql3gto128&feature=youtu.be.
I'm about half way through. Its very interesting, but more importantly, informative. I wish this hadn't been advertised as debunking JWs, as it will turn off most JWs from even being willing to watch it. It is something that they might watch for information had they not been turned off by the introduction to it (by its youTube titling). My mom would watch it otherwise, she loves this kind of thing. Trying to find the same presentation elsewhere on net.
after many years of objecting to the wt teachings on many levels, blood being one of them, i recently started to wonder (ok, i am slow!
) : what exactly does the wt think that the early non jewish christians were abstaining from in the blood abstention bit.
while i understand the context of the request that the apostle sent to the brothers, i do not understand what jws think they were abstaining from.. meat slaughtered improperly?.
I guess I fail to see how they are being at all observant about abstaining from blood merely by draining the meat from the tray. The reason why Jews slaughtered a certain way was TO ensure that the animal was properly dead and that they had not died with the blood just settling in the tissues. That requires more than merely draining the tray. The way animals are killed now results in the blood not being drained properly and they really have no clue whether an animal (like poultry) is strangled or not. The modern way of killing is not "kosher" in that the blood remains in the dead animal.
I actually think you are absolutely right about what the scriptures said regarding the eating of meat/Jewish law on blood(allowable so far as NT Christianity), but I am addressing this towards the JW mindset. They are not willing to go so far as those ancient gentile Christians were expected to go so far as their diet, but they put this other burden on them, instead.
Am I the only person that thinks that point in particular is hypocritical? More importantly, and to my question, has this ever been addressed by the WT?
after many years of objecting to the wt teachings on many levels, blood being one of them, i recently started to wonder (ok, i am slow!
) : what exactly does the wt think that the early non jewish christians were abstaining from in the blood abstention bit.
while i understand the context of the request that the apostle sent to the brothers, i do not understand what jws think they were abstaining from.. meat slaughtered improperly?.
After many years of objecting to the WT teachings on many levels, blood being one of them, I recently started to wonder (ok, I am slow!) : What exactly does the WT think that the early non Jewish Christians were abstaining from in the blood abstention bit. While I understand the context of the request that the apostle sent to the brothers, I do not understand what JWs think they were abstaining from.
Meat slaughtered improperly?
Drinking blood (from a vessel or straight from a living animal) literally?
We all know that those early Christians were not confronted with blood transfusions. So, it would seem fitting (JWSPEAK) that the WT folks would be giving up whatever kind of blood products that those early Christians did.
I have seen JWs (and everyone else!) drain the blood from the meat trays at the grocery store. They, like many, are repulsed at the idea of blood pudding or blood sausage. I have seen their written quandries about blood in the food of their pets.
I have never, however seen them shop for kosher or halal meat.
So, but for blood transfusions, how are JWs abstainig from eating blood?
(I asked elsewhere, but got no answers, just degrading comments about my person, which is typical. Please skip the bits degrading my intelligence-I have been informed already)
Shalom, salaams and peace to all.
