It seemed to me that ANYTHING related to the arts was discouraged. I was into any and every form of art you can imagine, but the arts usually deal with depicting truth and reality - thus, they don't really fit in...especially performing of any sort. I wanted to take drawing/painting/graphic design SO BADLY, but my parents only encouraged PRINTING (as in using a printing press so that I could get into Bethel).
Posts by tonic
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47careers and job positions JWs are not allowed to have
by tula inhow many of you were required to give up a certain career you had in order to become a jw or before you could be baptised?.
help here in naming all the job positions and careers that dubs are not allowed to have and the scriptural reason for it.
detail if possible.. can a jw be a mortician?.
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44
WERE YOU EVER A SUBJECT OF K. HALL GOSSIP???
by chuckyy inwhilst a jw, one thing that was evident to me was the constant gossip and backbiting.....being nice to someones face and then talking about them behind there backs.were you ever a "victim" of this sort of behaviour???
is it as common as i suspect from cong.
to cong???.
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tonic
Quandry: I know, that's exactly what I thought. I guess she was implying that somehow the state of my JW "spirituality" could somehow affect her son's spirituality - even though I am 2,000 miles away. She was just trying to lay on the guilt to acquire some great gossip.
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WERE YOU EVER A SUBJECT OF K. HALL GOSSIP???
by chuckyy inwhilst a jw, one thing that was evident to me was the constant gossip and backbiting.....being nice to someones face and then talking about them behind there backs.were you ever a "victim" of this sort of behaviour???
is it as common as i suspect from cong.
to cong???.
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tonic
Are you kidding? Gossip is one of the few acceptable things in the congos (even if they say it isn't)..even at Bethel. My favorite was when a "sister" I knew contacted about 2 years after I left the JW's and told me she needed to know if rumors she had heard were true and that her 5 year-old son's life depended on her knowing. I hadn't seen her in about 4 years and had only seen her son one time, so it was obvious she was fishing for gossip to relate back to others. I told her to make up whatever she wanted about me and tell the bros and sis that it was true...
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WERE THERE ANY ZOONOTIC DISEASES ON NOAH'S ARK?
by badboy inreading the latest national geographic magazine, it talks about zoonotic disease.. now if he different animals were slapped close together,wouldn't pathogens have jumped rom species to species?.
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tonic
Don't you remember? That's how they lost the ninth passenger on the ark: Bordecai. Also, the unicorns and the Trelonius Bandersnatches went extinct in transit due to the diseases as well. It's in Jedediah 7:14-16 :(... Too bad...loved the cute little Bandersnatch.
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JW's saw my halloween decorations -YIKES!
by annalice inso i just got all my new decorations up for halloween .
they look awsome!
and who stops by?
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tonic
lol... I say: "Let's give'em something to talk about." They all love a little scandal to talk about. After I stepped down from being an elder and was reproved and stopped attending meetings, about 4 months later, I ran into an elder I had served with said how much everyone always asks about me and how concerned everyone is. I told him that, it's funny, my phone number hasn't changed and yet none of those concerned people ever call. Sorry.. wine side-tracked me: Congrats on your Halloween decorations...isn't it the funnest holiday?
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What a difference a year makes.
by Billzfan23 inlast year on this date... i was burned out as an elder, school overseer, book study overseer, etc... my monday nights were shepherding calls, phone calls, judicial committe meetings.
tuesday nights i conducted the theocratic ministry school and usually had a service meeting part.
wednesday nights i had a bible study with a family from the territory.
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tonic
I always tried "throwing my burden on Jehovah" but found he wasn't a very good catch. Congrats on realizing how great life can be. My friends tell me that when I left it was like night and day... from a very unhappy JW to an obviously fulfilled person. There will always be problems, but at least now you don't have to deny reality.
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tonic
Ah, by Oracle's list, I was a ZEALOT. I truly cared about the congo and helping them. The experience of being an elder (following suit with being a bethelite and doing need-greater work in South America) helped open my eyes even further to the borg. On my body of elders only about 1/3 were really caring. Others were power-mongering or self-righteous. And they LOVED having me, a young newbie, to become their slave. They made it as hard as they possibly could for me to step down. After stepping down, they pretty much had nothing to do with me. Then when I was reproved (Damn, I had to do SOMETHING to speed up the process!), they erased me from their data-banks and pretended I didn't exist. I went from being the 25-year-old superstar elder who had played by all their rules, gave their special talks, and took all the shit-work... to being nothing within 1.5 to 2 months. After I stepped down, only one person I served on the body with ever called me (the Presiding Overseer who he had admitted to me that he was gay)! On top of that, only one other person in the entire congo ever called me and he was someone who was married with children who had admitted to me that he was gay. Hmm, you can probably guess why they were telling me that. At any rate, YES any thinking brother will eventually realize that being an elder is thankless slavery. They only way I can imagine a person sticking with it is a love of power. Usually, they end up watching their own families fall apart, while they "serve" the congregation.
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46
What does your city/town smell like??
by horrible life inwhile on vacation, we drove through amarillo.
the smell of cattle was everywhere.
for the citizens of amarillo, texas, that is the smell of money.. in my town, we have the nearby paper mill, weyerhaeuser.
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tonic
Too often it smells like urine (NYC)...
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Would you live your life differently, if you new what happens after death?
by passive suicide inso i had a thought today, that may spark some interesting conversation......
if you were able to die.....totally, and utterly dead.and see what there really is for your own eyes/soul after death......not what the bible says, not what your mom, dad, preacher, rabbi,faithful and discreet slave, conscience ...whatever says will happen....but what really happens......( who can say for sure they know by the way), and then somehow you were brought back,
would you live your life differently?
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tonic
It's funny, my best friend left the JW's at the same time as I did and, while we both are agnostic, he lives his life as: "What if it all means nothing?" I prefer to live mine as: "What if it all means something?" I just find it the better option and living that way means I live fully, richly and wouldn't change a thing regardless an afterlife (or lack thereof).
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Fear of death.
by JeffT ini'm noticing a trend in the modern world.
everything comes with a scare story.
this was prompted by the shark steak thread and the talk about mercury in the food chain.
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tonic
There's a definite difference, for some, in fearing the process of dying or fearing death itself. While pain, etc. of the process of dying scares me somewhat, what happens after the moment death occurs doesn't scare me...it intrigues me. If dying is the end of all thought and experience, I won't even know it. I believe it's not at all, so I'm looking forward to finding out what the next chapter of existence is like (not prematurely though).