Posts by careful

20

New here, never baptised (thank god)!

by olongapo joe in

jw
friends

just signed up and wanted to introduce myself.

i had 1 x-mas and 1 birthday before both my parents joined the jw's around 1966 or 67 being 1 year old i don't remember them (the holidays), to this day holidays are nothing to me (thanks jw's).

i never really believed the bible or jw literature.

careful

An airdale—so were you shore stationed or aboard a ship? I was in naval comm. & intelligence, moved around a lot, and visited Subic-Cubi once and also got over to Clark once. My first night in Olongapo was my first exposure to real third world poverty. I was pretty shocked to see how desperate those poor folks were. A poor person in the USA could live like a king in PI. I remember groups of local Filipino road workers putting tar down on roads in the tropics within the naval base––for $1 a day, and they felt they were making great money. Then there were all those young teen girls working the bars. For a young guy it was both exhilarating and depressing at the same time. That was a long time ago and the world has changed so much. Even just relating these words is bringing back a lot mixed memories that I haven't spoken about in years. Anyway, I doubt there are many people at this forum who have been where you are!

Even with inflation I imagine $1500 a month can still go a long way in Olongapo. Does the navy give you any medical care? To your dependents? Did they ever fix that river between the base and Po City?

Don't worry about always making sense in your posts. Nobody's that fussy here.

As for your parents, I can picture, from his perspective, how your dad must have felt frustrated, feeling you were making the same mistakes he had, how he probably felt he had failed both God and you. That can drive a man to tears. The Witness world certainly does not prepare anyone for life on the outside. You would have had to have had exceptional JW parents for that!

Sorry, I meant E-7, not O-7. I'm rusty on all that old military jargon. First-class isn't that bad to retire at, though chief would have been better.

20

New here, never baptised (thank god)!

by olongapo joe in

jw
friends

just signed up and wanted to introduce myself.

i had 1 x-mas and 1 birthday before both my parents joined the jw's around 1966 or 67 being 1 year old i don't remember them (the holidays), to this day holidays are nothing to me (thanks jw's).

i never really believed the bible or jw literature.

careful

O-Joe, thanks for the reply. You'll find this forum, well, quite diverse, though a core of atheists/agnostics run the show. Those not of their persuasion are tolerated. I hope you're glad you never got baptized. If you had, your parents would likely have cut you off. Now you can still deal with them. They must have been bummed out when you joined the military. Now you would indeed have been pressured to get baptized in 5th grade, have been disassociated by the org for having gone in the navy (= being DFed), and your parents would have shunned/ignored you.

So I figure you're enlisted, not officer. What was your rate? Did you make chief (O-7) or go beyond that? I can picture a group of lifers in Po City now. I think the same sort of thing happened at the Panama Canal Zone, for I knew a guy who did the same kind of thing you've done, and he joined a group of retirees there. A buck probably still goes far in PI. Are the Jeepneys still running? Have you learned any Tagalog?

Did you ever marry and have a Westpac widow and kids?

Keep posting please. Love to hear more of your story.

38

Who can you trust to admit you have doubts?

by MrMonroe in

(that is, doubts).

in margaret atwood's "the handmaid's tale", a futuristic story of life inside a repressive, abusive big brother-style society tightly controlled by religious fundamentalists, there's a passage in which the protagonist is alone with another woman at a state-controlled centre where prayers are generated -- then printed out and read out -- by a machine.

the other woman asks, in barely more than a whisper, "do you think god listens to these machines?

careful

When I pressed those few people to whom I could open up about the org's corruption (less than 1% of Witnesses I knew), I found two basic reactions. 1. They agreed and eventually left themselves or were DFed for apostasy. 2. They admitted there were problems or even were aware to some degree of the real corruption that those who are enlightened can see, but at a certain point they cut me off in one way or another. I've come to conclude since that in the latter case, such behavior on their part was necessary for them because of the threat posed by the cognitive dissonance that facing the truth posed to them. Their minds just were not strong enough to fully face the facts.

At the end of Ray Franz's CofC book, he relates the case of some sister who learned of the org's corruption, became lost, didn't know what to do, and so wrote him. Although Franz never came out and said this, the implication seems to be that it may have been better in the case of this woman to have never learned the truth (that is, TTATT, The Truth About "The Truth," or the facts of the org's corruption), for he said he couldn't really offer her anything other than "just go ahead and live your life as best you can." In other words, water down the Christian life to the social gospel, like so many of the liberal churches have done. For this woman that did not seem to meet her personal needs, the point of Ray's relating the story.

If you want to have personal discussions with those still in about the org's corruption, it is good to always try and figure out the mental strength of each person to whom you want to open up about the matter. Few can really handle it themselves, and you may unintentionally frighten them, and THAT can come back to harm YOU.

My two cents' worth of advice.

20

New here, never baptised (thank god)!

by olongapo joe in

jw
friends

just signed up and wanted to introduce myself.

i had 1 x-mas and 1 birthday before both my parents joined the jw's around 1966 or 67 being 1 year old i don't remember them (the holidays), to this day holidays are nothing to me (thanks jw's).

i never really believed the bible or jw literature.

careful

A lifer in the navy—is Olongapo as crazy as it was in the 70s? Didn't the navy pull out of there in 1992 after the Mt. Pinatubo eruption?

I went to Piqua once. It was brief but there was nice park there.

44

Honeymoon over for the carts

by Deltawave in

speaking with inlaws i another congregation today who said exactly what is being said in our own hall.

the trolly work is long and boring and no one even notices they are there anymore but walk right on by.

jehovah really is speeding up the work lol.

careful

THANK YOU, DAVID JAY! They have become more and more shameful.

22

Bob up and down Naked.......Really???

by Giordano in

after meticulous research here are the documented scientific pronouncements of the wtbt$.

“air baths are good for preventing colds.

what you do is strip naked mornings and evenings and then bob up and down for a while.” golden-age feb 1926 pg 310. .

careful

SBF, there was this article authored by Lowell Dixon, Brooklyn Bethel head physician, and Writing Department member Gene Smalley, in the JAMA here:

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=364809

Official? Well, not really, but surely it must have been authorized by the GB.

13

My life After Bethel Part 1

by new boy in

jw
friends

the day i left it was pouring rain........i really screwed up, i found out the night before, as i was packing things up, that i had way under estimated how much stuff i had.

i had two large suit cases (that i could barely shut the lids on) and a large army duffel bag.

i would guess about 200 pounds of shit......my van was in rhode island with the engine out of it.

careful

Prologos: I hope it was a VW bus and not a beetle!

52

New Field Service Report

by cognac in

jw
friends

has anyone seen this?

when did that happen?.

http://www.jw-archive.org/post/137681838624/new-service-report-jwinspirational.

careful

It's been so long that I forgot the precise format of the old FS slip, but it is interesting, isn't it, that the hours are down in the list, placed below the electronic data? Doesn't this show how their emphasis has changed? Will they now go around asking "how many electronic views have you shown this month, brother/sister?" or requiring a minimal number of electronic data when considering appointments or deciding whether they should approve some publisher for "special privileges"?

I could quote Huxley and say, "Oh, Brave New World!" but that would hide the fact that they are returning in principle to the Rutherfordesque phonographs played at the door.

Maybe they'll go over to merit badges with tallied electronic views that the microphone handlers can hang from their suits as they run around the hall during meetings!

44

Is there evidence for networks of abuse?

by slimboyfat in

i tend to avoid the subject because it's too depressing, so i've probably missed lots of discussion about this issue.

but i read a comment on youtube yesterday that shocked me and made me wonder.

the person claimed that many years ago abusers in society generally identified jws as a safe haven for abusers and joined en masse order to exploit the situation.

careful

Kramer, believe what you want. It really happened. If you look at my other posts and comments, they are all real. Regardless of your personal feelings about God, the Bible, etc., the situation in 2 Tim. that I cited reflects a historical aspect of early Christianity. Perhaps you were not exposed to the wild swinging lifestyle of the 1960-1980s, but it was indeed real, and it made inroads into the Witness world.

44

Is there evidence for networks of abuse?

by slimboyfat in

i tend to avoid the subject because it's too depressing, so i've probably missed lots of discussion about this issue.

but i read a comment on youtube yesterday that shocked me and made me wonder.

the person claimed that many years ago abusers in society generally identified jws as a safe haven for abusers and joined en masse order to exploit the situation.

careful

An interesting thought. When I was active I was in one congo that had two male newbies come in around the same time. As I recall, they were baptized at the same assembly. One was the most sexually active person I've ever met. He'd starting having sex with his mom when he was pre-schooler. Even though he was single, he screwed several times a day, married and unmarried sisters, brothers (he was truly bisexual), but he especially liked young girls. He made his living as a private hairdresser who went into people's homes in order to work on their hair. He really was like 2 Tim. 3:6 says. Most publishers, and even the elders, saw him as very lovable. In fact the elders reproved, rather than DFed him time and again. Finally they had to DF him, after he'd broken up marriages and made many young teen virgin girls hot-to-trot, eventually the most powerful elder's 12-year old daughter. From what I heard, he really was a great lover. Many sisters said it was the best sex they'd ever had. One even abandoned her husband and kids to run off with him a while. The sisters used to get together and compare notes on the guy. One elder whose attractive wife he failed to seduce called him a stud.

The other guy came in and right after his baptism, married a really cute, but very dumb, single sister who'd had a background of sexual abuse as a girl. She had a very cute 5-year old daughter. Right after their marriage they moved away, and some years later it came out that the guy was having sex regularly with the young girl, in fact, all through her childhood and teen years. Then he dumped them both and took off.

So your idea couldn't help but make me think of these two since they came in together. They even studied with the same pioneer-elder who was quite oblivious of modern culture (ultra loyal, ex-missionary, big-shot ex-bethelite, truly in JWland). The congo was on a basic level very friendly and thus had frequent low-key picnics, get togethers, dinners, etc., so these two guys were often together at them. That congo in particular went out of its way to love bomb those studying, so these guys were always invited to the social events. Whether they planned all this as established pedophiles I do not know. This was before the internet, but I understand that now there are pedo-chatrooms where these people can get together and plan their attacks. So maybe you are onto something here. It's certainly worth pursuing, but other than the anecdotes like mine, how would you collect the info to do so?