osmosis

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Posts by osmosis

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  49

  Do Some JW Elders Secretly Consider It Possible That They Are Wrong?

  by West70 in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  i recently heard this "experience" from a now "christian" former jw, which has not previously been publicly communicated.

  this jw then moved back to their home area (no jw relatives), and simply continued living their already-in-progress non-jw life.

  inevitably, this exjw christian started bumping into their jw former associates.

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  osmosis

  SickOfLies: LMAO! Bisexual women are the best, aren't they? Hell is a small price to pay for a double helping of tang.
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  44

  I'm a newbie!!

  by Poodles in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  this is my first time in this forum!

  i joined because i would like to understand the witness way of life w/o joining!!

  all debates welcome!!

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  osmosis

  Welcome poodle! I'm new here too.

  Hey who said that thing about being a JW being like hotel california... that song is about heroin.. coincidence, or no?
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  23

  How much does it cost to be a JW

  by osmosis in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  ok the story i get from my jw relatives is that borg "isn't making money off them", but that never sat well with me.

  i've always wondered how much money she contributed to the borg.. since i don't have the nerve to ask them, and they probably won't tell me the "truth" if i do, i'm asking you folks.. how much money does the average jw contribute to the cause?

  how much do those silly magazines cost anyway?

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  osmosis

  OK the story I get from my JW relatives is that bOrg "isn't making money off them", but that never sat well with me. I've always wondered how much money she contributed to the bOrg.

  Since I don't have the nerve to ask them, and they probably won't tell me the "truth" if I do, I'm asking you folks.

  How much money DOES the average JW contribute to the cause? How much do those silly magazines cost anyway? The money has to come from somewhere, right?
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  40

  WATCHTOWER MONEY - New contribution program!

  by Severus in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  watchtower money serves two purposes: to protest the policies of jehovah's witnesses and educate the public about the hidden side of the watchtower society.

  consider this a sophisticated form of guerilla protest and awareness campaign.

  each bill or check is designed to get the attention of the beholder and quickly provide information.

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  osmosis

  LOL that's wicked. Nice job, man. I too admire the serial numbers.

  As for the back, how about the most distrubing quote from the watchtower you can find, complete with reference so they can look it up if they care to.

  Just yesterday I realized the best way to combat the JWs as a group is by publishing counter-information such as this funny money. The specific idea I had was to publish a parody of the Awake! magazine containing amusing, yet scathing articles about the JWs, in the same condescending tone of the magazine. I thought of calling it "Asleep!".

  If I agreed to do the editorial work, graphics and page layout, are there any amongst us who would spend some of their time contributing articles?
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  17

  What would put a "big smile" on JW's faces?

  by JH in

  1. jw
  2. friends
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  osmosis

  Giving the pope a wedgie

  Finding a crate of prozac

  Getting his/her finger on the button and pushing the button

  Free lobotomies for all the lord's faithful
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  43

  Meeting Survival Guide – Games to play

  by unclebruce in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  meeting survival guide games we play

  one doesn't grow up religiously attending '5 meetings a week' without developing a strategy for survival.

  mine started at about ten years of age and gradually grew more sophisticated as the years assemblies rolled by.

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  osmosis

  I'm intrigued by this pumping for information stuff (no pun intended).

  I've always felt that my JW aunt, when we talk (quite often) wasn't actually chitchatting with me or showing any real interest in me or my life, I usually feel that she's just probing for information that I may or may not want to share with her.

  Has my aunt been pumping me? Probably. At least now I know where that weird, uncomfortable feeling comes from when I talk to her.
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  22

  evps what do you think?

  by BlackSwan of Memphis in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  ok, i really love ghost hunters.

  one of my favorite shows.

  i think for me the possibility of whether or not there is something after this life is largely dependent on the prescence of god/dess or some other greater being in the universe.

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  osmosis

  Wow, some of you are really confused.

  I listened to those electronic voices and, in my opinion, so what? Doesn't prove a thing, doesn't even cause me to question anything. Doesn't convince me, doesn't even tickle.

  There are two things I would like to make known to you all which I think EVERYone can benefit from, even if they are already skeptical. One is the web site www.randi.org (that's James the Amazing Randi) which has a very good online encyclopedia of claims, frauds, hoaxes, occult, paranormal, etc. (In fact, you look under "J" guess what you'll see in there)

  The other is a fantastic series of shows by Penn & Teller called "Bullshit!", which airs on ShowTime. The series, available on DVD, covers all sorts of BS, quackery, false claims and stupid ideas. And what's more, it's very funny. In one episode on the whole "alien abduction" phenomenae, they get some claimed alien abductee, and show her this thing, and she says yes they [the aliens] use those. The thing they showed her was a sex toy spray painted silver! Bastards.

  Everyone should watch BS!
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  37

  Say hello to the new guy

  by osmosis in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i found this web site while researching jws (my immediate family on my dad's side is jw, except for my dad, who was subjected to the programming from birth, and who seems to be caught in some strange world between the jw world and the real one).. for the most part, these are decent, kind, loving people.

  the only problem is that they are jws!.

  i myself am atheist, so in theory i should them to be atheist also, but i'd gladly settle for steering them into a different form of christianity.. anything but jw.

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  osmosis

  Since I started researching JW stuff, I have seen many new and fascinating things, quite a lot of it surprising to me.. C.T. Russel's odd pyramid superstitions, the masonic connection, the adventist "cousins", william smith, the great disappointment, the wackos at waco.. all strange and decidedly occult. But never, in any of my wildest imaginations did it occur to me that googling "jehovah's witness" would lead to a group of cool people like this. Never.

  Thank you for welcoming me, I think I like it here.

  jgnat: Yes it would be way cool IF I could break them out of it, but it's like a bad habit they're in denial of(I keep wanting to snap my fingers in front of their faces and go "hello?!"). While my dad is in limbo (seems like purgatory sometimes) my aunt, her brother and husband are happy, devout, at-your-door JWs who claim spiritual fulfillment and have no apparent reason to give anything I say any credence over their beliefs. I've got a lot on my plate here, as you can well imagine. If I could budge my dad an inch in the right direction I'd be impressed, and he's the easy one.

  Or is he? I'm not sure, sometimes I think he got the worst deal of all.. he got the mental cripple but not the fulfillment. Although he doesn't *generally* talk their talk or espouse their ideas, I've seen it in there. More troubling is that they were born into it and the thought patterns are so deeply entrenched.

  Perhaps he's not the easy one of them though. Perhaps being neither here nor there is easier to rationalize than being an active, no blood card carrying, door-to-door-bot. They DO have the capacity to reason, sometimes. Maybe the ones who have gone WAY over the line are more off balance and therefore in the weakest position.. sort of an aikido philosophy there.. lol

  Balsam: I've been talking about some of the stuff I've learned and I've made a little progress. and by little I mean little. I have great respect and fear for their capacity to ignore even the most basic rules of logic. I've gotten them to at least recognize their own history, but they give me some BS concerning "the light of truth". I know it's their rhetoric so there's no explanation necessary. I think I'll lay off for a bit, let it mellow a while, then maybe hit them with some kind of unexpected logic.

  Maybe if their guard is down and I do it very carefully I can slip the logic in there while they're looking the other way. I believe that by informing them of their history, and getting them to produce a rationalization, I have laid the groundwork. Their explanation that "hey, we're allowed to change our minds" might be reasonable at face value, but not in the context of "the one and only true religion" of an unchanging bible!
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  29

  If you claim a divine miracle in your life, you will be disfellowshipped!!!

  by free2beme in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  one of the key things i have noticed since leaving the witnesses and interacting with other faiths, is that they often mention the word "miracle!

  " in that they will claim that their god had performed some sort of miracle in their life that brought about something amazing.

  it is not always christians who say this either, as many of my "pagan" friends and myself have had spirit driven moments that were something that could not be displaced as "chance.

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  osmosis

  Glad to see I'm not the only skeptic in the house.

  Mackin: I agree. If you truly believe that a miracle has happened to you or anyone else, you are at least a little bit completely insane. Not necessarily a fatal flaw though, some of my favourite people were a little bit totally nuts.

  Dozy: No, alien abduction claims are not believable. Many so-called alien abductees are actually victims of a crackpot psychologist who claims to "hypnotize" or "regress" them to uncover "repressed memories", but if you analyze their method, you quickly see that those "memories" are actually invoked at the suggestion of the quack psychologist. Others just don't know when they're dreaming and when they're not. In any case, if you analyze the claims, and the pictures these "abductees" draw of their "captors", it's pretty obvious that their claims and images have actually come from pop culture media, like the idea of the "flying saucer".

  Dr Jekyll: Yes the "bOrg" (love that name lol) has a twisted duality to it. On the one hand, they have and have always had some rather quirky notions about how the world works. On the other, there are some scientific leanings to them as well. For example, their religion has changed considerably in the last 100 or so years. Change is generally much more scientific than it is religious. C.T. Russel, if he were alive today, would probably be right here on this web site with us, having been branded an apostate and tossed out of the clique by the modern JW.

  FlyingHighNow: This NDE stuff is a load of BS engineered to sell you books and magazines on the subject. For quite some time now we have known with very good certainty that these visions are just symptoms of your brain going haywire when you're in your dying throes. It's very reasonable and *parsimonious* (google "occam's razor") to see this as a simple mind trip courtesy of mother nature. The very same effect can be achieved in one of those centrifuges they spin astronauts around in to see if they can stand the G's. Try googling "dying brain theory".

  I-CH-TH-U-S: That could not possibly have happened as you say it did. An extraordinary claim such as that requires extraordinary evidence to back it up. I'm willing to bet everything I own that you cannot produce, nor have you seen your own self, a single shred of real, solid evidence. You simply believe what your friend says, and he probably *believes* it too.

  anewme: I feel as you do. Yes, there is a message in the wind, that message is it's direction and velocity. If you try hard enough, you *will* hear something though. What might that be? It will be exactly what you want to hear. It might make you feel good, but it won't be real.
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  37

  Say hello to the new guy

  by osmosis in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i found this web site while researching jws (my immediate family on my dad's side is jw, except for my dad, who was subjected to the programming from birth, and who seems to be caught in some strange world between the jw world and the real one).. for the most part, these are decent, kind, loving people.

  the only problem is that they are jws!.

  i myself am atheist, so in theory i should them to be atheist also, but i'd gladly settle for steering them into a different form of christianity.. anything but jw.

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  osmosis

  Hello all,

  I found this web site while researching JWs (my immediate family on my dad's side is JW, except for my dad, who was subjected to the programming from birth, and who seems to be caught in some strange world between the JW world and the real one).

  For the most part, these are decent, kind, loving people. The only problem is that they are JWs!

  I myself am atheist, so in theory I should them to be atheist also, but I'd gladly settle for steering them into a different form of Christianity.. anything but JW. You've all apparently been there, so I needn't explain why. (Hmmm... not wanting to make them identical to myself... how very un-JW of me.)

  I think it's awesome that you have this forum, and that you support each other in your mutual quest for spritual and intellectual freedom.

  I look forward to chatting with you all. By the way, my real name is Robert, and I live in Vancouver, BC, Canada.