I can agree that it's hard to be a young person in "The Truth", but honestly I got out when I was 17 and before I was baptised, so I think I managed to avoid some of the worst. My family that's still in the organization doesn't have to shun me, etc. Yeah, it was a really hard time in my life for me, but I really feel like I got off easy when I hear about other people's stories.
apfergus
JoinedPosts by apfergus
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22
What age group has to sacrifice the most to be a JW?
by JH in.
what age group has it easier or harder to be a jw?
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58
DO SOMETHING
by ArtfulDodger ini see this site gets thousands of postings every day .. from literally thousands of members, mostly ex-dubs, from all over the world.. rather than simply go on moaning and whinging about the big nasty org why don't you all put your efforts into something positive ... do something.. ok - the org is evil .. but it exists ... and simply whining on about it doesn't change that.
with your efforts directed at something positive, you could do wonders for .
.for anything you choose.. hundreds of real charities could do with your support - to help the really needy .
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apfergus
First of all, many people are here for moral support--not to subvert the Watchtower by posting messages on a message board. Some people just have some anger, frustration, or other pent up emotions because they were hurt in one way or another by some people who claimed to love them. Don't get all snappy at them because they aren't out on the streets leading the crusade against the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
Second, if you're going to get on other people's cases about not taking direct action, the least you could do is offer some suggestions as to what can be done. If you've found some methods to help others escape the Organization, by all means share them. But if you don't have any idea what to do yourself don't presume to tell other people that they should be doing. Last time I checked, tearing down a cult of some six million people isn't just something you can just wake up and do (or even start to do) on a Saturday afternoon. -
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Free Home Bible Study, NOT!
by VM44 in"would you like a free home bible study?
" the jws ask people at their door.. the problem is, the study is not free, and is not a bible study!.
not a bible study?
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apfergus
Indoctrination it is. There are so many places in the Bible where the JWs actually switch rhetoric practically in mid verse in order to squeeze out support for their position. Take away the suplements from the society and pressure from a study conductor and I'd wager no one would be able to come to the same conclusions again.
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If All Who Wanted To Leave, Left...
by Lady Liberty inmy sister and i were talking today about how many would really be witnesses if they were allowed to leave without any reprocussions??
what would the real count be??
i bet you it would be far less than 6 million!!!
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apfergus
Just like a lot of folks already said: the shunning process is just a tool to stop people from leaving. It's all about control; shunning is in place because without it the JWs numbers would most certainly be fewer. It's hard to say by how much, though.
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How Were You Treated By The Elders?
by minimus ingenerally, were you treated with respect, kindness and empathy or did the elders treat you badly?
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apfergus
The weird thing was that the Elders and other older members of the congregation were the nicest to me. I was seventeen when I just stopped going to the KH mostly because there were never any other kids my age who were willing to give me the time of day, much less provide me with enough of a social life to stop me from associating with all those "wicked" kids at school.
Of course, after I hadn't been to the KH in over a week or so I kept getting calls from a couple of the Elders for a while, all of which I ignored. I didn't want to ruin the one thing about going to the KH which I remembered fondly by getting tied up in the politics that were sure to follow. -
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Are you a fan of Ayn Rand works and/or Philosophy?
by Eyebrow2 ini have done a lot of reading of rand's fiction, and have been reading a lot about her philosophy over the past several months.
i attend a local study group on her philosophy, and my family and i often attend get togethers that a local objectivist group puts on once or twice a month.. i am interested in talking with other ex witnesses that enjoy her work, and may be interested in discussing her philosophy.
i won't call myself an objectivist just yet, because i still am studying the philosophy.
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apfergus
Cool. I'll check out the website, but do you have any of Rand's essay collections you might be able to recommend? It's something I've been meaning to read up on once I get a break from school and work.
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Are you a fan of Ayn Rand works and/or Philosophy?
by Eyebrow2 ini have done a lot of reading of rand's fiction, and have been reading a lot about her philosophy over the past several months.
i attend a local study group on her philosophy, and my family and i often attend get togethers that a local objectivist group puts on once or twice a month.. i am interested in talking with other ex witnesses that enjoy her work, and may be interested in discussing her philosophy.
i won't call myself an objectivist just yet, because i still am studying the philosophy.
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apfergus
I'm personally not a huge Rand fan. While I do think she had some interesting points, I just don't see eye-to-eye with her on economics at all and I found Atlas Shrugged to be so boring and poorly written that I couldn't get more than a couple hundred pages into it. If I could just get myself to read a little more of her essays, I'm sure I'd have something more constructive to say. Having said that, I can't stand Leonard Peikoff. I think he's the one primarily responsible for the Ayn Rand Objectivist "cult" some other people have hinted at.
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A New Voice
by apfergus ini haven't been involved with the jws in nearly five years now.
i was raised as a witness from the time i was seven until i was 17 and a junior in high school.
i don't have any particularly sad stories to tell, really, except that the process of leaving the organization--even though i was never baptised--was the hardest thing i've ever gone through.
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apfergus
Good question, actually. It's all because of quantum mechanics. Back in the early-ish 20th century a guy named DeBroglie came up with a relationship between an object's momentum and it's wavelength. This completely counterintuitively implies that things with no mass, such as light waves, can have momentum--a property usually reserved for massive particles. Also, massive particles could be wave-like. This blurred the lines seperating waves from particles and now pretty much everything is just colloquially referred to as a particle--gluons, neutrinos (once thought to be massless, now we're working on measuring their mass), photons, and gravitons (never actually been observed, but theoretically massless).
Hopefully that helps. It's one of those things that kind of requires a bit of suspension of disbelief before you can really accept it. Quantum mechanics is just plain weird sometimes. -
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What is your favorite Bible?
by inquirer ini have a couple: new american bible, new jerusalem bible, new world translation and the world english bible.
i know i am going to cop it because i like the new world translation -- i have done a lot of research on it, and don't come to the same conclusion as nearly everyone else and think it's automatically bad just because it's done by the jw's.
doesn't mean i am pro-catholic because i like their bibles too...
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apfergus
I'm partial toward the Skeptics Annotated Bible.
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What Bible Characters Fascinated You?
by MissBehave ini grew up like alot of you on my book of bible stories with all the beautiful illustrations .
thinking back the characters that i was most fascinated with were those like jezebel, delilah, queen vashti etc.
being a young teenage girl, to me they seemed way more interesting.
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apfergus
I have two. One was Ehud. I don't remember the story too well, but he took the handle off a sword and used it to assasinate a king who was so fat that they couldn't find the murder weapon afterward. I just found that amusing.
The other is Mahershalalhashbaz--the longest name in the bible. It supposedly means "the spoil, the spoil, make haste to the spoil". I have no idea what he did, but his name was awesome. And by awesome, I mean crazy.