LisaRose

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Posts by LisaRose

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  28

  What is the current suicide and mental illness rate among JWs and previous members

  by 060702015 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  there seems to be no current data on this information and there is questions concerning the validation of past data.

  apparently there is high rate of mental illness and suicide.

  jehovahs witnesses suicide rate 5 to 10 times above average.

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  LisaRose

  As an example, my daughter was raised as a Jehovah's Witness. She began to have mental health issues by age fourteen and so wasn't qualified for baptism, if she had been baptized she would have been disfellowshipped for suicide attempts. She would not have counted in any statistical study of the congregation, they could say they didn't have any mentally ill in the congregation and been truthful, but their practices make that kind of statistical analysis meaningless.

  As another example, I knew of a Jehovah's Witnesses who began hearing voices, a sign of schizophrenia. He was disfellowshipped, as they assumed he was demonized.

  The study is meaningless because they shoot their wounded.
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  28

  What is the current suicide and mental illness rate among JWs and previous members

  by 060702015 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  there seems to be no current data on this information and there is questions concerning the validation of past data.

  apparently there is high rate of mental illness and suicide.

  jehovahs witnesses suicide rate 5 to 10 times above average.

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  LisaRose

  do not know of any study carried out on the mental health of ex-Witnesses and have no idea how that could be done with any reliability.

  Exactly. Which is why Rolf's study is less than worthless.

  Picking congregations at random does not make up for the obvious bias of the person doing the study. Being a lecturer in Semitic studies does not qualify you to do a study on mental health, it's frankly laughable. He may mean well but what are his credentials in mental health? What are his credentials in statistical analysis? Was this even peer reviewed?

  You are talking about a religion where it is not acceptable to be unhappy, much less admit to mental illness, so how accurate could any casual study actually be? And in a religion that disfellowships people for bad conduct, how meaningful is any one time study anyway? Anyone seriously mentally ill will soon get disfellowshipped, which is going to skew the results. You would have to do a long term study from birth to determine how many actually became mentally ill, which I doubt was done here.

  I don't even know how he got this published. It would be very interested to know how that happened.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
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  26

  Are gays really condemned in the Bible?

  by jws in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  so i was having this argument with a friend about the westboro baptist idiots.

  my point is that while they are horrible people, they are pretty much right in that the bible is against gays because it has verses in both the old and the new testament.

  which is one of many reasons to reject the bible as merely man-made rules from ancient middle-easterners.. and she argued that there are problems in translation, etc.

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  LisaRose

  I think the bible clearly does condemn homosexuality, but then it also very clearly condemns a lot of things. Most Christian religions these days have adopted a position of following the spirit of Christ's teachings without necessarily following the bible to the letter, and I think that is a good thing. Even in early Christian days there were different interpretations of things, so why shouldn't there be now? Even very fundamentalist religions like the JWs pick and choose what things they get their undies in a bunch about, so no group can really say they follow the bible perfectly anyway.

  Jesus said of a prostitute that "he who is without sin should cast the first stone", clearly indicating a moving away from the Jewish practice of following laws to the letter. In view of what we know now about homosexuality, that it isn't a choice, I think many Christians see that the more compassionate choice is to leave it up to the conscience of the individual.

  I have read the accounts of many gay Jehovah's witnesses and seen their struggle, their feelings of worthlessness and guilt, it's heartbreaking. No matter how hard they tried or how much they prayed they couldn't be other than what they were and they suffered for it because of the religion's harsh stance. To condemn them and treat them as unworthy of love and acceptance is to me the less Christian path.
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  28

  What is the current suicide and mental illness rate among JWs and previous members

  by 060702015 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  there seems to be no current data on this information and there is questions concerning the validation of past data.

  apparently there is high rate of mental illness and suicide.

  jehovahs witnesses suicide rate 5 to 10 times above average.

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  LisaRose

  Rolf Furili was a lecturer in Semtic languages, at Oslo University and is a Jehovah's Witness, so this entire study is highly questionable. His chief claim to fame prior to this was defending the Watchtower's questionable fall of Babylon chronology, he is not an expert in the field of mental illness and he has an obvious bias. This is a shameful attempt by the Watchtower to hide their problem with Mental illness and suicide, they have shown in the past that they will use dishonest methods like this to prop up their beliefs.

  From / Wikipedia

  Furuli has attempted to defend the religious views of Jehovah's Witnesses—of which Furuli is a member[3]—including their view that Jerusalem was destroyed by theBabylonians in 607 BC rather than the broadly recognised dating of its destruction in 587 BC.[4]

  Also from Wikipedia

  In a 2004 issue of Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Lester L. Grabbe, professor of theology at the University of Hull, said of Furuli's study: "Once again we have an amateur who wants to rewrite scholarship. ... F. shows little evidence of having put his theories to the test with specialists in Mesopotamian astronomy and Persian history."[5]
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  12

  Headaches vs. Migraines

  by Coded Logic in

  1. social
  2. physical

  a while back a coworker was telling me she had a migraine in the morning and had to take some aspirin before coming to work.

  i was like, "yeah, that wasn't a migraine dear.

  that was just a headache.

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  LisaRose

  Not all migraine headaches involve debilitating pain, but they do usually involve more than just head pain. A few times I got a weird migraine that affected the vision in one eye. The very center of my vision was completely out of focus in a sawtooth pattern. I was alarmed until my husband told me he gets the same thing occasionally. It went away after a few hours.
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  17

  Happy Birthday smiddy

  by smiddy in

  1. social
  2. family

  and a happy birthday to anybody else who born on the 5/7 month.

  smiddy.

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  LisaRose

  Happy Birthday

  🎉🎶🍸👑🎂
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  41

  Convention Weirdness

  by BlackWolf in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  well i just got back from 3 days in hell, and geez was this convention strange or what?

  im sure someone's probably made a topic about this already but i can't believe that there weren't any new releases besides the movies.

  has that ever happened before?

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  LisaRose

  I Remember this kind of speculation forty years ago in the run up th 1975, parsing out what was said and not said at the conventions, silly speculation about what it might mean.

  They love it when people read between the lines and start speculating, I think they actually want people to do that. Of course they never say anything themselves that they can be held accountable for later. They have been at this game for well over a hundred years, so why shouldn't they be good at it?

  I remember my mother telling me "brother Dimwit says Armageddon must be close, and he's and elder so he must know". I thought it was pathetic, I had begun to realize how much hope made people gullible. They weren't happy in their current life, they NEEDED it to be over soon and need made them willing to grasp at any hint.
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  16

  Need a Caleb&Sophia-doll?

  by crazy_flickering_light in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  it`s so crazy:.

  http://4ourkids-shop.com/epages/79abeb7d-1743-402a-b693-f12374c6191f.sf/en_us/?viewobjectpath=%2fshops%2f79abeb7d-1743-402a-b693-f12374c6191f%2fcategories%2fshop.

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  LisaRose

  The fact that it says "inspired by Caleb" tells me that it is not officially licenced.
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  28

  For My Kids

  by myjourney in

  1. social
  2. family

  i haven't been on here much, but every so often i try and keep up with the discussions.

  i'm sure this topic has been talked about before, so my apologies in advance if i'm repeating.. a little about me.... i'm a non baptized jw married to a devout jw.

  both my husband and i were raised in the organization.

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  LisaRose

  That's too bad. Never give up advocating for your children, this is too important. Think of it as a war, not a battle.
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  18

  Introducing myself

  by scratchme1010 in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  i just joined the forum, i just want to introduce myself.

  i tried to change my bio in my profile but for some reason i couldn't apply the update.. i was born and raise in the jw organization.

  lived in it for 23 years.

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  LisaRose

  Hello. Welcome to the forum. I am glad you found your way out.

  Lisa 🌹