You are a good writer - tell us what n0o one else has privy access to, and be personal instead of third person!
Randy
Dogpatch
JoinedPosts by Dogpatch
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16
I am seriously considering writing an E-book
by AK - Jeff init is wise for a first time writer to write about what he knows, so i will write about my lifetime as a jehovah's witness.
but it will likely be less autobiographical and more about the sub-level markers that eventually pointed me out of the cult, doctrinal matters that bothered me under the surface, and the very real lack of love in that organization.. ideas?
thoughts?
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Memories at Herman's Hotel
by Dogpatch insorry about the double post, it wouldn't let me back in to put in the title.
memories at herman's hotel.
sunday, 24 april 2011 22:49this last weekend i had to cut my work and storage space down due to the landlord wanting some of it back (right!
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Dogpatch
sorry about the double post, it wouldn't let me back in to put in the title. :-))
Sunday, 24 April 2011 22:49 This last weekend I had to cut my work and storage space down due to the landlord wanting some of it back (right! ...after 30 years of living in this same place you take our storage away!). I finally finished moving things and getting rid of a ton of stuff. A lot went in the trash, a lot went to Goodwill and some to the local equipment recycling plant. The rest I had to rent part of a new storage facility in Compton to keep (the facility is cheaper there).
In the 80s I did a evening TV show on cults with TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) because Paul and Jan Crouch wanted to educate Christians on cults - but they didn't care for Walter Martin's style (author of the major hit Kingdom of the Cults). Jan read my Refuting Jehovah's Witnesses book and said "I want him on instead."
So I was reliving my life up to present by going through all these old memories.
The animal days were my earliest education in facing reality. I was like a parent with 200+ kids - you can't make 'em all happy! I learned how to establish relative priorities in my life when it came to time spent with other creatures, including friends. (Good training for being a pastor (that came 16 years later).
Earlier Memories Found
I was a straight A student for all my school years except high school. One of my high schools gave us an SAT test as an experiment to see how younger kids would do, and to my surprise I had the highest score in the school - a badge was another piece of memorabilia I found. I was especially good at spelling, and beat out two girls who were considered the brains of the school in a spelling bee (one was a Jehovah's Witness).
As a kid, I felt I really did not belong in this world. For the first 12 years of my life I felt just as comfortable by myself as with friends - often taking long trips alone. This is where I developed my "bullshit detector." When you are away from society you look back at it from a different perspective and learn to love people enough but not to be so quick to believe in what they believe. Besides, it was time to grow my hair long and be a hippie.Back then, Las Vegas was owned by the Mafia, the bad 14-yr. olds were on heroin and there was no modern Strip with its giant ostentatious buildings. The first Caesar's Palace had just been completed (only a few stories tall) and Wayne Newton and Tom Jones performed on the Strip for years. My girlfriend made me drive her down to visit him in his dressing room a couple of times on my motorcycle (this was when you could ride a motorcycle in Vegas at 14 yrs. old). I always picked the wild girlfriends.
On the left was my girlfriend, Renee who was living with me in Newport Beach as a Rosicrucian. We both became Witnesses by looking them up, and we BOTH got our mothers, sisters and brother-in-laws into it! (Mine are all out now. Renee won't talk to me.)
Learning the Ropes
I don't exactly know how to describe this transition in my life. For the first 13 years I was more like my mom, then I slowly became more like my dad - outgoing, life of the party, crazy and the jokester. But I also learned all the tricks of working with people, since he spent 30 years in the car business and I often worked at the same agency he did. He was in demand by Ford agencies all over Southern Calif. because wherever he went sales would triple, especially when he started managing. You might want to watch my interview with my dad, made in Arkansas the year before he died, where I asked him how he managed to stay honest in the car business (back then it was more notorious and crooked).
I found the mountain and hiking pictures. Sometimes I feel partly autistic - preferring the world of nature and hikes with friends in the mountains of Yosemite and Yellowstone... hunting, fishing, riding horses and eventually dirt motorcycles.
But I also found pictures of my souped-up Mustangs and Orange Country raceway, where my auto shop teacher worked in the evenings. It was a two-hour class each day, and we built our own funny car and raced it there.
I always had two cars - one that cost $50 that you race through the thousands of dirt miles on unpoliced Irvine property that was mostly orange groves. Now the same uninhabited land is now the cities of Irvine and El Toro.
City life was not for me. I used to tell people the last place in the world I would ever live is New York City. God's joke on me? When I came back to Orange County and Los Angeles in 1980 it was like rural territory in comparison to Brooklyn!
So originally I was living in the early stages of the Hippie generation and we used to do LSD and barbituates and go vandalize the rural neighborhood, doing dares and double dares.Once my buddy and I tried sleeping in a haunted house - we tried twice and on the second attempt we hopped in the old Ford truck 7 miles up a dirt road in the Capistrano mountains at a 100 acre ranch owned by my Scottish neighbor. Bob Fraser is one of the heads of the large Fraser clan that has their own castle in Scotland (which I visited years later). It is still family-owned and operated, and is seen in movies occasionally where they need a real late-medieval-looking castle.
This time around I've lived at the beach for 30 years since leaving Bethel! Ahh, 30 years of memories in a small room.
[On the left is a picture taken on the Pacific Crest Trail on one of our 3-week horseback-riding trips when I was 16.]
My Space
This storage room is where I kept my shipping supplies, unused equipment, and was really the only storage I had. So now my Free Minds Journal (newsletter) folder is in my kitchen (we have two kitchens fortunately, and one is all mine, due to my seniority!) It is where I work all day. All my shipping stuff is now hidden away in cabinets that you THINK might be reserved for food. It's the hidden office, looks normal and not cluttered on the inside, but with the usual fridge, microwave, etc. and connects to my room, which other than a bed and couch would not look like your room.
I can lock myself away from the rest of the house when the gang (4 roommates) gets too noisy. We have probably had about 20 roommates over the years, thus gaining it the silly title of "Herman's Hotel."
In my room it's pretty much an office as well. There are so many pieces of equipment: video machines, lighting, 3 computers, 3 printers, and a big old TV. My ergonomic bicycle stands by the door. All shelves under my waterbed are full of paper and wires and other misc equipment.
This house has many memories, from my first year out of Bethel, when I worked graveyard at Anderson Lithograph in downtown Los Angeles, and came home at 6 AM and slept on the beach for awhile. Then I quit this job (my last employer) and started washing and waxing cars 20 hours a week so I could start writing my books, including Thus Saith the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses (now called Thus Saith Jehovah's Witnesses), a collection of photocopies of WT false prophecies, etc. published in May 1982, the first of several self-published books. As the Watchtower has changed its teachings, so it has gone through several printings. Ha! They sit on my bookshelf as reminders of my need to chronicle my findings while in New York.
The house is old, built in 1934, and was a cocaine party house I found out years later from the locals. I am only two miles from LAX airport, so a lot of stewards and stewardesses moved in this area and shared the house and partied here. The movie "Blow" with Johnnie Depp was filmed in the beach parking lot a few hundred yards away, since it was the scene back then.
So I came from New York and turned it into a church. I even have two small stained-glass windows upstairs looking up at the sky. We met on Wed. nights in the big living room overlooking the ocean, and rented a local property owners clubhouse for Sunday night church meetings.
Nowadays the house is almost an eyesore, but it sure has a lot of stories to tell!
Thanks for listening. Now back to work in the kitchen. :-)) -
2
untitled
by Dogpatch inmemories at herman's hotel.
sunday, 24 april 2011 22:49this last weekend i had to cut my work and storage space down due to the landlord wanting some of it back (right!
...after 30 years of living in this same place you take our storage away!).
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Dogpatch
Sunday, 24 April 2011 22:49 This last weekend I had to cut my work and storage space down due to the landlord wanting some of it back (right! ...after 30 years of living in this same place you take our storage away!). I finally finished moving things and getting rid of a ton of stuff. A lot went in the trash, a lot went to Goodwill and some to the local equipment recycling plant. The rest I had to rent part of a new storage facility in Compton to keep (the facility is cheaper there).
In the 80s I did a evening TV show on cults with TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) because Paul and Jan Crouch wanted to educate Christians on cults - but they didn't care for Walter Martin's style (author of the major hit Kingdom of the Cults). Jan read my Refuting Jehovah's Witnesses book and said "I want him on instead."
So I was reliving my life up to present by going through all these old memories.
The animal days were my earliest education in facing reality. I was like a parent with 200+ kids - you can't make 'em all happy! I learned how to establish relative priorities in my life when it came to time spent with other creatures, including friends. (Good training for being a pastor (that came 16 years later).
Earlier Memories Found
I was a straight A student for all my school years except high school. One of my high schools gave us an SAT test as an experiment to see how younger kids would do, and to my surprise I had the highest score in the school - a badge was another piece of memorabilia I found. I was especially good at spelling, and beat out two girls who were considered the brains of the school in a spelling bee (one was a Jehovah's Witness).
As a kid, I felt I really did not belong in this world. For the first 12 years of my life I felt just as comfortable by myself as with friends - often taking long trips alone. This is where I developed my "bullshit detector." When you are away from society you look back at it from a different perspective and learn to love people enough but not to be so quick to believe in what they believe. Besides, it was time to grow my hair long and be a hippie.Back then, Las Vegas was owned by the Mafia, the bad 14-yr. olds were on heroin and there was no modern Strip with its giant ostentatious buildings. The first Caesar's Palace had just been completed (only a few stories tall) and Wayne Newton and Tom Jones performed on the Strip for years. My girlfriend made me drive her down to visit him in his dressing room a couple of times on my motorcycle (this was when you could ride a motorcycle in Vegas at 14 yrs. old). I always picked the wild girlfriends.
On the left was my girlfriend, Renee who was living with me in Newport Beach as a Rosicrucian. We both became Witnesses by looking them up, and we BOTH got our mothers, sisters and brother-in-laws into it! (Mine are all out now. Renee won't talk to me.)
Learning the Ropes
I don't exactly know how to describe this transition in my life. For the first 13 years I was more like my mom, then I slowly became more like my dad - outgoing, life of the party, crazy and the jokester. But I also learned all the tricks of working with people, since he spent 30 years in the car business and I often worked at the same agency he did. He was in demand by Ford agencies all over Southern Calif. because wherever he went sales would triple, especially when he started managing. You might want to watch my interview with my dad, made in Arkansas the year before he died, where I asked him how he managed to stay honest in the car business (back then it was more notorious and crooked).
I found the mountain and hiking pictures. Sometimes I feel partly autistic - preferring the world of nature and hikes with friends in the mountains of Yosemite and Yellowstone... hunting, fishing, riding horses and eventually dirt motorcycles.
But I also found pictures of my souped-up Mustangs and Orange Country raceway, where my auto shop teacher worked in the evenings. It was a two-hour class each day, and we built our own funny car and raced it there.
I always had two cars - one that cost $50 that you race through the thousands of dirt miles on unpoliced Irvine property that was mostly orange groves. Now the same uninhabited land is now the cities of Irvine and El Toro.
City life was not for me. I used to tell people the last place in the world I would ever live is New York City. God's joke on me? When I came back to Orange County and Los Angeles in 1980 it was like rural territory in comparison to Brooklyn!
So originally I was living in the early stages of the Hippie generation and we used to do LSD and barbituates and go vandalize the rural neighborhood, doing dares and double dares.Once my buddy and I tried sleeping in a haunted house - we tried twice and on the second attempt we hopped in the old Ford truck 7 miles up a dirt road in the Capistrano mountains at a 100 acre ranch owned by my Scottish neighbor. Bob Fraser is one of the heads of the large Fraser clan that has their own castle in Scotland (which I visited years later). It is still family-owned and operated, and is seen in movies occasionally where they need a real late-medieval-looking castle.
This time around I've lived at the beach for 30 years since leaving Bethel! Ahh, 30 years of memories in a small room.
[On the left is a picture taken on the Pacific Crest Trail on one of our 3-week horseback-riding trips when I was 16.]
My Space
This storage room is where I kept my shipping supplies, unused equipment, and was really the only storage I had. So now my Free Minds Journal (newsletter) folder is in my kitchen (we have two kitchens fortunately, and one is all mine, due to my seniority!) It is where I work all day. All my shipping stuff is now hidden away in cabinets that you THINK might be reserved for food. It's the hidden office, looks normal and not cluttered on the inside, but with the usual fridge, microwave, etc. and connects to my room, which other than a bed and couch would not look like your room.
I can lock myself away from the rest of the house when the gang (4 roommates) gets too noisy. We have probably had about 20 roommates over the years, thus gaining it the silly title of "Herman's Hotel."
In my room it's pretty much an office as well. There are so many pieces of equipment: video machines, lighting, 3 computers, 3 printers, and a big old TV. My ergonomic bicycle stands by the door. All shelves under my waterbed are full of paper and wires and other misc equipment.
This house has many memories, from my first year out of Bethel, when I worked graveyard at Anderson Lithograph in downtown Los Angeles, and came home at 6 AM and slept on the beach for awhile. Then I quit this job (my last employer) and started washing and waxing cars 20 hours a week so I could start writing my books, including Thus Saith the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses (now called Thus Saith Jehovah's Witnesses), a collection of photocopies of WT false prophecies, etc. published in May 1982, the first of several self-published books. As the Watchtower has changed its teachings, so it has gone through several printings. Ha! They sit on my bookshelf as reminders of my need to chronicle my findings while in New York.
The house is old, built in 1934, and was a cocaine party house I found out years later from the locals. I am only two miles from LAX airport, so a lot of stewards and stewardesses moved in this area and shared the house and partied here. The movie "Blow" with Johnnie Depp was filmed in the beach parking lot a few hundred yards away, since it was the scene back then.
So I came from New York and turned it into a church. I even have two small stained-glass windows upstairs looking up at the sky. We met on Wed. nights in the big living room overlooking the ocean, and rented a local property owners clubhouse for Sunday night church meetings.
Nowadays the house is almost an eyesore, but it sure has a lot of stories to tell!
Thanks for listening. Now back to work in the kitchen. :-))Randy
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Captivers of a Concept on free PDF download
by saltyoldlady inwhile i firmly believe in rewarding an author with financial revenue for his efforts and i myself purchased his book with joy - those of you that may have limited budgets or have been postponing the reading of this classic did you realize it is readily available on the net as a free pdf format - i found it under [edited].
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Dogpatch
It is, by Don's request, available for free in SPANISH at:
http://www.freeminds-store.com/espanol/cautivos-de-un-concepto.html
very good reading! Buy it in English as mentioned above.
Randy
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Captivers of a Concept on free PDF download
by saltyoldlady inwhile i firmly believe in rewarding an author with financial revenue for his efforts and i myself purchased his book with joy - those of you that may have limited budgets or have been postponing the reading of this classic did you realize it is readily available on the net as a free pdf format - i found it under [edited].
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ICSA Annual International Conference in Spain in July !
by Dogpatch inicsa annual international conference.
barcelona, spain.
july 7-9, 2011. .
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Dogpatch
ICSA Annual International Conference
Barcelona, Spain
July 7-9, 2011
ICSA’s 2011 Annual International Conference will be conducted jointly with Atención e Investigación de Socioadicciones (AIS) and in collaboration with the University of Barcelona and Info-Cult/Info-Secte. The conference will be held at the University of Barcelona in Barcelona, Spain, one of Europe’s most beautiful cities (Facultat de Filosofia/Facultat de Geografia i Història, Carrer de Montalegre, 6).
You can register online and obtain details on accommodations, sessions, transportation, and other matters on ICSA’s annual conference home page : http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/event_conferences_workshops.asp
Hotels fill up in the summer because Barcelona is a beautiful city and a popular tourist destination. Hence, make your room reservations soon at a hotel or other facility. In addition to Web hotel resources, see our conference accommodations pag e: http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/event_conferences_workshops.asp?ID=392#Barcelona
More than 100 speakers will contribute their expertise. Sessions will be conducted in Spanish or English.
ICSA members receive a discount; nonmembers receive an ICSA membership with their registration. Speakers registered for three days receive an additional discount.
If you don’t have access to the Web and want information, please contact us (PH: 239-514-3081; Fax: 305-393-8193; [email protected] ; PO Box 2265, Bonita Springs, FL 34133, USA)
________________________________________________
ICSA (International Cultic Studies Association)
[Formerly AFF (American Family Foundation)]
P.O. Box 2265
Bonita Springs, FL 34133
Phone: 1-239-514-3081
fax: 1-305-393-8193
E-mail : [email protected]
Web site : www.icsahome.com
Bookstore: http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/bookstore.asp
Conferences and Workshops http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/event_conferences_workshops.asp
Become a member of ICSA and gain access to an e-Library with over 23,000 items.
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Can We Please Stop Referring To The Simplified English Watchtower A The Dumbed Down Version
by Philadelphia Ponos ini really shouldn't have to say any of this but as someone who is in the process of learning a second language, i can tell that simple language makes things a lot clearer when you are not familiar with the language.
everyone on here started out reading simplified english while they were learning, including you native speakers.
i'm sure no one here was reading on a college level in elementary school.
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Dogpatch
Good point PP, but thought control language is always more effective when made simpler to understand. Teaching the complicated paradoxes in their doctrines will not come up. Better to educate the public about fraudsters.
Randy
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Apology to Barbara Anderson
by believingxjw inbarbara,.
i apologize for saying what i did on the other thread.
you are working hard for all of us and what i said was disrespectful.
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Dogpatch
If you know Barb like I do (hours on the phone), she is very careful and hard-working. I trust her a lot.
Randy
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AndersonsInfo
by minimus ini am sick and tired of people putting down posters like the andersons!
they work hard to expose some things we might never have known about.
why some find fault with them, or ray franz before them, or maximus when he was here is beyond me.. be thankful for those that decide to come here and share what they know about this organization.. we get elders who are still in their positions and they share with us a lot of interesting news and perspectives.
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Dogpatch
Attacks on the characters (and I'm not attacking slimboy because some of us are, in effect, family and are trustworthy and raise quite intelligent counter-questions, which should be answered (unless a book deal is forthcoming :-__).
The best way to resolve it is through debate, IMNSHO.
However, My rule is, no tiny icons ALLOWED of faces that probably look nothing like you,
or bios that give no personal information. That's lame (not that you have no info, as some must maintain complete anonymity, but that you attack a known character with a reliable record of honesty, and YOU DON'T.)
You could be some legless Kim Jong-Il supporter who is just bored who is visiting his aunt in Madagascar). Scary!
And they were CLEVER enough to waste YOUR time. If that happens to me, I am the fool, not them (whoever they are). It's a simple ego trick to rumple your feathers. But if they are legit, you have a green light to give a courteous AND perhaps (think, educate yourself a little further, and adjust your own mind. I have never been afraid to see my errors when pointed out by others, nor do I take it personally. It's a GROWING EXPERIENCE.
Any idiot from the Dark Side of the Moon can attack from the sidelines. (Have we really checked there yet?)
There is nothing like an honest debate with honorable parameters. People respect the opinions of others who consider them equals. Plus, you make yourself VULNERABLE to attack as regards your premises, which only cowards shy away from. Trolls/cowards really only are after putting down the PERSON. They usually don't even disasgree with you, they just want to %^&* with your head, which #$%^s with their head and gives the a cheap sense of power and superiority.
JWN can be a cheap fix for a troll... a drug to feel better than others, and it only takes 2-5 minutes, and you will have no personal hurtful attacks, because NOBODY KNOWS WHO THE HELL YOU ARE. People on this forum try to bait me all the time. You want to know why I never answer the cowardly pinheads? PFFT. Bite me.
I'd be wasting my time on negative thoughts all day because someone figured out how to waste my time. Joke's on me! Plus NEVER give a troll credibility because they think you are "somebody." That gives them extra points.
Don't Feed the Trolls. They get excited and generate 10X the content in the days ahead. Lordy!
And they piss me off again.
Besides, they are often the lizard people employed by the CIA in the midwest. Now THAT is scary. :-))
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what are your opinions of ewatchman.com
by Evidently Apostate inlooking at some of his responses to comments on his videos on youtube i think he is rude, and condecending, not unlike the jw's he defends.
if he is trying to defend the majority of the doctrine why do it from outside the org?.
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Dogpatch
Well if he is really the same as YouKnow was, he was the coldest, most heartless a$%hole I've ever read. He made Knorr look nice. Never have I seen anyone so cruel and heartless in his reponses.
Randy
