Posts by OnTheWayOut

20

Humanism and Witnisam.

by The Rebel in

jw
friends

well it seems for many on this board the time came to leave the w.t and cross the bridge in to a real world.

speaking for myself l feel i did not enter the cold and lonely world i was lead to believe i was entering.

rather i have discovered it was no great loss leaving a world that had protected me with false, dreams, fantazy and false promises.. but what have i really achieved by my leaving that i value?.

OnTheWayOut

OnTheWayout:-
from your name you now sound well and truly out. Glad you got through " the rough period". Glad we both got out of what I now see as a dictatorship.

I could update my biography, my picture, even change my email associated with this forum. But I cannot change my name if I am to keep my account and all the posts with it. I would love to change my name to "Out" or something similar. OnTheWayOut was chosen when I was attending meetings. Others have chosen a name and then their situation changed.

If people can, they should consider counseling when they get out of the JW's. If they cannot, this forum can help a bit as a group therapy. Books can help also. Just talking to people is extremely helpful.

20

Humanism and Witnisam.

by The Rebel in

jw
friends

well it seems for many on this board the time came to leave the w.t and cross the bridge in to a real world.

speaking for myself l feel i did not enter the cold and lonely world i was lead to believe i was entering.

rather i have discovered it was no great loss leaving a world that had protected me with false, dreams, fantazy and false promises.. but what have i really achieved by my leaving that i value?.

OnTheWayOut

There are plenty of good things in most experiences of leaving Watchtower behind.

I went through a rough period when I left. I was told by JW's when I was recruited that I had been seeking deeper truths about life, the universe, and everything. And of course, they had all the answers about an issue of universal sovereignty and why bad things happen to people due to Satan and the demons and YADDA YADDA YADDA. But as it turned out, I was asking a simple question, which was "Who am I?" That's what people really want to know.

Once I realized that, I was able to proceed with my recovery from Watchtower quite well and to pursue happiness.

27

Happy birthday to me!

by purrpurr in

it's my birthday!

woweee!

i'm celebrating it too!

OnTheWayOut

Happy birthday, Purrpurr. Returning to celebrating birthdays was so awesome to me.

38

The Greatest Paradox

by Perry in

now that i have been a born again christian for 10 years, i see things that just boggles my mind.

like this: we all spent untold hours in the field service telling people (mostly christians) about the paradise earth.

that was the reason we were at their door.

OnTheWayOut

And making decisions based strictly on feelings is unwise. As humans, limited in perception, we can EXPECT to be deceived, especially in our feelings.

One of the greatest mind-boggling things I see is this: People learn to abandon using just their feelings to start discovering real truths via scientific methods and Perry accuses them of feeling angry with God and following their feelings. Meanwhile, after Perry has gone so far in learning that he wasn't in "the truth," that his feelings allowed him to be deceived, he still embraces Christianity because such beliefs feel right to him. To him, there's still a truth just like the Watchtower promised, but he just has to focus on Jesus instead of Jehovah and ignore science. Jesus feels right to him. It boggles the mind that he hasn't really learned a thing.

34

Reflecting on my Disfellowshipping

by kairos in

jw
friends

today is the day.. i was baptized as one of jehovah's witnesses on march 25th 1989.disfellowshipped for admitted apostasy today, september 10th 2015.. what an amazing story we all share.

how did we get involved with this group and think this was the best way of life?.

i asked my wife to stay home from the meeting tonight and spend the evening with me.she is.... we celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary this past monday.. i must admit, i never saw any of this coming, but it couldn't have come sooner.i'm free of all the fake friendships.

OnTheWayOut

A big CONGRATULATIONS on your disfellowshipping and freedom. As for the JW's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au1_3DWcGj4

38

The Greatest Paradox

by Perry in

now that i have been a born again christian for 10 years, i see things that just boggles my mind.

like this: we all spent untold hours in the field service telling people (mostly christians) about the paradise earth.

that was the reason we were at their door.

OnTheWayOut

I see things that just boggles my mind.

If your mind is boggled now, just wait until you find out that Christianity itself is a lie.

7

HOWARD HUGHES, Jesus Christ, and the problem of genuine (original) documents

by Terry in

bible scholars acknowledge the absence of original writings of the bible or even of the early generations of copies, recopied copies, up through the next several hundred years.since the details of the history, words and activities of jesus and his followers entirely depend on the accuracy and historicity of the bible, i started thinking about a modern day parallel.. ___________________.

when billionaire eccentric howard hughes died in 1976, the search was on for who might inherit his vast fortune and business holdings..a gas station attendant named melvin dummar stepped forward and told an amazing tale.

dummar claimed that while driving through rural nevada one night in december of 1968, he pulled onto a dirt road to answer the call of nature.. he says he found a scraggly, bearded man lying injured in the desert.

OnTheWayOut

The fake will included the LDS church so that they would feel the need to do something with this document on their desk. If it were just a nuisance, they might have tossed it in the fire, but it gave them a piece of the pie.

To complete this analogy, the Roman Catholic Church had several "Gospels" on their desk and they tossed any that they felt did not give them the biggest pieces of the pie. You see, all of them were fakes, so they didn't want to have competing fakes all over the place. They selected 4 gospels to survive and attempted to toss all remnants of any others.

The analogy is not perfect because these fake gospels were not only on their desk but were out there in the community. Their selection would have been tighter were that not the case.

The biggest difference here is that, although Hughes never wrote the Dummar will anymore than Jesus wrote a gospel, Hughes was real and could have met Dummar and the fortune mentioned in the fake will was real.

43

Deconstructing Splanes 'Generation' explanation

by Splash in

at around 4 minutes into the september 2015 video splane said "for the man and the baby to be part of josephs generation they would have had to have lived at least some time during joseph's lifespan.".

this is the lynchpin of the wt argument, that two lives must overlap to be considered the same generation.. let's take an example of twins who are born just a few minutes apart.

obviously, these twins are the same generation as each other.

OnTheWayOut

Splane is setting up the stretch of "this generation." Just as sure as they went from the 1914 generation being people old enough to recognize the sign all the way to the 1914 generation just being born by 1914, so this overlap portion will go from contemporaries that significantly overlapped their adult lives as anointed (basically, they knew each other) right down to babies born just before (10 minutes before) the first group completely died to become anointed later.

They are going to drop the "contemporary" word that they used to condition people to the silly overlap idea.

They like using Freddy Franz in their example because he was "of age" in 1914 and lived until 1992, a year that all of today's Governing Body were born before. They give the impression that the end will come before the current GB are all dead. But I imagine as a kicker, they will put someone born around 1990 on the Governing Body in 15 to 20 years (or less) when this stupid doctrine is getting stale and they will start making it seem like the end will come in that GB member's lifetime.

As a matter of opinion, I imagine they might already have this in mind to do somewhere close to 2034. And I don't think they will name an end date for Armageddon to have occurred, but will name a beginning date for THE GREAT TRIBULATION to have started. They will declare that it did start just like they declared that Jesus did show up on time invisibly.

44

A ship (no matter how big) will ultimately sink if it has a hole

by iconoclastic in

humanity is like a ship, and holes are our hobbies (lust, greed etc.

which are fondly renamed as each one likes) which always have been outperforming what science could accomplish!

most of the greater or significant scientific achievements started from 19th centurymay be with the commercial transmission of electricity!

OnTheWayOut

This explains how the scriptures were also corrupted. Scriptures were originally written to show how the Law of Cause and Consequences works.

Have you heard the term, "You're not EVEN wrong!" ?

It means that you are so far from "correct" that you would have to get closer to be considered wrong.

The original reason why stories were written by men and later called scriptures was not to "show how the Law of Cause and Consequences works."

There will be great arguments, but virtually none will say what you said. The writing of these stories was most highly likely to give a story to the Hebrews that would bind them together.

As far as "cause and consequences" goes, I do believe Genesis and Exodus were saying "Do as God says because he will mess you up if you don't." The rest of the Pentateuch tended to say "And obey all these laws and give sacrifices to the priests," so we can guess what that was about easily enough.

Anyway, with such purposes, the writings were not corrupted but possibly enhanced to further their purposes.

36

Could "this generation" inspire a new "1975 debacle"?

by Island Man in

i think that it's possible that they're getting ready to issue a new end time date insinuation like they did with 1975. now i know what some of you are probably thinking: why would they be so stupid as to repeat such a mistake, knowing what happened in 1975?

well here're two reasons why i think they could do it:.

first, it's important to remember that they are deluded.

OnTheWayOut

The Watchtower's style, established mainly by Freddy Franz but also by Russell and Rutherford, is not to calculate people's ages. Their style is to produce complicated theology like the age of Adam and Eve, and melding unrelated scriptures, and discussing past Biblical and current world events that "evidently" cause them to reach conclusions.

They may do a new end date, but it will be connected to the days of Noah and the fall and rise of the King of the North, or maybe some event that seems to fulfill the composite "sign" of the great tribulation.

I personally think they will not give an end date for "this system" but will give a start date for "the great tribulation" that leads to Armageddon. Then they can claim, just like an invisible presence, that it did happen and it did start and we don't know how long it will go on, but things will continue to get worse quickly. They will point to any governmental rulings against religion and the progress of homosexual marriage and adoption and the prevalence of anything they are against as proof.