Posts by OnTheWayOut

47

Taking bets on how long this cult will last and what will happen to it

by macys in

i wanna make a poll here.

how many years do you think the jdub cult will exist as is and what will happen to it?.

i say the growth stops this year and starts to decline.

OnTheWayOut

"I say the growth stops this year and starts to decline. I give it 10 years before the numbers are cut in half, that means 4 million publishers and in 15 years there will not be anymore JDub org. "

Watchtower will not be around forever. As to your prediction above, I tend to go along with the growth part and say they may have already peaked and are using manipulated numbers (not necessarily lies, but inaccuracies based on little slips of paper from congregations around the world turned in all at once to raise 'peak' numbers). I can even sort of go along with your 10-years thought to cut numbers in half- give or take. The members are mostly over 40 years old, much higher on the over-70 crowd. Their only growth is in small percentages of children of JW's.

I don't go along with them being gone 5 years after that, or even slightly longer. As Watchtower shrinks to 2 or even 1 million members, they will adapt. They will retain and recruit enough to stay alive for some more time. But I hope I am wrong.

5

We love you---but we don't trust you!

by eyeuse2badub in

can you truly love someone if you dont fully trust them and you are not willing to confide in them?

true love is a two way street right?

i just listened to the 2015 agm broadcast.

OnTheWayOut

I am careful not to use such a line of thought with my JW family, because I know the standard answer. That answer is that parents love their teenaged children but don't trust them to be adults. They put restrictions on them and monitor many aspects of their lives.

They try to paint that picture of Jehovah, and they try to paint a similar one of themselves.

61

I'm Catholic and madly in love with a Jehovah Witness...

by Luge62 in

jw
friends

we are madly in love with each other and she is in the process of being divorced.

let me make one thing clear i'm not the reason for the divorce.

she attempted to reconcile with him but to no avail.

OnTheWayOut

Again I would like to thank everyone for their comments and advise. It is deeply appreciated. I wish at least one present JW would voice their opinion.

Here's the thing. While there SHOULD be nothing wrong with it, active believers in the Watchtower will not come to this forum, or if they find themselves here, they are supposed to run away with their tail between their legs.

That is because Watchtower controls every facet of their lives. If this girlfriend still believes that religion, even if she gets kicked out (disfellowshipped) because she leaves her husband and marries you, she will go back and be shunned for a long time, she will be shunned by her family for a long time, then she will eventually be reinstated. To do that, she will decide that she regretted all that she did, including marrying a non-believer. Oh, she will still be married to you, but she will regret it. To make up for it, she may try to recruit you.

I don't know her situation with her current husband. I don't know that she should get out of it. I imagine so. But you don't have to be married to her before she figures this whole JW religion thing out. Let her decide if she wants to get kicked out. Let her decide if she wants to be your girlfriend. Do whatever dating people do, just don't marry her until she decides what to do down the road. Give it at least a year. You can live together or date or stay friends, you can have sex or not. But don't get hitched until she knows she doesn't want to go back.

Odds are heavy on her going back unless she left the religion for good reasons, not just left her husband for good reasons. You can work on educating her about the religion and how it's not "the truth." But her family shunning her might cause her to go back one day.

You have been warned.

43

Did Jesus really die on a cross?

by macys in

jw
friends

being raised a catholic we had lots of crosses around the house.

when my family converted to this cult they were all removed and destroyed in case they had demons in them lol but at this juncture in my life i do not even know if jesus as the way he is portrayed in the bible was real.

yes a man named jesus did live and die 2000 years ago and probably on a cross but he was definitely not the son of god.

OnTheWayOut

They can't even prove that Jesus really existed, let alone how he died. Maybe he left earth in the Doctor's TARDIS.

15

Fighting about college

by cognac in

jw
friends

my nephew is a sweet, smart, thoughtful person.

he wants to go to college.. normally, a mom would be proud to have a son like this.. nope, not a friggin jw mom.

apparently, he's being selfish to both her and jehovah.

OnTheWayOut

I feel for this boy. In my wife's family, they had the opposite problem.

My nephew had been attending the meetings off and on until high school, then his mother got reinstated and took him to meetings very regularly. To try to squash his thoughts of attempting to get an athletic scholarship, his mother had a pioneer elder show special attention to him. (Nothing weird or sexual- the pioneer got to count a lot of time, I am sure that was his motive.) So the nephew got baptized before graduation.

Anyway, the nephew graduates high school and was working at the mall in the shoe store. When pressed for his goals, he said he wanted to pioneer and keep working at the shoe store until Bethel would take him. The mother and grandparents (all JW) and many others including my JW wife were very upset at that. They knew Bethel laid off in the past and they knew a young man (especially a young black man) practically needed a trade or a degree.

I laughed and sighed at the same time. I said to them, "Isn't this what you wanted?" They knew I was mocking a bit.

Anyway, he never got called to Bethel. He never got motivated to take any college or trade classes. He still has that job and pioneers and lives at home with no car in a semi-rural area where you need a car.

46

JW Table at My Student Center Today, My Response

by breakfast of champions in

they're baaaack!!!

jws "tabling" at my student center again, first time in over six months.

i wonder if the fact it's been 15 degrees out had anything to do with it?

OnTheWayOut

I have not seen one table/cart on any of the three campuses I've been to this semester.

Bravo!!! Way to go!!!! Thanks for sharing a great update.

44

Money woes show it ain't the truth

by OnTheWayOut in

jehovahs people do not beg for money.

[...] we have never considered it proper to solicit money for the lords cause, after the common custom .

it is our judgment that money raised by the various begging devices in the name of our lord is offensive, unacceptable to him, and does not bring his blessing either upon the givers or the work accomplished.

OnTheWayOut

Start page 5 replies:

Vidiot, LOL.

212

Why Do You No Longer Believe in God?

by Tenacious in

i know this question has popped up from time to time but i really would like to know how you guys, those that no longer believe, came to that conclusion?

was it the wts and all its crap?

was it something you read?

OnTheWayOut

When I finally googled "Jehovah's Witnesses," I was pretty sure it wasn't "the truth" but I figured from what I had read that Christianity was probably the way to truth. If a person were to follow my path on this forum, they might see that.

But just as I finally learned to question the status quo of Watchtower, I couldn't stop questioning. I questioned the source that Watchtower started with- The Bible. My study found the Bible contradictory to itself and to evidence. Certainly, the people on earth had been here longer than the Bible indicated. Certainly, it wasn't literal. And if it wasn't literal, then there wasn't an original sin in the garden. At the same time I was questioning the Bible, I was examining what science said. The abundance of available evidence of man's evolution and the age of the earth and of the universe itself were fascinating.

All that, and I was only on the fence. I didn't know. But two things did it for me. My personal story leading me to Jehovah was the first one. I thought that God prevented me from committing suicide and led me to JW's. I gave my all to God, made myself fully available to do His will whatever it was. I was fully ready to accept whatever He was and whatever He had in mind for me. So either He let me get sucked up into a lie like the Jehovah's Witnesses instead of leading me to the real "truth" or He wasn't there. The second thing was the 2004 Indonesia tsunami (and later, the 2010 Haiti earthquake could be added in). The God of Christianity or any belief system that I heard about would not let all those children just be swept away from their parents and killed.

Everyone must take their own journey of spiritual awareness and all will want to take an individually tailored path.

35

Did Ray Franz manage to live out a comfortable retirement from the proceeds of his books.

by joe134cd in

i'm just curious if anybody knows.

firstly i don't take issue with the man making money from his books and if he was able to live comfortably from it then i say power to him.

but what i'm wanting to know was just how successful was it and did it allow him to live out the remainder of his years in comfort e.g buy a house, eat good food etc.

OnTheWayOut

I appreciate Blondie's information on this subject. I can appreciate that Ray Franz may have wished he made more money but probably was not upset to know how much people loved what he wrote. Praise for your book and knowing that people are helped by it- that's priceless.

I had hopes of making money as an author (and it's still possible), not so much as a living, but as a supplement to my career. Because of my current JW situation, my book about my experiences has not been promoted at all. I think I have made $500 or so on it just by putting it on Amazon at a very low price. I decided if I couldn't be "out there" with my book, I would rather that it's more affordable and more people read it.

I met someone who said they read my book "first" before the standard books like CoC. I read COMBATTING CULT MIND CONTROL first, and I know what that first book meant to me. I met someone who said they read portions of my book to their JW spouse because the spouse would not read "doctrine" but would listen to a personal story without that. I can say that these people's comments (and a few others) totally humbled me.

I am not pushing my book here. I am just saying I highly believe that Ray Franz got quite a reward for what he wrote. I wish he made more money from it. But that is what that is. I can also say that while I would love to have a million dollars from the writing of my book, I wouldn't have taken a million dollars from Watchtower to not write it.

32

Yearbook - will they drop figures that show a decline?

by freddo in

do you think the yearbooks will stop showing negative information as the numbers stagnate or even drop?

OnTheWayOut

There will be a point when they will stop showing numbers. It's hard to say when that point will be. They may use negatives as a way to say the end is even closer.