The 2 witness rule is worth attacking. So are all the other factors you raise.
The fact that pedophilia is a multi-faceted problem doesn't mean one of the factors is "not worth attacking."
neverendingjourney
JoinedPosts by neverendingjourney
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Why the 2 witnesses rule is not worth attacking........barking up the wrong tree!
by krismalone insome former jw protesters are wasting their time and energy "exposing" or criticizing the watchtowers 2 witness rule here's why:.
lets suppose the governing body changes this and expells anyone accused of child molestation even if accused by one person.
would that solve the problem?
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Did You Know “Weird JWs” When You Were In The Organization?
by minimus init could be argued that all jws are weird.
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i’m referring to really weird odd witnesses.. most of the oddballs that i remember were elders..
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neverendingjourney
I knew at least 3 sisters that seemed to see god's hand in literally every aspect of their lives and weren't shy about sharing the details of these interventions in casual conversation as well as in 4-5 minute comments on an unrelated paragraph of the watchtower study. Experiences included deciding to go out in service instead of going to the store to buy toilet paper when, wouldn't you know it - she found a roll of toilet paper in the street.
Just to make the point that this kind of lunacy isn't restricted to those with low IQ's, I'll share the following story.
I made friends with a guy a few years back who is devoutly religious. Although we don't share much in common, our senses of humor overlapped and we were able to strike up a friendship.
He is incredibly smart. He has an engineering degree and a law degree, both from top-20, super prestigious universities in the US. He graduated in the top ten percent from both schools. He'd gone on to become the head of the legal department for a very large company and was obviously well-off and successful.
He just couldn't wrap his head around the fact that I don't believe in God. I was honest with him about my JW past and he told me he has cousins who are JWs but that they stopped talking to him once they converted and became JWs.
In any event, he kept trying different ways of "helping me understand" that God exists. On one occasion he shared the following story to show me that God exists.
Once when he was in law school he went on a date with a girl. They stopped to have a meal before heading over to the movie theater. The food didn't sit well with him and he had instant diarrhea. He had already gone to the restroom once and found himself sitting down at the movies trying to fight the urge to run to the restroom again. So he prayed to God to help him find a way out of the situation and not too long afterwards someone pulled the fire alarm and they evacuated the movie theater. In the chaos, he was able to sneak in the restroom unperceived and heed nature's call a second time. He later caught up with his date in the parking lot and they decided to end the date and go their own way. Crisis averted. He didn't have to face the humiliation of having his date realize he had diarrhea.
The sad thing is that he was saving that story. He had to work up the courage to share it with me and he only did so because that was his best "proof" of God's existence. This is a guy who could take a legal brief, think through it logically, and tear it apart a hundred different ways. But when it came to the religious, a simple anecdote like that was sufficient to "prove" God's existence.
Nice guy, nonetheless. I was a groomsman in his wedding. He didn't have many friends. He married some woman from a town of a few hundred residents who looked like she was plucked right out of the cast of one of those fundamentalist Mormon shows, long hair, dresses to her ankles, no makeup. She had like 10 siblings and all the girls dressed the same. Some traveling preacher put them in contact with one another. She's actually a lovely lady and cut her hair and started wearing jeans once she was married and out of the house.
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Did You Know “Weird JWs” When You Were In The Organization?
by minimus init could be argued that all jws are weird.
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i’m referring to really weird odd witnesses.. most of the oddballs that i remember were elders..
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neverendingjourney
One of the biggest benefits of leaving the JWs is that I was able to rid myself of association with toxic people.
I can more or less filter unstable people out of my life now. Don't get me wrong, from time to time I'm forced to deal with difficult people, for instance at work, but unlike when I was a JW, I don't have any obligation to "love" them and view them as my brothers.
The religion is a haven for the unstable. There's a chicken-or-the-egg question there in that I'm not sure whether the religion makes people unstable or whether it attracts the unstable. Probably a bit of both.
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January 2018 Message of Judgment - What Is This?
by dubstepped ini've now seen a couple of references to this and did a little digging before leaving for work.
i saw someone on reddit in july saying that someone on the inside said a change was coming in 2018 with the jw message, and i've now seen two references to this in the past week.
help a former brother out.
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neverendingjourney
remember they had the truth book and you had to study for only 6 months and then if they dont want to take steps to baptism, dump them. because you know, the end is nigh
I was a regular pioneer in 1997 and we received the same instruction in connection with the Knowledge book. If the bible student doesn't take steps towards baptism in six months, dump them and move on. Time is running out. Focus on those who are rightly disposed to "the truth."
It's a reoccurring theme.
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January 2018 Message of Judgment - What Is This?
by dubstepped ini've now seen a couple of references to this and did a little digging before leaving for work.
i saw someone on reddit in july saying that someone on the inside said a change was coming in 2018 with the jw message, and i've now seen two references to this in the past week.
help a former brother out.
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neverendingjourney
I firmly believe that most JWs can't reason and defend their religion anymore. Heck, the whole org can't defend itself anymore. More and more it's becoming such that JWs less and less know their own history and their own beliefs.
They're really in a catch-22. It doesn't take a brilliant mind to realize that the JW prophetic framework failed. Everything JWs were promised didn't come true and has been replaced by overlapping generations nonsense and "wait on Jehovah" platitudes.
So the religion needs to rethink and make wholesale changes to its doctrine and prophetic structure.
Yet to admit this and move forward on that plan is to admit that they don't really have the truth and aren't God's special people.
They can't make the changes that are desperately needed without conceding defeat, so instead we've had this 20-year long period of stagnation hoping that somehow the things they believe in come true even though there's no signs of that occurring anytime soon. Meanwhile, I've seen my parents generation who came into this religion with young families grow old and die. Wasted lives, no retirement plans in place.
It's sad.
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Roy Moore
by ducatijoe inso... after seeing men who abuse children in the organization, i am out.
however this shit is in the "world" too.
my fellow alabama voters are still behind roy moore.
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neverendingjourney
Joe many years ago when I was first appointed an elder a older elder told me those who are supper righteous and talk about certain sexual sins all the time are guilty of it. I found that to be very true through the years.
When I was 15 I came under the wing of a young, charismatic elder in his early 30s. He was married and had two young children.
There was a Bible study who apparently had a very jealous husband. No men were allowed to visit when he wasn't home. This elder told me that it was certainly because the husband was a cheater and feared his wife was the same way. "El que debe teme" he told me, which is Spanish roughly for "if you have something to hide, you have something to fear." I thought it was an incredibly wise observation.
It turns out this elder was cheating on his wife and had first-hand knowledge of the topic. He was discovered a few months later and was disfellowshipped.
It made me think back and realize that he was incredibly obsessed with sexual matters. He went so far as to state during a talk that two people who aren't married should not dance together (he received a lot of push back on that because there wasn't anything in the literature to support that and it was common in my area for single people to dance during weddings).
He would often tell me about his past sexual exploits (in great detail) under the guise of helping me understand how much better off he was now as a JW. In short, the guy was a horn dog and couldn't keep it in his pants. And his personal experience colored the view he had of others. He didn't think others could control their impulses either, so he became obsessed with pushing through puritanical measures to control the congregation.
It's clear as day to me now, but it wasn't back then when I was still a teenager.
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Was It Really Mental Illness or Was It The Demons?
by minimus inwe supposedly had more than a few “demonized” people in our congregation.
they would hear voices or feel internal punishment within their souls.
the answer was always—-these people were affected by the demons and they needed counseling!.
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neverendingjourney
I grew up in Spanish language congregations where demon stories were more common than in English language congregations. It was part of the culture. In Mexico everyone seemed to have a ghost story to share, so these people (like my parents) brought this with them and adapted the stories to fit with JW doctrine.
In my family there was a reoccurring pattern. My parents were in a loveless marriage and every now and then there would be a huge blowup. Eventually things would settle down, my parents would make up, and there would be a cleansing ritual where we would purge our house of anything that might be associated with demons because surely the demons were making my parents fight. It wasn't that they were mismatched and should have never gotten married in the first place.
Most of these stories are benign and kind of comical in retrospect. But every now and then it veered into dangerous territory. There was a very troubled family that was kind of on the periphery of the congregation. They were off-and-on inactive. Their youngest son was clearly troubled. He just had that look to him. One day the elders get called to their house because the son is becoming violent (he was in his teens) and was mumbling gibberish. The kid confesses to hearing voices in his head telling him to kill his mother. The elders, of course, recommend prayer and helped them search the house for possessions that might be associated with demons.
I know this because I was told this story first hand by one of the elders who was there to counsel them. He was a high school drop out and a welder. The other elder was a barely-literate man whose education consisted of a few years of elementary school in Mexico. Instead of receiving professional medical assistance, this dangerous teen was receiving counseling from these two guys.
I don't know what happened to that family. This incident happend about 20 years ago. I've always wondered. Not long after that, I moved away and know very little about the goings on of my old congregation anymore.
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Why "fancy dress" and "theme weddings" were BANNED by our Congregation!
by Witness 007 inour kingdom hall was in a boring town of 30,000 people so to spice things up me and some special pioneers living with us decided to have a fancy dress up party!
what could go wrong?
nice clean fun, and no booze (oh crap!).
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neverendingjourney
and a Pioneer bro dressed up as a ballarena with full female make up!
There was a guy in a neighboring hall who almost had a judicial committee formed because he dressed in drag and went out in public, supposedly because he'd lost a bet. He was able to convince the elders that it was all in jest and that he really didn't hold any "perverse sexual desires." Rumor was that it wasn't the first time he'd dressed up as a woman and seemingly found any excuse to do so.
I'm not passing judgment. It's sad that otherwise normal folks have to suppress that side of them in order to avoid being kicked out of the tribe.
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Explanation please on the change of the term "worldly"
by careful ini've picked up from several replies to posts here that the org has stopped using the term "worldly" as it applies to people.
this must have happened after i left.
would someone be so kind as to explain the "rationale" behind this shift?
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neverendingjourney
There were people in my congregation who still believed the end would come before the generation of 1914 passed away years after the 1995 WT article changed the official interpretation.
Needless to say, not everyone reads their WT or pays attention at the KH, and old habits die hard.
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Ridiculous (degrading) comment on society's video
by Festus inon video "benefits of divine education" william samuelsson makes totally appalling comment.. starting from 3:05 he refers to "an effort" that was made in past to see how society's curriculum corresponds with normal - worldly - universities.. then he claims that following question was asked (to university representative) "how we in five months can teach the same that for them takes two years"?.
according to w samuelsson the representative of a university replied something like this: "your students are motivated, they have come to learn where as our students have been send to university by their parents and might have something else than learning in their mind".
this is to crystallize what he said.
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neverendingjourney
Variants of this nonsense have been going around for decades.
I remember a CO in the 80s said reading an Awake! bound volume was the equivalent of 2 years' of university education. Since maybe 1 out of 100 JWs had ever gone to college, in what kind of a position were they to contradict these "facts," especially when they're being thrown around by WT luminaries.