Posts by neverendingjourney

30

Why do CO's refuse to strip Elders of their position?

by Tenacious in

in several congregations i attended many elders were downright evil and flat out drunk with power.. many times i personally knew of things done by them that would have been a disfellowshipping offense had they not been elders.

and even though many times these issues and spiritual atrocities were reported to the co's and hq they would many times (if not all the time), get off with a mere slap on the wrist or a forced apology.. why do you believe elders are so protected?.

my theory is the authority integrity within the congregation.

neverendingjourney

This has a lot to do with it. When my father was a quite new as a CO he removed a number of Elder’s, a lot to do with domestic violence. The previous CO knew of the accusations but was afraid to do anything, particularly since in many of the congregations the elders were related and would back each other up.

There was a guy in a neighboring congregation whose father was an uber elder PO. The kid led the model JW life, baptized at 12, pioneer at 17, MS at 18, Bethel at 19. After two or three years at Bethel he abruptly left, purportedly to "serve where the need was greater," but he kind of dropped off the radar not too long after that.

Fast forward about 10 years and I found him on Facebook and his page made clear he was no longer a JW. I reconnected with him and it turns out what led to his awakening was an incident with this father. His father, the uber elder, had been beating his wife. Finally the Bethelite got up the courage to tun him in to the elder body. The elders did nothing. The father remained as PO.

This started getting him thinking how the organization could possibly be run by holy spirit, he gave himself permission to think critically, and that was the beginning of the end.

This elder was one of the cruelest men I've ever known. He led the judicial committee that disfellowshipped a good friend of mine. I was a witness at this JC and when he told me they were going to disfellowship him, he had a giant smirk on his face. I'll never forget that look.

30

Why do CO's refuse to strip Elders of their position?

by Tenacious in

in several congregations i attended many elders were downright evil and flat out drunk with power.. many times i personally knew of things done by them that would have been a disfellowshipping offense had they not been elders.

and even though many times these issues and spiritual atrocities were reported to the co's and hq they would many times (if not all the time), get off with a mere slap on the wrist or a forced apology.. why do you believe elders are so protected?.

my theory is the authority integrity within the congregation.

neverendingjourney

When I was still a JW, I felt there was something not quite right with the way elders seemed to be favored over the rank and file, but I could never really put my finger on it. The feeling was palpable, though.

Then after I left, I discovered that there was a special rule for elders who had committed serious sins in the past. Basically, even if they didn't confess, they could remain elders so long as enough time had passed and the "holy spirit showed its approval" or some such nonsense.

There is also the fact that the elders would agree to send money to the WT every assembly and not tell the rank and file about it (artificially inflated deficits every assembly).

And the fact that a select number of elders were aware of the kickbacks (free rooms) received by the WT in exchange for funneling the rank and file into select hotels. The rank and file couldn't be trusted with this information, so they were just guilted into using the WT approved list.

Disdain for the rank and file pervades the entire WT organization. It reminds me of a quote from Crisis of Conscience where Ray Franz quotes another governing body member as saying something along the lines of "the flock can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves" when Ray suggested that a certain matter be left up to each individual's conscience.

21

Demon stories

by HiddenPimo in

so as a child i was scared to death of the demons.

in fact you may remember the wt and awake loved to put stories of these attacks in the articles.

as a youth i loved to read books.

neverendingjourney

https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1987642?q=demon+attacks&p=sen

Amazing! I never thought I'd see this again.

P.S. I was 8 when this article was published.

21

Demon stories

by HiddenPimo in

so as a child i was scared to death of the demons.

in fact you may remember the wt and awake loved to put stories of these attacks in the articles.

as a youth i loved to read books.

neverendingjourney

There was an Awake article in the early 80s detailing a woman's supposed lifelong struggle with demons. I remember it vividly because I was a young child at the time. It spoke of the demon attacking her at night and inflating her stomach to the point where she appeared to be pregnant. The demons supposedly killed several members of her family. The attacks supposedly stopped once she became a Witness and learned to use Jehovah's name.

I've lost access to WT publications, so I haven't been able to locate it again. It was the stuff of nightmares.

32

30 years after leaving utterly unrecognisable

by Number 6 in

this is the first time i have posted on here in many years..... i seldom visit now although this forum was instrumental to me in gaining my sanity in the early 2000's and recovering from the watchtower religion.. by chance tonight i was on youtube and caught a jw.org video which out of curiosity prompted me to look at the official website and amongst other things i looked up the music section.. why that i hear you ask?

music is my passion and nothing reminds me more or evokes more memories than the kingdom songs i grew up listening to.. i am 49 years old and my mother was baptised in 1974. i grew up in the era of pink songbooks and green bibles.

of the theology of fred franz and types and anti-types.

neverendingjourney

Hmph. Some "community"

I agree, but for folks who are isolated and emotionally vulnerable, being a part of any community can be appealing. And the JWs are good about love bombing and presenting a certain image to potential converts.

BTW, I like your username. It makes me think of Falcor and Atreyu playing "Don't Stop Believing" on endless repeat as they fly through the Nothing.

I came up with it years ago when I was waking up. I had bought into the religion as a teenager and woke up in my mid 20s. It dawned on me that then that there were no easy answers and that life was a continuous journey. Opinions and outlooks would change depending on new information and experiences. There weren't easy answers.

It was difficult for me because I liked the certainty and structure that "the truth" provided. Knowing that there were no easy answers to life's tough questions was a huge let down.

32

30 years after leaving utterly unrecognisable

by Number 6 in

this is the first time i have posted on here in many years..... i seldom visit now although this forum was instrumental to me in gaining my sanity in the early 2000's and recovering from the watchtower religion.. by chance tonight i was on youtube and caught a jw.org video which out of curiosity prompted me to look at the official website and amongst other things i looked up the music section.. why that i hear you ask?

music is my passion and nothing reminds me more or evokes more memories than the kingdom songs i grew up listening to.. i am 49 years old and my mother was baptised in 1974. i grew up in the era of pink songbooks and green bibles.

of the theology of fred franz and types and anti-types.

neverendingjourney

I'm 10 years younger than you and have been out since the mid-00s. The sidelining of doctrine was inevitable.

One of the advantages we had was the general public's ignorance. We could soak up the fake wisdom and knowledge of the WT and feel like intellectual giants because the public was ill-prepared to provide a solid counterargument.

Looking back, I remember how big an impact on my faith it was to encounter the rare individual who'd studied Witness teachings and could push back. Being unable to easily dispatch them with a proof text was humiliating. Sure, I pushed it all back into the part of my brain where I shoved things I didn't want to voluntarily access again, but the impact was real.

Fast forward 20 years and more information than even those rare people possessed is available to anyone willing to spend 10 minutes reading the JW wikipedia page. Return visits would get derailed by having to respond to info the householder found online.

So instead of updating the doctrine, which is too hard to do, especially for a group run by a committee that requires a supermajority to act, you push doctrine to the sideline and make it all about the community.

The religion's appeal is much more limited that way. They'll manage to recruit emotionally vulnerable people who don't care about doctrinal consistency, but the real push is in retaining captive born-ins. But the walls are starting to crack there, too.

13

"Its not about the numbers...Its about Love"

by Solzhenitsyn in

in the org did anyone ever tell you that its not about the numbers...yet the reality was that it was all about the numbers?.

i ran into a pimi who asked why my family and i were awol.

i told him that it was private and personal and i wasn't at liberty to discuss it.

neverendingjourney

We become very good at lying to ourselves as JWs. For me, it started with telling people I preached to that I was just there to share a message from the Bible and wasn't there to convert them. I could justify that by telling myself it was in the householders' best interest.

This kind of thinking could devolve into the absurd. For example, there was a guy in my congregation who once told a householder that JWs did in fact believe in the trinity. I was in shock. After the conversation ended, I asked him why he would say such a thing and he responded that a circuit overseer had once told him it was okay to answer this way during early visits because Jehovah didn't want us to scare away anyone who was otherwise rightly disposed to the truth.

After leaving the JWs, I began to see it as a spectrum ranging from clever word placement intended to convey a message contrary to the one we actually held (Do JWs believe only they will survive Armageddon? We don't say that. Only Jehovah can judge), to lying when the other party doesn't deserve the truth (was once called theocratic warfare in the publications and justified by citing Rahab as an example), to outright lying when it was viewed to be in the religion's best interest (such as the guy telling the householder we believed in the trinity).

I was comfortable with word games, but never truly became comfortable with theocratic warfare or outright convenient lies. The issue, of course, is that once you become comfortable lying to others, it becomes easier to lie to yourself.

37

2 Gallons of Coffee

by Solzhenitsyn in

that is how much coffee me and another elder went through as we camped out all night until 7 a.m. outside the home where suspected jw fornicators we're staying.

little did i know what a powerful contrast that would prove to be when as an elder i was faced with another case involving the allegation of severe child sexual abuse.

we disfellowshipped the couple based completely on circumstantial evidence of sexual wrongdoing because they simply "stayed the entire night".

neverendingjourney

The world is littered with JW's and former JW's whose lives and family lineage was ruined or forever altered at the hands of "unlettered and ordinary" Janitors, Carpenters and Window Washers masquerading as Bible Theologians and playing detective because they given the authority to deal with complex matters that even trained professionals wouldn't dare to handle on their own.

There was a teenager in my congregation who in hindsight was exhibiting signs of schizophrenia. Two elders were dispatched to investigate. They determined he was under the influence of spiritism because he would hear voices telling him to kill his mother.

These two elders, one a construction worker and the other a low-level municipal employee who was illiterate until he became a JW, prayed with the family and helped them conduct a spring cleaning where they threw away any items purchased second hand at garage sales and the like.

I lost touch with that family a few years afterward, so I don't know what ever became of that kid. Needless to say, it could have very easily resulted in a tragic ending. No professionals were ever engaged to my knowledge.

21

my story...

by Nikki collins in

many of you have asked about my story, so here it is.

it's a bit long lol.

however i still loved jeremy but because he wasn’t a witness i knew i could never be with him and have my family.

neverendingjourney

Congrats on being free from the control.

Making the transition as an adult is going to be painful. I went through it 13 years ago, but to paraphrase the Shawshank Redemption, we crawl through 500 yards of shit and come out clean on the other end.

Don't give up hope!

21

Window Washers

by Nikki collins in

i know @hiddenpimo is going to laugh at me for this because we had several in our old congregation, but what is with all the window washing businesses owned/managed by jws???

they are everywhere!

.

neverendingjourney

It's pretty straightforward. There are lots of JW window washers because WT leadership encouraged people to become window washers. It was a "theocratic career" that would buy you instant credibility. You want a part at the circuit assembly? Become a window washer and get paraded in front of the audience as an exemplary Christian.

When I graduated high school in the mid 90s, the WT was encouraging recent graduates to go to vocational/technical school in lieu of college. I followed their advice and enrolled in a 9 month welding program. Nine months and twenty thousand dollars later I had a worthless piece of paper and nobody would hire me. It took me 15 years to pay off those loans. But, hey, at least I followed Mother's direction!

Whether knowingly or not, the WT was steering their members into one of the most fraudulent and corrupt industries in America: for-profit vocational schools.