RollerDave

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Topics Started by RollerDave

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  7

  What do YOU stand for?

  by RollerDave in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  after everything i had ever believed unassailable proved to be as a wisp of smoke in the breeze, i was forced to asnswe that question.. since i no longer stand for the wts, what do i stand for.. my lifetime of misery would be a complete waste if there isn't some positive way to frame it.. i figure, we come into this world kicking, screaming, naked, wet, and cold.

  we have nothing, not even a name.. our name is the first thing we get, and it has no meaning until we provide the context with our lives.. when we die, our name and what it has come to mean is all we can take out of this world with us; he who dies with the most toys still dies and gets no further benefit from his worldy goods.. so, what do we stand for, what shall our name mean.. i have not had the most optimal life, i suppose, periods of submersion in the wts fantasy world interspersed with episodes of incredible violence and deprivation.

  i have both been the victim of harm, and regretably inflicted my fair share of harm as well.. i have made choices so stupid that it was all i could do to set things right and live them down.. i have had a corrupted view of reality while under the spell of the wts that affected me equally whether i was in or out, either way i was damned.. i never expected to live, the big a was just around the corner and there were all these pesky bullets whizzing past my head and a knife in me; but here i was in my thirties with a second chance.. a relatively clean break.. of course, i was now confined to a wheelchair and poor with bad credit, but i was at rock bottom so the only way to go was up.. it could have been worse, i never picked up a criminal record, even though i rightfully deserved one.. what to stand for.... one has to stand for something.

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  WTS Google Earth Placemarks

  by RollerDave in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  if anyone has google earth, you can actually see russel's pyramid!.

  these are links to kml files, i don't know how to link 'em so that it's guaranteed they will open in google earth, but you can easily right-click and save, the resulting files are definitely double-clickable.

  http://machinedreamer.com/jw/russel's_tomb.kml.

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  9

  INCOMING!

  by RollerDave in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  well, i'm going to have visitors this saturday.... it's a long tale, but it does have a point, i promised at one time to post about the ugly poa mess, and these visitors are directly involved in this ugliness.. my dub niece and her hubby, who haven't seen fit to have any contact with me in over three years called me out of the blue offering me my dad's old furniture, so i'm going out there to pick it up in my van, but then they are following me back home to 'hang out and maybe grill some stuff' just as if nothing's changed, but a lot has changed.. we recently had a battle in my family over my aging mother's poa because she has the early stages of alzheimer's and the family broke into factions along unexpected lines.. the primary combatents were my two sisters, mrs. po who is the third child (i am the fouth), and srlb who is the youngest of us five.. the other players are my two brothers, 'non-dub', the oldest, and 'df', the second.. well, non-dub molested srlb when she was eight, just once, but that is a million times too many and after years of seeming to tolerate his presence when she had to, she decided that she could never forgive him for 'messing up her life.'.

  when non-dub was down on his luck, mrs po lets him live in a room in her house.

  very untypical behavior for a dub.. srlb 'personally disfellowships' mrs po, i guess you can be shunned even if you are in 'good standing', and the wife of the po at that!.

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  Breaking the mold

  by RollerDave in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  we are all products of our upbringing to more of an extent than most of us are probably aware.. those of us brought up in the wts mindset have to admit that we have been affected by it.. i, myself, am surprised at the effect it had on me, i sometimes find that i have been molded into the mindset and even though i have discarded the wts trappings, the framework remains to be used be new beliefs just as harmfully.. unless the actual framework, the mold, can be broken; we run the risk of just stumbling from one disastrous belief system to the next.. being a zealot can be so appealing, but it is just a part of the framework that props up the wts mindset.

  i have been guilty of it.. as the very glimmerings of disenchantment began faintly glowing within me, i found that redirecting my considerable zealotry helped me to ignore my misgivings for a time.

  i redirected my stubborn certainty into computer os bigotry.. i became an amiga fanatic, devoted to that platform with a fervor replicating that of a wts drone.

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  14

  Unscriptural

  by RollerDave in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  just had a lovely chat with my mom today.. after hashing out a bunch of other business, she asked what we were up to this monday.

  of course i told her we were going out to see dad.. this gave her pause because she is well aware that dad is rather deceased.

  she sputters 'you mean... his grave?

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  7

  Do you 'tidy up' before JW relatives visit?

  by RollerDave in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i've got an older sister who is a decent sort.. she remains within the congregation and is married to the po, but still treats me like a human being despite having inklings of my true views.. she was coming over to discuss a few family things so i 'tidied up' my ray franz books by turning their spines to the wall and carried a smaller and less obvious gun in my pocket than usual.. i viewed it as courtesy to an invited guest, but wondered if it might be a typical behavior.. any thoughts?.

  roller.

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  Can you be HALF a witness?

  by RollerDave in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i have an ex (my 1st), who is still a true believer in spite of her penchant for smoking, drinking, sleeping around and whooping it up with the lowest of lowlifes she can find.. (yes, moxie, i know you are reading this.

  you're a beeyatch and claim to be proud of it, so stop smirking and sign up if you want to refute the above!).

  she is one of those people who accept it as "the truth" mostly from the outside even though such acceptance means they better put butter and jelly in their pockets 'cuz they're gonna be toast in the big a.. she has a plan tho, she intends to 'get in' by pretending to comply long enough to get baptized, but still do pretty much as she pleases!.

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  More Recent Events

  by RollerDave in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  ok, so we covered leaving, regaining my faith, now for some recent events.. .

  from disabled housing, where i met my fiancee working as a pca together we weathered the death of my non-witness father, the y2k scare, 9-11, and more all the time doing our best to improve as people and serve wherever we could.. .

  she got through college and got her bachelors degree and a job as a contract-worker at 3m; i struggled in physical therapy to relearn how to walk.

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  20

  Since I left...

  by RollerDave in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  since i left.... so there i was, a disabled single dad bereft of all he had known or believed for 30 years.. i had moved a good 45 minutes away from the area where the events in my introductory post went down, but was now living in an area where i had resided some ten years earlier and still had a few stale connections with the organization.. i was lonely, depressed, pissed off, and really disgusted with the god i had been shown in my years of unfruitful association.. in my mind, he had made me the way i am, which apparently entailed being unable to meet his 'righteous requirements', and was going to kill me for it.

  he had endowed all of us with a natural human nature (apart from our fallen sinful nature,) and now expected us to conquer our every natural impulse or desire, even the healthy ones, to survive the big a.. hold off on marriage or kids, no college, no success, no normalcy... the big a'll get ya if ya don't watch out!.

  so i railed against him, defied him to just take me, do anything to show he even existed or had any power at all.. i went around saying 'god is an a$$h*le' and the like, but then i realized something that shook my world..... i was just as much a witness outside the organization as i had been inside!.

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  38

  Allow me to introduce myself

  by RollerDave in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i was raised among the witnesses and left in my early 30's due to a mixture of doctrinal disputes and social isolation.

  my mother and both of my sisters remain within the organization.

  i also have two brothers, one df'd, one who never quite caught the watchtower bug.. my road within the organization was a rocky one that eventually lead to a place where i found myself socially isolated within the congregation as a person simply unfit for fellowship with proper, upright, theocratic people who must cut off all 'worldy' association, suffer the ensueing isolation, and eat humble pie until such a time as they determined i was 'spiritual minded' enough for them to associate with.. baptism was held up as my expected goal, but despite trying, i was never quite good enough for them.

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