Thanks for posting this. It's a good article, but I wish the writer could have been accurate with the name in the headline. I can remember my father commenting about negative articles that "if they can't even get our name right, what else have they got wrong?" How many witnesses will dismiss this--or maybe not even read past the headline-- simply because the name in the title offers them a seemingly valid excuse?.
Cadellin
JoinedPosts by Cadellin
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43
The floodgates are about to open in the UK.. Sunday Times article
by defender of truth injehovah church faces flood of sex abuse cases.
"a woman who was abused from the age of four by a senior officer of the jehovahs witnesses has lodged a 500,000 claim for compensation in a test case that could open the door to hundreds more suits involving members of the religious organisation in the uk.".
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/crime/article1525363.ece.
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Just woke up
by Doctor Who innew to the site.
currently i am a ministerial servant and was told i was appointed to be an elder.
i told the brothers i was not ready for that assignment.
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Cadellin
Welcome, Doctor. Nice that you've been able to see firsthand the hypocrisy. You're in a good position to see through the Society's defense against negative publicity--that it is all a result of "lying apostates." For me, it was discovering the gross misuse of scientists' and others' quotes in WT literature, along with the bone-headed misrepresentation of evolution, so-called flood geology and early human history.
Waking up leads to challenges, though, if your family is all in and especially if you have a spouse who's active.
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New Caleb video uses fearmongering on children
by Jonathan Drake incheck it out.
literally the message is if you don't pay attention at the meetings you could die.
how insane, i feel like this must wake some people up..
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Cadellin
I feel so sorry for little kids who get sleepy at meetings. Even when I was uber-active, I never thought it was a good idea to force a small child to stay awake while some adult droned on about some incomprehensible trivia. You put a child to bed at 8:30 every weeknight except for one and then on that night, you expect her to stay alert until 9:15 pm. Right. Mind you, most small children are not put to bed that early anymore. But they should be--they need adequate sleep! And yeah...if Noah hadn't paid attention, then the whole entire realm of living species would have been toast. Right.
Oh, wait! It's been said before but it's worth repeating: It's a cult.
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Last nights meeting...
by DATA-DOG ini know dubs are delusional.
i know dubs don't reason well.
i know dubs are a bit off, like many groups.
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Cadellin
The kids being baptized are in the 11-12 range. The African-American boy near the beginning looked more like 10-12, the boy near the end maybe 12-13. These are CLEARLY prepubescent boys; way shorter/smaller than their mothers. This is a definite change from 20-30 years ago. I was an uber-zealous born-in and got baptized when I was 15. That was considered an appropriate age. My husband was also a zealous born-in and he was 15 when dunked as well. It was not the norm to see pre-teens getting baptized, although if you go back even further (50+ years), it did happen more often, based on what my mother has told me.
This video is aimed at an even younger crowd, however, based on the paradise and other imagery--6-12 years of age or so. To beseech children to "give your all to me" the way this does is just plain creepy.
Oh, yeah! It's a cult.
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WTS leader rants against higher education
by hoser inon jw tv.
anthony morris is ranting against higher education.
he is blaming parents for enrolling their kids in college.
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Cadellin
All I could think watching a few minutes of this is--What a f*cking idiot. At the same time, he's got it right. The purpose of a university education IS to affect your thinking, so you don't blindly accept whatever someone hashes out. It's to learn about recent scientific research so you know that there's no way the entire earth could have been submerged 4700 years ago, or that the human family is only 6,000 years old. It's to encounter other perspectives to which you wouldn't ordinarily be exposed, like other cultures, religions or sexual orientations. It's to see that your own way of thinking isn't the be-all and end-all you once took it to be. Oh, yeah--and it's also to engage in the sheer joy of learning about more than pipes and hammers. INot that there's anything wrong with pipes and hammers, understand. Trades are wonderful but my point is, you should have the right to choose.)
So, yeah, he's right. The WT should be damn scared of anyone going to university. Ironically, however, this angle of higher ed is under attack, with the evisceration of public funding, the move to vocationalizing and privatizing programs, the adjunctification of faculty and adoption of a retail, consumer-based business model by most public universities. But I digress.
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Canada's MACLEANS article "Against their will: Inside Canada’s forced marriages." The main subject in the story is an XJW we all know.
by AndersonsInfo inhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/against-their-will/.
forced marriage is one of the last taboos to break.
a new law could make it a crime.
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Cadellin
Interesting article. I have to say, though, that in all my 40+ years as an active JW, I never once heard about forced marriages. In fact, just the opposite--constant counsel about being careful in making a choice and avoiding marriage until "after the bloom of youth." While the JW example in the article is a sad story, I think it's more a case of a nutcase parent rather than anything doctrinal. -
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Does anyone have the 2014 stats from the 2015 Yearbook yet?
by berrygerry indoes anyone have the 2014 stats from the 2015 yearbook yet?.
(isn't it usually out by now - or are they waiting to celebrate new year's day?
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Cadellin
I think it's noteworthy that nowhere does the WT break out the foreign language stats within any Western country. I think if we saw the numbers for Spanish lang. and other major groups in the US, it would be startling since it's a certainty that's where the increase is originating (prob. the same in Britain and other major centers for immigration). English would be flat at best. It's also interesting that Canada is a zero for growth when the "amazing increase in the Chinese congs." are all my parents (active JW's there) want to talk about--they rave about how the Chinese and other Asians are flocking to the congs. If that's the case, then there must be a corresponding decrease in English and French.
Also noteworthy, and consistent with the WT's info control, is that the number 0 no longer appears in the report. Instead, it's a blank space when there's no change, as if they don't want to acknowledge it.
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New layout feels very chaotic
by EndofMysteries ini don't really know how to describe the feeling but i'll give examples, but the new layout to me makes it feel tiring being on for too long.
1. there is the top menu, then a big add between that and the next part, a big ad between the bottom and where you reply, then on the right column you either have 2 ads on top or some type of summary, then ad, then either related posts or other areas.
there are no borders, the adds have the same color and text type but larger font, and it all seems chaotically merged into one thing where you need to constantly sort out what you are viewing.
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Cadellin
First, I absolutely appreciate Simon's tireless work creating and maintaining this forum. But I'm finding it a little disorienting. I liked the grid lines from before, and found it easier to see in a glance how many pages, views, etc. Sorry I'm not being more specific. -
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How do you overcome this JW excuse?
by EdenOne induring one of those meetings that took place before my jc, one of the elders, who was a good friend of mine back then and used to come up with a few outlandish personal views about some teachings, attempted to counter one of my arguments like this:.
eden - "well, if the truth doesn't change, why is it that what we teach as 'truth' has changed over the years (several examples given)?
how can we dogmatically claim at any given moment that we have 'the truth' if our teachings keep changing?".
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Cadellin
That is a disturbing picture.
JW's even have a unique phrase to describe this slippery, nonsensical view: "present truth." I actually had a convo with my mother some time ago about the generation of 1914 having all passed away and she maintained, quite emphatically, that the Society wasn't wrong about that prediction because it had been "present truth" at that time. The fact that the events did not happen as predicted was irrelevant because it was the correct understanding at that time. Now, "present truth" consists of something else (even weirder, ironically, that of the overlapping business) and so that is entirely correct, now, just as the previous understanding was entirely correct at that, and for that, time. This circular reasoning (if that's what it is) completely short-circuited her ability to think through this to the logical conclusion: If that's how "truth" works, then the word is meaningless.
Orwell's Ministry of Truth has nothing on this.
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Creationism emails from a JW
by TheStumbler inearlier this year, i received an email from a jw family member with a link to this video:.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ruhkgqjug.
i wrote a long reply debunking the video (mostly copying talkorigins info).
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Cadellin
Great job with the (long) reply. Interestingly, all of the creationist claims that you adroitly dismantle are so old that they are themselves fossils! They've been debunked (most of them, anyway) so many times that any creationist that keeps repeating them is so sorely out of touch with the current state of the conversation that it probably would do little good to respond. It's the same way with the supposed evidence or rationale that the WT offers to support creationism.
One of the pieces missing from the conversation is the genetic evidence in support of natural selection and common descent. The ability to reconstruct whole genomes, including the reconstruction of ancient dna has been a gamechanger and for anyone with even a small amount of critical thinking skills is the final nail in creationism's coffin. The argument about a lack of transitional fossils is, as you point out, completely baseless but is rendered even more specious by the genetic transitions within species' genomes. Thus, it is possible to reconstruct the entire evolutionary history of, for example, cetaceans, when the abundant fossil record is matched with dna evidence that points, very clearly, to whales' nearest living relative as the hippo, or, to take another example, indicates pretty clearly that neanderthals were a separate species from ourselves. Moreover, the existence of pseudo genes that point to physical features once used by a species but now rendered obsolete is another form of transitional evidence not reliant upon an imperfect fossil record. Using the whale example, this can be seen by the fact that whales have the olofactory genes of a land animal, something completely unnecessary and perplexing if you believe in special creation, but completely understandable if you look at its origins as a land mammal.