Posts by Cadellin

40

Last Days? Are you serious ....?

by Aleph in

believing we live in the last days?.

Cadellin

While it is true that the ability to wipe out life via nuclear detonation DOES distinguish our modern times, it is also true that humans have shown admirable (and unusual) restraint in using those nukes. Setting the potential aside, there is no escaping the fact that we are living in the most peaceful and prosperous time in human history. For those in doubt, check out economist Max Roser's wonderful graphic website http://ourworldindata.org/, where you can page through graphs of historical data measuring things like life span and global poverty rates.

Who knows whether humans will wipe themselves out? We can't speculate. But what we do have is comparative data on how the day to day lives of humans has changed for the better. One of my frustrations with WT rhetoric about the last days is that the stats they tossed around were always decontextualized. Okay, so there were 100,000,000 people killed in warfare during the 20th Century. That's a lot! But it also suggests that there were a lot of people AROUND to kill, people that would have died in childhood or early life if they had lived during other times. Numbers always have to be put within context so that you are comparing apples to apples, which is why the Society rarely offers statements as comparative percentages, preferring the shock effect of straight up raw numbers.

44

The Witnesses Are Really Trying Hard To Get Me Back In

by minimus in

jw
friends

at my mom's bed side all i see is either jw family or friends making a concerted effort to have me return to their fold.

evidentlyy, my mom has encouraged this and i'm a trapped prisoner, as they do their best to have me come back.

it's bad enough that i have to endure my mom's dying, now i have to be bombarded with this bs..

Cadellin

I'm sorry about your difficult situation. I'm going through something similar right now, though from what you've posted, not as bad. Hang in there...it's tough.

138

My Mother Died Two Weeks Ago

by Perry in

jw
friends

none of my jehovah's witness relatives called to tell me or my family.

just found out this morning.

Cadellin

You have my deepest sympathy. That is terrible. I'm so sorry that your family are behaving in such an unchristian, inhumane way.

135

Latest Leaked BOE letter to Elders Oct. 4th

by Watchtower-Free in

october 4, 2015. to all congregations.

re: new provisions announced atannual meeting.

dear brothers:.

Cadellin

This is rebranding to save a sinking ship. But wow--I never expected it to be so drastic. Yes, no doubt that this part of the continued abatement of any participants' creative thinking skills. The Theo. Min. School used to be the most interesting part of the meeting, esp. when someone would (occasionally) get creative and then the counsel was always interesting, esp. when it was actual counsel instead of a pat on the back. Now, packaged videos from Mother and a pretty coloring book. Yikes.

And how in holy hell could the Bible Teach book get any more simplified??? It's already at about a Grade Four reading level. The target audience must indeed be developmentally disabled persons or those who are completely illiterate--those least likely to see through the craziness. So sad.

61

Today's Special Day Assembly Expenses and the $10,499 Deficit. Silent Majority?

by Tenacious in

today i attended a one-day assembly in my hometown.

i knew when it came time to read the afternoon expenses that it would be an incredibly high and ridiculous amount that was nowhere near the real expenses for that day.

sure enough, after lunch came the announcement.

Cadellin

Interesting comment from the Assemb Overseer about the Branch raising the "expense" per publisher from $3.50 to $10.50 to reflect the equal balance for the Branch "as a whole." I wonder what that means exactly? At first glance, I took it to mean that English speaking congs. need to pay more to offset the lesser means of foreign lang. congs., who, as we all know, are far outpacing them in growth. Spanish congs. have many impoverished attendees and could probably never afford to pay the "suggested" or whatever cost per pub.

But--I don't know. It would be interesting to know more about this...

Let me add too, that, even though it's been years since I had to attend an assembly, it was ALWAYS like that--a stratospherically high expense report and a reported deficit. This, too, was for an assembly hall that had been in use for years and years and HAD to be paid for by then (Surrey, BC, Canada). It had a full-time caretaker who was in "special service" (read: minimal monthly allowance aka Bethel-rate) and any major repairs were done by brothers for free, naturally. I could never figure out why it cost thousands of dollars to pay for lights, water and heat for one or two days. And, yes, of course those things are kept on all the time, but this assembly hall was used every single weekend, plus there were two or three KH in the same building, whose publishers would also be paying each month. Crazy, crazy.

60

New light from GB member David Splane!

by Island Man in

in the latest jw broadcast splane is quoted as saying:.

"suppose there was a man who died 10 minutes before joseph was born.

would he be part of joseph's generation?

Cadellin

What's even more interesting (and mindbending) is that he is suggesting that if a baby was born 10 minutes BEFORE Joseph died, then they would be of the same generation. By this logic, a child born 10 minutes before Fred Franz died in 1992 would be of the same generation as Franz. In other words, someone 23 years old right now is of the same generation as someone born in 1893.

The WT's use of the Joseph generation scripture is really quite ridiculous. Joseph and his brothers were of the same generation not because their lives overlapped, but because they were all brothers, born of the same man. Moreover, given that a woman's procreative timespan is relatively short (less than 40 years) and given that their four mothers were all contemporaries of each other (Rachel, Leah, Bildad and Zilpah, if I have that right), the brothers would not have been dramatically far apart in age--less than 40 years from the oldest to the youngest--in all likelihood. Again, fitting with the Biblical generation.

210

TV.JW.ORG (September 2015) - Generation explained again

by Designer Stubble in

guess the overlapping generation concept is difficult for most to comprehend.

david spane does his best to explain it again.

the cutoff date for this generation has now moved to 1992 (was once 1935), the year that fred franz died.

Cadellin

It's not just stupid--it's depressingly stupid. At one point, long ago when I was active, I could take a certain pride in the (quasi) logic of our theology, believing that it was at least somewhat defensible from the Bible. This new nonsense isn't even close.

30

Debating evolution, intelligent design and cosmology with a JW

by Thestumbler83 in

ive been having an email exchange with a jw family member and the discussion seem to have become a bit heated and im not quite sure why.

i dont think ive said anything obviously offensive and ive been very careful with my wording.

but i think im sometimes a bit tone deaf with these things.

Cadellin

Your last email is pretty good. However, speaking from experience, I've found the best way to have any kind of discussion is to keep the topic narrow and focused. It's too easy for a JW to bounce from topic to topic, skimming the bare crown (because most of their knowledge is less than wading pool depth) and moving on. If you discuss one thing and one thing only and keep bringing your JW back to that topic, you might get somewhere (similar to the example of an earlier poster).

For example, I had a recent email exchange with a JW whose email covered about ten things that were supposedly evidences for creation. My response focused only on one of them and pushed her to look at it a bit more deeply (critically). It was a fool's errand, anyway(!)

Welcome, by the way.

83

What woke you up?

by Israel Ricky Gonzales in

in march of 2014, i was a very active jw, a ministerial servant, gave a public talk, was an attendant for the memorial, and one of 4 cleaning captains for an international convention of 40,000+ attendees.

so what woke me up?

an innocent comment from a co-worker about the candice conti court case rang a bell that could not be unrung.

Cadellin

The first big thing was discovering the gross misrepresentation of quotes in the Creation book. I was an uber-diehard JW, longtime pioneer, foreign lang. group, etc., married to a former Bethelite, elder. The whole schmear. I always had this vague knowledge that we, as JWs, had our "own" timeline of events from "creation" onward which was a source of discomfort, but I was always able to rationalize it. Then I started re-reading the Creation book and actually tracking down the sources. What an eye-opener. I remember just sitting and sobbing my eyes out. But the shock got me to start researching other things and I quickly discovered the UN NGO lie, and that was the end of any kind of allegiance to this stupid religion.

I was mentally out but had to do a long, slow fade to accommodate family. Now, I'm happy to say I'm OUT OUT OUT! And never going back--and never been happier!

78

I believe that the greater percentage of JWs-You Will Not Be Able to Help, no Matter What Facts You Show Them.

by John Aquila in

so i ran into this brother whom ive known for a while and the conversation led into me being invited to come back to the kingdom hall.

we talked for about an hour during which time i explained to him 607 being the wrong date and a lot of other stuff including the child abuse cases in australia.

but what i wanted to relate was the last few minutes of our conversation.

Cadellin

Actually, that witness gave a very eloquent and intellectually honest response as to why he chooses to remain in. I say "intellectually honest" because he is admitting indirectly that facts, logic, empirical evidence, etc. are not the cornerstone of his belief. His belief system creates a very comforting space in which he exists and he is consciously choosing that (well, relatively consciously). Hope is a powerful force and for many JWs, their religion supplies them that in spades. One of the most difficult things I had to face when learning TTAT was that "truth" is not necessarily cosy or pretty or silver-lined, that just because something was true did not make it emotionally palatable. Or, to put it another way, just because something was emotionally uncomfortable or unsettling did not diminish its truth value. There's no cosmic law that says life is peachy and if this life isn't peachy, then you'll get a better one in the future. The fact of the matter is that life has no inherent meaning embedded within it. We have to create meaning for ourselves; we have to imbue our lives with meaning through our own endeavors and thoughtful ethics--and that's not easy. Of course, it can be done and life can be rife with meaning but it doesn't just happen. And that's hard for a lot of JWs to take. It's so much easier to go with the sweet, comfy, adorable paradise hope, and honestly, if I had lost a child in death, I might be willing to close my eyes to the crap and cling to the hope of seeing that child again.