Posts by mindmelda

36

this evil ...wicked.....rotton system of things.....NOT!!!!.........

by oompa in

of course anyone not a jw is "worldly""...i think that mentally this is the hardest part to overcome if you are born in..... you should have seen the look on my wife's face recently when i told her that i feel that things are prob about as good as it gets.....no evil wicked system of things exists........ ya..... i know times are tough here in usa as far as employment.....but damm....this ain't like the great depression or wwi or ww2!!

!.......life in the middle ages used to be 38 years......now it is 88 years!!!.......

i can walk just about any neighborhood without fear...if the "world" were as bad as they say...there would be a prisons every 1000 meters!!!

mindmelda

I was reading the works of evolutionary psychologist Jared Diamond a while ago and it was a huge eye opener for me. He had all this compelling evidence that humans are actually getting LESS violent as time goes on.

Oh sure, it's hard to believe when you watch the news some nights, but it's all relative. In Bronze Age societies (we're talking Biblical times here) the usual rate of loss for young men due to violence was...get this...a minimum of 40%! Diamond does the math for you; I can't because I suck at math.

Studies across the board say the more primitive the society, the more violence, the more death from violence. Even WWII and Viet Nam, the most violent, worldwide conflicts in human history, did not have a 40% loss of males in their prime due to the war and associated violence. It was about 10%, something around that.

That's not a statistic you'll be reading in the Watchtower. Because it doesn't support their ideas that things are getting worse and worse as time goes one. Things are CHANGING, and certainly, humans will have to keep changing with them. The climate, energy resources, how we grow food, what we eat, what we wear, what kind of houses we live in, our transportation, all those things will have to adapt to the changing conditions of the earth and technology and always have. But, that's not equivalent to things getting worse. Unless you find change frightening, and yes, most people do.

1

mindamelda please read...

by mouthy in

jw
friends

hi i did get your phone message.

but i am fine.

out most of the day with my daughter sue,.

mindmelda

I'm SO glad you're feeling better. And that you spent the day with family,I know how much that means to you. I was just worried about you. I know all these older folks and I'm a worrier, so I'm always calling them.

26

It's not the same to make NEW FRIENDS, I want to keep my OLD FRIENDS - Am I right?

by BonaFide in

jw
friends

i appreciate all the advice on here about making friends outside the organization.. i am making new friends, both at work and at school.. but it's not the same as old friends.. my old friends i grew up with.

i sometimes go to the movies with them, dumb movies.

like that night at the museum, smithsonian one.

mindmelda

Real friendship transcends differences, even significant ones at times. Witnesses rarely get a chance to learn that valuable lesson because to be a friend to most of them, you have to believe everything that they believe. No, they want the world to be one uniform construct of thought, devoid of individuality and the perfectly human right to disagree and dissent.

Sad, isn't it? They are never getting a chance to be the tolerant and loving people that they could be. That's not tolerance, and its definitely not love.

I say "some" because I do know a few Witnesses who are kind and loving in themselves enough to rise above the ridiculous and unfounded association limits the WTS rules put on them.

The other day, I heard a pastor on TV apply that scripture about "Friendship with the world" in James 4:4 to communication and being true to Christ's personality in the way you deal with others. Not as legalism about neutrality and politics. Communication and getting along in spite of differences is the context in which James was written. It's all about how to get along amongst ourselves and with everyone if you're Christian. Nothing else.

I burst into tears because I had used that scripture and others as a basis for hate, discrimination and fear for so long. I'm done with hating. I have no more room in my heart for it.

You will find new friends and I hope you keep some of your old ones.

72

Goddess Roll Call: LADIES, Show Your Inner Goddess, Stand Proud Say It Loud!

by GoddessRachel in

jw
friends

my username is goddessrachel.

because i believe we are all gods and goddesses.

after all aren't we made in god's image?.

mindmelda

My husband has been calling me "The Goddess" for years now.

My husband says "I have the body of a god....Buddha."

He cracks me up. We laugh a lot.

37

thinking of writing a book this summer

by John Doe in

jw
friends

after brainstorming a couple hours, i'm thinking of writing a book about a man with a wife and two kids.

wife and possibly two kids get into accident and become permanently disabled, wife braindead.

man, who's had a crush on wife's friend, becomes torn between being faithful to his wife and moving on with her friend, and the book centers on his search for answers that are not there.

mindmelda

I've been writing fiction for 10 years, It's lots of fun, and I have plenty of internet readers, but it pays nothing. LOL

I have to write whether I get paid or not, or my head will explode. I write a blog every day. If you can find a blog site with a private option, it's a good place to do story notes and keep track of them.

I just made a new Troll Warrior and a Tauren Druid on the Fenris server. I have too many toons. *sigh*

15

marriage vows...

by lurk3r in

i had a bit of a chin-wag with a freind of mine the other day.

we were talking about the questions that "nobody knows" and as witnesses, you can never get an answer for.

she came up with one i never thought about before so i thought i would share it here.. .

mindmelda

I got married in a court house by a judge, because I was marrying an unbaptized associate. LOL We had no mention of God or religion in the ceremony.

Purely civil.

I've been to some wacky Witness weddings, let me tell you. The ones where they make up their own vows can be real knee slappers. I used to have to bite my hand to keep a straight face at some of the bad poetry that was spouted on those occasions. Occasionally, you would encounter a little talent, but I guess the one that takes the cake form me was the sister who fancied herself a diva and sang her vows. Off key and ear splittingly loud, just like she sang the Kingdom songs every meeting.

Lord help us all. I cried, but it was from the pain in my ears.

10

Dinner and alcohol - what will happen next

by rockmehardplace in

last night, i had a friend over for dinner.

nothing major, just ordered a pizza and talked a good bit about his business, family, vacations coming up.

nothing really from a spiritual aspect, which was fine by me.

mindmelda

Undercover, that's not an uncommon thing that happens to people leaving a highly structured sect or cult like JWs. They throw out EVERYTHING having to do with it at once, and as you said, go kind of nuts trying all the "forbidden" things that they felt they were denied by the cult.

They scare themselves with their out of control behavior and feel that they cannnot "behave" with out the authority of the cult again directing their morals,their thoughts, their behavior. They are like a guy who has been in jail for many years and cannot adapt to normal society, and so they deliberately committ a crime that takes them back to their relatively safe and comfortable prison, where life is predictable, restriction is imposed externally and everything is under the illusion of control.

I suppose some people can't handle thinking for themselves and figuring out what is good and bad for themselves without a Big Brother looking over their shoulder.

You know, that's how the WTS sells itself. "Quit thinking for yourself, it's not what humans were intended to do, that's why it's so hard and feels so bad. Let God do it for you." Except God is the WTS. And God doesn't do that anymore.

Maybe people needed that for a long time. They needed hard rules written in stone and legalistic enforcement of those rules to keep them in check and from killing each other off the face of the earth when they were three hairs away from baboons. But, at some point, religion needs to evolve beyond that and be about an internalized set of principles that guide the conscience and allow for personal expression and freedom.

That's what your friend never discovered. He needs the wardens of the WTS to make him behave...or so he believes.

6

JW PARROT

by iknowall558 in

jw
friends

a man went to a pet shop and purchased a parrot.

it belonged to a jehovah's witness because it kept repeating, "read the watchtower and awake", "avoid worldly association", "the end of the system is near".

squawk!.

mindmelda

Terrible joke! But, rockmehardplace, don't let the Witnesses ruin contemplating eternity for you. That idea has been around a lot longer than JWs!

It's practically a meme of human existence. Anthropologists consider the concept of immortality (not the reality of it, which is not too provable of course) it a defining mark of what it means to be a modern human.

Thats why I could never figure out why the Witnesses are such Nihlists. Disbelieving in immortality or even limiting it (they kind of do both) is a dumb move religiously speaking. It's so inherent in most religions, Pagan, Christian, Islamic and yes, even Jewish (most Jews believe in an afterlife of some sort, forget what the WTS tells you about what Jews believe, it's largely bullshit....) that it's kind of a denial of human nature to exclude it from your belief structure.

Kind of interesting that only atheists and Jehovah's Witnesses believe that "when you're dead, you're dead". Of course, Witnesses have an "out" in their version of resurrection, at least for some, but essentially, they deny the perfectly human desire for immortality and bend it around in an unprecedented way.

6

Why is biblegod so passive, passive/aggressive?

by Satanus in

jw
friends

why does he "use people" to do stuff.

i grew up a jw, and continued jw for a few decades as an adult.

i did my best to serve the wtbiblegod during all that time.

mindmelda

LOL Narkissos. I've had people ask me "Why can't faith be simple for you?" and I have to say, "Because I'm not simple and I think too much about EVERYTHING!"

I'm not inclined to complexity as far as rational construction or deconstruction, but as far as mysticism and the psychology of belief and the philosophy of belief, yes, I'm attracted to the complex. I have to go through the complex to get to the simple, but that's just the way it works for me. *G*

When you learn the context of belief, myth, God, religion, it fits in so very neatly with what it was at the time and place it arrives. Christ could not have been inserted into human history at a more advantageous time...or if you don't believe in his literal existence, the IDEA of God made Man is even remarkably necessary as an evolution and break from old, tribal authoritarian religious constructs. (even though there was an immediate desire for some to return to those and there continues to be, I.E. Fundamentalism and Jehovah's Witnesses, among others)

Religion evolves with man or fades and dies just like everything else. The desire to appear static and fundamentalistic is just that, a desire. Even the most orthodox, fundamentalist and conservative structures are forced to embrace change to survive at some point.

The question is, will you change willingly, embrace the natural evolution of thought and culture that is a necessary component of faith, or will you be dragged into it kicking and screaming, or will you grow static and die? All things that remain static eventually die from their stagnation, their inability to adapt to the changing needs of human themselves.

The WTS is static as regards their authority structure, it has only tightened it's authoritarian and patriarchal structure rather than adapted in any beneficial way. I predict growing disintegration and slow death without radical change to a more democratic structure. It's what history tells us will occur. As humans in general, we are moving away from static authoritarian constructs and reaching towards more democratic ones everywhere. Authoritarian religions or expressions of religions will be less and less tolerated, just as authoritarian governments are now decidedly going out of favor.

Time will tell. I think this is happening to all religion and it's interesting that only the Fundamentalists and highly structured versions of religions regard it as a definite threat. Jehovah's Witnesses definitely do, the break in general in society from unquestioning respect for religious authority structures frightens them a great deal, which is why they constantly rail at it and throw scripture at it.

10

Dinner and alcohol - what will happen next

by rockmehardplace in

last night, i had a friend over for dinner.

nothing major, just ordered a pizza and talked a good bit about his business, family, vacations coming up.

nothing really from a spiritual aspect, which was fine by me.

mindmelda

oompa, I left you a private message. *G*