Posts by mindmelda

33

Comment on Loneliness

by jgnat in

jw
friends

one of the great lessons this board gave me is the cruelty of shunning by the jehovah's witnesses.

it is inhuman.

the toll it takes on a person cannot be underestimated.

I had to work pretty hard at first to overcome the fears I'd had implanted in me since I was about 12 years old about "worldly" people. I try to remind myself that some of the nastiest treatment I've gotten has been at the hands of Witnesses, so could it be any worse among other people?

But, it's amazing how the brainwashing can still kick in every time I meet a new person and get to know them with casual chit chat or whatever...sometimes I find myself going throught that WTS checklist of what every wordly person is in their view...either a thief, a liar, an addict or a morally deficient fornicator!

LOL God, as if Witnesses don't do any of those things. Over the years I knew quite a few who drank too much (addiction) lied their asses off, stole money from me or defrauded me, and were constantly thinking about how they were going to get their next piece of tail.

The danger is believing that they're bastions of morality who would never do anything bad to anyone. Ha.

31

Help! Today's (5/23) WT study

by Dagney in

jw
friends

anybody who went, was there any supposedly "nooo" light regarding trouble in the congos during the last days?

got a call from a "sis" on the way to the meeting telling me about this interesting "nooo" light.

not sure exactly what she was saying, something like "satan (i know i know) is actually bringing people into the congregations to disrupt them.

mindmelda

Every religion since religion started has had "heretics" or "apostates" which merely means someone who disagrees with the guys in charge who wear the funny hats or the suits who let the rest of us poor slobs know what God is thinking this week, year or century.

11

Don't get me wrong, I like Jesus

by stillin in

font of wisdom, anti-corruption, moral type of man who stood up for his beliefs.. in today's watchtower study, the illustration of the weeds sown among the wheat was expounded upon.

it occurred to me that one thing that jesus never mentioned, but that any farmer/gardener would have thought of right away, was that leaving the weeds among the wheat would have, at best, diminished the quality of the harvest.

that's what weeds do.

mindmelda

I guess technically, since I didn't believe some of it EVER, I was always an apostate who attended meetings...for 34 years. The stuff I didn't believe I just mostly kept quiet about, since I'm not stupid and knew there'd be hell to pay. (the only hell I believe in, actually)

I never seemed to be able to assimilate that part where I was supposed to believe everything the WTS said was completely and utterly true and good for me.

28

How many have left your congregation ?

by leo999 in

hi everyone ,.

there are many new folk joining here everyday , and i thought it may be interesting and fun to just see how many people have left the congregation that you have attended in the past 5 years .

i dont mean of course people who are active jw's moving to another cong , but people that have left the wt religion , faded , da'd or df'd .. so , i will start off with my own cong .there have been 9 leave , 8 completely gone , myself hardly ever there and ' inactive ' .. leo999.

mindmelda

In the 34 years I was baptized, I can't even keep count of how many people I knew who were baptized who are now not associated in some way. Probably a hundred, at least.

33

Comment on Loneliness

by jgnat in

jw
friends

one of the great lessons this board gave me is the cruelty of shunning by the jehovah's witnesses.

it is inhuman.

the toll it takes on a person cannot be underestimated.

mindmelda

I was rather lonely AS a Witness, much of the time, because I wasn't ever terribly active (I had three small children in ten years to care for, and two of them had minor to serious developmental problems).

I got occasionally consideration, and I do have quite warm memories of a handful of Witnesses over the 34 years I was involved who were terrific friends and people who helped me in times of need, but other than that, I was largely ignored, particularly by the elders. Probably a good thing in a way...I'm glad I pretty much escaped their notice 99% of the time now!

When I "got out into the world" I found that the percentage of people willing to do good for me and to me and with me was actually higher. I've over all received more support, encouragement and consideration from "worldly" people. Isn't that a pisser?

I've also met a lot of worldly people who are total jerks of course, but again, no different than Witnesses.

Which only proves to me, personally, that whether a person is a mensch is a very individual thing, may only in some cases have to do with their religion and is definitely not the soul possession of Jehovah's Witnesses.

23

New Terminology

by SisoNoSiso in

i've heard that "return visit" has been replaced with another term.

is this true?

if so, what is it?.

mindmelda

There's a lot of rumors in JWville about many things, and I tend to think that it's because they change terminology as often as a girl changes her undies, but no, I haven't heard anything about that particular one.

Personally, I think the terms change for the same reason that you had to have a different password every week to get into Hogwarts houses dormitories, they're checking to see who's keeping up with things. LOL

99

Why FAITH is actually a form of suicide

by Terry in

jw
friends

i once heard a psychiatrist explain suicide as the ultimate act of self-preservation.

sound weird?.

counter-intuitive as that sounds, he went on to explain why.. when all you value in life is threatened you do whatever desperate act that will preserve that value.. destruction of self stops the ......process.....of consciously losing.

mindmelda

Hm, I concur with BTS on this one. I came to the realization that being a JW required no faith at all, except in the pseudo-profound utterances Watchtower, which seems to back up and run over itself every so often.

Witnesses seem only to require a cocksure attitude of being right about all things religious, and sometimes otherwise, all the time. That's nothing special, the glassy eyed cultist always has that. That's not faith, it's being utterly brainwashed.

True faith in anything religious or otherwise, requires questioning, doubt, investigation, resolution, pondering... all sorts of complex mental and emotional processes denied Witnesses as it's deemed "weak".

The only things those actions weaken is their stranglehold on your thoughts and emotions.

I guess I define faith as merely having a good degree of confidence in your conclusions, at least enough to justify them. Not too mystical, I'm afraid, but there you are.

The religiously inclined will tend to use faith in the metaphysical sense, to be sure, but on an everyday level, we all have it in ordinary things. I have faith that the sun will rise every morning, for instance. That's based on the fact that it always has. I don't know 100% that it will, but it seems a pretty valid assumption given my admittedly limited powers of observation.

I guess faith is a conclusion one makes on the preponderance of evidence, or at least on how they interpret that evidence.

Personal interpretation seems to have a lot to do with it, and even in a court of law, no two people have the same interpretation of any single event, which makes eyewitnesses among the least reliable evidence of all.

12

Apostate Buzz Words

by White Dove in

jw
friends

scriptural gymnastics.

noo lite.

getting your fade on.

mindmelda

I like:

Field Circus

Piosneers

The Watchtower Babble and Crap Society...or any clever version of that.

Literatrash

Gubberning Buddies, Gibbering Biddies, Gibbering Baddies

Drinking the Koolaid

Choosing the red or blue pill (ala The Matrix)

Nu-Lite

The Borg, The Borganization

Faithless and Dismissed Slave

Fading

Jehoover, Jehoba, any silly variation of "Jehovah" which is a damn silly sounding name now that I think of it

16

Atheism is NOT a Faith...

by zeroday* in

**disclaimer** i'm an atheist.... atheism is not a faith, it is not a religion, it is not a belief system...what do atheist and believers have in common...nothing.

so why do atheist seem it necessary to argue, fight and debate believers.

what is to be gained, a new nonbeliever...i have never understood it.

mindmelda

I agree that religion CAN lead to intellectual dead ends, but that as a blanket statement makes no more sense than any other blanket statement about human nature you can make, which is none.

Humans are too diverse to catagorize with all or nothing statements. For me, studying religion comparatively whetted my intellectual curiousity, thanks all the same. I found out that some of it (okay, about half of it, lol) is ca-ca, but I found that out for myself, which is the best way to find out anything.

I would never disallow Comparative Religious studies at the level of higher education as that's what leads to all that lovely questioning in so many cases.

Since I'm not an atheist, I wouldn't dare define their whatever it is for them, philosophy is the safest word, I suppose, but there's no such thing psychologically speaking as a person without beliefs, because that's part of the human psyche. It's what you believe IN that is in question, and some people just can't get behind anything metaphysical or supernatural to explain the world around them, unless they're pushing it over a symbolic cliff, of course.

As far as I can tell as an outsider, that's all atheism is. Nothing too scary. I'm not scared by anything anymore except serial killers, fried foods, chimps that rip off your face, Anne Coulter's Adam's Apple and Whoopi Goldberg's mysterious lack of eyebrows.

93

The Bible, Why not Reliable?

by sayitsnotso in

okay here is my thread to discuss this.

i believe the bible is inspired by god and reliable.

many argue it's neither.

mindmelda

*still wondering how Alexander wrote an AUTO (self) biography long after his death*

Oh, god, the idiots have truly taken over the world, haven't they? I am so ashamed of our educational system if this is what we're getting out of it. *sigh*