in a recent thread, i was basically called out in this manner.. here is part of the quote:.
mean no disrespect with the following but i have to ask, when you disassociated yourself what did you think would happen?
did you expect witnesses to suddenly change to accommodate you?
It is sort of like a toothache.
You remember it every second you put your tongue in that special sore place. The memory of it can last longer than the true pain of the infection.
It is only when you realize that you have not done the self-test for several days, that you realize it does not hurt any more.
Forgetting it all (really forgetting it all) is the true freedom.
another day with betty (dorothy) dunlap.
first ... inside the nursing home:.
it's really not this dark ... it's a very pretty foyer.. .
Sacolton, Is Betty bitter at all? By the way you talked, she stated facts, without bitterness or anger. I look forward to the day, when I too, can think back, and not frown.
I certainly hope that this is the case.
this thread doesn't just have to be about jws.
it's about the weird stuff that isn't taught by the religion, but an individual believes it.
my examples:.
Sorry to double post, but forgot to mention that Annie really thought that from time to time in field service (when she kind of forgot what scripture to find to make a point) her bible would just magically (well - angelically) fall open to just the right place and there it would be.
She was such a nice old lady that I never said a word.
I did nail that little creep of a circuit overseer, though, on the dinosaurs. He claimed he was still right because Sinclair had one on their signs...
Oh well...
this thread doesn't just have to be about jws.
it's about the weird stuff that isn't taught by the religion, but an individual believes it.
my examples:.
One old sister (the lady that studied with my mom) thought that the annointed would float around the earth to help us in the new system - like put you back if you fell off a cliff or something...
She also thought that these annointed would "get their power from the sun", "because we all know that the sun is an everlasting immortal thing".
She also believed that soon Russia and America (king of north and south) would soon be "making war on the moon" because they had (at least U.S. had) sent astronauts to the moon. Claimed there was a scripture that plainly said there would be "blood on the moon". (actually, I heard some of this even from assembly talks - off the written outline probably).
Circuit overseer who believed that petroleum came exclusively from squashed dinosaurs, and that this was god's reason for making them. Wonder where he thought coal came from...(careful with this one...)
foxnews today - {another bullcrap story} siberia's lake baikal the worlds deepest lake.....military divers chased "a group of humanoid creatures dressed in silver suites".....3 humans died during the chase.
six objects followed a sub in the pacific...when the sub surfaced so did the objects, which then left the water and flew away.. anyone see the movie "the abyss"........drugs are bad!
mermaids anyone?.
This thread is worthless without pictures.
i never hear much about her anymore.
she's got a title but that's about it.
or am i reading the wrong newspapers?.
I wonder what would be the effect if the Obama camp caught wind of her true initiative (first lady president) and then decided to fire her at an appropriate moment well prior to the primary season in 2012?
Would not put it past them one second, given the past history of dissing his competitors in Chicago and State Ill. politics.
flipper asked this question and got me thinking about it.
why don't they do more to protect the children?
why not hunt the abusers down and get them out of the organization?
Just one more point (and I agree with every one above comes in to some extent...) -
The Witnesses have an inherent distrust of the police. This follows right along with distrust of government, the military, charitable organizations, in fact - everything except the WTBTS itself.
I think they have a literal fear that the government, court system, and police are there to "take them away" - after all, they have done every possible thing they could to antagonize the normal systems of society. For example:
I was the magazine loader asst. servant at Oak Glen in Oklahoma City way back when, and thus was the one to discover that we had a burglery as I had to come in early to separate the magazines and put them in the publisher's boxes. The robbers stole our sound system and pissed on a green NWT; that was the only damage.
I called the cops from the KH phone immediately and kind of got told off for it - should have called the CO FIRST, and then we could have decided whether to file a police report!!! At the time, I assumed this was just because the CO was a control freak, but now I think that it was also because many of the senior servants did not want to have a "dirty worldly cop" actually inside their inner sanctum.
More of the "we can take care of everything by ourselves better than anybody else". Wonder if I should have called the CO FIRST (instead of the fire department) if the place had been on fire?
i believe i did in 1974, but i was just coming into the org and didn't realize the significance of the part he played.. it was a sunday at a stadium on the campus of the university of alabama in tuscaloosa.
all the "friends" were almost beside themselves with excitement, so looking back, it must have been f. w. franz!.
i'd worked until 6 pm that saturday night, had a one year old teething child, and had to arise at 3 am to get ready for the bus trip.. when we arrived, the weather had turned colder, the stadium was quite warm, and i fell asleep a few minutes into the talk.
Was Freddy possibly the keynote at a Kansas City convention in 1969 (the first astronauts walked on the Moon during this convention)?
I am sure I have sat through at least one but-burner from him but cannot quite remember where...
Strangely, after being at many of the big conventions from the early 60s to the early 70s - I never once heard Knorr, nor ever see him in person.
But pretty much all the others.
i observe two ways the watchtower society keeps their followers "sheeplike".
both are based in fear.
love is not the glue that holds it together, although familial love is exploited by them in #2 below.. 1. god is going to destroy everyone who is not a jehovah's witness in the immenent armageddon blitzkreig.
As Armageddon has been postponed numerous times, is it possible that the Society is quietly dropping the Armageddon fear as number one reason to stay active and replacing it with the heightened fear of being outcast and being shunned?
It was my experience that no witness I knew ever thought themselves to be vulnerable to armageddon - no matter how slack/inactive/even immoral they happened to be. They were still witnesses in good standing after all -
UNLESS THEY GOT DISFELLOWSHIPPED.
So, the DF thread was the double edged sword - first, you would REALLY get killed in the big A, and ALSO, your family and friends would kick you to the curb and under the bus.
we know the wts says not going on the internet is for their protection.
yea yea i know.
we all know they just don't want jws to read all the real truth about the wts.. but what if there is another reason?
Lady Lee has historical precedence. In the 1960s, there was much talk about "old light" and "new light" and how dangerous it was to even have the "old light" around in printed form - let alone actually compare it with the "new light". I observed an old lady try to give the congregation a complete watchtower collection going back to practically the beginning of publication - it was refused because the CO thought this was dangerous exposure to "old light"... REALLY. It would probably be worth quite a few dollars if it still exists to specialized collectors today.
Use of such outdated material would likely lead to the often mentioned horror of "studying yourself right out of the truth".
Also ironically, we were later told not to refer to the terms "old light" and "new light" anymore as that in itself was confusing to new ones.
When I was a the Elders School, Schroeder gave an example of a School attendee who went nuts while he was there at the school (Brooklyn), and I believe later committed suicide. It was blamed on "reading the old outdated literature" in the Society Library. Schroeder also stated that "now the society carefully monitors who can have access to this material, you must be a writing department honcho with legitimate cause" - I guess to avoid getting demonized or such.
