this is a damning question to be asked of any loyal, active, devout jehovah's witness.. can you choose any year in the entire history of the org and say it is "safe from error"?.
if there is no single year ever free from error--in what reasonable way can jehovah being "guiding" the only "true" religion?.
what does it mean to be the only true religion if--at no time in your history--was what you were teaching actually true?.
Well, nice thread, Terry. By the way, I finally rented the 'Noah' movie this past weekend; I shall have to post my thoughts on your thread about that sometime.
How about 2001? Safe year? I know 2007, 2010, 2013 are not safe years for sure. 2000 isn't, 1995 isn't. But I can't remember it all...
Wow, this is a great question.
--sd-7
the watchtgower has decided to drop most of it's old publications up to 1990 and it looks like the library cd will be a thing of the past soon .i have decided to save some of the old content especially the questions from readers like wordpress posts and add photos ,let me know what you think.here is one from the 1967 watchtower.
how old was abel when he died ?.
.
Here is an honest question: How many other human beings were alive on Earth WHO WOULD HARM Cain?
A great number of small children, a la Lord of the Flies, first of all. A vengeful Adam. Possibly some of the adult women who were born after Abel and before Seth. That's about all I can imagine.
--sd-7
the watchtgower has decided to drop most of it's old publications up to 1990 and it looks like the library cd will be a thing of the past soon .i have decided to save some of the old content especially the questions from readers like wordpress posts and add photos ,let me know what you think.here is one from the 1967 watchtower.
how old was abel when he died ?.
.
What effect did NOT PRODUCING A SON for so long have on the multiplying of the population from just 2 people to the large populations in all the world in real history?
We would have to assume the Bible just doesn't mention every child--maybe Eve had nothing but girls for a few decades until Seth was born? Even if that was the case, it does create some major problems for population growth, especially if no one was taking multiple wives.
--sd-7
is there anyone who is currently appointed who can tell me what this 10 min meeting with the co was about?
he made the announcement that he wants to meet with all appointed men right after the meeting..
All I can think of right now is David crying, "Absalom, my son, Absalom!"
Hmm. So I wonder if that means yet another phone call from the chairman of my judicial committee? I guess I have to stop being civil and tolerant about it, because 'tolerance has the boundary of decency' as that cute JW girl said in the latest drama DVD. And it's just indecent to keep calling someone who's clearly opposed to your beliefs.
But you said 'inactive', so...maybe I'm wrong there.
--sd-7
when i read about bethel experiences my mind go to the show locked up raw!.
why would someone subject themselves to this without commeting a crime.. the wife and i went to see bethel in broklyn a few years ago and it was unlike anything i expected.
very cold.. went the bosert hotel and was talking to a brother there and asked how long he had been there, he said 25 years...i asked how old he was.
why save for retirement?
Exactly. Why even have a job, since we know we'll never fulfill any career in the short time left in this system of things?
Only experience I had was the couple of times I visited--it was obsessively clean. Nice-looking place, really, but who wants to get up at exactly the same time every day? Not me. I had thoughts of wanting to go, but I didn't want to give up my individuality for a rigid schedule. So...I couldn't judge it one way or the other, really.
--sd-7
can you be sexually sterilised?no, it is absolutely wrong - w59 7/1 p. 416 questions from readers.
however, it is absolutely wrong for a person to think that in order to stay free for the kingdom service and avoid family responsibilities in the way of children he is justified in getting himself sexually sterilized.. .
no, it is harmful - w61 12/1 p. 735 questions from readers.
It's a painful procedure, but mostly the two needles before they even do the surgery. But...given that it's really none of the Society's business, one would just have to avoid telling them and hope no JWs work at the urologist's office or the hospital... But you'd need collusion from your mate, and since mates tend to be stool pigeons in my experience, well, I guess I just have no appreciation for God-given reproductive powers. Or maybe I've just counted the cost and wanted to have more resources to devote to Kingdom interests rather than caring for children in this dying system of things, depending on how you look at it. Besides, won't Jehovah repair my reproductive organs 'soon' in the new system, as he 'must' if I am to gradually reach perfection?
--sd-7
i've talked with some good friends on the board about this before and we seem to be in agreement : one reason ( among many ) that some disfellowshipped jw's go back and return to the wt organization is because they are full of uneeded guilt or uneeded fear because they haven't educated themselves about how the wt society uses mind control tactics to deceive them into thinking they have " nowhere else to go " .
i understand that some dfed ones may go back to the organization for family and friends- however- it's an exrecise in futility because once you learn the truth about the truth you cannot undo what you heard.
so some may just go back and live a fake jw life to appease family- but just think of how that can damage a person's emotional and mental health playing the fake jw game the rest of their lives !
Well, Flipper, I'd like to say that there's nothing about all this that qualifies as 'easy'. I loved the JW belief system--particularly the idea of a world at peace, united under a single banner, free from fear (ha!). It was a very painful thing to find out it wasn't real. I had people I cared about on the inside and I knew I'd lose them if I left. Unfortunately I wanted one person more than I had any right to, and last week she told me that she hated me. I guess I had that coming. I got her, but...I came to see that she didn't really belong to me, she belongs to the WT.
I approached the issue of mind control with some trepidation at first, but after reading Steve Hassan's excellent books, I appreciate the concept far better. I think what proves challenging for me is that beneath the quiet and sometimes seemingly detached person I might appear to be, there's a lot of deep feeling for the people I care about. It's hard to feel disconnected from my wife and children in this matter of worship. It's hard to not see my big brother and my cousins anymore. I have avoided all family involvement, even funerals for non-JW family members, just to avoid dealing with seeing the JW members of the family again. It's not the best way to handle it, but I don't claim to be an expert on the application of any kind of how-to-live stuff.
But if you ever believed any of what you learned as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, then you gained an appreciation for the concept of 'truth'. And once you have established by proof that something is not true, your conscience compels you to reject it. Seeing that the Governing Body has a very loose definition of 'truth', seeing that they are capable of manipulating information and academic dishonesty, well, it becomes clear that I cannot be part of that. Even if I really, really wanted to, I can't. It's just not in me to accept as truth something that just isn't true.
Freedom of mind can be worth it, and even for me, despite my idiocy, it's been worth the sacrifices. It may never entirely stop hurting, but that's part of the struggle. I've come to see that freedom has to be guarded continuously above all else. Without it, little else will be sweet in life. I could go back, share a meal with 'family' and 'friends', but in my heart I would know that neither I nor they were free. It would eat me up inside, and I'd just end up back in a judicial committee again for finally saying what I was really thinking. Well, I wouldn't go a second time to a committee, of course. A terrible waste of a few hours, that last one was.
I've had to struggle with guilt a lot. I've had days where I hated myself. But my rational mind always corrects me, helps me to understand that it was never, ever because of leaving Jehovah's Witnesses that any of the bad stuff happened. If something bad happened, it was because I didn't make the sacrifice I needed to make to have the freedom I was hoping for. I didn't let go of the one person I no longer had a right to pursue.
I tried reading two Watchtower articles this morning, and I found that there was no way this could be 'the truth', the way they talked about the organization as if it was Jesus incarnate. Such self-important declarations just don't fit with Christianity. But beyond that, it was clear that what they wanted was to block off the intended audience's ability to think objectively about the scriptures being cited in the articles. I'm just too far gone from it all, and it really just isn't where I ever want to be again.
I've done a lot of reading in the 4 years since I left, and it's been amazing. Enlightening. I might even dare say empowering. Watchtower literature rarely ever had that effect on me, if at all, and certainly not in that deep, satisfying way that tells me I've explored something new and developed a richer perspective on life and the world around me. Once you begin researching Christianity and its history, you begin to realize that you were getting baby food from the Society. They'd probably read some of the same books in their research, but they made sure to sanitize it, remove anything that might get people to think too hard, and toss the rest. Once you've had steak, you don't go back to baby food. That's just how it is. They told you it was a 'banquet of well-oiled dishes', but if their literature is all you ever read, well, it'll always look like a banquet until you see other possibilities.
Everyone who has left the JWs needs to educate themselves about mind control, or the more modern term, destructive social influence. It is critical to helping you move on with life. No life is going to be easy, but a free mind has more possibilities, more options, than a mind in chains. Never stop learning, and never shy away from answering the next question that comes to mind. That's how we grow, and that's one of the best things freedom of mind can be used for.
--sd-7
the whole article makes me ill with its worse than average mind control.. i was going to only include one quote but there are so many doozies that i will post what i feel to be the worst.. from paragraph 6.
"gods organization survives and flourishes on earth because the people who are part of it have his approval.".
the great tribulation has been "so close" for over 120 years of wt history.
What I noticed in a brief perusal of this article this morning, was that Jesus was mentioned maybe twice in the text of this article. It looks an awful lot like the organization itself is yet again usurping the place that Jesus is supposed to have for a Christian.
And even if "God is a God, not of disorder, but of peace", it does not necessarily follow that said God chose this particular organization. Was the prerequisite merely a state of being organized or something? Nowhere in the Bible does it say that being organized in itself is a factor. I think the article before this one was somehow suggesting that Adam and Eve were going to 'be fruitful and become many' in an organized manner. I guess that means Adam and Eve were supposed to schedule times for when they tried to 'be fruitful'? Organize the animals and plants in alphabetical order? Fill out form s-72, "Notification of New Animal Name" and submit it to their angelic overseer, while keeping a copy in the congregation file?
Anyway, as I've said before, the more I read their literature, the more I see I made the right decision to leave. Here I thought the Bible was supposed to be used to help build one's relationship with God, but apparently it's supposed to be used to build your relationship with the organization, too. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Organization, Amen!
--sd-7
so said the co last night.. apparently a jw was on a flight and just happend to sit next to some big wig from pixar and when the man from pixar heard that he was a jw the pixar man just gushed over what great work that the watchtower has done in producing the caleb video's.
he siad he only wished pixar could do such great work.
the co said we are able to do it because we have free labor and jehovah behind us.. my husband stayed home from the meeting but wanted to tie in by phone and that is what the co said in his talk.. the co also talked about all the changes that have happened in the last ten years and how if some of the friends did not like it they needed and to quote him "they just needed to get over it" these changes are going to happned period.
As many times as I've watched 'Monsters University', I can tell you that whoever made the Caleb/Sophia videos would probably not be fit to carry the mail of the kinds of talented folks working at Pixar. But hey, who knows? Maybe Caleb will be bought and it'll be all Caleb Meets the Avengers or something.
--sd-7
so, a guy i know and would sometimes chat with briefly at work came to me recently.
he said he'd been invited by his neighbor to attend the upcoming jw convention.
apparently, he had heard that i used to be a jw and wanted to get my thoughts about whether he should go.
So, a guy I know and would sometimes chat with briefly at work came to me recently. He said he'd been invited by his neighbor to attend the upcoming JW convention. Apparently, he had heard that I used to be a JW and wanted to get my thoughts about whether he should go. I was caught by surprise, but I thanked him for coming to me and shared with him my own experiences in exiting the group. I was able to send Ray Franz' books to him after I got home, and gave him some links and other books that would be worth looking into. Jwfacts.com got a plug there, I might add, so hopefully he checked you out, Mr. JWFacts.
I tried not to make a big thing of discussing my exit from the JWs with co-workers, since you never know how that sort of topic might be taken. But I did talk in depth with co-workers I felt comfortable with about it. I guess that means they have been talking about me. I usually tend to stay to myself, and don't much socialize with my co-workers--definitely not outside of work or anything--so it was interesting to have that happen to me. I'm glad I was able to help that man to avoid potentially getting recruited by a JW convention.
I don't go out of my way to broadcast some sort of anti-JW message in my day-to-day life, though. I think I toned down my discussions of religious stuff once I started to question Christianity itself, which seems to make people really uncomfortable.
I just thought I might share this experience with you folks, since I've not really done any threads on a personal level in awhile. I don't think I'll be going into my home life or anything in much detail, but I guess I can add a little about that, too.
The good news is, I'm not going to be attending the international convention this year. Heck, I won't even have to give the Mrs. a ride to the site. Well, not that I ever had to. She is finally learning how to drive, so...soon she'll be all over the place, which is pretty cool for her, I guess. If I had actual money, I'd enjoy the time by catching a double feature at the movie theater--maybe Guardians of the Galaxy and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes...or if I can find X-Men: Days of Future Past or The Amazing Spider-Man 2 somewhere, I'd check them out. But I can probably just do like I usually do when there's an assembly I'm not attending--have a Lord of the Rings Blu-ray marathon. Or maybe an X-Men marathon. Well, something like that. So, I won't be offering any notes or what have you from the convention. Looks to be decent weather this week, at least from the forecasts I've seen so far, so at least the family probably won't be baking out there in extreme temperatures.
But I'm doing fine. All in all, a fine witness was given, and so far, I've disinvited 1 person to the convention. How we rejoice to hear such thrilling news!
--sd-7
