read this lovely little admission and judge for yourself: .
there is a differencea big differencebetween education and propaganda.
education shows you how to think.
This was one of the most interesting finds that I encountered in Ray Franz' first book, Crisis of Conscience. The funny thing is that this is almost an exact cut-and-paste from a similar article on propaganda from the late 1970s. If you can find and compare the two, it looks like they just used a thesaurus to change a few words in that paragraph.
--sd-7
with the internet becoming availible almost anywhere and ipads become more and more common, do you think this scenerio will be a relatively common experience as well?.
i'm thinking it will..
Wait, so no shoulder-surfing elders caught you? They don't have an IT department logging your keystrokes and site history? Well, they should! [Applause] They should! But we are not saying!
--sd-7
view of money and pride?.
jehovah?.
comments.
Marketers cleverly
convince people that they must have the latest products.
And they certainly don't want to convince you that you must have the latest Watchtower and Awake!, right? Or the latest calendar of JWs, Yearbook, Daily Text, Convention releases...
Do not
abandon them to online immorality, violent
games, spiritism, and bad association
just to keep them busy and out
of your way. If you do, they may conclude,
‘Since Dad and Mom don’t care,
it must be all right.’
Guilt at its finest! If you let your kids use the computer, you've abandoned them to a satanic playground and they're going to think you don't care about them and do even more horrible things!
multilevel marketing schemes
You mean like one with a handful of people at the top controlling your time, resources, and decisions, and a massive number of people at the bottom whose value is measured by how many sales they put in and how many man hours they offer the organization? Psshaw! That would be terrible, if anyone was involved with a group like that!
Indeed,
resting our hope on our savings,
investments, or ability to earn money
in this system amounts to resting our
In short, any ability you have that you can use to add value to yourself and your life amounts to trusting in Satan the Devil. Instead, just offer your value to us. Oh, and by the way, we'll also accept your savings, investments, and ability to earn money as contributions while giving you empty promises in return...real estate is good, too. Especially real estate.
--sd-7
hope on “the god of this system,” Satan
the jws have a way of either eliminating or making miserable the things most people find to be highlights of their lives.
when i started dating my now wife, and yes i married the first person i ever dated at age 19 by the way, what should have been a great time became mostly miserable.
her parents didnt make it any easier.
Wedding nights must be strange....for some people it must be the first time they are unchaperoned?
How do you know if you are compatible or not?
Yeah, that's gotta be pretty scary. And of course, you get to learn at last that the person she was in front of chaperones and at the KH...is the total opposite of who she actually is. That's a little more frightening, I should think. But that horror is usually extended over the course of several, agonizing years. Not that I would know, of course...
--sd-7
just got a call from my mother.
a daughter of one of my mother's cousins just died due to complications of breast cancer surgery.
the funneral will be this saturday.
Stupidity along with being an elder is a mix I have no desire to witness again.
[Stupid elder's facial expression] "Only stupidity I see around here is your apostate wickedness. I thought you were smarter than that! Don't you want to see your cousin again in the new system??"
Well, rather than clawing his eyeballs out in a glorious display of brutality after those sentences are uttered, why not just stay home?
--sd-7
the jws have a way of either eliminating or making miserable the things most people find to be highlights of their lives.
when i started dating my now wife, and yes i married the first person i ever dated at age 19 by the way, what should have been a great time became mostly miserable.
her parents didnt make it any easier.
Everywhere we went everyone had something negative to say. Very few upbuilding people. Of course every minute had to be monitored with a chaperone. These became harder and harder to find to the point that some began demanding we pay their bill if we went out to dinner. Its amazing how even the WT only says you need a chaperone only if you are going to be in private but noooo everyone else feels you need one even if you are at the a$$embly, convention, zoo, park, restaurant, movies, anywhere! We got to the point we just started going to breakfast or lunch without telling anyone.
This was my experience, too. Nothing but negativity and me getting slammed with gossip. Even my own brother just saying he didn't think my then girlfriend (now wife) was all that attractive! As if that had anything to do with anything, given that (1) I found her attractive, and (2) shut up, she's not your girl, you won't have to wake up next to her, if that's what you're worried about!
Actually I hadn't thought about how potentially burdensome this could become on chaperones if they have to deal with paying a restaurant bill or something every time you go out on a date. But the funny thing was, I didn't even have a car, so all our dates were on public transportation. The one time we were alone for two hours and didn't do anything but hold hands and watch TV, we both got called into the back room by the elders for it. And it's like, the only person who even knew about that was, who, a non-JW daughter of the JW my then girlfriend was staying with? So who ratted us out? And why?
(Not to mention that if a non-JW was to accompany you on your date, that couldn't count as a chaperone, since obviously they've got their digital camera and we're all going to make a porno, right?)
And that's where your point really drives it home...
The irony of it all is that my then girlfriend/fiance both had vehicles and could meet up anywhere we wanted to fornicate if thats what we wanted!
The chaperone system falls apart when you realize this glaring problem: people can meet up at anytime and do whatever they want, if they really want to do it. It is ultimately going to be your personal desire to wait until marriage that will result in success or failure in that regard. If you don't want to, you're not going to.
For me, all the negativity did not give me any desire to invite a chaperone along. I mean, who wants to surround themselves with people who are hellbent on making sure the relationship can never work? (No offense to the naysayers about my marriage, since, well, that's another ball o' wax, there.) So I just kept on meeting my girl in public places to keep things simple and keep the fuzz off our backs. We went to see 'The Incredibles' like three times for lack of better ideas...
And yeah, any expression of affection--or even no display at all--was met with all this controversy! When we first started dating, my wife and I spent our lunch break at the assembly together, just walking around, minding our own business. I even took a picture of her that day. But my God, what a firestorm that ignited! Everyone was already planning the marriage and/or its disaster from that day on. All the pressure got to her first and she dumped me, and odds are, we might've had a better shot at it if things hadn't gotten so screwed up at that point. I may be wrong, but I already know that...
she said how great the movie looked and its too bad its rated R! I just felt like telling her to SNAP OUT OF IT! YOU ARE ALMOST 30! yOU ARE AN ADULD AND CAN WATCH WHATEVER YOU WANT!!
Ha! I still have to tell myself that sometimes, the guilt is still strong... I can't handle R-rated violence for the most part, but I do love a good R-rated drama or a smart enough R-rated romantic comedy or something. It's just with small children around so much I have to keep it to a minimum. I usually just wait till they're at the meetings so I don't get any complaints from the Mrs. about it. Speaking of that, you just reminded me that I need to make a list of R-rated stuff I want to check out.
Anyway, I like your rant. I totally relate.
--sd-7
psychologist steven hassan writes that ""destructive mind control can be understood in terms of four basic components, which form the acronym bite:.
i.behavior control.
ii.information control.
This is sort of a scenario where 'doublethink' comes into play. The Society tells you exactly what your major decisions should be, but then tells you that you must make your own "personal decisions" in such matters. They make clear that certain choices would be 'unwise' or 'dangerous' without directly telling you not to do them.
So the simplest answer is no, but those major decisions are heavily influenced by innuendo and threat, mob-boss style. [Bad mob-boss accent:] "Now, of course, you know, you could go to college. But would it really be a good idea? Think about your family. We wouldn't want anything bad to happen to them. I know you'll do the right thing."
--sd-7
i was encouraged to post this thought, so here it is.. i recently finished reading "the gentile times reconsidered" by bro.
carl olof jonsson, ( third edition).
phew!!
I always figured Jeremiah 29 is the key to wiping the 607 date out. The Society claims the Jews were at Babylon for 70 years, but the message in Jeremiah 29 (from which 29:12 gives the Society their "seventy years at Babylon" based on their translation) was given to people taken into exile 10-11 years before Jerusalem was destroyed. Jer. 29:1-3 very clearly shows that the message was given to the exiles in Babylon by messengers who were sent by King Zedekiah, showing that Jerusalem had not yet been destroyed. Jeremiah referred to these earlier exiles as--you guessed it--exiles, and told them they would be "at" (or "for") Babylon for 70 years. So for them, the 70 years started well before Jerusalem was destroyed. Thus, the 70 years cannot have started in 607. End of story.
--sd-7
brothers would full on laugh at the c.o's lame jokes.
fight over who gets him for dinner where no expense would be speared..."oh they dont eat flour, sugars or milk products...".
Well, whenever I would attend the meetings during the circuit overseer's visit, I noticed that the volume and sense of excitement in the KH was always twice as high as normal. They would laugh at his jokes--hey, I found some of them funny, but sometimes the humor just doesn't merit the level of laughter that often comes out of people at the meetings, I mean, really.
Otherwise, I'm not sure how they were treated. I mean...I didn't really get to know most of them. A fellow JW actually boasted about my having graduated college while the CO was in the car. I admit I probably wanted to hide in a hole somewhere, but the CO was at least decent enough not to say anything derisive about that.
My experiences with them were generally limited but pleasant enough. I think they were more...dubious when giving talks at the assembly, where they had to spout the more extreme statements that usually aren't said at local meetings.
--sd-7
a few years ago i became interested in the subject of neuro-linguistic programming (nlp).
while the core concepts of nlp have been largely discredited as new-age pseudo-science, there is no doubt that there is at least some validity to the idea.
words and images remain the key way we communicate.
To say "it is not wrong", in this specific case is to imply without saying it outright that your audience is in doubt as to the rightness of hoping for a loved one's return to the organization. Maybe even to imply that some of them might think it IS wrong to hope for a loved one's return, which would be a sad thing, indeed, to feel about a close relative.
So, then, who gave such people those guilty thoughts? Who tells them that people who leave are wicked and doomed to destruction unless they return? Oh. I see. So the Society creates guilt in the first place, and then cashes in on that guilt. It's like a double taxation on the conscience. This statement pulls the guilt up just a little, only to be followed by slamming it back down on the heads of anyone who might want to talk to their DF'd relative.
Reminds me of the confusion and guilt I felt years ago as I read an article that didn't quite answer the question of whether it was okay to pray for a DF'd person. The elders told me no; the Society was vague and only suggested that it was okay if you were in a position to observe their repentance (which is kind of difficult if you're shunning someone). One would think the sinner needs more prayer than the righteous person, but apparently the WTS feels otherwise...
--sd-7
