Having read all the above, now I understand the strange mishmash of features on this forum.. kudos to you Simon, for your work, both on and for the forum...
Having said that, did you look at the simple machines forum software, Simon? In my experience, it's one of the better ones around.
which would you choose and why?.
As for going back to make sure CT Russell met an untimely end, I don't think Russell was the problem it was Rutherford.
Really? Here's some snippets I've assembled from a few sources at http://www.watchtowerdocuments.com/
From The Watchtower, September 15, 1910, p298. All emphasis and italics in the original version. These are Russell's own words:
"If the six volumes of ‘Scripture Studies’ are practically the Bible, topically arranged, with Bible proof texts given, we might not improperly name the volumes - ‘the Bible in an arranged form.' That is to say, they are not mere comments on the Bible, but THEY ARE PRACTICALLY THE BIBLE ITSELF. Furthermore, not only do we find that people cannot see the Divine plan in studying the Bible by itself, but we see, also, that if anyone lays the ‘Scripture Studies’ aside, even after he has used them, after he has become familiar with them, after he has read them for ten years - if he then lays them aside and ignores them and goes to the Bible alone, though he has understood his Bible for ten years, our experience shows that within two years he goes INTO DARKNESS. On the other hand, if he had merely read the ‘Scripture Studies’ with their references, and had not read a page of the Bible as such he would be in the light at the end of two years, because he would have the light of the Scriptures"
The commentary of the day had this to say about our "friend" Russell and his claims:
"Let this be taken in clearly. "Scripture Studies" "are practically the Bible itself." So much, for the sake of duping the credulous Bible-lover. He who “goes to the Bible alone" will within two years go "into darkness." Whereas he who reads Scripture Studies alone, without a word of the Bible directly, will remain "in the light." The only light for us, then, is the Russellized Bible. It follows that there never was light before the Bible became Russellized.
What blasphemy! "When man thus belittles God’s Word and makes his own superior to that of God, it seems to be nothing short of the worst kind of blasphemy. Reflect upon it - to confine oneself to the Bible means outer darkness - to take the word of this one man and never read a page of the Bible means to be in the light.” This inspiration has its origin in the pit! Who is this man?"
On "Studies in the Scriptures", his critics had this to say: (highlighting mine)
"Mr. Russell opens his treatise with the claim - which runs as a refrain through the whole - that the light of God’s Word is perceived only as it becomes due from stage to stage in the course of time. He thereby induces the credulous reader to be prepared for any "advancing light" which may be offered by novel interpretation of the Word, however much in conflict with all previous understanding it may be. While this has a plausible side, yet it is a plea which an artful interpreter can use with an untaught reader to a ruinous effect. And the extent to which Mr. Russell carries this principle was the first thing which caused the writer to put himself on guard. Some quotations will be just to the author and will make the point under consideration clearer.
“It is the light from the Sun of Righteousness in this owning of the Millennial Day that reveals these things as ‘present truth,’ now due to be appreciated by the sincere - the pure in heart” (Vol. I, p. 10). "The truth is progressive, shining more and more unto the perfect day, to those who search for it and walk in the light of it, while the various creeds of the various sects are fixed and stationary, and were made so centuries ago.”
A quantity of evidence has reached the writer’s hands from former prominent followers of Mr. Russell, by which this serious contradiction of teaching is exposed explicitly and in startling light. The later teaching has been appearing during the last four years in the periodical of Millennial Dawn teaching, the "Watch Tower." Very cautiously and secretly the latest issue of some of the volumes we are examining has been altered here and there to harmonize with the periodical mentioned. As one writes: “Mr. Russell has made but few changes in the books, evidently fearing to do too much at once."
As to this change in teachings, so marked that one formerly prominent as a follower writes: "Separation has occurred in practically every country on this globe because of Mr. Russell’s perversions of Scripture," Mr. Russell himself, with characteristic duplicity, explains, at one time, that the old teaching “is a part of the smoke of the dark ages, which we are glad now to wipe from our eyes,” and, at another time, that the new teaching is really the "elucidation” of the old."
IT ALL SOUNDS MIGHTY FAMILIAR, DOESN'T IT? The same "new light" horse-shit that the GB uses today to justify and explain every change, flip-flop and cover-up was instituted by Russell himself, along with the program of promoting the WTS literature (and by implication, the Society as well) ahead of the Bible itself.
So no, I don't agree that the rot set in with Rutherford.. It has been "company policy" from the very beginning.
my xp system won't boot normally.
it loads windows and goes to a blank screen where normally my mouse arrow shows up while it finishes, it just sits there and doesn't do any thing else.
i tried loading a previous one that works and it does the same thing.
Sounds a lot like you have a trojan (probably several) on your computer. Ordinary anti-virus software can't find these, or remove them. You need a special program such as MBAM or Super Anti-Spyware. Both are good, I tend to prefer MBAM.
Go to http://www.malwarebytes.org/ and download the free version of MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (MBAM). Install it and let it update. Then do a full scan of your C:\ drive. This will take anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes depending on how much stuff is on the harddrive of your PC. Allow it to quarantine/remove everything it finds.. you'll probably have to reboot to remove the last traces of the things it finds. It's not uncommon to find 200 or more infected objects/files on your PC. (the most I've seen and killed on a single machine is over 700!)
When you're done, go to http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis/ and download HijackThis! Install it, run the program and post a copy of the logfile it produces here.. I'll analyse it and let you know if there are any other problems with your computer.
This is worth trying before you do the more drastic steps above.. I've brought several machines back from the dead with MBAM.
JAFO
which would you choose and why?.
Being in Pittsburgh, in 1870 or so, in order to arrange the untimely demise of one C. T. Russell has a certain appeal to it... so many lives could be saved.. or would never be ruined..
Sigh.. so many choices..
i thought it would be good to discuss it to understand what caused some of us to exit suddenly, or some to exit gradually .. myself , i had been in 44 years , had mentally had doubts for years before exiting - but injustices by the elders and my doubts about the " generation " doctrine led me to exit suddenly one night before a meeting.
the elders pissed me off , i went to my seat, picked my books up and walked out - never going back.
so what is your story and reasons ?
Mine was quick.
My mother and us 3 kids began studying in early 1974, I think, when I was 13. (I'm the oldest, my brother, Aussie Oz, has already told his story back on the first page of this thread) Until this time I'd been very academically inclined and had probably been reading a book a day since the age of 5 or so. The anti-academic bias didn't sit well with me even then, but I trusted my mother's judgement and so I tried to quell my misgivings and be the good, well-behaved son I was expected to be.
Sometimes it was not so easy.. I still recall one Thurs night Ministry School - I would have been 15 - where two sisters were on stage discussing evolution. One says to the other "So I said to them, well, if monkeys turned into people, why aren't people turning into monkeys today?" The triumphant tone with which she delivered this devastating piece of logic stunned me, but not as much as did the applause this remark drew from the audience! I couldn't believe it! How could they hope to convince any half thinking person with the slightest understanding of the theory of evolution if this was considered brilliant argument? Then the brother - whom I had considered fairly intelligent - gets up to critique the presentation, and actually proceeds to praise her for this steaming turd of a remark! (I'm not sure, but I have a feeling, that night she was working on "logical development of an argument"!)
Fast-forward 10 years, and I'm working as a railway clerk in Alice Springs, Central Australia. This was a cut above the kind of employment the elders would have liked me to pursue, but they couldn't complain too much, as I'd only had one more year of high-school than they'd have preferred. I'd had the usual battles with masturbation, and my time as a junior clerk before I'd left home at 21 had given me easy access to porn at work, which certainly didn't help! I had been struggling to maintain my faith in the small, insular, 3 main families based congo we had ended up at after my mother's re-marriage to a brother in another state. I hoped the transfer to the Northern Territory and a bigger congo would help. 18 months passed, I was now almost 23, and pressure was being put on me to dedicate myself and get baptised. I thought (hoped) to myself that maybe this step would somehow help to strengthen my yet-again weakening faith, and so I made all the right noises at the right times, and proceeded to get baptised.
A few months on, I was asked to take under my wing an unbaptised 17 yo boy from a troubled family in the congo, to try to be a good influence on him. His family (DF father) was moving back to the coast, and he wanted to stay in "The Alice" because of his worldly girlfriend. This proved to be rather a challenge, as he had many bad influences on him, and was up to all kinds of stuff that I didn't even know about for some time. I felt I was making slow but steady progress with him, but apparently not fast enough to suit the BoE.. they hauled him up on charges of some kind (smoking, I think) and proceeded to give him a good dressing-down besides some public humiliation in front of the entire congo. Things spiralled down from there, the bad treatment continued, and I began to see that they were much less concerned about lovingly trying to help a lost sheep than they were about driving him out where the wolves could have him. He stopped attending meetings.
This injustice troubled me greatly, and I skipped a few meetings to try to sort out for once and for all how I felt about things. I came to the conclusion that I was being hypocritical by advocating to others a way of life that I no longer believed in. I stopped attending altogether. A few weeks later 2 elders came to see me. I told them that I was no longer interested in being a jw, and that they could consider me to have disassociated myself.
A few weeks later I got notice that they would be making the announcement, so, being the bloody-minded kind of guy I am, of course I decided to attend that particular meeting. <insert evil-grin emoticon>
From the moment I stepped into the hall it was obvious that the announcement would be coming as no surprise to most people there.. I took a kind of perverse pleasure in the flinching and avoidance I saw all around me. I seated myself in the very front row. The meeting dragged on, I made sure to look up every scripture quoted, and sang every song. Finally the announcement was made. I was not DA'd.. I had been DF'd! I stood, making sure to hide my surprise, kept my head held high, and strode out past the lot of them..
I have never set foot in a kh, or read a WT$ publication since that day.
The years that followed were not easy, but I was something of a loner by nature anyway, my family were all thousands of km's away, and I found better friends amongst the friends of the young man I'd tried to help.. of course, that led down a path of going wild (in a mild kind of way, hey the 'inculcation' runs deep) that eventually led to me spending 4 months in jail, and a couple of bouts of depression, but it also led to a search for meaning, values and spirituality that felt right for me. One thing the jw's had done well, they'd shown me the other mainstream religions out there were all fundamentally flawed too, so at least that eliminated a whole bunch of beliefs I didn't need to explore.
It took roughly 15 years before I reached a point in my life where I felt truly comfortable with who I am, but every day of my 26 years out of the bOrg has been better than being 'in'. Nothing compares with the freedom to think, feel and act as you believe.
JustAnotherFuckin'Observer (JAFO)
Thanks all, for the warm welcome..
I take it you didn't find Nov's WT on independent thinking very 'encouraging'
To be honest, I haven't read a WTS publication since the day I left...but hey, my streak of independent thinking was what made my 10 years in the bOrg (LOVE that term, btw) so hard to take.
In fact, after 26 years of freedom, even working out the meaning of many of the acronyms used here has been a bit of a stretch at times. There are so many terms that have not been a part of my world for so long.. (I still haven't twigged to what PO stands for ) Seeing some of the quotations and scriptural references posted here has been an... ummm... unsettling experience... I look at some of the pictures from the books and magazines, particularly the staged photo-scenes, and my skin crawls, my brain screams "propaganda!".. there was one in particular, a teenage boy with 3 elders, the caption was something about them lovingly helping him after some transgression.. there was not an ounce of compassion or loving concern in their faces.. they reminded me of vultures waiting to strike. (I guess that photo came out much more realistic than they'd intended.. )
At the bottom of the main page of watchtowerdocuments.com there is a link to an mp3 titled "2008 Higher Education Crafty Act of the Devil." Listening to it was much more difficult than I would have believed.. the guys voice is just so slimy.. I found myself wondering how anyone could fall for this crap.
Having said all that, I guess I'll have to go read that independent thinking article you mentioned.. curiosity is another curse of mine..
Yes, it's a great feeling that we're all out.. being the black sheep all on my own for so long was not much fun either.. As for 'out mentally', if you mean as in they no longer believe it to be "The Truth", well, Aussie Oz is undergoing that awakening as we speak.. he was pretty much the holdout in that respect.
This forum is responsible for him coming to full consciousness, after 10+ years of him feeling that the failing was his, for not being able to live up to The Great Megalomaniacs expectations. I think he's doing ok, for somebody who was still convinced it was "The Truth" just a week or so ago.
For that, I'd like to thank everyone here.. I wish something like this had existed back in '83 when I gave the WTS the finger and walked.
does anybody have a recording or transcript, anything!
on the wording and even tone of voice used to 'apologize' for these years mis-predictions?.
stuff like this will be invaluable in helping young witnesses realize that they need to look back to last century.
I see the funny side
Heheh... nah.. he's no troll.. he's jus' my lil' bruddah.. we raised him to be Real Polite TM
Now he can't break the habit...
with all their flip flops, errors and changes, do you know of any printed admission of mistakes made ?.
have they ever apologized for wrong doctrine?.
i think it's because of too much pride..
Ummm... not quite.
There were statements made then, and thereafter, stressing that this was only a possibility.
That's the "original" statement.
Unfortunately, however, along with such cautionary information, there were other statements published that implied that such realization of hopes by that year was more of a probability than a mere possibility.
This is the "latter" statement.
So, they are saying that the 'cautious' "wouldn't it be neat if" statements were simply speculative in nature, and then over-excited, over-enthusiastic statements were made that overshadowed the earlier statements and caused the gullible R&F to get carried away..
Weasel-words indeed.. but it doesn't quite imply that they're saying their own later statements can't be trusted.. of course, so far as I'm concerned, anything they say can't be trusted.
As an aside, are all those pre 1980 W & A issues available as scanned collections anywhere?
Ok. Maybe this isn't the most appropriate place for my first post, but I don't see any place for newbies to introduce themselves, and so I claim special privilege to use this thread because I'm Aussie Oz's wicked older brother...
I learned about this forum yesterday from my bro, followed a few links, and frankly, I have to say I'm stunned.
I was the first of the 5 kids in our family to leave the jw's, over 25 years ago now.. found my way alone through the wilderness via many misadventures to where I have been comfortable with who I am for a long time now. I'll leave my story for it's own thread, however.
Like Aussie, I have generally defended the dubs... seeing them as sadly deluded (like all christians - with apologies to any here) but basically good people and neighbours. A couple of years ago I learned from our younger sister (sorry bro, but you weren't the last to leave, she was) of the pedo scandals, and was not overly shocked, the entire culture of the dubs is a perfect sanctuary and hunting-ground for peds who want to avoid attracting attention. I'm sure word went out via the ped-networks that all they had to do was join the dubs, fake belief, and they'd have a nice safe hidey-hole amongst people who were highly unlikely to go to the police even if they were 'outed'.
Despite this, I continued to regard the organisation itself as sincere, if misguided.
That has now changed.
It's not quite the shock to the system that it currently is for my brother, but I certainly didn't get much sleep last night! And that's after having been reading devouring threads and documents until 3.30am...
Now I can clearly see that the entire thing was set up pretty much from the beginning by that scumbag Russell as a massive cash/power cow. The mould was cast right back then, and the fundamentals of the organisation haven't changed since.
I only wish it was possible to free our mother from their clutches. Unfortunately, it has been her life for 36 years now. Her belief is sincere, but she has always bucked the org where it came to associating/speaking-to/supporting her apostate kids, and we all agree it would not be fair to kick the only friend/support/belief-system structure she knows out from under her. To shatter her world and leave her struggling with feelings of betrayal and searching for meaning at her age would not be a kindness. That day may come, but I'd rather she reach that point by her own growing understanding.
By and large, the dubs are a chapter in my life that has been closed for a long time, and I've moved on. There are, however, things I've learned in the last 24 hours that I need to think about and discuss here, I think. So no doubt you'll hear more from me in the near future.
Hang in there Aussie Oz... it's a lot to absorb in one hit, but you can always Skype or phone me if you need to rant.
JAFO
