a close friend of mine enlightened me a couple of weeks ago by telling me so many things about the wt.
that's how i first heard about the involvement with the un, russell's pyramidology (freemason symbols), dates, etc.
this friend also used terms like 'mind control' and 'rank and file', which i'd never heard before in this context.
And of course the superb http://www.jwfacts.com/ and a bit of a newie, http://www.jwstruggle.com/.
For a good roundup, also see the candid Wikipedia articles on Jehovah's Witnesses at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah%27s_Witnesses and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Jehovah%27s_Witnesses.
For a discussion of the Governing Body, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governing_Body_of_Jehovah%27s_Witnesses.
andre, who had served jehovah for years, had the bitter experience of being led astray.
by apostate thinking.
he felt that having a quick look at an apostate web site would not be dangerous.he recalls: initially, i was attracted to the so-called truths that the.
" I became aware of how crafty the false teachers were."
Who the hell speaks like that apart from the Watchtower?
andre, who had served jehovah for years, had the bitter experience of being led astray.
by apostate thinking.
he felt that having a quick look at an apostate web site would not be dangerous.he recalls: initially, i was attracted to the so-called truths that the.
The whole "experience" stinks to high heaven.
1. Who were the "apostates" he gained his information from? There are certainly some low-value books out there by evangelical Christians attacking JWs, but are they apostates if they've never been JWs? There are also some pretty strident anti-JW books by former Witnesses, but no one with brains would take obviously polemical literature as the final word on the anti-JW side of the debate. The fact is there are plenty of quality books out there examining the JW beliefs and practices, starting with Franz and Penton. Beckford, Holden, Rogerson and Gruss also spend much time discussing the control methods of the GB.
2.Where does one "research" "apostate" claims? In other "apostate" books? Or does one rely on the confident WTS statement that they have already done all the hard yards in thoroughly researching apostate claims, so all you need to do is read their statements?
3. No intelligent person who saw through the WTS bullshit and began reading books attacking the Witnesses would willingly return to the Kingdom Hall and submit to the tyrannical, autocratic, "tough love" rule of the GB. If it did indeed happen as described, "Andre" would be a very unusual experience. He would clearly be a braindead individual, but also very easily led. If he is so easily persuaded, who knows which way he will swing next?
4. Amen to the other suggestions that he returned because he wanted to recommence contact with his family and pulled the wool over the elders' eyes with his oh-so-humble confession, giving the elders the rare satisfaction of getting one over the apostate "enemy".
the questions from readers feb 15th 2011 raises the (no doubt burning in many jws minds) question about why moses became angry with aarons 2 sons after the death of their brothers.. the wtbts undertakes to answer this question but really doesn't seem unsure of themselves (perhaps the channel of communication was suffering some interference that day.
) notice the numerous ways that the wtbts in a short (half page) article hedges its bets.
it reminded me of a schoolboy cooking up a story when he was caught with his hands in the cookie jar , vacillating & hedging as he tries to think up an acceptable answer.. it appears that , the surviving priests had evidently acted , aaron may have wondered , perhaps he felt , aaron mayespecially have reasoned , aaron may have thought , moses seems to have accepted , evidently, jehovah too was satisfied.. .
It's like telling a lie to cover a lie. They have insisted they alone have the truth, so therefore they MUST know the answer to every question. That always stuck in my craw that they would attempt to make dogmatic statements about things they clearly would have new more knowledge than anyone else:
Will resurrected people marry?
How long was it after God created Adam did he create Eve?
What will lions eat in the new system if they don't hunt zebras?
How will Armageddon survivors get over the trauma of seeing mass annihilation of billions of people before their eyes?
What happens if someone suffers a serious accident in the new system that you'd expect would be fatal?
i haven't posted in a long time.
most trying to recover and still get my head straight, this religion when you find it's not the 'truth' is hard to move on sometimes.
my mom urgently needed to speak to me about a magazine that just came out.
Though to be fair, I've also found another Encyclopedia of Religion, http://www.gale.cengage.com/pdf/facts/EncyReligion.pdf, a 15-volume tome, that the Awake may be quoting. Among all the encyclopedias that include JWs, they've finally found one that says what they want. If it does.
i haven't posted in a long time.
most trying to recover and still get my head straight, this religion when you find it's not the 'truth' is hard to move on sometimes.
my mom urgently needed to speak to me about a magazine that just came out.
If the link at http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3424501597/jehovah-witnesses.html is the article they're quoting from (and the online article is sourced to The Encyclopedia of Religion), it contains the following statements:
The WTS is very skilled at plucking convenient quotes from published literature to give the impression of an official endorsement.
a previous thread http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/200592/2/joel-p-engardios-article-on-jws-washington-post has covered an earlier story joel engardio wrote on gays and witnesses.. in the washington post (nov 7, 2010) he writes again of how his jw mother grieved for him "as if i had died" when she learned he was gay.
engardio notes:.
"among jehovah's witnesses there is no easy exit for the adolescent who skillfully parrots theology at age 10 or 12 and decides in his late teens or early twenties that the religion isn't for him.
A further point: Engardio's mother is apparently comfortable maintaining a relationship with her gay son because he chose not to get baptised as a teen. Just more example of the talmudic application of rigid, pharisaic rules: if he had been baptised, she would presumably have been happy to never speak to him again. God's will, of course.
As the Watchtower (Feb 1, 2009) so accurately put it:
MANY religious people treasure their own beliefs and traditions. But what happens if these teachings are not in harmony with what is found in God’s Word, the Bible? Jesus showed the danger of following man-made traditions when he said to the religious leaders of his day: “You have made the word of God invalid because of your tradition.” He then went on to quote these words of God: “This people honors me with their lips, yet their heart is far removed from me. It is in vain that they keep worshiping me, because they teach commands of men as doctrines.”
a previous thread http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/200592/2/joel-p-engardios-article-on-jws-washington-post has covered an earlier story joel engardio wrote on gays and witnesses.. in the washington post (nov 7, 2010) he writes again of how his jw mother grieved for him "as if i had died" when she learned he was gay.
engardio notes:.
"among jehovah's witnesses there is no easy exit for the adolescent who skillfully parrots theology at age 10 or 12 and decides in his late teens or early twenties that the religion isn't for him.
Sorry, forgot the link: http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/11/when_religion_is_the_bully.html
Incidentally, is there an easy way adding a URL link here?
a previous thread http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/200592/2/joel-p-engardios-article-on-jws-washington-post has covered an earlier story joel engardio wrote on gays and witnesses.. in the washington post (nov 7, 2010) he writes again of how his jw mother grieved for him "as if i had died" when she learned he was gay.
engardio notes:.
"among jehovah's witnesses there is no easy exit for the adolescent who skillfully parrots theology at age 10 or 12 and decides in his late teens or early twenties that the religion isn't for him.
A previous thread http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/200592/2/Joel-P-Engardios-article-on-JWs-Washington-Post has covered an earlier story Joel Engardio wrote on gays and Witnesses.
In the Washington Post (Nov 7, 2010) he writes again of how his JW mother grieved for him "as if I had died" when she learned he was gay. Engardio notes:
"Among Jehovah's Witnesses there is no easy exit for the adolescent who skillfully parrots theology at age 10 or 12 and decides in his late teens or early twenties that the religion isn't for him. Anyone who officially joins through baptism is subject to shunning if they don't follow the agreed upon rules.
"I was never baptized and it saved my relationship with my mom. Gay kids who got baptized before they could come to terms with their sexuality are not so fortunate. In the most extreme cases, parents cut all contact with their shunned adult children.
"...I wonder if parents with religious objections to homosexuality have fully considered the consequences of insisting their gay child follow a faith that works for them but not their child. Can the religious parents who lost a gay child to suicide or shunning ever find peace with the outcome? Or would they rather have a relationship with their child, alive, separate from their religion?
It's a shame that Engardio, whose "Knocking" doco was embraced by Witnesses as a glowing endorsement of their religion, didn't address the issue of shunning by families in his piece.
The lesson in Engardio's tale is a powerful one: kids are pushed into baptism at an early age, long before they are mature enough to know how they will feel in adulthood. But once baptised, they are trapped in a religion that refuses to allow anyone to escape without being eternally damned, their families forced by a cold, calculating religious doctrine to refuse to speak to them again, treating them as if they are dead.
let us know what got you questioning wbts in the first place.
i've got a theory that it starts with people hurting us and only then does the "apostate" turn to looking at the beliefs.. anybody who started questioning beliefs first?.
1. First, the people. It increasingly bothered me that people were putting so many of the decisions in their life in the hands of "the brothers" and declaring that they would support the decisions of "the brothers" come what may. Over time it rankled me that I couldn't buy Lotto tickets, our kids couldn't celebrate birthdays ... they weren't even my decisions to make.It bothered me that so many in the congregation were nasty, small-minded, gossiping and overwhelmingly judgmental.
2. When I spent two or three days staying with relatives at Bethel, it horrified me how Bethelites seemed both lobotomised and smug; how their lives were dictated by endless arbitrary rules, many of them designed to humiliate Bethel members, and the appalling implication that THIS was how they imagined life would be like in the new system, run by small-minded, petty and egotistical men like THAT.
3. I became increasingly angered by the time wasted at conventions and assemblies I loathed because of the same dreary material trying to make me feel guilty for not doing enough, the same fake experiences and demos that didn't relate to real life at all and the whipped up "excitement" at anything some visitor from Bethel said about what "the brothers" were doing anywherein the world. I realised that few JWs actually enjoy conventions ... they go because they feel obliged to and know that if they miss it there'll be whispering about them.
4. The UN debacle piqued by curiousity about what else "the brothers" were up to they weren't telling us about, and it was after that that I began furtively reading bits of Crisis of Conscience on the internet. That allowed me to see at last how the GB were just men, and arrogant, manipulating and deceitful ones at that.
5. It was only after a good friend told us she was leaving the org (she told us she couldn't use the term "the truth" any more because she decided it wasn't ...) that it provided the realisation for my wife and I that we actually had the option of simply ceasing attendance. We wish, wish, wish we'd bloody well done it a long time ago. Thank God for Raymond Franz and the internet.
