hi to all the brothers and sisters and friends who are using this site.
this is just to introduce myself.
my name is dan edmund, and am a fellow witness from australia.
I don't mind Dan being here. I, too, am now having a lot of single Filipino girls smiling at me on this page. (If someone cares to start a thread about breast enlargement that may not be a bad thing ...)
It's good to see this guy's response. He didn't run away in fear, he seemed to treat us with respect. Dan, it would be good to scan some of the threads in this forum. Your frank comments would probably be appreciated.
maybe i just missed it, (the story of the word) - but i am seeing this word "happifying" in a lot of threads.. can it possibly be that the wt actually printed this??
?.
District conventions, of course, are opportunities for us to find happyifying experiences, be spiritually upbuilt and most of all to find the material there so encouraging. At post-DC debriefing meetings a month or so afterwards, it was always good to be the first to put your hand up to say you were so encouraged. Walking out the door, thinking about the unmade beds and piles of breakfast dishes awaiting us at home because we had to race to the convention and save our seats in the morning, we would smile and say how encouraging and upbuilding the whole thing was.
We just hoped no one asked us what the highlight was.
I remember some dickhead elder giving a talk from the platform -- complete with props!! -- about the benefit of spiritual binoculars that allowed us to see the dangers far ahead.
seen this?.
blogger is a partner of an ex-bethelite who attends a memorial after a decade out, takes a nibble and is asked to leave.
photographic evidence provided.. partner, meanwhile (non-jw, smoker, unmarried) is warmly welcomed.. .
reading the posts about the 2011-7-15 watchtower about mentally retarded apostates i foresee the following scenario:.
1. congregational elders trying to get grip on non regular publishers and inactive witnesses.. 2. the good ones read in the watchtower that apostates are to find in the local congregation.
3. inactives like me (i hate this name, but i use their language), and liberal witness like me, will be hunted, .
Nothing will change. After my wife and I stopped going to the meetings in early 2008, a friend in another city assured us that the November 15, 2008 articles on "helping those who stray from the flock" would prompt members of our congo to call us and ask after our welfare and urge us to return to the meetings.
I doubted that, and in fact nothing happened. Although it was a very strident call for JWs to act when they see people fading and drifting, the drones just sit there, mark their Watchtowers, put their hands up for an answer, then wander off home and take off their jackets and ties and get on with their sorry lives.
Nothing in the Watchtowers makes any impact on the drones. To them, this particular magazine article is just more background noise, banging out the same old message.
(prompted in part by the post on the latest wt reinforcing shunning).. say a child has occasional, not regular, contact with a d/f parent.
the child later gets married, is inviting the parent seen as ''necessary family business''?.
if a wedding is not, then what is?.
Pirata nails it. The definition is left intentionally loose so that it can be interpreted by the local BOE. If they want to crucify you they have carte blanche.
getting through the tough steps toward real freedom from the wts involves a lot of work for some.
many, start out angry that their authentic lives were hampered by a high-control group of men posing as god's organization.
we feel robbed of something we can't quite put our finger on sometimes.
I feel a mix of anger and pity. At school when I pick my kids up I see Witnesses I used to mix with, and I often think about the "friends" who studied with me and introduced me to this organisation. And I feel a measure of pity and sorrow for them that they're still trapped, as I was for more than 20 years.
But then I figure, I had the brains to analyse and inspect my religion. I found the resources to do so. They just haven't. As the famous Walter Salter letter said, " 'A man who cannot think is an idiot, a man who won't think is a fool, and a man who is afraid to think is a coward.' I absolutely refuse to have any person do my thinking for me."
They can all choose to live their lives in submission to a group of old men who sit around a mahogany table in Brooklyn, or they can take control of their own lives. It's their choice.
Yet they continue to regard me with pity and contempt because I "slacked off" or "lost faith" or become "seduced by the world" or want to "enjoy the temporary pleasure of sin" or whatever lie they believe. Idiots.
i figured i'd start off by just examining the language used in the july 15th, 2011 watchtower, page 15-16, paragraphs 4-7.. apostates are like:.
1. ravenous wolves.
9. their own ideas.
Well considered. Many thanks, sd7. That's brilliant. Don Cameron in his Captives of a Concept book similarly compared the them-and-us language which provided a stark contrast between the terms describing the organization and those they perceived as its enemies. Reading it in a list as you (and he) have done underlines the point so well.
they just released a "simplified english" version of the watchtower... "it is very important that everyone understands.
the information that we study.
in thewatchtower each week.
Online definition of "apostate": "A person who renounces a religious or political belief or principle."
JW Simplified WT defiinition: "People who rebel against true worship and abandon it." (page 11)
The dictionary definition would mean that anyone leaving another religion to become a JW is an apostate. The JW definition boils it down to anyone who leaves Jehovah's Witnesses because they disagree with that religion's teachings.
