5 trust in jehovah with all your heart and do not lean upon your own understanding.
6 in all your ways take notice of him, and he himself will make your paths straight.. .
i called on the phone the other day an ex-jw friend of mine.
To me it's like reading a story about Santa Claus, or the Sleeping Beauty!
There may be some morals to the story. It was written as a way to get some practical advise, granted, it wasn't always literal but it carried a massage. The message could be one of many others.
"i know it took a long time, but i finally made the truth my own.".
.
"It is against my religion"
i've read on multiple threads that ray will not have a memorial service per his request and that he will be cremated.
on one hand this is good because it's confirms his sincerity and humility and shows he doesn't seek praise or attention.
it's more evidence that his books were written honestly and weren't written out of spite or for just monetary gain.
I love Vegas!! :)
just setting the record straight.
there is another thread that notes a claim on wiki that said that ray has died.. he had a stroke yesterday, and is in the hospital.
he is still alive.
Today is a sad day, because we have lost a great man. A man who was a defender of common sense and justice, someone who stood up for the truth, and fought against imposing lies on naive people. Someone who was courageous enough to go against a powerful organization who manipulates millions of people by intimidation and fear.
Three years ago, while serving as an Elder in a congregation, I started reading his book "Crisis of Conscience" and I realized that the anomalies that I saw locally were not unprecedented and that the patterns and contradictions came from the very same world headquarters. I realized that the corruption, lust for power, envy / conflicts, political games, nepotism, etc. also take place at the World Headquarters with the Governing Body. Not exactly what most of us expected from the place that claims to be guided by the holy spirit and God's organization on earth.
I sincerely thank Ray Franz for his courage and the sacrifice he made to leave a very comfortable life as part of the nucleus of power in the Governing Body. He left his life where he got preferential treatment, which consisted of blind sheep at the service of super men who claimed were directed by the Holy Spirit of God. He quit being a 'rock star' in the world of Jehovah's Witnesses, and became a shunned man, accused of being an apostate! The Watchtower did everything possible to discredit, defame, accuse, but he continued his fearless campaign to help others discover the falseness of the Watchtower Society.
Being vocal and expressing his views defending the truth cost him dearly, as he was removed from being a member of a special group of men who often implied that they were infallible. Men who claimed to be instruments of the Holy Spirit of God and who dictate rules that have cost the lives of many people naively willing to serve God. Ray left everything behind, and continued his fight for justice, confronting and uncovering the contradictions of the Watchtower organization until the end of his life. His life will be remembered, not as a coward, but as a fighter of truth, someone willing to take a stand and to fight a false prophet, an organization that has usurped the place of a mediator of God.
His fight and his legacy does not end today. The search for justice against a false prophet who has deceived millions of people using scare tactics and manipulation to control the blind herd moves on. Thank you Ray Franz for your books and the fine leadership exerted for more than 30 years.
We will always remember you!!
spoke to my jw husband today ( we dont live together), he has the co visit this week..." the end is very close now,we need to stay focused, now is not the time to be missing meetings,co was very positive, a great speaker, i sense myself that the end is just round the corner"......hmmmm i remember a co visit around 1990, i too thought the end was just around the corner, in fact my daughter would not start school lol, her son started school 2years ago.. did i miss something or do i have to wait till my grandsons kids go to school..... loools.
how could i have wasted so many years, is there a syndrome for this ????
?.
DUMB FEARMONGERS!!! I dislike anybody who tries to manipulate somone based on fears!
i once heard a psychiatrist explain suicide as the ultimate act of self-preservation.
sound weird?.
counter-intuitive as that sounds, he went on to explain why.. when all you value in life is threatened you do whatever desperate act that will preserve that value.. destruction of self stops the ......process.....of consciously losing.
Excellent article, food for thought! Totally makes sense!
hello..i have been lurking for quite some time and am finally ready to make my first post!.
i was raised a witness and am still "active" in the congregation and am married to husband who is also and have been having some doubts for some time and voiced some of them to my husband a few months back and he immediatly called the elders who provided a sheparding call.
doubts were mainly on the harshness of the disfellowshipping and the blood issue.
I suggest you try to be patient and work with your husband. Try to bring him on your side, reassure him of your love, and when appropriate mention some of the inconsistencies with the WT. Research with him, and suggest reading books like Crisis of Conscience by Ray Franz. You need to be together on this for as much as possible, give him a reasonable amount of time, if he is not willing to be reasonable with coming up with some sort of compromise, then you may want to consider taking your own route (having no kids makes it easier).
My wife and I managed to leave this cult together. I was serving as an elder at the time when the big doubts started happening, I continued for over a year, until we had a well established plan to transition out of the borg. Your efforts will be rewarded if you are patient with him and slowly and in subtle ways make him realize what they are doing wrong.
Seeing the inconsistencies and the false doctrines are the easy part, but the difficult part is how to deal with the emotional blackingmailing ,and the sense of loss from being in this cult. Good luck in your journey of liberation!
i was up in my mum's house the other night (she and my father are still active jws) and saw the june 2010 awake!.
as i browsed through it i came to watching the world.
as i read the article on the "baby mammoth" i noticed that there seemed to be some important information missing, as well as some good old watchtower selective quoting.. bear in mind that devout witnesses would never question the organisation or suspect that an article could be misleading them far less go and research the information to check it's authenticity.. the article mentions the age of the animal at time of death (3 to 4 months) and the fact that it was well preservedin the ice and that it's airways and digestive systems were clogged with silt.. right at the end of the article they say that the "scientists were lead to believe" the animal "must have drowned".
I don't even bother reading their publications. It would be such waste of time, but I'm glad some people do because it helps those with doubts!
They are not trustworthy! CONTROL AND POWER, that's the only thing they care about!
i still go to a few meetings a month just to keep members of my family happy.. the witnesses seemed to be getting all worked up about how close the end.
it sorta feels like the 1975 era only 35 years later.
the brother who gave.
The end already happened for me. It's actually the end of the watchtower bondage.
The year 2012 is being exploited to create fear. But come on, it's all wishful thinking. It's part of the past.
ok, my issue with the memorial i have put forth in another thread, but allow me to past them here:.
the memorial enfoces on them the power of the gb and of the "annointed" class, it is the total opposite of grace.. where god's grace is given free to all, the memorial is withedl from the majority.. god's grace tells us that no matter what we do, god loves us and if we belive, our salvation is in christ's hands.. the memorial is about the opposite, no matter what you have done, you are not worthy to partake on what was free given to all.. only the annointed can partake, the rest are not deserving.. if that is not a slap in the face of god's gift of grace, i don't know what is.. there they sit, all the "un-annointed", their heads hanging low, nomatter how many hourse they put in, how many loved ones they shunned, how many they have lost to the horrifc "no blood policy", they are not deserving to share in what jesus told all his believers to do.. the last supper was our lord's gift to us so that anytime we do it, we remember him.. when we say grace before our meal and we thank jesus for all his has done, for his sacrifice, we are partaking of his blood and body.. but even here the wt ignores jesus's commands and relegates him to the back with the rest.. horrific....
Good point, I never thought of it that way!
