dear friends, we were so touched by your warm welcome and all of your comments to my ballroom dancing post.
thank you so much for your kindness.. i have more to tell you, but i wanted to share this with you.
we have a son that has been disfellowshipped for 18 years for smoking.
Finally Left,
Terrific news that your family is reunited once again. The religion of the JWs is many things, but one thing it isn't is family friendly. This includes, but is not limited to, the cruel practice of shunning.
Anyway, congratulations on making the break from this @>%* cult (realising that this can be a surprisingly difficult thing to do) - and also a belated welcome to this site!
at least he doesn't rewrite his bs as updated light.. http://www.patrobertson.com/teaching/teachingonbabylon.asp.
WTWizard,
Where did you get all that from?
i did!
even when i was in junior high school i would go to the library and look for anything that was about charles taze russell or millenial dawn or jehovah's witnesses..... maybe i was an "apostate " in the making..
waton,
Out of curiosity, after you had finished reading it, what were your impressions of 30 Years a Watchtower Slave?
i did!
even when i was in junior high school i would go to the library and look for anything that was about charles taze russell or millenial dawn or jehovah's witnesses..... maybe i was an "apostate " in the making..
I read WC Stevenson's 1975: Year of Doom? and WC Schnell's notorious 30 Years a Watchtower Slave before the term "apostate material" was ever bandied about - let alone put on the "forbidden list" by the WTS. Back then, I believed that as we definitely had "The Truth", then there was no harm done. After all, "The Truth" would stand up to anything, wouldn't it! (Particularly when stood up against the rather incoherent rantings of some disgruntled ex-member; which is how Schnell's work came across as).
Also, during my early years as a JW, the congregation's territory that I was in contained a large component of what are now known as "Alternative Lifestylers". This led to some very interesting conversations while engaged in the "Field Circus".
There were Hippies, Communists, Maoists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, Marxists, Red-Feds, Anarchists, "Born Agains" of various stripes (particularly of the more extreme variety), Draft Dodgers (perhaps even a few army deserters - the Vietnam war was still not over), Pacifists, Spiritualists, converts to the "Eastern Religions" (including Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims):
- all working as seasonal workers for the local fruitgrowers and tobacco farmers; with most of those being either staunchly Episcopalian or of one or other of the Brethren churches.
As far as I could see at the time, yet another person with some unconventional ideas (in this case, a former JW) couldn't be too harmful.
However, once my doubts began to grow, I did some serious but discreet research of my own - even though by that point it had become a definite "No-No"
ok your bible study wants to get baptised.
make sure he is aware of what's involved.
here is a checklist.
Explain to them also that it would help immensely to have a certain operation in which a by-pass switch is installed on the back of the neck:
- one that places a short circuit between the ears and the motor-nerves, completely bypassing the brain!
i pretty much did it all.
vacation pioneered as a youngster and became a regular pioneer out of school.
i became a ms then an elder.....the organization pushes you to be somebody within the confines of their realm.
I know this is slightly off-topic, but the matter of "green handshakes" has been mentioned by others.
In some of the congregations I was in, the "green handshake" would have looked distinctly unimpressive! I doubt if the CO would have been able to even half-fill the tank on his car with it -even if he received such a parting gift at all (which would have been quite possible). During the recession of the early 1990s, our congregation would have not had the proverbial "two bob to rub together". This was in a low cost housing area (Logan City, QLD, Australia) and had more than its complement of JWS - who, being as they predominantly are in the lower socio-economic bracket - couldn't afford to live elsewhere.
That old saying about being "poor as church-mice" comes to mind!
cowtown ain’t.
in which i tell you about my hometown, ft. worth, texas.
question: “what do you call mexican food down in guadalajara?”.
Terry,
Thanks for this interesting bit of history.
The closest I have ever got to Fort Worth, TX was in my dealings with a company called Solar Turbines. While never managing to wangle a visit to Solar's factory, I nonetheless did have frequent interactions with some of their company's representatives. (This during the years I managed a power station in Papua New Guinea; one that used a set of eight Solar Gas Turbine Engines).
However, on checking Google Maps, I see that the site of Solar Turbine's factory at Mabank, TX, is actually closer to Dallas than it is to Fort Worth? That was the reverse of what I had been led to understand, and reveals some flaws in my knowledge of North American geography!
years ago it was all about armageddon and getting out of babylon the great.
then with the draw close to jehovah and is there a creator that care about you.
it was all about building a relationship with jehovah.
Interestingly, this has happened at least once before.
During 1975, and for a year or two afterwards, the JWs took much the same line. We started hearing a lot about "Christian love", supposed "Design Patterns in Creation" and similar - but nothing at all about such matters as "hours".(Previously to that the meetings and assemblies seemed to feature nothing but "hours" and "full time service").
This, however, did not last very long. In the congregation I was in (Newmarket, QLD, Australia), the return to a more usual "Heads Down, Bums Up" approach was heralded in 1977 by the assignment of a new CO to our circuit - the unforgettable "Cyclone Rex" Mainwaring.
As Sparrowdown has observed, they (the WTS/GB) will say / preach whatever they like, depending entirely on their - and only their - agenda. A return to the more usual JW equivalent of "Hellfire and Brimstone" methods could not necessarily be ruled out.
i pretty much did it all.
vacation pioneered as a youngster and became a regular pioneer out of school.
i became a ms then an elder.....the organization pushes you to be somebody within the confines of their realm.
Sparrowdown,
"One of the biggest illusions of JWland is that their is a ladder when there is no ladder only the illusion of one"
Of all the gems that have come out of this thread, that remark is one of the best!
The fact is the JWland itself is just one great exercise in Smoke and Mirrors.
i honestly think they are the most boring people on earth!
even when they produce their so called "new light", there's no excitement.
jws just do their thing and refuse to think about their useless lives.
I have said this on another post, but since the question has arisen once more, I will repeat.
When I had my first contacts with the JWs in the mid-1960s, what they were saying did sound quite interesting. In fact, that was what probably drew me towards them back then - as by contrast, the "mainstream" churches seemed to be boring and quite irrelevant.
This seemed to also be the case into the 1970s and 80s; I had family members who agreed to the JW offer of a "Bible Study", simply because what the Witnesses were saying came over as very interesting. Feedback we used to get, too, from the "Territory" was that "these people are interesting."
Certainly, though, during the decades since then, all the fizz and the sparkle has long since gone out of it!
