i've seen several posts relating to the mood among longtime jws here recently.
i thought i would add to that collection and recount a discussion i recently had with my dad and a small group of folks about his age.
quick background on the group:.
The more dissidents there are, the easier more will find it to be dissident.
The more who leave, the easier more will find it to leave.
If GB2.0 really is having this place monitered, they must be freaking out on at least some level. Remember how paranoid Old Man Jaracz was about the Vast Apostate Army?
..., and while i usually contribute in a thread that's already been created, i thought this particular topic might warrant it's own.. like many of you, on friday i was persusing the "concerned elder speaks" thread about higher-ed and the gb's ross/rachel relationship with it, and a couple of posts caught my eye:.
room 215 - "that's it, boys; alienate the remaining elders, drive them to resign and exacerbate the shortage already underway.".
baltar447 - "it's like they want fewer elders and servants.".
NewChapter - "If WT didn't put on the front of neutrality, those scary right wingers would grow by millions overnight."
One of the main reasons why I suspect they've lasted over 100 years; similar to the Amish, they're (officially) pacifist; unlike the vast majority of other fundamentalist Christian religions. Most of these actively embrace militancy in one form or another; as a result, if and when they descend into extremist/antisocial behavior, law enforcement - correctly - perceives them as a threat to public safety, and cracks down on them - hard.
NewChapter - "I hope this was all coherent. Did you see Jesus Camp?"
Completely; you seem to get what I'm saying, and no. The trailer creeped me out too much.
Mr.Freeze - "If anything, they will crash and burn, go down with the ship."
That's what I'm trying to get at. They would never percieve it that way (or acknowledge it out loud), but that's irrelevent.
Mr.Freeze - "I don't see that happening anytime soon, despite any recent changes in attitude by the men in the high tower."
Maybe not, but these changes are coming at a rate that's almost dizzying compared to the relative snail's pace of the 20th Century's "New Light", which suggests to me that the WTS (being reactive rather than proactive) is trying all kinds of new tactics to survive, hoping that one or two will stick; they aren't "changes in attitude" - if anything, the attitude has entrenched itself, and the "changes" are an effect rather than a cause.
tia.dalma - "I don't think this religion will self destroy."
I'm not talking about self-destruction, per se; I'm talking about attempting to thin the pack (conciously or otherwise) to save the alphas - and thusly (in their view) - save the Organization. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, humans (as individuals or groups) are just as influenced by instinct as any other organism on the planet, and in a corner, will do what seems necessary to survive, even if those actions simply postpone extinction, rather than avert it.
In chess, Kings are expected to sacrifice Pawns to protect themselves. Have they not done that on a smaller scale already?
tia.dalma - "...if they survived after predicting that the end will come in 1975, they will survive anything, especialy that they are now very careful not to set any exact date or year."
Ah, but therien lies a substantial problem; recent studies pretty clearly show that apocalyptic millennialist groups absolutely have to date-set in order to foster a minimum sense of urgency among their memberships, and therefore maintain a minimum level of recruitment. With the high turnover rate of the WTS, fostering that urgency would by default be top priority (and we've clearly seen that). Except - after a century of repeated failed predictions, any further date-setting can't help but undermine whatever shred of credibility they have left among the remaining R&F capable of reason.
They need to date-set (among other things) to keep on truckin', but can't anymore.
tia.dalma - "About not having enough donations... they already reduced their costs by publishing the magazines only once a month. If they will change the hours for pioneers, there will be more who pioneer and they will not need to pay so many special pioneers. Many bethel families around the world have been reduced... so I think they know how to handle the money crisis, in case they really have one."
All stopgap measures in the long view; eventually corporations experiencing a prolonged reduction in income flow - despite the value of their assets - run out of cost-cutting contingencies; especially ones that build multi-million dollar complexes to sequester themselves away from the public eye. Their actions - more and more - are characteristic of a bunker mentality; they're battening down the hatches, even if they themselves don't realize it.
tia.dalma - "On the info war... are they really losing it? I don't think so. It looks like they are trying to take advantage of the internet, there is the society's page, the jw.org page where anyone can download literature."
They've been nostalgic for the 50s since the 50s, and as such, the World Wide Web is as alien to them - on a fundamental level - as the Space Age was to people who grew up idolizing the heroes of the Old West. All their reactions to the Information Age have been just that - reactions, and relatively slow responses, at that. Case in point; how many JWs knock on the door and direct people to the WT's website? Plus, the website has no open forum; these days, who frequents websites where they can't participate?
The WT.org website was simply another stopgap measure to give the R&F something with a modicum of modernism; the full transparency and inherent checks and balances of the Information Age, however, are an anthema to any authoritarian regime, even one that presents itself (or even perceives itself) as benign.
..., and while i usually contribute in a thread that's already been created, i thought this particular topic might warrant it's own.. like many of you, on friday i was persusing the "concerned elder speaks" thread about higher-ed and the gb's ross/rachel relationship with it, and a couple of posts caught my eye:.
room 215 - "that's it, boys; alienate the remaining elders, drive them to resign and exacerbate the shortage already underway.".
baltar447 - "it's like they want fewer elders and servants.".
Alright, thanks for the feedback. I'd hoped to get more, but whatever.
Something I should clarify; one of the the reasons I suggested this scenario is that historically, whenever authoritarian regimes feel their authority is waning - whether it really is waning or even if it isn't, they inevitably adopt a scorched-earth mentality; "if I can't have it, no one can", or perhaps more accurately; "if the WT comes to an end, it's because we decided, not a bunch of apostates". This mentality, in the end, contributes to and, in fact, often accellerates the subsequent fragmentation and/or collapse.
All indications strongly suggest that the WTS has been in serious siege mode since Old Man Jaracz ran the show, and his successors (official or otherwise) are - by all indications - cut from the same cloth, i.e. archconservative hardline company men. Men like that know and care to know only one way.
The more people in the developed world who leave, the easier more people still in will find it to leave...resulting in a steadily decreasing flow of revenue from the part of the world that is needed most for its revenue flow. What other ultimate response would there be but scuttling the ship and abandoning the majority of the crew to save the command crew and a few loyalists?
Grandma Jones - "I really don't think the organization is about to self-destruct. I never looked at ANY information that I thought even MIGHT contain negative statements about "the truth", and I dressed conservatively, saw only pg13 movies, avoided anything connected with violence, etc.etc.etc. There was really no way the internet influences many JW's..."
I don't know if "self-destruct" is the right term for what I described; maybe "cascade effect", or "accellerated decrepitude" (yes, I love Blade Runner - you should watch it even though it's rated R). Make no mistake, though, the internet - or more accurately, the Information Age - has had an unprecedented impact on the WTS. As a social organism, it is very poorly adapted to survival in this environment.
Just out of curiosity, how did you come to leave or fade or whatever?
ok.... looking for some logical explainations.... my daughter, ali, who i've been posting about on the forum...who has developed congestive heart failure.... has had some spooky experiences lately in her house.
here are a few of the things that happened:.
about a month ago, ali and her son david, heard noises from the attic above ali's bedroom...that sounded like something was being dragged across the attic floor.
Finally-Free - "I've never been one to believe in the paranormal, but sometimes you have to wonder."
I'm on that page; I've had a couple experiences that twitched the needle on my weird-shit-o-meter.
Nothing like the intro post, though.
i'm getting dirty looks at work again thanks to these adds....some of the girls look underage!
{sorry simon i know it pays for us but}.
Especially the one in the white minidress with the DDD implants and the vacuous smile...it's a little confusing; at first I thought it was a photoshop job.
so, i've been thinking a lot lately about the chinks in my "spiritual armor" and my journey from jw to atheist.
i realize now it all started with a mastadon.
i visited one of my favorite places, the natural history museum, where i stared contemplatively at lucy.
NewChapter - "The trouble with the WT, is they feed enough info to make a person feel like they've been educated. People who THINK they are educated are worse off because they don't search any further. In that way, WT is much like Fox News, imo. Adherents are walking around ignorant thinking they are smart."
Bwaahahahahahahahah!
Back in the day, my highly educated (yet devout) JW mom and her BFF were always joking about the "proudly ignorant".
so, i've been thinking a lot lately about the chinks in my "spiritual armor" and my journey from jw to atheist.
i realize now it all started with a mastadon.
i visited one of my favorite places, the natural history museum, where i stared contemplatively at lucy.
Leolaia - "...I was convinced that Neandertal/Cro-Magnon society was pre-Flood..."
Ditto. In fact, one of the first major things that helped start my fade was stumbling across a Yahoo! news article about the Neanderthal Genome Project back in '06.
The thing that hit me like a ton of bricks at the time were the preliminary conclusions of the Project researchers; that there weren't enough genetic commonalities between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons for them to interbreed; that Neanderthals were, in effect, a completely different species of humans.
In an Awake! article in the late 90s ("'Ape Men' - What Were They?" *), the WTS had grudgingly acknowledged that Neanderthals were human (they wore clothes, used tools, etc.), and let the R&F (including me) fill in the blanks and assume that they were just some obscure "race" of humans - descendents of Adam and Eve - that had perished in the Noachian Deluge, perhaps.
Anyways, the mental transmission kicked into high gear; how the hell could modern humans and Neanderthals be two different species??? All humans were descended from Adam, therefore all humans had to be members of the same species, right??? I'd never bought into the idea that there was some kind of vast diabolical conspiracy to debunk Genesis; and my Mom - while a devout JW - had nontheless instilled in me a healthy respect for education and science. I came to the inescapable conclusion that the only way two different species could have a common ancestor was - gasp - evolution!
I tried discreetly to talk about this with a couple of trusted JW friends, but I could practically see the mental walls going up to prevent the cognitive dissonance; I realized right away that the WTS wouldn't - couldn't - ever reverse their position on this; they had way too much of an ideological stake in the Genesis-as-literal-history construct.**
I, on the other hand, picked up my balls, started to read about both evolutionary biology and other forms of religious expression, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Imagine my amusement years later, when the final published results of the Neanderthal Genome Project reversed their preliminary conclusions; that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons had, in fact, interbred. LOL!
* I noticed even at the time that despite the Awake! article's title, the question of "what 'Ape-Men' were" was never actually answered in the article. I found that weird at the time and a little annoying.
** This was happening around the same time I was learning about authoritarianism as a social phenomenon, which helped me reach the conclusion so quickly, and in retrospect, avoid a shitstorm.
so, i've been thinking a lot lately about the chinks in my "spiritual armor" and my journey from jw to atheist.
i realize now it all started with a mastadon.
i visited one of my favorite places, the natural history museum, where i stared contemplatively at lucy.
I used to have fun with mammoths, too. I'd work a conversation towards the age of the earth, and mention in passing the Ice Ages.
There was always a faithful JW who felt compelled to chime in and state that there was no Ice Age, to which I would reply: "Then why did wooly mammoths have the thickest and heaviest fur of any known land animal?" Crickets chirped.
Once in a while, one of them would counter with the flash-frozen-at-the-deluge mammoth argument, saying that "hey, wooly mammoths DID live in the tropical Pre-Flood era!" To which I would reply, "Sorry, bud, those were Columbian mammoths that were frozen. Mostly hairless. Tropical animals."
I got some dirty looks, and a mild piece of counsel from an elder about focusing on more spiritual matters. It never stopped me.
Those same "victims" were the ones who would state that dinosaurs were contemporaries of humans, or that T-rexes and raptors were vegetarian. I have to confess, I had fun with them, too:
"If dinos and humans were contemporaries, why are there no cave paintings of them?"
"If theropods ate plants, why have they found allosaur teeth imbedded in apatosaur bone? Why have they found the fossilized remains of one species of dino inside the the fossilized body cavity of a completely different species?"
Yeah, I was a bit of a shit-disturber. Believe it or not, though, I was well-liked.
as the board no doubt knows, there was some sort of rumor in the early 1980s going around amongst the witnesses that a smurf doll came to life in the kingdom hall, or that smurfs were demonic.. 2 questions:.
1. do any not remember any such rumors though they were witnesses at the time?.
2. of those who do, did all the witnesses believe them, or otherwise, what proportion rejected the rumor as nonsense?.
NewChapter - "Years ago, (more than 20) before becoming JW, I associated a bit with the hardcore religious right. They gave me creeps, but they had a mission. They were determined to become the majority and dictate how Americans live. And they are succeeding. What was once thought of as "fringe" is now mainstream."
Oh, sweet jeezus, don't get me started. learning about the religious right, whil not directly an influence in my fade, was also a minor factor. In fact, I've sort of come to view the WTS as the religious right in microcosm (with a few distinct differences, obviously).
NewChapter - "I should probably start a new topic, but I'm low on posts again. I look forward to more conversations with you."
The higher your post count gets, the more posts you can make. And ditto.
Now, back to our regular programming...
...he's wearing sloppy casual clothing, comes in after the song and prayer.
he sits down in the backrow and puts his feat up on the row ahead of him.
he looks very relaxed and starts to intently listen to the public talk.. people start looking back at him, wondering how he could be so brazen.
Okay, for a second, I thought a punchline was forthcoming, but if that last sentence was it, I don't get it.
"A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a Kingdom Hall..."
