http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/206514/3/wow-this-is-getting-tougher.
after the last comment from sweetbabycheezits, the thread disappears with no place to continue posting.
i went to page one and added a comment to the thread but i can't see it.. suggestions?
http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/206514/3/Wow-This-is-Getting-Tougher
After the last comment from SweetBabyCheezits, the thread disappears with no place to continue posting. I went to page one and added a comment to the thread but I can't see it.
Suggestions? Help?
i'm having a really hard time giving my meeting parts.
i had a service meeting part this week and i could hardly get through it.
i am no longer convinced of some of the things jws teach and so i try to either eliminate those things from my parts, or reword them so that i'm not speaking about that which i do not personally believe.
You inspired me to check him out. Great stuff!
i'm having a really hard time giving my meeting parts.
i had a service meeting part this week and i could hardly get through it.
i am no longer convinced of some of the things jws teach and so i try to either eliminate those things from my parts, or reword them so that i'm not speaking about that which i do not personally believe.
Thanks for the tip, Leaving. I expect it. I already get it from some non-JWs that I share my beliefs with. My lack of "faith" is not a reaction to my lack of belief in WT doctrine. I'm not a "throw the baby out with the bathwater" kind of person. What I am trying to do is get a grasp on key spiritual concepts and then test them against all the available evidence. The more facts I have, the more evidence I have, the less faith I need. I'm weighing everything out and choosing the most plausible side of any given issue, fully aware that absolute truth is rare and I should never be dogmatic about my personal conclusions on matters which can never really be proven (like, the existence of God). In my deep research of humanity's grasp on God and the history of religious practices in general, I have arrived at my current state of agnosticism. Could there be a God? Sure. Could there not be a God? Yeah. Has any person, document, vision, miracle, or religious group given me reason to believe that their way of understanding God is the best way? Not really. So I'm following the evidence. For me, faith is too reliant on emotion. Like the Stoics, I can see where emotion can cloud my better judgement. So I dial back what makes me personally feel good or bad and instead, look for the ideas that clearly tip the scales with overwhelming evidence.
I am born-in, btw. My wife too. Very big, very spiritual families on both sides. 4th generation JWs.
i'm having a really hard time giving my meeting parts.
i had a service meeting part this week and i could hardly get through it.
i am no longer convinced of some of the things jws teach and so i try to either eliminate those things from my parts, or reword them so that i'm not speaking about that which i do not personally believe.
Jeff said, The other thing is [and this will be hard for you to actually believe at this point I imagine]: Your journey is just underway. You don't know where you will be in a year, and certainly not where you will be in seven or ten. I imagined at the moment I discovered that the Jw's were not the 'truth' that I would leave eventually. But I never believed that I would eventually reject all religion, and that I would someday question and then adjust my entire view of the god concept too. But I did. And I have never been happier in my life for having allowed myself to become myself.
Not hard to imagine at all. It's happening now. I don't consider myself religious. "Religion is a snare and a racket," right? If and when I leave, I'll never sign up on another religious group's roster. My concept of God is uniquely mine and should not be dictated by anyone else. Right now, after much research, meditation, and honest soul-searching, I would fall in the category of strong agnostic. I don't think we can define God, let alone say what kind of movies/education/health care/job/clothing/etc. it would approve of. To put a face on God seems disrespectful of what God could be. How arrogant it is to minimize the largeness of God (whatever God is) down to a human level.
As for the journey aspect, the concept of never knowing the answers to these big metaphysical questions is thrilling to me. I've embraced it fully. I enjoy the prospect of spending the rest of my life searching for something that I may never find. Where the tension resides is being a part of a religion that pretends to know who God is and what his plan is. Sure some of these religious interpretations and concepts are fun to think about and can serve as a sort of mental exercise. Could they be true? Maybe. Not likely though. No harm is hypothesizing but I feel it crosses the line when someone tries to present it as fact.
this is something i've thought about for a while now.
it seems like the same story on this board over and over--the husband, who also might be an elder, ms, etc.--starts having doubts and researching, aka miseryloveselders and franklin massey and others.
he starts to smell the coffee and realizes that this organization isn't what it claims to be.
Crisis said, Emotion many times overrides logic and that could be why it seems that a woman does not wake up. But I have realized one thing. My wife DOES listen and even thinks about what I have said. She brings up things that I have mentioned and admits that she agrees with some of them and is bothered by things she has observed herself now.
inbetween said, However, often after some discussions, where I try to help open her eyes, and even if she disagrees on the spot, later on she admits, thinking about it and its bugging her, that the org says this or does that. and sometimes she even surprises me with "independant" thoughts, that even I did not think about. I commend her for that, and we openly discuss doctrine and other things.
Same here. She is getting comfortable enough to openly express obvious flaws she notices in the doctrine. After some of our more intense discussions, I have learned that she had already come to some conclusions of her own way before I started having doubts. The difference was that she accepted them and carried on. She was able to reconcile the faults under the premise of, "Make the truth your own." For her, making the truth your own means understanding it all in your own unique way. I, on the other hand, had an emotional response to learning the truth about The Truth. I felt cheated and angry.
i'm having a really hard time giving my meeting parts.
i had a service meeting part this week and i could hardly get through it.
i am no longer convinced of some of the things jws teach and so i try to either eliminate those things from my parts, or reword them so that i'm not speaking about that which i do not personally believe.
Again, thanks for all of the comments. Some days, I feel like I do need to be in a hurry to make a decision. I'm a solutions guy. I like closure. This is certainly a test of patience.
this is something i've thought about for a while now.
it seems like the same story on this board over and over--the husband, who also might be an elder, ms, etc.--starts having doubts and researching, aka miseryloveselders and franklin massey and others.
he starts to smell the coffee and realizes that this organization isn't what it claims to be.
Good observations Blondie. One thing you said though stood out to me...
But if a man is a jw and has progressed to the position of MS or elder, certainly that shows he doesn't just have a passive approach to his religion as some sociological studies say men in general have.
A lot of this "progress" isn't religiously based, it's organizationally based. JW males are constantly being told to reach out for greater service. There is a ladder to be climbed and every congregation is structured around constant recruitment and promotion. If a male is able but doesn't reach out, he gets the guilt trip. A male could easily be so busy with responsibilities in the congregation that he has very little time to ever question his beliefs. Think of the terms "company man" and "worker bee." That's what a lot of our brothers are.
i'm having a really hard time giving my meeting parts.
i had a service meeting part this week and i could hardly get through it.
i am no longer convinced of some of the things jws teach and so i try to either eliminate those things from my parts, or reword them so that i'm not speaking about that which i do not personally believe.
It could be worse, Franklin - I had to give the memorial when I no longer believed in the literal 144,000.
Yikes!
curious asked, I wonder how many like us there are here
There are quite a few. I've had some much needed private conversations on here with Brothers in similar situations. It's amazing reading other's posts and feeling like they wrote them for you.
this is something i've thought about for a while now.
it seems like the same story on this board over and over--the husband, who also might be an elder, ms, etc.--starts having doubts and researching, aka miseryloveselders and franklin massey and others.
he starts to smell the coffee and realizes that this organization isn't what it claims to be.
For me, the deeper I got in the Org, the more flaws I saw. The more meeting parts I had to prepare, the less certain doctrines made sense. The more questions the friends or householders asked me, the more research I did - and the more research I did, the more doubts I had. The more Bible studies I conducted, the less sure I was of what I was selling these people. In the beginning of my departure from the total JW doctrinal package, I did everything by the book. Study, prayer, meditation. The more I studied, prayed, and meditated, the more the WT's version of "truth" faded away. I didn't end up here until I was already waaaaay out of the JW mindset.
In one of my other posts, where I was lamenting my situation, a female poster mentioned that as far as public apperances go, it's easier for a sister to fade. She has less skin in the Organizational game. I think this is a sad fact. Sad because if the Org really wanted to grow, they would let women do more instead of lowering them to second string status.
My wife is slowly waking up too but unlike me, she is more comfortable in her individual beliefs because she doesn't have to teach the congregation. She doesn't have to shepherd the congregation. She is happy just going along knowing that she doesn't agree with everything the Governing Body puts into print. When I have trouble preparing a meeting part that contains elements that I don't personally believe to be true, she calmly tells me, "Leave it out." The biggest area where we don't see eye to eye is in how the Org deals with those who disagree with its teachings. She thinks that JWs can hold doctrinal differences in the same compartment as they hold conscience matters like certain areas of entertainment, health care choices, alcohol consumption, etc. According to her, if I don't believe that Christ was enthroned in 1914, that's my business and to avoid offending anyone, I should just keep that to myself. The problem I have with this is that not only are we expected to believe in 1914 (or any official doctrine), we are expected to tell others to believe it. We are told to give them magazines and books containing that information. No one really cares what movie I saw or what band I like and in the Big Picture, none of that matters. Those are conscience matters. But doctrine is different. It's much more serious.
the movie opens up with three men being hung and the camera angle leaves nothing to be desired.
then it's pretty much nothing but crazy fun violence from start to end; some of it was pretty grizzly.. don't get me wrong, flipping hell of a movie... but it's weird that it somehow got a pg-13 rating.. -sab.
No sex. No language. Just violence. One "F" word or nude scene and the MPAA would have given it an "R."
