Posts by Half banana

17

Why is Mother's Day wrong?

by stuckinarut2 in

so why is celebrating mother's day wrong according to witnesses?.

is it not an opportunity to show respect to the giver of life (mother) and therefore god, the originator of families?.

does it not give an opportunity for members of the family to give a hard working mother a day off?

I wonder if the time will come with declining membership, when they will start listening to their critics and accept Mother's day and birthdays and all sorts of commonplace traditions just in an attempt to retain numbers?

It is a possible future for the cult to be a more easy going, chummy thing with laid back "conscience decisions" on the above matters. The key to WT success is not doctrinal truth which is an impossible ideal for any group but to control a large membership which equals income and power for those at the top.

14

Mexican new GB member

by sp74bb in

jw
friends

more light for our ex jw members.... http://www.extj.com/showthread.php?27719-the-show-of-apple-jam-by-president-s-brother-the-accounting-chaste.

in patterson there is a group of brothers, all of them baptized after 1975, a group of them are candidates to all new gb membership, as soon as new places will be included or some members will passed away.

clear details and info tell us that a new gb will be a us citizen with mexican background.. really funny to see that we can give light to our ex jw family months before it comes public :).

Half banana

Yes the mandarins are usually Anglo-Saxon/German, with a token African at present.The outstandingly successful Christian cult is the Catholic superstition and just as with the Papacy, it was a good political move to have a representative from the latin south at the top. Where the RC church leads, the Watchtower will follow.

32

Shooting in the foot (homophobic video)

by Syme in

with the newly released homophobic video by the wts, it gets clearer that those people can't stop shooting themselves in the foot.

they are already under examination and de facto trial by the australian committee; more and more people and officials in western democracies inquire into their abusive tactics and put them under the microscope, and what do they do?

they release a video which confirms those worries.

Half banana

The reason for the condemnation by the JW org is that the Bible plainly discriminates against homosexuality.

Jehovah's Witnesses are duty bound not to reason for themselves or question what is written in the Bible. JWs are superficial thinkers, they just blindly follow the text and quote scripture as if by doing so it will buy them their ticket to paradise.

When something does not accord with rationality and fairness and people's well-being; well that's too bad for them! and with a smug superiority they will be pleased to inform you..."That's what the Bible says".

That will be the day when JWs start to think deeply and realize it is this infantile reliance on the foolish, bigoted Bible text which is at fault--- not homosexuality.

17

Why is Mother's Day wrong?

by stuckinarut2 in

so why is celebrating mother's day wrong according to witnesses?.

is it not an opportunity to show respect to the giver of life (mother) and therefore god, the originator of families?.

does it not give an opportunity for members of the family to give a hard working mother a day off?

Half banana

Well Jesus set the pattern by snubbing his own mother...and therefore so should we...?

241

Another generation....

by joey jojo in

it has been 21 years since the 1995 article that pretty much buried the idea of the '1914 generation'.. remember those guys?

the ones born in 1914 that would still be alive when the end of the system arrived.. i'm glad i'm old enough to remember going from door to door, preaching this belief.

the reason i say that is because i have a lot of 'still in' jw friends and family.

Half banana

What an enormous red-herring? Perhaps more than 20 million people have believed the ever evolving teachings of the Bible in the JW manner. According to Pew research, about 20 million still believe this but less than half are active in following through.

My thought is that all this talk of "generation" is misleading. The statement in the gospels is only about Jesus' generation not any other...and Jesus words did not come true. It's childish nonsense like all prophecy is.

For goodness sake the Bible is just a book, it is not holy unless you are fool enough to believe it is. Little of it makes sense for the twenty first century and Jehovah's Witnesses, hanging on every word, are living proof that Bible teachings cannot be taken literally nor for that matter do they have any significance at all.

How can anyone believe that all mankind will be brought back from the dead? This is ridiculous...

There is a real life awaiting those who give up this stupidity.

55

Here's a view on homosexuality for you...

by konceptual99 in

...right from a pro-jw site in response to a post about the relative seriousness of homosexuality.

all you can do is reason from the scriptures, which you appear to have done.

homosexuality is as serious as bestiality, or adultery and fornication.

Half banana

All you can do is reason from the scriptures (JW post on another site)

This defeatist mentality is at the root of the JW belief. Instead of thinking there is only one set of rules by which we must organize our lives it makes greater sense to take a leaf from reality and not run your life on hocus pocus from the ancient world.

We are born with undifferentiated sexual proclivities and usually early on, sometimes after a little experimentation we realize where our natural interests lie.

Homosexuality exists, not from choice or by design, it is simply a fact of mammalian life on Earth. Religious people fear things which do not accord with their childish concept of what an invisible spirit creator decreed, i.e God made man and woman and they had sex and the woman gave birth to children. No room for homosexuality or bi-sexuality there.

How crushing this must be for those of the minority who do not fit the Biblical prescriptions. How disgusting for Jehovah's Witnesses to blindly follow the Bible and each other in asserting their hurtful ignorance.

16

New Brochure: Answers to 10 Questions Young People Ask

by Designer Stubble in

https://www.jw.org/en/publications/books/teen-questions/1 who am i?2 why do i worry about my appearance?3 how can i talk to my parents?4 how can i fix my mistakes?5 what if i’m being bullied at school?6 how can i resist peer pressure?7 how can i deal with the pressure to have sex?8 what should i know about sexual assault?9 should i believe in evolution?10 how can the bible help me?basically a compilation of previous wt articles.let's take chapter 9 on evolution:statements as quotes below are really going to help jw teens defend creation: [quote]“if you were walking through the forest and discovered a beautiful house, would you think: ‘how fascinating!the trees must have fallen in just the right way to make this house.’ of course not!

it’s just not reasonable.

sowhy should we believe that everything in the universe just happened to come about?”[/quote][quote]“imagine that someone told you that there was an explosion at a printing plant and that the ink spattered onto the walls and ceilings and formed the text of an unabridged dictionary.

Half banana

Absolutely Xanthippe, not only do the WT conflate evolution with the arrival of life but they entirely miss the point of the theory, deliberately so, which is that evolution occurs in small increments with the organism utilizing a small variant which favours its reproduction. Big changes come very slowly.

So the illustration of a house in the woods arriving by the fall of trees and the tired one of an explosion in a print works is so inappropriate as to be laughable. Unless of course you are a JW with a mental age stuck at the level of a 5 year old. Four year olds might buy magical creation illustrations but perhaps not so many six year olds?

(I have to admit though because there is nothing in everyday life like evolution, a simple illustration of the process is very hard to find.)

Naturally teaching as if to a five year old is desirable in a doomsday cult as having your audience unquestioning and unsophisticated like children are makes it easy for mind manipulation.

Sad and vile at the same time.

11

Watchtower State

by nelim in

i was watching a documentary from last week about saudi arabia.

there are many human rights violations going on, supported from islam ideology.

apparently is(is) is an off-shoot of saudi society.

Half banana

A neighbour of mine working on intelligence security for the military was in Saudi Arabia at a small conference. He was with a colleague, a black man, a Canadian who was sent by the company as a technical consultant. The host speaker announced, "There is a black man here, we can't have this , take him out".

Yikes!

35

“Even if this wasn’t the Truth, I need the structure.”

by Londo111 in

i remember many years back a fellow ministerial servant saying this to me.

he felt that even if jehovah’s witnesses were not the only true religion, the regimented routine of meetings and field service and the strict rules and enforcement provided a beneficial structure for his life.

at the time i thought if this wasn’t “the truth”, i’d have no need for all that “structure”.

Half banana

I find the more I leave Jehovah’s Witnesses behind, the better my life

Thank you Londo for such a good reference for leaving the JW delusion.

On the other hand there are those who by nature or by being born into a repressive religion are either taught to be dependent or who inherently have a need for external control due to their insecurity or anti-social tendencies.

As a JW I noticed unsettling examples of how the Watchtower with its strict boundaries served as a behaviour regulator for individuals with serious problems.

One example was one local JW who told me he would be an armed robber if he didn't have the religion. Even more disturbing, by being privy to data on prisoners in the UK there were serious sex offenders who were JWs, for whom the threats of Armageddon did not do its trick. Note how the notorious 'Yorkshire Ripper' (who will never leave prison) has adopted the Watchtower regime.

The lesson surely is to become self reliant with adult reasoning based on a factual understanding of our world?

This involves good education...not threats of punishment for moral infringements.

36

Understanding The Bible ... The "Linchpin" Effect

by Littleleslie in

understanding the holy bible.. .

after many years of study of scripture, our bible study group has discovered something very important that needs to be realized or absorbed, before one can come to a correct understanding of the bible.

we call it, the "linchpin" effect... .

Half banana

Sorry to dampen your enthusiasm but the Bible was never written to be "The Bible".

It is just a collection of ancient texts, re-interpreted by partizan scribes for use by religious authorities in demanding control over their followers.

To believe there is any "message" in the Bible is a complete waste of time. To believe there is a missing message is approaching paranoia.