Half banana

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Posts by Half banana

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  23

  Bunker Video Sparks Family Drama!

  by Wasanelder Once in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i guess you are guaranteed to survive the "great tribulation" if you don't be a "kevin".

  my family members are doubling down on their fervor about meeting attendance.

  they are having an effect on some of my wishy washy long time inactive family.

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  Half banana

  Thanks Carla, it sounds like judgement day paranoia is alive and kicking in the collective American consciousness...
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  24

  If you could speak to your former self, what would you say?

  by LoveUniHateExams in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  if you, knowing ttatt, could go back in time and speak to your former jw self, what would you say to wake yourself up from the wt religion?.

  i would speak to my unbaptised publisher self.

  at that stage, i believed.

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  Half banana

  I just wish I had been taught philosophy and understood the value of skeptical thinking before I first went to a JW meeting at the age of fourteen.
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  71

  2016 Regional Convention - Sunday Morning synopsis

  by Jehalapeno in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  via reddit.

  here are the morning program highlights.

  will update for the afternoon once it's all over.

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  Half banana

  I think we must recognise a more serious significance in the adoption of the bunker or siege mentality.

  It usually happens in groups who are isolated from the rest of the world, often held in the thrall of leaders who use the situation to foster a sense of unity and prideful identity among its members. The notion of persecution is a critical propaganda ingredient and North Korea is a good example. Note how the leaders prosper and rank and file sacrifice all they have. Loyalty is praised as the key virtue.

  For Jehovah's Witnesses governance, the concern is that they are weakening in their influence over a community who are able to get an alternative and a more accurate description of what is going on through the internet. This loss of authority has triggered a response from the leadership to heighten the fear and consequently the believer's dependency on the words of the leaders.

  My own musings on this are to do with the fact of the governing body's complete negligence for the welfare of the sexually abused in their midst has exposed them to public shame and justifiable censure. Many governments are now on the JW org case. Yet any persecution is fuel to their paranoid teachings so the believers, who are insulated from the real reasons, will only interpret it in the way the GB spins it, not realizing how selfish and truly heartless they really are.
  

  Nevertheless the JW org is clearly moving towards hunkering down in the bunker.

  It is significant in a political or religious group to move from one mode and into a siege mentality. It usually presages big changes or even total breakdown as with the denouement of the David Koresh group at Wako.

  Doomsday cults do not usually have a good shelf life and one hundred and thirty seven years is stretching any intelligent person's credulity.

  Let's hope that it heralds a grand awakening........... even among the leadership; that Jehovah's Witnesses are participants in a monumental confidence trick.
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  12

  Something's Gotta Give

  by pale.emperor in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i've been 100% alone since my df last month.

  i'm dead to my family now, unless i return to their cult - so i recently made contact with 3 former jw's that were in my cong when i was in my youth.

  to my surprise, they all had exactly the same doubts and reasoning i had and said even though they've been out 6-7 years they "still feel tied to it in some way" and "feel guilty celebrating xmas or birthdays".

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  Half banana

  PE, it was good to find friends who were JWs. In fact it is a good thing to make new contacts and friends after having been locked into the Watchtower social club. Keeping company with sensible non-JWs is a real a help in losing the insane JW way of thinking.

  When we leave the org most of us follow a familiar pattern. The anger, the shunning, the new found freedom and the unfamiliar need to think for ourselves. Actually we have to be constantly re-thinking EVERYTHING for quite a time.

  While we are doing that, things continue to drop into place and we become normalized, we realize the enormity of the hold the JW thought-vice once had on our brain.

  After a while I think you might agree, perhaps not yet but later on, that the need to reform the JW org is futile. If it is not God's exclusive "spirit guided organisation" then it may as well be disbanded...and the sooner the better to prevent any more harm being done to people's minds, education, well-being and self esteem.
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  48

  Animals not meant to eat meat

  by Carl in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  jw don't believe in evolution .

  how come animals teeth are designed to chew meat?

  sharks for instance have razor sharp pointy teeth these are not to eat vegetation .

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  Half banana

  I would be interested to hear any argument or good reason why anyone should listen to what the Bible says...but in the absence of such, I cannot see how an old book of myth borrowed from pagan sources could be the work of an almighty creator god. How can you defend the Bible?
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  48

  Animals not meant to eat meat

  by Carl in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  jw don't believe in evolution .

  how come animals teeth are designed to chew meat?

  sharks for instance have razor sharp pointy teeth these are not to eat vegetation .

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  Half banana

  Carl get a grasp on the fact that the Bible has nothing to do with telling us anything practical...it is a story book for the illiterate of the Iron Age based on Bronze Age myths.

  The tiger shark has an interesting take on survival of the fittest: whilst still in the womb the embryonic sharks attack each other until there is one left who in turn will go out into the sea and having eaten all its siblings will go on to pass this ruthless strategy to a new generation.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrqgPjZ07Ts

  Did the vegetarian God slip up here?

  Or is it not a perfect demonstration that Darwin's big idea is right and that Genesis and vegetarian lions are just a bunch of primitive folk tales?
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  60

  Are they either leaving or going full on 'cult mode'? No quarter.

  by punkofnice in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  it might just be me imagining things.. i hear things from my jw spies.. from all that's being said, it seems to me that the rank and file(tm), are either waking up to the scam and fading/leaving.

  they are going full on 'cult mode' and acting like 'spiritual police'.. is it just me and my imagination?

  have others noticed this?.

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  Half banana

  I like Cha ching's point that they leave it up to the next generation of gb to clean up the mess left by the earlier incumbents and find their own excuses and spin as to why Big A has not yet come.

  The poisoned chalice is handed down to a new set of leaders who keep the lie of paradise on the move like a Chinese juggler keeps his plates spinning on a stick.

  It must appear like a game at the top of the JW (dis)organisation.
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  150

  Start A Butterfly Garden!

  by Bonsai in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  time to take a break from debating religion.

  take in a breath of fresh air and be healed by the wonders of nature around you.. how many of you have a garden?

  how many have a nice flower patch to go with your vegetable garden?

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  Half banana

  My Collins Guide to the Insects indicates you have a Magpie Moth.

  Until this week southern Britain has had a damp dull early summer, hardly saw the sun in June (which is our sunniest month of the year!) hence as you say Xanthippe, very few butterflies...just a succession of Red admirals...always welcome, the odd Brimstone and a few Great whites or cabbage whites as I've always known them.

  The real show is when the Tortoiseshell butterflies arrive in September and swarm on the Buddleia

  How about you people in far flung places, what butterflies do you see ?
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  12

  My 1st Unwitness

  by HappyGal in

  1. watchtower
  2. child-abuse

  i have seen the witnessing carts pop up around our city.

  there were no such carts when i left the jw's in the 1980's.

  since leaving the organization i have survived (and thrived) by: .

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  Half banana

  Well done Happy Gal! I love confronting JWs on their trolleys here in England but recently they have become hard to find. Come to think of it I don't see them calling on the doors in my area either.
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  11

  Speculation about GT

  by aintenoughwiskey in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  what were/are your speculations about the great tribulation.

  unless those days were cut short no flesh would be saved?.

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  Half banana

  Footnote on Josephus' exaggeration of Jerusalem's population. Have you seen a city of one million? It would not have fitted into the space which Jerusalem then offered. The population of the empire's capital city Rome at that time was only about 800,000!

  Jerusalem, a provincial town, from a Roman perspective; probably had something like 50,000 residents with some estimates as low as 20,000.

  Jerusalem's population today is only 800,000+ and only 500,000 of them are Jews. You cannot believe everything you read...investigate first methinks.