Half banana

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Posts by Half banana

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  8

  Attention all leaders of corporate organisations under threat!

  by Half banana in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  imagine you are on the governing board of a religious organisation with around eight million subscribers and an annual income of approximately a $billion (well it used to be!).

  you are about to be handed a mass of legal cases against you for concealing your negligent practice of concealing paedophiles in your congregations---followed by the prospect of a cascade of damning publicity?

  do you admit you were wrong and apologise unreservedly?.

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  Half banana

  I think resigning would we one option and leave the others to sort the mess out.
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  8

  Attention all leaders of corporate organisations under threat!

  by Half banana in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  imagine you are on the governing board of a religious organisation with around eight million subscribers and an annual income of approximately a $billion (well it used to be!).

  you are about to be handed a mass of legal cases against you for concealing your negligent practice of concealing paedophiles in your congregations---followed by the prospect of a cascade of damning publicity?

  do you admit you were wrong and apologise unreservedly?.

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  Half banana

  Imagine you are on the governing board of a religious organisation with around eight million subscribers and an annual income of approximately a $billion (well it used to be!)
  

  You are about to be handed a mass of legal cases against you for concealing your negligent practice of concealing paedophiles in your congregations---followed by the prospect of a cascade of damning publicity?

  Do you admit you were wrong and apologise unreservedly?

  Make private compensations to the victims?

  Make public statements that you were “caring” all along?

  Change your beliefs with sudden “new light”?

  Or what?
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  21

  God wants to remain unidentified

  by anointed1 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  1) books supposedly written by god contain errors.

  2) people supposedly appointed by god make human rights violations.

  and god does not prevent those things from happening.

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  Half banana

  Thanks for posting a1. Hostile bunch here sometimes!

  As we depart the grip of the JW religion we drop the old “imperatives” but are then confronted with attractive fresh beliefs which we often wrangle with to fit into our new and evolving perceptions. This is a positive thing to do.

  I can see that you are indeed exploring good ideas and long may that continue. Putting thoughts out on this site is often met by being slapped down in a ‘pavlovian’ response to particular errors! Partly it is the reaction of those of us who once were fooled by some of these very notions.

  Don't lose heart, it takes determination to get to the root of some things such a as who or what God is or isn’t. What I find encouraging is that all ideas do ---like plants--- have roots. Some ideas have flowered for thousands of years!

  Once we imagined we had the one and only definitive “Truth” and on escaping from this trap we often imagined there was another body of doctrines which serves as an alternative and monolithic “Truth”. We often defend to the hilt those things we would like to retain such as the hope of paradise or the almightiness of God. But these are matters of emotion not tangible reality.

  Instead of absolutism or belief because it sounds good; there exist myriads of testable evidential "factoids" which are assembled within an evolving scientific frame of perception and these form the only useful information for the progress of humanity. It’s not a case of new light, more a matter of ever getting a sharper focus on the cosmos and all it contains.

  Scent and colour in flowers and insect mimicry in orchids for that matter, whilst fascinating cannot be linked to a creator, if you can demonstrate otherwise do let me know.

  It can however be shown scientifically that preferential selectivity by pollinating insects would give rise to these charming aspects of the flora .
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  13

  Leaving story

  by leavingeverythingbehind in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  i've been following this forum for a couple of years now, but it's only just now that i've decided to register.

  it's been quite a long and strenous process leaving the org, having been borned and raised in and spent so much time in.

  i'm so gratefull there's the internet these days which helps new people find their way out of this and other religions.

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  Half banana

  LEB I share your delight in the idea of studying epistemology. If only the leaders of the JW religion understood its meaning, they would have to pack their bags, dissolve the corporation and remove their nasty stain from the world.

  But a serious question; can you say what constitutes scientific epistemology?
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  144

  2.16.2017 NJ Star-Ledger Ad: "Were you sexually abused by the Jehovahs Witnesses?"

  by breakfast of champions in

  1. watchtower
  2. child-abuse

  my wife found this 1/4 page ad on page 2 of yesterday's nj star-ledger, probably the biggest newspaper in nj.

  pretty telling.. .

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  Half banana

  This is a big nail in the GB coffin!

  There will be hackles raised at their weekly boardroom meeting. Yet it's their own selfish fault since they NEVER have cared about the well-being of the individual JW member. Their only concern is about a good public name for the "org", well that is now in tatters!

  There is little defence available to them in the face of such damning publicity.Their propaganda machinery only works on the flock, all they can do is beat the sheep harder, have stricter shunning and stick their heads deeper in the sand.
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  13

  Leaving story

  by leavingeverythingbehind in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  i've been following this forum for a couple of years now, but it's only just now that i've decided to register.

  it's been quite a long and strenous process leaving the org, having been borned and raised in and spent so much time in.

  i'm so gratefull there's the internet these days which helps new people find their way out of this and other religions.

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  Half banana

  Welcome LEB I enjoyed very much for your interesting letters between you and your father.

  I think you managed to say succinctly just about everything possible to deny JWs having the true religion and in doing so you leave for us and others a brilliant record of key points, most of them from their own literature. You must have done an enormous amount of research?

  I liked the 1881 Watchtower on "new light" showing how impossible it would be for divine truth to change, only can it be added to. A reasonable position to which the GB with their fatal doctrinal and prophetic mistakes can never return. Also the clear statement on why disfellowshipping is unscriptural Awake Jan 1947.

  The algorithms of science and religion were excellent too.

  The main thing is that you have stopped living under the Watchtower directives and now live like a free woman exercising your human right to choose your own path.

  Yes, leaving stories are heartwarming for us all---thank you for writing yours!
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  6

  Hope deferred

  by life is to short in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  proverbs 13:12 "hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.

  i have heard this before from dave ramesy about finances and how if you can never see an end in sight to get out of debt, if you always are making nothing to live on and getting nowhere with no hope of it ever changing, you just give up.

  thank god's it's friday and oh god it's monday breaks your spirit.. i was reading this book by henry cloud and he expounds on this and says "there are few sicknesses of the heart like hope deferred.

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  Half banana

  As a JW I remember the irony of the Watchtower using the scripture you quote contrasting hope deferred with fulfillment of hope.

  I also remember staying in California about thirty years ago and hearing that the bros around there at the time were getting impatient because of not seeing "the end" as promised by the WTBTS.

  Deferring hope is all the JW org can ever do, it's a big con trick. Each generation of Watchtower believers, and there have been five of them now, forgets that the earlier generations also lived with their hopes permanently deferred.

  People eventually tire of hearing false hopes and I think the org is now ignored because of being a false prophet as the decline in numbers is beginning to show.

  Yes LTS life is too short to waste on useless religion.
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  40

  Uk members ?

  by midnight in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hi anyone from the uk ?

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  Half banana

  I live in Oxfordshire, where do you live midnight?
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  58

  baptised nearly 51 years

  by Phoebe in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  been reading this site for awhile now.

  i have had a long and often tragic life as a jw.

  my story is so long because i'm pretty old :) i feel sad i've been locked in fear and guilt for my entire life.

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  Half banana

  Thank you so much for having the courage to come here and post your sorry tale. You have indeed suffered. The scriptures tend toward keeping people subservient and put upon...this is not living a fulfilling life, it is cultism and imagining some future reward which never comes.

  The pressure is off now that you have no obligation to the religion which keeps you down. When I left I felt an enormous relief from not having to listen to the organisation ever again.

  I hope you find friends outside of the org who are sympathetic human beings and that you can live a normal and happy life with your family---you deserve it!
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  22

  How Do JWs Reconcile Contradictions Between Mt. and Lk. and Their Birth Stories?

  by Saename in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  does anybody know how jehovah's witnesses reconcile the contradictions between the stories of jesus' birth as found in matthew and luke?

  when i was a jehovah's witness, i wasn't even aware of this contradiction; i simply thought that all of it happen—namely that there was a census (luke 2) and the slaughter of the innocents (matthew 2) simultaneously.

  but at the time i didn't know that the census took place in 6 ce and that herod the great died in 4 bce, thus placing those birth stories 10 years apart in time.

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  Half banana

  As far as I am aware (and I'm happy to be corrected) there was never a census in the Roman world at that time, before and after perhaps. The Romans kept very good records and there is none.

  Since the primary documentation of the Christ events were first written in the book called the Gospel of Mark, Luke and Matthew had been included as corroborative evidence although perversely as you point out they are much at odds with each other!

  Luke and Matthew seem to be incorporating their own independent threads of variations on the traditional virgin birth based on pre-christian stories of the "saviour figure". These include the Mithraic legends of Persian origin, based on ancient astrological lore of the birth of the Son of God in the East who were visited by the three wise men (magi or persian astrologers). May I add that the astrological basis for this was that the three stars on the belt of Orion (the three wise men) point down towards Sirius the brightest star, hovering just over the horizon in the east at the winter solstice. I checked the night sky at Christmas and happily confirm this is still the case!

  The "slaughter of the innocents" has no historical record or basis and not even the opponents of Herod subscribed to it. Josephus, a writer of Herod's life and would most certainly have spelled it out, never mentions it. There are however precedents in a number of the earlier saviour myths. Luke's account for example recalls (for a Roman audience) the legend of Romulus and Remus where their births were subject to a Herodian type of decree to slaughter all of the new-borns to deny the heroes a life.

  Whatever the biased Watchtower says in an attempt to synchronise these dubious events; do not believe the Bible as literal truth. It is myth layered upon myth.