saw the news story on jw.org this morning about all the help they are sending to congo after flooding there.
yay for them!
oh wait!.
The JW org have to blow their own trumpet since no one else will. But why give to the Congo? Why, it is their star performer in terms of publisher increase!
Not surprising they have a resonance with this country as it stands at the seventh from bottom in the league of backward countries, on the verge of civil war and therefore ideal new JW growth territory.
When things look hopeless the Watchtower is like clutching a straw to save a drowning man.
gorby went to the kh for family reasons today.. and landed right away middle in a pseudo history watchtower article.
just that aspect of the jw belief he is so sensative about.. so 1918 and 1919 are changed with one mark of a pencil.
the argument of change was in the past the argument of the doctrine.
Why bother about WT events from a century ago?
I guess it may be irrelevant to the rank and file but for the GB it is like a holy dried pea buzzing around the insides of their empty skulls desperately searching for some justification for their existence.
All they can do is mythologize their history to make it sound as if something significant was happening in the early days of the religion. ("Came out of Babylon the great" = portentous nonsense)
As it happens there isnât any justification for their existence. The reason for starting the Watchtower cult was to announce that by 1914 Godâs kingdom will have made the earth a paradise. This means their sell by date has passed by 103 years.
Wouldn't it be fun if they were honest and sincere and were able to openly discuss how terribly wrong they have been right from the start!
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?.
I think resigning would we one option and leave the others to sort the mess out.
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?.
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 âcaringâ all along?
Change your beliefs with sudden ânew lightâ?
Or what?
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.
Thanks for posting a1. Hostile bunch here sometimes!
As we depart the grip of the JW religion we drop the old âimperativesâ 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 âpavlovianâ 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 isnât. 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 âTruthâ and on escaping from this trap we often imagined there was another body of doctrines which serves as an alternative and monolithic âTruthâ. 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. Itâs 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 .
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.
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?
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.. .
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I live in Oxfordshire, where do you live midnight?
