hi all,.
a friend has a jw funeral coming up and wants some input if possible, so a copy of the latest outline would be invaluable to him when he talks to the elders, another question he and his brother, neither now jw's, wish to give a eulogy, is this allowed ?.
any advice will be greatly appreciated..
A eulogy might go:
"Fred was a wonderful man, he wasn't the slightest bit interested in his religion in fact he hated it but as an example of what a good chap he was, he went along to the meetings to please Mavis..."
An ordinary church funeral could cope with this truthfulness but not the JW cult.
what can one person do to save as many people as possible from this organisation?.
youtube videos?.
mail shots?.
One avenue is for awake elders to take as many friends with them as they exit. Two awake elders working together could probably take out half the congregation if they played it right. I believe seventy or so left the Lethbridge, Alberta congregation after the departure of James Penton.
make the taking of blood transfusion a conscience matter since the bible forbids just the eating of blood.. have youth programs for the congregations like basketball teams, baseball teams, etc.. still not allow the celebration of christmas and easter because of the pagan origins, but allow birthdays, mother and father day celebrations.
the cart people currently love baby showers to celebrate the birth of a baby but then they can't celebrate the birth date of the same baby one year later.. only have the best speakers give the talks on sundays.
too many monotone, just read the outline speakers now.. drop the members giving talks during the clam meetings.. allow the jdubs to count time to visit the sick, help the elderly with chores, to visit members in nursing homes.. not have meetings for service on saturday mornings.
Why would anyone want to perpetuate a life-suppressing toxic cult?
i'm sure many others noted in yesterday's news feeds, that scientists deciphering the dna of the skeleton remains of a man thought to have died some 10,000 years ago in the south of england, have presented him as:.
as blue-eyed (now that's quite english) but as dark skinned.
and, that's not very english, to the horror of many.. (link: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/ancient-face-cheddar-man-reconstructed-dna-spd/ ).
The likelihood is that dark skin in the climate and latitude of southern England would be unsuccessful as a dominant trait in the population of the time. Before farming was invented humans lived on the very edge of survival, so anything favourable to surviving up to breeding age (teenage) would be passed on as a helpful trait to the species and any unfavourable traits would be bred out of the population.
Dark skin protects from strong sunlight but does not encourage the absorption of vitamin D as pale skin does, so Cheddar man’s family under these conditions would likely result in contracting rickets with leg deformities, due to vitamin D deficiency. This would greatly hamper a hunter’s success in the field. With limited information about his contemporaries we can’t know how typical the blue eyed swarthy man was, although his DNA clearly remains a component of north-western Europeans. However when farming and cheese arrived on the scene dark skinned people could happily have survived under grey northern skies. Cheddar cheese arrived in the 12th century by the way.
Since at 10,000 years ago it was not long past the time of the recent ice age, you could still walk from Denmark across Doggerland to England. Mammoths would have just recently become extinct on your path but you might have encountered giant elk with formidable two meter wide antlers. There would have been pioneer travellers from the east exploring new living space on the western edge of Europe.
There were however earlier human residents in Britain at various sites so this guy is by no means the oldest Briton. There had been Neanderthals living in the caves at Cresswell in Derbyshire followed by modern humans who carved the walls there around 15,000 years ago in fact the last ice age was the first one which Homo sapiens heroically endured. Strangely Neanderthals, who seem to have been cold adapted, died out before the coldest episode began. The average annual temperature in Southern England 18,000 years ago was -3 Centigrade! (“Ice wedge formations” only occur at or below this temperature and I have seen a number of them locally in pits and quarries in Oxfordshire.)
For the record, The 'Red Lady' of Paviland in Goat cave on the Gower peninsular, near Swansea South Wales, is the red ochre coloured skeletal remains of what we now know to be young man who died about 33,000 years ago.
Cheddar man’s forebears appear to have come from the Near East. In Turkey at this time the Mesolithic nomads were building their remarkable sculptured temple like structures at Gobekli Tepe.
so at the phd today with my wife and me, and in slowly getting to the heart of matters (like peeling an onion if you ask me), the dialogue in part went like this: .
phd: if it came down to it, would you take a bullet in the head instead of giving up membership in your organization?
wife: absolutely, i would die for my faith.
Mentalclarity puts a finger on an important point; it is a matter of enormous pride which a JW holds internally that they would die for their faith. Pride equates with valuing something and can have a positive feedback even if its actually delusional.
This is related to the fact that JW religion compensates for other things which people find missing in their life.
A witness might think "I have a crummy job and delinquent children but I have the promise of everlasting life if I remain loyal to the org". Religion is a private anchorage point in an unstable world for many people. By bringing to the surface the questionable nature of her beliefs it is likely you are threatening your wife's imagined ticket to paradise and she will perceive it as you trying to deprive her of that vital emotional anchorage.
By you stopping following the JW nonsense it will only make her ten times more determined, and I speak from experience as I think I may have mentioned in an earlier post.
Therefore If you value your wife, I would suggest you quit the criticism of her faith and look to see if you can see why she so desperately clings to the 'certainty' of JW beliefs. It may be something you can help her with, for example the inability to recognise that we all without exception die. Does she fear death? Perhaps it's related to not having some other things in life which she is missing out on such as self confidence, the lack of which leads to depending on the religious claims of others. Self confidence and self fulfillment are subtly if not overtly suppressed in JW thinking. By helping her develop her own identity and confidence in her own abilities she may feel less inclined to rely on the org.
I know its easy to say things and a lot harder to resolve deep seated emotional and psychological difficulties and differences-- but if there are genuine good intentions, a common goal or at least common ground to start with, progress must be achievable.
i recently attended a non jw funeral at a local church.
during the service, a couple of friends/relatives of the deceased eloquently spoke for a few minutes about the deceased with some of their fond memories and gave heartfelt, respectful tributes.. would i ( a non jw) be given a few minutes to speak at either of my jw parents funerals at the kingdom hall ?.
i guess i already know the answer, but if the answer is "no", then why not and how would they hide the heartlessness of refusing ?
Redundantcartworker (What a good name!) I really do think that kh funerals bring out the very worst in the JW religion. How would they hide their refusal? They would probably claim that the focus of the funeral is the hope the deceased enjoyed. . . in other words it's just to promote themselves.
Their true heartlessness is the result of the leadership never trusting any creative or personalised expressions given by individuals in the congregations.
I think it boils down to simply a matter of the GB needing to maintain total control at any cost, even at the cost of hurting individual's feelings. To permit or encourage private viewpoints would create heresy and splintering, the two most dreaded threats to a high control religion. Everything they do is geared to maintaining their iron grip on members' minds and activities and that means conform or be punished.
in the context of speaking about human teaching and its teachers (mathew 15:8, 9) jesus said: “they are blind guides.
if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.” (mathew 15:14).
its application need not be too limited because what is being subjected to our senses is very limited.
The first century Palestine was a Roman province and benefitted from most of the mod cons which came with Romanisation; roads, education, sewerage and baths etc. The Jews were at a low ebb and heartily influenced by the prevailing Classical civilisation with its focus on power, control and citizenship, they were urbanised and secularised. Not at all the picture we get from the Bible!
The saviour cults including the Jesus cult were irritating the state authorities because of their disregard for the liberal Roman religious attitude which consisted of respecting a plurality of gods. The Jews being monotheist helped in saviour cult recruitment and especially with a Jewish saviour figure at the centre as opposed to a Roman or Greek yet they were considered a threat to stability for persuading many uneducated peasants to their anti-state viewpoints with what the Romans considered the most frivolous claim, namely the coming to life of a traditional saviour hero. This idea in the Jesus cult was a new departure and a low point in the history of logic.
When we have Jesus' words referred to, they could not be from the Bible character, had he actually lived it was a generation after his purported death when the writing attributed to him took place. There never was a contemporary record of his presence as a miracle working god-man in the Roman world let alone a record of verbatim speech.
The words attributed to Jesus were the writings probably in the second century which would have been from the minds of the leaders of the Jesus Christ cult. (That is in contrast with the Mithras Christ cult or the Dionysus Christ cult) The "blind leading the blind"as many clever figures of speech would have been in circulation in the literate Roman world and in that milieu of religious sects publicly declaring their wares and seeking converts, such rhetoric would have been ammunition to put down traditional religious views which had become ossified.
King David and Jesus are literary characters not real beings, Heraclitus was right, ideas grow out of earlier ideas.
my name is jacobi, i am a born-in but mentally out for more or less a decade at this point (although it was cradual) and about 40yo.
i don't want to say a lot about my family, but it is a mix of going-through-the-motions, semi-actives (but mentally in), some who have left for a few reasons and one really depressed pioneer.
because people fade in and out i have managed to slide under the radar and i keep up apperances of not being all-out apostate but i completed my fade about years ago (it also helped i moved to another part of the country).. i might rub some of you the wrong way because of my views on different things like politics.. i am not a trump supporter at all and neither are most people in my country.
Welcome Jacobi, glad you made the big leap from being a JW zombie to being a normal human.
As for your views, controversy always makes the site more interesting, remember it is only in repressive cults where disagreement is forbidden.
rolf foruli, scandinavian academic and watchtower apologist, has come out with a video at times quoting figures on mental disease from the 1930's and 40's, in support of his allegation that the rate of mental problems and depression is actually only a third of what it is among the entire population.. there are numerous holes in his presentation.
for one, when jw's are da'ed or df'ed they're no longer considered jw's and only active jw's are part of the results.
those who were victimized and suffered the most mental trauma as jw's aren't even considered in the studies he mentions.. watch his video: "the mental health of jehovah´s witnesses" r. furuli, on youtube:.
From Wikipedia on R Furuli;
In a 2004 issue of Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Lester L. Grabbe, professor of theology at the University of Hull, said of Furuli's study: "Once again we have an amateur who wants to rewrite scholarship. ... F. shows little evidence of having put his theories to the test with specialists in Mesopotamian astronomy and Persian history."[5]
Furuli here in the mental health analysis of JWs, is speaking outside of his expertise not that this automatically makes his information incorrect but his record shows that he is prepared to use his academic qualifications to promote his religion regardless of factual and peer recognized evidence.
With no further knowledge of his data on mental health, it would nevertheless be significant to point out that Furuli's first MA on Babylonian texts in 1995 coincided with the Watchtower's reappraisal of the failure of their pivotal "1914 generation" and the consequent 'excuse' of overlapping generations.
The Watchtower at that time would have been desperate to find an academic prepared to use "theocratic warfare" and support the unsupportable evidence for 607 bce as the fall of the siege of Jerusalem instead of 587 bce.
Clearly they found one in Furuli.
i couldn't bleedin' well resist it.
there were these 2 jobo blokes standing behind a jobot trolley.
jobo, 'what's that?'.
Diogenesister, I am greatly relieved to realise we have a safety net for our species a mere 20 light years away. Phew!
Punky I was out on the town last night (went to see Amadeus at the National Theatre--stupendo) and outside Embankment station were two young men engrossed in talking to each other with "JW org" tattooed on their foreheads, perhaps not but you know how it gives that impression. The thing was there were hundreds of thousands of passers by but not within spitting distance of the JWs who were backed up against a wall in a corner with their trolley propaganda.
No doubt they imagine they are "giving a witness even if no one listens" but for goodness sake no one even looked their way let alone listened. I suppose this is the normal futility of JW org preaching and how they work today.
