on a scale of 1 to 100, i would put the lds in the high 90s, and the witnesses at about minus 10.. these days (well, around here at least) one encounters the mormon missionaries all over the place.
if they are not knocking at your door, they are approaching you out in the street.
of late, this has been happening all the bloody time!.
8M JWs do not preach. I would say an average of 3-4M actually go in service, most of that these days is carts and letter writing for 1-2h/week if they’re “spiritually strong” or per month if they’re your average witness.
Mormons work 60-80h/week during their missionary service.
i was following a few threads in reddit from current pimo jws complaining about local announcements regarding halls being short on their per publisher "rent payments".
third gen and i have been out pomo for a while...so how much is this charge now?
could this be part of the recent push to get people to "come back" or get re-instated...if it even is online and 15 minutes of service per month?
That’s roughly $50/month + local expenses + personal expenses (suit, briefcase, transport), we are easily looking at $1000-1500/y/pp
Family of 5, no college, …
in the march 2025 jw broadcast david splane in his morning worship talk mentioned that "some thought" that armageddon would come 40 years after 1914. such statements are usually meant to shift the blame of their own false predictions on to their members for speculating.
however, i was unable to find anything in print showing that such a thing was indeed taught by the society.
was this really a thing?.
@finishedmystery: that’s exactly how 18xx, 19xx, 1975 and 2000 was treated. Everybody believed it (there are even recordings of it being announced at conventions) and then when nothing happens it was “a small group” of people being misled but “not me”. Cognitive dissonance at its best, you cannot find a single witness that would’ve admitted “they” believed in 1975 after the fact, hell, I set the goal of 2000 myself as a child (if the end hasn’t come by the time I’m an adult) and then completely ignored the promise I made for myself because a pioneer girl made my baptism a precondition for her and then she still rejected me in favor of a ministerial servant. I did try to leave after that by getting a worldly girl, then I met another JW girl, a little redhead that wasn’t too strict with the rules… I was really thinking of another kind of salvation and paradise back then.
https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/1jb6nv6/jw_vs_norway_march_2025_from_jan_frode_nilsen/.
the verdict is out.
after full understanding and decision by the state administrator, full confirmation in the appeal case by the ministry of children and family affairs, three victories in the injunction case, a full victory in the district court, we now faced a loss in the court of appeal.
With all the recent European cases, the courts are violating their own laws. These laws are being used to persecute some groups (but not about these matters, the other cases are mostly around prayer in public), when it comes to JW the WTBTS has consistently been able to persuade the politicians and judges not to convict them on clear written law. The only other groups that have consistently evaded the laws as written is Muslims.
My opinion is that at various levels, the WTBTS’ pretending to have an arms-length relationship and investments with organization like the UN, shady corporations like Rand Corporation and various trusts which do work on behalf of the UN and WEF and off course the influence they get in local politics through their real estate empire seems to be paying off for them.
The thing is the WTBTS is too small for major scrutiny but big enough to be able to “convince” a few politicians and judges to look the other way, especially at a local level.
ancient history may be revised based on new dna discoveries.
https://www.wsj.com/science/the-ancient-horsemen-who-created-the-modern-world-ba4b314d?st=mgaryn&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink.
science.
I like the story, however this is sensationalist science reporting and not really what the research says.
People in that region of the world share a complex DNA imprint with European, Asian, and Middle Eastern populations, resulting in a mixed ancestry that persists to this day.
Yes you can find a trace of a tribe in the modern European population, you can also find traces of tribes from other places.
Autosomal DNA only goes back a few generations (about 200 years) at which point nobody for sure can tell who your parents were. Mitochondrial DNA can tell to some extent your matrilineal ancestry for a bit over 1000 years. 8000 years ago, forget about it, the amount of DNA you inherit (or do not) is so small beyond a few dozen generations you cannot distinguish except for large region provided they were isolated from each other not too long ago.
So yes, we did inherit some DNA which travelled around the world but you cannot distinguish ancestry with any accuracy, it is equally likely an aboriginal tribe from Australia or a shark species has a similar genetic mutation that means nothing in the grand scheme of your DNA.
Whether anyone specifically inherited that mutation or whether this is even the same mutation is also impossible to say. It is entirely possible that over the years we have lost and then re-evolved that specific sequence, that’s how small the sample is.
From a research perspective, I would give this a “interesting enough to support your PhD thesis”, not “hypothesis proven”
locally, in northern california i have seen/heard a drop in jw and mainstream church attendance especially in person attendance.
(exception: a new creepy local new-age charismatic/pentecostal group: "bethel church" 11,000 and growing mega church(kundalini yoga/sex combined with prosperity gospel, trumpism, guns, rock music, dancing, glitter, speaking in tongues, and faith healing).. for me this paragraph sums it up regarding jehovah's witnesses: " ...smith described organized religion to me as having become a “polluted” idea in the american mainstream, because of the publicity around sex abuse scandals and financial malfeasance in many different faiths in the ’80s and ’90s as millennials came of age.
“the scandals violated most of the virtues believed to make religion good,” smith wrote.
Christian church attendance has been declining for certain types of churches. There we see a decline of 30% or more in the past few decades, however Atheism hasn’t become much more prevalent, only increasing by 2%. Question is where did those people go. Around here most seem to go to non-denominational churches that aren’t politically affiliated and aren’t counted towards a major religious group.
There has been a notable increase in church attendance among millennials, with 39% reporting weekly attendance, up from 21% in 2019. Especially the traditional Latin Catholic Mass has seen a major bump.
So the numbers don’t really square up, these old traditional media survey/pollsters aren’t connecting with the majority of people and you basically end up polling an increasingly irrelevant portion of the population.
years ago rick fearon hosted on his six screens podcast a person identified as "johnny the bethelite" who talked about goings-on in watchtower headquarters.. johnny talked about the experiments with cart work.. johnny talked about pedophiles and child pornography in jw headquarters.. people claimed "johnny" was a fraud.
a fake.
cart work is everywhere.
I don’t think Johnny ever said something most of us already didn’t know. Cart work was being rolled out (lol) when I was still “in” they just didn’t want people to make it their main priority. Child abuse is as old as the organization itself, the fact there aren’t more investigations is the real problem.
I mean, at one point didn’t he say the JW were connecting their headquarter sites with tunnels and bunkers - not sure how many millions they have, but 30 miles of underground tunnels at $200M-2B/mile and that’s just two of their sites and from experience, the bedrock there is about the equivalent of marble.
let's start the ball rolling with two connected claims.. the religion of jehovah’s witnesses is the one true religion.
all other religions are satanic, including all the churches of christendom..
The name itself Jehovah’s Witnesses betrays their aggrandizement.
They are witnesses of God himself, which is scripturally the role reserved for the Messiah.
i think i may be moving on shortly.
i officially joined this web-site 12 years ago as pimo about to exit the organisation.
i had spent about a year before that, as just a none commenting member.
Good for you, many do find their way out if you can cut ties completely. I was hoping to be on that way, but then I seem to keep getting pulled into the painful and disastrous results of their policies through close and extended family that are still ‘in’.
I’m probably going to be around here for another decade or so, hopefully after that I can make that same transition and just have it as a bad history.
asking jehovah’s witnesses to interpret specific passages is a great way to demonstrate their interpretive abuse.
got any clear examples?.
Their flawed interpretation starts at Genesis 1:2 as they already rewrote that chapter to fit their theology and it continues until Revelation.
Genesis 1:2 NWT says and God’s active force was moving about over the surface of the waters.
Whereas the Bible says: the Spirit of God (a separate entity within the Godhead) was hovering over the waters.
Given their re-interpretation of the deity of both God, Holy Spirit and Son (Jesus according to Christians), they basically reject all scripture and simply pick and choose select verses that seem to fit (and even then they may have multiple interpretations of the same verse or use the same verse to support multiple beliefs).
