not really a scandal, but serena williams doing the crip walk on national tv wtf .
@liam: your experience depends strongly on your congregation. Even back in the day, the foreign language congregations were like that, but there are plenty of others that are still very strict.
Also, you are speaking as an inactive youngster, once you get deeper into it, get older, speak against the organization, commit a “sin”, your experience will change quickly.
not really a scandal, but serena williams doing the crip walk on national tv wtf .
If you don’t see what the problem is (according to JW) perhaps read the lyrics:
the watchtower—study edition | march 2025. keep walking by faith.
7 note how javier, a brother in south america, saw the need to walk by faith.
he says: “i had applied for a prestigious job that would double my salary and provide considerable personal satisfaction.” however, javier had the deep desire to pioneer.
The thing with part time jobs is that they are very few and far between and often unstable. It’s for companies that don’t need a full time person to do some menial task. It’s mostly intended as a “side job” like Uber/Lyft to complement your full time job and work a little harder to make some extra money while you are young, so it often doesn’t have the same benefits and protections, especially outside the US.
As others have said, most of the “millions now living” from the cover of that magazine have already died and if you were a child like me when that magazine was published, you’re now having children of your own entering the workforce and maybe you even have grandchildren. If I had done that, worked part time for all these years, I couldn’t afford kids, I couldn’t afford a house, I couldn’t afford savings for pensions, I wouldn’t have learned on the job as I have. Keep em poor and stupid.
so i am having these discussions about children etc and there are witness ties and family history in these discussions.
i got the feeling having this discussion that they seemed to imply somehow it was ‘the parent’s fault’ for having a miscarriage.
whether it was domestic violence, or the mother did something wrong themselves.
@biahi: this was official doctrine because you run into logistical issues resurrecting the pre-born into the womb. They changed that to “we don’t know how but Jehovah may come up with a solution” pretty recently, I would say late 90s, early 2000s after test tube babies and frozen embryos were common.
paula white said, “yes, jesus did live in egypt for three-and-a-half years.
but he was not an illegal immigrant.
if he had broken the law then he would have been sinful and he would not have been our messiah.” well, there you go.
Well, yeah, Rome was pretty well known for its open immigration:
But in the fifth century the Romans lost control of the immigration process. Armies were sent to the Middle East to counter a hostile, newly invigorated Persia, leaving the West open. The Germanic tribes were allowed in, but once inside the empire they were not assimilated but retained their cultural and political identities, eventually combining to form armies within its borders that the Romans could no longer overcome.
(Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Pan Books, 2005, 158ff.)
so i am having these discussions about children etc and there are witness ties and family history in these discussions.
i got the feeling having this discussion that they seemed to imply somehow it was ‘the parent’s fault’ for having a miscarriage.
whether it was domestic violence, or the mother did something wrong themselves.
Forgot all about the Bathsheba story, or the story where the priest gives basically an abortion (magic potion) to people that are under suspicion of adultery and if you are an adulterer, you have a miscarriage, if not the child survives. These weren’t backwater witnesses though, this is educated, relatively middle class in the city.
But looking through some of the articles, I can see where people may get the impression:
Note here that the extended story then basically says God killed the babyDivorce, unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, loss of trust or respect—all of these may be the sad, unavoidable consequences of sin. Recall that even after forgiving David for his sins in connection with Bath-sheba and Uriah, Jehovah did not protect David from the disastrous consequences that followed - 2 Samuel 12:9-12
Or how about this gem:And Jehovah struck the child whom U·riʹah’s wife had borne to David, and he became sick …
On the seventh day the child died
In this particular case of David and Bath-sheba neither of them had a right to the child and so there was no injustice in their being deprived of it. Besides, as an uncircumcised, unnamed infant it had not as yet developed any personality pattern or consciousness so as to appreciate life.
so i am having these discussions about children etc and there are witness ties and family history in these discussions.
i got the feeling having this discussion that they seemed to imply somehow it was ‘the parent’s fault’ for having a miscarriage.
whether it was domestic violence, or the mother did something wrong themselves.
Children, enemies (video on jw.org) from 25:00-25:30 you can see the governing body address children as enemies of God
Think about it - we're not born as friends of God.
Because we're born as sinful offsprings of Adam.
Actually if you think about it, we are born as enemies of god.
Sometimes you hear people say of a little baby, " look at that little angel".
But more accurate would be to say - "look at that little enemy of god."
i vaguely knew that the pinata had some kind of pagan origin and i assumed that having a pinata at a jw party was frowned on by the b0rg.
however, despite its blatant pagan origins, apparently i was wrong.. the 22 september, 2003 awake states that the aztecs would smash a clay pot full of 'treasures' in honour of the god huitzilopochtli's birthday.
spanish missionaries simply switched the pot for the pinata during the christian conversion of the aztecs.
Birthday’s weren’t really celebrated in history, except for really rich or powerful people. Children’s birthdays originated in early 1800s Germany and spread. This was much similar to Christmas and other celebrations for kids, it practically was the Industrial Revolution that caused the practice to spread, suddenly people were wealthy enough and kids didn’t have to work enough to make it affordable.
so i am having these discussions about children etc and there are witness ties and family history in these discussions.
i got the feeling having this discussion that they seemed to imply somehow it was ‘the parent’s fault’ for having a miscarriage.
whether it was domestic violence, or the mother did something wrong themselves.
So I am having these discussions about children etc and there are Witness ties and family history in these discussions. I got the feeling having this discussion that they seemed to imply somehow it was ‘the parent’s fault’ for having a miscarriage. Whether it was domestic violence, or the mother did something wrong themselves.
I knew my grandmother would express that and back in the day, that was kind of implied as well, but I thought that was mostly in the past. We never got the support we needed from the ‘elders’ but I always kind of put it on - well, they’re not experienced or trained to do grief counseling. But then now I’m hearing the same arguments still from a ‘younger’ generation, implications that it was something we must have done wrong.
I am just disgusted by the idea that in this day and age, somehow your kids die before they are born, it is because you sin and not some unknown or medical condition.
Anyone else grow up with that idea or stories you know in the same vein?
the jws haven't been to my door for a while, but i don't doubt that they'll turn up eventually*.
(i saw easter eggs in the supermarket yesterday, so "memorial" season is fast approaching 🙄).
what's a good question to ask, to get the ball rolling?.
Are you here for the orgy?
Seriously, unless you get some old geezer, you probably won’t find much substance anymore. They really flattened everything out to a few soundbites.
The times of “deep study” is over, what we knew as the “good” JW doesn’t exist anymore. You are basically a sales drone with a script, go off script and they will try to placate with a standard answer, ignore it, or even consider it a threat and hurry away.
I had one lady call my phone, within minutes she asked whether I was getting information from non-JW websites, she tried to pass it onto an elder, when I pressed her for her opinion, she said for more information to submit a request online and ended the call.
The people standing at the literature stand also have a scripted answer to any questions, want to know more, fill out the form on JW.org.
