Posts by snare&racket

23

You know, I recently believed that Jesus was a cool guy....

by Muddy Waters in

after leaving the jdub world, for awhile it still seemed like the bible was still a holy book, something valuable, worthy, etc., and that the jw religion had just corrupted it and used it to their own ends.. i thought that jesus was like a bhudda, a guy going around taking about peace and love and who exposed the hypocrisy of the religious leaders.. .

but he also said some hurtful things, harmful things, things like dividing up your family, things like whoever had more affection for their family than for him was not worthy of him, to not take time to bury your father but go preaching instead... to send out his followers without any food for the day but to rely on the kindness of others and believe that that kindness and charity expressed gods blessing and favour.... bah!.

i now believe jesus was just another man, saying both good things and stupid things.

snare&racket

Hey slaves.....be faithful and discreet and do your jobs!

What a douchey move

33

Am I part of the Cure or am I part of the disease

by Jon Preston in

jw
friends

so this is the ultimate dilemma.

my wife and i are on the same page.

do we fade, in which all our friends, and i stress friends call us and feel sick and hurt and hurt and we feel guilty; or do we da so we tell the wt what we see as wrong as what we see that lead us to believe its a false religion; or do we df and let me or my wife let them catch us at some wrong doing and stop going to meetigs..... .

snare&racket

p.s. I still get to nod and smile and chat to JW's and family, without being one. DF is a very unecessary procedure. Remember it is all a game and none of it is true, so being DF makes no real difference in the real world, other than it makes it very hard on your family and feiends AND you.

There is no good reason to voluntarily do that.

Fading is easy, far less painfull and it makes it very hard for WT to pin anything on you, you left for legitimate reasons and in good standing! This is also a better way to show people...

A. That they can leave

B. how to leave.

33

Am I part of the Cure or am I part of the disease

by Jon Preston in

jw
friends

so this is the ultimate dilemma.

my wife and i are on the same page.

do we fade, in which all our friends, and i stress friends call us and feel sick and hurt and hurt and we feel guilty; or do we da so we tell the wt what we see as wrong as what we see that lead us to believe its a false religion; or do we df and let me or my wife let them catch us at some wrong doing and stop going to meetigs..... .

snare&racket

p.s. I still get to nod and smile and chat to JW's and family, without being one. DF is a very unecessary procedure. Remember it is all a game and none of it is true, so being DF makes no real difference in the real world, other than it makes it very hard on your family and feiends AND you.

There is no good reason to voluntarily do that.

Fading is easy, far less painfull and it makes it very hard for WT to pin anything on you, you left for legitimate reasons and in good standing! This is also a better way to show people...

A. That they can leave

B. how to leave.

33

Am I part of the Cure or am I part of the disease

by Jon Preston in

jw
friends

so this is the ultimate dilemma.

my wife and i are on the same page.

do we fade, in which all our friends, and i stress friends call us and feel sick and hurt and hurt and we feel guilty; or do we da so we tell the wt what we see as wrong as what we see that lead us to believe its a false religion; or do we df and let me or my wife let them catch us at some wrong doing and stop going to meetigs..... .

snare&racket

Take the reigns and keep hold of them!

Think about it, you have taken their power away and once more ganied autonomy by realising it is all lies.

By opting to DA you legitimise them and give them backpower over your life, due to its consequences.

Like a regrettable mistake, simply walk away from it.....stop poking it.

Snare

22

Right Wing growth in UK and Europe.

by snare&racket in

jw
friends

anyone else finding it troubling?

anyone feel it represents their views?.

is it being reported in usa/australia etc?.

snare&racket

i understand what you mean Cofty, but I worry that the BNP mindset is now voting UKIP.

Racism now has an entrance into UK politics.

Shame on the lib dems and clegg for their sham promises and causing such huge liberal apathy. People are refusing to vote LD ever again after Clegg's selfish choices and promise breaking. This has split the liberal vote and left room for such seat takeovers as seen with UKIP.

I appreciate the CONS have lost mostly to UKIP, but lib dems have pissed all over liberal politics and made the youth look and feel duped.

I dread the future where a negative message of immigration and asylum is held and it is worrying to see the CONS siding up with UKIP ideology in order to plug leaking voters.

UKIP can't have it both ways....immigrants have destroyed the country, but also our country is so good immigrants will come in droves.

Both are in fact a lie.......

If this is the way it is going, I won't be sticking around. A daily mail britain is not one I would want to be a part of.

43

How do you study? What are your methods of memorizing big amount of text?

by will-be-apostate in

jw
friends

i'm having an exam in mineralogy in 20 days and need to learn 120+ pages of content.

i've learned a part of it so far.

i'm just curious how did you/do you study?

snare&racket

"I don't know how medical students stand the stress for so many years. Your college classmates are making more than decent wages. Once I started practicing, I finally had enough money to......"

It's not like that band, in reality our university pals often make more. My nephew on an internship will make as much as me as a doctor. He is doing economics.

This is a huge misconception... the hours are terrible, the work is hard, the pressure is high, the law suits are inevitable, the pay is not great compared to what we could have earned elsewhere....

As lame and cheesy as it sounds.....it really wasn't about the wages. I LOVE my job. I love being around and helping people.

The wages are not terrible, in honesty I only found out how much I will earn very recently. I will be on approx £600 week after tax. I say that calmly but inside, it boggles my mind. I have lived off £3000 for over a year now. I have had no money for nearly ten years. To have money will be bizzare. Also I have free accomodation and no outgoings for the first year. It is not lost on me, as only 12 months ago I couldn't pay rent and hit zero in my bank with exams within weeks. I have no financial safety net and so had to request financial assistance from the uni.

I also grew up very poor. We lived in homeless shelters, lived in a caravan on a farm, our homes were social housing in paticularly poor areas. All my meeting clothes were second hand by enlarge, until I was earning myself. I remember a non JW family friend, who used to be a neighbour, seeing my siblings and I with my parents at a shopping market and they gave my parents money and told them to buy us some cloathes. Goodness knows how we looked. I went to 12 schools in all, as we moved a lot. I mention this because it is relevant to the OP, my education got fuc**d up.

Maybe this seems like a long rsnt, but maybe it explains how I can be so content with what seems like an amazing wage to me. I have spent 33 years worried about money and security. That fear id dissipating for the first time AND I get to do a job I love. I feel like I am the luckiest guy ever. I never saw myself becoming a doctor! I always wanted to be one, but it seemed impossible.... I did badly at school, I was a JW, we were poor.

Education is astounding! It converts effort into social mobility, security and it can also give you a job you love.

sorry for the waffle...

31

Would blood mgmt improvements have been made without firm stand of JW's

by berrygerry in

http://o.canada.com/news/national/blood-transfusions.

thoughts?.

snare&racket

This topic need to be treated very delicately.

I would argue that soldiers on the front line with no access to blood and JW's have both contributed to the drive of reduced blood use. BUT this is misunderstood as JW's bringing new clinical policies through the idea blood is not good for you.

This is the awful truth, we can't and don't take life threatening experementation lightly. We simply don't do it. When we give blood it is because we really think a patient needs it. As with every intervention , there are risks. There are risks to giving oxygen!

The awful truth is...

The JW's have provided a large sample size of patients, that over time have contributed to showing where prophylactic blood, i.e. giving blood before a procedure as a precaution of blood loss... is not as necessary as we once assumed. By providing lives to experiment with, the JW's have lived and died on operating theatre tables all over the world for nearly 100 years now. They have by their lives, highlighted procedures where blood is not indicated.

BUT..........Blood does save lives, all day in hospitals globally. To skew that message is very, very dishonest.

There is NO alternative for blood in 2014, no other means to carry oxygen to the cells of a human being. If someone has lost the blood volume necessary to sustain life, it has to be replaced. If a human has lost the ability to clot, if a human has lost their platelets....they need to be replaced.

But the procedures with risk of bleeding, such as cardiac surgery now are improved in that they don't routinely give blood prophylactically. Some studies credit JW's for this. Some credit the amazing doxtors that have found alternate means of surgery, that have proven to be safer...due to the restraints of a JW patient. But let's be clear, the JW's have not advanced medical research, they have offered up new data with their lives. Where did they live, where did they dide....when saying no to blood.

As the article said...

When someones blood results come back and the haemoglobin (hb) is low..... some people may be sat upright, normal as ever. Some may be pale, short of breath and with a racing heart. Some lose a lot of blood and recover, some lose a little and don't.

To say Brother 'X' had a HB level of 'y' and said no to blood and survived...as we heard so many times in assemblies etc...is inappropriate. 9/10 they add "a doctor told hi that had he had blood, he would likely have died." I can not think of ONE reason why blood would kill you, other than these staements being a terrible over simplification of the risks it has as an intervention and the probability of a mistake of a doctor administering the wrong blood type. These are people putting their life on the line. They have every right to. But it is what it is.

Youths that put god first..... are no longer here. They would in all probability be here now had they said yes to blood. But .....yes indeed we have their data to add to the medical sciences, they likely added to what we know....just as the 60yr old Jw Who survived CABG without blood contributed data......but it is not something I would personally celebrate.

Snare

p.s. Such articles trouble me. It has quoted doctors and science without a clear context and it feels troubling. We don't have much data because we dont experiment with people on death's door. We know it saves lives, but we can't research it as much as we would like for obvious reasons.

We also dont have much research on medication and babies, medication and children or medication and pregnant women. All for obvious ressons. We cant test and experiment with these groups! it is illegal to use these people in drug trials. Imagine a religion that had a doctrine of where experimentation on children, babies and pregnant women was mandatory. Would that increase medical knowledge! Yes.....

You get my point....

5

The Best Ex Jehovah's Witnesses and Apostate Jokes

by Watchtower-Free in

https://www.facebook.com/jwjokes.

http://exjehovahswitnessesjokes.yolasite.com/.

poking fun at the wacky world of the jehovah's witnesses cult.

snare&racket

Why did Jehovah cross the road?

To kill some people in a bad way...... also to buy some beans.

50

Ray Franz - is he REALLY a hero?

by baltar447 in

jw
friends

on one hand, he's enlightnened many to the internal circle jerk that is the governing body (circa the 70s).. but if there's one reason that can be pointed to for the jws becoming full on cult, it's ray franz.

without him leaving in the manner he did, and stirring the pot, they might not have change the rule (retroatively i might add) on shunning of disassociated ones.

they specifically changed that so they could remove him and eliminate his influence.. his actions single handedly have created the situation where we have to fade, evade, leave marriages, say goodbye to family, just because we don't buy the jw bullsh!t anymore.

snare&racket

I can't help but think that anyone that becomes a GB member has to turn a blind eye to serious wrongdoing at the top. He of course admitted as much in bis book. He ignored much for a long time, watched people suffer for a long time. He even had a hand to play in rules he knew hurt people.

We have to remember Franz was 'anointed', he claimed god had personally communicsted to him that he was special, that he was going to heaven.

This I can never respect.

But I will always stand for someone who puts their conscience above all else. He gave it all up, became an enemy to the whole organisation, because he eventually had let to much go, he could not pretend, could not lie anymore. He stood by what he felt was true.

This I do respect.

It is a difficult question you ask. He had a part to play in me leaving, but being an atheist, I believe there was no god to tell him he was special or anointed.

So I am left with just another religious man who tells untruths.

Tough question.

609

What is spirit, exactly?

by Viviane in

i've always wondered that.

recently i asked that question on another thread and didn't really get ananswer.

cofty made an excellent point that we often hear what it isn't, but that really isn't useful.. so, what is it?

snare&racket

I think thousands of years ago, they assumed there was a first man and woman, makes sense, you can't have people without an original man and woman.

Of course this is not correct in reality.

How did these people come to be? Well god made them from the earth. Then he interacted with them so that they came to life. He used his spirit to breathe life into them.

Dead people don't breathe, thousands of years ago, it would be logical to assume life is connected to breathing. Remember they had no concept of oxygen, celluar respiration etc .... it was just something humans and animals did,until they died.

All of this ignorance led to this idea of god using a force to introduce breath into inanimate forms to become alive.

I have no opinion on its use today or whether it will survive as a term.

I do think that whilst there are people that believe a spirit exists, that it helps us breathe....... we have a lot of work to do.