sitting in the service of my old church, i am reminded of the power of corporate worship, the repetition of key phrases.
one reaches a peculiar estatic state, intentional i am sure.
i find myself wishing the congregation would join in a huge line dance to seal the experience.
The idea of collective energy.
The law of intention.
Healing touch.
Placebo medications that work
There are many things that we see have some kind of effect. We just dont understand the principles at work some of the time.
That doesnt make them any less real or useful or powerful.
A saying I like:
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. - Bertrand Russell
sorry,couldn't think of a better title for this post,without it being long.. i was thinking this morning,if ex-jws, who were born into the group less likely to join another religion after leaving.
vs. the witnesses who belonged to a church before joining the religion.. from my own prespective,being raised a witness,i have no intention of joining any religion.
and it seems that born-ins are less likely to join a religion after leaving the cult.. in my own experience,i think it's religious burn-out to tell the truth.
I think JWs have pretty much ruined religion for me.
while i'm glad i found this site, it has also crumbled to bits everything i've believed in my whole life.
i feel like the certainty, magic and wonder has gone out of my life.
this has left a huge hole in my soul.
For me, the WTBTS robbed me of the magic and wonder of life. They reduced this universe and our earth down to nearly nothing.
I would have to say that is/was true of me also. I am more aware now that I always had these "secret" ideas...
ideas about the spiritual nature of well........nature! Animals and so on. I have never liked the way their role is downplayed by Jws. Maybe it was too much fear of that talking snake that caused that? I dont know!
None of my ideaswere all that weird or special - just ideas that fell OUTSIDE the JW ideology. For example, I have never thought that Jehovah would destroy most people at Armageddon.
You learn early to keep this type of thing to yourself however.
So thanks for that link FlyingHighNow.
while i'm glad i found this site, it has also crumbled to bits everything i've believed in my whole life.
i feel like the certainty, magic and wonder has gone out of my life.
this has left a huge hole in my soul.
Purrpurr, I think for some of us where we are right now is as bad as it gets.
That means better is ahead of us.
I am picking up a lot of "trust the process of looking and examining" in what people are writing here. There is comfort in that I think.
One of the things that I have been thinking a lot about lately is the gap in the JW timeline between when the apostles died off and the resurgence of the late 1800's and Pastor Russell's teachings.
Where was God then? Where/who were his "people"? The JW answer to that is very sketchy and lacking in substance. Whenever they provide sketchy answers to honest questions, it has been my experience that it is because there isn't an answer that fits nicely with other things they are proposing.
In this case, it doesn't fit well with the teaching that God has always had a people for his name. That God has always worked with a "group. From that we are expected to take a logical (?) leap to believe Abel was Gods "group" in his time. Then Noah, at least Noah had an actual group (his family) thus making the Abel connection not be questioned as to why exactly he was a group. Then on and on it goes tying in with Abraham and the Jewish nation etc.
But it gets very blurry after the apostles died off and the Bible was basically considered "written" doesn't it?
So as I said above, I have been thinking about those individuals who lived then. How did they feel about God? Not just the Anglo European view point (which molded the American viewpoint) but people everywhere?
What did they believe? What did they comfort themselves with? What gave them hope?
I am not a well studied person but I do have the ability to think. To peel away emotion and look at facts and then add the emotion back in where appropriate.
I have read long enough here to know that this doesn't have to automatically result in my becoming a jaded angry person who barely believes in anything outside myself.
Three are many warm, caring and highly intelligent thinking minds here. It does make me feel hopeful that I can get to where they are.
In the organization, there were so many times I was told "you think too much." Or, "you need to trust in Jehovah more." So the concept of thinking and it not being wrong or scary and where to place my trust (at the moment I am standing in one place, holding my trust in my hands with no where to put it just yet) is baffling me greatly.
in the last year or so, many bible passages that i used to strongly and confidently apply to non-jws, began to seem to apply to jws.
this change in my thinking was shocking and disturbing.
i can best describe the feeling by comparing it to the feeling i got in 1981 when i watched the movie dead and buried starring james farentino.. in that movie there are murders committed in a small town by dead people reanimated by a doctor doing experiments.
Proverbs 6:
6:16 There are six things that God hates ,
even seven things that are an abomination to him:
6:17 haughty eyes , a lying tongue ,
and hands that shed innocent blood ,
6:18 a heart that devises wicked plans ,
feet that are swift to run to evil ,
6:19 a false witness who pours out lies ,
and a person who spreads discord among family members .
The uneven application of the blood doctrine and the disfellowshipping policy alone make the JWs qualify.
The lack of love among the elders extending downward. The amount of judging that goes on among the flock towards one another. The feeling that JWs are "better" than worldy people.
I could go on but we all get the idea...
while i'm glad i found this site, it has also crumbled to bits everything i've believed in my whole life.
i feel like the certainty, magic and wonder has gone out of my life.
this has left a huge hole in my soul.
purrpurr, your post really spoke to me.
I am in a similar place as you and dis-member. Merely taking care of myself is not going to satisfy me long term because I am a very big picture person.
Just volunteering isnt going to cut it either (at least long term) because I have been volunteering for years and most of that is a "feel good" hit and as temporary and corrupt in its power structure as JWs or other organized groups.
I am trying to break it down in to 2 questions at the moment.
1) is there a God whose creative touch I see around me?
2) Does he have a people, or are they scattered around the earth and not organized in any form of group?
The second question is the one I am focused on right now.
Jehovahs Witnesses cause too much pain to people and there is an abundance of evidence that they are NOT spirit lead.
That much I have found to be true.
So back to you purrpurr, the fact that you can feel (and are aware of) the state of magic and wonder, the fact that they exist at all, means you can believe in them with confidence.
If magic and wonder were non existent, you wouldnt be able to concieve of their presence.
As for the certainty of what you thought you knew, better things will replace the more elementary beliefs you formerly had. Perhaps that is part of the magic?
Wishing you and all of us, a peaceful place to arrive at.
i was feeling a little melancholy earlier this week and i decided to start reading wt literature again, just to see what was new and improved.
and it seems that, as has consistently been the case, the more i read of the literature, the more i see that i made the right choice to leave.. the first chapter goes into explaining what the kingdom is, then it looks like they must've essentially cut and pasted from the recent wt study articles about the 'harvest' illustration and about the two groups of anointed = one generation, but there's a third group of anointed who aren't part of 'this generation' (but, i imagine, probably will be someday, i mean, if two groups decades apart in age can be part of one generation, why not three?).
it's interesting, looking at it again after all this time.
So does this mean that when people born in '92 are dead that another explanation will be needed?
What then?
humans that just have something about them
Those are the people that interest me the most Data Dog!
And Minimus,
I would have guessed that about you AND I must agree (just on a mental level from knowing you here)
Minimus is a perfect ten.
there are interesting claims in the watctower, august 2014:.
2 today, jehovah guides his people by means of the bible, his holy spirit, and the congregation.
(acts 9:31; 15:28; 2 tim.
very well written post opusdei.
I havent seen the Aug article yet but I do appreciate your well thought out addressing of it.
I am a 7 on a good day and a 2 on a bad day...
shall I average that out?
I am healthy though and I heard that as we age health becomes beauty....
Im banking on that.
