my mind was wandering last night, and i though of this as a reply to a jw.. "oh, your the people who believe 8 men in brooklyn, ny are directing the world's only true religion.".
the sentence is a fact that they can't deny, but clearly shows delusion.
any other one sentence "stingers"?.
"Will you promise that the WTBTS will never change a doctrine from this point forward?" They will have to answer a resounding "No, I can't do that" to that question.
Then come back with " Then you are admitting that some of the things you believe, right now "could" be wrong, beliefs that you use to make life and death decisions could in fact be wrong. You could lose your life or the life of your child due to blindly following faulty beliefs"
NJY
from jw.org (while waiting for new bible to download, i clicked on the link for "christian," which asks the following question...).
"are we christians?
we are christians, for the following reasons.
SFPW,.said,
I consider elder, CO, pioneer, etc. more or less labels, not necessarily titles. Furthermore, nobody in the congregation is more elevated than anyone else in the congregation. We all just have different roles and different responsibilities or privileges. A CO can't tell you what to do and neither can an elder, neither can the GB or the Writing Department through the literature. The only thing they can do is provide Bible based counsel or suggestions that we'll take into consideration out of humility and recognition that they're where they are because Jehovah's spirit caused it to be.
While the CO etc may not say "You have no other option but to do this" they do hold, metaphorically speaking, your entire social network, family, possibly even your lively hood over a "barrel" , as it were, so that you will not be able to interact with this group, if you do not, well, how do you say, "Comply" with our understanding of what is best for you.
So whether a group of people are "physically" prevented from being interacted with , such as in a prison, or "mentally" prevented from being interacted with, such as being DFd which results in shunning. It ultimately is the same.
NJY
as a young teenager, i would look at "apostate" books at the city library.
i was always intrigued as to what was sooo bad and other than a few writings of some that seemed like they hated the witnesses, i would clandestinely look at literature, especially in "christian" bookstores.. it took years for me to finally disconnect.
i will say that ray franz' books enlightened me the most!.
One of the first times that I can remember is when, I think it might have even been this site, was stopped temporarily from being a pro Jw site to just a page
with some explanation that they were shutting down and some links to some apostate sites.
I remember reading that page and wondering, What the heck is going on here? I look back now and wonder if that instance was when, I have heard and am not sure about how this all went down, Simon was originally running this site as a Pro Jw site, got hit with some apostate drive bys and possibly was told by the brothers to shut down the site, put up the temp page, then it looks like after I saw that, re-branded this site to be more open minded, if you will.
Does any of this ring a bell or was that a totally different site?
NJY
i loathed giving talks and doing meeting parts.
i dreaded all assignments.
i was intelligent enough and always did a good job, but all my jw life (born in to mid-30's) i enjoyed giving talks about as much as a visit to the dentist.. i am sure that 90% of all jw's similarly dislike it.
Here is what I think is the reason.
Taken from this page on Cognitive Dissonance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Check it out,,,
The more severe a task the person performs for a group, the more interesting or worthy they must reason the group is to prevent dissonance.
Note: I made an edit below (**) and replaced "sever" with mild, as they had "severe" in both cases.
NJY
Effort justification paradigm [ edit ]
Further information: Effort justificationDissonance is aroused whenever individuals voluntarily engage in an unpleasant activity to achieve some desired goal. Dissonance can be reduced by exaggerating the desirability of the goal. Aronson & Mills [17] had individuals undergo a severe or mild "initiation" in order to become a member of a group. In the Mild (**) -initiation condition, the individuals engaged in an embarrassing activity. The group they joined turned out to be very dull and boring. The individuals in the severe-initiation condition evaluated the group as more interesting than the individuals in the mild-initiation condition.
All of the above paradigms continue to be used in fruitful research.
Washing one's hands has been shown to eliminate post-decisional dissonance, presumably because the dissonance is often caused by moral disgust (with oneself), which is related to disgust from unsanitary conditions. [18] [19]
so i've been sharing some a little at a time with my sister.
she is married and very scared of actually learning too much.
she doesn't want to ruin her marriage.
The following is just speculation about he CTR arrived at the date of 1914 initially.
I was wondering if CTR was not trying to reverse engineer that date. I think he already had 1874 as Christ presence, and I believe he added 40 years to that due to some Jubilee rule. Not sure, SO,... SO,.. he used the 2520 years from William Miller to start looking backwards to see what Bible event happened around that time so that he could start counting forward to be able to justify his date of 1914. 586 or 587 BCE was close enough to work with to hitch his beginning date to.
NJY
i've been lurking here for a year or two now (since i stumbled across ttatt and was stumbled by it), i even started an account some while back and asked a couple of questions.. but i never actually stood up and said hi... so hi, my name's jon and i'm a dubaholic.. .
i was "born in" in the 80s - and grew up on a liquid diet of cheap suits and revelation book pictures (i mean really, group after group just staring at the pictures while not listening, i must have spent more time staring at those pictures than i have any work of art in my life, literally hours at each lurid picture).
i "left" in my teens, but apparently lacking any kind of actual sense, returned to studying with a childhood friend from the congregation in my twenties (although i was never baptised, my entire small family were dubs, so i saw more witnesses than "worldly people" on a regular basis.. they love bombed my arse for years!)..
Hey Lucidchimp,..
Welcome,
Have you been able to come across jwfacts.com yet?
It helped me a lot.
NJY
--not a big screaming deal, but the heading at the top right of the page is wrong here:.
.
.
Mine has the same error,..That scripture, Num 35:37 does not even exist.
NJY
so i've been sharing some a little at a time with my sister.
she is married and very scared of actually learning too much.
she doesn't want to ruin her marriage.
Here is a great link to JWFACTS.com where you can find loads of info about the JW beliefs and how they cannot be based on reality.
If ever in doubt, try this site. When on the jwfacts.com site, they have a search function and I just typed in "william miller" and got this link as a result.
Hope this helps with your research.
http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/607-1914-7-times-history.php
NJY
i struggled with this question before i got baptised.
what helped you to overcome any doubts?.
SFPW Jesus said to keep on the watch, and that's what those faithful brothers have done throughout the years.
Keeping on the watch and giving false hope/promises that armageddon is imminent are two very different things.
If my smoke detector went off every day I would not be grateful that there 'might' be a fire. I would throw it away as clearly defective.
If the manufacturer of that smoke detector also made other items which kept failing, I would no longer buy from that manufacturer.
Splash.
Great thought, I wish I had heard this one about 2 years ago when 2 elders were at my door asking me why my family was missing meetings.
They mentioned that if my house was on fire, would I want them to kick in the door and run in and drag my family out to safety. I said yes of course, but I also mentioend to them that it is illegal to shout "Fire" into a crowded theatre if there is not an actual fire. One elder came back with a "Where theres smoke, there's fire" comment, I would have loved to "dove tail" your thought into his comment.
NJY
i struggled with this question before i got baptised.
what helped you to overcome any doubts?.
The Watchtower are nothing but false prophets. They were the most guilty of that sin during their 1918-1919 inspection. There's no way in HELL, they were appointed by Jehovah. Everything from that time period is riddled in false predictions, pyrmidology, and Jesus' presence occuring in 1874 (until 1943 this was taught).
I thought that I had read on jwfacts.com that this was taught until 1929 or so.
Says that in 1930 they made mention of 1914 instead of the 1874 presence of Jesus.
Here is the link to that page.
http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/607-1914-7-times-history.php
NJY
