Posts by David

25

And then it hit me: we were abused

by Anders Andersen in

from a psychcentral (run by mental health professionals): a familiar item on a list of 7 types of parental abuse :.

spiritual abuse.

has the child experienced:dichotomous thinking – dividing people into two parts: those who agree with the parent and those who don’t.

David_Jay

Over 50 now and I still have recurring nightmares in which I find myself playing with toys as a child in the home I grew up in...and then it hits me: "Oh, no! I'm a child again! Help!" Nothing else happens. My parents are not there. I do not get abused. The nightmare is that I am a child again.

Child abuse is a living nightmare, a horror that even the most strictest of family lives cannot match. I lived with an actual dread of each day, searching for a way out. And you desperately want out each and every day but can't leave because you are just a kid. Witnesses may fear reprisals from leaving the cult, but as adults they can leave. They don't spend each moment of each day looking for a way out as I did.

You don't see Witnesses and their children constantly peeing themselves in public places or throwing up in church or school each and everyday because of having been made to follow the rules and miss Christmas. But I would do these things all the time due to the abuse I suffered as a child because I couldn't express emotionally what was happening to me at home when I was in the hands of my father and mother.

Following strict rules in the Witness religion doesn't leave you with bruises, with bloody noses, with concussions or sore genitals and a bleeding bum. Abuse does. Being taught there are evil spirits or Armageddon that can come any day now is not the same as being tied up and gagged and locked in a closet for a day or two, having to live in your own feces and urine.

Being dragged to meetings and field service on regular basis is a breeze compared with having a naked adult's body on top of you as they release sexual fluids on and in you. Complain about being made to sit quiet through a 2 hours meeting or an assembly for several hours at a time? Try getting slapped in the face 15 to 20 times and then being told if you cry or shout in response you will get more of the same.

I'm sorry. But you are not describing abuse if you compare those things with these and many other things I went though. It may not have been easy for some of you, and for others there may have been actual abuse even as adult JWs, but these others things...no, they aren't child abuse.

43

2520-607 = 1913

by schnell in

jw
friends

i love math, i love calendars, and somehow, this always gets me.. 2520 - 607 = 1913. not 1914.. 2520 - 606 = 1914. from what i understand, russell realized this.

he had previously used 606 bc, of course, but then he switched it to 607 bc.

i know there was something about no zero year, so it actually should be less one, correct?.

David_Jay

We did attempt to compensate for the leap year problem and came up with a year as close as 1841 as a result, but then realized that was an artificial stab in the dark. We merely had to guess at the amount of time added because at one point in history the months were added through visible examination, and this was not always correct. It led to problems that had to be corrected later.

So if one merely counts 2,520 straight lunar years of 29.5 days, you still can't figure it out unless we know for sure if the leap months were added when mathematically necessary (enough .5 days to make an extra month), or were added when they were observed by Jerusalem in the historical past (which has some mistakes in the calculations of the past), or if they should be added when the leap months should have occurred (based on the corrected recount of modern times), or do they get ignored completely? There's no way to know.

43

2520-607 = 1913

by schnell in

jw
friends

i love math, i love calendars, and somehow, this always gets me.. 2520 - 607 = 1913. not 1914.. 2520 - 606 = 1914. from what i understand, russell realized this.

he had previously used 606 bc, of course, but then he switched it to 607 bc.

i know there was something about no zero year, so it actually should be less one, correct?.

David_Jay

But it is also correct that the 2,520 years is very off. Jewish years are composed of 12 lunar months of 29.5 days. Every few years a leap month of 30 days is added, but until modern times this did not happen on a set schedule.

If one were to count 2,520 Biblical years from 607 B.C.E. one would need further instructions: do we add leap months, and if so, according to the modern method or the ancient one? And if we use the ancient one, do we match the way the Jews were adding extra months or do we make corrections that we now know they failed to make (which is why we now have a system in place to tell us when we are adding an extra month)?

I was doing this the other night with some rabbinical assistance but had to stop when Shabbat began. We realized that there can thus be three figures, none of which match 2,520 solar years as the count is made by Jehovah's Witnesses to arrive at 1914 C.E.

We always ended up with a discrepancy that kept us about 300 years on average short of the 1914 date. Because the Witnesses count the Gentile Times using solar years, they are like the fictional Germans from the movie, "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Having made a "measuring rod" based on a miscalculation of some Jewish writing, the bad guys in that film were "digging in the wrong place" for The Ark. The same is true for the Bible Students who made up that formula of 7 Gentile Times: even if their 607 starting date is right, and their 2,520 is precise, they counted 2,520 Gregorian calendar years to get to 1914 when they were supposed to be using the lunar years of the Jewish calendar.

1914 is never a possibility using any of the dates on hand for the beginning of the Gentile Times, and there is probably no way to know how to count from then up to now because of the leap year issues.

25

And then it hit me: we were abused

by Anders Andersen in

from a psychcentral (run by mental health professionals): a familiar item on a list of 7 types of parental abuse :.

spiritual abuse.

has the child experienced:dichotomous thinking – dividing people into two parts: those who agree with the parent and those who don’t.

David_Jay

I am an adult survivor of child abuse that took several different forms. I know exactly from years of personal terror what child abuse is.

It is never a bad idea to educate people in the various forms that abuse toward children can take. But it should be noted what doesn't appear in this article, namely the fact that this is not a list describing members of any particular religion but of abusive parents who use religion as a weapon. The article is talking about people who use religion as a means to abuse children, not really about people who belong to a religion that teaches such things.

I knew of too many Witness families that were very, very bad at following the guidelines for shunning, segregation, and unquestioning obedience (which is really very, very good). The very fact that the Governing Body constantly has parts on programs, gives talks, and prints articles about the same subjects along these lines (and now produces video about the same) shows that many members of the JWs still regularly fail to live up to the standards demanded of them. In my experience of about a decade with the JWs and serving in 4 different congregations across the US, I rarely found a faithful Witness who did just about everything taught by the Governing Body. Most were R-movie-watching, get-drunk-when-no-one-is-looking, masturbating, porn-watching, bad-word-using, finding-ways-to-get-around-rules-against-sex, gossiping, lying, hypocritical Witnesses. Not bad people, no. Just not good Witnesses. Almost none I met had ever read the Bible all the way through or kept up with the weekly magazines.

Religions that do demand such hard things can become horrible weapons in the hands of abusive parents. Cults are big on transferring the abuse of church leaders upon adult members to their children, and children become too easy of a target. But do not confuse what the study cited above is saying. It is talking about parents who abuse their children by making these same demands but of minors with severe punishment of some sort as a consequence. This may have happened to you as a Witness, but it has less to do with the doctrine and more to do with the parent's intentions upon the children.

I know of a case in the Roman Catholic Church where a man treated his family and especially his children almost to the letter of this description. Clergy have had to repeatedly intervene to save the children from what their father was doing. The man had managed to turn Catholicism into his weapon for child abuse: demanding that children recite so many number of rosaries a day, daily learn large sections of the Catechism and Scriptures by rote, attend constant prayer vigils before abortion clinics where the father would incite non-Catholics into violence and put his children in danger of physical harm, tell the children that they were already consigned to hell unless they could live up to the demands he was placing upon them, etc.

While we may have grown up in a religion that teaches ideas that matches the above-quoted list and demands such things of its baptized members, we might not have been children of parents who demanded the same actions of us. They may have taught us these things, but were we forced to follow them and punished in some manner when we didn't? Was horror and despair the result and mainstay of our childhood lives as a consequence to how this played out? There's a difference between being taught that these things are right and being forced to put such things into practice in order to intimidate.

You may have indeed been a victim of child abuse if you went through something like this. I would hope you find ways to heal and reach out for help. But just because you may have been part of a religion that teaches these things and learned of them yourself, this doesn't mean you were being abused or that JWs are currently abusing their children by being part of an organization that tells its followers that this is the only way to live. When you wrongly accuse others of perpetrating abuse, you might even steal precious time and attention from a real victim who needs your help. There are surviving victims who never get the attention they deserve because people sometimes focus on judging and punishing the abusers more than helping the victims.

210

Morality Without Deity

by cofty in

one of the most persistent arguments for belief in god centres on the necessity of an ultimate law-giver and epitome of goodness.. a softer version is seen in the genuine concern that a loss of faith will result in a corresponding loss of a moral compass - a more strident argument links the existence of good and evil with proof of the reality of god.

it is often asserted that without god, moral decisions degenerate to nothing more than personal preferences and the victory of "might is right".. i want to succinctly lay out my response as an atheist, and show that a supreme being is not required for objective morality.. it is helpful to distinguish between absolute morality, objective morality and subjective morality.

christian apologists frequently conflate the first two, and secular debaters often fail to point out the difference.. theists who disagree on everything else, are unanimous that god is perfectly good.

David_Jay

The logical conclusion of Atheism obviously is Nihilism and Nihilism says we are nothing but an illusion. So the ultimate choice is between God or nothing, there's no middle way in this matter.

This might not be true.

To some extent, the monotheism or God concept of Judaism was likely an ancient form of atheism, and to some extent it still is.

According to Jewish tradition, Abraham's very first revelation from God was that there were no gods like the ones sold by his father Terah in his shop. His father provided various idol gods to people of various beliefs. The narrative states that after contemplating on the matter for some time, young Abraham reasoned that the world and its beauty and all that people on it had to be caused by something far greater than the god images people purchased from his father--even greater than the concepts behind the idols which filled his father's shop. The world was too wonderful to be the product of such things, Abraham understood. There had to be a greater Cause than the deities that were represented in image form on a shop's shelves or even those worshipped in nature (such as fire, water, clouds and wind).

This great Cause is in a sense not a deity at all, at least not a deity in the sense of human comprehension. While referred to as "God," the Ultimate Cause is remarkably greater than even this mortal designation. The interesting factor that God is worshipped with no image and that God's name is not pronounced makes God somewhat of an anti-God. I have often explained the Jewish understanding of God as the "un-God," much as the soda pop 7-Up was once sold as the "un-Cola."

At least from a Jewish perspective on monotheism and philosophy, atheism may not be a dead end road at all. Denying the God-concept which, as you point out, is often the one promoted by Fundamentalist Protestantism, may be quite efficacious.

The Catholic and Orthodox concept of God is virtually similar to the basic Jewish one, namely that for all we might explain about God all definitions fail and God remains mysterious. Even the reason for the advent of Jesus Christ in the world was, according to Christians, to make this mysterious God relatable and comprehensible. Colossians 1:15 describes him as "the image of the invisible God," even though as the story of Abraham from Jewish tradition points out, God is not an idol deity, God is not a God with an image.

On the other hand, you could also be right in saying that the ultimate end of atheism is nothing. But is such "nothing" incapable of being another type of revelation of God? That "nothing" is also what describes our God. One seeks an image to represent God, one leaves with nothing. One wants to hear the true pronunciation of the Name of God, one is told to say nothing. One wants to see the Great Cause of the universe? One can point their telescopes anywhere and everywhere they wish, and all that the human eye will see is nothing.

The anonymous work that inspired St. John of the Cross, The Cloud of Unknowing, suggests that the way to truly know God is to abandon any definitions and attributes one places upon God through the concepts they learn. The work suggests that the reason many of us argue about what God is has to do with our failure to surrender our own ego. Just as the Israelites fatefully created an image of a Golden Calf and declared it God, sometimes theists make up a similar mental image of dogmas and doctrines that define God for them. The work teaches us that in the end the only true way that one may begin to glimpse the nature of God is to let go of our own concepts of God, to enter this "cloud of unknowing." Only by embracing the "nothing" can one truly find Something.

Better to find a common ground in the convictions of our atheist sisters and brothers than to challenge their claims by arguing over...nothing.

82

the-question (607 BCE explained and proved)

by pleaseresearch in

so a user named "the-question" said the jw's were right about 607 bce.. this is your chance brother to prove us all wrong.. we all can't wait to hear from you :).

David_Jay

One more to add: one of the rabbis said that since the Witnesses are using "mean" or average years in their count, it would be fair only to do the same. This would mean we would remove all years calculated via leap years and such.

The number is lower: 2,520 lunar years averages to 2293 solar years, all partial and leap years removed.

My math skills suck by comparison (and they are also talking something about the Jewish calendar of the past I know nothing about), but they are taking this up further this next week to get other views and refine things. But the result will always be the same: the Witnesses have counted 2,520 solar years from 607 BCE to get to 1914. They should have counted lunar years, which would leave you with far less solar years to count.

82

the-question (607 BCE explained and proved)

by pleaseresearch in

so a user named "the-question" said the jw's were right about 607 bce.. this is your chance brother to prove us all wrong.. we all can't wait to hear from you :).

David_Jay

Footnote: Because I wrote the above in haste through excitement, I will reiterate.

The 70 years of captivity upon Jerusalem are LUNAR years, as are all the years mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Because of this the 2,520 years the Witnesses claim make up the Gentile Times would also have to be LUNAR years. It is the only calendar the Jews knew.

The Jewish calendar has 12 lunar months with an extra month added every so often to compensate for the 29.5 day monthly lunar cycle to catch up with the solar year. But when counting time you don't compensate to match the solar year. You merely count 12 lunar months, adding the leap year when you have enough extra days.

In the process of counting 2,520 years, about 70 years are lost in solar years (which is of interest for those you understand the Jubilee year connection). There was a 2.7 year loss as well in the calculations made to compensate for the fact that the first year of 607 counts for only a partial year and that some solar years in the time period ate a few days along the way due to leap year considerations.

82

the-question (607 BCE explained and proved)

by pleaseresearch in

so a user named "the-question" said the jw's were right about 607 bce.. this is your chance brother to prove us all wrong.. we all can't wait to hear from you :).

David_Jay

RichardHaley wrote

Isn't 537 B.C.E. before (earlier/older) than 515 B.C.E.? Either way they are off.

Yes, I made an error due to two things: first, I spoke in A.M. terms, saying AFTER when I meant BEFORE (A.M. counts forward as B.C.E. goes backward), and second, I used a calculator to determine the Jewish A.M. dates (which I forget doesn't work).

I am getting help from some rabbinical assistance as I write this. Right now they are explaining to me that the real error in the Witnesses dating is that they are counting 70 years as if they are SOLAR, but in reality the 70 years are LUNAR.

Even if the 607 B.C.E. date is correct (and let's say it is), 2,520 Biblical years would be LUNAR years. You can't count the years between 607 B.C.E. in 12 month increments as they have to reach 1914. In solar years the equivalent of 2,520 lunar Biblical years is only about 2447.

This means that 1914 would not be the date according to the JW formula. 2,520 Biblical years from the 607 B.C.E. date would land you in 1841 C.E.

In order for the year 1914 to work, the 2,520 Biblical years would have to be counted from about 535 B.C.E.

18

A quick Biblical question....

by dubstepped in

my wife and i were talking about how religions claim to be directed by god, yet god never seemed to let any of them know about the danger of sexual predatora to children.

the it hit me, does the bible say anything on the subject?

is there a thou shalt not diddle kids scripture?

David_Jay

dubstepped wrote:

Were you ever a Witness? If so, you know our questions come from an intense interpretation that was foisted upon us, as you alluded to. I can see where it must feel so messed up to have other people running wild with your book and history. I appreciate you sharing your perspective.

I was indeed one of Jehovah's Witnesses as most here. I went in at 17, unaware I was Jewish until right before my baptism. Just days before the dip, my parents protested and revealed we were Jews--which explains why they would never let us eat cheeseburgers or have milk with dinner like the rest of the kids in school. But when I told the elders they laughed and said it couldn't be true. I was going by my Sephardic name then instead of my Hebrew name I use now, and Sephardic names sound Spanish--so the idiot elders said I could be a Jew since "you're a Mexican!" When it was confirmed 10 years later through an accidental run-in with a rabbi and I learned I had a halachic (legal) standing as a Jew and Israelite and that this likely made my baptism invalid, the elders shut down in in a defensive denial. I was a ministerial servant and regular pioneer at the time of my leaving, and I am glad I can help with the perspective I've gained from my situation.

Finkelstein wrote:

...one might say they were advanced for their era but trying to emulate it to the degree the JW religion does creates a problematic folly in itself.

The Bible is a static snapshot of an era long gone, and we Jews have had almost 4000 years of advancement in the monotheism concept since. But folks like the Witnesses are stuck trying to imitate and literally live according to the legends and mythological religious dramas we developed before we even invented the rabbi. I'm glad you see how stupid they are being!

18

A quick Biblical question....

by dubstepped in

my wife and i were talking about how religions claim to be directed by god, yet god never seemed to let any of them know about the danger of sexual predatora to children.

the it hit me, does the bible say anything on the subject?

is there a thou shalt not diddle kids scripture?

David_Jay

Since there is scripture stating that children who dishonor their parents should be put to death, it would leave the impression that children had little if any human rights in the ancient Hebrew civilization...

There was no such thing as "human rights" in ancient civilizations.

I note that those from a Christian background, including perhaps even some of those who leave it behind, seem to demand that our Jewish works be read through a lens compatible with modern views on justice and with Christian definitions on God and perfection. That's not the fault of the Bible as much as it is the fault of non-Jewish readers not remembering that they are reading an account of a people who allegedly lived some 3,500 years ago.

Notions like "human rights," a "perfect God that is like the loving Jesus," etc. are expectations that you wouldn't expect to find in other religious writings of other cultures of the same period. Jews aren't saying that their religious mythos demonstrates axioms of perfect behavior or that the personality of the God of the ancient Hebrews is supposed to match with the words of the children's song: "Yes, Jesus Loves Me"!

Sometimes the demands made upon the Hebrew text by others sounds to me like that scene from the musical, The Book of Mormon where white American boys from Utah find the dark realities of Uganda shocking. They don't understand why their stories about Jews building boats and sailing to America to grow into tribes that war with each other wherein eventually some get cursed with black skin in the process for being bad don't ring true with the people of Africa. Part of the comedy in the show is that they've been seeing the world through rose-colored glasses that they thought the rest of the world had money enough to afford. The reality is that even if each person had the money to purchase glasses like that, most aren't interested in them.

As a Jewish man I will be the first to tell you that my people had some pretty screwed up ideas some 3,500 years ago. But guess what, so did your ancestors! Just compare your people's histories to mine and see for yourself that they were just as stupid as mine. That was 3,500 years ago! Is it always logical then what's being demanded by some of the Bible?

Also, it's not the fault of our Scriptures that someone who wasn't Jewish told you lies about our stories. Don't blame us or our book! If we can read the same pages and claim that the stuff inside is at times downright horrible and ugly and that our God in its pages often didn't do what we think should have been obvious to an Almighty Being--and we still come out seeing some value in it--all I can say is that I'm sorry that you can't make the "Square Peg of our Ancient Bible" fit in your Modern Christian-based Society circle of a hole. I think you should be mad at the teachers who taught you that the mythology of ancient Jews was journalist history and stop complaining that the square won't go in where you think it should go.

Now I know that is NOT what many of you are actually saying, even here. But I do want people reading this to note that some of you Gentiles wouldn't be so happy if I messed around with your legends either. What about Americans and their legend about George Washington, how when he was a boy he was allowed to go about wielding an axe and chopping down other people's trees? So what if he told the truth about it when asked? Would his refusal to lie about what he had done still be as heroic if instead of chopping down a cherry tree he had gone next door and chopped to death his neighbor's dog? So what if you admit you did something wrong? "I cannot tell a lie. I was the one who chopped Rover to death and kept chopping till he was in bite-sized chunks." Telling the truth that you did something bad doesn't make you honorable if what you're being honest about is a crime.

See what I mean? If you look closely at anyone's cherished legends, you can find fault if you look at it in the way it was not intended to be viewed. Jews aren't the one's saying their Bible or God is perfect. If you got a bone to pick, it's not with us.

A good rule of thumb to remember is if you can't read the legend in the original language, always keep in mind that something may get lost in your translation--so be careful how you interpret it.

David_Jay

Posts by David_Jay