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

Hey folks, I am being sincere that I may have made a mistake and written things in ways I shouldn't have. No one needs to apologize for anything they said either. Before my God I promise I hold nothing against anyone here.

I went from being abused all my life suddenly to the lifestyle of living as a JW at 16, going to meetings, no Christmas, going to assemblies, Saturday service, etc. That was not abuse for me, but one man's paradise can be another man's hell, huh? Sorry how it sounded. I know it must have been horribly abusive for many if not all of you who went through it.

A last thought: when someone said they were afraid for the people I worked with because of what I wrote, that did some damage. I understand, and I forgive you, but I am moving on. The damage from that one comment has to do with something...well, it is far beyond what I can explain now, and for reasons you couldn't have known it is damage that will be permanent if I don't leave now.

Hey, it happens, and it's okay. I've survived worse. It could happen again in the future that someone may say something in a thread that will just stab an old wound they don't know is there. On this forum I would be stupid if I thought it couldn't occur again. It will happen in other parts of my life too.

I can't stop all those situations from popping up. But I decided I won't stay and continue after tonight as exposing myself to that possibility in the future has to be minimized for my own good. I can minimize future pain and have to. You are still wonderful people, and I am sure and know in my heart that no one means to be malicious. Just sometimes two sick people will only make each other sicker unless one goes to their own sickbed. That is what I do now. Regardless all is still forgiven. We can only do what we can to keep exposure to the elements at a minimum and do what's best for each other's healing.

Good nignt. Shalom. My best wishes. And my most sincere thanks for all the help you have given me. You have been to me a most wonderful mitzvah.

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

Thank you, nonJWspouse, but I think we need to move on now from me. What probably caused me to write my post without thinking is that I became a JW as teenager, leaving my parents behind for the life of meetings, field service etc. For me it was a relief. The abuse stopped (at least those things I mentioned as happening in my non-JW home before my Witness aunt took me in), and so I cannot say that living that life was anything but a relief. I came from a rich home, all the toys I could want, a nanny, dogs, we even celebrated all the holidays though we were Jews. I guess I knew no better as I was happy to go to meetings and field service and have no Christmas etc., anything but what I was rescued from. But I sincerely appreciate the adjustment. I need some time to move on for a bit, but I did want to thank you for that comment.

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

No, I feel I shouldn't have said anything as I was merely comparing being raised as a Witness without beatings, etc and saying that alone was not abuse. But if others believe that such is abuse, even without such things then I am not going to deny that of them. Apparently how I wrote things show, as dubstepped wrote, that there is something that even the people I work with should fear of me. I will seriously take that into consideration.

I feel very bad now for participating and the mistake I've made. Please accept my apology. I will move on to other subjects now, but thanks again for the correction.

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

And I would like to apologize to anyone else who found my post as an attempt to say that there are not other forms of abuse. I was only calling for some perspective on matters.

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

@dubstepped

I strongly believe that there are such things as religious abuse and that members of the Jehovah's Witnesses may have experienced different forms of this in different ways.

I never stated that my experience was the "measure of the spectrum of abuse."

I never tried to make it "the bar for abuse."

I only stated that having to live the life of a JW child is not in and of itself child abuse.

...honestly it frightens me for those that you work with that you have such a narrow view of abuse. In fact, trying to tell people that feel abused that they aren't simply because it wasn't as bad as you had it is itself abusive. Invalidation of others fits right in line with emotionally abusive behavior.

Apparently you are the judge of what constitutes a "narrow view of abuse" in a comment on this thread. I didn't think I told people who felt abused that they were NOT abused because it wasn't the same type of abuse I went through, but apparently you have this ability to look deep inside another person and determine that is what they meant. So I am going with you.

Thank you for telling me I was invalidating the feelings of others. Apparently you would never make such a mistake, and never by your words make someone who went through abuse feel worse for sharing their own feelings on the matter...you obviously also took a lot of consideration on how hard it was for me to share that.

Peace to you all.

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.

David_Jay

Posts by David_Jay