to answer my question, no i do not pray over meals anymore exept for when i am with other jws i do a 15 second head bow for appearances sake.
i just came to the realization god had nothing to do with whether i ate or not.
many believers are starving right now whilst many non-believers are eating like kings.. also why should god give me food while he lets little children in dprk concentration camps starve to death.
Last i prayed over a meal was many months ago with my wife... Right before I told her that was the last prayer I would every give. It started. A really nice conversation actually! It's all in how you come across.
I gave gave up prayer when I realized I was just praying to myself.
as i grew up in the religion, i was a 10. i wanted to be made a "servant" because that was instilled in me from infancy.
i diligently studied ever piece of watchtower literature and defended my religion intensely.. when i got into my 30's, i started to see little cracks in the watchtower's surface but decided to "wait on jehovah".
then i started to research a little more critically and realized i couldn't defend the prophecies, the treatment of people and the hypocrisy that was becoming more obvious, that especially an elder can see.. it was a gradual thing---from a 10 to a zero!.
Mostly 3. Never more than a 4. Once I discovered the vagina, .005. I thought most of it was true, but hoped it wasn't. I always ALWAYS resented being raised as a JW, but followed along because it was all I knew. You could say I was destined to become an apostate.
wtbts published a new article on jw.org (http://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/daniel-4-bible-chronology-1914/) entitled "what does bible chronology indicate about the year 1914?
" in it, it points to daniel 4 as the prophecy and uses the same leaps of insane logic to get from the first and only fulfillment of that prophecy to 1914, using 607 as the starting point and 2,520 years as doubling the 1,260 years in revelation.
of course, there is no accounting for the difference in our solar years and the bible's lunar years, which makes the math have a very different outcome.
Badfish - pretty much. It lands on 1914 cause of no zero year. And yes, no taking 360 day years into account.
You might want to focus now a bit on the 607 date... I challenge you to find ONE secular or even just non-JW reference to 607bce as the date that Jerusalem fell. Just one.
recently, a public speaker brought up this point that i remembered being preached in the 70's.
when they bring this matter up, they always manage to give you an experience of how one person stood his ground, and got a great job offer, as a result.. what about the many experiences of ones that were not blessed?
i can memtion horror stories of ones that should have kept working their meetings..
Easy for someone to say when they go in service and give talks for a living.
i have heard rumors for over a year now that the wt is not going to have a 2014 dc.
i know they are having a circuit assembly and special day talk assembly but what about their yearly dc.
has anybody heard anything?.
Yep, we get to make a 7 hour trip each way this year for the 3 day bore fest. Yippee.
The only ones who say there won't be a 2014 convention are the ones who actually think that the big A will come before then.
"everything in life has a purpose" is something a lot of (religious) people tend to say.
i used to believe that too... but i have always been wandering about animals, bacteria and everthing around us.
what purpose is there?
Well you should already know this, but bacteria serve a very important purpose in decomposition and digestion. Right now you have more bacteria living inside you than you can imagine. You need them there.
Animals? Well they're tasty, so there's that...
But purpose IS a human invention. There is no end goal or purpose. We just happen to be living in this time period right now.
when one goes deep into the science, there are things that suggest the existence of immortal soul or a caring supreme soul.
hence, the question is not about lack of proofs, but is all about whether one is willing to accept or not (mathew 11:14).
let us take some samples:.
How... HOW does someone wake up from their JW slumber, free themselves with all the cost involved... And just slide right into an even wackier cult?
everytime i hear jw's talking about free will, i either feel the urge to burst in laughter or feel sick.
each publication keeps talking about how wonderful jokehova is for giving us free will.
the only small thing is that he'll kill you if you don't do exactly what he says.
Are you a Sam Harris fan at all? He wrote a great short book on the subject.
what is it about the jws that draws them together?.
group think?.
ambient abuse?.
Hmm sneaky. Perhaps we become atheists because the same logic that brings us out of the religion brings us out of all religion. To just stop thinking after leaving JWs is to be willfully ignorant. If a person is to be willfully ignorant, they might as well stay with the JWs.
in the past year or so i've been completely evaluating whether i believe in god.
i studied marine biology at uni for the last 3 years and it completely change my view on evolution.
even when i was in i believed in evolution to a certain extent (ie the flood made no sense, the earth being 60000 odd years old etc etc) and this has made me question the existence of god.
So what will you do once abiogenesis is proven?
