My wife once told me that the fact that Armageddon didn't come, just shows that the "new light" is correct.
shepherdless
JoinedPosts by shepherdless
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20
Is it really possible to disprove the Watchtower?
by Coded Logic indear brothers and sisters,.
considering the end is so near at hand we thought it important for to reiterate that it's absolutely impossible to prove god's "one true organisation" wrong.
there is nothing on heaven or earth that could ever be shown to be false or incorrect in our entire .
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Another reason Watchtower may be hurting financially
by shepherdless ini don't think anyone else has raised this point.
below i set out the case that the jw demographic in usa has a steadily decreasing combined income, and as a consequence, has less money to donate.
not only is the flock not growing, the flock is producing less wool for the borg to fleece.
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shepherdless
Hi all, thanks for all of your good comments.
A couple of points:
I'm guessing this means since women are increasing as a percentage of jws over men, and women generally earning so much less than men, this too will impact donations.
Yes, that is what I meant. This is a complicated subject, and it would take me lot of work to explain in detail. Just for starters, a graph of median income vs age for women (instead of men) tends to be a different shape.
So, my question is: does Watchtower know how much income its members have and the liklihood of their spending some of it on WT?
They would have a trove of data direct from congregations. I doubt that they would have data about people's incomes, but they would definitely have sufficient data to line up demographics with expected donations. Do they do that? I don't know.
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Is All The Bad Publicity About The Watchtower Pedophile Lawsuits Causing Contributions To Nose Dive Worldwide?
by Brokeback Watchtower ini think with all the child molestation lawsuits the watchtower corporation is and has been hit with is the main reason for all the prime property sell off recently.
the silent lambs protest back in 2001, and the dateline prime time expose probably was the death knell for the watchtower's hey day in brooklyn.. their membership is drying up, young people are leaving in droves, the situation is no doubt far worse than the annually published yearbook figures show and so they ceased it's publication permanently.
and those left remaining are experiencing a huge grab of money from their congregations accounts and now are required to make pledges about how much they can contribute which i think is a last ditch effort by the governing body to squeeze more money out of the rank and file watchtower indoctrinated drones.. i think all this is happening because even those still loyally attending are hearing reports of these tremendous pay out that the watchtower is making to the victims of their self serving policies that put young ones at great risks so that even the rank and file don't want to contribute to pay court costs and so are withholding giving contributions to a very great extent.
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shepherdless
Truthseeker: I will shortly be working on a project to analyze all congregations in the U.K. and their contributions once the data has been pulled
That would be fantastic. I have thought for a long while about doing that, but it is far too big a task for me. It should tell us a lot about the real financial position of Watchtower in U.K.
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Another reason Watchtower may be hurting financially
by shepherdless ini don't think anyone else has raised this point.
below i set out the case that the jw demographic in usa has a steadily decreasing combined income, and as a consequence, has less money to donate.
not only is the flock not growing, the flock is producing less wool for the borg to fleece.
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shepherdless
sbf: ...the decrease in contributions may be larger than the decrease in income because of the important distinction between income and disposable income. In other words, while JW income may decrease by 3% in real terms, the fall in disposable income (which drives spending, including charitable donations) will be much larger.
Yes, that is quite true.
I was avoiding complicating the issue, in the o.p. There are a number of factors that come into play, about how much is available to donate. For example, older people may have fewer essential expenses because they are not raising kids, or may try to save harder, given they know there is little further income coming in for the rest of their lives. I chose words to try to steer clear of that debate, and let others argue about it, if they wanted.
The refusal to allow young JWs to get an education may really be coming back to bite Watchtower.
Yes. However, there seems to be a more fundamental problem; a lack of young JWs in the first place. Reasons may be:
1. a complete failure to recruit, in recent times;
2. the usual drop out in the late teens / early 20s; and
3. as I pointed out in one of my earlier posts, it seems the "return to Jehovah's" aren't returning in the numbers that they used to.
What I mean by point 3 is that it seems it used to be the case that a lot of late teens / early 20s JWs would leave, but come back around the time they have kids of their own. In an earlier thread, I put up some stats that suggested they don't return to the extent they used to.
I also wonder whether, overall, shunning has had a backfire effect, and has lost them more younger members, never to return, than they might have retained by the threat. For whatever reason Watchtower has a shortage of youngsters and it is hurting them in a number of ways, including financial.
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Another reason Watchtower may be hurting financially
by shepherdless ini don't think anyone else has raised this point.
below i set out the case that the jw demographic in usa has a steadily decreasing combined income, and as a consequence, has less money to donate.
not only is the flock not growing, the flock is producing less wool for the borg to fleece.
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shepherdless
I don't think anyone else has raised this point. Below I set out the case that the JW demographic in USA has a steadily decreasing combined income, and as a consequence, has less money to donate. Not only is the flock not growing, the flock is producing less wool for the Borg to fleece. Further, the decrease is significant, and likely to continue.
Data Source:
I am concentrating on USA, because what happens in the USA is far more important to the global health of the Borg, than in any other country. The same argument probably applies to a number of countries. I am cross-referencing to data I previously extracted from the Australian 2016 census, because:
(a) the similarity in that data leads me to conclude very similar things are happening in USA; and
(b) there is much more data available from the Aust census.
Key Pew Findings:
The complete Pew Report in pdf is here:
http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2015/05/RLS-08-26-full-report.pdf
Page 50 of the Pew Report shows that in USA from 2007 to 2014, the median age (of adults) went from 45 to 50. None of the other religions listed on that page show such an increase.
Page 58 of the report shows that in 2007 JWs have lower incomes than most other religions, and that their incomes further deteriorated in 2014.
Page 60 of the report shows that the demographics of the religion is becoming more feminine. In 2007, the ratio of men to women was 40:60. In 2014, the ratio was 35:65. JWism is easily the most imbalanced religion listed.
Weaknesses in the Pew Report are that, as a survey:
- Only 245 JWs completed the survey (see Appendix A page 89); and
- Only those 18 or older were allowed to complete the survey.
Australia Census:
The Aust censuses of 2006, 2011 and 2016 were effectively surveys of 80,000 JWs. On the following thread, I showed that the Aust JW median age was also going through a substantial increase in median age.
The increase in median age was not quite as dramatic (5 year increase over a 10 year period in Aust, with the same increase in USA occuring in just 7 years) but it shows a pattern. Actually, because the Aust data includes minors, the 43.9 median age in 2016 in Australia would be equivalent to 43.9 + 9 = 53.9, so actually the Aust JWs are typically 4 years older than their US "brothers and sisters". If you look closely at the numbers, you can see that further increase is inevitable.
On the following thread, I showed that Aust JWs were also earning less, compared to the overall population, and from 2011 to 2016, they appeared to be falling further behind:
However, if you read the detail of the thread, you will see that the reason they appear to be falling further behind is that they are becoming older and past their prime income earning age. It is a by-product of the increase in median age.
Less money for the Borg in Aust:
What I didn't spell out in my second thread above, is that, in effect the total JW community in Aust in:
- 2011 had a combined weekly income of $411 x 85,498 = $35,139,678 ; and
- 2016 had a combined weekly income of $420 x 82,512 = $34,655,040
In other words, if every JW in Aust was donating one week's pay per year to the Borg, the Borg would be getting 1.5% less income in 2016 than it did in 2011. But this is a period where statistically incomes increased over 14%. So the Borg is actually 15% worse off. One could characterize it as a 3% drop per annum, in real terms.
Of course, one may argue that older people have less expenses etc (although I am not sure that that is true), but it is clear that there is less wool to fleece from the flock.
Relating back to USA:
If you have read this far, you will notice the similar increase in median age and the similar decrease in incomes in Aust and USA. I won't go into detail, but the gender gap is similar as well.
Detailed statistics would be needed to prove the point conclusively, but from the above, it is reasonable to conclude that JWs in USA as a demographic, have less money to donate than they used to, and will have even less money to donate in the future. Further, there is likely that this rate of decrease is of the order of 3% decrease per annum, in real terms. That has to be painful for the Borg.
As I said, not only is the flock not growing, the flock is producing less wool for the Borg to fleece.
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Who is Jesus?
by Jarred K innew to the forum.
hope today finds everyone well.
i’m not super familiar with jw theology concerning jesus.
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shepherdless
Venus, that is an interesting argument in your first paragraph (leaving aside the last two sentences). I haven’t come across it before, but I like it.
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Alternative witnessing
by Zyron inthose of us still attending meeting are actively encouraged to use out tablets or smartphones to direct people to jw.org.
how about, after doing the standard presentation casually say to householder, you can also look at this forum to read of experiences of life as a jw as well as the official version?.
obviously you need to be working by yourself or with a pimo jw..
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shepherdless
I probably should add something to my earlier comments.
Many years ago, when I was at Uni, I did a bit of casual work going door to door doing market research; essentially getting people to fill out long surveys on the spot. We were given an extract from a number of extracts from street directories, and told what streets to do, within a period of a fortnight. This employer experimented, by, instead of paying an hourly rate of around $9/hr, it paid per completed survey. Well, of course, I planned my attack on each suburb to catch people at home, and pulled out every trick to get virtually everyone who opened a door to complete a survey.
I was effectively earning about $80 to $100 per hour, which was awesome for me at the time. I would finish my territories early, and go back to the office and grab more territories that other people (not as pushy as me) had retuned, and do them as well.
One thing I noticed was that I could only go in short bursts of a couple of hours at most. Once I got a little tired, and lost a little spark, doors were just closed in my face.
After a few months, the market research company went back to paying hourly rates, and so I quit.
The point is, JWs are door to door salesmen, and in my observation a lot of them are incredibly poor at it. I am not going to list what they should be doing (in case Borg spies are watching) but I can see why they fail so miserably.
Even though my first post was partly a joke, I am serious that if you want to “spoil the sale” or make sure the householder will have no interest in the message or joining the borg, there would be no better method than the one I described in my first post.
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Alternative witnessing
by Zyron inthose of us still attending meeting are actively encouraged to use out tablets or smartphones to direct people to jw.org.
how about, after doing the standard presentation casually say to householder, you can also look at this forum to read of experiences of life as a jw as well as the official version?.
obviously you need to be working by yourself or with a pimo jw..
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shepherdless
Sorry Carla, I am the wrong person to ask. I am not a JW.
However, my observation is that a lot of them (but certainly not all of them) come across so cringy and awkward anyway, I wonder if any elder would notice anything amiss, even if you were paired up with one going door to door.
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Alternative witnessing
by Zyron inthose of us still attending meeting are actively encouraged to use out tablets or smartphones to direct people to jw.org.
how about, after doing the standard presentation casually say to householder, you can also look at this forum to read of experiences of life as a jw as well as the official version?.
obviously you need to be working by yourself or with a pimo jw..
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shepherdless
Thanks Muddy Waters.
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Alternative witnessing
by Zyron inthose of us still attending meeting are actively encouraged to use out tablets or smartphones to direct people to jw.org.
how about, after doing the standard presentation casually say to householder, you can also look at this forum to read of experiences of life as a jw as well as the official version?.
obviously you need to be working by yourself or with a pimo jw..
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shepherdless
Surely the best “alternative” witness would be to just appear bored, unenthusiastic, going through the motions, and unengaged. If you want to go the extra mile, be cringy and awkward. In other words, just act like you are a member of a group that nobody would want to join, and with nothing interesting to say.