woke up to this piece on abc news australia.. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-13/jehovah-witnesses-child-abuse-four-corners-investigations/100444320.
the shine lawyer group have a reputation for going in hard.. jtg..
Woke up to this piece on Abc news Australia.
The first thing my JW wife does in the morning is open the ABC News app. Guess what the top news story was today!!
She said something like, “Oh not another story about us. I am not going to read it.”
Sounds like there might be a 4 Corners episode coming up as well.
minimus former jw, prolific poster on jwn died.. minimus.
joined 19 years ago.
started 4,139 topics.
Very sorry to read this. May he rest in peace.
my fifty year-old daughter is studying to be a jehovah witness.
i am her catholics father.
just wondering because they are not allowed to associate with worldly people.
Gary, yes I am in the same situation, although you are a couple of decades ahead of me. We also have 4 kids, so there are 6 of us under the one roof. I intend to do a new post on how this is all playing out.
Just to add to what I posted above, there are lots of very good intellectual arguments that should in theory persuade a JW to leave. You can see lots of them at jwfacts.com
However, most JWs are immune to intellectual arguments, because (unbeknownst to themselves) they are there for emotional not intellectual reasons. Further, a non-JW trying to persuade a JW using scripture etc will inevitably fail, as the moment a non-JW does not use the exact correct word or theological terminology, their credibility is shot.
As long as you don’t actively discuss religion with your daughter, you are not a threat. In fact, you are a potential “Bible student”, yourself, in their eyes. And keeping in contact with your daughter is probably the best thing for her, as it would keep her grounded to reality. She may one day suddenly work it out for herself, or she may not.
i escaped the cult many years ago.
as a result, i have an eye for cultlike thinking, whether in terms of religion, politics, centrist thinking, etc.. last december my fiance and i had a baby.
she is black and i'm white.
So, taking it from an angle I'm familiar with, how did/do non-JW parents who have a JW spouse, make sure that their kids get exposure to more than just one form of "spiritual food," while keeping things peaceful?
I was never one to encourage any other form of “spiritual food”. I always encouraged logic and reason, and rational responses to events, instead of superstitious nonsense.
my fifty year-old daughter is studying to be a jehovah witness.
i am her catholics father.
just wondering because they are not allowed to associate with worldly people.
My advice to Gary would be that, given he has already provided his daughter with info, and the daughter is still studying, then there is not much else that can be done, apart from keeping in contact.
Why would a 50 yo lady start studying? Probably lonely, or in need of some company, or being manipulated. Such a person will not pay much attention to intellectual arguments.
I think Gary should just maintain contact, agree not to discuss religion, if need be, and hope his daughter works it out.
do you recall reading this passage before?
i came across this it yesterday while preparing a bible presentation on trees.
i had no idea this passage existed.
I had heard or read of that passage ages ago. I see from Earnest’s post above, that Rutherford (as usual) came up with a pile of pseudo-mystical nonsense, in interpreting it.
An interpretation in “Christendom” would likely be along the following lines. The first and most obvious point is to look at the context. Someone called Jotham gave a speech that included the tree allegory. It is clear in context that Jotham was not reporting an event; he was just being allegorical. Further, Jotham was speaking in order to persuade a crowd that Abimelech (who had just made himself king by force and murder) should not be accepted as king. The idea of brambles (a low-lying plant) offering shade is a joke, and brambles being a plant of no virtue, and also flammable (ie dangerous) is part of the allegory.
Thus, the explanation and interpretation of the passage is relatively simple and straightforward; ie don’t choose a morally corrupt person as your ruler. (Also, notice how the least worthy tree/plant is the one to demand to be the ruler, or else.)
more bad press for the borg in australia.
this is on the webpage of the national broadcaster:.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-13/austraila-talks-trust-religious-figures-dropping-covid-pandemic/100202940.
More bad press for the Borg in Australia. This is on the webpage of the national broadcaster:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-13/austraila-talks-trust-religious-figures-dropping-covid-pandemic/100202940
i saw a statistic the other day that something like 25% of all the debt that the us has incurred since 1776 was created in the last 12 months.
that's because they have printed so much currency and instead of letting that stop them, they are going to continue printing more to go on a spending spree on crazy green-new-deal schemes and union handouts.. does anyone think that this can be anything other than inflationary?
they are effectively stealing the wealth of everyone to then hand money out to people.
Interesting question, and an interesting discussion. I generally agree with Simon. Others have already said a lot of what I would say.
I see someone referenced Modern Monetary Theory. Under MMT, quantative easing doesn’t necessarily lead to inflation. However, according to more traditional economic principles, quantative easing is very inflationary. Most economists do not have any faith in MMT. It has been labeled “Magic Pudding” economics by some.
The way that all the major governments in the world have increased their debt, printed large amounts of money (via quantative easing) and held interest rates incredibly low, is extremely worrying. It can only end in one of 3 ways, all of them bad, with rampant inflation being the least worst outcome.
So why isn’t inflation already rampant? I think that that is because (a) workers everywhere aren’t in any mood to demand higher wages at the moment, and (b) colossal amounts of capital are being destroyed by zombie companies at the moment.
Finally just a note about this all being “a plan by a Lefty cabal”. It is true that Irresponsible economic management more often than not comes from left of centre governments, particularly far-left governments such as Venezuela. However some supposedly conservative governments are just as irresponsible. There is no plan; there is no mastermind; there is no secret meetings. It is mostly about politicians acting short term to match election cycles, doing things that give short term sugar hits and long term damage.
had an ultra jw relative say to me the there are only a few examples of csa in the jws.
the catholics are significantly worse.
i’m after statistical information that proves him wrong.
The ARC gives some figures. Here is a link:
https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/religious-institutions
I was going to extract the relevant sections, but copying and pasting is not working for me on this little device. You will see that from 1980 to 2015, for the Catholic Church, there were 4444 victims, the majority of whom had had their claim acknowledged and had received some compensation. For JWs, there were 1800 victims.
Doing a back of envelope calc, comparing the different sizes of the religions, a JW child would have been around 16 times more likely than a Catholic child to have been abused.
most of the witnesses i knew never really talked about sex.
whatever couples did was pretty much kept quiet.
every once in a while a wife might complain to the elders or a friend that the husband is too demanding or even immoral because of the sex practices the husband wanted.
Question: Why do Jehovahs Witnesses oppose sexual foreplay?
Answer: It might lead to women handling microphones.
