Posts by Saethydd

21

How much money people usually donate to WT ?

by Bardamu in

i grew up in the org and never got baptised, however i was wondering recently about how much money my family and old friends are wasting in all that.

.

i remember of course never talking in amounts, that it was important to give from what you can not what you have etc but i admit i have no clue how much the average witness gives (say in % of their income).. i'm sure it varies greatly, i'd love to hear what you guys have to say..

Saethydd

It seems like my parents usually donate somewhere between $75.00-$125.00 a month.

5

Divine Punishment???

by Saethydd in

i was recently at a sunday watchtower, reading one of the novels i have on my ipad to help me get through the dreadfully boring event.

every once in awhile though i'll glance at the article just in case anyone is peeking at my screen, and in the article, i noticed these paragraphs.. 3. how did exile in babylon differ from the slavery the israelites had experienced in egypt?.

3 what the prophets had foretold came to pass.

Saethydd

I was recently at a Sunday Watchtower, reading one of the novels I have on my iPad to help me get through the dreadfully boring event. Every once in awhile though I'll glance at the article just in case anyone is peeking at my screen, and in the article, I noticed these paragraphs.

3. How did exile in Babylon differ from the slavery the Israelites had experienced in Egypt?
3 What the prophets had foretold came to pass. Through Jeremiah, Jehovah advised the future exiles to accept their new situation and make the most of it. He said: “Build houses [in Babylon] and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their fruit. And seek the peace of the city to which I have exiled you, and pray in its behalf to Jehovah, for in its peace you will have peace.” (Jer. 29:5, 7) Those who submitted to the will of God lived a relatively normal life in Babylon. Their captors allowed them to administer their own affairs to some extent. The exiles even had freedom to move about the country. Babylon was a center of trade and commerce in the ancient world, and documents that have been unearthed indicate that many Jews learned the art of buying and selling there, while others became skilled craftsmen. Some Jews even became prosperous. Exile in Babylon was nothing like the slavery in Egypt that the Israelites had experienced centuries before.—Read Exodus 2:23-25.
4. Besides rebellious Israelites, who were affected by captivity in Babylon, and what limitations were placed on their ability to worship God acceptably?
4 Although the material needs of the exiled Jews were being met, what of their spiritual needs? Jehovah’s temple with its altar had been destroyed, and the priesthood was no longer functioning in an organized manner. Among the exiles were faithful servants of God who had done nothing deserving of punishment, but they had to suffer along with the rest of the nation. Nevertheless, they did what they could to observe God’s Law. For example, in Babylon, Daniel and three of his companions—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—abstained from foods that were forbidden to Jews. And we know that Daniel maintained regular communication with God in prayer. (Dan. 1:8; 6:10) Still, under a pagan administration, it was impossible for a God-fearing Jew to do everything the Law required.

Bear with me please as I try to follow this string of events. God creates the nation of Israel, the nation of Israel doesn't worship God according to rules he set up, God punishes the Israelites by removing them from an environment that allows them to follow all those rules he set up, but other than that they have their needs cared for.

So basically this punishment didn't adversely impact the people who were not worshiping Jehovah whole-souled, in fact, if the statements made in these paragraphs are accurate it was ONLY the people who continued to try and worship Jehovah that faced any large difficulty. Which means that God was, in essence, administering a form of punishment that primarily had a negative effect on his faithful servants.

Isn't that simply absurd? It would be like if one of your kids acted up, so you decided to punish them by taking a toy away from their sibling.

26

Do you think I should get something for my wife for her birthday?

by schnell in

jw
friends

my wife is still nominally in, but only because it "makes me (her) happy".

there is nothing academic about her beliefs and when i try, she interprets me as negative.. but then she cusses like a sailor and watches certain movies with me.

her birthday is coming up and it's also right around valentine's day.

Saethydd

Not to change the subject, but I recently gave someone a birthday present for the first time in my life. I gave my history instructor an apple on his birthday, by no means an extravagant gift, but he really seemed to appreciate that I remembered. It felt good.

19

Conditional Love

by Saethydd in

i've noticed several posts recently claiming that jw friends and family members give out conditional love.

well, i'm not so sure that is entirely accurate, in fact, i would say they tend to be very steadfast in their love.

the issue is this, they have been taught a poor form of love.

Saethydd

Everybody has a different situation, and perhaps I would view things differently had I been shunned for decades, but I would rather not get so wrapped up in my own pain that I start assuming motives that paint the people around me as cruel and vindictive. After all is that not what the WTBTS says about apostates? That they are wicked people who just want to drag you down with them.

I don't want to make that same mistake about the people I'll most probably have to leave behind. Where possible I like to believe the best about people until proven wrong, and all I'm trying to do here is offer another point of view.

19

Conditional Love

by Saethydd in

i've noticed several posts recently claiming that jw friends and family members give out conditional love.

well, i'm not so sure that is entirely accurate, in fact, i would say they tend to be very steadfast in their love.

the issue is this, they have been taught a poor form of love.

Saethydd

This may sound weird at first but even true love causes you to act differently under different conditions, but that doesn't make the love itself conditional.

Another simpler example came to me, you wouldn't normally shove your friend with all your might, but you would if a car was about to hit them. Why? Because it would spare them a worse fate. It's just that in the case of JWs they have been convinced that by taking the actions they do they may spare us a worse fate.

19

Conditional Love

by Saethydd in

i've noticed several posts recently claiming that jw friends and family members give out conditional love.

well, i'm not so sure that is entirely accurate, in fact, i would say they tend to be very steadfast in their love.

the issue is this, they have been taught a poor form of love.

Saethydd

I don't think I expressed myself as well as I meant to, I wasn't meaning to make an argument of semantics, but rather show the difference in points of view. For example:

Let's a say you have a set of parents that never let their child play outside, now at first glance that might seem cruel. What if a doctor told them that if their child plays outside he will very likely die? Then they have a good reason, or at least they think they do. But what if that doctor turns out to be a quack, and their child will actually be no worse off if he goes outside? Then the parents aren't cruel they just failed to get a second opinion. (Which I would call lazy, but that does not equate to cruel.)

And you also have to keep in mind that this "doctor" is an old friend of the family who has been taking care of their medical needs for decades, meaning that they are going to automatically try to ignore anything negative about him, and may even fear that getting a second opinion would offend him.

From their point of view they are expressing love, but as is often the case they lack the full picture, and if the child did go outside despite their rules, they may even punish him, but that doesn't mean they don't love the child. Just that have been tricked into this situation in which they administer a punishment that doesn't actually help anyone.

19

Conditional Love

by Saethydd in

i've noticed several posts recently claiming that jw friends and family members give out conditional love.

well, i'm not so sure that is entirely accurate, in fact, i would say they tend to be very steadfast in their love.

the issue is this, they have been taught a poor form of love.

Saethydd

I've noticed several posts recently claiming that JW friends and family members give out conditional love. Well, I'm not so sure that is entirely accurate, in fact, I would say they tend to be very steadfast in their love. The issue is this, they have been taught a poor form of love. They have been taught that by shunning us they are showing us love, as twisted as that may seem. They consider it loving to press everyone into a certain mold that will ensure their survival.

This is all perfectly understandable when you remember that their highest example of love, is the God of the Bible. A God who claims to love mankind but at the same time will quickly deal out punishment for any tiny transgression, and sometimes even going so far as to take it out on people who are completely innocent. (The people of Isreal dying for David's census taking.) Their God doesn't show the sort of love that allows him to accept us for our failures, rather he has to make us all "perfect," or kill us. He offers no middle ground. So is it really any surprise that they try to do the same thing by any means necessary? So no, it's not that their love is conditional, they just don't know how to really love and accept someone, they haven't been taught to.

106

So what caused you to have doubts in the first place?

by nicolaou in

jw
friends

i had no doubts at all about the 'truth' untill a friend of mine in the cong' began falling away.

in trying to help him i had to ask questions and do research and that of course cracked the doors of my mind open for the first time in over thirty years.. years ago, when jwd allowed members to have signatures, i used the following quote from voltaire as mine.

i still love it.. doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous..

Saethydd

I think the seeds of my doubt were planted not too long after I started college. (no doubt a detail that would be used to further scare current JWs away from pursuing such an education.) I took public speaking in which we had to write two speeches, for my first speech I decided I would write about the persecution faced by Jehovah's Witnesses, however, we were supposed to vary our sources so I tried going outside the WT to find accounts of this persecution. Discovering the fact that JWs didn't have things quite as bad in Nazi Germany as I had been led to believe, and that Rutherford actually wrote letters to Hitler saying that they shared common interests...

Well, those things shook me, so I looked a little further into Rutherford and discovered the more despotic and hypocritical parts of his personality that my WT education had failed to mention. I suppose fear kept me from digging much deeper, for I was treading dangerously close to "apostate" sites and didn't want to be "infected" by their way of thinking. So I quickly finished my speech using the bare minimum of sources and halted any further research, meanwhile, I did my best to rationalize the troubling details I had discovered. Those things laid dormant in my mind for awhile, because not too long after my first semester at college I met a JW girl through Instagram.

What followed was a largely clandestine, long-distance relationship, which, suffice to say, got messy by the end. I won't go into gory detail but not longer after that relationship ended I was disfellowshipped, done in my own guilty conscience that led me to report myself, though I think part of me just didn't want it to bite me in the butt 5-10 years down the line, better to get out in front of it. I did my best to bear my "discipline" with strength and integrity, but my forced solitude gave me time to think and research... and that eventually led me here.

29

Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson

by azor in

jw
friends

listening to 2 of my current favorite thinkers debate/discussion.

i've been looking forward to this since i found out about it a month ago.

hope some of you get a chance to listen.

Saethydd

Does anyone else think it strange that JWs never seem to do any public debates for their beliefs? I mean they even recognize that C.T. Russell engaged in such debates on Bible subjects and that those debates helped to publicize the "Truth." So why don't they do any today defending old-earth creationism, or their own interpretation of the Bible?

22

Looking for a Book on Evolution

by Saethydd in

i am wondering if anyone is aware of a book or series of videos designed to explain evolution to creationists, (specifically the jw strain of creationism if possible) without being patronizing or overly confrontational.

i would like to have something to recommend to people who challenge evolution, but i know that the sources which convinced me would turn most of them off because of the confrontational and at times condescending tone in which it's presented.. some examples of what i'm looking for would be someone who doesn't claim evolution is a fact until after they have presented all of the evidence that makes it a fact and also have addressed as many counter-arguments as possible..

Saethydd

I think I may have found one, I'll let you all know how I like it after I read it, in the meantime if you find any more books or video series please feel free to add them here.

The Scientific Approach to Evolution: What They Didn't Teach You in Biology