Xanthippe

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Posts by Xanthippe

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  15

  "Reaching out" in the org and personal confessions...

  by Good JW in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  going to be completely honest here, no feelings spared for me.

  when i was a jw, one of my biggest motivations for "reaching out" was to become a "somebody".

  i loved the idea of being a leader, teaching/training others.

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  Xanthippe

  It's egotism in disguise

  Oh yeah and sometimes not disguised at all. We had an elder who used to say, Rome wasn't built in a day but then I wasn't foreman on that job. Insufferable man. Did the congregation hate him? No they just lapped it up!
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  10

  Where I'm at now

  by LoveUniHateExams in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  just thought i'd start a thread about what i've been up to recently.

  any comments and suggestions are welcome.. so here goes .... i'm interested in enrolling for a master's degree and i've almost completed it.

  i just need one more reference, plus i need to sort out the finances.. i'd been claiming universal credit for 2 years after graduating from uni.

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  Xanthippe

  Hi LUHE. I don't think we should be afraid or thoughts like 'what's the point if life'?'. It doesn't necessarily mean you're depressed. Reflection is a good thing because life is complex. Deciding where you want to go next and thinking what you really want to do will generate questions about the meaning of life.

  Suggestions? Well my daughter just got her masters in English literature. She just started her first job, working as a teaching assistant in September. She loves it and has been using the time to decide if she wants to get a teaching qualification.

  The thing is she has long holidays working at a school but it means she can write. She has always wanted to be a writer as did her father, so she's going to give it a go. In fact she's already got a trilogy of books planned that she started when doing Alevels. Now if she becomes a teacher she will find it tricky to find time to write because they work through holidays marking books and planning next terms' lessons. So we shall have to see.

  If you do want to go into teaching you could always try teaching assistant work with secondary school kids and see if you like it. Where my daughter lives there are agencies that find teaching assistants for schools. If you start and then decide to do a teaching assistant qualification online you can get about £18,000 with grade three.

  Or you can do a PGCE and go into teaching. There are also schools that let you learn teaching on the job but you have to go wherever in the country they want you to go. That will start off at about £21,000 which is not bad when you're an unqualified teacher. I hope this helps.
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  14

  The International Space Station passing Overhead At 10:22 pm ESDST Lakes entrance Victoria Australia.

  by smiddy3 in

  1. social
  2. current

  it`s always a buzz to see this with the naked eye and know that their are human beings orbiting the earth a couple of hundred miles up every 90 minutes or so .. the wife and i were just sitting out on our porch/patio waiting for the cool change to arrive when i noticed this "star" moving across the sky in a se/nw (?

  ) direction { i hope that`s right }.

  anyhow i thought some others on here may be interested in tracking the iss from time to time.. by the way the cool change hasn`t arrived here yet it`s still quite warm though not as hot as it was today at 41 deg c.

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  Xanthippe

  I love to see the space station overhead. I use the tracker on NASA's site. It gives me a kick after being a history graduate to see humans in space passing over my house!
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  66

  Since leaving the JW Organization, who is believing?

  by Issa in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i left the jw organization last year during summer.

  maybe some of you can relate.

  who of you are agnostic or an atheist?

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  Xanthippe

  Hi Issa, I was a Christian for a year or two after leaving but not a church-goer. My husband and I started reading books on evolution, because we could now read whatever we liked, and realised we'd been lied to by the JWs about the lack of evidence for it.

  I also could not see that anyone is in charge of the world and realised all the religious explanations for why God permits suffering are all extremely convoluted explanations for why we don't see him doing anything. One day the penny dropped with me that we don't see God doing anything not because of Adam and Eve, sin or arguments with the Devil but because he's not there.

  We were humanists for a while but we found that we couldn't catagorically say there was no life after death as humanists believe. Browsing in a second hand bookshop we found a book on near death and out of body experiences which was very surprising and have read many books about them since.

  I have no religious beliefs and am now an atheist by I think it may be possible for consciousness to evolve to exist in non-physical states. I don't believe in anything supernatural, everything in the universe has by definition got to be within the laws of physics but I allow for the possibility that we don't understand all of physics yet.

  My husband attained a physics degree after leaving the JWs having always wanted to go to university because he loved the subject. He said you have to throw out what we call common sense when you study particularly quantum physics because that expression no longer applies. So I think the universe is full of possibilities and I never stop looking for answers. Good luck with your quest Issa.
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  13

  Would you sacrifice yourself?

  by Half banana in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  under roman rule, which covered a large part of the civilized world around the mediterranean, to be a trouble maker or a magician or an insurrectionist was a capital offence.. to live back then in a civilised society was a boon.

  naturally for the sake of law and order certain compliances had to be met to as part of the social bargain to be a roman citizen.

  among them were included the requirement to respect the “genius” or spirit of the emperor, not to be an atheist and to respect the roman gods.

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  Xanthippe

  But is there some perverse node in our psyche or even in the cerebrum which gets turned on by certain types of religious thinking? I reason that the idea of belief in a certainty of religious hope is made 'real' to believers by others demonstrating it by laying their down lives --and taking pleasure in doing so.

  Yes I think it's all about the belief in life after death and as you say it's made real to believers by watching others gladly lay down their lives.

  It has always been believed that life after death is a reward a person has to strive for either in a life of self-sacrifice, adherence to religious rules or through a martyrs death.

  
  
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  13

  Would you sacrifice yourself?

  by Half banana in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  under roman rule, which covered a large part of the civilized world around the mediterranean, to be a trouble maker or a magician or an insurrectionist was a capital offence.. to live back then in a civilised society was a boon.

  naturally for the sake of law and order certain compliances had to be met to as part of the social bargain to be a roman citizen.

  among them were included the requirement to respect the “genius” or spirit of the emperor, not to be an atheist and to respect the roman gods.

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  Xanthippe

  Christianity was all about Jesus dying painfully and the religion promoted the notion that followers would do well to imitate him literally.

  Yes Christianity is a religion that promotes martyrdom and self-sacrifice. We had this a lot in the memorial talk. If Jesus had those six-inch nails hammered into his hands and died an agonising death for you, the least you can do is pioneer, go to bethel, sell your house for the kingdom and so on.

  The way I feel now is, self-sacrifice is all very well but what's in it for me?
  
  
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  29

  Anxiety, OCD, Hoarding, and the JWs

  by Spiral in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i'm noticing what seems to be a higher incidence of the above among the local jws than in the "general" (read: worldly) population.

  i don't say this lightly, my wanderings around the fringes of jw society locally is revealing an alarming trend here.

  the poverty doesn't help (there are good jobs, but you need a degree or qualifications to get one).. anyone else see this?

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  Xanthippe

  OCD to compulsively clean house I've seen a lot of, probably because of the cult's constant nagging women to keep the house spotless so as not to 'bring reproach on J'.

  I had a boyfriend whose mother had ruined so many sofas and other furniture because she kept chucking water on it. She even made me lift my feet so she could wash the bottom of my shoes when I went there. A women in my congregation cleaned her house from top to bottom every single day of the year. Very sad.
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  41

  Avoiding Service Tips?

  by Kohanic in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  back again!.

  so as i'm still pimo and living under my parent's roof, how can i get out of service?

  cause i really don't want to go and i feel dirty just knowing i could be influencing someone into this garbage..

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  Xanthippe

  Kohanic is it possible for your mother to attend one visit with your psychiatrist with you to find out just how ill you are? In your first post you said she thinks you are using your mental health as an excuse but from your description you are very unwell.

  Cold calling on people is one of the most stressful things a person can do do. Cold calling to talk about religion increases the stress by a factor of 10! Your mother needs to know from your doctor you're not well enough to do this, I feel.
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  13

  Would you sacrifice yourself?

  by Half banana in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  under roman rule, which covered a large part of the civilized world around the mediterranean, to be a trouble maker or a magician or an insurrectionist was a capital offence.. to live back then in a civilised society was a boon.

  naturally for the sake of law and order certain compliances had to be met to as part of the social bargain to be a roman citizen.

  among them were included the requirement to respect the “genius” or spirit of the emperor, not to be an atheist and to respect the roman gods.

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  Xanthippe

  In a modern day example I always thought while I was still in that it was ridiculous for JWs to go to concentration camps instead of lying to the Nazis. Why would you have to tell the truth to monsters? Just sign the paper, say you no longer believe and go home. God was supposed to read your heart so what was the problem?

  To my mind the problem with Christianity is it starts with a crucifixion and has nowhere to go but down.
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  45

  COLD today

  by wasone in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  it's a cold 13 degrees fahrenheit in tennessee this morning where i live.

  glad i'm retired and don't have to work outside today.

  what about where you live.

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  Xanthippe

  Yeah I know the A47 Punky. I got off a train from Manchester during the snow a couple of weeks ago. We'd had three inches of snow and the roads were at a standstill. Even though it had started snowing three hours before not a gritter in sight.

  Luckily I'd booked a taxi from the station because all the taxis had gone home and people were trying to get in mine. It took him an hour to drive eight miles and I finally got home at midnight. Nightmare.