my dad recently found out i wasn't coming to meetings and going out in field service.
he found an excuse to get me alone in his car and just lit into me about it.
he said that if i'm not going out in service that i'm not one of jehovah's witnesses and the brothers won't be able to trust me when the time comes to go undercover due to being attacked by the authorities.
I'm not one of Jehovah's Witnesses and the brothers won't be able to trust me when the time comes to go undercover due to being attacked by the authorities.
On a more positive note, the authorities won't come after you when the JWs are being "attacked by the authorities". Did you ask him if he'd like you to bring him a cake with a file in it when he's in prison?
i have been on this site daily, almost from its beginning, since i left the jws in 2001, but i have been more of a reader than a poster, as you can see from my post count.
i know few here know me, although i know many of you through reading your posts.
maybe it is not right to ask for support, when i generally stay quietly in the background of this forum, but i want only to speak a human misery of the deepest kind.
I am so very sorry for your loss.
the memorial last thursday night was, to my recollection, the shortest i've ever attended.
thirty-five minutes.
it was truly a cliff notes version.
Well, it went just over the perfunctory "need not exceed 30 minutes" for the Funeral Discourse™ (cf: http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/beliefs/136147/1/20-minutes).
At least Jesus ranks slightly better than most dead JWs (GB, COs, DOs, and Regional Building Committee Coordinators excepted).
what does the bible really teach?
using only the bible, can you prove - 1. who the 'other sheep' are?
2. the context of john 10:16?
You want honest answers to those 16 questions?
Here goes: 1-16... I don't care. Honestly.
thx buhbye
latley i have been telling some of my family members that i don't beleive anymore, i had my mom especially not really beleiving either...then today's special talk scared her into submission to the wt society.
i guess the brother started crying during the part when they were telling inactive people to come back to jehovah.
she now says she's going to be a regular auxillary pioneer and that she's not going to give up on serving jah now cause she's afraid she's going to die.
she's not going to give up on serving Jah now cause she's afraid she's going to die.
Way to go, Jehovah™. People aren't serving you because they love you, admire you or appreciate you, they're serving you because you scare the $h!t out of them.
this has been bugging me for a while, and while i dont want to turn this into something about semantics i think that we should quickly define what an agnostic and atheists are.. richard dawkins defines 7 different types of atheist ranging from weak to militant atheists, but along these definitions there appears one definition with a strong resemblance to agnosticism.. to me an agnostic is a person who neither believes nor disbelieves in deity/deities, but there are those who define agnostics as a ignorant who simply just don't care or don't have the intelligence to come to sound conclusion.. an atheist can be a person who disbelieves in a deity/deities based on the current mathematical and scientific understandings of the universe, as well as understandings that can refute certain religions such as the strong influence of protestantism christianity in america.. .
from here i will refer deity as anything ranging jehovah to a real spaghetti monster, it's not important because a) we dont know b)for the purpose of this discussion it is not important to define what we believe god to be.. an argument that can be used about a deity is -we cannot prove nor disprove that god exists- this is referred to as a null hypothesis, an assumption that we cannot create a hypothesis to prove or disprove this deity.
this to me is agnosticism and is more correct than the idea of atheism.
I'm more of an I-don't-give-a-crap-one-way-or-the-other-ist. I have no intention of wasting any more of my life on it, when there are so many more productive and positive things I could be doing.
for those who are atheists: did you become an atheist while being a jw, then left, or did you not view them as the true religion and left, but still believed in god/bible, but later turned to atheism?.
I think I was atheist before my parents joined the JWs (when I was 6) - prior to that, we never talked about god or jesus or anything religious - I'd never been inside a church nor had I been christened as an infant. I had to drink the Kool-Aid once they joined because all other options were removed.
Twenty-five years later, when I quit the JWs, I gradually found my way back to non-belief.
Yep. I know and am related to some who do. Fishing too.
Personally, I'm not a fan of hunting and fishing for sport. My dad gave up hunting (but not fishing) when he converted to the JWs, but it was a lifestyle he grew up with. He felt, once he became a JW, that shooting animals and the possibility of not bleeding them correctly would make the meat inappropriate for JWs to consume and showed disrespect for life. My take on it was that he was guilted in to giving it up because one doesn't just go hunting for a couple of hours - trips would sometimes take 2 or 3 days - which meant missing Meetings™ and Field Service™. My brother and his FIL don't seem to have the same pangs of Conscience™, and they are both Appointed™ Brothers™ in their Congregations™. I don't know how much of what they bring back is used, but I don't see my SIL allowing a big moose or deer skin to decorate her home - I think they only use the meat.
I won't eat venison or moose or rabbit or other game animals, and I'm not even keen on eating game fowl or fish that has been baited and hooked. But really there's barely any difference between hunting wild game and slaughtering a farm animal. I wouldn't be able to eat a chicken that I had to kill, but I know JWs who raise chickens for their eggs and then kill them for their dinners.
I guess I prefer to think that chicken, fish, steaks and bacon come in neat little packages from the supermarket. It keeps the messy and uncomfortable business of animal slaughter out of sight and out of mind.
a few weeks ago, i visited my mom and a couple of elders and a young ms also came by to see her.
while i was there, the elders invited me to the memorial and i was very polite with them and thanked them for their invitation.. i just spoke to my mother and she said the elders saved 2 seats for my mother and i !
they seemed confident that i would show up.. unbelievable!.
I'm guessing it was the "hot seat". I wouldn't lose any sleep over missing out on *that*.
What else can they brag about? How many homeless people they help? How many people they feed? How their contributions to medical research have improved the lives of [insert disease of choice] patients? How many women and children they save from abuse? How many alcoholics or drug abusers they've helped?
"No" to all the above. The only thing they give two $h!ts about is Memorial attendance, so that's all they have to boast about.
