The Conditional Donation Arrangement™ is a complete farce. If anyone dares to ask for their money to be returned, they will be answered with guilt-laden replies to the effect that "you haven't needed the money in all this time, why would you need it now?" In essence, trying to bully a poor cash-strapped JW into just letting the WTS keep their money.
Posts by Scully
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75"8 Ways To Give Us Your Cash" - the desperation in the latest Watchtower is tangible!
by cedars ini know gayle has already started a thread on the latest november 15th watchtower article that mentions the article on donations, but i thought a thread with a more specific title might be in order just to drive the point home for any lurkers.
i hope gayle doesn't mind!.
i've been banging the drum for a while now about what i view as the obvious signs that the watchtower is in a state of decline.. i have written the following blog articles on the subject.... http://jwsurvey.org/cedars-blog/branch-closures-and-fire-sales-a-growing-trend-for-the-society.
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Women-Only City Planned
by Bangalore inwomen-only city planned.. http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/373151/20120813/women-city-saudi-arabia-jobs-hafuf.htm.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/saudi-arabia-plans-to-open-a-new-city-for-women-workers-only/story-e6frf7jo-1226449383578.
http://www.travelerstoday.com/articles/2693/20120814/women-only-city-coming-to-saudi-arabia-to-increase-female-workforce-sharia-law-muslim-islamic-law-women-city-saudi-industrial-property-authority-modon-middle-east-restrictions-segregation.htm.
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Scully
Just watch, it will end up being the centre of a female revolution in Saudi Arabia.
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Is Fading Emotionally Taxing?
by Aware! ini don't think i could handle a fade.
sooner or later the truth would be found out.
i have yet to come out, but when i do, i'll probably da myself without telling anyone why.
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Scully
Like Blondie says, fading is not intended to be a permanent situation. It's to help you transition from a JW existence to a non-JW existence.
You've already partially accomplished a fade by starting to further your education. You're meeting new people with similar interests who have no connection to the JWs. You're planning the next step of moving out of your parents' home and being on your own, away from your JW family's influence and control. If you're also working, you're expanding your network of non-JW acquaintances. You've got a couple more years of school ahead of you and have more opportunities to continue to cultivate new friendships and interests.
For the most part, a move away to attend school - one that takes you outside the Territory™ - will help you fly under the radar. Keep your Publisher Record Card™ there, and when you visit your family it won't hurt to sit through a Meeting™ on Sunday to keep the peace. You don't have to visit every week or every month, just sporadically. You could also plan your visit such that you have to get back to your place to finish up assignments and sadly have to cut your visit short / miss the Meeting™. If you aren't doing anything to make your family or other JWs suspicious (smoking, drinking, letting your hair / beard grow) just making that small amount of effort will keep the family happy and the Elders™ off your case. If the Elders™ ask for your Field Service Report™, give them one... you're pretty sure you talked to someone about JWs, right?? (Even if it's us... LMAO!!!) The point is to keep your relationship with your family as "normal" (i.e., what they are accustomed to) as possible until you are in a position to be completely independent of them.
My family started our fade with a move across town to facilitate my going to college. It worked out great - different Congregation™, different Circuit™. Nobody from our old KH expected to see us at the Circuit Assembly™ because of our move. If we met someone we knew, we always said that things were great and everything was going well. We never attended a Meeting™ again after that move, and it took years before any JWs we knew realized that we'd left, because they never gave us a second thought after we moved away. Our Publisher Cards™ were sent to the new KH, but nobody from there bothered to try to find us, and when JWs called at the door, I pretended to be just another random "Not Interested". In the meantime we were all making new friends, growing a new social circle and developing new interests, without the stress of the JWs pestering us to go back to the KH, or spying on us to catch us doing something they thought we shouldn't be doing.
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85
What did you eat when you moved out if you didn't know how to cook?
by Aware! ini'm male, in my early twenties, and i don't know how to cook.
if one day i blow my cover i will have to move out and fend for myself.
my question is what frozen meals or quick fix meals do you recommend for a single guy?
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Scully
Depending on where you live, you might be able to hook up with some inexpensive cooking classes.
I go to one regularly at my local grocery store that costs me $10 to register. It's taught by a chef, and he shows us how to pick ingredients, gives us a new recipe, and shows the preparation - takes place over a lunch hour. At the end of the class, you get to try the dishes that he made, and they give us each a $10 gift card to use in the store. A free lunch, basically, and some ideas to make a nutritious meal in less than an hour. You could make an entire batch and freeze extra servings to have another time.
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85
What did you eat when you moved out if you didn't know how to cook?
by Aware! ini'm male, in my early twenties, and i don't know how to cook.
if one day i blow my cover i will have to move out and fend for myself.
my question is what frozen meals or quick fix meals do you recommend for a single guy?
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Scully
Anyone can learn to make soup from scratch. It's pretty cheap to make, filling and there is a sense of pride in being able to make it yourself.
Any time you cook chicken save the bones/carcass to make broth. You can keep your broth in the freezer and take it out as you need to use it. It is the basic ingredient of a lot of soup recipes. What you'll need to do is take the chicken carcass (all the meat taken off the bones) and put it in a big pot (4-6 quart size). Peel a carrot or two, a stick of celery or two, an onion or two, some garlic cloves and add them to the pot. Add water to the pot to cover all the ingredients. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and let it simmer gently for 30-45 minutes. Then you're going to strain the liquid into another container and discard all the bones and cooked veggies. That's your broth.
You can do this with chicken bones, beef, pork, shells from shrimp and so on.
If you want to make a roasted vegetable broth, take a bunch of veggies (I try to clear out my veggie drawer in the fridge regularly, so I use up the older stuff this way) carrots, onion, celery, garlic, mushrooms, zucchini and so on - whatever you like - and toss them with a little bit of olive oil in a roasting pan. Turn the oven on to 275-325 F and roast the vegetables for about an hour. Then take them out of the oven and add them to a pot of water, bring to a boil and then lower the heat and simmer for 20-30 minutes. Strain out the veggies, and what you have left is vegetable broth.
To make a simple soup, start with a few strips of bacon, chopped up in a big soup pot. Start cooking the bacon, then add chopped onion, celery, carrot (chefs call this combination "mirepoix"). Let the vegetables cook gently, then add some chopped garlic and a bay leaf. Open a can (28 ounces) of diced tomatoes and add to the pot. Open a can of red kidney beans, drain off the juice and rinse them before adding to the pot. Add some more chopped veggies (leftovers will do). Add your chicken broth. Bring to a boil and turn the heat down to simmer. Let it cook until the vegetables are starting to get tender. Add some chopped potato or elbow macaroni and let it cook for 10-15 minutes until the potato/pasta is al dente. Add some chopped parsley or cilantro, whatever you like. You can add some leftover chicken if you want or leftover sausage or anything else you like. This will make a big pot of soup for you to enjoy for several days, so you could leave the meat out when you first cook it, and then add some meat just before you have a bowl of it. The time it takes to chop the vegetables is an investment, because you'll have quick and easy meal for several days.
If you have a slow cooker, you could do up a recipe of soup on the weekend (leaving out pasta if you plan to use it because it will go mushy) put the crockery in the fridge over night and then start it in the morning before you leave for school and it will be almost done (10 minutes for the pasta) when you get home.
Same goes for chili. Brown your ground beef, chop onions, celery, garlic, rinsed beans, diced tomatoes and seasonings, etc. Add them all to the crockpot and pop in the fridge overnight. Start the slow cooker on low in the morning and you'll have an amazing batch of chili for several days.
If you want to roast a chicken in the slow cooker, you can do that too. Just have all your ingredients ready in the crockpot in the fridge and set it up first thing in the morning on low and your dinner will be ready when you get home. Spend a little time de-boning the chicken after cooking so you can make some fresh chicken broth, and use the leftover chicken for your soup or for chicken sandwiches. $10 for a whole chicken may sound like a lot of money, but you can stretch it over several meals and it becomes very economical.
For lunches and stuff: hard cook some eggs for egg salad sandwiches, have tuna on hand for tuna sandwiches. Grilled cheese sandwiches go great with soup. Make sure you have fresh fruit (apples, oranges, bananas) for portable snacks. If you aren't allergic, pop some almonds into a small baggie to have a bit of a protein boost through the day. If sandwiches get boring, you can always switch from bread to tortillas to make a wrap.
Anything you can make from scratch will be healthier for you and less expensive than pre-made convenience foods.
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86
A little example of how severely the contributions for the Society are drying up
by sir82 injust a little tidbit from the congregation i attend..... the congregation has approximately 120 publishers.. well over 1000 magazines per month are picked up, not to mention all the books, brochures, and tracts that are picked up.. there was a "local needs" part on the service meeting recently, asking for more contributions.. it seems our congregation has averaged just about $300 per month contributions to the "worldwide work" over the past year.. .
assuming 1500 magazines / month, that's just 20 cents per magazine - and that completely ignores all other literature that is picked up.. the last price the magazines had, 20+ years ago, was 25 cents per issue.
with inflation that would have been about 50 cents each now.. just another sign of how severely the contriutions to the society are drying up..... .
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Scully
@ moshe
"... and getting car insurance with Geico!"
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What do you replace it with?
by konceptual99 inso... i am coming to the conclusion that pretty much all of the doctrinal stuff that i have believed for 25/30 years is built on a house of cards and it's about to come crashing down.
question is what do i replace it with?.
my intellectual head says that that whole thing is junk and there is almost certainly no god at all.
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Scully
Hi konceptual99
I agree that Dawkins has an agenda. Is there anybody who writes a book that doesn't have an agenda? Creationists (including the WTS) have their agenda, Dawkins and other evolutionists have theirs. The trick is to weed through it all and see what is supported by scientific evidence, and set aside the rest until the evidence is in one way or the other.
Another book I recommend is called Why Evolution is True by Jerry A Coyne. This book succinctly explores the best examples of evolutionary development. He's not condescending. He just shows the evidence. And while his agenda is clearly stated in the title, he meets the standard of the scientific method.
The WTS treatise called Creation is one of the most heinous examples of quoting scientific experts out of context - including Dawkins. A long-time member of JWN and an even older friend of mine, alanf, wrote an exposé of each quote that the WTS had in its list of references, and how each had - in a succession of deliberate acts of academic dishonesty - been taken out of context from the original scholarly work. That is one for the ages.
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64
What do you replace it with?
by konceptual99 inso... i am coming to the conclusion that pretty much all of the doctrinal stuff that i have believed for 25/30 years is built on a house of cards and it's about to come crashing down.
question is what do i replace it with?.
my intellectual head says that that whole thing is junk and there is almost certainly no god at all.
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Scully
Try reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. He'll give you plenty of food for thought.
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A little example of how severely the contributions for the Society are drying up
by sir82 injust a little tidbit from the congregation i attend..... the congregation has approximately 120 publishers.. well over 1000 magazines per month are picked up, not to mention all the books, brochures, and tracts that are picked up.. there was a "local needs" part on the service meeting recently, asking for more contributions.. it seems our congregation has averaged just about $300 per month contributions to the "worldwide work" over the past year.. .
assuming 1500 magazines / month, that's just 20 cents per magazine - and that completely ignores all other literature that is picked up.. the last price the magazines had, 20+ years ago, was 25 cents per issue.
with inflation that would have been about 50 cents each now.. just another sign of how severely the contriutions to the society are drying up..... .
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Scully
nugget writes:
The elders actually made it a condition of appointment that brothers set up a direct debit for monthly contributions.
That's disgusting. What it means is that any @$$hole that wanted to be Presiding Overseer™ or whatever the hell they call it now, can basically just outbid the rest of them by making bigger Contributions™.
Sounds like simony, a move right out of the Borgias playbook.
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If I write a book(scratch) about my life......
by Iamallcool inif i write a book(scratch) about my life as a deaf jw since birth and ex jw, i would like to criticize few dubbies but i would not name them at all.
would i be free from libel lawsuit if i do not name them?
there are many details that i have never told you.
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Scully
Some authors will create pseudonyms (aliases) for the people they describe rather than naming real names.
Some will change place names. Some will create composite characters that use the attributes of a few different people.
And quite a lot of them use a disclaimer that says something along the lines of "The names used in this work are pseudonyms and any resemblance to persons living or dead is unintentional" to cover their ass from a legal perspective.
You could also just call it a work of fiction. Then there's no fact-checking required.