I read Visions of Glory years ago when I was still a JW elder. It got me thinking. Barbara and I corresponded for a few months just before her death.
What really took me out was reading the Bible. I have my last NWT reference Bible still, and there is a page at the beginning where I have this list of verses that didn't make sense that I compiled during my last years as a JW. It's a very full page. One aspect of it was that in the list was the fact that the phrase "the day of Jehovah is near" can be found in verses written thousands of years apart. I realized the whole concept was meaningless.
There was a science book by a Boston Globe science writer that helped, and Ken Wilber has a book about science and faith, can't remember the title, that was important to me. I remember that he wrote how science has doomed any literalist religion like the JWs.
After I was out, Crisis of Conscience was an eye-opener. Ray's tone and quality of work belied the angry, lying apostate stereotype. I had enough JW background, which included meeting Ray when he was on the GB, to know that his book had the absolute ring of truth to it.
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Seeker4
JoinedPosts by Seeker4
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your personal favourite books that freed you from the JW's
by ninja in1/captives of a concept.....fantastic....thanks don...you freed my mind completely .
2/visions of glory...barbara harrison....fantastic insights......(god can't kill arnold) .
3/jehovah lives in brooklyn.....ricky francis.....he sums all jw's up brilliantly....love this book .
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What's the dumbest thing you've ever heard a JW say?
by Renegade inalot of you maybe stuck for choice so you can say as many as you want.
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Seeker4
One comment by a sister at a WT study. They had a young daughter that the sister said they didn't allow to watch Sesame Street because one of the songs on SS at the time was to a disco beat.
It was during the JW anti-disco era. Several in the hall were holding back either gags or laughs.
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Why Are Barb Anderson's Comments Missing from Silentlamb's NBC Transcript?
by Seeker4 ina few weeks ago i was checking out a few details on line about the nov. 12, 2007 nbc broadcast concerning the wts settlement on the west coast pedophile cases, and the release of the court documents on cd by barbara anderson.
i think it was lisa meyers who interviewed barbara, and brian williams was hosting.
well, i figured silentlambs had a transcript of the show, and i went there, only to find that they indeed had the transcript, but all of barbara's portion of the interview was oddly missing, and there was no link to the video.
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Seeker4
Earth to JCANON! JC, you are so in your own world.
Do you have any idea what this thread is about? You are, without a doubt, in the running for the JWD Resident Wingnut Award!
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E-mail to JW Ex-Wife: What You Can Learn Researching the WTS in 3 Hours!
by Seeker4 ini posted a thread earlier this week about a conversation i had with my jw ex-wife.
the next day i sent her this e-mail.
one should never be afraid of ideas.
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Seeker4
JCANON:
I don't know what to say - I almost never read your threads because what I have read, you sound like a Russell/Freddie Franz clone and I've had my fill of people trying to make prophetic sense out of the Bible. It's never worked for anyone else, and I think the reason is that it's about the same as trying to make prophetic sense out of any other hodge podge mix of history, myth, fantasy, rewritten history, poetry and hallucination. It's a study in frustration, and you are living proof that anybody can come up with anything they want out of it.
Your curt dismissal of the evidence against Noah's Flood indicates it would be another study in frustration to get into a discussion with you.
About the name Jehovah: What kind of god can't even preserve his NAME? One that doesn't exist. We may not know how the tetragrammeton was pronounced, but we can be sure of one thing, the name of the Hebrew god was definitely NOT Jehovah!
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E-mail to JW Ex-Wife: What You Can Learn Researching the WTS in 3 Hours!
by Seeker4 ini posted a thread earlier this week about a conversation i had with my jw ex-wife.
the next day i sent her this e-mail.
one should never be afraid of ideas.
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Seeker4
Just headed to work, no time to respond or even read what was posted in the last 12 hours or so.
But, this is the website with the WTS correspondence about the flood:
http://www.watchtowerletters.com/Home.html
Thanks for all this discussion!
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E-mail to JW Ex-Wife: What You Can Learn Researching the WTS in 3 Hours!
by Seeker4 ini posted a thread earlier this week about a conversation i had with my jw ex-wife.
the next day i sent her this e-mail.
one should never be afraid of ideas.
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Seeker4
Reniaa,
Glad your still here on JWD. I will agree with a few things you wrote. I absolutely agree that being a JW can help to make you a bery good reader, and I personally feel that if you read well, you've got the key to educating yourself.
I credit a lot of progress I made in a lot of areas to having learned to read well. The JWs are one of the few groups that emphasizes reading aloud - at Book Studies, WT, TMS, etc. I know that helped me, and I also know that I worked with my kids on reading, and reading aloud doing the Bible reading or whatever, was a part of our family life, and all my kids are good readers.
I'm not so sure on the analytical thinking skills. There is a dichotomy when you're told to question THOSE things but you have to accept THESE teachings without question or doubt. There are truly some bright JWs - but the ones with real critical thinking skills end up on JWD!
I also have to disagree that the JWs "still have Jehovah." I'm sorry, but I view Jehovah as a mythological creation of an ancient people who they presented as a pathological monster - a killer of anyone who disagreed with him, a jealous egomaniac who demanded constant attention like some sniveling psychopath. If there truly is a god, that god would need none of the things that the Bible demands of Jehovah's worshippers. A true god would never need to be worshipped, as they would be totally complete in themselves. I'm a fahter, but I certainly don't need to have my children constantly thinking of me and telling me how wonderful I am. I just want them to live their lives, find their own way to happiness, and let me be a part of their existence.
Awakened - Glad to have you here. You and I have much in common. I've truly enjoyed your posts. The same with you, BenV and Flipper. I posted that letter on here with the hope that people would use it. We should all stay in touch. We have much to share with each other and the ex-JW community.
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Any apostate POs or elders have a scan of the BS announcement?
by 1914BS ini would surely love a scan of the letter read on april 28-08 at the khall's of jehobnob witlesses.
also, in what year was the bs implemented??.
thanks muchly.
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Seeker4
Someone posted in the last couple of weeks that the Book Study (Bible Study) is the oldest meeting, going back to the 1890s or so. Do a search and you might find it. It's a far older meeting than the WT Study.
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Why Are Barb Anderson's Comments Missing from Silentlamb's NBC Transcript?
by Seeker4 ina few weeks ago i was checking out a few details on line about the nov. 12, 2007 nbc broadcast concerning the wts settlement on the west coast pedophile cases, and the release of the court documents on cd by barbara anderson.
i think it was lisa meyers who interviewed barbara, and brian williams was hosting.
well, i figured silentlambs had a transcript of the show, and i went there, only to find that they indeed had the transcript, but all of barbara's portion of the interview was oddly missing, and there was no link to the video.
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Seeker4
Thanks 2X, Blondie!
Jeff:
I vividly remember how I reacted when, as I was leaving the JWs, my research revealed all of the dishonest quotes in the Creation book. Other stuff I could maybe understand or overlook, but the unethical journalism was a planned effort to deceive their readers, and I'd have left the WTS over that fact alone.
I'm not saying Bill is misquoting, but letting personal feelings interfere with total openness and transparency is not acceptable. I do get the impression from reading over his material about this particular situation that he is trying to highlight his own role and downplay the work of others.
I have nothing against Bill - he was the one who told me to get onto this site! – and I think he's done a great deal of good, but this sort of thing really detracts from that.
I'd still like to hear an explanation if there is one.
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E-mail to JW Ex-Wife: What You Can Learn Researching the WTS in 3 Hours!
by Seeker4 ini posted a thread earlier this week about a conversation i had with my jw ex-wife.
the next day i sent her this e-mail.
one should never be afraid of ideas.
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Seeker4
I posted a thread earlier this week about a conversation I had with my JW ex-wife. The next day I sent her this e-mail. I tried to be nice in it, but I also wanted to get across that the superior attitude she showed about a lot of things (JWs and JW morality is better than anyone else's sort of thing) wasn't entirely justified. She hasn't replied, which doesn't surprise me. I'm sure she's upset that I sent it, but she was the one telling me that there was nothing preventing her from doing all the research she wanted.
Below is the text of the e-mail - sorry for the length:
I hope you weren't too disturbed by our conversation last night. BUT, that freewheeling give and take type of discussion is just what you can't do if you're a Witness, and what I've come to love after leaving. It takes real courage on your part to discuss your beliefs like that, but it's a very freeing thing.
One should never be afraid of ideas. Without fear, good ideas will thrive and bad ideas will die. Fear of thinking, discussing, questioning is the worst kind of slavery, and leads to slavery of all sorts.
Tons of people who leave the Witnesses are hungry for that sort of thing - to be able to freely discuss their ideas in the rough and tumble of public discourse without fear that it will get them in trouble. Put your ideas out there, and defend them. If there is no way to support them, that become obvious pretty quickly - and you can adjust your thinking accordingly.
That can't happen if you're a JW. You can't change the things for which there is no proof, or for which there is abundant evidence to the contrary, because the whole thing collapses then.
An example:
The Society knows that there is no evidence for their date of 607 for the fall of Jerusalem, in fact ALL the evidence, and there is considerable, proves another date all together. But the WTS can't change their date because that's the only way they can come up with 1914. Most Witnesses have no idea that Russell originally came up with the 1914 date using pyramidology, which the WTS now considers spiritism!
Many, many a brother has gone to the Society with the evidence against 607, and all were rejected and most are out now. So the WTS is in the position of using a date for which there is no support in order to come up with a date that was originally arrived at through pyramidology! How ironic. Do a google search of "Pastor Russell's grave" if you don't believe me. He was buried under a huge pyramid - and it's all covered with Masonic symbols! Pyramidology was a part of Witness belief well into the Rutherford era.
Another example. I have a friend who wrote the WTS several very respectful letters over a period of years with all the scientific evidence proving there could not have been a worldwide flood 4000 years ago. The evidence comes from several branches of science and is irrefutable. The Society defended its view by quoting from a "science" text that, when the brother looked into it, was a book written in the 1700s! They really had no response to this brother's questions and he ended up posting all his letters and the WTS's responses on a website.
Those are the sort of things I was talking about last night. The Society can't change a lot of things that it can no longer support. If you change the 607 date, you lose 1914, If you lose that, you lose 1918, which is the date the Society claims Jehovah picked them as his spokesman on Earth, which is where they get all of their authority from.
Also if the Flood didn't happen then Jesus was obviously wrong in referring to it, which can't be if he was a perfect person. Or if people existed prior to God creating Adam 6,033 years ago, then the whole Genesis account is just a myth, and if it is then there is no need for a new Adam in Jesus if there was never an old Adam living as a perfect man in Eden. And of course, there is tons of evidence all over the globe of people being around tens of thousands of years before Adam was supposedly created. You can prove it dozens of different ways.
That is the "house of cards" I was referring to. Disprove one part of WTS theology, and boom, the whole structure collapses. The WTS has locked itself into an indefensible, literalist position. Anyone who takes the time to actually research this stuff (one hour or three!!) and you don't turn into a pumpkin, you just get a realistic understanding of what the WTS really is, AND what it's not.
This is what you'll find. Jehovah's Witnesses are just another religion, (claiming like all the rest do that it alone has the truth) connected with a huge publishing corporation, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Incorporated, and directed by what used to be the corporation's board of directors, now known as the Governing Body. The GB has appointed itself as God's spokesman on earth - and the claim itself is used as the evidence that it happened. It's a circular reasoning: "We're God's spokesman, and how do we know that? Because we say so, and we're God's spokesman."
That in a nutshell is what a few hours of research will reveal. You will also discover that the WTS has the absolute worst record among religions for it's prophecies – not ONE of the things the Society originally claimed would happen in 1875, 1914, 1915, 1918, 1925, 1950, 1975, 1995 or by the end of the 20th Century, has happened. That takes some careful research to discover because the Society tends to rewrite it's history from time to time, changing things around and leaving things out. I'll bet not one in a thousand Witnesses knows what the WTS actually said was going to happen in 1914. It wasn't the return of Christ – they said then that that had happened in the 1780s! In fact, if you taught now 90% of what the WTS was teaching in 1918 when they were supposedly picked by God to be his chosen group, you'd be disfellowshipped for apostasy! By the way, this system was supposed to have ended in 1914.
But wait, you might think,"The Witnesses are the only group preaching God's kingdom door to door. Doesn't that prove we're the only true religion?"
Not really. Lots of groups go door to door. In reality, in this day and age, door to door preaching is mostly a huge waste of time, because most people aren't at home. It uses up massive amounts of gas basically knocking on empty houses. You and I know that from our years of Pioneering! One television evangelist probably contacts more people in one broadcast than a congregation of Witnesses does in a year! The Pentecostalists started about the same time that the JWs did in the 1800s. Today the Witnesses have 6 million members, the Pentecostals claim 500 million members!
I also know for a fact that the GB did an in-depth study of the concept of door-to-door preaching in the Bible that showed that all the house-to-house references in the Bible do not refer to the preaching work, but to other activities. A majority on the GB voted to do nothing with that info as it would be too disturbing to the friends. That's how the GB make decisions - based on a 3/4 majority vote. The h-to-h work is not a Biblically backed indication of a true religion.
If you want to remain a member, that's fine, just do it with your eyes open. The Witnesses provide a great social community in some ways, as long as you don't rock the boat. Just be realistic about it - they are nothing special, and science and the free access to massive amounts of information and education will eventually doom literalist religions like this over the next few centuries.
That's a good reason to be careful about feeling superior to non-Witnesses and judging people for not living according to Witness standards. Anyone with even a basic understanding of modern science sees the Witnesses as a scientifically ignorant group of people who base their lives on an ancient mythology that they take as literal fact. It's no surprise that the PEW Survey I mentioned last night found that the religious group in the US with the lowest level of education among its members were the Witnesses.
High on the list of things that people who leave the Witnesses found disturbing was the arrogance among the Witnesses, this feeling that they are right and everyone else is wrong. People refer to it as the "window washer with no college education making fun of the scientist with a lifetime of research" mentality that they find hard to swallow.
How long can a religion keep a sense of urgency in its members that the "end is right around the corner, " or that we're living in the last minutes of the last days, when they've been saying that for going on to a century and a half now? They were saying we're in the last minutes of the last days when I was a kid in the 1960s! You were saying something similar last night. People grow tired of that when nothing really ever happens.
It's part of the reason they're cutting down meeting times. People need a break. Shorten the Public Talk, lump the Book Study in with Thursday night and shorten all those meetings. If things were really urgent, you'd think they'd be doing the opposite, "drawing together all the more so as the end draws near." But the friends are tired and I think the sense of urgency was lost a long time ago after 1975 came and went with nothing happening.
When the "80 years from 1914" slipped through without a whimper in 1994, and the WTS changed that whole generation teaching in 1995 to an open-ended time frame, and then changed their statement that the preaching work would be completed in the 20th Century, it became impossible to maintain that urgency.
Remain a Witness for your friends and social network and activities, but just be very careful making important decisions based on what the WTS tells you. The blood policy is a mess and hardly understood by anyone in the JW rank and file. It has changed dozens of times over the years, and there are very few that have kept up with or that understand the changes. How can anyone make a life and death decision based on that - especially for a kid? And now this attack on higher education. I feel very sorry for Witness young people today, having to deal with that.
Take everything with a grain of salt and don't be afraid to question anything - just do it quietly to stay out of trouble! Demonizing the Internet, claiming that all information critical of the Witnesses is lies inspired by Satan, discouraging ANY research outside of what the WTS provides, consolidating the meetings, starting to publish a "private" edition of the Watchtower for Witnesses only, once again strongly discouraging higher education - all of this smacks of a desperate attempt at "information control," a not unusual process for a high control group like the Witnesses.
Just be aware of what it is. You say you're free to research anything you want, but you are also well aware that doing so will get you in trouble with the elders if they happen to find out. If you discover something that disturbs you or that factually contradicts what the WTS says, and you publicly comment on that, you can be disfellowshipped. Fear is a strong motivating force, and it's keeping a lot of Witnesses very quiet about things that don't make sense to them.
Wow, that's a bunch of stuff!! But I strongly believe that one should never be afraid of information and facts. Anything or anyone that makes you afraid of learning about something, reading something or researching something should set off a huge alarm in your head. The only reason to try to limit someone's access to information is a fear of what they'll find out.
I'm glad you're not afraid.
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Is the GB crooked or just misguided?
by easyreader1970 ini ask myself this from time to time.
is the governing body operating seriously out of the belief that they are god's only channel to mankind?
or are they deliberately scamming people?
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Seeker4
There is the fact that the WTS routinely uses unethical journalistic practices in the literature: pulling quotes out of context, using outdated reference material, cherry picking material from sources where they would disagree with a good deal of the rest of the source material and perhaps worst of all, quoting only enough material so that they are quoting a source as saying exactly the opposite of what the source intended.
But I think that is common among JWs in general. When you start with the premise that the Bible and the WTS are RIGHT, then ANY SHRED of material that supports them, no matter how unethically used, is justified.
An example: I had a long discussion once when Fred Rusk was staying at my home on vacation. At the time I didn't understand why (I do NOW!), but Fred gave me a long explanation about how there was this ONE source reference that the WTS was using to support the 607 date. He was obviously well aware that the preponderance of evidence was against that date, but he and the Society were clinging to this one straw in their favor as though it were a life vest.
They feel that the ends justify the means, and thus have no trouble sliding down that slippery slope.
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