Swan

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Posts by Swan

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  38

  new too

  by RaceBannon in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i am one confused dude and need serious therapy.

  leaving is very tough.

  my family are in a life and death race to save me before "the end".

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  Swan

  Welcome RaceBannon!
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  30

  I'm going to get out

  by Sacchiel in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  hey everyone, i've been examining my faith and found it doesn't stand up to biblical theology.

  its going to be hard since a lot family and friends will very likely repudiate me.

  i have taken some steps to introduce topics to my family that will get them to analyze the wt teachings.

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  Swan

  Welcome Sacchiel!
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  32

  Hello...

  by gymbob in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i've been reading you all for a couple years now, it's about time i post.. the first thing i would like to say is....thank you.

  without this forum, who knows what my life would be like.

  you all have been such a big help to me since i left the witnesses about 4 years ago, and i'm very grateful to you all!.

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  Swan

  Welcome Gymbob!
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  5

  Roof collapse on eve of JW convention

  by candidlynuts in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  roof collapses at foster city hotel by liz harrelson palo alto daily news

  .

  a slow-moving avalanche of rotten wood and drywall brought down a portion of the crowne plaza hotel's roof in foster city on thursday, prompting a partial evacuation and the shuttering of at least 60 hotel rooms on the eve of a massive jehovah's witness convention.. no one was injured.. ``thank god no one was under that, that no one was hurt,'' said foster city mayor linda koelling as she viewed the damage.. at least 100 people and possibly as many as 120 were evacuated from the hotel after a manager standing in the entrance and beneath the unstable roof heard creaking and witnessed the roof fall about two feet, said san mateo fire department battalion chief mike borean.. ``apparently water had been collecting in there for quite some time and rotted out the structural beams,'' said borean.. around 5:45 p.m. the beams fell another 12 feet, though by that time the entire northern side of the 350-room hotel had been evacuated and the immediate area cordoned-off, said borean.. ``it's kind of scary, kind of crazy,'' said kelly branson, a resident of plymouth, calif., who is staying at the hotel and attending a three-day jehovah's witness convention at the cow palace, in brisbane, which draws an estimated 10,000 worshippers.. foster city fire department battalion chief stan maupin said wood weakened by dry rot caused the roof to fall.. ``in general dry rot is caused by moisture getting into the wood and over a long period of time degrading the wood to a point where it will no longer hold it's own weight,'' said maupin.. about 60 rooms were shut down thursday night and will be inspected by a building official today before they are reopened, said maupin.

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  Swan

  "Thank God no one was under that, that no one was hurt,'' said Foster City Mayor Linda Koelling

  Notice she said God, not Jehovah.

  When I was small we went to an assembly in Medford, OR in 1968. Some people in our congregation were riding down in a carpool together when there was a sudden blowout on the freeway. Their car ended up upside-down and one of our overseers (as elders were known back then) was killed, his head crushed like a mellon.

  I wondered, why Jehovah wouldn't ensure our safety traveling to and attending his assemblies if he was truly directing things? At the end of every assembly the District Overseer's final wrap-up talk told about all the blessings Jehovah had caused to happen to have this assembly come about. Some official in charge of the stadium would push through a permit that was holding things up, or some hotel manager who was very curt with the rooming committee before was now complimenting the brothers for the nice well behaved families and asking "Will you be back next year?" These experiences were interspersed with "See how Jehovah directs things?" and "What a fine example of Jehovah's direction!" followed by lots of applause.

  And then we went home and had a funeral.

  The following year, a tired sister was killed crossing a roller-coaster track on her way home. It was after one of the eight long days at the Empire Stadium in Vancouver, BC in 1969. On the last day we had the final wrap-up talk relating wonderful experiences with police, hotel managers, stadium employees, and others as proof of Jehovah's blessing and direction. I'm sure after that several other people went home and had a funeral.

  After that, I tried to keep rationalizing it, but the experiences in the yearbook of JWs in Africa who had soldiers invading and shooting up their homes while they were safe at the KH no longer seemed credible to me.

  Tammy
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  9

  Have you installed your WT "Keeping Spiritually Clean" software?

  by LovesDubs in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i believe its coming.

  big brother wt cant control the internet, they tried to shut down all anti jw sites, they threatened those who went to any sites that mentioned jw beliefs even if it was pro-jw....they dfd jws who published books or had sites about the organization even if they were pro-jw....they developed their own web sites to counter the flow...then came the jw dating sites, the jw chat rooms,...they cannot stem the flow!

  so... they will develop software (spyware) that all "loyal" jws will have to have on their computers that will prevent them from going to any non-approved web sites containing any anti-jw information.

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  Swan

  Reminds me of this thread:

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/81650/1.ashx
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  91

  Ooooooohhhh...My "unofficial" DA letter...yup...got it in the paper!!

  by HadEnuf in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  over the years here on the forum...i have read with interest many da letters.

  brave people!!

  not so brave.

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  Swan

  WOW!
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  16

  How False Can You Be Now?

  by serotonin_wraith in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hi, my first post but i'll get more into my background later.. i was raised as a jw for sixteen years, one good thing that came from it was my learned ability to lie extremely convincingly using body language and speech.

  not just through how they taught you to act, but by leading a double life for so long just to survive childhood.. so how about you?

  how false are you able to act now and do you find it helps?

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  Swan

  Welcome S.W.!
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  16

  Another wacky BOE letter

  by sir82 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  here's part of the text of another boe letter read recently.

  i'm going to see if i can get these scanned so someone can post them.in line with the letters to all bodies of elders dated july 1, 1989, august 1, 1995, march 14, 1997, and february 15, 2002, elders should call the legal department regarding any inmate who may have been accused of child maltreatment in the past and who is now associating with the organization, whether he is baptized or not.

  (child maltreatment includes physical or sexual abuse.

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  Swan

  The key word here is Inmate

  It has nothing to do with accusations against anyone in the congregations who hasn't already been convicted or sent to prison.

  Tammy
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  44

  The Global Flood and Antarctica - Can we have both?

  by mavie in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  a thought came to me this morning in the shower.

  i was thinking about ice cores scientists have drilled in antarctica from which they can measure conditions that existed 650,000 years ago.

  this got me thinking, how could antarctica have been around that long if the global flood as described in genesis really happened?

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  Swan

  For me it was taking the tours of Wind Cave Nat'l Park and Jewel Cave Nat'l Monument in South Dakota. One of the rangers leading the tours mentioned that the caves were hollowed out by countless eons of rain water eroding limestone. A dub response, filtered by years of dub conditioning, popped into my mind automatically and I whispered to my mother, "Or it could have a catastrophic flood 6000 years ago?" But as the tours progressed, I saw no evidence of a violent flood. The delicate formations had to have been formed by individual droplets. Literature from the gift shops furthered my doubts.

  Then I was thinking about the Badlands we had see a few days before. Once at the bottom of an ocean, the layers of sediments were clearly visible. The fossils of dinosaurs were found in those hills. How could these have been upthrust violently by the great flood as was claimed in "Is the Bible Really the Word of God?" Wasn't the scientific explanation of a prehistoric world slowly submerged and then gently emerging and eroding more plausible?

  Then there were other parks and magazine articles that made no sense with what I had been told. Petrified wood was a real stumper! Marsupials in Australia. Fossils discovered in areas that would have taken far longer to erode than the few 7000 year creative days claimed by the Watchtower society. Glacial erratics.

  So where are the glaciers that should still be here if the world-wide flash flood had quick frozen as the WTBTS claimed? An ice age doesn't melt and recede that fast.

  I had remembered asking about dinosaurs when I was a child. My mother and the PO showed me a book in the KH library from the 1940's. Green it was, I think. It had pictures of the dinosaurs and the explanation that they had been destroyed in the flood. So why didn't any preflood remains of Noah's neighbors appear alongside the dinosaur remains?

  More and more things just didn't add up, and soon I started looking at everything through a more plausible, scientific filter. When I did this, things began to make sense. Everything began to fit together, and the grand timescale of the Earth's history made me feel very small. If they were wrong about the flood, were they also wrong about the creation timeline? It appeared so. Then I wondered if they were right about creation itself?

  From there on things began to unravel more and more.

  Tammy
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  23

  I am a magnet for men in cults

  by kristyann in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  okay, so the ex-jw boyfriend and i finally broke up... and i am not really looking for anyone right now.

  that was 2 and a half years of a pretty crazy relationship, and i don't think that i was particularly healthy staying in it.

  i don't mind just hanging out with some guys, but i am not in the mood for anything serious after that roller coaster ride.. do you know what is so weird, though?

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  Swan

  Is he a new-fangled Mormon or one of the old fundamentalist Mormons? You could end up with sister wives like on Big Love.

  Tammy