Yes, depending on their personalities, you might hear from them as soon as you become "irregular" (a zero-hour month within the last 6 months), or after a couple months of irregularity when it becomes clear that the first month wasn't a fluke.
Apognophos
JoinedPosts by Apognophos
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Inactive for how long?
by Powermetal4ever inas the title says: how long does it take to be inactive in fs before some elders comes knocking on the door?
or calling or whatever... any experiences?
how was it for you guys?
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Apognophos
Thanks for your story, I found it interesting. You don't mention in detail what your current beliefs are, but you still identify as Christian. That surprises me because it sounds like you do not have faith in the Bible as God's word anymore, which would make you more of a deist, wouldn't it? I might have misunderstood your position.
@Simon: I tend to attribute the gender inequality to men just being less spiritual, generally. I don't know if garyneal would agree with that, as he was naturally a spiritual person his whole life, but I think most men are (perhaps pig-headedly) trying to be self-sufficient and do not want a big boss in the sky telling them what to do. Women are also "networkers" and are more likely to want to go to community functions (like church) in order to meet their neighbors and make friends. That's my slightly sexist take on the subject, anyway.
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Scientists Should Not Dismiss Genesis So Quickly
by Chris Tann innasa discovery proves the bible scientifically accurate.
the debate.
for decades there has been a long standing debate between science and religion as to the validity of the biblical genesis account of creation.
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Apognophos
Sorry that people are not always kind here, Chris Tann. The reason is that they have all been where you are now mentally, and have moved past those beliefs, so they have no respect for them now. The problem is that they forget what it's like to believe that way, and don't remember how they would have wanted to be talked to at that time.
An additional contributing factor is that we do have a couple disingenuous Christian posters here who do a copy-paste-and-run on the forum from time to time, with no interest in having a conversation, and your OP made you look like another one of them. I guess you didn't mean to paste all that, so it was a miscommunication.
Anyway, you asked for specific points to respond to, and I wanted to remind you that I gave two examples of problematic points in the Genesis account in the third post in this thread. Thanks.
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Do Jehovah witnesses exploit the most vulnerable in society?
by Blind_Of_Lies induring my final few years being active with the jws i noticed that the vast majority of people who were studying or joining the group in general where those that the rest of society would consider disabled and/or severely mentally ill. now by disabled i dont mean i lost my leg in nam kind of disabled... in some cases these people were mentally retarded, had the minds of children, were severely abused as children or even as adults and as a result had personality disorders that put them on the edge of society.... and then we had the full on crazies... about 15 years ago one of the brothers who worked at the local welfare office somehow started a study with a person who was a paranoid schizophrenic.
he met her because she was a client of the welfare office.
she got handed off to a sister who studied with her, then started driving her to her doctors appointments, and to get grocerys, and took her to congregation events.
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Apognophos
I agree, although I would hesitate to call love-bombing a "tool" because it's not something that JWs employ intentionally. There's no training or articles that encourage them to do more than simply welcome people to the meetings; it's mostly a natural response from people desperate to have new fellow believers, which cools off once the person is no longer a new face.
Although there are other avenues to help needy ones, I'm not aware of any support groups or governments that send people door to door looking to help people. So it's not surprising that JWs are effective at claiming these people. Many people won't even answer the door if they don't know who's at it, because they have no need for a stranger at their door to offer them anything. Whereas there are people who are praying to God for help, for a sign, for answers, and then, bam, one day the JWs call after they were praying, and this one (not such a) coincidence motivates them to join the religion.
So it's hard to see how we can undercut the Society in their ability to reach these people unless there were qualified clinical workers proactively going door-to-door offering help to people. Or, at the very least, if ex-Witnesses went out in their own kind of ministry to give an anti-witness (though negative messages are not anywhere near as effective as positive ones). It seems that Witnesses are the only people who are sufficiently motivated to spend time going to people's doors, however.
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Can you imagine what that would be like?
by cookiemaster inhey guys, here's something to think about.
in my country there's a small town of a few thousands people were most people are jws.
can you image what's like living there?
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Apognophos
Wow, that could be a recipe for losing one's mind. A real life Watchtowistan!
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Jehovah's organization growing like never before: but bible studies are way down. Huh?
by kneehighmiah inso the governing body likes to keep claiming incredible growth.
at the same time they claim bible studies are way down.
are the finally admitting what we've known all along, that they can no longer recruit outsiders?
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Apognophos
Others have made this observation before me, but now that they mentioned it, I'm hearing it at my meetings too. When the friends are asked to relate encouraging experiences from field service, they're often of the form:
"The householder objected with X, but I responded with Y, and we had a good conversation. They didn't take anything, but it was a good conversation."
"The householder was an atheist so I asked him the question Q, which I prepared for any atheists I encountered. He still isn't interested, but maybe it got him thinking."
"We didn't talk to anyone today, but we had a good upbuilding conversation in the car group."
"...Well, at least people know that we're out doing the work that Jesus commanded us to do."
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It's my theory of the moment that the Society sees the writing on the wall w.r.t. field service, and in order to continue to be able to boast about growth, they are moving towards other figures that they can reliably brag about, such as translation and web site statistics.
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What really woke me up: I started noticing most JWS are weirdos..
by kneehighmiah inthankfully my parents are converts so they aren't wierd.
seemed pretty popular by all accounts.
they are "popular" jws even now.
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Apognophos
Considering that the original disciples were (generally) "unlettered and ordinary", I didn't give any thought to the fact that JWs often were uneducated or outright strange. As a born-in, I also had nothing to compare it with since I did not associate much with non-believers.
What did start to wake me up, though, on a similar note, was when I observed Witnesses passing dubious urban legends onto each other. It was a red flag for me that JWs were so credulous towards information that came from fellow believers. Their lack of skepticism got me to wondering what other things they were accepting uncritically.
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Scientists Should Not Dismiss Genesis So Quickly
by Chris Tann innasa discovery proves the bible scientifically accurate.
the debate.
for decades there has been a long standing debate between science and religion as to the validity of the biblical genesis account of creation.
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Apognophos
The summary of this, interestingly, has already been given in a number of the Society's writings. For instance the explanation of the seemingly too-late creation of the sun and moon with the response that 'from the point of view of someone on the Earth, the sun and moon did not exist until they were actually visible from the ground' has been stated in the WT literature as well.
There is really just one broadly valid point here, which is that both the Genesis account and the scientific account agree that things started off chaotic (unformed) and became more organized. Any further specific correlation with science has to be forced rather than naturally read in Genesis.
This voluminous apologetic does not address other thorny issues with Genesis, such as chapter 1's creation of plants before the sun was shining, or chapter 2's creation of animals before plants. An honest reading of Genesis, with a respectful attitude towards the culture that actually told the story, shows a very different, primitive view of the world that does not jive with science at all, nor with the Christian concepts of the nature of God.
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Do Jehovah witnesses exploit the most vulnerable in society?
by Blind_Of_Lies induring my final few years being active with the jws i noticed that the vast majority of people who were studying or joining the group in general where those that the rest of society would consider disabled and/or severely mentally ill. now by disabled i dont mean i lost my leg in nam kind of disabled... in some cases these people were mentally retarded, had the minds of children, were severely abused as children or even as adults and as a result had personality disorders that put them on the edge of society.... and then we had the full on crazies... about 15 years ago one of the brothers who worked at the local welfare office somehow started a study with a person who was a paranoid schizophrenic.
he met her because she was a client of the welfare office.
she got handed off to a sister who studied with her, then started driving her to her doctors appointments, and to get grocerys, and took her to congregation events.
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Apognophos
I observed this too -- that most converts were mentally ill or social misfits. But I viewed it as evidence of the love in the religion that JWs would work so hard to bring these people in and help them go out in the ministry. I still think it's to the credit of any JWs who have the patience to deal with these people, but counter-balancing that, I also am aware now that the JW is motivated to make converts in order to affirm his own beliefs, and I'm also concerned over the pros/cons of being in the religion.
People who are adrift in society or who have substance abuse problems may in fact be better off in the religion than they were before, but what about the pressures that the religion places on them? And even within the religion they'll always be a second-class citizen if they are not capable of "reaching out" for "privileges".
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why didnt God just do this?
by sowhatnow infor one thing, i cant get past genesis, but no matter.. when god told adam and eve if you eat from the tree youll die.
so why did he not simple let them die and not allow the offspring to?.
you see, if i was a god, and i told two people that, id let them die , .
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Apognophos
This story actually makes plenty of sense in its original context, and is self-consistent. It only stops making sense when you bring science, modern ethics, or a Christian perspective into it. Read the story on its own terms before you trash it.
- As was already touched on, the concept of inherited sin was considered fair at the time, so there was no reason for God to warn Adam and Eve about their children inheriting their curse.
- God could not have prevented them from sinning because he was not always around. The idea of an "omnipresent", "omniscient" God did not exist yet at the time of this story. He was only present and aware of what was happening in the Garden when he walked through on one of his afternoon constitutionals. That's why he couldn't find Adam and Eve when they hid from him. All the verbs used for God's actions in this account point to him being a powerful man-like being who can breathe life into forms he molds from clay -- not some immaterial being in the sky, watching everything.
- As to what the tree of knowledge was doing there in the first place, it was for himself and/or the angels. That's why eating it will make the humans "like God". So to cover the times when God wasn't there, he left Adam and Eve with a warning not to eat from it. The next time he entered the garden on one of his afternoon walks, he noticed Adam and Eve were missing. When he coaxed them out of hiding, he saw their makeshift clothing and realized that they were no longer the childlike creatures he had created, ergo they had eaten some of his knowledge fruit.
- Adam and Eve hadn't had children or even sex right off the bat when Eve was created, simply because it would not have occurred to them. Exercise for the reader: How old were Adam and Eve when they were created? physically? mentally? Forget your assumptions or what you've seen in illustrations made by an entirely different culture -- what does the account actually tell us, or not tell us?
- As sowhatnow already said, there was no concept of perfection in the story. Adam and Eve were never "perfect"; this concept had not been invented yet when this story was told. They were simply animals like all the other animals that God created. The one thing that made them special was that they were made in God's image (they looked like him and had his greater intelligence, but lacked his knowledge and power). Then they actually became inferior to the other animals in some ways when God cursed them, making it harder for them to obtain food and to give birth than what any of the animals experienced.
- Why didn't/couldn't Adam and Eve just eat from the tree of life and live forever? While they may have been cast out before they were in the Garden very long, it's also possible that they had eaten from the tree many times already. Exercise for the reader: Where in the account does it say that the the tree of life magically grants one immortality with just one bite of its fruit? And why didn't God tell them not to eat from it if it was not meant for them? He said they could eat from "all the trees" except the tree of knowledge, didn't he?
- Adam and Eve were probably not equal before Eve's curse. The verse that is read to mean that Eve was subjugated to Adam can also be interpreted to mean "you will have a sexual desire for your husband and he will lay on top of you". It's a statement referring to the awakening of sexual desire and the future of the woman in terms of her lot in life -- to be impregnated and to suffer a "sorrowful" pregnancy (morning sickness, etc.) and "painful" childbirth.
- As Mum just said, the snake was a snake. The account has nothing to do with Satan, who had not been conceived of yet. This snake could talk, but possibly all snakes could, at least before they were cursed -- notice that the snake was the most cunning of all the animals. This is a typical "trickster god" animal, as found in many cultures' mythology.
So, viewed in the right cultural context, I find the account to be quite sensible. It simply requires the modern reader to jettison the assumptions and interpretive framework of the culture in which he was raised, which come from a gradual evolution of religious concepts over the last few thousand years which would have been totally foreign to the ancient Hebrew listening to this story.