I've certainly seen elders be caring towards the elderly ones and visit them regularly. I imagine it varies by Hall and whether some of the elders are setting a good example for others to follow.
Apognophos
JoinedPosts by Apognophos
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25
It Appears The Elderly Are More Taken Care Of Then Ever Before By The Elders
by minimus ini usually find fault with the religion but i must give credit when due.
in the hall my mom is in, they regularly check on her and assign different ones to visit and check on the elderly.. if there's a storm or an extremely cold day, they come by to make sure the elderly have everything they need..
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Satan is certainly a wiley devil! He came in the guise of Square Dancing!
by Lady Zombie inrecently a few threads have remarked upon how restrictive the jws have become in the last decade or so in terms of activities and the amount of freedom alloted to individuals.. well, i can ballpark estimate when it started in my area.
it was the mid to late 80's.
throughout most of the 80's, my congregation frequently had potlucks and days at the park when all the local congregations would gather for fellowship.. there was a lot of laughs, lots of grilling, and easy interactions with other jws.
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Apognophos
I think in my cong. we stopped doing fun stuff by the late '90s. The early '90s were still a fun time -- picnics, softball, etc. I'm not sure if what changed was a specific elder raining on the parade -- it doesn't seem that way. I think it was some sort of general cooling-off that happened locally as certain families moved away that used to organize the events, and no one stepped up to take their place.
One interesting question in my mind these days, as I read all these stories on the forum about joyless buzzkill elders/COs ruining things for others, is, "Why are Witnesses so easy to pick on?" They'll let one over-sensitive person push them around and stop them from having harmless fun. But of course then I remember that being a Witness is all about being led by men. We were conditioned never to "talk back" or be a troublemaker by offering counterpoints to an argument that supposedly was Bible-based.
Most of all, I think it would have fallen on the other elders to be the ones to have the guts to resist the buzzkill elder before he was able to rain on everyone's parade, and I think in all these cases, they've generally failed to be "man" enough to put up any resistance even when it would have been easy to counterargue from the Bible. I guess elders are at least as conditioned for unthinking obedience as the average R&F member.
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To circumcise or not to circumcise?
by srd inhere's a good one for you, looking at gen 17 and paul's subversive interpretive practices.
http://contradictionsinthebible.com/is-the-covenant-of-circumcision-an-eternal-covenant-or-not/.
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Apognophos
Leaving aside what women prefer, even as a guy, I think it looks better circumcised, and I'm glad that I was circumcised. Ironically, it seems to me that ones who believe we were designed by God ought to be against something that implies God made a mistake, or that God would require a painful operation on infants to separate his people from heathens. But since I just see our bodies as a result of evolution, there's no reason for me to say that we can't improve on our bodies with operations, even for aesthetic reasons (although I generally find that cosmetic surgery doesn't appeal to my aesthetics).
Making sex less enjoyable doesn't seem a problem for me. Doesn't it feel good enough anyway? Anything that encourages people to be less like animals is a good thing in my book. Perhaps circumcision doesn't go far enough.
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Change the Channel!
by perfect1 inon another thread band on the run mentioned the jw habit of changing the channel on tv abruptly whenever something spiritually reprehensible might pop up.. recently, when i was visiting a family member, they changed the channel from sumo wrestling so that we would not see such obscene nudity.. of course, as soon as i left the room the channel would switch back.
id come in and it would switch again.
this made for a semi entertaining game of seeing how close i could get before the channel changed.
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Apognophos
Yes, as AGuest says, by stigmatizing sex, they only make it more interesting to a youngster! What's funny is that JWs claim that they are not a prudish people -- this claim is always heard from the platform, and is followed by the speaker discussing all the different kinds of things that are off-limits for JWs. So sex is only okay to talk about when we're being told what kinds of it not to do, but it's verboten when someone discusses sex in a positive light, or makes a harmless joke about it, on TV?
Of course, the difference is that the pro-sex statements only come from worldly people. Witnesses will let a speaker forbid and denounce various sexual acts from the platform because whatever he says is from the slave and therefore they have to sit and listen to it, and make sure their kids hear every word about what kinds of sex acts count as "sex". It's only when a worldly person talks about sex that JWs show their true colors as puritans and shout, "Change the channel!"
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Conversation with a Seminary Student in Starbucks today
by Terry inthis is a distilled (and from memory) reconstruction of a chat this morning.... my 81 year old ex-baptist minister friend dub and i went to starbucks for coffee and conversation.
dub likes to start conversations with strangers.. today a seminary student caught his eye.
they talked for about half an hour before dub dropped me into it.
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Apognophos
Wow, I never saw that episode. An interesting allegory, and subtle enough that it could get past the censors of the time
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Yehowah, the divine name known by the Watchtower, but not used.
by nibbled in(yeho?wah); gr., ?
the participle ho?weh is from the root verb ha?wah, related to the divine name, yehowah.. .
heb., yehowah.
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Apognophos
I'm an agnostic, so I don't have a dog in this race, but it just didn't seem germane to the topic of God's name to say, "There is no God." We get it. You're atheist. You don't have to remind us in every thread about God. It's like if, every time you talk about some restaurant you went to, I remind you that I'm vegetarian, and are you aware of the bad things about eating meat? I might be trying to help, but all I'm really accomplishing is annoying you.
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Newbies: Any Feedback on the "New Light" Regarding GB?
by daringhart13 inthe newbies are pooring in....... curious.......can any of you new folks confirm the sentiment of the publishers regarding the new light that the governing body is the faithful and discreet slave?
has anyone even noticed??
what's the word on the street?.
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Apognophos
I honestly have zero interest in what an R&F Witness thinks of this -- I knew from the beginning that they weren't going to react to this or have any intelligent thoughts on the matter. What I am very interested in is, What do the anointed think? They know full well that they used to be part of the F&DS, and that they've just been given the boot. I'm thinking of an elderly anointed brother I know, wondering what he's made of his demotion....
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Yehowah, the divine name known by the Watchtower, but not used.
by nibbled in(yeho?wah); gr., ?
the participle ho?weh is from the root verb ha?wah, related to the divine name, yehowah.. .
heb., yehowah.
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Apognophos
Granted, if one does not believe in God, then this whole subject is pointless (so why post in this thread? :-), but I think the question raised, "Why did the Society go with a name that they knew was far from the original pronunciation?" is a valid one. Their answer, "Because TRADITION" was correctly pointed out by nibbled as foolish; weren't Witnesses supposed to be the ultimate rejecters of Christendom's traditions? The additional reason "Because it was familiar" is dubious to me, as most people never encounter the name aside from JW literature, but perhaps in the 1800s, the name was somewhat more familiar to Bible readers.
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Music you never noticed was ...
by nibbled ini have friends in very cool jobs.
my world interacts quite often with music stars, and i have interesting conversations.
for instance, i was talking with the members of animal kingdom, and asked the lead singer about the lyrics i picked up while listening them perform for the group a few minutes earlier... i felt stupid because i hadn't realized the name of the song, and only had caught a few lyrics... he wrote of mephistopheles.
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Apognophos
Aha. Well, since I don't know that specific music, I can't comment on whether it's got a Christian message or it's just using Christian symbols because they're evocative and familiar, but I have a feeling it's usually the latter. I'm reminded of this album by The Thermals, which is not preaching as much as warning against overly-strict Christianity. But then you have true believers like Sufjan Stevens and Danielson Famile who make use of religious symbols more reverently. Perhaps they've started a trend....
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Yehowah, the divine name known by the Watchtower, but not used.
by nibbled in(yeho?wah); gr., ?
the participle ho?weh is from the root verb ha?wah, related to the divine name, yehowah.. .
heb., yehowah.
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Apognophos
Anyone who thinks it's unimportant to know the correct name of God clearly hasn't read "The Nine Billion Names of God" ;)