Posts by Apognophos

27

I have nothing left in the tank, I need help

by Yondaime in

i dont have the willpower to attend meetings anymore.

i'm literally on the sound system list every week.

i'm either reading on sunday or tuesday, praying on tuesday nites, adjusting mics, passing mics, or working the sound system, or doing last minute parts for the service meeting.

Apognophos

Man, why are you doing so much? It's not necessary to do all those things in order to satisfy the brothers that you're a believing Witness. You need to consider your mental health. As Justnowout says, you should ask the appropriate brother(s) if you can temporarily put some of your responsibilities on hold. Pick the things that are most stressful to you and put those on pause. You may never want to resume them again, but you and they don't have to know that right now. Just ask for a temporary reprieve. Are the most stressful tasks the talks and the reading for the study? Then talk to the school overseer and the Watchtower conductor.

If you have the appropriately contrite expression on your face when you speak to the brother who is in charge of whatever area you need to do less in, then unless he's a jerk and doesn't like you, he won't give you a hard time. Even if he does give you a hard time, just squirm and look pained and refuse to give in to his pressure. You can honestly tell him that it's causing you too much stress right now. Guess what? He can't make you do anything. Some brothers will even just take someone off their list lickety-split if they're asked nicely, without making a big deal out of it.

Frankly, you sound like you have a problem saying "no". Usually this stems from being overly concerned with what others think. It gets easier to say "no" when you get older, but there's no time to start learning like the present. Don't worry about what he'll think of you -- "Will he think I'm spiritually weak? Will he just plain think I'm a wuss? Will he suspect me of not being a genuine JW since I 'should' be able to do these things and go to college at the same time?" -- just shut those thoughts out of your mind. They don't matter. The brother in question is just a nudnik who believes in silly things and, while he may matter to your world as long as you're an active Witness, some time in the next few years he won't matter at all.

30

"You can't believe anything science says, they're always changing their minds.."

by disposable hero of hypocrisy in

jw
friends

i know this is going to come up in a conversation shortly, how would you respond to this?

i've had it said to me before, specifically about health, one week wine/eggs/milk/axle grease is good for you, next week it's not..

Apognophos

"If science can't be trusted, then where did we get all this technology from? Would you want to do without modern conveniences and medicine just because scientists might someday change their mind on how some of it works?" Witnesses like to boast about how perfectly the universe works thanks to the laws God set for it, such that they can land a rover on another planet by launching it at just the right angle. Well, science is the process of discovering those laws.

Besides the fallacy that OEJ mentioned, it's also typical "all or nothing" thinking from Witnesses, who won't accept anything that's not perfect. At least, they claim that they're not satisfied with anything imperfect, though they still use the results of man's ingenuity while not showing any gratitude for them. Imperfect solutions are all this world has to offer, but good luck convincing a JW to give up their idealistic fixations and accept that. If they can't live forever in a perfect world that is filled with perfect people and only has perfect weather, then screw it, they're taking their toys and going home.

14

Interview with an Unbelieving Mate (UBM): Frazzled

by Frazzled UBM in

in honour of jgnat i have completed her template:.

is your wife still an active witness?

no thankfuly - she has only been to the memorail, a convention and the kh once this year and has done none of that for at least 6 months.

Apognophos

I'm glad to hear that things are currently going well for the both of you w.r.t. the religion not having a tight grip on your wife, Frazzled. As you mentioned, she would probably benefit from counseling, but I would suggest that the anxiety in her lower brain (the emotional core of the mind) cannot be properly appeased until the higher brain (her intellect) gives it permission to relax. In other words, if she still believes "it's the truth" or "it's the closest thing to the truth" then she is still going to be vulnerable to sudden bouts of guilt or fear and maybe a desire to return.

Counselors are not able to dispense TTATT in verbal or pill form. While you found that storming the castle didn't work in the past, it could be that, now that she is not attending meetings and getting her regular reindoctrination, a patient, gentle offer to show her TTATT in dribs and drabs will allow her to escape WT control more completely. You might already be doing this, but I say it for the benefit of anyone else reading as well.

24

new neighbors

by Theredeemer in

jw
friends

so, my wife and i purchased a house about a month ago and recently we met our new neighbors.

they are an older couple.

they are very nice and even brought us cookies.. in conversation they brought up that they were mormons and mentioned how much they loved it.

Apognophos

The couple was shocked at everything, but the "sisters" had a very uncomfortable look specially when we talked about shunning. The couple mentioned how that was wrong and any religion that does that is not the truth. They are fairly new in the faith so I dont think they know that Mormons do shun.

20

JW's donations going to sexual abuse cases?

by Ginx in

i read somewhere on the internet (don't recall what site it was) that jw's donations are going towards sexual abuse cases.. is this true?.

where can i find solid evidence regarding this matter?.

.

Apognophos

blondie, the disaster relief situation is a bit different, because accounting laws basically require them to spend money on what it is donated for. So if someone writes "for Katrina" or "disaster relief" on the memo line of their $15 check to the Society, the Society has to spend that $15 on that specific purpose. This is a problem because if they get more money designated for a certain cause than what they can reasonably spend on that cause, they end up with untouchable money sitting in their bank. Of course the less gracious take on things is that the Society doesn't want to spend as much on disaster relief as they could, and would like to re-purpose most of that money. In either case, converting money designated for disaster relief into general income by rebuilding homes and then having the insurance payout for the home damage granted to them by the home owner is pretty damn clever.

Anyway, Ginx, I think you see that one way or another the Society has to be paying for the settlements, whether through "allegation insurance" or simply paying it all out themselves. It doesn't matter if they have an account set aside as "sex abuse insurance" on the books. The only way that they are not spending any donations from Witnesses on sex abuse settlements is if they have an account set aside and only money gleaned from investments and real estate goes into that bucket. Even in the case of real estate sales, those profits are only made possible in large part by the free labor the brothers and sisters supply in having remodeled and maintained the buildings they are selling. However, I think it is unlikely that the Society would see any reason or have any legal requirement to maintain a distinct revenue stream for settling lawsuits.

This leaves the other possible responses by a believing JW, which are that (a) the stories are phony, planted by apostates to make JWs doubt, or (b) the allegations are false but it's safer to settle than to leave it to the courts of Satan's world to decide a verdict, or even (c) they're true but the perpetrator was never really a JW, or else they were but they went apostate before they molested the child. This last point is sort of a meaningless red herring, but Witnesses will mentally squirm out of things any way they can if they don't want to accept something.

39

why didnt God just do this?

by sowhatnow in

for 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 , .

Apognophos

that reflects the jewish concept that sin was introduced to mankind by the original sin of Adam and Eve and that's who evil came into the world

Well, that's true. I was focusing too much on the curses pronounced on Adam and Eve, but the fact remains that they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and it "opened their eyes". Apparently that means that we inherited the potential for evil thoughts from our first parents. So I stand corrected on that point.

My intention was to make the point that it was only post-Paul that Christians began to say that man was created perfect. This was because the idea of God had advanced from (a) a powerful man who created life from clay, or a tribal war god (in the oldest Jewish stories) to (b) the most powerful tribal god (later Jewish writings), to (c) a unique, omnipotent, omniscient being (Christianity, modern Judaism?). So Christians could no longer conceive that this kind of God would ever create something flawed.

Thus they changed the Jewish concept of inheriting death and "sin" (the potential for evil thoughts) into the inheriting of "imperfection" (a general failure of the body and mind to function as God originally intended). They ignored the significance of the tree of life in the Eden story (viz, that we were not created to live forever, but required the tree to sustain eternal life) and they ignored the fact that God only pronounced specific curses on man and woman.

Now that we know about DNA, this leads to an incredible deviation from the original Jewish thought, because a science-minded Christian is left to try to ponder how imperfection actually works on the genetic level. How did Adam's sin cause his DNA to become flawed? Which workings of our body are flawed and which still function as intended? Were we supposed to have body odor, to get gassy from time to time? Were women really designed to bleed every month? And why did God design Adam and Eve with a genetic booby-trap triggered by disobedience? Et cetera.

Paul would be totally baffled by this whole way of looking at things. When he said that Jesus was needed to redeem us from Adam's sin, he didn't mean that Jesus was perfect like Adam -- he meant that Jesus was another son of God in human form. That's why there's a genealogy tracing Jesus back to Adam, "son of God". God was the father of two humans, Adam and the incarnated Jesus. That's why Jesus could be the redeemer, according to Paul -- not because God somehow prevented the baby Jesus from inheriting genetic imperfection from his mother.

32

Jehovah's organization growing like never before: but bible studies are way down. Huh?

by kneehighmiah in

jw
friends

so 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?

Apognophos

Heh, nice question, kairos. I can think of some people that don't know they're Bible studies. For example, a lady who occasionally talks to a friendly JW acquaintance over the phone. She doesn't know that as soon as they're done talking and they hang up, the JW basically pumps her fist over getting a b.s. and another hour of time in.

17

A big bang from a previous universe compacted into one big mass makes more sense than out of nothing....

by EndofMysteries in

jw
friends

i've been learning a lot more about the universe, galaxies, planet formations, etc.

it's amazing how stars are constantly recycled, they form from gathering all the dust/gas/mass around them, the heat and pressure as the mass gets larger, producing stronger gravity, and depending on it's makeup creates fusion, turning into a star, then when it dies, it turns into a supernova, explodes, and sends it's matter out there for other stars to form,etc.

now galaxies do the same thing, and supposedly in many billons of years many galaxies will have eaten others, and if blackholes or something pulling in all the stars and mass is at the centers of these galaxies, then eventually everything would turn into one huge mass.

Apognophos

Last I heard, the prevailing scientific opinion is that the universe is going to continue expanding, not compact back together. And how would life survive a Big Crunch anyway?

More importantly, as Simon indicated, you've just pushed back the origin of things to a previous universe, which doesn't make anything more plausible, just more remote.

I think the real question is whether you've read anything about abiogenesis. The abiogenesis theories out there now make life's formation sound pretty plausible, within our own universe, on this very planet, with no need to pawn off the problem on another place and time.

That being said, it would be foolish for any of us to act as if we can really explain how This all came about. The universe is ultimately unexplainable and probably will continue to be for quite some time. Keep in mind that we just invented the light bulb a little over a century ago. Science has a long way to go before we can expect to know all the answers.

39

why didnt God just do this?

by sowhatnow in

for 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 , .

Apognophos

To be clear, though, the Genesis account does not speak of sinfulness or imperfection being inherited. That's a Christian concept introduced by Paul. The only things being inherited according to the story itself were the specific curses on man:

Man:

- Enmity with snake (will have his heel bitten, now that snake is low to the ground without his legs).

- Ground will not be as fruitful.

Woman:

- "Sorrowful" pregnancy and painful childbirth.

- Enslaved to man through sexual desire.

And snake:

- Legs removed, and will now (literally, or perhaps poetically) be eating dust.

- Will get its head stepped on by man when it attacks, since it is now low to the ground.

But I agree with your basic reasoning point, EdenOne, namely that from both the Jewish and the Christian standpoint, God chose to design us a certain way which allows imperfection or a curse to propagate to each one of us. He could simply have chosen to not design us that way.

8

Inactive for how long?

by Powermetal4ever in

jw
friends

as 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?

Apognophos

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.