i hope you are all having a nice day with family and friends.. :).
Happy Thanksgiving to all. I had a great time with my husband and the rest of our families. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving day.
I have many, many, many reasons to be thankful. Too many to mention. In fact, gratitude has always been the key driver in my progress and stepping away from all that organizational nonsense that always paint the world as something to be scared about or despise. I EFFING LOVE THE WORLD!!!
this scene from quo vadis is how most christians (of all brands) imagine the early history of christianity.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skdrflc8v9e.
but how close to real-life experience is that modern portrayal?.
two historians from the university of queensland search for the likely truth in this overview.. http://theconversation.com/mythbusting-ancient-rome-throwing-christians-to-the-lions-67365.
I'm more than happy to persecute whoever christian comes to my house, violating my privacy and life choices over their stupid Jesus.
They try to shove their bible down other people's throat and claim to be victimized when they are put in their place.
If you look at the history of how many people from how many religions and how many reasons they have been oppressed, christianity has had it pretty good, not to mention that those have been more the oppressor than the oppressed.
as i have revealed in other threads my mother and i havent talked in over 2 years.
she has been keeping her distance, therefore staying loyal to jehovah.
she found me on facebook.
Did I strike a nerve? Thoughts? Was there a recent study article written about reaching out to "inactive" ones?
Probably. She is your mom after all. She may be coming from a place of love and care for you. I am basing my comment on the premise that you have a loving mother.
My thoughts are that sometimes the reaching out doesn't come from a WT directive. It may have come from the fact that she just found out that you have a child that she didn't even know about. As brainwashed as they are, JWs are still human, they feel and they love and they need to know about their loved ones.
Through the years I have seen and experience a very unstable, psychologically damaging varying stances from the WT when it comes to loved ones who have left. Of course, their directives have nothing to do with the well being of anyone but themselves, and that may be the reason why it constantly changes.
In the last decades they have said that it's not ok to talk to ex-jws, then that it's ok to have some form of communication, then back to not talking at all, then reaching out directly to them, then leaving up to the jws, and round and round they go. It is very hurtful for JWs to have to go through all those directives as the Wt see them fit without taking into consideration people's feelings and the fact that they are dividing families for their own benefit.
For some reason I think that in this case your mom just saw you on FB and saw that you are ok, alive, well and thriving, while she's there expecting you to be suffering some kind of consequences for your decision, making such consequences want to go back. She's jus being your mom, I think.
It has to be very saddening for JWs to realize that they don't have any power over those who leave because of them, and those who leave them hold them responsible for ending relationships.
I wouldn't pay attention to her nonsense; I think her feelings speak the real truth.
3 questions i hit my jw mum with:.
first question: do you believe that god is love?
third question: do you think a god of love would choose to destroy me for not doing something i cannot do (be a jw) because i am not convinced rather than convince me beyond doubt?
That's a great way of putting things under perspective. I hope it keeps helping you.
However, as right as you might be, I'd suggest to be sensitive and don't constantly bombard your mom with your doubts. You may hurt her. Reinforce your love for her, just to be on the safe side.
in the story in the gospel of mark, mark writes that jesus is hungry and comes across a fig tree.
mark explains that it not in season yet jesus upon finding the fig tree has produced no fruit kills the tree.. this story makes no sense if literal so do the gun teach that it literally happened?.
The Bible makes no sense, imagine that!
witnesses always claim to have a "bible trained conscience" yet they are really just watchtower robots who cant piss without checking with an elder or watchtower.
an elder who cuts hair was scared when i asked for a bald buzz cut since my hair was receding and grey.
he actually rang a bethel elder to see if this was okay watchtower wise!
And that's why it's considered a cult.
with recent events pointing at watchtower growth, i felt compelled to say a few words.. if the figures turn out to be true, then we should not be discouraged.
after 9/11 there was a surge in, not only the watchtower, but other demonisation of organised religion.
whenever there is a a paradigm shifting event that puts fear into others, this tends to have a life changing affect on an individual.. now let us zoom to the present.
I completely agree. What I see, however, is absolutely nothing new in the horizon. Never, not once, religion, especially Christian religions, have had anything good to say about the current state of affairs.
The number one thing that I see in organizations that want to manipulate people, is that catastrophic view of the world. I don't see anything new.
so sunday afternoon tea with my "anionted" mum and her old witness holy friends.
they start talking trump how he "is gonna do somthing to start armegedon.
" no sad faces about this apocalipse.
So Sunday afternoon tea with my "anionted" mum and her old Witness holy friends. They start talking Trump how he "is gonna do somthing to start armegedon." No sad faces about this apocalipse. NO, they were all smiles...nodding their heads together, smiling like stepford wives. I was totally CREEPED OUT! I can imagine in 1939 Witnesses doing the same with Adolf Hitler.
And they said the same thing when Obama got elected and made same sex marriage legal, and when Bush got elected and started the war in Iraq, and when Clinton was elected because of the "false sense of peace', and when the other Bush got elected for who-knows-why.
Same nonsense, different name.
i often come across jw's using the "worldwide brotherhood" as one of the reasons to justify that jw's have "the truth.
" such a brotherhood, they claim, would not exist outside the organisation because there is no way that people of different religions, nationalities, races, cultures, backgrounds, languages etc.
can be united and associate together freely without "the truth!".
I find interesting that many JWs use their faulty reasoning to stay in their "truth" without daring to look inside themselves about how they feel. If you noticed, Divergent, in your post (at least what I got), not only you uncovered a way in which JWs manipulate people to not look around for better ways of uniting with other people, but also you find that there's a way to have a sense of community in a diverse group of people without any of them believing or behaving in the exact same way.
pale.emperor made an interesting observation in another thread:.
the "blocking an expression of gods love" crap is a sneaky tactic to make the shunner not feel like they're doing something evil.
cults do that.
What I'm really getting at is this: The idea of a god -- any god -- creates an opportunity for power over a group of people. So, belief in a god tends to become organized, and then it's all quite political and manipulative from there.
Not only that, but I can easily add that it's not limited to a diety at all. There are cults that use the same tactics and what they are based is on recovery from drugs and alcohol. There are other ways of using the same tactics, using political causes or self-help, for example, that can harm as much as using a god or diety.
