Posts by tergiversator

14

Emotional Bankruptcy after the Tower

by Esmeralda in

jw
friends

"in many ways, poverty is a state of mind.

emma bromon, ~founder of liberty house, a halfway house in new orleans for homeless girls with children, or who are pregnant.. this quote inspired me tonight, on an evening where i certainly needed to feel inspired by something.

it made me question the way that i feel sometimes, that sickening out of control emotion that keeps me awake some nights.. nights like last night.. the feeling that carries over into days like today, .

tergiversator

But sometimes, hell, it's hard. Feelings of despondancy blindside you. This morning I awoke from a dream in which I was reaching for my father, to give him a hardy clap on the back, and he kept dodging me, staring me down with his cold, penetrating stare. I wonder why he won't write to me, eat with me, visit me, etc. I mean, I know, but I still wonder.

I wonder too, sometimes. It amazes me how blindsided I can get. Sometimes, I'm just so happy to be where I am now, free, young, at school, able to do whatever I want to do with my life... but on certain days that seems to boil down to a few impossible desires. Have my mom call me up out of the blue, to ask how I am doing, not just to discuss "business". Get a letter from my best friend who hasn't said a word to me in a year and a half. Be able to actually talk with my family without having them retreat into...

But that, alas, remains wishful thinking. What I would also like would be to not feel as if I am somehow treading on thin emotional ice: as if everything is going well and then something external happens - a bad day in lab, perhaps, or waking up too early from an unsettling dream - and suddenly the gaping pit is back, returned from the days when I was digging into my religion and my life and felt as if I had dug through too far and fallen out into the sky.

It's much better now, of course. The worst that can happen has just about all happened, and I am well on my way to rediscovering who I am and want to me. But... it takes a long time, this recovery process, which I realize better sometimes than others. And it's frustrating to sometimes feel like I'm playing emotional catch-up with other people my age, that I've got 13 years that I have to sort through, somehow. But then those good days, yeah... that's when I realize how lucky I am. How lucky we all are. Even if we don't always feel like it.

-T.

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people simply exist." - Oscar Wilde

71

My Identity!

by qwerty in

jw
friends

that got you to read this!

what country are you from?.

i find it encouraging to see where different posters are from in the world, especially for me, if you are from the uk or europe.

tergiversator

Gosh, is no one from Southern California? I attended congregations in three different cities here (Ventura, Santa Maria, Santee) and am currently going to school in the LA area. Probably a dead giveaway of my identity to anyone who knows me, but hey, I only wish my friends and family were frequenting this bulletin board

15

Kingdom Melodies Cassette #990

by kimberly in

jw
friends

alright, this is one of those what was your favourite questions:.

when you were a witness (or even if youre still reluctantly attached like me), did you have a favourite kingdom melody (why couldnt they just be called hymns by the way)?.

i remember thinking they were ok as a young child, but that was until i got to secondary school and heard the other kids singing proper hymns in assembly, while i had to stand outside.

tergiversator

Hmm. My absolute favorite song when I was really little, say 5 or 6, was #112, "Then They Will Know." (Must've been some ironic foreshadowing...) My mom says I once started singing it really loud in the middle of a grocery store, and everyone looked at me kinda funny.

But once you get past the stage where singing songs loud is fun because you get to see how many people in the rows ahead of you will turn around and look at who's singing so loudly (and, perchance, a tad bit out of key), the songs overwhelmingly underwhelm. The first time I ever went to a non-witness service, however much I still had some residual discomfort from being in a (gasp) church, I was quite impressed by the music, as well as by the fact that there was quite a bit more of it in proportion to sermon time.

My never-witness boyfriend and I looked through a song book once and he, knowing a little bit a music, pointed out how simplistic and repetitive most of the songs were from a technical point of view - something, of course, that I had figured out from years of listening to them. There's so many of them that just all sound the same, aren't there?

12

Why our beliefs are true...

by Dogpatch in

jw
friends

from gary busselman:.

a quote from skeptical inmquirer.

"finally, beliefs survive best when their adherents feel they are part of a cohesive community; an ideologue who gives his followers a sense of belonging has already won the battle against skeptics who seek to disconfirm his teachings.

tergiversator

On your 21st post you cease to be a Newbie.

Tergiversator, of the I Just Became a Junior Member and I Still Can't Type Right Class

166

BRITS v YANKS

by nicolaou in

jw
friends

brits v yanks.

this is just for laughs, but let's be honest us brits are most definately ahead of our 'cousins' across the water in the credibility stakes.. i'll kick us off and see where we go;.

[1] the beautiful game.. it's called football.

tergiversator

Since I was once accused of having a Canadian accent (someone thought I pronounced "about" funny), I thought I should step in on their side with the following link. It's called "The White House Burned".

http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/166/166947.html

43

Did you/Do you actually LIKE Field Service?

by LovesDubs in

jw
friends

god i hated it..every living breathing minute of it.

it was pure hell for me, and based on the pace i see the jws all over the world moving, they aint so fond of it neither.

the persecution that the jws feel they get is from irritated householders who know nothing about their religion except that they hit people over the head with it and then judge them because they dont like being hit over the head with it.

tergiversator

I always liked going out in service. Well, except for return visits; those terrified me from the moment my mom began hinting that I could call back on people that I left literature with. Well, to be fair, I also didn't like talking to people at the doors. I loved not-at-homes and used to drag out the time we spent on the porch. I also hated it when the householder actually said something, because then I had to try to explain what I was presenting, which grew more and more difficult the older I got because I realized how inexplicable most of it was.

So what I really liked about service was being out there with the group, doing what we thought was right. Except for when we intruded on people during the holidays, I always thought that was rather tacky and rude. And it wasn't too fond of running into people I knew from school, come to think of it. But still there was a great sense of accomplishment, spending the whole day in service. Except getting our time started at laundromats always felt like cheating , not to mention rather useless. And except for one year, coincidentally the year I got baptized and auxiliary pioneered three times, I hardly ever got into a car group with people I had anything in common with. And I was even less fond of field service every third year, when our congregation had the early meeting on Sunday as well and I never had a single day to sleep in.

Phone witnessing was the most horrendous torturous experience, which I thankfully only got stuck doing a few times. If I had thought of calling my own number or a number I knew to not be at home, I probably would have.

So I guess the only part of field service I liked was waiting for other people to come back from calls after I had declared that I had "nobody to call on today, sorry." And letter-writing on rainy days was probably the least painful way to fill up hour requirements, though I often wondered what people who knew me in other contexts thought when they received letters with my name of them.

The best thing about field service is that I never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever have to do it again.

T.

20

what brought you out?

by uncle_onion in

jw
friends

i was intersted in what brought "you" out.. with me it was the 607 bce thing.

i always followed the org and would have died for it but when i saw the fallacy of the 607 date that blew it for me.

i am now on a quest to try and find something to feel comfortable with.

tergiversator

I think it started with gratuitous use of exclamations points. :) I began to be irritated by the writing style of the publications, finding it manipulative and altogether too reminiscent of the propaganda techniques I'd learned about in high school history classes.

Then it was a bunch of little things: the organ transplant fiasco, finding www.ajwrb.org and realizing that there were other ways of interpereting the blood scriptures (heck, a householder once told me that he'd always thought that "refrain from blood" was a prohibition on murder!), the way women were treated. Like AlanF so masterfully said, the scientific attempts of the publications were becoming woefully more pathetic to me also.

But what finally pushed me over the edge was thinking about disfellowshipping/disassociation. I decided that I hated the whole concept, hated how I was going to be treated when my decision to not be a witness was know, hated how I had treated DA'd/DF'd people when I'd been younger even though I'd thought that I was being as nice as I could be.

So I left.

-T.

7

PLEASE HELP!

by qwerty in

jw
friends

you've probably wanted to do something positive to help other fellow humans, since learning that we have been working for a man made organisation all this time.

well you can my fellow x's and jw's.. follow this link to the health board (copy and paste it into you browser)....and my post there : -.

http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/forum/thread.asp?id=4274&site=3

tergiversator

Sniff. No Mac version yet :( Otherwise it looks like a really good idea.

Tergiversator
(of the Mac Users are Cultists Too class)

2

Education=Looser Ignorance=Winner

by WhyNow2000 in

jw
friends

i attended college during late 80's and early 90's when university was a taboo, bad karma, unchristian, bad example...how could you do that.

i endured myriads of encouragements to lure me away from materialism.

when i moved to another congregation, i learned to downplay my full fledged student status and in silence i finished my school.. how many of you went to universities when you were an active jw?

tergiversator

Welcome to the board, WhyNow.

I must say, I have a lot of respect for people like you who went to school while being active witnesses, both for your courage and for simply keeping up with your schoolwork with the amount of time that meetings et al. took up.

As for myself, I can't really say much about being a Witness college student, since I decided to leave the organization in November of my freshman year... but I did have to deal with other people during high school, when it became clear that I was going to go to college. It helps that my school's name sounds like it's "only" a technical school, and I played up the "need to get job training" idea, which seemed to work okay.

Of course, when I left my mom chocked it up to me being "distracted" with "higher learning". And suddenly I wasn't nearly as bright as I had been, back when I was in high school and still a model witness. It was just too much to expect her to understand that going away to college didn't make me leave the "truth", the organization made me leave the "truth", but oh well. Gives her something to blame, at least, besides me.

As far as choice of major goes, I think that all those years of saying I was going to get "job skills" and "necessary training" have caused me to study completely useless things :) (at least from a financial point of view). I'm currently a sophomore in physics, leaning toward geophysics, but who knows. Definitely planning on grad school to postpone entering the real world a bit longer, also.

T.

14

JW attitudes on women - why beneficial

by tergiversator in

my secret wish, when i was about 10 years old and we were going through the revelation book for the second time, was that one day we would show up at the book study and all the baptized brothers would be missing and they would let me read.

i was pretty sure that i wouldn't mangle words like thyatira and laodicea nearly as badly as some of the poor brothers they roped into reading at times, who looked like they were being tortured during particularly difficult lessons.. i liked to read, i thought.

my older brother got to read a lot, even when he wasn't baptized.

tergiversator

Hello, Flowerpetal,

I have to say attitudes have gotten better, as they have generally in the world at large. But you get some of the most outrageous comments from older brothers who just... don't... get it. Just a few years ago, during my senior year in high school, I remember one brother, ministerial servant, not actually that old, who was talking to me about doing well in school. He said at one point that "those books won't matter so much once you find the right brother." I was quite outraged, naturally.

The fact that there are these silly restrictions about who directs who in the territory, etc, do make it difficult for many of the brothers to see any reason why they should change their attitudes toward women, though.

-Tergiversator, of the When Do I Stop Being a Newbie Class?