That was very nifty keen cool, SlayerLayer.
-T.
tergiversator
JoinedPosts by tergiversator
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11
JW's in South Park
by SlayerLayer inhey guys,.
yes i have too much time on my hands today, and created this website just for your entertainment.
please check it out and let me know what you think.
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Measuring Evil
by Sam Beli inthe measurement of evil is the subject of the article at this link; i find the tribal behavior discribed of interest to former jws: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010511/hl/psychiatry_evil_1.html.
enjoy,.
sam beli
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tergiversator
Hi Sam Beli,
Thanks for the interesting article, and welcome. You've got quite a history with the organization. I, for one, am glad that you didn't "die faithful" but instead are here to talk with us. I suspect you are too ...
-T.
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How does the DF process begin??
by Camay inquestion its seems like for the past 3 weeks by jw boyfriend stays.
after the bible meetings for a long time.
last week they kept him.
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tergiversator
Hi Camay,
Sounds like he's getting called in for judicial committee meetings. Whether or not he gets kicked out, publicly or privately reproved, or nothing happens depends very much on the individual congregation. How well connected is he (ie, elder's son/nephew/3rd cousin twice removed)? How "repentant" is he? How much do the local elders care about whether he is repentant vs. setting an example for the rest of the congregation?
Since he has been going to all the meetings, and willing staying afterward for these "talks", he is showing that he wants to stay in. Anybody's guess if they'll let him.
And as far as the length of the committee meetings go... all I wanted to do when I met with the elders was announce my intention to leave, and it still dragged into several hours on at least two different occasions. (At the time, I was still a little too polite to just walk out on them.) And there wasn't much to talk about in my case - no "sins" to dissect in gory detail, no "injury" to the congregation's reputation to devise suitable punishment for. If he's actually seeking "advice" from them... you could be in for a lot of cold dinners.
Pity being thoughtful toward you is not a criteria much looked for as a sign of "repentance"...
Hope this helps,
-T. -
12
Do you appreciate the Watchtower Magazine?
by Norm indont you know that there is no more important magazine on the earth today then the watchtower magazine?.
as we know it is in that very magazine jehovah makes his official notifications to mankind.
since jehovah apparently isnt at all interested in reaching all of mankind he isnt using tv or radio.
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tergiversator
Hey JT, I remember that line too. I think it was quoted to us as 10 years of WT reading = 4 years college. No wonder they didn't understand why I wanted to pay for an inferior worldly education.
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Wow! The look they had on their faces!
by ianao inwitnesses: "why, no sir.
witnesses: "well, actually sir if...".
witnesses: "ok sir, but may i just say something?".
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tergiversator
So for the next 45 minutes they argued back and forth as I prayed for a quick and painless death.
Hehehehehe, riz! I can remember being stuck with those kinds of people. And I hated being stuck with people like mommy, too (sorry ), who had to wait at the door practically until the absent householder pulled into the driveway that evening. Oh sure, a little strategic dawdling here and there was a good thing, but after a while it got really dull and I wanted to get the blood flowing in my legs again.
It also happened once or twice, when I was stalling at a door I was sure no one was home at, that the householder would suddenly open the door, on their way to check the mail, say, and looked really surprised, saying, "Oh, are you still here?" That was when I was always sorely tempted to say something like, "We're from the census", anything to not identify us as Jehovah's Witnesses. Never did, though.
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Witness Kids and Disfellowshipped Parents
by tergiversator ini thought i'd share my own experience on the subject (sorry it gets a little long winded!
) and ask how having to shun relatives as a kid affected anyone else here.. disfellowshipping (and disassociation) have been part of my life for as long as i can remember.
when i was six or seven, my dad, after opposing my mother's becoming a witness for several years, had a whirlwind flirtation with the organization and got baptized (as my mom put it, he was so disappointed that nothing special happened when he got baptized that he left the assembly at the lunch break).
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tergiversator
Hello, everyone, and thanks for all your kind words.
CornerStone, I quite agree. I haven't finished sorting out where I stand religiously, but I know that any group that proclaims disfellowshipping is LOVING ain't it.
JT:
but you are free now and man ran with it
That just about sums up my attitude. Well, that and not feeling guilty about sleeping in Saturday morning. I remember the feeling, when it first dawned on me that it might matter what I studied in college, because I could actually do something that I liked with it. It was kinda terrifying because it was a rather sudden realization... but quite liberating, actually, knowing that I could make my future and not just endure it.
What about the blatantly false statement on the WTS site that says "disfellowshipping does not end family ties"?
I get disgusted every time I see that quote, too, Patio. I'm really tempted to ask my mom about that line from the official website - though, technically, our family ties aren't severed. Just very, very, very frayed.
Since Thirdson asked how things were with my mom now, here's how things have unfolded... My mom still talks to me, sometimes, although she tries to stick to "family business". Unfortunately, she began her rebound with the Society (after years of just being too busy with work to do much else) right when I was having my most serious doubts, and she is very much the loyal obedient witness right now. Remarried to a rather nice up-and-coming ministerial servant, too. She still forwards me all of my junk mail and financial aid documents, though never with any attached notes asking how I am. (I was amused a few weeks ago, in a sad sort of way, at how happy I was to get an unsolicited email from her advising me to eat my green vegetables. )
She also refuses to eat meals with me, but somehow thinks that family get-togethers with worldly relatives are ok. (Mustn't give a bad witness...) It's a shame, really. We were pretty close, before, and my leaving has really torn her up. Now, she's just hoping that I'll snap out of it and come back in a few years, when I'm done being "distracted" by schoolwork. I haven't the heart to disillusion her...
As for where I am right now, I'm almost finished with my second year of college. I'm incredibly grateful that I managed to effect my transition from impeccably-good-witness-girl to frothing-at-the-mouth-apostate-college-student [8>] so seamlessly; I know from reading here that so many other people weren't that lucky.
And bajarama, that's what I love about the internet too. Everyone understands why we have such crazy messed up families, and also that, underneath the apostate scum, we're not such a bad lot after all .
-T.
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Glad I am no longer a jw parent.
by pamkw ini have been thinking lately how differently i raise my kids now as compared to when i was a jw.
my oldest son had the bad luck to have a mom who was trying to be the perfect jw single mom.
i. was really mean to him at times.
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tergiversator
Hi Pam,
Don't know much about it from the parental end of things, but as a kid... I can remember how tough it was to sit through meetings at first (I was 4 and my brother was 8). And I was the sort of kid who liked sitting quietly by myself reading for long periods of time. It must be much, much worse for people like your youngest son.
Heh. Some sister once made the comment to my mom that her kids whent from being "two of the worst kids in the hall to two of the best", by which she of course meant that we were well behaved and quiet. Guess we're back on the "worst" list again (I'm da'd and he's very inactive).
Anyhow, nice to meet you.
-T.
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Witness Kids and Disfellowshipped Parents
by tergiversator ini thought i'd share my own experience on the subject (sorry it gets a little long winded!
) and ask how having to shun relatives as a kid affected anyone else here.. disfellowshipping (and disassociation) have been part of my life for as long as i can remember.
when i was six or seven, my dad, after opposing my mother's becoming a witness for several years, had a whirlwind flirtation with the organization and got baptized (as my mom put it, he was so disappointed that nothing special happened when he got baptized that he left the assembly at the lunch break).
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tergiversator
I thought I'd share my own experience on the subject (sorry it gets a little long winded!) and ask how having to shun relatives as a kid affected anyone else here.
Disfellowshipping (and disassociation) have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. When I was six or seven, my dad, after opposing my mother's becoming a witness for several years, had a whirlwind flirtation with the organization and got baptized (as my mom put it, he was so disappointed that nothing special happened when he got baptized that he left the assembly at the lunch break). Within six months he was out, disassociated for voting I believe (though at that point it was a technicality; there were plenty of other things he could've gotten nailed for), and my parents' marriage also collapsed at the same time, for many other reasons as well.
So then came the fun and exciting ritual of visitation with a disassociated dad. I was oh-so-very conscientious to never say amen when he would say a prayer over dinner, because I knew how spiritually dangerous that was. My earliest memories of "dealing" with my father when he started talking to us about 'postate stuff was to tune him out. (Hehe, great preparation for teenagerhood ) I used to get so exasperated with him for harping on us about not showing proper "Christian love" and (his favorite) not "honoring our father", because he just didn't understand. How clearly I saw that he was twisting scriptures! How equally obvious was it that his own lifestyle, a constant jumble of losing jobs and bad roommates and homelessness and creepy drugged-up "friends", was not what I wanted! I was a very perceptive eight year old, and drew the connection between being disassociated and having a messed up life all on my own. (Mostly.)
Fast forward a few years. My dad had at this point left the area and I hadn't seen him regularly in several years. This was also the zenith of my witness days, when I knew it was the truth beyond a shadow of a scrap of a shred of a doubt. A few weeks after my brother and I got baptized, I at a very mature thirteen (hah!), my dad called us up to say that he was back in the city we grew up in (we had moved away). Somehow it comes out that we had gotten baptized, and he got furious at us for not telling us about it. Two hours later (the minimum time it takes to drive up to where we lived), he was there at our house, yelling at us.
Now, of course, I understand exactly why he was so upset; but then it was just the perfect way to reinforce how much apostates like to trouble good lil' witnesses. We didn't see him again for a while - much, I am ashamed to admit now, to my relief.
Fast forward another year or two. We've moved again, and I'm now in high school, as well as in a congregation where I have absolutely nothing in common with anyone. I still see my old friends, but only once or twice a year, since they are a good six hours drive away. My dad then decides (to my mother's chagrin) to move down to San Diego, where we were, and for the first time in many years begins to hold down a regular job. He wanted to start up seeing us on a regular basis again, and we started going out to dinner, he and my brother and I, maybe once or twice a month.
At this point, he'd been away from the witnesses so long that he just didn't bring up "objectionable" subjects all that often, and my brother and I were masters at steering the topic away from ones where he would start ranting. (Heck, he rants enough on subjects completely unrelated to religion. ) My mother was unhappy about having his "bad influence" around again, but I was old enough that I knew what I believed (at least I thought so...). I also thought I knew where to draw the line between familial ties and showing respect and not associating too much with an ex-witness (or non-witness, for that matter). Eating the occasional dinner with my dad was not going to change anything.
Until the elders told me to stop it.
The stories I've read online about other people's experiences with bad elders leave me shaking my head in amazement, because I must've been in pretty decent congregations (or else too oblivious to notice); but I had this one run in. One of my favorite elders and someone else came by on a shepherding call when I was 16, in my junior year of high school. They told us that, since my brother was no longer a child (he was 19), he was not under "legal obligation" to see my dad any more (ie, visitation arrangements) and thus he should "seriously weigh" how much time he spent with him. I, of course, would face the same "decision" when I turned 18.
To give some idea of how "serious" this was, they informed me that if I didn't cut off seeing my dad, I wouldn't be approved to auxiliary pioneer again, as I had just finished doing that spring break. In other words, I would be marked as "spiritually weak".
Now, I had never done anything wrong at this point. I was the model witness kid - did very well in school, was always out in service, liked being out in service, pioneered a lot, never got in trouble, etc. But I was very, very offended by their "loving counsel". Especially since they had NO IDEA what growing up with disfellowshipped parents was like, both being from model witness families. But they had come up with an arbitrary rule that non-custodial ex-witness parents get the shaft the instant you turn 18 (and before that if you're "reaching out"). I was supposed to meekly obey.
It was, as they say, the beginning of the end.
My brother and I did not stop seeing my dad. My brother never was approved as a ministerial servant, and has now been inactive for at least a year. I refused to pioneer that summer in protest of their unfair decree - made excuses to my mom about being "tired from the school year" and carefully scheduled my trips up north to see my friends so that I wouldn't have any given month with enough free time to pioneer.
And, when I got online that June, and naively starting doing research about the tax on the witnesses in France (such noble intentions!) and opened the floodgates of 'postate sites, I was much less inclined to skip over them. I wasn't disenchanted enough to stick around long (the old H20 scared the heck out of me when I stumbled across it), but I gained a vague knowledge of organ transplants and 1975 and the AJWRB. And they remained in my memory throughout the next year, when other things began to bother me; when I was pretty much forced into pioneering again (they didn't remember their threat, evidently... but I did) that spring by the PO's wife, trying to drum up support for some campaign or other; when I was faced all at once with the prospect of getting free by going away to college and the realization one meeting that I wanted nothing in the world more than to be OUT of that Kingdom Hall and never have to come back.
What finally made me decide to leave, for good, was when I realized how much I hated the idea of belonging to a religion that makes you choose between your friends and family and your peace of mind and self-respect. I hated disfellowshipping and disassociation, with a passion born of long experience on the one side and the realization of what was going to happen to me on the other. So I disassociated myself.
My mother blames my dad. She has no idea.
-T.
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tergiversator
The things you find in old magazines... if I had ever bothered to read some of the old literature my mom got after an elderly sister in our hall died, I might have come to some conclusions about the Society's wacked out crazy past a lot sooner. Ah, hindsight.
I was curious about this statement you made:
Rutherford’s interpretation of the Jericho story is of course not receiving much attention in today’s Watchtower literature, although there are some people today who actually remember this insane drivel. One such person was actually stupid enough to mention it in the Watchtower, March 1. 1998, page 29. And as with all the other insane blunders of the Watchtower Society it was of course “meat in due season”. What a mess!
I was still dutifully reading magazines back then, and I could swear this is the first time I heard about any such "Achan" class or Jericho applying to an obscure radio broadcast in 1933.
Anyhow, thanks for the post, Norm, a pleasure to read as always.
-T., who thinks the Society's coffin can always use another nail or twenty
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Things That NEVER Made Sense To Me:
by Englishman ineven when i was a dyed in the wool jw, there were a few things that never made any sense whatsoever to me.
like most dubs, i glossed over them, here's my top 3 doubts during my period of dubdom, doubts that were never resolved:.
"all scripture is inspired of god and beneficial for teaching".
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tergiversator
One thing I never understood was the motivation for the preaching work. I mean, I knew we were helping people to learn the "truth" so that they could survive Armageddon, but really, why on earth would anyone think it fair to judge someone based on being woken up on Saturday morning to fifteen seconds of "HiMyNameIsJillPublisherIHaveTheLatestAwakeOnTheRealHopeForTheRainforestsOhNotInterestedOkMaybeSomeOtherTimeBye"
Really.
It also seemed silly, thinking about, say, China. I remember one day out in service in the early 90's with a bunch of pioneers sisters (pre-generation change) speculating about how close the end might be. Someone relayed a CO's comment that the "good news being preached throughout the world for a witness to all nations" didn't mean that it couldn't come until after China and the middle East had been thoroughly covered (which, if so, gave us a good couple of decades at least).
Rather, "all the nations" was "symbolic", and if people in China didn't hear the good news they would die at Armageddon for not knowing better. But, get this, they would then be resurrected in the new system because "Jehovah would know their heart condition". That seemed very inefficient, to me; kill a billion people, then resurrect them again. Not to mention a little hard on the individuals involved, all for an accident of geography.
I also didn't understand (being the individualstic uppity girl that I was ) why women needed to be "in subjection". The argument about "can't have two captains of the same ship" never flew very far, and anyways, even if it were true, who said the guy was always the most qualified?
And Had Enough, I agree, one of the reasons I held on mentally for all those years was because it seemed like, whatever other faults there were, the chronologies and prophecies seemed to make sense and indicate that there might still be something to it. Reading Franz's book, looking online, and generally taking a step back and re-examining everything from the outside convinced me that there wasn't anything at all.
-T.