Posts by tergiversator

34

Why did you get baptized?

by NoLongerAjw in

jw
friends

was it for love of the kingdom hall and jehovah?

pressure .. felt like you had to?

for me it was because all my friends my age had gotten baptized.. and it was left up to me to do it too.. to fit in i guess.

tergiversator

In three words, it was: age of accountability.

Defined as the idea that 12 or 13 year old children are old enough to understand witness doctrine and thus old enough to take a stand for themselves when Armageddon comes Real Soon Now. Or else they (might) die.

I got baptized because I thought it was the right thing to do and because I wanted to do what I thought God wanted me to do, but I got baptized on my thirteenth birthday (well, what would've been it) mostly because I didn't want to die when Armageddon came. I seem to recall being guilt-tripped (er, inspired...) by the the hardhitting baptismal talk at the district convention the summer before I got dunked.

I also wanted to be baptized so I could auxiliary pioneer. People just didn't support unbaptized kids who were trying to get more hours. Stupid, stupid me.

I was the first one of my friends to get baptized, and was also the youngest person at our circuit assembly, and boy was I proud of myself for that. (I also think it was partly because of me that my brother, 3 1/2 years older than me, got baptized the same day I did, because otherwise it wouldn't have looked right.) In my mother's view, of course, I was much more mature at 13 than when I decided to leave at 17.

Gah. If ever there was a true believer kid, it was me. But I was still a kid.

-T., who hopes some of her friends wise up the way plh's did.

3

Have I blown it...?

by Sunbeam in

jw
friends

hello folks.

just to let you know the latest on our family situation - and ask for advice.

to re-cap, my husband's mother is the only jw in the family.

tergiversator

Hi Sunbeam,

Witness sure don't like being preached at, and for those who refuse to listen because they genuinely don't want to hear what anyone else says (as opposed to people like me, who just felt we shouldn't) I don't know what you can do. I do think you should probably ease up on your mother-in-law in the name of family peace - and perhaps ask her to stop trying to preach to you also?

I'm relatively new to this whole "wanting very badly to tell my parents things but not being able to" scene myself, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I do think that, unless she asks you a specific question, you had better resign yourself to dropping subtle hints here and there and hope she eventually comes to her senses. Unless she wants to hear it, she won't - and if you try to force her, she probably won't like you for it.

-T.

72

Adoption by Jehovah's Witnesses is blocked

by expatbrit in

jw
friends

adoption by jehovah's witnesses is blocked .

the independent - united kingdom; may 26, 2001. by brian farmer.

a couple originally approved by a council as adoptive parents have been refused permission by social workers to adopt a child, because they are jehovah's witnesses.

tergiversator

Hi kenyata,

Thanks for clearing up a little bit about where you're coming from. It sounds like you have good parents. I'm also guessing you never got baptized? I have a wonderful mom who is also a witness (my dad - divorced - left after being in very briefly), but because I got baptized myself when I was 13 and left at 17, she now drastically curtails the time she spends with me. I live 2 hours away and yet I only see her once or twice a year, in passing, for a few hours (and no meals). And in my family, religion is the ONLY problem. There's no issues of not "living correctly" to complicate the matter; the only thing I've done wrong, in her viewpoint, is questioning witness doctrine.

So... I know that most witnesses love their children, and many would make fine adoptive parents. Some even manage to show unconditional love to their children in spite of being told that leaving the organzation means they should be virtually cut off. But they're not the norm! The religion clearly teaches that children who get baptized and then leave must be shunned, whether or not it's for "unclean living" or for simply disagreeing with some or all of what the organization teaches.

That's just wrong. They hurt far too many children who are born to witness parents. I don't see why they should get a chance to hurt any more.

-T.

59

3 meetings per week NOT FIVE!!!

by sawthelight in

jw
friends

am i the only person ever to fall under the influence of the borg who can count?.

no offence all but jws meet three times per week.not five!

i consider the familiar statement about 5 meetings per week to be a good indication of just how indoctrinated a person is.

tergiversator

some times there is no crrelation between paragraphs in the same study article.

Hehehehehe...

BTW, my name means "someone who shows reluctance or turns away from a previous cause, position, party, or faith". I found it will idly looking for synonyms for apostate, and decided it made a decent screen name.

-T.

59

3 meetings per week NOT FIVE!!!

by sawthelight in

jw
friends

am i the only person ever to fall under the influence of the borg who can count?.

no offence all but jws meet three times per week.not five!

i consider the familiar statement about 5 meetings per week to be a good indication of just how indoctrinated a person is.

tergiversator

Yeah, I always thought the math was kinda funny too. We didn't have two meetings, we had one meeting with songs at the beginning, middle, and end. In my family, missing one part meant you either suddenly took violently ill and had to be rushed to the hospital, or else were detained by terrorists on your way to the meeting and missed the first part.

-T.

14

RAGE ... trying not to give in ...

by dedalus in

jw
friends

i recently stopped by my father's house to pick up some mail and to drop off my brother's sunglasses.

my father, a zealous dub with 24 years in the collective, asked to talk to me.. for those who don't know, my fiancee and i are having a baby, which for obvious reasons causes some consternation on my father's part: you don't have to be a witness to believe that sex before marriage is wrong.

(if someone wants to discuss whether this is a valid position or not, do it in another thread.

tergiversator

Hey dedalus,

Yeah, witnesses (especially relatives) can suck a lot. My mom, at least, still talks to me occasionally, but won't let me eat with her - except at "family gatherings", where all of our worldly relatives would be quite upset at not seeing me. (Guess it would just be too bad a witness to take a hardline stance there?) But she still pulls stuff like your dad.

A few weeks ago, my non-witness grandparents drove out from Colorado and went down to see my mom and stepdad for dinner. My very inactive brother and stepdad's non-witness parents were also there, so it seemed to fall under the category of "family gathering". I, of course, never got an invite. It just so happened that I had to move to a different dorm room that weekend and might not have been able to go anyways, but I don't think she knew that until my grandparents would've got there and told her. (I did get to see them earlier during the week when they visited my school.) They, of course, probably thought that was the only reason I wasn't there, and I doubt my mom was going to disillusion them. It still hurt.

Sorry your family is playing the same stupid game. I don't want to think about how much fun it won't be dealing with them when kids come along.

-T.

72

Adoption by Jehovah's Witnesses is blocked

by expatbrit in

jw
friends

adoption by jehovah's witnesses is blocked .

the independent - united kingdom; may 26, 2001. by brian farmer.

a couple originally approved by a council as adoptive parents have been refused permission by social workers to adopt a child, because they are jehovah's witnesses.

tergiversator

Kenyata,

I think you missed my point. If a witness couple adopts a child, we're most likely talking about a little kid - baby, toddler. Are they not going to teach him about their religion, which they believe is the truth? The question I'm asking is: is it fair to let a child be adopted by a couple who will raise him in a religion that will teach him that the one thing he must never do is leave the religion, or else his new family will abandon him just as much as his birth family did?

"Old enough to understand what kind of decision they are making", in my mind, does not mean the age at which most witness kids get baptized (12-16). Teenagers can understand perfectly well that they want to serve God; they are much less able to discern if the religion they are raised in is the right way to do so.

-T.

72

Adoption by Jehovah's Witnesses is blocked

by expatbrit in

jw
friends

adoption by jehovah's witnesses is blocked .

the independent - united kingdom; may 26, 2001. by brian farmer.

a couple originally approved by a council as adoptive parents have been refused permission by social workers to adopt a child, because they are jehovah's witnesses.

tergiversator

A hypothetical situation: a witness couple adopts a child. They teach the child about their religion, which he accepts and gets baptized as a young teen (say 12-13). Then, upon coming of age, the child decides he wants nothing to do with the religion (he doesn't care about religion, he realizes he doesn't believe it anymore, he gets disillusioned by how he is treated in the congregation for something, maybe he finds his birth family and wants to celebrate holidays with them - there's plenty of reasons why this could happen).

Question: how loving will the witness parents be when their child is disfellowshipped? (And DON'T say that "shunning him shows how much they love him, because that will show him the error of his ways").

34

For all x-JW's: quick question.....

by Kathy in

jw
friends

if you remember, i've been inquiring about how to discuss jw issues with my boyfriend's sister.

it appears she is accepting the watchtower driven interpretations of the bible, but we are still not giving up.

if you are willing, would you respond, in a nutshell, to the question, "what is the doctrine or belief that the jw's hold that was most instrumental in leading you to abandon this religion?

tergiversator

Hmm. To put it in a nutshell, I ultimately left precisely because I knew what would happen to me afterwards. I knew my friends would suddenly never send me another email or letter or phone call again, I knew my mother would toe the party line and drastically curtail contact with me (currently, she won't eat with me... except at family gatherings where there are worldy relatives around), and that tore me up for a while (I was 17 when I left btw).

But I had come to hate disfellowshipping and shunning, and did not want to be part of an organization that would do something that cruel to people who couldn't accept their doctrines any more. (And especially to those of us raised that way; I was baptized at 13.) I came to this realization not just because I wanted a more acceptable way out, but also because I had had to deal with a disassociated dad when I was growing up, and found the strict "one-size-fits-all" counsel of the society to be unacceptable. (If you want to read more on that, I wrote an essay on my website: http://tergiversator.freeservers.com/story.html)

That was the breaking point. What led me there was a combination of never accepting the arbitrary regulations about women (just how does not wearing a handkerchief on your head make you ineligible to say a prayer in front of a baptized male?); of finding the official teaching on evolution to be scientifically impossible to justify to myself; of discovering how much I hated the propagandistic style of the magazines; and yes, even of reading online about the blood doctrine (and just why would God want us to value a symbol of life more than life itself?) and about the shocking facts that the witnesses had once forbidden organ transplants and prophesied the end in 1975 (and soooo many other things, but I didn't find out about those until afterward).

But disfellowshipping/disassociation is what did it for me. If you have the truth, then why do you need to keep your followers from having absolutely any contact with people who chose to leave? That, to me, is why the witnesses cannot be from God.

-T.

13

Map where Beth Sarim is...

by TheApostleAK in

jw
friends

hope this is where it is... http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?bfcat=&pyt=tmap&newfl=use+address+below&addr=4440+braeburn&csz=san+diego%2c+ca+92114&country=us&get%a0map=get+map.

it's about 7ish miles from the coast.

why have a secret compound in a place that would of been one of the first places in america to be invaded by the japs during ww2?.

tergiversator

Gosh, that's real close to where I used to live... and it's really amusing how close it is to Qualcomm stadium, site of many a district convention where the only interesting thing to do is watch the birds swoop and dive. They should tell the conventioners to drive by and have a look, if they want to see some genuine Theokratic History (apologies to Tallyman).

-T.