Would it help if I drew up a table for Japan like the one I did for the UK?
I see there are a handful of numbers floating around here, but might be helpful to see the whole thing.
Posts by 88JM
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8810 Years Japan losses 5,400 Publishers and 638 Kingdom Halls! Why?
by Witness 007 injapan had a handful of witnesses after ww 2....this number skyrocketed to 222,912 by 1998!
then something happened.
publisher figures didn't stop, they dropped by thousands over the next decade!.
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WT Society, Travel agency? Latest money making scheme?
by dropoffyourkeylee inrecently there was quite a buzz at the local hall of people applying to be a specially approved candidate to attend an international convention overseas.
one person i knew applied to go to the assembly next year in south africa.
she was elated to find she and her daughter-in-law were accepted for the south africa site.
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88JM
It's funny you should say that, Blondie, about "no party boys" at the Internationals...
I lost my virginity at my first international convention (well not at the convention itself, but at the hotel of course). The next international, I was sneaking my dates back through the hotel lobby in the morning afterwards. Visiting other places is a great opportunity to meet people - not always JWs either!
This will all be in part 3 of my story if I ever get around to writing it!
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Time of Trouble: Knocking on the Door of Jehovah's Witnesses (interesting article)
by ldrnomo infound this article on gawker.com.
check it out i'd like to get your thoughts:.
http://gawker.com/5986407/time-of-trouble-knocking-on-the-door-of-the-jehovahs-witnesses?post=57721553.
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88JM
I'm glad to see the craziness is still readily apparent even to non-JWs.
The writing is very well done indeed. If I didn't know any better, I would have almost said it was an ex-JW. She picked a good week to attend as well - that Watchtower article was extra crazy, especially with the follow-up.
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"Foreigners" and today's Watchtower
by 88JM ini know this is true every week, and i say it all the time, and i know blondie will be doing her review later, but.... today's watchtower was bat-shit crazy!.
i knew it was going to be a bizzare one just reading it, but the comments at the meeting took it even further.
i can't post all the crazy ones, but in summary what they were saying was:.
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88JM
They are saying stupid things faster than I can write about them.
"...if ever they were written in full detail, I suppose, the world itself could not contain the scrolls written." - John 21:25
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"Foreigners" and today's Watchtower
by 88JM ini know this is true every week, and i say it all the time, and i know blondie will be doing her review later, but.... today's watchtower was bat-shit crazy!.
i knew it was going to be a bizzare one just reading it, but the comments at the meeting took it even further.
i can't post all the crazy ones, but in summary what they were saying was:.
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88JM
Roberta804 - and it didn't end there either - after the Watchtower, for Sunday ministry the service overseer did a whole field ministry meeting about how we can direct people to the website. Pretty much all the JWs think the website is the dogs bollocks at the moment - thinking they're so modern and up-to-date.
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WT Society, Travel agency? Latest money making scheme?
by dropoffyourkeylee inrecently there was quite a buzz at the local hall of people applying to be a specially approved candidate to attend an international convention overseas.
one person i knew applied to go to the assembly next year in south africa.
she was elated to find she and her daughter-in-law were accepted for the south africa site.
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88JM
I'm sure they are a great money maker. Expect to see more of these "special conventions" as the borg gets more strapped for cash.
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"Foreigners" and today's Watchtower
by 88JM ini know this is true every week, and i say it all the time, and i know blondie will be doing her review later, but.... today's watchtower was bat-shit crazy!.
i knew it was going to be a bizzare one just reading it, but the comments at the meeting took it even further.
i can't post all the crazy ones, but in summary what they were saying was:.
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88JM
slimboyfat - Yes, my congregation is a total magnet for crazy people. I swear it's like this every week. I only go for the entertainment value. Also, my avatar is a sculpture of two Roman wrestlers - it was at a country estate I visited in Ireland, but I believe it might be a copy of a Rodin.
breakfast of champions - alarmingly that comment was made by my own J-DUB dad - I hope he doesn't want me to be his kidney donor!
ambersun - it's no conincidence you've picked two comments by the same crazy person.
St George of England - that's amazing about the Yearbook - I must remember to look that up.
If I had to pick my favourite comment, it would probably be:
"Some people don't feel comfortable talking to Witnesses at the door, so we can direct them to the jw.org website."
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"Foreigners" and today's Watchtower
by 88JM ini know this is true every week, and i say it all the time, and i know blondie will be doing her review later, but.... today's watchtower was bat-shit crazy!.
i knew it was going to be a bizzare one just reading it, but the comments at the meeting took it even further.
i can't post all the crazy ones, but in summary what they were saying was:.
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88JM
I know this is true every week, and I say it all the time, and I know Blondie will be doing her review later, but...
TODAY'S WATCHTOWER WAS BAT-SHIT CRAZY!
I knew it was going to be a bizzare one just reading it, but the comments at the meeting took it even further. I can't post all the crazy ones, but in summary what they were saying was:
"Although the majority of people in the world are racist and bigoted, JWs are not racist and bigoted. We are different to people in the world."
How can they not see the problem with that argument? Cognitive dissonance at its finest.
Below are some of the real comments I heard. I've done my best not to take these out of context and typed them from the recording of the meeting in the words that were said:
"If people do view us as strange, we have to view it as a compliment. What would be wrong is if we appeared as normal or we blended in with the rest of society. It would show something is wrong with our conscience."
"When we become Jehovah's people, it's like we change our nationality - we become his nation."
"We are not simply saying that we are temporary residents in the world, but our way of life backs it up as well."
"Some people don't feel comfortable talking to Witnesses at the door, so we can direct them to the jw.org website."
"Someone we met in the ministry last week said Witnesses act irresponsibly because they don't vote to make changes. What they don't understand is that our vote is already given to Jehovah's government. Because we are different, we sometimes get this persecution."
"The world seems to want to want to spot differences and even define people by their one big or obvious difference. But if we are in a family, we don't call our sister "the curly-haired one", or "the ginger one" but we spot our similarities and say "that's my sister" or "that's my brother" - we accept people for who they are, we look to our similarities and that's what we have to do."
"If you were ill and you wanted a kidney transplant, we wouldn't mind where it came from."
"We have what the world would view as foreigners in our congregation and there are certain differences in culture and that's been highlighted. I've been told that in Italy that if you don't wear a white shirt when you're on the platform, you can't go on the platform. It's these little things that we learn about so if we were there, we can respect these people's cultures. But at the end of the day, we are just brother's and sisters."
"If it had been done Jehovah's way, we would have black, white or yellow popping up here and there, not in great masses like they are at the moment. The reason they are in great masses at the moment is because they've separated themselves out and so there's one kind of feature grown up in different races. But otherwise, it would have been a mixture and that's the way it should be."
"The Watchtower goes to great pains to define the word foreigner in a way we can understand. But it demonstrates the more you try to define it, the more pointless the expression becomes. It's really down to our individual attitude toward people who may be slightly different for whatever reason."
"And with regards to the picture, I just think it looks like a bus-load of foreigners. ( everyone laughs) But if you were actually from that country - wherever it is - it wouldn't look like a bus-load of foreigners, it would just look like a bus-load of people."
"It [the picture] looks like Latin America and the woman that the sister is preaching to looks of indigenous nature, probably from the outskirts of the city, and so she might be different to them because she's not part of the city. We can see everyone is in modern clothing and she is in more traditional clothing. So she probably views this area as foreign, but this sister has spoken to her, using the new brochure and witnessing to her, saying to her that I'm witnessing to you no matter where you're from."
"Only Jehovah's witnesses have adopted God's way of thinking."
"If a worldly man [referring to the Ted Turner quote] who hasn't got any regard for bible principles or standards can come out with a comment like that, then how much more so should we take that on board. That's why we take this point seriously. Like in the the war in Rwanda, brothers didn't see tribal differeces but they saw their brother and sister in need, and that's why they risked their own life to save their brother and sister ."
"I'm just very grateful that I've been taught by Jehovah that people from other places are the same as myself. But I would have been brought up as a very different sort of person, hating foreigners, and not liking people of different colors. But I'm glad now that I can look people straight in the eye (and I've done this going out to assemblies or on the train) and they can see straight away in my face that I don't dislike them or distrust them. And I've talked to lots of different foreigners and I've had good times with them and witnessed to them. They expect it normally for a person of a white race to hate a person of a coloured race or be suspicious of them, but I've had some good times with them."
"If there's a disaster in a foreign country, perhaps a plane goes down, they immediately segregate: "oh, there's so many English people that we're not aware of whether they're well or they've died or not" but if a bus-load of Jehovah's people on the way to an assembly crashed and they all died, we wouldn't be saying: "oh, you know there were 8 British and 7 Scottish" - they would be brothers and sisters."
"We are part of the European Common Market but each nation fights for it's own interest - it just doesn't work."
"Satan and his demons are behind these divisions. The boudaries are really artificial, not intended by Jehovah."
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Project: I need help finding Watchtowers that show hate, prejudice, and name-calling.
by Emery ini know there are a lot of examples to choose from but i want to find wt references that are the most blatant.
the printed evidence can be a great resource to all, including jw lurkers who fact-check.. .
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88JM
I know you're probably looking for recent stuff, but you will find a lot in the letters about the Jews that J. F. Rutherford sent to Adolf Hitler. http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/hitler-nazi.php
Don't forget the Awake article from the 1977 that talked about "the body odor of blacks". http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/beliefs/222181/1/WARNING-Extremely-disturbing-and-racist-Awake-magazine-October-8-1977
