last week a sister in my new hall made the following comment,.
"a brother once told me that it is better to be wrong with the organization, than to be right and be on your own without the organization.".
wow.
Just like ÁrbolesdeArabia, we also had a brother saying 'Orgasm' instead of 'Organism' during book study. Man, he just kept on going....
One other crazy comment was from a CO that said that you shouldn't let your hair cut by a homosexual. In order to be funny, he then impersonated a gay guy (that is, he impersonated a gay guy according to what he thought a gay guy acts like). I felt very sorry for the brother sitting in the hall, being single and obviously very gay...
first up, happy new year .
hi everyone, ok i guess this is controversial, but im doing it as therapy for me - so im not bitter about the way i was raised.
plus i want to see if i can be the op of an "epic thread"!!.
Another thread that I feel I should comment before I got the time to make an introductory post about myself. Anyways...
Sky, AMEN to your OP. There are all these bad things that we now know about the organisation, but being a child they do not strike you as being that odd. What remains is the love and interactions with what you feel are your brothers and sisters (that is, if fate was kind enough to place you in a congregation with reasonable, loving people, which is unfortunately not always the case). I just really felt at home in our cong. Then again, I never experienced any real problems in my youth and my parents were not that strict, so maybe that also caused me to feel at ease during my childhood.
What I see from my own children is that there is only one important thing: children have to be loved and feel loved ALL the time. Then and only then can they feel truly happy. This state of happiness is what comes to mind when thinking about the cong in which I grew up. The fact that the love that I felt was in fact a strictly conditional love was not a real problem; it didn't feel like that at the time (blessed is the ignorant...).
Apart from the love that children should feel in a cong, there is I think also one other beneficial aspect of being a JW as a child and that is the perceived purpose of life. What you do seems to all make sense, like it's the proper thing to do. Having a purpose in life makes you happy/happier by definition.
this might be an unfair question for those who have been out of the organization for decades, but i'm wondering if any of you remember your earliest doubt -- maybe something odd that occurred to you as a kid (if you were a jw then).
please try to limit to two doubts at the most :-).
i think my first "doubt" was simply realizing that at the time of the flood, every animal that wasn't in the ark died (well, besides the fish, supposedly).
Been reading this forum for some time, but having read this thread caused me to finally register (BTW, as a small introductory: I'm from the Netherlands, in my thirties, wife, kids, born-in, not doing field service for about 5 years, fading).
In contrast to what some people said about expressing their doubts before the age of 10, if've never really recognised my doubts at that age as being doubts. I just really wanted to believe; if everybody else believes (mom, dad, older brother, older sister, nice people from the congregation), then it's probably just me. 'Maybe I should try a little harder'.
First real doubts appeared in the form of anger when I learned that an elder criticised my father (who was also an elder) for not kicking me out of the house because I got a JW girlfriend while not being babtised (BTW, the JW girlfriend is now my wife and eventually I did get babtised, though I did not know about this elder's ideas at that time). That was the time I started doing some research on the internet and needless to say, I had even more doubts.
