Posts by EdenOne

56

JW Net and Politics

by snare&racket in

jw
friends

this site was and remains instrumental in assisting people that want to leave the jw's.. there has been political discussion here for some time now, a good couple of years and it makes me feel a little uneasy.

i just opened up the site for the first time in some weeks, of the 10 posts being discussed, 4 were by the same poster, about politics, promoting their right wing beliefs.. this has been the trend for some time now, the same name behind a peppering of posts stirring the right v left of politics.. i remain forever grateful to the site and it's founders simon & angharad, i appreciate that simon shares some of these these political beliefs.

it would be a shame to see the site evolve from a place for jw freedom of thought and escape, to political squabbling, that the world is frankly tired of right now.. just to clarify, politics is my hobby, whilst my friends read the football scores, i'm reading polling data.

EdenOne

I concur that the heaviness of political (and hard right-wing at that) megaphone on this site has not only disheartened me from significant participation, but my well be scaring away others who might be testing the waters to see what the "apostates" are all about. It ain't so pretty.

Let me draw a parallel that I find interesting (and perhaps you may find it as well, or not, depending on your political leanings).

The other day I had a bit of trouble getting to sleep, and so, out of pure nostalgia and curiosity, I went on to check the first "apostate" website that I ever visited, even, to the best of my memory, before I joined this forum as an active member: Robert King's "e-watchman's post". My jaw dropped! When I first visited, the guy had recently published some book with his own prophetic interpretations - "Jehovah Himself Has Become King" - and was furiously denouncing the falsehoods and weaknesses of the Watchtower Society, and many things I read there were "aha!" moments for me. But then, as time went by, I began to notice a penchant for "One World" conspiracy theories, and it just started to stink, and I dropped it altogether, as my investigations had led me very far away from giving the Bible any credence. When I joined this forum, Robert King had been somewhat of a hot topic here, Pearl Doxsey and the "Anointed Witnesses" were the hot topic (where are they now? I see that they still publish on their website, but they apparently failed to take over the JW's by storm and interest in their movement seems to be waning since 2016 as indicated by fewer and fewer "questions from readers" being answered).

Anyways, fast forward perhaps 5 years since my last visit to "e-watchman". And now ... WOW! The site REEKS of the most absurd conspiracy theories bought straight from Infowars, QAnon and other such sources. It's a cesspool of right wing hatred intertwined with ludicrous and lunatic prophetic interpretations "a la carte" from the biblical prophets and Revelation, and (low and behold) even criticism and denunciation of the Watchtower is taking somewhat of a secondary role on the website. Just, wow! I'm sure this kind of pathological path has got to some day have some entry into the DSM manual of mental illnesses.

What I fear, is that such a valuable resource such as this forum, may be going, slowly but surely, into the same slippery slope territory.

31

If only someone had kicked my a$$.. (This is post is not for theists)

by HowTheBibleWasCreated in

i think back on the 30+ years of bs as well as my fading almost a decade and even now being low key in person to hopefully save my nieces from the wt.

i'm a wreck in some ways.

i'm other days i'm stable however when it comes to theism i depart quickly and with anger!

EdenOne

I got my a$$ kicked in here many times, and I am thankful, because, hard as it was to get repeatedly challenged on my deep seated beliefs, it finally shook the theism out of my system. (Mind you, I still don't call myself atheist; rather, agnostic and apatheist. That's just my zeitgeist). But yes, it was through some bitter catfight here that FORCED ME TO GET OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE, and question, well, everything.

I only wish it had happened many years sooner, when I could have altered the course of my life in a more significant way. But, like someone said here, I wasn't ready then. I had all my adulthood since I became autonomous to think for myself, and yet I chose daily to forfeit that ability and surrender my thinking to an evil organization. I have only myself to blame for staying stupid for so long. I was duped, yes, but It's not like I was in a window-less dungeon. I could have looked outside.

28

I miss old posters!

by Biahi in

jw
friends

blondie, flipper, shirley w, where are you?

did this site get too republican for you?

i just take those threads with a grain of salt..

EdenOne

Also, take into consideration that, for a considerable number of ex-JWs, "turning the page", finding a meaningful life post-JWdom also means to gradually fade off from engaging in things related to JWs - including active participation in online forums.

I frankly got very disheartened with this forum because of the political bickering over US politics that seemed to pervade most of the discussions. First, because I'm not north-american, and second, because I don't subscribe to ultraconservative and ultraliberal points of view, and much less to left-wing boogeyman conspiracy theories which seemed to take hold in here. I am a hardcore centrist and pains me to see the kind of burning of bridges between the two sides of the political aisles. Alas, I probably live in the wrong era. But it was sad to see this forum being dominated by political bickering rather that what this forum had been all about - helping people to flee the Watchtower.

Sign of times, I guess.

52

Collapse of JW Org - Possibly on the Horizon?

by JWTom in

this topics get a great deal of discussion here.

what i find interesting is even some of my pimi family is embracing the reality that all is not well with jw.org and that many current jws are just going through the motions due to not having a good way out of the org.

wondering what could realistically lead to the collapse of jw.org in the not distant future?

EdenOne

I agree that there will be a very gradual descent into almost nothingness.

See what happened with the original russelites - the Bible Students movement. After more than one century past the 1914/15 Russel prophecy debacle and the death of its founder, and no "new light" (that I know of) has been published since 1916, there are still splinter groups that separated from the Watchtower that are still active. It's reduced to almost nothing, but they have somehow survived. They are true believers.

The Watchtower / JW.org will carry on existing, maybe will go through a few metamorphoses. It won't crash and burn. It will just fade, slowly, with a couple of spikes here and there, as they stirr the scarecrow of 'imminent Armageddon', but it will surely fade into utter irrelevance, probably outliving every single one of us here in this forum. In the meantime, it will suffer cuts and blows, financial loss, opposition, loss of credibility, scandals, maybe even a secession or two, etc, but it will carry on, each time downsizing and poorer. I am certain that the COVID-19 crisis will speed up (and be the excuse to justify) some dramatic downsizing moves that we will see soon. But the true believers, ah, those will keep on believing.

And I guess that's the best we can expect about it.

12

Book offer

by StarTrekAngel in

howdy everyone!

before i am accused of anything, i only came in here to fulfill a promise i made a couple of years ago.

this place keeps getting crazier.. i have a copy of a book that was given to me by a member of this group for free.

EdenOne

Uumm ... and back to the point of the thread, I highly recommend Carl Olof Jonson’s works. If one can also grab a copy of “The Gentile Times Reconsidered”, it’s absolutely worthy reading.

12

Book offer

by StarTrekAngel in

howdy everyone!

before i am accused of anything, i only came in here to fulfill a promise i made a couple of years ago.

this place keeps getting crazier.. i have a copy of a book that was given to me by a member of this group for free.

EdenOne

JWs and thus former JWs are over represented in black and Hispanic communities, Democratic voters, and people with left leaning political perspective. Which you wouldn’t guess from reading this forum, leading me to suspect that this forum is not very typical of JWs or former JWs in general. People who either believe in God, the Bible, or that the coronavirus remains a huge problem, or don’t support Trump, and are left leaning, tend to keep it to themselves or go elsewhere. The forum becomes ever narrower as a result. - slimboyfat

My feelings exactly. For the most part I have given up participating in this forum because of the political bickering that quickly contaminates the discussions and the lack of basic respect for believers. While I myself am not a believer anymore (I have come to a mindset that is somewhat a hybrid of atheism / agnosticism / apatheism) and my political leaning is, from a european standpoint, clearly moderate center-right, it just bothered me greatly how narrow-minded, and thus unhelpful, this forum has slowly become. If it weren’t for few contributors still being here, and the priceless heritage trove of information from past years, I wouldn’t even bother to come here now and then to read the “latest”.

I have no patience for alt-right rethorics, authoritarian eulogy, telling others what they should be thinking (else they’re stupid or unpatriotic or whatnot) and conspiracy theories, really. To me it’s just a repackaging of the old JW mindset, and I can’t stand it. Plus, me, my wife and my son have gone through so much in our lives that we want more distancing from the JW past and anti-JW activism as time goes by. We have made a conscious effort to get more “normal”. I am immensely grateful for what this forum meant in my awakening, but it’s sad to witness the direction it was lead into and that people I used to appreciate here also took a back seat or left altogether for similar reasons, I imagine.

36

I'm tired of the org misquoting scholars to support there heretical NWT

by yogosans14 in

day after day jws are constantly fighting with me over the internet that the nwt is the most accurate translation and then they prove it by quoting scholars from the watchtower magazines.

they tell me i'm biased and there rendering of john 1:1 as "a god" is approved by scholars but i have researched there so called "supporters" and i have found they have tooken what they said out of context to twist the scriptures to there liking.. .

dr. julius r. mantey (who is even recognized by the watchtower as a greek scholar since they quote his book on page 1158 of their kingdom interlinear translation): calls the watchtower translation of john 1:1 "a grossly misleading translation.

EdenOne

Not that I care much about "the truth" being in the pages of the Bible, but here's an interesting thought.

If the writer of John 1:1 INTENDED to convey the idea that the pre-human Jesus was "a god" and not "the God", then he was henotheist or polytheist. I don't believe that is the case, being that the author of the gospel of John wrote it very late into the christianity game, I am very inclined to believe he wrote it with the intention of elevating Jesus to Almighty God status, because, well, that was the growing trend that would eventually trump over the other ideas about who Jesus was.

That aside, henotheism (the belief that there are many deities in the spiritual realm, but only one rules supreme or is worthy of human worship) isn't new in the Scriptures. Despite all later scribal redacting, the traces of a pre-babylonian exile henotheistic jewish society are still there to be read in passages of the Old Testament. Examples?

Psalm 82:1 - "God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment"

Psalm 89:5-7 "5 Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Yahweh, your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones! 6 For who in the skies can be compared to Yahweh? Who among the gods is like Yahweh,7 a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him?"

Genesis 31:51 - Here Jakob and Laban clearly are swearing by different deities.

Deuteronomy 5:6, 7 - About the first commandment, notes Nicholas F. Gier, professor emeritus of Idaho University: "Contrary to popular understanding, the First Commandment, "You shall have no other gods before me," does not deny the existence of other deities. In his commentary on Deuteronomy Anthony Phillips maintains that "there is here no thought of monotheism. The commandment does not seek to repudiate the existence of other gods, but to prevent Israel from having anything to do with them."

Also Deuteronomy 32:8, if we follow the pre-massoretic texts, indicates that Yahweh himself has allocated the nations of the earth (see Genesis chapter 10) to different deities, while keeping Israel as his special property.

The whole story about Israel being the first monotheistic society is flat wrong. It was polytheistic, then henotheistic, and only after the babylonian exile became monotheistic, and then redacted all its ancient texts to make it look as though its past has always been about worshipping solely Yahweh. It wasn't like that, at all.

18

My first book: "APOSTATE – WHY I LEFT THE JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES"

by Antonio_Madaleno in

my first book: "apostate – why i left the jehovah's witnesses".

it will be release on march in portugal by penguin random house.. .

EdenOne

It'll be an eye-opener for the portuguese language community.

Good job my friend!

16

'Organisation is our mother'

by EdenOne in

i need your help please, for an article i'm writing.. i believe that quite recently in the 2010's, possibly at one of the annual meetings of the watchtower, there was one speech (or was it in a publication?

in a broadcast?

) where it was stated that the "organisation is our mother".

EdenOne

This was taken from Randall Waters' website:

Governing Body member Albert Schroeder in his address to elders of the Bethel family on
May 29, 1980:

     "We serve not only Jehovah God but we are under our 'mother'
(the organization). Our 'mother' has the right to make rules and
regulations for us... This book, entitled Branch Organization
Procedure, contains 28 subjects; and its sub-sections involve
regulations and administration. In it there are 1,177 POLICIES AND
REGULATIONS...this is an improved, fine-tuned organization, and we
are expected to follow its policies. If there are some who feel
that they cannot subject themselves to the rules and regulations
now in operation, such ones ought to be leaving and not be involved
here in the further progressive work."

Seems to me that not all of Bethel's elders are of the anointed, even at this time in 1980. So, the expression "our mother", as used here, must also apply to the Organisation in a broad sense, including its visible, earthly part. The "mother" prepared the Branch Organisation Procedure, and that is clearly part of the "earthly" organisation, which is therefore part of the "universal" organisation.

16

'Organisation is our mother'

by EdenOne in

i need your help please, for an article i'm writing.. i believe that quite recently in the 2010's, possibly at one of the annual meetings of the watchtower, there was one speech (or was it in a publication?

in a broadcast?

) where it was stated that the "organisation is our mother".

EdenOne

I know Blondie, that article in 1957 was a landmark. Also, please note the difference between "celestial organisation" and "universal organisation" – the latter expression encompassing also the earthly organisation.

That quote from 1983 is also very good, thanks for pointing it out.

But even very recently, and I could swear it was on a talk delivered by a Government Body member in an annual WT meeting of this decade already, ( I may be wrong, though) it was stressed out again the role of the Organisation as "our mother", as per Galatians 4:26.

On the article I'm writing, which looks at the emotional attachment between the individual Witnesses and their "organisation" in the light of the psychological "Attachment Theory", it seems important to me this "personification" of the organisation in a motherly figure.