I hated the Thursday meetings with a passion. I worked till 6pm on those nights, and had just enough time to grab something at McDonalds and eat it in the car on the way to the meeting, only to get the side-eye from the elders because I didn't look "put together" enough to suit them.
em1913
JoinedPosts by em1913
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37
Mind Numbing Meetings
by minimus inwithout a doubt, jw life is boring.
and those meetings!
5 congregation meetings, meetings for field service, elders meetings, judicial meetings, meetings to figure out who was qualified to clean the toilets....🤔.
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em1913
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Political Correctness and Censorship / Banning Books
by TerryWalstrom inbanned books?censorship?.
let’s say you live in a land where the rule is: you can’t offend anyone.okay, fair enough.
let’s take a look at what follows (implicit in this rule).. if you are speaking to 10 people, is it okay to offend 1 in 10?
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em1913
I think there's a big difference between actual censorship and not teaching a book in a class. When you're taking books off library shelves and burning them for political reasons -- as was done in the United States during the 1950s -- that's censorship. If a teacher chooses not to teach "Huckleberry Finn," that doesn't affect my ability to reach for my own copy and read it any time I want to . I have "Mein Kampf" on my shelf (right next to Marley Cole's "JWs The New World Society," ha ha ha) and can read it any time I want to. I used to have Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" on my shelf until I read it and realized how much it sucked, so I threw it away. That's not censorship, that's having good taste in fiction.
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You might have been a JW if...
by Incognigo Montoya in... unlike the rest of humanity, you looked forward to mondays because it was a day off from a meeting..
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em1913
You still have circuit assembly food tickets in your bottom desk drawer.
You have used the word "contrariwise" in a conversation.
You judge a man by the size of his briefcase.
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Political Correctness and Censorship / Banning Books
by TerryWalstrom inbanned books?censorship?.
let’s say you live in a land where the rule is: you can’t offend anyone.okay, fair enough.
let’s take a look at what follows (implicit in this rule).. if you are speaking to 10 people, is it okay to offend 1 in 10?
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em1913
In 1952, the city of Boston banned the comic book "Panic" -- a knockoff of "Mad" -- because it published a satire of "The Night Before Christmas." "Political correctness," so called, goes way way back in America. I'm pretty sure there were banned books when I was attending school, long long ago, but that never stopped me from reading anything I wanted to read, whenever I wanted to read it.
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Have you ever considered trying ancestry.com?
by minimus ini was recently given a gift of ancestry.com and i’m curious if anyone else has used this service?.
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em1913
I was a member several years ago when I needed access to some data for a research project, and I ended up tracking down quite a bit on my own family besides. Turns out my 6X-great grandmother was hung for witchcraft in Salem in 1692. Three cheers for That Old Time Religon.
At the time I was a member, close to 20 years ago, Ancestry was about the only place you could find a lot of the information offered. It was worth the price then, but I don't know if it would be now.
My mother signed up for one of those DNA deals, and it turns out we're part Yakut. Siberia's lovely country I hear.
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What JW Beliefs Did You Find Difficult To Explain?
by minimus inthere are a lot.
anything blood related was difficult to reasonably prove from a witness perspective.. 1914 was another one.
what can you add to the list?
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em1913
"The light gets brighter." I remember vividly that "tacking into the wind" Watchtower study in the early 80s that tried to put this concept into simple terms, and while it sounded good to a believing JW, you couldn't explain it to a person at the door without them giving you the fishiest of fishy looks. "Tacking into the wind" means absolutely nothing to anybody who's never been on a boat in their lives, and anybody who does know about boats knows that the way the WT used the analogy is completely ridiculous. A tacking boat may move from side to side, but it never goes backwards.
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Baby it’s cold outside...Is That Song Offensive To Ypu?
by minimus into think that this classic song is “offensive “.... is absolutely ridiculous!.
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em1913
It's actually not something I hear anyone talking about -- except on cable TV and talk radio shows that I tune past as soon as I see that they're on, or in internet forum threads where people seem to be hypertrophically offended over the idea that anyone could possibly be offended.
I don't really care about the song one way or another. It's very low on my personal radar, and as I said before, it's not even a song I particularly like. If someone finds it offensive, it doesn't bother me at all. If someone likes it, that doesn't bother me either.
I do, though, have a problem with people who discount the idea that a woman might be offended by some beery scuzz hitting on her when she's not interested. Usually this comes from the kind of men who can't believe that any woman could possibly resist their masculine charms. Believe me, such men are highly resistable. This has nothing to do with "left" versus "right." It's just a matter of having no interest in assholes of any political stripe.
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Baby it’s cold outside...Is That Song Offensive To Ypu?
by minimus into think that this classic song is “offensive “.... is absolutely ridiculous!.
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em1913
I've got a lot of experience with the music of the 1930s-40s, and frankly it's not one of my favorites. It's one of Loesser's lesser -- a retreading of "Two Sleepy People," which is a better melody with better lyrics. If people don't like it for other reasons, that's their business. If people don't like that other people don't like it, well, life is just such a burden, isn't it? By the way, in what way is it a Christmas/holiday song? Skeevy men at parties know no season.
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Did Ray Franz Help You To Get Out of “The Truth”?
by minimus ini sneakily read his books at work.
it was written in such a way that no one could accuse him of being another bitter old apostate.. once it registered in my brain, especially after reading the second book, i knew i had to get out!.
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em1913
I first heard of Ray Franz when I saw a piece about his expulsion in "Time" magazine in 1982. I hadn't been in long at that point, so of course I discounted everything he had to say in that interview, but it did plant a seed that, perhaps, things in Brooklyn weren't as spirit-begotten as I'd been led to believe. I left of my own accord six years later, and never really thought aboit Ray Franz again until 1996, when I first ran into Randy Watters' website and saw an article about "The Franz Incident." That piqued my interest, amnd when I finally did read CofC I developed great respect for the man, What would really be interesting is for someone to write a modern-day CofC. All I know about the current GB bunch is what I read here, and it sounds like someone really needs to do a definitive insider expose for the "2.0" generation.
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Should Voters Be Made To Prove They Are Eligible To Vote?
by minimus ini believe that just because someone shows up at the voting booth, it doesn’t automatically qualify them to be legitimate voters.
i think it’s not unreasonable to provide proof that you are qualified..
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em1913
Where I live you have to provide a photo ID and a Social Security number to register. Voting is done at neighborhood polling stations where the wardens know most, if not all, of the voters by sight, and no ID is required other than confirming your name and address on the registration roll.
Since 1970 there have been three cases of voter fraud confirmed in my state. Two of them were described as "good old boys" who owned property straddling a town line, and who claimed they thought that entitled them to vote in both towns. The other was a man with "cognitive difficulties" who was simply confused. None of them were cases of "non citizens" or other persons not legally qualified to vote.