well i'm sure we can come up with clever comments that make people feel uncomfortable by serving to decompartmentalize things that have been compartmentalized in the thinking of the average jw.
or comments that make the cognitive dissonance stand out plainly, these have to be said in innocent manner and with an apparent obliviousness to the contradiction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/compartmentalization_%28psychology%29.
well i'm sure we can come up with clever comments that make people feel uncomfortable by serving to decompartmentalize things that have been compartmentalized in the thinking of the average jw.
or comments that make the cognitive dissonance stand out plainly, these have to be said in innocent manner and with an apparent obliviousness to the contradiction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/compartmentalization_%28psychology%29.
Great answers... I would argue that they are more afraid of life than of death because every day is another opportunity where they could slip up and lose everything...
I think this is why many JWs will still rather die than take blood. For many the idea of dying for their faith is very strong. I think many JWs are the same type of people who would martyr themselves (and others) in a public square.
i have updated the article at memorial partakers with the figures released for 2014. no surprises here, it has risen yet again, this time by 6% over last year, and is now 14,121.. .
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My Mother started partaking around 1982 (she was in her mid-thirties at the time). She married a brother and soon after he was partaking. Soon, other people in the hall got "anointed-fever". I have not talked with them in years but I recently found out through the grapevine that my nephew and his Dad may be partaking in the next memorial. I'm starting to think there are high-levels of "midi-chlorians" in my family. ;-)
I have been out for 25 years but I am sure that the numbers are waaaaay higher than what they report. As already pointed out by posters, many partake in private and/or are "discounted" as "mentally ill/imbalanced", etc. I was an MS at the time and I remember given directions by the elders on who to count or not. Crazy.
Glad to be now be an atheist where I don't have to pretend to understand all of this nonsense.
i don't typically hear from my mom often, but i tell you, over the past couple of weeks, i have heard from her several times.
you heard the comment about "our way of worship will be altered" and thank you for your posts by the way....but yesterday, she calls and is asking about the kids and then, in typical jw fashion mind you, says:.
"you know, you should really get back to meetings.
After I left the "Organization" I started to play cards for fun and profit. Don't judge :-) You learn a lot of about psychology doing that. I think a lot of JWs exhibit what is known as "loss aversion" - aka "chasing your loses". You watch people at the table invest/lose $1000, then they lose $10,000 trying to gain their original, $1000. They can't walk away from their original loss and in a few hours their down $100,000. And because of desperation they play badly and recklessly.
A witness who served looking to 1975 as a payoff then doubles down to 1984, then to 2014, etc. They are invested. They are chasing the loss and can't walk away from the table.
scientists discovered an organism that has not evolved in more than 2 billion years (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150203104131.htm) .
one can dismiss this as an exception*!
yet overwhelming proofs are too obvious to miss if we take the community as an individual (community is the reflection of the behavior pattern of the individuals that make up the whole).
abiather, I think you are mixing a number of separate ideas which are probably best to address individually.
Evolution provides a satisfactory answer to your first point as to why certain organisms may or may not change over time. It is an impersonal mechanism that is not man-made and does not require belief for it to work.
The rest of the points you listed (e.g. religion, social institutions, economics, governments, etc.) may be better analyzed under the framework of social/cultural evolution, semiotics, philosophy, psychology, and other man-made constructs. And, to be fair, these may operate in a similar way as evolution. This is what many are trying to do in the field of memetics, which at present is a weak theory but serves as an interesting analogue to evolution.
However, you then seem to add God into the equation and try to tie (and/or explain) those ideas together. I think? Perhaps to you the above don't make sense without the idea of a God/Designer/Prime Mover. I think this is true for many theists.
As an atheist, I will be happy to add God to the equation if it ever becomes necessary.
do we obsess about the jw org?
i admit i do.
the reason is that two of my offspring are still held hostages by the beliefs of the cult..
cleanlines, your comments resonate with me. I was out for about 25 years. All of my immediate family is still in the "Organization" so I am alone. Through all of those years I never did any research on what they were currently teaching or went to any ex-JW sites. It wasn't until this year until I did so. In those 25 years I woke up with a dark cloud over my head about my family and what I had lost.
One of the things my family was able to do for 25 years was continuing to making me feel bad and inferior. And, I believed that I deserved the shunning, etc. However, in the past year sites like this have given me the tools to understand that the "Organization" is just a business and nothing more. And, that my family and the "Organization" has no moral superiority over me. At the very least, I feel much better because, unlike them, I do not harbor criminals. That's very liberating.
i have heard this nonsense said by many believers, especially when science conflicts with their belief, they say:.
" well, science may tell us how we got here, religion tells us why we are here".
does religion tell us that ?
Mlllie210, your story resonates with so many of us. What you are describing sounds a lot like an "Existential Crisis". There is a body of psychotherapy ("Existential Therapy") which might provide you additional tools to deal with that "free fall" effect and help you develop a sense for your own meaning.
I have often heard the statement "Religion gives us the 'Why'" and each time I just have to shake my head and do a 'facepalm'. If you compare all Religions in the most objective way all you will find are a collection of people (usually from the Bronze Age) who codified their answers/opinions to that question. I think we are much smarter than them and know much more than they did and are likely to come up with better answers. If you really think about it "Religion" doesn't really seem to provide an answer. All it does is makes you "feel" like you have one. Kinda of like a "Teddy Bear" makes a child feel safe.
Science can and does provide a large number of "Why" answers. However, its role is not to replace the "Teddy Bear". And, I think this is were many people get stuck.
i wanted to start a thread with correct explanations of what witnesses really mean when they say stuff... please add to it!.
"we missed you at the last meeting" = "where were you?
why did you miss a meeting!?".
"Apostate Literature" = Literature...
