hi fellow speakers (sorry, brothers only!):.
my first public talk, given in my early 20s, was actually a twenty-minute part of a symposium talk.
my pioneer partner friend and i each had twenty minutes and a "servant" had the concluding part.
I counted my public talk time. I counted 1 hour when I gave 45' talk, and 1/2 hour when I gave a 30' talk (after the recent change). That includes memorial talks.
I did not count any other kind of talk.
Of course, when I went for a talk to a distant congregation, I used to take along with me at least 1 unbaptized publisher, so the actual counting was a lot more than 1 hour.
do any of you sometimes experience difficulty in shaking wt teachings?
like it intrudes in your daily life and thought and some things that may be alright, now you feel as if they're wrong or you plain just don't know.
i know the wt is a lie but i haven't lost my faith in god, i know he's there but it's hard knowing whats the right thing to do.
In order to ''know what to do'', you need resources.
Before you act, you need to have a background. The sterile WT publications that were your sole channel of information until now, do not provide that background.
Now that you are not bound by the WTS publication chains, try reading as if you read for the first time.
Read philosophy, read science, read politics, read economy, read applied psychology. Read everything that helps you re-discover the world around you and re-defince your place in it!
When you have sufficient amount of secular knowledge, you will apply it to your own life, circumstances and feelings, and then do what's best for you.
there was a sister in my congregation that signed up to aux pioneer one month to put in 60 hours.
we couldn't figure out why she was never at the arrangements, but yet she said she got in her time early in the month.
we found out later that we wrote a letter that took her an hour.
Two pioneer couples went on a holiday trip by car. They made a 7-hour journey to their destination, and counted the WHOLE 7 HOURS as field service because ...they witnessed to the clerks at the toll stations!
The most ridiculous thing is that, when they came back, they actually bragged about it, as if it was something ingenious! They really showed me what ''pioneering'' means for the average jw, and reminded me why on this forum the term ''pious-sneer'' is so often used.
when i saw this article's title in the latest kingdom ministry - http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/bible/278822/1/june-2014-kingdom-ministry-km-06-2014-pdf - i was delighted!!.
i thought, "at last, we are all being encouraged to visit our poor brothers & sisters in nursing homes, who feel abandoned!.
nope, that's not it - it's all about targetting non-witnesses in those establishments, and get them to sign up for "bible" studies.
In my country proselytizing (converting) is still illegal. However, that law nowadays only applies when trying to proselytize certain 'sensitive' groups such as minors and elderly who are not in full mental clarity (e.g. dementia). So, it would indeed be interesting to see how the relatives and authorities will react when j-dubs begin to preach systematically to elderly people in nursing homes....
i am sure there has been a post about this subject, however being a recent addition to the network i don't know how to do a search.
and i'm sure new folks have joined since then.
i am really curious of how others came to know ttatt.. for me is was a real bad experience with one elder after another.
I started by reading about Evolution. I cross-checked the quotations and statements made in the Watchtower books, such as Creation (1985) and Creator (1998), and found out that they were full of quote-mining and various other fallacies. A moment of revelation was when I cross-checked a certain Hitching (not Hitchens) who WTS presented as a prominent ''evolutionist'' who discredited evolution (!!), and found out that he actually was a charlatan with spiritist practices! That undermined my faith in the sincerity of Watchtower authors.
I then viewed the movie "To Verdener" (Danish), which is about a malfunctioning JW family. It presented a familiar scenery, though seen from a different viewpoint, more realistic, more cynical.
Then came this forum :)
i am not hot linking to jw borg, but they have a whole section for obviously very small children (become j's friend, with a whole array of caleb-related stuff).
i have actually never visited the site, today was the first time, because i wanted to check a technical information about their websites architecture and came across this sh*t!.
the way they are targeting small kids is nauseating me (i have a 5 year old, still in with her mother).
Darn, BluePill, you made my stomach feel like it's been visited by a tractor.
mickey rooney passed,a sad loss.
yes, the above is reported to be his epitaph.
how about yours?.
A song-writer in my country wanted this to be his epitaph: "I come from infinity, I go to infinity. What a fool was I to think that I was immortal, and the center of the world". (rough translation)
Something similar for my own epitaph. I think the above thought surmises the situation for many poor j-dubs: they think they are the center of the world, they think they will literally live forever, and when their time approaches, they lose all that illusion in astonishment.
as a few of you may remember, i suffer from bipolar.. when working at the uk home office, i was signed off by my doctor with depression and anxiety.. in the space of 11 months i was assessed by 2 home office doctors, both diagnosing me as unfit for work.
i eventually left.. how therefore, can stupid little people in the kh say you'll be better doing fs, ministry school and being regular at meetings??.
they have to be the most un-empathetic bunch of people on the planet.
I came on the edge of depression when I was serving in a distant congregation, reg pioneer, elder, but with no work at all. It was an un-natural situation, so depression would only be logical.
When I left the assignment and went back to work in my hometown, any signs of depression vanished. I got, though, some skin problems due to stress. (=cognitive dissonance, since 'awakening') Now I still struggle with those skin problems, but I feel free now (at least mentally, for the time being), and that is a huge psychological asset.
every once in a while i hear people purposely make fun of jws, calling them hovas, jeehoovers, etc.
i don't think that's a good way to reach them..
It doesn't bother me when jws are mocked here, by other jws or ex-jws.
It doesn't bother me when an educated atheist such as Richard Dawkins mocks them, on the basis of reason and science.
But it does bother me when another delusional, equally ignorant Christian (or Muslim or whatever) mocks them, just because they happen to be born in this or that religion.
It does bother me when a religious hater mocks them and wishes to see them incarcerated, or even dead. If WTS deserves mocking, then how much more mocking do those hateful religious dogs deserve?
has anyone else seen the local congregation doing the usual field service push before the memorial?
i think its strange that we (nor our neighbors) havent seen them in the neighborhood yet.
only 2 weeks away and no territory blast?
In my congregation, various below-average-IQ zealots and pioneers steam of enthusiasm about the amount of territories they've covered so far.
"3 territories!" says one. "Gonna take a fourth one!" says another.
Thing is, how many people will they actually manage to bring to the memorial? Close to zero. The local memorial is typically attended by only the local witnesses plus their ''chronic interested'' acquaitances, and *some* of their Bible studies.
So, what's all the territory fuss about? A rhetorical question. (we know the answer too well: Keep them busy, keep them on-plug, keep them in a vegetable state)
