by Wasanelder Once 19 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
yes Mj that is so ture.
Just recently my husband said "when will they announce this stuff from the KH, ie bro cano at bethel?"
They won't I said. It wil probably just become heresay and if you don't know elders or arent' well connnected, you may never know about it. likewise , all the property they buy and sell and other things we know about b/c of this board, i'd never been privy to as a jws.As an active jws, I knew nothing, well, until a elders wife put me in the fast lane.
From what I remember, I had 2 contacts with apostates when I was in the Org.
I was going d2d with a brother who was about 90 years old and when we reached this particular door, this guy who answers says "I'll read those (the w.t. & awake), if you read these" and he pulled his hand out from behind his back and had some old photo copied w.t. mags. This old brother says "I know where you got those from and those people can make them say whatever they want. I know you're not an apostate, but those people are". We left shortly after. The brother knew this guy had never been a witness.
The 2nd time was an r.v. that a sister gave me and an elder, because she said she didn't feel comfortable about going back. This elder and I go, and the guy at the door was irate and told us why we came, because he wanted that sister to come, not us. Then he started in about a scripture in Acts and all this stuff, so basically we figured this guy was setting this sister up for some apostate assault.
The funny part is, the elder started laughing at the guy, because he was getting madder and madder at us, and as we were leaving down the driveway he threatened to come out and "kick our ass". So the elder yells, from the sidewalk, "Come on out!". The elder and I waited and he just kept yelling.
Good thing he didn't come out. Why, you may ask? Because I had taken martial arts and boxing before I became a witness and the elder had been in 2 branches of the armed services and was a boxing coach.
There is my apostate tale for the day.
Warlock
Well we had a couple of brothers in our cong DFed for apostasy. One was my uncle. None of us ever knew what they believed that was different. He never once said a word to anyone about his doubts and questions.
Eventually he went back and even became an elder.
But now he is out again and is more an apostate in real life now than he ever was before.
And I still don't know what he was DFed for. Maybe Grace or her daughter knows. Her daughter was married to another uncle around the same time. But he never spilled the beans to my mother and I
Never talked to anyone while in.... never baptised. I left as soon I could, but just knew I would never be a "good little JW" and felt that the end was so soon I would see what the world was like. 1975 came and went, I started to read bible history from a non JW standpoint.
I married, had a family, etc. My JW family would talk about changes and I wondered what else was changing.
Computers came in the 1990s and then search engines.... *I could find out what else was happening! Read Crisis of Conscience and no more guilt.
Sure, maybe not ridicule as much as immediately dismiss anything I considered to oppose the truth. I remember one of the first talks I gave in the TMS talked about apostates but back then I didn't really understand why they chose to leave or disagree with certain things. It's funny to think how robotic my responses used to be, one time at a convention I was warned to not even look at them.
I guess looking at someone who might actually be right might make my brain start working and researching. We wouldn't want that now, would we?
I remember an apostate agitating with loud voice outside the Brooklyn Columbia heights gates on the way to the luxury hotels.
Some one gave me "30 years a watchtower slave" by snell, read it, but dismissed it.
this someone was inside the organisation, even authorized to perform marriages.
It was later, the internal doctrine contradictions, intellectual dishonesty that freed me.
Well, my approach to this has evolved over time. I don't much see a point in attacking, say, Russell and Rutherford themselves as men. I think understanding the Biblical issues, for me, was a vital part of this. I came to see that many verses that made up JW doctrine were taken out of context, and that reading the full context really sheds a lot of new meaning on things. This was a somewhat comforting thing to learn, that it wasn't necessarily the Bible itself, but the JWs' abuse of the Bible that was the problem.
Of course, in time I began to question the validity of the Bible itself as an absolute guide for morals and as an absolute guide to understanding the concept of 'God'. But I generally don't see a purpose in attacking the Bible itself, certainly not if I were speaking to a JW. The walls will go up even faster that way.
It's mainly the corrupt attitudes--as reflected in Watchtower literature--that I think are at the heart of the problem, in my mind. There's this sense of one's absolute rightness and everyone on the outside being absolutely wrong even if we agree with them in some ways. The idea that even if the GB royally f---s up, we're still supposed to just trust that they've got it all figured out.
The only time I can really recall even discussing apostates myself was in a talk I gave, in which I struggled to find any sort of meaningful discussion of what apostates actually said to people. Beyond that, it wasn't a topic I was particularly into talking about, since there were so many other things I considered more worthwhile to discuss (ie. the example of Jesus).
But you know, it came to a point for me where I just felt something was wrong, didn't know what for sure, so I started looking, and that was it.
--sd-7
Sorry for interupting this thread...but I can't seem to access topics started or topics posted on or even start a new thread.
Does anyone know the reason or remedy for this?
"First, they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win."
Mahatma Ghandi
The gold standard illustration for this is as follows:
"honey, I want a divorce."
"Why?"
"because I don't like the people at work."
the idea being promoted is that people leave the truth always because of the other people, and that they should be able to overlook "faults" in love and kindness. What is being left unmentioned is that actual policies and protocol within what is supposed to be "God's Organization" are what are at fault. We could be big enough to overlook the faults that individual people may have. Actually, some of them are wonderful people. LOTS of them are just fine!
