by metatron 35 Replies latest jw friends
Something you might find amusing...I invited my parents over Christmas Day for dinner but my
mom asked if we could do it Saturday as Sunday was too "Christmasy." So I'm cooking Christmas
dinner on Christmas Eve....I don't get it. And she made a point of telling me that she couldn't be there
until 5:00 because they have a Bethel speaker. Exactly how most people want to spend their
Christmas Eve, I imagine!
I totally agree with you Metatron and to add to it...having reared my kids mostly in the 'truth' we abandoned these festivities and I now realise that such celebrations with strong family memories are very significantly missing as traditions that would've helped hold us together. As it is the family's memories are bound up in conventions and assemblies which fail totally if a family member leaves or is Dfd. Strategic manipulation to destroy family unity is what I've decided they are for. Thanks WTBS...great job.
Loz x
Before my parents converted to JW, we had many cousins, aunts, uncles within less than a one day drive. I have fond memories of spending time with them most often over the holidays. Then we converted to JW when I was about 10 years old, and we were cut off from all of our family.
My parents told us children it was them who did not want anything to do with us because of our religion, so that is what we grew up thinking. Today, I know better. Now I have spent most of my life totally alianated from my cousins who I have such fond memories of as a child.
I should probably try and reach out to them now, but it has been so long, it could never be like it was before. What a loss to loose all of my extended family because of this stupid rule!
METATRON: Correct. It is about isolating the new JW from their non-JW family and friends. The religion is afraid once the JW experiences unconditional love from their family and friends, they will leave the vacuum of a religion. The "pagan" bullshit is just a front to fool naïve people. I had a "lightbulb" moment many years ago on a Thanksgiving holiday! I despise this religion of phonies and manipulators that tried to turn me into some kind of exile! Now, I celebrate the Holidays with a vengeance and this religion can go to hell.
Send Mistletoe in the mail to a JW friend.
That's what it's all about, and it did wonders in driving a wedge between my mother and the rest of my non-witness family. In group/out group bias. High control organization genius.
I completely agree that the whole anti-holiday and anti-birthday rhetoric came at the behest of one man - Joseph Franklin Rutherford. Rutherford didn't want his people distracted in any way from hitting the streets and preaching. This was a man who actually instituted quotas for field service hours and implied that these orders came down from the Almighty. I think that was his initial reason to do so, and that these rules were perpetuated throughout the years as a method of isolating Witnesses from their non-believing families. Witness lives became austere, and were focused around the weekly meetings and field service. Meanwhile, the Judge himself lived a life of leisure out at Beth Sarim and at all other residences the Society kept for him. Every now and then he'd give a talk at the conventions where he vented against the clergy. I just find it offensive that such a man had a huge influence on millions of lives - a life he certainly was not willing to live himself.
Interestingly enough, JWs have no problem with celebrating a shower for an unborn baby, which can be said has also pagan connections.
They will get a cake and wrap presents and put decorations up in honor of the unborn baby. The excuse is that it seems to biblical to celebrate the birth of someone, but that the anniversary of that birth is wrong. HUH??? yup you heard it. Quite the logic indeed. It's as logic as saying that is ok to celebrate a wedding, but not ok to celebrate the anniversary of that wedding.
Just another example of the fact that these decisions of whether to celebrate something (or not), have very little to do with logic, pagan connections, or personal conviction, and has all to do with whether it is "approved" or not.
Everything we have has a pagan background, every tradtion can be traced to an earlier pagan tradition.
Just silly people trying to make themselves special and different and "not of this world".
Yes, Metatron, it's all about isolation...
When I was first researching cults, that was one thing that I noticed - though the Watchtower Corporation doesn't actually LOCK people away in compounds, they are VERY SUCCESSFUL at isolating them from the real world...
Many people that I spoke with, at the time, couldn't understand my recognition of the Jehovah's Witnesses as a cult - Jonestown had happened just a few years previously, and it was so horrific - and the members were so totally cut off - that "worldly" people couldn't understand what I was seeing as 'cultish' within the Watchtower Corporation's methods..
But they are EXTREMELY effective at isolating people, and I think you hit the nail on the head with your opening post, Metatron - it's all about ISOLATION, ISOLATION, ISOLATION - which then renders the recruit vulnerable to the subsequent CONTROL....
Zid
