Schmalz said. "Once you leave a group that's been your whole life — letting that go is a kind of death."
And believe me, IF they could literally execute a person they would do it gleefully.
JW's make the big time news
by eyeuse2badub 26 Replies latest watchtower scandals
-
FedUpJW
-
LV101
This is so heartbreaking -- appreciate the link/topic and I'm passing it on.
-
FedUpJW
A few apologetics who are either lying or ignorant of their own religion.
They most surely are not ignorant.
-
Finkelstein
Its sad to see what this highly controlling possessive cult does to people through manipulation and exploitation but there its is.
Deaths from refusing blood transfusions, deaths from suicides, the breaking up of families are the undisclosed causative results.
My own family has the death of are mother due to refusing a blood transfusion and my family have been separated due to this religion.
Ex-Jehovah's Witnesses break silence on shunning: 'My mother treats me like I'm dead'
Tresa Baldas, Detroit Free Press Published 6:01 a.m. ET March 18, 2018(Photo: Dan Anderson, AP)
CONNECTTWEETLINKEDINCOMMENTEMAILMOREAmber Sawyer was just 8 years old when it happened.
She was watching cartoons on the living room floor of her Mississippi home when she heard the bang.
She went to investigate and found her 21-year-old sister, Donna, dead on her bedroom floor. She had shot herself in the heart with their father’s hunting rifle weeks after being excommunicated by their church for getting engaged to a non-Jehovah’s Witness.
For Sawyer — who sat crouched next to her sister’s body for hours that day, waiting for her mother to come home from her door-to-door missionary work — it was the beginning of a long, painful journey that would one day tear her family apart.
Years later, Sawyer got excommunicated, too, after seeking a divorce from an abusive husband. She ended up leaving the husband — and the faith. Her family cut all ties.
“Jehovah’s Witness kids grow up knowing that if they ever mess up, their parents will leave them — and that’s scary,” Sawyer, now 38, said in a recent interview from her home in Pascagoula, Miss. “The shunning is supposed to make us miss them so much that we’ll come back. … It didn’t work.”
Sawyer and many others like her are now denouncing the church's shunning practices in the wake of a recent murder-suicide in Keego Harbor that killed a family of four ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses who were ostracized after leaving the faith. The deaths sparked outrage among scores of ex-JWs nationwide who took to Facebook, online forums, blogs and YouTube, arguing the tragedy highlights a pervasive yet rarely-publicized problem within the church: Shunning is pushing the most vulnerable people over the edge, they say, and tearing families apart.
-
Boredposter
These articles always seem to show the two sides with a huge gap in ideology between them. Someone can read these two sides and agree with both. It would seem 'reasonable' to have to have some form of 'discipline' in a religion to hold people accountable.
However, JW.org needs to recognize the pscychological vulnerability of people who are shunned. Simply dropping all support to a person in such a fragile state is criminal. Most people are disfellowshipped after that person voluntarily seeks help for a problem they are having. They usually have some pscychological issues going on already. The action is simply a symptom of those issues. They usually already know what they have been doing is wrong (which is why they seek help with the elders). To take away support at that time is not the right course of action. There needs to be a reform put in place which gives a 'time out as they say) but also gives support.
-
AllTimeJeff
Discipline that outright demands a choice between your family and the cult isn't reasonable. That is the whole point of the article, and of what former JW's (and mental health practitioners) have been saying for decades.
What is reasonable discipline within religion? It sure as hell isn't extreme shunning, where even family cannot meet off of church grounds.
-
Boredposter
I think we agree Jeff on the extreme shunning as being unreasonable. What is reasonable then? Something else for sure. What is discipline? A correction, a readjustment. Some people might say tough love but even in tough love support is not withdrawn from people (outside of JW's). I think this question goes to the very core of what religion/myth is supposed to do. Yes, the big questions are supposed to be answered but there is also some sort of transformation that takes place in a person. Something a person can rely in even in the toughest of situations. Clearly, this hasn't happened for someone disfellowshipped. Why? That is the question and how can it be achieved? Taking all support from someone is obviously not the answer. But what is?
In my opinion disfellowshipping is the ultimate failure. It is the 'easy way out for elders'. A huge failure in helping someone to transform their inner self.
-
AllTimeJeff
I'll settle for "anything other then shunning..." ;)
-
ShirleyW
This story is on the Yahoo Homepage also, lot's of folks that have left comments are aware that the Dubs are nothing but a Cult, which is good to hear.
-
Finkelstein
The WTS. leaders arranged who and what their servants were to behave and look like, as well what doctrines they were to unquestioningly adhere to.
Suicides within this organization directly or indirectly has been a hushed down problem mostly relating to shunning or the organization's disfellowshiping policy.
