Here's an extract from an October 15, 2003 Watchtower article on self-control:
Can anyone say: "Same ol', same ol'"?
Article On Self-Control: Witness Blames TV - Shock, Horror!
by Stephanus 22 Replies latest jw friends
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Gopher
Poor fool. He had a perfectly good job and earning a great income to support his Jehovah's witnessing or whatever he and his wife did. Now his contributions to the worldwide work will probably take a drastic hit, LOL.
So the static/interference SEEMED to come only during times of sex and violence? Come now. Can anybody say "SELECTIVE MEMORY"??
So he's a hothead. We all have our faults. But why get emotionally involved in a certain scene? Wouldn't doing a technician's job require that you maintain your calm composure and help FIX the technical problem in front of you?
And finally -- the sex scenes caused tension with his wife? What -- was his wife right there at his job, watching his reaction to sex scenes? Or - did he report what he saw to his wife? Was she so insecure about his inner thoughts while doing his technician's job? Seems to me if he were a REAL Christian man, he'd be able to control his thoughts, and if she were a decent wife, she'd give him the benefit of the doubt that he was just doing his job and not concentrating on these sex scenes. Or was he?
He learned to say no -- because his wife made him, not because he was wonderfully influenced by his own conscience or the teachings of Jehovah's Witnesses.
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Stephanus
I find his last sentence in that piece extremely interesting. Is Jehovah now in the business of granting wishes??
Good call, Gopher. His change of heart (and job) was probably more due to a
naggingconcerned wife dobbing him in to thenoseycaring elders than to any gain of self-control on his part. -
Gopher
"No gain of self-control on his part" -- exactly right!
This experience is about avoidance. According to his experience, his WISH (that the great genie in the sky granted) was that he could AVOID these minor temptations at work, instead of conquering them with the "Fruitages of the spirit" that of course ONLY Jehovah's Witnesses can display. (The great genie in the sky doesn't grant holy spirit to anyone who doesn't read the Watchtower magazine.)
So now this un-selfcontrolled JW has a lower-paying job and that makes him more theocratic.
Way to go Watchtower Society. You succeed in molding your followers to be abject beaten-down drones.
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Guest 77
I'm going to disagree with you fellows on this subject. If you've never lived on a 'daily diet' of foul language, sex, alcohol, etc, and say it doesn't have an affect on you, just what world are you living in?
I've lived, worked in the construction trade and play professional sports in that type of enviroment for over forty years, and to say it didn't have any affect on me, I would be living in the world of OZ. To succeed in professional sports you must be able to handle DISTRACTIONS, at least in golf because it is primarily an individual sport.
I've read reports of women having serious problems with their husbands (non-JW's) spending a great deal of time on the internet watching porno, monkey sees, monkey wants to do. I myself has served (in the past) as a bad influence, so, I'm talking from experience.
Guest 77
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Stephanus
I've lived, worked in the construction trade and play professional sports in that type of enviroment for over forty years, and to say it didn't have any affect on me, I would be living in the world of OZ.
I myself DO live in Oz, and I still think that playing the blame game like this guy is doing is going nowhere.
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Gopher
J6,
I agree with you that a great deal of exposure to foul language, sexually explicit programs and so forth can definitely have an influence on a person.
This example shown in the Watchtower, though, is different. Here we have a technician who is supposedly monitoring the technical quality of TV images as part of his job. There were 30 different monitors that he was scanning. (I can't even imagine that he had the sound up on all 30 monitors, for that would be too much for anyone to try to hear.... So he was basically watching 30 monitors with no sound...)
He claims that somehow (maybe by Satanic temptation -- that's what a JW might think) glitches mainly occurred when questionable content came on. This stretches his credibility way beyond belief.
Now if he were sitting at home watching TV for entertainment, and certain scenes came on featuring sex or violence -- and he had to learn to "SAY NO" because it violated his conscience, then I'd think we have an issue here.
The Watchtower featured this man because he was perhaps the only such example of a JW who came forward with a problem like this, and solved it the Watchtower way -- with great financial sacrifice. The more you look like a martyr, the better the experience seems to look to JW's in their literature.
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smack
I work in the same field as that brother. I have the same things happen, when a saucy sex scene comes on, the bloody phone rings and I can't watch. When the violence starts, some other problem crops up and I cant watch. It's uncanny It's like someone is timing it so I can't get anything but uplifting clean christian television.
There was that time I worked for the Australian Christian Channel. Kn'scary that was.........
Steve
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rocketman
I can see a bit of both here. On the one hand, this guy was already a "hothead". And evidentlty, he didn't have the self-control to watch the programs from strictly a technical viewpoint, though I can see where that might have been difficult at times.
But as Gopher said, it's set up as a "my faith vs my job" battle, one that we see frequently in the wts publications.
But overall, I'd say, it's his living, his life, so if he needed to find a new job, so be it. And perhaps it did help his marriage, which for him and his wife, would be a good thing obviously. But yes, now he looks like a fine Christian martyr, doesn't he?
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rocketman
Oh, one more thing - it kind of seems like, in experiences like this, the person almost always gets a job that pays less, not more (or the same). I guess that's part of the martyr thing.