"Fleshly" brothers and sisters

glitter

I hate how the WT makes a member's family seem less important than their JW "family" by conditioning them to add the "Fleshly" qualifier to "sister" or "brother" when talking about their siblings.

It just always made me shudder.

Did this really bother anyone else?

Dustin

It's just another one of those really weird things that make you scratch your head. I always hated that too. I actualy hated the term brother and sister for other members at the hall. I'll tell you what, alot of those pricks were no brother or sister of mine. I always thought family should take priority over church anyway.

Dustin

Why Georgia

My husband and I were just talking about this. It really upset me when the people at the KH would tell me that my Fleshly family would be less important in my life than the people at the hall.

The people at the hall would be my new family.

Yeah - right...until I did something they didn't like.

It still upsets me today but I am glad that it does because no matter how lonely I get I will never go back there.

kaykay_mp

Yeah.

There was this pioneer sister who always put an emphasis on it when she talked about her family. But she would drag out the word fleshly, like, "fleshhhhly sister". You could see her teeth come together in slow motion for the shhhhh part. And all the time she would talk about her family she would put the word fleshhhhhhhhhhly in front of it. Then I would like walk away whenever I had the slightest inkling that she would talk about her family. Annoyed me to no end, it did.

laters

kaykay_mp

iiz2cool

Yes, that always bothered me. What is it about JWs that makes them unable to understand something so simple? I have 2 sisters that were never JWs. Every time I mentioned them in conversation to a JW I was interrupted and asked for a qualifier - fleshly? or JW???

The JWs sometimes were offended when I'd answer that they were my REAL sisters.

Walter

Dustin

Kaykay you kill me with your stories. They are absolutely awesome.

Dustin

MungoBaobab

What's so stupid is that by forcing the term "fleshly" in front of "brother" and "sister," the true meaning of both words is hijacked. It would be more appropriate for one Witness to refer to another as "my spiritual brother." Just another example of playing Orwellian word-games, I suppose.