so at last nights ministry school we had 2...yes that's right two that had parts and gave them with beards.. i found it interesting.
i thought the consensus was that you couldn't have any extra privileges if you wore one.. maybe the school is different?.
anyway, anybody else seen this in the u.s.?.
I had drinks with my MS brother a while ago and he excitedly (and without me asking anything about the cult) reported that some other congregations were letting men with beards read the watchtower on stage. What a revolution this was! He was hopeful that it would migrate to his congregation so he could have a beard.
I guess I've finally gotten some distance from this cult...it really struck me how absurd and childish all this was.
(for the record, i’m agnostic who is earnestly seeking an objective, honest and concrete hope for something greater).
“there is evidence of a creator if you just look for it”.
many of us have heard similar sentences from believers regarding proof of creator, proof that their religion is the correct one, proof that their particular sect is the right one, proof that their individual sects interpretation of a certain religious text is the right one, proof that their own personal interpretation of a certain religious text is the right one; the list goes on.. in one of my previous posts, i shared the following thought of mine:.
The statement that there's evidence of a creator if you look for it betrays a lack of understanding of how one should go about arriving at correct conclusions. The point isn't to look for evidence of what you want to be true, the point is to decide what's true based on the evidence that's available. Finding evidence for something that you want to be true is called confirmation bias.
kind of got into it with my jw wife last night for the first time in a long time.. i try to not engage in conversations about doctrinal matters unless she asks me which she did.. anyway, i wont go into details but of course i am "not going to change her mind" and "why is it that you can't see when very smart people can?
" yada yada yada.
you probably can imagine.. it makes me so depressed.
The worst part of it is that I felt totally fuzzy in my head. Like I couldn't argue my point well. I began to actually feel like "what is wrong with me?"
First off, cults work very hard to instill this sort of self-doubt into their victims, especially those that are having doubts about the cult. Keep reading, researching and soul-searching until you have complete self-assurance that you're of right mind, pure motivation and are certain that it is not "the truth." Do whatever it takes to get there. Just know that you're not alone, and that the way you feel right now has been ingrained into you for the purposes of control.
If your marriage has any chance of success you're going to have to communicate well. Big surprise there. Talk to your wife. When she attacks your motives (perhaps without even realizing it, i.e. "why do you go if it's just to criticize?") point out what she's said, how you've interpreted it and how that makes you feel. If you're going to support her, you need to let her know that and make sure that this is what she wants. You're not a martyr for making sacrifices for someone if they don't want what you're giving them, so make sure it's what she wants before you make the sacrifice.
With any luck you'll be able to get your wife to trust you, trust that you're motivated by a love of truth (real truth) and a concern for your (and her) well-being. If you can get to that point, you've made a huge stride. I never was able to get my wife to trust anything I said, though, as she would fall back on insisting that my thinking was being manipulated by the devil and I couldn't be honest about my motivations even if I wanted to, etc. etc. That's what eventually lead to the end of my marriage. I hope that your wife will be more reasonable (and less superstitious) than mine was and that you two will be able to (re)establish trust and communication to get through this. If you're able to do that, then you've got a decent chance of waking her up eventually, too.
As others have said, making snap judgements about other people is normal, healthy, and in our best interests. We've persisted as a species by being able to efficiently make quick assessments of people and situations that help us to avoid threats to our survival. Doing this should not be demonized nor should it be avoided. The problem, in my opinion, is when people make snap judgements and then refuse to change their opinion based on further information. The goal should be to always make decisions based on the information available. Sometimes when little information is available, those decisions will be overly risk averse or otherwise less than ideal. The key is to make sure that you're using all the information that's available instead of using the first bit of information you got, forming an opinion, and then basing all future decisions on that opinion (and whatever later information is acquired to support it). The human tendency to avoid changing one's mind to be in line with late evidence is one of our greatest weaknesses and I think we would all do well to fight this instinct.
i have some tricks to play.
i know it may sound childish but i feel that creating havoc and forcing the memorial to be postponed will be the highlight of the night!
wish me luck!.
I feel like your time would be better spent staying home - at least then you're contributing to the slow and steady discouragement of JWs by virtue of the decline in numbers - this affects ALL JWs, not just the ones in a particular congregation. Going and causing havoc will just play in to their persecution complex and make them ever more sure that they're instruments of god and being attacked by the devil.
the june 2017 watchtower tells the experience of a bible student who was homeless and unkempt, but improved his appearance after being preached to.. peter began to change.
he bathed, neatlytrimmed his beard, and put on the betterclothes that don offered him.
peter continued to maintain a clean appearance.. so here we see that with a neatly trimmed beard the watchtower's writers view him as having "a clean appearance".
I had drinks with my (MS) brother a few weeks ago. I'm not sure how much he's heard about my leaving the cult, but he's tacitly acknowledged that I don't go to meetings. In any event, in the course of the conversation he started talking about how some congregations nearby (Southern US) are allowing beards and he even saw someone in another congregation reading the WT with a beard so he's hopeful that this will make it to his congregation. I suggested that he just grow a beard if he wants to and his response was that he wanted to keep his rank because he likes helping the congregation. Such myopic logic.
Anyway, my point is that it does seem that beards may be becoming acceptable in some places on a wider scale. That said, it could always change in an instant if the GB decides to change their mind.
i have made a poll to try to determine the impact of the wt's no blood policy on ex members.. if you are an exjw, please participate.. vote here:.
*oops...hang on here...i have to make a new poll...this one lets you vote more than once.
i will post the new one .
I've recently had my own blood drawn (so not allogenic, but still in violation to the cult's rules) and spun down to plasma and injected into my knees. I was actually kinda excited to commit another disfellowshipping offense (I think I'm up to 4 or 5 now!)
okay i was thinking about it.
and it is a transhumanist argument and nothing new, i do realise that before anyone points it out.
but it struck me afresh today that the resurrection must happen.. firstly, to state the obvious, a rational materialist conception of reality seems to exclude resurrection.
Assmuption 1. If reality consists of material and nothing else then who we are and our consciousness arises purely from the order of the material substance of our bodies - primarily our brains. There is no spirit or soul involved.
With ya so far.
Assumption 2. Since the material substance of the universe obeys consistent laws, the position and configuration of material in the universe at any given point in time could, in principle, be extrapolated from the position and trajectory of the material substance of the universe at any other given time.
There is a fairly decent chance that this assumption is not consistent with our universe. Things like black holes may actually destroy the ability to extrapolate back in time as mater that enters them can no longer causally affect matter that is outside of them. There are some possible solutions to this "information paradox" but it is not yet clear if information is actually destroyed (from our perspective) when something enters a black hole.
Furthermore, due to the uncertainties in quantum mechanics, our universe is not deterministic. At best we could calculate the probabilities of certain events happening (or having happened, if we're extrapolating backwards) but we could not with perfect certainty reconstruct the past position and momentum of any particle based on having seen it at a future time.
Assumption 3. Over time humans (or intelligent beings generally) accumulate information about the universe, its content and laws. If this accumulation continues indefinitely it will inevitably reach a point where the material composition of the universe is known exhaustively, not simply for one point in time, but for all time. Just as geologists are now able to create maps of how the continents were configured millions of years ago by extrapolating continental movement according to physical laws, future scientists will be able to map out the exact composition of all matter at all previous points in time according to physical laws.
The assumption that we will continue to accumulate information is probably pretty good, but extending that to assume that we'd have all information after an infinite period of time does not hold. It's perhaps counter-intuitive to people that aren't used to dealing with infinity (and the various cardinalities thereof) but gaining knowledge indefinitely does not imply that all knowledge will at some point be gained. Furthermore, the assumption that we will continue gaining knowledge "indefinitely" is false because the universe will inevitably suffer heat death at which point no intelligence will be able to exist and, indeed, nothing will be able to happen. But don't worry, all civilizations will be long gone well before even that happens.
Assumptions 4. A civilisation or intelligence which has been able to exhaustively map the material composition and configuration of the universe over all of time will also be in a position to recreate entities including people from the past by recreating their exact material condition.
It seems that the assumption here (as most of this follows from your above assumptions) is that the technology to recreate, exactly, a given thing based on knowing precisely how it was structured. Again, due to quantum effects, this is probably impossible.
Assumption 5. Humans of each generation will be suficciently attached to their parents and immediate ancestors to insist they are brought back to life when it becomes feasible to do so.
This is a terrible assumption. I'm certain that a reasonably large percentage of the population does not have nostalgic views of their parents to bother recreating them. Even of those that would have this attachment, I expect many would opt not to recreate the person only to watch them die again, as they inevitably would.
If all of these assumptions are true, it seems to me that a general resurrection at some point is not just likely but pretty inevitable. Which is a ridiculous thing to say. But it seems to follow from the assumptions. And each of the assumptions as they stand seem quite reasonable.
1/5 of your assumptions is reasonable. There's no logic in expecting a resurrection of any kind.
it is an often asked question i know, but it perplexes me.. if witnesses are so convinced that they have "the truth", why is the act of researching information from external sources so taboo?
didn't the bible itself tell people to "use their powers of reason" and also praised ones like the boreans for researching things they were told??.
seriously, if there is no doubt about the organization being "god's channel" on earth, and it alone having the "truth", surely researching would only enhance such 'facts'?.
The cult instills self-doubt in people. They repeatedly stress scriptures like Jeremiah 17:9 (the heart is treacherous, who can know it) that cultivate a fear of trusting oneself. Combine that with an encouragement of what is presented as rational ignorance (i.e. why waste time reading apostate literature when you know it's filled with lies? It's not worth the effort) and you've got a pretty powerful thing going - a fear that you're not strong enough to resist being misled (or, in my case, that your motivations for research are actually selfish so you'll inevitably find things wrong with the cult as a way of justifying a desire not to put in the work) and a rationalization for why you're smart not to research. Then there's also a desire to avoid indulging those evil apostates by reading anything they write. Those three things are what held me back, at least.
As far as actual biblical research - I was never afraid of that. I just didn't care and couldn't be bothered. I wasn't interested in the bible at all, and I had more than I wanted of the bible's nonsense force fed to me several times a week for my entire life. And in the bits that were forced on me I already saw problems that took a lot of effort to rationalize. Because, after all, my heart was treacherous - I told myself this was a failing on my part - I just didn't understand and couldn't no matter how hard I tried. So why would I want to do more research into the bible when I'd just come across more problems (that I now know are actual faults of the bible) that would only demonstrate to me the extent of my lack of understanding?
eurgh!
more patronizing and uninformed reasoning from the "experts" at bethel.
this time tackling the sensitive subject of those attracted the the same sex.
That’s what Lisette, 16, who was at one time attracted to a girl, found. She says: “Through my biology classes in school, I learned that during the adolescent years, hormone levels can fluctuate greatly. I truly think that if more youths knew more about their bodies, they would understand that same-sex attraction can be temporary and they wouldn’t feel the pressure to be gay.”
One chick went through a bi-curious phase (which isn't surprising considering recent studies suggest that no women are completely straight) so that can definitely be generalized to indicate that all same-sex attraction is a passing phase. Yeah, that adds up.
All youths face a choice
I'm gonna shamelessly steal a bit from a stand-up comedian whose name I cannot remember:
When it comes to relating to homosexuals, all I have to go on is my own sexuality - I'm attracted to women and I've never had any sexual urges towards a man. It has never felt like a choice to me to be attracted to women, I just am. So this leads me to one conclusion: if you feel that you're making a choice to be straight, I've got news for you - you're gay.
