https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/29/explosion-hits-jehovahs-witnesses-prayer-meeting-in-indias-kerala.
I remember many experiences from the platform from our visiting COs as a kid claiming "angelic protection" for JWs attending conventions, and bad things happening to those missing the convention.
I guess this and the German Hall shootings disprove those theories. 8 dead. :(
after my divorce four years and still attending the meetings i joined jwmatch.com as a non-paying member, eventually.
after i stopped going to meetings i wrote on my profile that i was inactive and after four years i have 63 "fans"...... sisters.
interested in me, from all over the world, as young as 29 and very pretty.. it looks like the sisters are so desperate for a mate that they would be interested in almost a 58 year old man.. very sad that many will stay single and will never have a chance to find love.. anyone interested in meeting them?
At under 1% of the general population, JWs are a very small pool of people to date. EX JWs would be an even smaller subset.
A few extended JW family spinsters took the GB's advice to "only date servants"....time marched on, the "end" never came, and they never married or had children. In their 20s they were looking for "Circuit overseers with a Gold Card", and movie star looks, but they never found one :). They are approaching 50 now, broke, and alone. :(
We have an old POMO friend who uses JW dating sites. He is astounded how many "sisters" could care less about his disbelief in Watchtower's "inspiration" and the Governing Body's advice.
i’ve noticed a pattern where things don’t go the way i expect them to go and/or whenever i realise there is a trend and, i mentally adjust for the idea that the trend will continue, the trend stops in its tracks.
so on that basis, and given many people, including myself, and active jws, have been asking ‘what changes will the governing body make next?’ perhaps the (disappointing) answer is: ‘nothing much for a while to come’.
maybe they’ve made the changes they want for now, and will wait a while and see how it’s received.
If it was up to them, they would implement no new changes for a while...but it is not up to them. Japan, the UK Commonwealth, France, Norway, Czechoslovakia, USA Civil lawsuits, et al will be cramming changes down Watchtower's throat. I believe they will need to amend their child baptism stance, and allow people to quit/leave without repercussions. Minors (under 18) can not enter into a contract in any developed country in the 21st century. Jesus himself was not baptized as a child.
if it is illegal for minors to get married, enter into contracts, drink, and smoke, why is it legal for them to enter into lifelong religious contracts they can not break without family shunning and community ostracism????
how religious shunning ruins lives.
a form of institutionalized estrangement, shunning hurts health of the excluded.. updated march 27, 2024 |psychology today magazine.
As society and the medical establishment become more aware of the actual harm of Disfellowshipping I see another financial drain on Watchtower. Lawsuits for "Intentional infliction of emotional distress" following their defamation for simply leaving the organization.
https://www.fightingforyou.com/resource-center/articles/can-you-sue-for-emotional-distress/
https://www.injuryjusticeattorney.com/mental-emotional-injuries
"
IIED is a type of intentional tort that occurs when one person commits outrageous actions for the intended purpose of causing another person to experience severe emotional distress.
The emotional distress caused by the outrageous behavior may manifest in physical symptoms such as insomnia, headaches, and stomach problems, or it may result in mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and extreme fear.
Severe emotional distress may include feelings of suffering, anguish, shock, grief, fright, humiliation, anxiety/worry, and more.
Most notably, you don't have to experience any physical injury to sue for IIED or prove conclusively that the defendant intended to harm you. Instead, you only need to show that the actions were intentional and that you suffered as a result.
There are different elements your California attorney must prove in an intentional tort lawsuit to recover damages for IIED:
The different factors that are considered to determine whether the defendant's conduct was outrageous include the following:
As noted, you are not required to prove physical injury to recover damages for severe emotional distress. Damages are usually covered in cases where you have high medical bills, lost wages, lost earning capacity, or other compensatory damages.
You are allowed to recover punitive damages in cases of recklessness and intentional wrongdoing. Since intentional infliction cases require outrageous conduct, they are more likely to result in an award for punitive damages.
Intentional infliction of emotional distress can be filed as a lawsuit on its own. Still, IIED lawsuits are often filed in addition to other offenses (both criminal and civil) that may have caused other types of damage. Common instances where it might be appropriate to file an additional IIED suit include:
if it is illegal for minors to get married, enter into contracts, drink, and smoke, why is it legal for them to enter into lifelong religious contracts they can not break without family shunning and community ostracism????
how religious shunning ruins lives.
a form of institutionalized estrangement, shunning hurts health of the excluded.. updated march 27, 2024 |psychology today magazine.
?? If it is illegal for minors to get married, enter into contracts, drink, and smoke, why is it legal for them to enter into lifelong religious contracts they can not break without family shunning and community ostracism????
Updated March 27, 2024 |Psychology Today Magazine
A former member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Josh Caswell Sr., reached out to me after reading one of my posts about estrangement. He asked that I explore the policy practiced in some religions of shunning.
In religious communities, shunning means cutting ties with members—even family—who don’t explicitly follow religious beliefs and the leaders’ demands or who wish to break with their religion. Religious shunning is a form of institutionalized estrangement and emotional abuse.
Shunning is widely practiced among certain religions—including the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Church of Scientology, the Amish, and Orthodox Judaism—to control the conduct of its members. A silent form of bullying and rejection, the practice—more common among cult-like denominations—ensures that the identity of a collective group does not tolerate individual thinking.
The Watchtower, the official Jehovah’s Witnesses magazine, reports that 1 in every 100 Jehovah's Witnesses is “disfellowshipped” each year—a total of more than 80,000. Of these, fully two-thirds will not be reinstated. This means that more than 1 million disfellowshipped Jehovah's Witnesses are alive today who are being shunned—more than 10 percent of the number of active Jehovah's Witnesses.
“I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness in Massachusetts,” says Caswell, 45, who now lives in Arizona and works as a diagnostics specialist for Pep Boys auto services.
“In my 20s,” he says, “I ‘faded out’ of religion. I felt it was too restrictive and didn’t allow me to be a human being. The cost was losing all my family and friends.”
That’s a high price to pay for being human. Recent studies show that shunning has a long-term, detrimental effect on mental health, job possibilities, and life satisfaction. Intense loneliness and a feeling of loss of control over one’s life are common after leaving. The culture of informing on other members inside the Jehovah's Witnesses also leads to a continued sense of distrust and suspicion long after leaving.
“The religion teaches that if someone decides to leave the religion,” explains Caswell, “the entire congregation—including family members—shuns that person by not talking to them and avoiding them as much as possible. My family has shunned me for over 25 years. I know first-hand that the result is devastating.”
Research has shown that shunned individuals often experience feelings of depression, helplessness, hopelessness, low self-esteem, suicide ideation, and self-harming behaviors. That’s certainly what happened to Caswell.
“I was very smart in school. I was taking 11th-grade subjects when I was in 9th grade. I had a full scholarship to MIT, but I wasn’t able to go to college because that’s not something they believe in. Why waste your time going to college when the end of the world is just around the corner? I was forced to give up that educational opportunity.”
Caswell says that pursuing any career was discouraged because religious leaders preferred that potential husbands devote their time to the church, as elders in the congregation, or as pioneers who preach some 90 hours a month. To protect these priorities, he was allowed to date only within the congregation.
At 17, Caswell left the religion. He says his father, an elder in the congregation, had raped six of his eight sisters. The church said it would handle the abuse internally, but his father was disfellowshipped for only a month before being reinstated. He believes his mother orchestrated the sexual abuse.
“I honored my parents when I was living with them,” he says. “But I was never happy. So I set forth to find out who I was.”
By the time Caswell was 20, everyone in the congregation, including three sisters, had stopped communicating with him. In abandoning his religion, Caswell left a safe “bubble”—but he knew nothing of the outside world. Consequently, he went from one extreme to another, following a dangerous path on which he drank to excess and used crystal meth. Eventually, he became suicidal and ended up living in his car.
For the last 19 years, he has been clean. However, he has had no relationship with his mother or other family members for decades. His father passed away years ago; they were estranged at the time of his death.
Humans have a primal need for social support. Without a sense of belonging—a feeling of emotional safety and context—people come to fear that their very lives are at risk. They lose the ability to trust and connect with others, instead becoming consumed by the task of surviving alone.
Shunning, therefore, is like a social death penalty—and studies prove this point. Exclusion has been found to cause pain that cuts deeper and lasts longer than a physical injury, according to Dr. Kipling D. Williams, a distinguished professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University who is noted for his unique studies of ostracism.
When someone is shunned—even by a stranger, even only briefly—Dr. Williams has found that they experience a strong and harmful reaction, activating the same area of the brain that registers physical pain. The crucial difference between physical and psychic injury is that physical damage heals, while social injuries linger. In his studies of more than 5,000 people, Dr. Williams used a computer game to show how just two or three minutes of ostracism can produce ongoing negative feelings.
“Our studies indicate that the initial reaction to ostracism is pain,” he explains, “which is similarly felt by all individuals regardless of personality or social/situational factors. Ostracism then instigates actions aimed at recovering thwarted needs of belonging, self‐esteem, control and meaningful existence.”
Caswell, who asked me to use his real name because he wants his voice heard, says that religious leaders know full well the profound psychological impact of shunning. “That’s exactly why they do it,” he says. “Shunning is not love; it’s how Jehovah’s Witnesses discipline members. It’s a form of punishment.”
References
Williams, Kipling D., NidaView, Steve (2014) Ostracism and Public Policy, Sage Journals, Volume 1, Issue 1, https://doi.org/10.1177/237273221454975
Harper, Janice (2011) A Reason (and Season) to Stop Shunning, HuffPost, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-reason-and-season-to-st_b_1146103
Luther, Rosie (2022) What Happens to Those Who Exit Jehovah's Witnesses: An Investigation of the Impact of Shunning, National Library of Medicine, PubMed
as your family considers its disaster preparedness plan, please ensure that the secretary has up-to-date contact information for you and your emergency contact.
also, we have re- peatedly seen good results when brothers and sisters are prepared with go bags and are ready to obey direction when they face various kinds of disasters.
please be sure you have a go bag, and review its contents at least once a year.
Another Watchtower dream is that the "brothers will check on me and grandma". Nope. No phones. No one wandering around- except criminals. Once evacuated, and the looters start, entire neighborhoods are sealed by law enforcement, and National Guard. I doubt few people want to argue with National Guardsmen sitting behind a 50 cal machine gun on top of a Humvee. We had a few at intersections entering the neighborhood, no sightseeing, or visiting. If you leave a sealed area you might not get back in. Options: Leave or sit tight.
PS: Always keep extra BBQ coals on hand. As your freezer starts to defrost without power, you can have daily BBQs of defrosting meat. :)
this is chart-topper: "jehovah's witness whose parents were siblings opens up about their twisted relationship - which saw them having seven children together".
vanessa, from ohio, appeared on an episode of the we're all insane podcast.
the 46-year-old explained she is 'one of seven kids born to a brother and sister'.
I can't top Ron W.s bookstudy story.
One Hall I was in had lots of poor rural territory 40 ++ miles from city limits in the mountains. The traveling C.O. would meet with me on Tuesday afternoons to go over congregation records, and ask if all the midweek lunch providers had indoor plumbing and if the food was safe to eat. :)
Ye haw!!
this is chart-topper: "jehovah's witness whose parents were siblings opens up about their twisted relationship - which saw them having seven children together".
vanessa, from ohio, appeared on an episode of the we're all insane podcast.
the 46-year-old explained she is 'one of seven kids born to a brother and sister'.
I have seen child abuse, domestic violence, incest, theft, fraud, JW kiddie porn rings, and even murder, but never even heard of a case like this one.
Just another day in the JW "Spiritual Paradise?"
this is chart-topper: "jehovah's witness whose parents were siblings opens up about their twisted relationship - which saw them having seven children together".
vanessa, from ohio, appeared on an episode of the we're all insane podcast.
the 46-year-old explained she is 'one of seven kids born to a brother and sister'.
"
Vanessa, from northeast Ohio, appeared on a recent episode of the We're All Insane podcast alongside host Devorah Roloff.
The 46-year-old explained how she was 'one of seven children born to a brother and sister' - a fact she found out aged nine.
She said: 'I was in third grade. I didn't really understand whether that was right or wrong. I didn't know. My grandmother was happy that her children found somebody to love and it just kind of became normal.'
In the clip, which was shared to YouTube earlier this week, Vanessa dished on the bizarre family dynamic.
She began by explaining how her parents got legally married in 1974, adding: 'I guess back then they didn't have to show a lot of ID.
'They had different last names. They did have different fathers... They swore under oath they were no close of kin than second cousin and they walked out with a marriage license.'
Vanessa said that her mother was 19 years old at the time and her father was 28.
It was around this time that her parents enrolled as Jehovah's Witnesses, which caused friction among the congregation due to the incestual nature of the relationship.
'The entire congregation knew... I know people there didn't like it but if you talk against a decision you're going to get labeled an apostate so they kind of had to deal with it,' she explained.
Discussing her relationship with her parents, she said: 'My mom had some anger problems. She was physically abusive and emotionally abusive so I was never really that close to her.'
Vanessa's dad moved in and out the house due to the 'rage and anger,' but the couple continued to welcome children together in quick succession.
One of the couple's sons died at just three months old of walking pneumonia, but within a year they welcomed a fifth child.
Vanessa said the congregation advised her mom not to have any more kids at the risk of getting shunned - but she ignored their warnings.
Her parents welcomed their sixth child in 1989, when her mom was 40 years old, but the boy suffered a series of health issues from birth.
'There was a problem with him. Apparently he did not have a properly structured urinary system and he had a dead kidney...,' Vanessa detailed.
'He ended up living through everything. He had three surgeries [before he was six months old] and the dead kidney was removed. They were able to fix everything.'
Two of her siblings were also born with crossed eyes, which were successfully corrected, as she asserted: 'Other than that none of us kids really had any serious issues.'
Vanessa explained that despite her advancing years, her mom still 'wanted more babies.'
'My dad wasn't living there anymore so she was just going out in the evening to his apartment for the sole purpose of having a seventh child,' she said.
But after giving birth again despite the warnings she was forced to move congregations to avoid being shunned from the religion.
'She then, at 42 years old, wanted to try for an eighth baby but her brother said no. He was done,' she said.
Vanessa concluded: 'So my mother was pregnant by her brother a total of nine times - seven live births and two miscarriages - and still got to be a Jehovah Witness in good standing.'
But Vanessa explained: 'She wasn't that motherly. I honestly don't know why she wanted so many children.
'There came a point where I thought the whole thing just became a little like a fetish to her because she liked talking about her love for her brother....
'By the time I was about fourth grade I knew how my dad performed in bed, I knew what kind of size he was, my mother liked talking about what she did with her brother even to children.'
Delving deeper into what it was like being raised as a member of the religion, Vanessa said: 'There's no holidays. There's no Mother's Day, no Father's Day, no Fourth of July.
'They're allowed to celebrate their anniversary and the memorial of Jesus' death. Those are the only things they are allowed to celebrate.'
She continued: 'You have to go to Kingdom Hall meetings three days a week and then they want you to preach - I think at least 10 hours a month you are supposed to go knock on doors.
'We weren't really allowed to have friends outside of the religion but I didn't really have friends in the religion either.'
She said people got shunned for 'smoking cigarettes and gambling' - among other things - before revealing that she 'didn't get any education after seventh grade.'
'I was grieving my education. I loved school. And now I'm home 24/7. Basically I'm just at home taking care of the babies and that's about it,' Vanessa said.
'I was being forced only to have Jehovah Witness friends but at a point they don't want to be my friend.
'I'm not working towards baptism. I'm a teenager who does not believe in any of it so some of their parents don't want them to hang around me.'
It was around this time that a 21-year-old man, who was part of the congregation, 'started taking an interest' in the then 13-year-old Vanessa.
'I felt I was grown in my head anyway... so I kind of soaked it all in. This guy wanted my attention. He liked me and at that time I didn't see anything wrong with it,' she said.
She candidly continued: 'Nobody said anything there like that it was wrong or anything.
'[One woman who was a Jehovah Witness] walked up on him actually with his hand in my pants - I'm a kid, he's a man - and she didn't kick him out, didn't report him, didn't call the police.'
Vanessa said that the older man was eventually brought in for a judicial hearing, but no action was taken, adding: 'In my mind, I thought he was my boyfriend so I was happy they didn't punish him.
'I was kind of happy the elders didn't do what they were supposed to do and didn't have him arrested or anything because I got to be with him longer - which now sounds pretty messed up.'
But eventually Vanessa, then aged 15, started getting 'really fed up' of the abuse from her mother and the older man - before making a drastic decision in February 1993.
'I just decided I'm not going to be here anymore one way or another,' she said.
'I decided one night either I'm running away or I'm going take my life and didn't know which because I have a bunch of siblings and I love them a lot so I didn't know what to do.'
Vanessa ultimately decided to run away which she described as a very difficult decision: 'My baby brothers were only two and three years old at that time so that was hard on me because I can't take them.
'I'm holding them in my arms before I went out crying and I'm like I don't want to leave them because I know they're going to get abused but I couldn't stay.
'Even though I was thinking suicidal things I didn't want to die. If I stayed I'm going to die because I can't do it so I had to leave the babies.'
She later was told about her mother's reaction to her being a runaway: 'She just acted like she she didn't care, like she didn't love [me] at all, she was just mad.
'She wasn't worried. She was mad that [I] embarrassed her, not worried that [I] was safe.'
Asked if she thinks that Jehovah's Witnesses covered issues up, Vanessa said: 'With my family they did....
'They brushed off the relationship I had with that grown man there and then they brushed off my brother when he reported child abuse.'
Having run away with a Jehovah Witness from another congregation, who was two years her senior, the pair married and she fell pregnant - all within two months of leaving.
Vanessa welcomed two more children by the time she was 20 years old and is now also a grandmother.
She explained that in the years that followed she battled a sex addiction, adding: 'I guess a lot of people coming out of that cult end up repressed or probably like me not knowing what to do about sex at all.
'I didn't realize until recently that I actually had my mother's rage. She raged at everybody because of her childhood pain and I was using sex to not feel my rage.
'I couldn't heal, I kept making bad decisions, I didn't even know I was that furious. I had to feel something - something strong - so that's what I did.'
Vanessa concluded: 'It's only been probably the last five years that I actually like who I am.'"
I feel for the poor kids, and I hope they can get professional counseling and some peace in their lives.
as your family considers its disaster preparedness plan, please ensure that the secretary has up-to-date contact information for you and your emergency contact.
also, we have re- peatedly seen good results when brothers and sisters are prepared with go bags and are ready to obey direction when they face various kinds of disasters.
please be sure you have a go bag, and review its contents at least once a year.
Having lived through a disaster with 30,000 people evacuating it opened my eyes to the fallacies of most "disaster plans".
1. ALWAYS having enough gas in the car to travel 100 + miles away from the danger zone. Local power and cell towers are frequently gone. No power for ATMs, gas pumps, water pumps, TVs, cash registers, grocery stores, internet, etc. A few hundred dollars CASH in small bills can really help. There will be few places to stay nearby if thousands of people are displaced. I was surprised at how quickly the criminal element gathered their friends and weapons and started patrolling closed areas looking for easy targets to loot. Distance is your friend.
