Posts by rmt1

4

The lure of reading the wt is equivalent to a college education came about

by MTSman in

jw
friends

i've been out for, god, six years now.

it only seems like yesterday when i was before three a-holes pleading for my life.

relecting back, i've come to realize having the ax fall on me was the best thing.

rmt1

A college education is comprised of individuals, using their own brains, collecting their own data, arriving at their own conclusions, testing their findings, and then standing or falling by the review of their peers, who are able and entitled to reproduce said findings. College is also replete with different interpretations deriving from the same sources, and then engaging in the act or process of persuasion, and being subject to the court of public opinion. Conferences or seminars or conventions at the college level are busy affairs with multiple tracks in multiple rooms, with many speakers addressing handfuls or gobs of willing voluntary listeners, who paid dearly to be there to hear the new research, and not all messages or interpretations are the same, and not all agree. Differences of opinion can be polite or outrageous, and poaching turf is met with defensiveness, and undermining one's life's interpretation can lead to throwing chairs. But these behaviors are natural reactions by people who are permitted to use their own brains. A college education involves meetings where you sit around a table reviewing the latest research paper and some different person each week leads the discussion by highlighting what they found insightful or misguided in that paper, and yours is printed out and marked up and cross referenced if you prepared well. Everyone is free to agree, disagree, interpret, interrupt, question, disregard, dismiss. A college education involves weekly evening public talks by local faculty where you sit attentively, whether dressed up well or in your jeans, and you hear out the subject matter and you feel compelled based on the merits of their argument, or their presentation, and they generally have some kind of audio visual medium that provides a structure upon which to shape your understanding. A college education involves undergraduate level clubs where you meet and figure out what your volunteer activities will be and how you will interface with the public, and then you haul a bunch of crap in your vehicles, you set up shop, you face the public, and you put yourself out there and draw listeners to you to hear what your club and activity is about, and how it impacts that random person, and how that random person can become involved, or see the next iteration of activity, if they so desire.

Manifestly, a regular habit of reading the Watchtower and Awake is the precise equivalent of getting a college education. How could anyone doubt it?

70

Feeling sad over a wasted life in watchtower

by wannaexit in

jw
friends

it's been 12 years since i first read ray franz's books and the scales came off my eyes.

by that time i was in my forties.. since 2002 i went back to school and have worked with 3 very professional organizations.

but my biological clock is ticking away and while my peers are looking forward to retirement, i am only beginning.

rmt1

Magnum, and 2+2=5: I hear you loud and clear. I have got ZERO ounces or inches or shades of smoke to blow your way. You have nailed it. There is no silver lining to this monster other than it did not kill whoever is still posting, yet.

Here's my grim take on being too old to start doing what you want. I do not classify it as silver lining. I recently went to the 2014 AAS DPS meeting in Tucson where planetary scientists talk about exoplanets and the Solar System. There were a ton of young grad students (I'm 41), mix of early middle to early senior aged people, and a thin serving of what I could only characterize as spunky gray-haired and white-haired guys who were still doing their science, still getting up before the audience, still razzing the young speakers, still interrupting their peers in their polite way, and they had to be north of 65 years old, maybe 70. Not many of them, but an unambiguous statistical presense. They were doing what they loved doing. I will not make it through any higher degree than I have, but I'm reducing data on an exoplanet (before this lunchbreak), and it fills a huge gap of alienation from the life I think I could have fit into.

I won't get back the life the JWs stole. I can calculate that as being a longer period of time than the actual years you were under the KH roof, because the act of starting some learning experiences after your cohort has moved on carries STEEP opportunity costs in time, money, political and relationship capitol, etc. So just to estimate a metric from my own experience, the years that the JW borg steals from you is roughly a factor of 1.5. If you did not know yourself, you have to meet yourself. If you did not have loving, caring, wise, learned, concerned advice from parents or invested parties who knew how reality worked, then you had a steep learning curve to "catch up", if ever, to something resembling the civilized and socially responsible adult. You never stop experiencing this opportunity cost curve. Things you should have known at a younger age delay learning things you should be knowing now.

There is also the penalty of not being able to focus and finish what you started, because there are so many things you want from life that were prevented by all this delay. I've got zero good advice there. Worldly people have to face the same crisis of focus, but they got to do so in their normal cohort, under the wing of invested persons with experience in reality.

IMHO

70

Feeling sad over a wasted life in watchtower

by wannaexit in

jw
friends

it's been 12 years since i first read ray franz's books and the scales came off my eyes.

by that time i was in my forties.. since 2002 i went back to school and have worked with 3 very professional organizations.

but my biological clock is ticking away and while my peers are looking forward to retirement, i am only beginning.

rmt1

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Human+rights+abuse

" human rights

pl.n. The basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law. "

20

My 88 Year Old Mom Is Going To Special Meeting Today And Shouldn't!

by minimus in

jw
friends

my mom only goes out for doctor's visits.

they are "encouraging" her to spend three hours to hear the annual meeting at the kh.

she is on oxygen and can barely move.

rmt1

"my theory on why they insist on attending in person is this: if you are not at a meeting in person your reactions can not be observed during a talk being given. All the self righteous spies are watching everyone seated there to try to read minds and determine the level of everyones' gullibility. Additionally, if you're not there you can't feel approved of or disapproved of; you can't see the expressions on the elders' faces as they either beam at you or frown at you or even shake their heads at you.

Physical presence is mandatory to keep mind control effective. That's why they harp continuously at meetings that if you miss meetings you won't have Holy Spirit - meaning, they lose control of your thinking process."

A convenient word already wraps this up, "Facecrime".

32

Circuit assembly symposium: help those who have become inactive

by rosyray in

jw
friends

i just discovered that the circuit assembly my family is attending tomorrow contains a symposium entitled:.

help others to seek jehovah's righteousness: those who have become inactive.

i poked around a bit on here and didn't find any comments about this.

rmt1

To |discern| is to "stumble".

To |hand over all keys to your own cognition| is to "discern".

Let the reader use discernment.

38

University Application Personal Statement dilemma - Should I mention my jw past?

by will-be-apostate in

jw
friends

i am applying to chemical engineering course in the uk through ucas (a lot of things changed since i've posted last time).. i have a lot of skills i developed while regular pioneering, like public speaking skills, ability to reason (even if it's bs), presentational skills etc.. i feel it would boost my personal statement a lot, but i'm also afraid they would say "this guy beleives in god, and loves science, he must be creationist.

away with him".. how could i mention that i gave interviews front of thousands of people and did voluntary work in my hometown without giving a bad impression?.

i don't want to go into details and start explaining myself that "however i don't beleive in god", or something like that.

rmt1

It sounds like you're in a position where the JW heritage is all the cards you have to play with. Now, you can say play your opponent not your hand and bluff with JW stuff. Do you have technical / computer work experience / hobbies? Can you apply as an 'undeclared major'? If you do that, you might take intro math, intro chemistry, intro engineering (open to non-Chem Engr students) and gain some insights and leverage into your formal application to the College of Engineering / Chemical Engineering.

If that's your picture, it would appear you have a lot of years to make mistakes and prevail against them. You can parlay that youth against the red pill, Your in-JW experience will not assist you in *matriculating into* *Chemical Engineering*. I say this as someone who carefully considered every interesting degree program that the U Arizona offered, and picking that one because I heard it was the hardest and made the most money after graduation. I was a JW, I had gotten out, I was owed some kind of ordinary, if belated, "worldly" existence, I wanted to get mine, I'd show them what I was made of, etc, etc. If I could go back to the moment I started questioning my ability to get through the math, my present self would tell my past self, "You are twenty-six years old. You CAN take the time to cover all the necessary bases for success."

And go talk to an academic advisor. This is what they're paid for. Don't spill the JW beans like to a confessor. No one frankly can give a rat's ass. It's 2014. That cult should be illegal. Just get their take on how while holding only a few cards.

If you get into a science and engineering program, the good news is: Your exiting-JW experience *might be able to help you in a degree if you were doing as the Boereans did, and used the scientific method, testing out to see if this or that bullshit, this or that theory, was true. Remember that you have many years, and several months spent carefully Now, maybe a year (yes, or two) can save decades, quarters of centuries, of financial angst.

38

University Application Personal Statement dilemma - Should I mention my jw past?

by will-be-apostate in

jw
friends

i am applying to chemical engineering course in the uk through ucas (a lot of things changed since i've posted last time).. i have a lot of skills i developed while regular pioneering, like public speaking skills, ability to reason (even if it's bs), presentational skills etc.. i feel it would boost my personal statement a lot, but i'm also afraid they would say "this guy beleives in god, and loves science, he must be creationist.

away with him".. how could i mention that i gave interviews front of thousands of people and did voluntary work in my hometown without giving a bad impression?.

i don't want to go into details and start explaining myself that "however i don't beleive in god", or something like that.

rmt1

Here's my "any thought", worth less than a widow mite. I started in on a Chemical Engineering degree and discovered I did not have sufficient real math preparation, yet I wanted a degree as feasibly soon as possible to have a discriminator between my present then self and the former JW self I was trying to escape. So, I first fell back to an English degree. One of the talks by graduates said they started out at $60,000 (22 year old) and they basically got by with draconian discipline during the week, and party only, if ever, on the weekend. That, plus the axiom that Chemical Engineering is particularly difficult because of the trifecta, 'hard, boring and dangerous'.

So- succeeding in that degree is going to take terms like "tenacity", "persistence", "perseverance", "attention to detail", "clarity in communication", excellent technical writing, ability to follow safety procedures to the letter. Public speaking and public presentation comes up in every degree, so mention it in the tenor 'but, of course', and don't pretend like it's unusually significant. Too many non-JWs do too much volunteer work, as well, for it to mean anything special. Mention it as, 'but, of course'. Convert all JW word bombs (free advertising for them) into vanilla plain "church". You are now graduated from JW-land and entitled to voice the fact that it WAS a church.

44

Why are alot of JW's Fascinated with Sci-Fi?

by NoMoreHustle in

i am still in & gradually fading.

i have always wondered why alot of jw's that i know are really into alot of sci-fi stuff like star wars, i robot, x-men stuff etc.

i mean they take it another level with this fantasy stuff.

rmt1

Adults fall over themselves to delineate how 14 year olds are know-it-alls that bear no cognitive merit or recognition, have no insight into anything, source no legitimate complaints or observations about the religious system and logic into which their parents have raised them, and can be answered with a pat assurance by an elder or two or three who just remind them to (what the &%&^% ever they say) and just (wait on whoever) or (whatever) (you can fill in all these ad libs). The role of a 14 year old is to shut the hell up about any inconsistencies they observe, and deceitful or concerning patterns they detect, and falsities they hear with their very own ears, and hypocrisies they see with their very own eyes. The role of a fourteen year old is to be told they don't know what the hell they're talking about when they read up on the latest -at the time- scientific journals about theories of parallel universes and many worlds and multiverse, which raise the spectre of multiple iterations of a deity-like-Jehovah-type for each and every of those parallel planes of existence. The science fiction section of the school library could not have been big enough to provide the salve to cover the open wound of life bleeding out, day in day out, from loss of opportunity to use one's mind, loss of opportunity to develop long term relationships with real humans of one's own age, loss of opportunity to travel the world as if it was here to be experienced, etc etc etc. Science fiction does all that for someone that cowers in the cult.

27

The 7/14 APOSTATE study articles are preparing the rank and file for new light!

by ADJUSTMENTS in

i believe the last two wt studies in the 7/14 wt study articles were planned for this exact time and did not come about by happenstance... the jw cult is preparing the rank and file for some faith altering "new light" to be announced fairly soon, and these scare tactics will do just the trick.... the articles are preparing the rank and file to become apostataphobic, they have the rank and file in such a frenzy, even have them questioning themselves and their own motives for being in the borg!.

with paragraphs like:.

if you hear someone that has doubts or questions about the borg avoid them like the plague, and tell your local elders, but don't judge them!!!.

rmt1

""Still, when exposed to unscriptural teachings..." - notice this method of brainwashing, they call apostate teachings, 'unscriptual teachings'. It's interesting that all ex jw's, it's based on the WT teachings not scriptual teachings. Infact the WT is what publishes 'unscriptual teachings', so everybody should reject the WT as it's apostate with it's unscriptual teachings. However they have people spun and convinced that bringing out the unscriptual teachings of the WT, and studying the bible by itself is apostacy, somehow the WT has become the bible and the bible itself has become 'unscriptual'."

This reminds me of the book (Paradise?) with the illustration of the Early Church (Catholics?) burning a man for reading the Bible, with the Bible chained around his neck. Very visceral. This article's language is very threatening concerning reading your own copy of a book you paid for and using 'god-given' reasoning on those scriptures, whose general jist should be public domain if ever there was one.

37

Do you think JWs know what apostates really are?

by KateWild in

my friend was slagging off one of my other friends saying they have been known to say apotate things.

she does apostate things herself without realising it.

she meant well because she fears the word apostate as i once did, but she openly says to me my jc was lacking in holy spirit.. she doesn't have a clue what apostacy really is she just wants me not to mix with ones who have been known said "apostate things".

rmt1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vvvPZd6_D8

Emmanuel Golstein, Two Minute's Hate