i was in for 30 years.....my ex was an elder...."holy spirit appointed" he tortured me....i was married 33+ years....you know,,,marriage is sacred...you can leave,,,i know,,,,if abuse is intolerable....but that starts a series of events...etc etc etc....i finally left everything...and moved far away.....people actually believe "holy spirit" appoints people,,,my ex would not pray unless there was an audience...you know,,,,people invited over for supper kind of thing,,,you get the point..... my best friend had a mental breakdown,,,,she basically became psychotic.....had to be hospitalized....she took up smoking,,,got disfellowshipped...and lost all emotional support....to this day,,,,as far as i know,,,she is still disfellowshipped...needs to be hospitialized every so often....she is on complete disability.....and still trying to get back into the org....her mother does support some what,,,,even though she is a witness herself,,,,,takes her to assemblies,,,,memorial,,,etc,,,,this has gone on for years.....she cannot mentally handle the organization,,,nor can she mentally handle not being a witness...lost everything....guilt....etc..... did not mean to ramble on so much......i have mental scars that will not go away....because i stayed in a "mess" for god,,,,i could write page after page of things like the above....as being my "last straw".......curious about you here on the board....any specific "breaking point" or a collection of many things..... thanks for your in put...peaches.
My wife and I were "raised" in the borg. We got out [by means of fading] 5 years ago! [That deserves a cellebration!!] The pedophile issue ripped our blinders off, but it took a few years and some very good books to give us enough information to be strong enough to stop attending.
I had been an elder for 11 years, and thought I understood it all! How dumb can you be? We are so glad to be out of it. What a way NOT to live your life. Our families are wasting their lives away for something that is not ever going to happen.
so, one of the first things i did was look at the beginnings with regard to charles taze russell.. while this may be old news to many, this is indeed new to me.
and i want to tell this to the jws that are no doubt on here too.. you are an adventist sect.. without posting the expanded (very long) version of my research, i will post the basics that lead me to this conclusion.. how unique are jehovahs witnesses?
Good info. If russell were to come back to life today and preach what he did back then even though his dogmas were obviously approved by the christ in 1919 [rutherford hadn't had time to change a great many of them yet] he would be DFed for apostatcy!
we went to oz for a wedding of a brother and sister from the sydney bethel.
it was the most bizzare wedding of all time, the cake was a multi coloured telitubby creation and the veggie food option was baby octopus and squid, the alcohol was free flowing and all bethelites in attendance took full advantage.
we were sat listening to the speaches and it was getting rowdier and rowdier and some of the language was rather unscriptual to say the least, as it was mixed jw and non jw we were surprised to find that all of this noise came from the bethelites.
My wifes Father was the official JW wedding celebrant for our whole area for many years. She went to more weddings than she cares to remember. The one that stands out was her cousins. The mother of the bride to be, did her circuit a favor by buying up all the unused and thawed chicken left over from a circuit assembly. She promptly refroze it and saved it as the main dish at the wedding reception. 2 people nearly died! Lots ended up either in hospital or at home with severe food poisoning.
She was dragged into the backroom, but not much could really be done to her. The local health authorities were also very interested in what had happened.
My wife said as they were driving home they would drive past a car load of people all on the side of the road spewing their guts out, then they would have to pull over and do the same!!
one thing this site has made me reflect on the baptism practice in jw land.. many of us were raised in the religion, thus you were given the pressure early on to shoot for baptism as a goal.. i remember feeling bad because i waited until the ripe old age of 14 to take the plunge.. looking back, i realize that when i was 14, i didnt even know what my favorite color was, let alone have enough knowledge to make a life altering decision.
yet, growing up in that climate, i would say anyone who waited past their early teens to get baptised was viewed with great suspicion and was likely to be viewed as "bad association".
kids who took the dip at 8-9 years of age were viewed as "wise beyond their years" and the like.. how old were some of you when you were baptised, and what are your feelings on the matter?.
HI all, I was 14. I was soooo sick that day, the nerves had got the better of me and I was in the toilet vomitting for at least half the talk. I had searched the assembly grounds the find the p/o and tell him I had changed my mind.... but darn! I couldn't find him anywhere.
My dad had an affair and my mother was reeling. So I thought that if I got baptized it would help her and give her some stability...... So I did it for her. It was a struggle too... as someone said earlier, twice the guilt!
Different CO's have their own ideas and they encourage bodies of elders in certain directions. We had one who had a definition of loose conduct. So we noted it, did some "research" and found the wt articles that backed his definition. We then set about using his definition and followed "the steps" closely and d/fed a guy. The branch questioned the decision. We supplied the articles and the action stood.
Interestingly, not long after they came out and said that bodeis of elders have no rights in determining if a couple has the right to seperate or not, that elders weren't to get involved in saying that they had/didn't have grounds to split.
Thereby preventing the kind of action that was taken.
CO's are a big influence, and their particular "bent" determines the application of some of these fluid rules.
it's probably a "human nature" question more than anything else, but perhaps someone who was a full-fledged jw (unlike myself) can explain it.
virtually the entire jw belief system, even their name, revolves around their public ministry and this ministry is based on certain ideas and premises:.
I think that going out in the f/s was a way of showing ones "faith" regardless of whether you made a convert or not. I generally hoped that in all reality I did NOT meet someone who wanted to take it any further and study the beliefs. It was more convienient to just do my time from door to door and leave it at that. I had too much else to do, let alone study with someone.
I had an episode where I studied up on THE DRAGNET and what it meant in a parable of jesus. I then studied through all the wt stuff and none of the former applications made any sense in relation to the change of the generation stuff. I ran it past a c/o and others and they agreed that it made no sense, but didn't want to think about it lest it spoil their faith. I had to trust in jah, wait upom him, stay loyal to christ's brothers.... I bet if i got the latest wt cd and looked it all up again, it would NOT have changed even now.
