Reniaa,
There's a lot of variety between elders in different Congregations, some elders in some Congregations might make it more difficult than others. There have been cases where elders have disfellowshipped people who had been gone for years, but most of them just leave such people alone, and since, I guess, nobody here knows your Congregation or elders it's very difficult to predict exactly what will happen when you return.
While I'm also bemused as to why you'd ever want to go back, I'll go against the tide here as well and say however that I think a lot of elders don't like to disfellowship people and like to see inactive ones come back so I doubt you'll get too much trouble. Depending on what you've done, I expect you'll have a brief meeting with a few elders, not neccessarily a JC, and as long as you don't defend yourself, it will be relatively painless.
I will add though, that whilst open doubts will be accepted for now, once you commit yourself and become active again for some time, raising any more doubts might get you into a bit of bother...
Posts by Zico
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223Diary of a thinking to return ex-Jw
by reniaa ini thought long and hard about posting this but the mis-information on this site finally persuaded me, i already accept many may not accept what i say on face value and get their appologist pens ready for making sure no pro-witness propaganda slips through the net on this site but here goes....... i've been on this forum for a few months my first post was about how i was thinking of returning to jw's and at my sisters recommendation to look at this site for both sides of the story before taking that step.. i faded from jw's 10/11 years ago now i left my hubby at the time divorced him to going on to have more relationships and kids, i was definately given the impression after asking on this site and with what i read that if i tried to return i might face df or at least a jc but definately a couple of elders questioning me over what i've been upto these last few years - none of these have happened.
i talked with an old jw friend (yes i do have then and she never shunned me quite happily accepted an offer of coffee from me and my asking for a chat) i told her i was interested in going back and was very frank about what i done in the last 10 years but not sure how returning was done now, she quite happily said she go ask for me to find out.. result!
she came back this week and said "all i had to do was goto meetings again" and an offer of a study was there for me if i wanted it to explore the open doubts that i had expressed i now had.. not quite the fire and brimstone welcome this site led me to believe would happen.. i will keep you posted with further updates if i feel the need to put them in future.. .
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Zico
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New Scientist - "Blood doesn't always save lives"
by Zico ini got sent a .pdf copy via e-mail today about blood transfusions that's causing a lot of excitement among local jws.
it was one of those 'look, scientists say we're right' e-mails.
it was in the april 2008 issue of new scientist magazine.
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Zico
I got sent a .pdf copy via e-mail today about blood transfusions that's causing a lot of excitement among local JWs. It was one of those 'Look, Scientists say we're right' e-mails. It was in the April 2008 issue of New Scientist magazine. I think this might end up doing the rounds in the JW community, and I can also see it being quoted in a Watchtower, so I thought I'd post it here. If anyone wants the original .pdf, if you PM me your e-mail, I can send it to you.
Here's what New Scientist have to say:
An act of faith in the operating room
BLOOD transfusions have been a constant of medicine for almost a century. They are used to treat not only patients who have lost a lot of blood in a traumatic accident, but also those who are critically ill or undergoing major surgery. So it is a shock to learn that the technique frequently does more harm than good. A series of studies suggest it may increase the risk of death in all but the most serious cases of anaemia and people suffering a catastrophic loss of blood (see page 8). It appears this damage is done not by infectious agents in the transfused blood but by the blood itself - possibly because of chemical changes that have a deleterious effect on the recipient's immune system. The precise mechanism is still unclear, and every effort should be made to uncover it so that surgeons can be made aware of all the risks involved. At first glance it seems astonishing that a technique used so widely for so long could be doing such harm. Yet many surgeons have proved reluctant to submit their methods to systematic study. They have tended to put their trust in the fact that their procedures have been practised for years and appear to work. The lesson is clear. Surgeons must bring science to bear to ensure their techniques really are having the desired effect. The revelations about the dangers of blood transfusions are a stark reminder that in medicine there is no substitute for evidence.
Blood doesn't always save lives
Transfusions can be a lifeline, but concerns are growing that they can sometimes be harmful too
RACHEL NOWAK
"FOR the life of the flesh is in the blood. No soul of you shall eat blood." So says the Bible's book of Leviticus, and it is for this reason that Jehovah's Witnesses shun blood transfusions. They do not, however, shun surgery. As long as surgeons use special techniques, Jehovah's Witnesses can have surgery - including operations with the greatest potential for blood loss, such as open-heart surgery - without ever receiving a drop of someone else's blood.
Now some surgeons and anaesthetists are questioning whether every patient shouldn't get the same treatment. Over the past decade a number of studies have found that, far from saving lives, blood transfusions can actually harm many patients.
The problem is not the muchpublicised risk of blood-borne infectious agents, such as HIV, but the blood itself. Study after study has shown that transfusions, particularly those containing redblood cells, are linked to higher death rates in patients who have had a heart attack, undergone heart surgery, or who are in critical care. The exact nature of the link is uncertain, but it seems likely that chemical changes in ageing blood, their impact on the immune system, and the blood's ability to deliver oxygen are key.
In fact, most experts now agree that the risk posed by the transfused blood itself is far greater than that of a blood-borne infection. "Probably 40 to 60 percent of blood transfusions are not good for the patients," says Bruce Spiess, a cardiac anaesihesiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
Such claims have led this week to the US National Institutes of Health issuing a call for proposals to study the problem Also this week, the Joint Commission in Chicago, which accredits US hospitals, is holding the first of several meetings to look for ways to reduce the risks. It is expected to at least conclude that hospitals should be more selective in the use of transfusions.
Blood transfusion became a mainstay of medicine during the two world wars, where it was used as a last resort to save soldiers who had suffered massive blood loss. But now, far from being restricted to catastrophic bleeding, transfusions are routinely used as an optional treatment, most commonly for patients in intensive care or undergoing major surgery. In these situations, mostly small volumes of red cells are transfused, usually after they have beer stored at 4 °C for anything up to 42 days.
The rationale behind such blood transfusions seems incontrovertible. Red cells deliver vital oxygen to tissues, and seriously ill patients who are also anaemic fare less well, so a transfusion should help. Those assumptions went untested for the better part of a century.
Things started to change in 1999 with a randomised controlled trial on 838 critical care patients in Canada that used haemoglobin levels to determine when a blood transfusion was given. Normal levels of haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in red cells, range from 120 to 170 grams per litre. A normal haematocrit - the proportion of red cells in the blood - ranges from 36 to 50 percent. Doctors decide whether to give a transfusion based on a number of factors, including haemoglobin levels and haematocrit, and the patient's overall robustness. Many guidelines exist, and practice varies from one hospital or doctor to another, but it is common for patients to receive transfusions when their haemoglobin dips to between 70 and 100 g/1 or their haematocrit to 21 to 30 per cent.
But the Canadian study found significantly fewer patients died in hospital, 22 versus 28 per cent, if they received transfusions only when their haemoglobin fell below 70 g/1 rather than when it fell below 100 g/1.
A more recent study has found that in heart attack patients withhacmatocrits of over 25 per cent, a transfusion is associated with more than three times the risk of death or a second heart attack within 30 days compared with not having a transfusion (Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 292, p 1555).
For almost 9000 patients who had heart surgery in the UK between 1996 and 2003, receiving a red cell transfusion was associated with three limes the risk of dying in the following year and an almost sixfold risk of dying within 30 days of surgery compared with not receiving one. Transfusions were also associated with more infections and higher incidences of stroke, heart attack and kidney failure-complications usually linked to a lack of oxygen in body tissues (Circulation, vol 116, p 2544).
"There is virtually no high quality study in surgery, or intensive or acule care - outside of when you are bleeding to death - that shows that blood transfusion is beneficial, and many that show it is bad for you," says Gavin Murphy, a cardiac surgeon at the Bristol Heart Instiiuie, who ran the UK study.
Organisations such as the American Society of Anaesthesiologiscs have started recommending that doctors be more conservative about ordering transfusions. But many experts worry that the recommendations are being ignored, and don't go far enough. Transfusion, they say, should only be used as a last resort, and far greater effort should go into preventing blood loss in the first place and ensuring patients are not anaemic before surgery (see "Bloodless surgery').
"Usually when there is any clinical uncertainty about a treatment you don't give it, but with transfusions we do," says James Isbister of the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, who is an adviser to the Australian Red Cross Blood Service.
A priority is to find out how transfusions can be harmful. One possibility is that they affect the patient's immune system. Blood transfusions are typically teeming with cytokines - chemicals that modify immune cells - and both the cytokines and white blood cells in donated blood have been shown 10 affect the action of "recipient" immune cells in the lab. Before modern immunosuppressant drugs were developed, blood transfusions were sometimes used to achieve immunosuppression during kidney transplants.
Several of the recent studies have found an association between contracting infections in hospital and transfusions, which seems to support the theory. "The more units of blood patients receive, the more likely they are to get infections," says Mary Rogers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who has studied transfusions in US heart surgery patients.
Infections are not the whole story, however. Within hours of being collected, red cells become stiff, making them less able to squeeze into narrow capillaries - essential if they are to deliver oxygen to organs. The changes are triggered in part by white cells, although it is not known how they might do this. Blood banks in the UK routinely filter blood to remove any white cells, something which is not done everywhere in the US or Australia. Chemical changes also take place that limit the ability of red cells to deliver oxygen to the tissues. For example, levels of nitric oxide (NO), which signals blood vessels to open, drop dramatically within a day of collection. "We are now working on the best way to put NO back into blood on a large scale," says Jonathan Stamler of Duke University in North Carolina.
Another study, published last month, suggescs the longer red cells are stored, the poorer their quality (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 358, p 1229). It found patients who received blood more than two weeks old were almost 70 per cent more likely to die within a year than those who got newer blood.
"If all blood had to be used within two weeks, it would cause a major inventory problem," says Isbister, adding that the finding highlights the need to look for better ways to store blood. Just as important is the need for clinical trials to work out who benefits from transfusions and who doesn't. "We need 60 or 70 randomised clinical trials right now," says Spiess.
But people should not stop donating blood, stress experts. "Transfusion is critical in several situations such as severe haemorrhage. We also need blood for essential products such as antibodies and clotting factors for people with haemophilia," says Isbister.
BLOODLESS SURGERY
"Reduce, reuse, recycle" is usually a mantra for the environment, but it applies to "bloodless surgery" too.
It was originally developed to enable Jehovah's Witnesses, who shun transfusions, to undergo major surgery. But as safety concerns have spread so has its use. It may involve little more than treating any anaemia prior to surgery, reducing the blood taken for tests, and meticulous surgery. "Most general surgery patients who receive a transfusion get one or two units of blood. With careful surgery you can avoid losing that amount in the first place," says Nicolas iabbour at the Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City.
Special techniques can also be used. For example, at the New Jersey Institute for the Advancement of Bloodless Medicine and Surgery at Engiewood Hospital, patients who have lost a lot of blood may spend time in a hyperbaric chamber after surgery in an attempt to load their remaining red cells with oxygen. More commonly, during or after surgery, spilt blood is collected, cleaned and reinfused. The process has the disadvantage that it removes proteins that stimulate clotting and is also unacceptable to some Jehovah's Witnesses. An alternative is to remove some blood before surgery and replace it with saline or another fluid. After surgery, the patient's blood is returned.
Bloodless surgery works, suggests a 2006 study comparing 49 Jehovah's Witnesses and 196 non-Jehovah's Witnesses undergoing cardiac surgery, which found comparable death rates during surgery [The American Journal of Cardiology, vol 98, p 1223). -
137
What is the best way to help BurnTheShips...
by nvrgnbk into grasp that the basic purpose of science is to produce useful models of reality.
how to help him understand that trying to make observable reality "fit" around a collection of writings designed in its first half to inspire the oftentimes persecuted jewish people and in its second to consolidate the fragmented roman empire is an exercise in futility?.
sorry, burn.. i couldn't resist.. hope you're having a wonderful day,.
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Zico
Dawg:
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137
What is the best way to help BurnTheShips...
by nvrgnbk into grasp that the basic purpose of science is to produce useful models of reality.
how to help him understand that trying to make observable reality "fit" around a collection of writings designed in its first half to inspire the oftentimes persecuted jewish people and in its second to consolidate the fragmented roman empire is an exercise in futility?.
sorry, burn.. i couldn't resist.. hope you're having a wonderful day,.
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Zico
I think this thread's repitition that BurnTheShips will become an atheist is arrogant and condescending.
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What will you do when the Great Tribulation Begins?
by Malkiel ini've always wanted to ask this question to those that have decided to leave the organization.. what will you do when the great tribulation begins?.
right now folks, a lot is happening in the political world.. gordon brown (prime miniter of england) last week gave a speech to the un stating that it is time for the un to step in and solve the world's problems, (specifically mentioning the economy and hunger crisis worldwide.).
barrack obama is shaping up to be the next president, a fellow who sure knows how to persuade and lead great crowds.
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Zico
Malkiel,
"That is why I adhere to my organization, while at the same time live 'in Jesus' by doing my best to adhere to his words and principles."
Just a quick point: Do you think this is the full essence of what being 'in Jesus' requires? And what do you think being 'in Jesus' means? Perhaps Romans chapter 8 will help: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%208&version=31 -
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Is the Bible a magazine
by TopHat ini am cornfused by this news release.
since 1926, the watch tower bible and tract society of pennsylvania has published more than 153 million copies of the bible in 67 languages.
the watchtower has an average printing of 37 million, giving it the largest circulation of any religious magazine in the world.
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Zico
They have printed more than 153 million bibles in 67 languages.
On top of this, they print an average of 37 million Watchtower magazines per issue.
Which part is confusing? -
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Personal observations Re: former religious members
by Zico init seems to me that many (not all) agnostics/atheists on here, as former jws, seem to grow quite an adversity to religion as a whole, seeing any kind of religion as harmful, and when they make such critism, those on the board who have maintained religious beliefs often point out to them that they need to distinguish between the effects a mainstream religion, and a high control religion has on someone's development.
i've generally found that people who had religious parents, but were raised in 'mainstream' or moderate religions but stopped attending don't hold any grudges or ill thought about the religion they were raised in as children, whereas those i know who were raised in the jehovah's witnesses and left, are usually quite anti-watchtower (myself included!
i thought about this, after a general discussion at work today, when a girl in my office, in her late 20s, and who was recently married made a comment that i found surprising.
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Zico
Narkissos, thank you for your observations and story, very interesting.
Also thanks to everyone else for your input.
So many non-believers do see a religious upbringing as something helpful as opposed to something damaging. In my 2 years on this discussion forum there have been regular threads talking about the damage religion causes, I think such observations suggest otherwise? -
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Blondie and/or Leolaia...I have a question
by BONEZZ inso i am going thru my boxes of cult books making them ready for ebay when i come across a book called, "man's salvation out of world distress at hand!.
" (a freddy book i believe) it was published in 1975 and owned by my dad who was quite a jw student before his eyes opened.. anyway, i'm checking condition of the book and on page 208, paragraph 8 he has made a notation to the left of the paragraph.
scanners not working so i will type out part of the paragraph.
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Zico
"Rutherford taught at one time that they were BROTHERS!!!"
Don't the Mormons believe this? -
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What will you do when the Great Tribulation Begins?
by Malkiel ini've always wanted to ask this question to those that have decided to leave the organization.. what will you do when the great tribulation begins?.
right now folks, a lot is happening in the political world.. gordon brown (prime miniter of england) last week gave a speech to the un stating that it is time for the un to step in and solve the world's problems, (specifically mentioning the economy and hunger crisis worldwide.).
barrack obama is shaping up to be the next president, a fellow who sure knows how to persuade and lead great crowds.
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Zico
Malkiel,
Trying to be a bit more serious, unlike my last post:
"Jehovah's organization is that ark."
The bible, and certainly not the New Testament, never talks about God having any kind of Organisation, let alone it being what our salvation is based on. Instead we find the bible regularly pointing to faith in Jesus' and his death as that which can save us. After all, he is 'The Way, and the Truth, and the Life' and he said 'No one comes to the father except through me' surely any Organisation that claims such roles or titles contradicts Jesus' own words?
Perhaps the real biblical concept of being 'in Jesus' would better illustrate being in "that ark" -
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Mac or PC?
by wings inso i have a decent computer.
hp, nice sony monitor.
when my dad passed i inherited a new mac.
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Zico
JWD hates Macs. :(