Open mind

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Posts by Open mind

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  28

  What Is Your "Gift"?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  we all are gifted with something.. i would say that i am gifted with a great sense of humor and i'm told i'm very discerning and perceptive.. now, if you asked me to hammer a nail, i'd think about getting a screwdriver...... .

  what's your gift???.

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  Open mind
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  61

  How Many on JWNet are still JWs?

  by RayPublisher in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i've been wondering about this for some time.

  if there are 60,000+ registered users on here, what percentage are actual non-dfed or non-daed witnesses?

  if it was 1/3, that would be over 20,000 active/inactive witnesses that post and read these pages- and that's huge.

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  Open mind

  Technically still in. Attend a meeting about every 6 weeks. Wife and kids even less. I'm the "spiritual" one I guess. Keeps my elderly JW parents who live in another state somewhat happy to think we'll all be in the Paradise Zoo together. Will likely continue this charade as long as they are alive.

  Also, it keeps up enough appearances to be able to do a little bit of seed planting here and there with other JW relatives.

  om
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  12

  GREAT BOOK ! May free your JW loved ones.

  by wobble in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i have just finished reading a great book entitled "believing bullshit" by stephen law, published by prometheus books of n.y. www.prometheusbooks.com.

  in it the author outlines how we come to believe total claptrap most often because of the dubious methods used by the promoters of these ideas.. he does not set out to debunk the ideas themselves as the main purpose of the book, though in passing he has to do so with some .like alien abductions, christian science and homeopathy etc.

  his main purpose is to expose the methods used to get people to believe,,and how even if the idea being put forward may be good, or a truth, to use such methods is not justified, and leads one open to being sucked in to an intellectual black hole if you are duped by them.. if this book is read by an active, believing jw they will not smell any rats, but by the end of it, if they are honest with themselves they will see the methods used by the wt as totally dishonest and reminiscent of snake-oil salesmen.. it may just free their minds enough.. i cannot praise it too highly, it is a valuable read for anybody, and shows why even college educated, intelligent people can be fooled by bs..

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  Open mind

  Thanks for the recommendation wobble.

  I've got a pretty liberal JW relative who probably wouldn't be put off by the title.

  Here's another read that I tried getting some fairly hard-line JW relatives to read, but I don't think they ever did:

  

  http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986

  Ms. Tavirs discusses cognitive dissonance at great length without targeting religious beliefs directly. A great way to present to JWs is:

  "Hey, here's a book that's got a lot of good ideas for improving communication in a marriage."

  It really does. No "shocking" words in the title. No direct attacks on religion. Just a primer in critical thinking skills.

  (Credit goes to OTWO for originally bringing this book to my attention.)

  om
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  24

  My Husband gave an elder the "finger" yesterday

  by Found Sheep in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  dave the elder is actually a nice guy, he fixed the walls of our house, took six months!!!!.

  anyway my ,never been a jw husband, was driving home and saw him and all the pain that i have gone through went through his head and he though what right did this guy have?

  he spent six months comming to our house as he pleased and then to turn around and shunn my wife!!!!.

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  Open mind

  As a 3rd gen JW, we were trained to get all googly eyed when we'd pass by a Kingdom Hall on cross-country trips.

  Thanks to this thread, we'll now have a different way to take note of these landmarks.

  om
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  14

  Who thinks that I am intolerant as a born again Atheist?

  by AK - Jeff in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  who thinks that i [and other born again atheists] am intolerant?.

  godrulz 32 pages of thread - and he doesn't even make sense in what he said.

  what the hell?

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  Open mind

  Atheist tigers are the worst.

  om
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  17

  This is how I'm doing.

  by hotchocolate in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i'm smiling as i write this.

  i've just read my post three years ago, titled "i left.

  " i wrote that two days after i had packed up my house and flown 2000 miles away to sydney with my little boy.

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  Open mind

  Good on yer mate!!!!

  Ya warmed the cockles of my Yankee heart.

  om
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  59

  New to this site. Scared, Lonely and in a lot of pain due to shunning by my family.

  by wonder*woman in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  this is my very first post to this forum.

  i am begging for some much needed encouragment and support by those who are kind hearted and know exactly the pain shunning causes.

  i am a 30 year old former jehovah's witness and a mother of two beautiful girls.

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  Open mind

  ((((( wonder woman )))))

  You're among friends here.

  What a beautiful, painful first post.

  Wishing you strength on your path.

  om
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  8

  Stop bashing Awake! (You just might be making it better.)

  by Open mind in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  the august 2011 awake!

  contains the most secular article i've ever read in this magazine.

  it's entitled "ibn battuta reveals his world".

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  Open mind

  james-woods: "can we be sure this was not copied word for word from some un-named source?"

  Anything's possible, but I doubt this is very likely. Now re-writing and paraphrasing? Oh yeah.

  InterestedOne: "I have always wondered if they watch this site and pull ideas from it."

  Plenty of threads have been done on this topic. At minimum, someone (perhaps a paid non-JW 3rd party provider) keeps an eye out for copyright infringements and WT has taken legal actions to protect their rights. It's also pretty easy for a non-believing poster here to make a casual comment to a well-connected COBOE who talks to a CO who talks to the Branch. Enough CO reports pile up and even the bloated bureaucracy that is Watchtower may slowly make a change. Just not big enough or fast enough, IMO.

  om
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  8

  Stop bashing Awake! (You just might be making it better.)

  by Open mind in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  the august 2011 awake!

  contains the most secular article i've ever read in this magazine.

  it's entitled "ibn battuta reveals his world".

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  Open mind

  The August 2011 Awake! contains the most secular article I've ever read in this magazine. It's entitled "Ibn Battuta Reveals His World". The three page article reads like it could easily have come straight out of National Geographic for Kids. It's a biographical essay about a 14th century Muslim man whose claim to fame was traveling. He racked up 75,000 miles during his lifetime, "a feat unequaled before the age of steam".
  
  The first thing I did when glancing through this article was to jump to the final paragraph looking for the usual JW sales pitch. It wasn't there. Next I scanned for scriptural references. Not a single one. My interest now peaked, I actually began reading the article slowly and carefullly. (Yuck, I know.) 99.5% of the article shows no bias in favor of the Bible, Christianity and certainly not JWs. Nor does it bash Islam one iota. Only one little word betrayed the providence of this article as being the Watchtower Writing Department. Here's the quote. See if you see the same thing.

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  "On his way to Jerusalem and its Dome of the Rock shrine, he stopped at Bethlehem, where he noted the veneration that professed Christians gave to Jesus' birthplace."
  *************************

  Professed? That's right. Per WT dogma, by the 14th Century "true" Christians pretty much didn't exist anymore.
  
  But hey, other than that tiny little bit of deeply veiled self-promotion, this article was about as neutral and secular as anyone could ask for.
  
  
  I'd love to hear anyone else's review. Also, I'd love to hear ideas about how or why an article like this made it into Awake!
  
  om

  p.s. I'm sure the article is available to anyone on Watchtower.org
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  54

  JW's who remain in the organisation but try to reform it - pissing against the wind

  by jambon1 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i came across a website that presents decent argumentation against three main areas of jw doctrine.. http://jwreform.org/index.html.

  who do these people think they are?

  do they really believe that the wts will sit up and take notice of their objections?

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  Open mind

  One of my relatives who is soon to become an Elder disagrees. He's going to be a force for change within the local BOE.

  Ah to be young, idealistic and full of head-beating-against-a-wall energy again.

  *sigh*

  p.s. I've carefully tried to demonstrate the futility of his plan, but to no avail.