If the Star Wars analogy of destroying the Death Star were viable, then one person using the force would "let go."
That was Ray Franz.
The problem is that the Empire continued to exist after the Death Star exploded. Unlike Luke, Ray did not last to destroy the Governing Body.
But "there is another."
been a lurker here for a long time.
i am just now starting to deal with the issues from my witness upbringing.
it's been about 10 years since i was df'd.. just recently i started to see a therapist and i am trying to get across the depth of the effects of growing up a witness.
Try researching Steven Hassan's BITE method to identify dangerous mind-control cults.
Here's a start:
https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/91207/cults-steven-hassans-bite-model
i just had a thought inspired by @newboy's recent post:.
why is it that despite the watchtower corporation being arguably the biggest publishing house in history, having produced billions of tracts, brochures, magazines, books for o very 100 years, and having the largest army of volunteer publicity agents on the planet, that 99% of the population is still clueless as to what their message is all about?.
if you ask random people what jw's beleive you will rarely get the so-called "good news": gods kingdom is going to soon usher in a paradise earth and fix all the worlds problems under the 1000 year reign of christ.. you will instead get: "they're the people who... 1. don't celebrate christmas or birthdays, 2. don't take blood, 3. go around with the watchtower, 4. have big assemblies... etc etc".
The biggest publisher of stuff almost nobody would read. You can't learn about them unless you read it. And in orfer to commit to learning about them, they offer free home studies. Who the hell wants that?
The average person in America can name Kim Kardasian's baby but cannot tell you who is the prime minister of Canada or President of Mexico.
To be fair, most know nothing of competing religions, unless they watched some documentary video.
my wife was diagnosed with ms about two years ago.
we have been living in ohio for the last 5 years but were recently assigned to a new congregation because of the dissolving and sale of our congregation/kh.
my wife's symptoms spiked after being relocated to our new hall back in january.
If it is possible, I have to highly agree with ALL OR NOTHING above.
If not, still consider fading quickly, quietly.
i'm an atheist as i do not see any evidence for the existance of a god.
i encourage critical thinking in everyone and am ready to debate anyone on whether or not there is a god and what that god might be like.
hmu..
SBF: For many people the idea of God explains why there is something rather than nothing, because he is understood to be a being outside of material reality who is the ultimate cause of everything that exists. For many people this makes more sense than simply asserting that reality exists and no further explanation is required or even possible.
Who said "no further explanation is required or even possible." People are searching for answers and Krauss's "something from nothing" is still far from accepted, but it's progress. We will get it one day. We will laugh at primitive understandings of dark matter/energy and the like.
So man created the gods to explain rain, lightning, sunshine, etc. Even as man developed, gods were a great explanation for anything and everything. Then science developed enough to start making gods less needed in explanations. We then had the god of the gaps- gaps in our understanding of how things happened.
Slim, we grew up as a species to the point where we realize that the god explanation is flawed. It just pushes back one level at the question of how we came to be. We would still have to explain how "God" came to be or accept that something was eternal or came from nothing.
I struggled with "If that eternal something had to be a god, is it because of needed care and guidance?" Well, between sincerely turning to God for guidance and winding up in a dangerous mind control cult, and looking at all the thousands of children torn away from their parents to die in a tsunami, and seeing senseless pain and suffering among people, I concluded that a caring and guiding god doesn't exist.
Man is still just living with the ideas of that same god who made the rain and lightning. But a group of control freak priests in the middle east twisted at the idea of god enough to add that "He" was nothing but good. Before all that, even "Jehovah" was a warrior god. And then it got worse- politicians in Rome trying to salvage their empire added Jesus to the mix and "How dare you attack Jesus?"
When a person tells me their prayers are answered, and that's proof-enough, I just fall back on tsunami victims and suffering humans and my own cult time. Yeah, that's proof enough to me that praying for small enough "miracles" leads to coincidences. And we are grown-up enough to stop believing in a tooth-fairy-type of god.
not quite a week ago, @lost in the fog created a thread entitled: do you have this illness?.
https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/5187824140681216/do-you-have-this-illness.
in my year of being on this forum, i have browsed many a disillusioned thread of ex-jehovah’s witnesses expressing similar symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder when detailing their awakening - my own story included.
"Watchtower’s suppressive approach to the flock freezes their development to that of a helpless child, unaware that critical thinking even exists. It strips members of opportunities to solve their own problems under the guise of protecting them and dressing it up as “convenience”."
So true. Instead of the equivalent of a college education, many JW's are homeschooled to protect them from "worldly" teens wanting sex, and they barely qualify to pass the high school equivalency test. They wind up introverted, but don't even know that because they can stand at a door and do a presentation in front of a stranger. (The animated Disney movie TWISTED can help ones see what that is like.) Even the ones who go to public schools are discouraged from anything beyond basic involvement and they avoid after-school athletics, music, dance, anything that makes them a more rounded person, and then are told that college is bad.
JW's don't really have opinions. They are used to looking to their Watchtower library to see what they are supposed to think about issues.
Many who leave Watchtower by way of inactivity suffer incredibly "in the world" because of their inability to think for themselves and a skewed sense of morality.
most americans want some form of religious identity - even atheists are creating churches.
by j. warner wallace | fox news.
the number of self-proclaimed christians is shrinking in america.. i’ve been collecting data on this trend for over 10 years, and the surveys reveal an important truth: fewer people claim a christian affiliation than ever before, and those who claim no religious affiliation are the fastest growing group in america.. but while fewer people may belong to christian churches or communities, americans will likely retain some form of religious identity – especially if what’s happening in europe is an indicator of things to come.. a new pew forum survey conducted in western europe reveals that christianity is waning there even faster than it is in the united states.
I think the data in the initial post is skewed a bit.
In my humble opinion, Americans desirous of a religious identity are not increasing in numbers.
American Football is the Sunday religion here.
Polls suggesting high numbers of "believers" are about those who will say it, but don't really live it. Heck, a higher power could be the aliens who helped build the pyramids.
this is bigger than christmas and birthdays wrap into one.
thanks to the australian royal commission our youngest son has woke up.
we received a e-mail from him tonight where he apologized to us for shunning us all these years, how bad he felt for doing this.
Well, it won't post. It just says AWESOME!
"millions now living will never die" that teaching persisted for a number of years from the early 1920`s ,sad to say that their would not be anywhere near millions alive today.and with another few years their won`t be anybody alive .. the year 1925 was supposed to see the resurrection of faithful men of old such as abraham issac and jacob and noah who were to be princes in the earth.
of course no such thing happened and we don`t here anything more about that prediction anymore.. the time period between adams creation and eves creation was an excuse why armageddon was delayed in about october 1975 because they didn`t know how much time had elapsed between the two.
that`s all forgotten about now.. six thousand years of human history was supposed to have ended in about october 1872 according to studies in the scriptures vol.2 1906 , the "time is at hand" page 11 (forward 1916 ) puts the start of the one thousand year reign of jesus christ as of the year 1873. so in 1906 they the i.b.s.a.
-That originally, a water canopy rendered the entire planet temperate and this was the source of the flood waters
-That human lifespans fell drastically after the flood because of some sort of shielding effect provided by this water canopy.
I know that they don't say any of that any more, but I would assume that is still current doctrine.
i feel like the world needs to wake up and realize that bethel, the home of the governing body in warwick, new york is the "vatican" of the jehovah's witness world.
their doctrines, edicts, and policies affect every jehovah's witness man, woman, and child around the world.
i don't feel like the politicians in foreign countries understand this.
Governments can mandate certain things. So there could be special circumstances due to individual governmental laws that cause things to differ in Australia from anywhere else.
But the only ultimate solution is the admittance of wrong and ending any involvement of children beyond attending with their parents (such as the recruitment work), telling parents and children about what has happened, and always always always treating any accusation of a crime as if it were as serious as murder (because it certainly is that serious to a victim).
