Posts by neverendingjourney

61

Problems of Dating the Watchtower Way

by enigma1863 in

i wanted to know what problems you have learned about dating in the "truth" acording to there policy.

i feel like you dont really know someone until you live with them.

also some put on a false personality until they get what they want i.e.

neverendingjourney

This thread reminds me of a disturbing talk at a district assembly in the early 1970s. Back then all single JWs were expected to devote all our youthful energies into full time pioneering and were encouraged to "wait until the New System" regarding marriage.

The more things change the more they stay the same. The Watchtower published a book called Children in the early 1940s that advised youths not to get married on account of the nearness of Armageddon. The 10 year-olds this crap was pushed on would now be dead or well into their 80s.

Anyway, this particular talk actually advised brothers who felt unable to remain single not to waste valuable time on courtships as the only thing that mattered was a mutual love of pioneering and being able to serve Jehovah full time together. Yes, that's right, just marry the first person you meet who is also looking for a marriage mate and you will automatically be compatable with each other!!

I'm convinced this is what happened to my brother. He was in his early 20s and married a woman in her late 20s. She was already an old maid by WT standards. I think he truly loved her but I never got the sense that she did. She was always cold and unaffectionate towards him and our family in general. She was uber-zealous and was doing the "spiritual" thing, aka being obedient to the GB, by marrying my brother who had rank in the organization and appeared to be headed for a nice "spiritual career." It saddens me to see my brother because he's clearly stuck in a loveless marriage with no way out.

61

Problems of Dating the Watchtower Way

by enigma1863 in

i wanted to know what problems you have learned about dating in the "truth" acording to there policy.

i feel like you dont really know someone until you live with them.

also some put on a false personality until they get what they want i.e.

neverendingjourney

Their stance on dating really set me back. I was never very good at talking to girls anyway, and I was never forced to develop those skills early on. By the time I became an eligible bachelor (roughly 17 in WT land), girls were showing interest in me. I didn't have to exert much effort. I was part of a very small pool of guys that age who were regular pioneers and who had the full seal of approval from WT elders.

It was very much an artificial world. I didn't have to develop any dating skills. When I would "date" it was always in a large group setting. If I did something obnoxious, or what have you, I wasn't forced to change. I could play the submission card and get away with it.

I started waking up when I was 23. Fading was an extremely slow process. I wasn't fully "out" until roughly 27. By that point, I had zero real world dating skills, and I've been playing catch up ever since. It was extremely difficult to learn that all of the attributes that would make a man desirable in the JW world are largely irrelevant in the real world. I was no longer in demand as the pool of eligible bachelors became infinitely larger. It's been a rough ride.

I wish I had spent my adolescence and early adulthood shaking off the social awkwardness and honing real-world dating skills instead of wasting time with WT tasks. It's extremely difficult to try to go through that when you're in your late 20s and 30s, and I've largely just given up.

25

Don't let your job interfere with your meeting attendance

by Quarterback in

jw
friends

recently, a public speaker brought up this point that i remembered being preached in the 70's.

when they bring this matter up, they always manage to give you an experience of how one person stood his ground, and got a great job offer, as a result.. what about the many experiences of ones that were not blessed?

i can memtion horror stories of ones that should have kept working their meetings..

neverendingjourney

The sad thing is that whenever an assembly rolled around they always seemed to find some poor sap who'd recently given up a stable job in order to pursue "kingdom interests". They'd parade him in front of everyone on the platform and for a short while he'd feel like he was walking on clouds, getting congratulated and attaboyed by all the "prominent" people in the circuit.

I wish they'd do "where are they now" updates and see where those people ended up a year or two later. In my experience, most of them were forced to take a sorrier version of their prior job when Jehovah failed to provide. It took me a few years before I had enough experience to figure this out on my own, but new initiates generally don't have a clue how these things end up.

203

My Explanation of Why They Got it Wrong About Blood Using Only the NWT

by cofty in

10 " any israelite or any alien living among them who eats any bloodi will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from his people.

12 therefore i say to the israelites, "none of you may eat blood, nor may an alien living among you eat blood.

15 'anyone, whether native-born or alien, who eats anything found dead or torn by wild animals must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be ceremonially unclean till evening; then he will be clean.

neverendingjourney

I look at their blood and smoking bans as cult attempts to make the members feel special about taking a unique stand compared to "the world" and as distractors because the end hasn't arrived yet.

One of the earliest realizations I had during the waking up process is that the Witnesses attract converts by setting up processes of elimination, but they never really fully substantiate their own beliefs. They start off with the premises that there is a God and that the Bible is true. If you buy into those premises and are sufficiently ignorant of the Bible's content, then they start you off with series of eliminations.

War is bad; eliminate all denominations that go to war. The trinity is false; eliminate all trinitarian denomiations. You must go preaching door to door; that eliminates pretty much everyone else except the Mormons. Smoking, blood, belief in the soul, and so on and so on. At that point only the Witnesses are left, so they must be the truth!

The problem is that presenting evidence that a position is wrong doesn't necessarily mean the opposite position is the correct one. It's much, much easier to show that there are arguments suggesting the soul is mortal than it is to conclusively prove that the Bible says it's immortal. It's a logical fallacy that the untrained mind can easily fall for. The blood ban is another of their exclusive doctrines they can use to "eliminate" other denominations from possibly having "the truth."

58

New congregation accounting system

by thedog1 in

i'm sure i read a thread here about the new congregation accounting procedures.

i ask because i handle the accounts in our cong and in our part of the world the new accounting system has just arrived whereby local congs do not have their own account any longer, but all funds outside of basic monthly costs is forwarded to an account controlled by the org.

this is causing huge confusion in our cong as we have to work out how much we need to keep back for monthly costs and the new idea is that you send all your extra cash to the org and if you need it back you can ask for it but we don't know how easy or hard it would be to do that.

neverendingjourney

This is probably way off topic, but I could have ripped the congregation off big time back when I was assistant account servant or whatever it was called (it's been way too long). About half the elders and servants lacked a high school degree. None had gone to college. They were completely ill-prepared to do the simplest accounting task. Preparing the weekly bank deposit was an hour-long affair.

When the audit would come around, the elder doing the auditing would read the instructions from the society and would be absolutely clueless. He would read some questions, joke about how he didn't have a clue what it was saying, check the right box, laugh and say "you did that right guys", and we'd all have a laugh and go on about our business. Duplicate receipts weren't kept. A book study conductor could simply create a receipt saying there were 5 dollars in donations when there were actually 20 and pocket the difference.

Luckily for the Witnesses, I never saw any evidence of thievery. The donations were typically pretty pitiful, so the caper would be an extremely small one. I was a kid when they were still selling the magazines, but I imagine the temptation to steal would have been a lot bigger then as hundreds of dollars were being collected.

To bring this back to a point that's on-topic, although I think any theft is probably a minor problem, electronic payment, donations by credit card, etc. would all but eliminate it. There's always the off-chance that some hacker JW could figure out a way to game the system, but honestly how many of those could possibly exist?

46

Doesn't the ARMAGEDDON teaching foster a MORBID view of the future?

by Black Man in

jw
friends

even when i was dyed-in-the-wool j-dub, i felt the armageddon teaching was one of the most morbid concepts to be hammered into the psyches of jws.

think about it, only jws would survive this catastrophe, which translates to roughly .001 percent of the population would survive while everyone else would die a horrible death.

that includes people who do good things and are good people, but are just not jws.

neverendingjourney

This view also helps explain why JWs don't give a sh*t about doing charitable works for non JWs. They're bird feed anyway.

16

It comes it this...

by new hope and happiness in

he once had the hard rugged and handsome face of a hollywood film star.

he was one of those i feared completely indoctinated,enforcing his indoctrination with out love.

everything anybody did for the organisation was a privalige and all outside organisations were apart of the world, this included law inforcement.

neverendingjourney

Even though I've been out for nearly a decade, not a day goes by without my giving some thought to the Witnesses in one form or another.

This morning as I was getting ready for work I was thinking of the P.O. of my old congregation. The man was only a few years older than my father, but for as long as I can remember (and I'm in my mid 30s now), we always thought of him as an old man. He always carried himself that way.

Rumor has it he was borderline illiterate before we became a Witness and he fully learned to read using WT publications. Children were afraid of him. JW parents would threaten their kids by telling them they would let Bro. P.O. know they were misbehaving if they didn't shape up. When I became a pioneer, he often showed contempt for me. It didn't sit well with him for whatever reason that I was a young, ambitious JW looking to quickly move up the ranks. Many if not most JWs my age didn't care for him. Some outright despised him.

Yet, on a few occasions I was able to see how genuinely hurt he was when yet another young JW drifted away, many of them into criminal or emotional problems or unenviable lifestyle choices. After several years had passed since I drifted away from the WT world, I had occasion to see him again at my grandmother's funeral. I was never disfellowshipped. His expression revealed genuine joy at having seen me again. It's almost as if he were happy to see that even though I'd drifted away from the WT, I managed to make it out okay. If you knew the fate of many of the JWs in my congregation who were my age, you would understand this. It made me forget a lot of the resentments I held against him.

Word got back to me through my JW siblings that the PO's health has been deteriorating. He battled prostate cancer a few years back and now has pretty advanced Parkinson's. I'm genuinely sad for this man. His entire life was the congregation. He thought he was doing the right thing. He spent countless nights visiting sick people at the hospital, doing home visits with families who had unruly children the parents needed help with. I don't think the man ever took a vacation. He took a really low paying government job so that he could have the evenings and weekends free to dedicate to JW matters. And what does he have to show for it?

At least he has a govt pension and social security to pull him through, but this is a man who never thought he'd see the year 2000, much less old age. He's now roughly 70 and has very little to look forward to in life. I wonder how he does it. How does he manage to quiet the thoughts at night that doubtless urge him to reconsider how he spent his life? For as much as I despise what this religion does to people or for as much as I genuinely hate people who use the authority structure to abuse others, I can't help but feel sorry for this man. When he dies, I'm sure the KH won't be able to contain the attendees at his funeral, but given how strict and ornery he was in life, I think very few will actually be genuinely saddened by his passing.

40

Tech49 has the CO over for lunch

by Tech49 in

so awhile back, during our last circuit overseer visit, vic and i decided to bite the bullet.... there seemed to be very little support for the mid-week lunch plans for the co and his wife, so we signed up to host.

we definitely didnt want it to be awkward, so we invited a few others along, as a nice little group affair.

they were excited, and offered to do the cooking, so i said i would play along.. just some background.... this particular co is kind of a tool (big surprise right?

neverendingjourney

A simple thought exercise: If you had the current Pope over for dinner instead, who do you think would most closely resemble the biblical Jesus, the Pope or the CO?

Not that I'm pushing Catholicism. I'm an atheist, but it put things in perspective.

40

Tech49 has the CO over for lunch

by Tech49 in

so awhile back, during our last circuit overseer visit, vic and i decided to bite the bullet.... there seemed to be very little support for the mid-week lunch plans for the co and his wife, so we signed up to host.

we definitely didnt want it to be awkward, so we invited a few others along, as a nice little group affair.

they were excited, and offered to do the cooking, so i said i would play along.. just some background.... this particular co is kind of a tool (big surprise right?

neverendingjourney

There are some nice ones and some like him. Not shaking your hand...

This brought back a latent memory. There used to be CO in a neighboring circuit 20 or so years ago who refused to shake hands, supposedly because it was a good way of spreading germs. Word is he would shake your hand once and then alert you to his preference. From that point forward you were not to extend him a hand. I don't know this first hand but it was relayed to me by some people who were pretty high up and reliable sources of information.

91

NEW BOE LETTER - It just got exponentially harder to "fade"

by sir82 in

jw
friends

here is the text of the letter:.

february 2, 2014. .

your brothers,.

neverendingjourney

I was very fortunate in that the PO of my congregation took the view that elders were not authorized or encouraged to act like private detectives. The guy was the most powerful elder in the whole area (a large percentage of elders were people he mentored), so that attitude was pretty prevalent.

After I stopped going to meetings and moved out of town, he gave me one phone call and said he hoped I was doing well. When I started to give him my excuse, he interrupted me and said he wasn't calling to interrogate me. He was just calling to check in and make sure I was fine.

Because I knew him so well, I know that he mentally checked a box and for him the matter had been concluded. His view (and I know this because when I was a pioneer we discussed this issue specifically) was that the role for elders didn't begin anew until the inactive witness returned to the meetings, asked for help, or was otherwise in a position to affect the flock. Since I moved away, I've never even gotten one request for a shepherding call.

Since I fell off the grid, cut almost all ties with all JWs except my immediate family, I've never been bothered by them. I was doubly lucky because my immediate family has never confronted me or even asked about my going inactive.

Unfortunately, I think my case is quite rare. I know an elder from a hall not too far from where I grew up that would behave exactly like a private detective, going so far as to conduct "stake out" operations...follow suspsected evil-doers around to gather evidence against them.

As to the specific point in the letter, I concur with all the comments saying that it's unlikely to change behavior given how overburdened the vast majority of elders currently are.