there are many on this site that do not believe that jehovah truly exists; that he is not a real being.
but, he is as real as next breath you draw into your nostrils.. some of you say that there is no evidence that he exists.
yet, none of you can prove that he does not exits.. cofty, (you come to mind), i appreciate that you have stated, without reservation, that you do not believe that god exists.. yet, you cannot prove it.. hope in jehovah..
neverendingjourney, do you pray for yourself or your family?
No, but I don't care either way whether you do. If you find peace in religion, more power to you so long as your religious views don't trample on my right to live as I see fit.
I was baptized in 1995 and was a regular pioneer at one point. I stopped attending meetings 10 or 11 years ago and haven't looked back. I was never disfellowshipped and I've managed to keep a good relationship with my JW family.
there are many on this site that do not believe that jehovah truly exists; that he is not a real being.
but, he is as real as next breath you draw into your nostrils.. some of you say that there is no evidence that he exists.
yet, none of you can prove that he does not exits.. cofty, (you come to mind), i appreciate that you have stated, without reservation, that you do not believe that god exists.. yet, you cannot prove it.. hope in jehovah..
I believe in unicorns. Can you prove to me that unicorns don't exist?
Hope in unicorns.
i've had this thought for quite a while and wonder if fits with the recent talk about the wts claiming that matt.
24:14 has been fulfilled.
my thought was this --- in the wake of the recent cutbacks at bethel, scaling back of literature, and other cost cutting measures, could the wts be preparing the r&f for the complete or massive reduction of literature that would normally be placed with "householders?
This is quite the blast from the past. It was this specific thread that brought me to JWD and that consequently led to my wholesale rejection of JWism.
I had been inactive for a year or two, but I still received the occasional mass-distribution JW email by well-meaning but misguided witnesses. I had gone about 99% of the way in my rejection of the religion, but I didn't want to do anything that would foreclose the possibility of a return (like reading evil apostate material) in case I later decided my doubts were wrong and the witnesses had been right all along.
One day I received an email from a JW claiming that a Bethel speaker at an assembly had announced that Matt 24:14 had officially been fulfilled and now the end was really super close, just around the corner. Reading it made a small part of me panic and I wanted to confirm whether there was any legitimacy to the email without asking a JW since doing so would prompt all sorts of uncomfortable questions I didn't want to answer.
So I got on google and typed "Matthew 24:14 fulfilled," which brought me to this forum. I couldn't stop reading. I spent many sleepless nights reading thread after thread, confirming many of my suspicions, and obtaining relief from knowing that there were a lot of people like me who saw the same flaws I did. I wasn't alone. I wasn't going crazy.
That was 10 years ago. I went from spending hours a day on here to casually browsing topic headings a few times a month. Losing my faith was a traumatic experience, one that affects me to this day. I'll never be completely "normal." I gave the religion my best years and I've constantly been playing catch-up in my life trying to make up for some of the time I lost. All in all, I think the last 10 years have been good to me. The pain of leaving was well worth it in the end.
in the congregation that i grew up in there were about 30 children under 16 (myself included).
as time went on they one by one slipped away from the meetings and most never got baptized.
of those 30 children only myself and two other girls stayed and got baptized.
In my area few of my contemporaries leave for good (I'm in my late 30s now). Most seem to be caught in this never-ending cycle of leaving and coming. The vast majority continue to believe on some level that it's the truth, which is a shame since they're never really able to move on and live a full life.
That's not to say the congregations are full of aspiring elders and pioneers. Most of them exist on the periphery of the religion, hating themselves to varying degrees for not having the self-control to be truly all-in.
i may not have put this in the correct spot, but i do think it's scandalous the way time gets counted now.
i've seen a cart at the edge of our farmer's market, never anyone close enough to talk.
yesterday was a drizzly day and there were two carts set up, covered in plastic, "witnessing" on their own.
I started out being very vigilant about time-counting. I would carefully track start/stop times, would discount time spent on any breaks, etc. I would round to the nearest 5 minute interval at most.
I very quickly became disillusioned with the regular pioneers, though. They would take two-hour lunch breaks without discounting any of the time. If pressed, they would often try to justify it by pointing out some unbaptized publisher who was in attendance, almost always a young child of a pioneer. Mostly, they didn't care, though.
Once I became a regular pioneer, the falsity of time-counting became even more apparent. One of the regular pioneers was a recently-appointed elder. One time he and I had spent about an hour and fifteen minutes knocking on doors. I asked him how much time we had spent (I had forgotten to document the start time) and he said to just write down three hours because "we were pioneers." There was another guy who we'd almost never see in service, but he was of the opinion that if you were doing yard work, for instance, that was a witness to your neighbors and therefore time you could count.
I was only a regular pioneer for a year and a half. By the end of it, I'd more or less adopted the general philosophy held by the group. Swimming upstream was just too hard, but i was pretty disgusted with myself for doing so.
This whole cart-witnessing thing, if officially sanctioned by the WT, would have been a god send for me. I would have been able to get away with counting a ton of hours without the guilt associated with feeling like I was cheating. Thankfully, I have better things to do with my life now.
this idea was inspired by another post i saw (but forget who or where) referencing the mootness of delaying armageddon now that the 1914 generation is gone.
(i just skimmed over the post and thread, and didn't give it much thought until later).
wt doctrine basically says that jehovah, through his undeserved love, allows wickedness so that people can hear, and accept, the 'truth', thus being saved from the destruction of armageddon.
I posted something similar on this thread:
https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/5636310582689792/_post/6198967404593152
ok so this week's wt study article is entitled "why must we keep on the watch?"..
it is filled with statements on the importance of "being watchful" for the beginning of the "great tribulation".
paragraph 2: “keep looking, keep awake, for you do not know when the appointed time is.”after that, jesus admonished them repeatedly: “keep on the watch.”.
In Genesis God announced that the flood would come in 120 years; but the WTS reasons that he did not tell Noah until 50 years before that, adequate time to preach?
Right, that's the direct analogy in the Bible according to the JWs, yet Noah didn't preach to multiple generations. The flood came within a few decades.
ok so this week's wt study article is entitled "why must we keep on the watch?"..
it is filled with statements on the importance of "being watchful" for the beginning of the "great tribulation".
paragraph 2: “keep looking, keep awake, for you do not know when the appointed time is.”after that, jesus admonished them repeatedly: “keep on the watch.”.
The thing that bothers me the most concerning this topic is the following:
What's the point in having a 102 year warning period? All the people who were reached by the Bible Students during the 1910s are now dead. That's especially true for the people who read the Watchtower back in the 1880s.
It seems to me that on its face the reasoning behind the 102 year gap logically falls apart. There is no reason for having a century long warning period.
Couldn't God have found a way to warn mankind, say in 10-15 years? Wasn't the early preaching work a waste of time given the fact that those people died before Armageddon? Isn't that like warning your next door neighbors that their house will burn down 100 years from now? Who cares?
it appears that watchtower is distancing itself from the blood fractions.
the new "blood card" doesn't mention them and any mention of blood in the watchtower ignores fractions.
i wander if they are going back to their hard stance.
My mother was having surgery performed a few years ago and my idiot brother who was an elder at the time filled out her blood card and checked "no" for every elective blood fraction treatment because "Jehovah doesn't like blood."
The type of surgery she was having bore a very, very low risk of complication, so I decided not to blow up my relationship with my family over it, but I was incensed.
My brother had no idea what kind of danger he was unnecessarily placing my mother in just because he was too stupid and lazy to even comprehend his own religion's teaching on the subject.
the wt’s teaching that humans will live forever on a paradise earth will necessitate that given that there will be no more death, then immortal humans will have to be relocated to other planets in order to prevent the earth from becoming overpopulated.. so how many habitable, earth-like planets are there?more and more habitable, earth-like planets would have to become available on a continuous, never-ending basis ad infinitum as mankind’s population grows given that there will be no more death.. the longevity/sustainability of life on these planets will be limited by the fact that the sun serving these planets will eventually die:https://shar.es/1cko6n.
http://www.space.com/22437-main-sequence-stars.html#sthash.ejbt1xrz.dpuf.
so immortal humans will have to keep moving from planet to planet.
The waters are muddied somewhat by the "new thought" that perhaps even miscarriages and stillborn babies will be resurrected.
Jesus, I must have missed this! What an utterly absurd thought!
Roughly half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, most before the woman even realizes she's pregnant. That means half or more of all people receiving resurrections would be setting foot on the planet for the first time.
