Posts by neverendingjourney

26

January 2018 Message of Judgment - What Is This?

by dubstepped in

jw
friends

i've now seen a couple of references to this and did a little digging before leaving for work.

i saw someone on reddit in july saying that someone on the inside said a change was coming in 2018 with the jw message, and i've now seen two references to this in the past week.

help a former brother out.

neverendingjourney

I firmly believe that most JWs can't reason and defend their religion anymore. Heck, the whole org can't defend itself anymore. More and more it's becoming such that JWs less and less know their own history and their own beliefs.

They're really in a catch-22. It doesn't take a brilliant mind to realize that the JW prophetic framework failed. Everything JWs were promised didn't come true and has been replaced by overlapping generations nonsense and "wait on Jehovah" platitudes.

So the religion needs to rethink and make wholesale changes to its doctrine and prophetic structure.

Yet to admit this and move forward on that plan is to admit that they don't really have the truth and aren't God's special people.

They can't make the changes that are desperately needed without conceding defeat, so instead we've had this 20-year long period of stagnation hoping that somehow the things they believe in come true even though there's no signs of that occurring anytime soon. Meanwhile, I've seen my parents generation who came into this religion with young families grow old and die. Wasted lives, no retirement plans in place.

It's sad.

19

Roy Moore

by ducatijoe in

so... after seeing men who abuse children in the organization, i am out.

however this shit is in the "world" too.

my fellow alabama voters are still behind roy moore.

neverendingjourney

Joe many years ago when I was first appointed an elder a older elder told me those who are supper righteous and talk about certain sexual sins all the time are guilty of it. I found that to be very true through the years.

When I was 15 I came under the wing of a young, charismatic elder in his early 30s. He was married and had two young children.

There was a Bible study who apparently had a very jealous husband. No men were allowed to visit when he wasn't home. This elder told me that it was certainly because the husband was a cheater and feared his wife was the same way. "El que debe teme" he told me, which is Spanish roughly for "if you have something to hide, you have something to fear." I thought it was an incredibly wise observation.

It turns out this elder was cheating on his wife and had first-hand knowledge of the topic. He was discovered a few months later and was disfellowshipped.

It made me think back and realize that he was incredibly obsessed with sexual matters. He went so far as to state during a talk that two people who aren't married should not dance together (he received a lot of push back on that because there wasn't anything in the literature to support that and it was common in my area for single people to dance during weddings).

He would often tell me about his past sexual exploits (in great detail) under the guise of helping me understand how much better off he was now as a JW. In short, the guy was a horn dog and couldn't keep it in his pants. And his personal experience colored the view he had of others. He didn't think others could control their impulses either, so he became obsessed with pushing through puritanical measures to control the congregation.

It's clear as day to me now, but it wasn't back then when I was still a teenager.

32

Was It Really Mental Illness or Was It The Demons?

by minimus in

jw
friends

we supposedly had more than a few “demonized” people in our congregation.

they would hear voices or feel internal punishment within their souls.

the answer was always—-these people were affected by the demons and they needed counseling!.

neverendingjourney

I grew up in Spanish language congregations where demon stories were more common than in English language congregations. It was part of the culture. In Mexico everyone seemed to have a ghost story to share, so these people (like my parents) brought this with them and adapted the stories to fit with JW doctrine.

In my family there was a reoccurring pattern. My parents were in a loveless marriage and every now and then there would be a huge blowup. Eventually things would settle down, my parents would make up, and there would be a cleansing ritual where we would purge our house of anything that might be associated with demons because surely the demons were making my parents fight. It wasn't that they were mismatched and should have never gotten married in the first place.

Most of these stories are benign and kind of comical in retrospect. But every now and then it veered into dangerous territory. There was a very troubled family that was kind of on the periphery of the congregation. They were off-and-on inactive. Their youngest son was clearly troubled. He just had that look to him. One day the elders get called to their house because the son is becoming violent (he was in his teens) and was mumbling gibberish. The kid confesses to hearing voices in his head telling him to kill his mother. The elders, of course, recommend prayer and helped them search the house for possessions that might be associated with demons.

I know this because I was told this story first hand by one of the elders who was there to counsel them. He was a high school drop out and a welder. The other elder was a barely-literate man whose education consisted of a few years of elementary school in Mexico. Instead of receiving professional medical assistance, this dangerous teen was receiving counseling from these two guys.

I don't know what happened to that family. This incident happend about 20 years ago. I've always wondered. Not long after that, I moved away and know very little about the goings on of my old congregation anymore.

29

Why "fancy dress" and "theme weddings" were BANNED by our Congregation!

by Witness 007 in

our kingdom hall was in a boring town of 30,000 people so to spice things up me and some special pioneers living with us decided to have a fancy dress up party!

what could go wrong?

nice clean fun, and no booze (oh crap!).

neverendingjourney

and a Pioneer bro dressed up as a ballarena with full female make up!

There was a guy in a neighboring hall who almost had a judicial committee formed because he dressed in drag and went out in public, supposedly because he'd lost a bet. He was able to convince the elders that it was all in jest and that he really didn't hold any "perverse sexual desires." Rumor was that it wasn't the first time he'd dressed up as a woman and seemingly found any excuse to do so.

I'm not passing judgment. It's sad that otherwise normal folks have to suppress that side of them in order to avoid being kicked out of the tribe.

20

Explanation please on the change of the term "worldly"

by careful in

i've picked up from several replies to posts here that the org has stopped using the term "worldly" as it applies to people.

this must have happened after i left.

would someone be so kind as to explain the "rationale" behind this shift?

neverendingjourney

There were people in my congregation who still believed the end would come before the generation of 1914 passed away years after the 1995 WT article changed the official interpretation.

Needless to say, not everyone reads their WT or pays attention at the KH, and old habits die hard.

23

Ridiculous (degrading) comment on society's video

by Festus in

on video "benefits of divine education" william samuelsson makes totally appalling comment.. starting from 3:05 he refers to "an effort" that was made in past to see how society's curriculum corresponds with normal - worldly - universities.. then he claims that following question was asked (to university representative) "how we in five months can teach the same that for them takes two years"?.

according to w samuelsson the representative of a university replied something like this: "your students are motivated, they have come to learn where as our students have been send to university by their parents and might have something else than learning in their mind".

this is to crystallize what he said.

neverendingjourney

Variants of this nonsense have been going around for decades.

I remember a CO in the 80s said reading an Awake! bound volume was the equivalent of 2 years' of university education. Since maybe 1 out of 100 JWs had ever gone to college, in what kind of a position were they to contradict these "facts," especially when they're being thrown around by WT luminaries.

49

The Internet is worse for the Watchtower than 1975 was: here's proof.

by ILoveTTATT2 in

jw
friends

i am translating jwfacts to spanish.

i am doing the "statistics" section.here are two graphs that show that the statistics have never been worse for the watchtower:quantity of hours required for 1 baptism: note how low it went in 1974-1975, and note that 2016 is much higher than the slump of 1978... about double, to be exact.

2016 was a historical record in this statistic (higher is worse for watchtower).. this stat is the baptisms as a percentage of the publisher average.

neverendingjourney

I really want to buy into your premise, but I just don't see it, at least not on the scale that you're suggesting.

One thing to keep in mind is that the number of persuadable Witnesses has likely been on the decline since the widespread use of the internet in the late 90s, when we would expect most of them were reached.

You see evidence of that in this forum and others like it. I only caught a passing glimpse of the late 90s/early 00s ex-JW online community as I was still a JW, but it was incredibly more vibrant than what we see today. There were extensive debates about doctrine, complex manifestos being written, just a wealth of intellectually stimulating threads

Even in 2006 when I first visited this forum those days had largely disappeared. Now the online community is a shadow of what it once it once was, likely a reflection of the fact that the flood of those early JWs who had been reached by the internet and were persuaded to leave the JWs for intellectual reasons have gotten on with their lives and moved on.

That's not to say that the internet can't continue to be a force, particularly for those born-in JWs who start reaching the age of reason, but I'd expect the data to show a large exodus beggining around 1998, peaking around 2003, and steadily declining ever since.

13

New Instructions?

by FedUpJW in

i may have missed it, but i just heard from a local elder that there are "new" instructions for how the two one day assembly's are to be conducted and handled......fifty-nine pages worth.

he said they will now all be put on the same as the regional conventions.

did i miss that letter/orders from "mother"?

neverendingjourney

With the non-release release at this year's convention, maybe they'll get less in donations.

They can run the artificial defect grift to guilt the sheep into donating. Apparently they have credit card machines now. No excuses.

30

Finds in Jerusalem shore up biblical account of Babylonian conquest (586 BCE date)

by Hecce in

this is a nice article about archaeological finds, what caught my attention is the use of 586 bce as the date for the destruction of jerusalem.. according to biblical descriptions, in 586 bce, the babylonian king nebuchadnezzar vanquished the judaean king zedekiah and razed his capital city, jerusalem.

the babylonian captain of the guard nebuzaradan was dispatched into the city, where, as told in the book of jeremiah, he “burned the house of the lord, and the king’s house; and all the houses of jerusalem, even every great man’s house, burned he with fire.”.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/new-jerusalem-finds-shore-up-biblical-account-of-babylonian-conquest/.

neverendingjourney

Dates are becoming more and more irrelevant to WT doctrine, the days of the heavy duty interpretations and conclusions are gone.

The 607 date doesn't really matter in practice anymore. As you say, the days of complicated prophesy analysis are behind them. In its place is a lot of "just around the corner" sloganeering and overlapping-generations nonsense that nobody can explain with a straight face.

Pride, ignorance, and the fear of disfellowshipping is sufficient to keep most of the Witnesses in line.

They may let 1914 slide into the dustbin of history without formally dropping it, just like they did with the thousand-year creation days nonsense that led to the 1975 hoopla. They never formally renounced that view, either. They just stopped teaching it.

30

Finds in Jerusalem shore up biblical account of Babylonian conquest (586 BCE date)

by Hecce in

this is a nice article about archaeological finds, what caught my attention is the use of 586 bce as the date for the destruction of jerusalem.. according to biblical descriptions, in 586 bce, the babylonian king nebuchadnezzar vanquished the judaean king zedekiah and razed his capital city, jerusalem.

the babylonian captain of the guard nebuzaradan was dispatched into the city, where, as told in the book of jeremiah, he “burned the house of the lord, and the king’s house; and all the houses of jerusalem, even every great man’s house, burned he with fire.”.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/new-jerusalem-finds-shore-up-biblical-account-of-babylonian-conquest/.

neverendingjourney

Am I missing something ? They haven't dropped the significance of 607 have they?

No, but I suspect they will at some point. That's what I meant.