Posts by neverendingjourney

26

Ex JW of 30 years , still messed up from it

by Doubledecker in

jw
friends

hi , this is my first post .. i left jws 30 years ago as 18 year old unbaptised youth and after the initial fallout from leaving pretty much put the whole thing in a box and buried it .. however , i am now starting to realise how much the doomsday messages and the ‘them and us’ doctrines that’s fed to you from birth has remained in my core beliefs.. how have others managed to reprogram themselves ?.

thanks for reading , have a good day .

dd.

neverendingjourney

I've been out roughly 15 years after spending my entire life in it.

It's hard to overstate how ingrained the programming becomes. Growing up in the cult leaves behind a legacy that can take a lifetime to overcome.

When we're children, we take in lessons from our upbringing and connections get formed in the brain that condition us to react in certain ways to specific stimuli. We process this as fight-or-flight reactions to situations that might break certain JW rules, like being at a party with worldly people or being in an intimate situation with someone other than your spouse. These are situations that "worldly" people view as normal.

When we leave, we don't wipe the slate clean. The programming is still there. You have to actively train yourself to overcome it and it takes years. It can be accomplished, though. I remember being at parties in my late twenties full of anxiety even though I hadn't been a believer in two or three years. After many such parties, the anxiety eventually went away.

Best of luck to you.

44

Allowed?

by punkofnice in

a jobo i know has cancer.

her son goes and cleans her house and generally cares for her.

so does another non-jobo relative.. the congregation, interestingly, has shown very little support apart from the odd one rabbiting on about 'bible promises this and that'.. so, the co visited and said, 'but your son is an apostate(tm).

neverendingjourney

There was an elderly woman in a neighboring hall who reaped her reward for relying on "the friends" to take care of her.

I went back and found the loving obituary "the friends" published for her in the local paper.

I've omitted personally identifiable information.

"________________, _____, janitorial worker, of ____________, formerly of _______________, died Sunday. Visitation 4 p.m. today, _________________ Funeral Home. Services 1 p.m. Thursday, ___________________ Cemetery, near ____________."

What a moving tribute.

44

Allowed?

by punkofnice in

a jobo i know has cancer.

her son goes and cleans her house and generally cares for her.

so does another non-jobo relative.. the congregation, interestingly, has shown very little support apart from the odd one rabbiting on about 'bible promises this and that'.. so, the co visited and said, 'but your son is an apostate(tm).

neverendingjourney

There was an elderly woman in a neighboring hall who reaped her reward for relying on "the friends" to take care of her. She was baptized during the 1950s in Yankee Stadium. She and her husband left their former lives behind and converted while none of their siblings followed suit. They had one special needs child.

By the time I became aware of her, her son and husband had died and she had no JW family members. She had soft-shunned her family as was expected of loyal JWs back then, so there wasn't much of a connection there. As her health deteriorated, she was placed in assisted living. The "friends" got tired of her fast. She'd often be left waiting by the curb side as her designated ride would "forget" to pick her up for the meetings.

After she became too much of a hassle, the elders decided to put her in a proper nursing home and that was pretty much the end of her. All the joy was zapped out of her life. The "friends" rarely dropped by to visit. She only had the "privilege" of calling into the hall to listen to the meetings. Nobody would actually bother to take her to any.

She died alone and severely depressed. Hardly anyone went to her funeral.

28

How many here believe the WTS really has has 8.5 million followers / 8.5. million members

by Hotpepper in

i think it's closer to 5 million with all the selling of kingdom hells and branch bethel's all over the world.

it's even hard to get a hard copy of the lastest craptower or afake mag now in new york city..

neverendingjourney

Every census result I have seen gives higher figures for JW menbership than their own publisher numbers: Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, or any country that has a census which asks citizens to specify which religious denomination people belong to, sometimes by a significant margin. So in terms of self-identified affiliation, I wouldn’t be surprised if the worldwide figure would be over 10 million.

Let's unpack this a bit. I don't think the average Witness cares much about how the WT goes about deciding who counts and who doesn't count for purposes of their annual statistics. They're much more likely to pay attention to the rate of growth or decline.

The WT has been using the same metric for decades. I have very little doubt that the number of people who self-identify as Jehovah's Witnesses is larger than the number of publishers who have turned in a time slip at least once in the past six months.

In a sense, you can view this as a sign of honesty: If the WT were truly dishonest, they'd start counting everyone who attends the Memorial! But actually, an abrupt change like that would be very noticeable and would likely be more detrimental than not.

The 10 million figure you cite isn't particularly helpful if the goal is determining whether the WT is "cooking the books." If you could reliably compare the 10 million figure versus what that same figure was 1, 5, 10, and 20 years ago, you could start to plot trends on a graph. One would expect that trend to parallel official WT number of publishers. If there was a significant discrepancy, it would be strong evidence that the WT numbers aren't reliable.

In other words, the real doubt is the WT's honesty in revealing the true rate of growth or decline. The raw number of Witnesses isn't really an issue as there are many different credible ways of trying to arrive at the definition of what constitutes a Jehovah's Witness.

16

Hellooooo! 6 years since i posted

by Aussie Oz in

jw
friends

so... it has been six years since my last post.

i wonder who still remembers me?

a lot has changed and then again, a lot has not.... i'm still out of course as are my children who are doing very well.

neverendingjourney

Now that you're back, don't forget to turn in your time slip at the end of the month.

15

Governing Body prefers property over prayers, songs and use of bible (Mexico)

by krismalone in

for many years the government of mexico did not allow religious organizations to own property.

any property used by a religious organization was confiscated by the government.

this law changed in the mid 1990's.

neverendingjourney

The corrupting factor behind this is their arrogant belief that they're authorized to lie if it benefits them.

I had already been baptized for about a year when I learned of this doctrine. It came up during the Bible reading. We were assigned a few chapters from the book of Judges and the talk that week was about Rahab. The lesson the Watchtower took from it is that those who oppose Jehovah are not entitled to the truth. This is straight out of their literature.

Once I was out I learned that this idea had its origins during the Rutherford era and that back then it was called theocratic warfare. It's a corrupting influence because it gives them license to essentially lie whenever they think it's in the religion's best interests. After a while, it starts to corrode their core beliefs.

22

Jordan Peterson - Messiah or Poseur?

by cofty in

a jp video came up on my youtube feed last week - he was on a panel in front of a huge audience and some poor disturbed guy ran on stage and started crying and wailing to peterson that he needed his help.

it was agonising to watch.. what was even more disturbing was the comments section.

i do not exaggerate when i say that dozens of people were extolling peterson's wisdom as if jesus had come again.

neverendingjourney

He's a father figure to a generation of young men without older male role models in their lives.

There's a big market for that sort of thing.

39

Who make up the new memorial partakers?

by jwfacts in

when the doctrine regarding 1935 being the close of the calling was done away with in 2007, it was not unexpected to see the number rise.

over the next few years it went from around 8,500 to 10,500. this seemed to indicate that there were a couple of thousand people that may have felt they had the calling all along, but too shy to profess it.

for the 30 year period between the mid 1978 and 2007, parktakers had barely dropped.

neverendingjourney

Edit: Never mind.

22

Were / Are the Governing Body "Rock Stars"

by Number 6 in

in 1976 when i was a young lad of 6, fred franz came to glasgow and gave a talk in govan a suburb on the south side of the city (for those of you who dont know).

our congregation hired a bus to ferry us all to the hall and it was standing room only.

being only 6, i have only the vaguest of memories other than an old man shouting and bawling from the stage.

neverendingjourney

I went to an international convention in the mid 90s that was held at a big sports stadium. If memory serves, attendance was about 30,000.

When a GB member would walk to the stage, and it was quite a hike because the stage was in the middle of the field, the entire stadium lit up with camera flashes. You could have easily mistaken the mood for that of a rock concert.

In hindsight, it was pretty sad. They trotted out Carey Barber who was already half senile and he just droned on monotone and incoherently for 45 minutes at a time.

28

Current JW growth in the United States in historical perspective and in comparison with other groups

by slimboyfat in

current jw growth is slower than during most of their history.

the only probable exceptions are following 1975 when there was a brief worldwide decrease, the late 1920s when around half of the members left the movement, perhaps around the 1917 schism, and various schisms during russell’s time.

there were also periods of sluggish growth during the 1950/60s and around 2000. .

neverendingjourney

I'm not a conspiracy theorist by nature. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. 9/11 wasn't an inside job. The Earth is round.

That being said, I have a very difficult time accepting the JW numbers at face value. The reason for this is that Watchtower leadership believes they're entitled to lie to protect the Watchtower's interests. We saw this with the ARC. I read a news article about shunning not long ago where a WT representative outright lied in a way I don't ever recall them lying. Not clever word play. Not half truths intended to convey an incorrect impression. Lies.

It stems from their interpretation of the Rahab account. Apparently Rahab was authorized to lie because the Philistines didn't "deserve the truth." If leadership believes the flock might stumble if they publish negative growth numbers, I don't think they'd hesitate to pad them.