since i've been raised a jw, i obviously never voted-----not even in school.
yet, i've always been very interested in politics (more than i should've been as a witness).
I have been voting many years & I hold a minor office in my township that I was appointed to.
I do NOT get involved in political rants, however. I personally find it offensive & it ends up bringing everyone down. It quickly disintegrates into insulting things being slung back and forth. It changes no one's mind. It starts to feel jw to me when someone tries to "educate" other people.
I love politics! I think unless someone votes, they shouldn't complain. But I keep my politics to myself :)
i always have felt that the following expressions were stupid, why dont they just call it pro abortion, anti abortion.
anyway, knowing our backgrounds as jw's what is your viewpoint on this highly debated issue?
That's true Dawn, PG was the best kind of friend a person could have. These decisions are never entered into lightly, & they are very traumatic.
i always have felt that the following expressions were stupid, why dont they just call it pro abortion, anti abortion.
anyway, knowing our backgrounds as jw's what is your viewpoint on this highly debated issue?
Elamona,
Why so hostile & angry?
The entire subject has to do with the effect on the earth's atmostphere, discarded items, pollution, emissions from automobiles, global warming trends, etc. Why not do some reseach on the topic?
i always have felt that the following expressions were stupid, why dont they just call it pro abortion, anti abortion.
anyway, knowing our backgrounds as jw's what is your viewpoint on this highly debated issue?
Excerpt from a book currently used in an environmental science class at college called Maybe One, by Bill McKibben, page 102 :
When she began studying the difference between pro-choice & pro-life advocates, Kristin Luker noticed something interesting. It was true that they differed over the morality of terminating pregnancy, but those differences were the product of other, more fundamentalist, splitsin their view of the world. They felt differently aobut God, about the role fo women, and, most interestingly, about the nature of planning.
Pro-choice activists, she observed, were almost obsessed with planning for their children, trying to give them "maximum parental guidance and every possible advantage", while parents active in the anti-abortion movement "tend to be laissez-faire individuals in their attitude" toward child rearing. "Pro-life people", she wrote, "believe that one becomes a parent by being a parent; parenthood for them is a "natural" rather than a social role . . .The values implied by the invogue term parenting (as in parenting classes) are alien to them". One woman that she interviewed said "I think people are foolish to worry about things in the future. The future takes care of itself" Too much planning, including too much family planning, means "playing God".
That way of seeing the world attracts me; there is in its spontaneity and confidence something of a real beauty. It offers a kind of freedom. Not the freedom of unlimited options that we've come to idolize, but a freedom from constant worrying and fretting. Sometimes I hate the calculater instinct in me that constantly weighs benefits and risks, the part that keeps me safe and solvent at the expense of experience. There is something incredibly attractive about the mystery of the next child, and the next; I'd love to meet them. I'd love to leave it to God, or to chance, or to biology, or to destiny, or to the wind.
The trouble is, there are now other ways to play God in this world, & not planning is one of them.
We no longer hae the luxury of not planning; we're simply too big. We dominate the earth. In a crowded world, not planning has as many consequences as planning.
Some statistics from this book:
In one recent study, condoms broke 4.8 percent of the time that they were used. Sixty percent of pregnancies in the US are unintended. That doesn't mean all those children are unwanted; half just come when their parents weren't planning on it, but half end in abortion. In fact, six in ten women having abortions did so because their contraception failed; among typical couples, 18 percent using diaphrams and 12 percent using condoms managed to get pregnant.
I would highly recommend this book for everyone, as it makes a person think about mankind's effect on the earth, the effects of overpopulation, & it even explains the "warming" of the earth simply & concisely. It also crushes some myths & stereotypes about only children, using statistics & studies.
part of the watchtower's response to theodicy -- the problem of why an omniscient, all-loving god would allow evil -- is that adam and eve were given free will and chose to exercise their right to disobey god, hence bringing sin, evil and death into the world through their genes (of course the genome has been mapped and no evidence whatosever for that idea is established, but i digress).
let's look at this problem of evil a little more closely.
a common objection to the jws is "why didn't god just create adam and eve so that they would not sin and, hence, there would be no evil?
This was also explained the same way to me by another Christian, & it doesn't make sense to me either, along with a whole lot of other stuff about that religion. Perfect things don't malfunction.
Suuposing one was able to believe the first part of that explaination. If it were all true, why wouldn't God just fix everything? If it were all true & their God was a loving God, why wouldn't he just put it all right?
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and i won't be paying $4500 out-of-state tuition, and it has a 55% reduction in in-state tuition, along with a small stipend.. but i will be busy this semester!!.
i can afford to buy new glasses now!
Awesome!
another topic brought this up.
my dad slugged a guy who beat up his own wife, my dad's childhood friend, during the intermission right after the public talk.
which my dad gave, he was guest speaker.
Lol, I never saw any of this in my short stint at the witchtower concentration camp :(
It would have been a damn sight more entertaining than those dramas :)
my son told me the other day that he and his sister are just about the only kids at the kh their age that go to public/private schools.
almost all the other kids are home-schooled.
i was rather shocked.
The one jw friend I had was taking correspondence courses in high school. I felt at that time she was ripped off & it was a way for them to keep more control of her & isolate her. I still feel that way. There were many jw parents doing all kinds of things to keep their kids out of public school at the time. It's another way they ended up not feeling "connected".
after about 3 years of being part of a pagan religion, i'm finally realising that this is the time to tell my jw mother.
the question is, how do i put it over to her?
i'm wiccan, and it is true that wiccans refer to themselves as witches.
What's the matter with "My spirituality is mine, and it's personal, I don't go shoving it up everone's . . ."
Seriously, why do you want to tell her the specifics, & what do you think the result will be? Are you at a point in life where if she shuns you, so be it?
those of you who are now x-jws, did you ever lead a double life while you were "in"?
did you have "worldly" friends, watch r rated movies, drive fast cars and do other things you weren't supposed to do, yet believed you were a "good" jw because you belived in the truth, "put in time", and attended meetings?
if you did, how long did it take you to see the truth about the truth and leave?
My mother got into that cult when I was 13, & I just went insane! What was I rebelling against? Whaddaya got? It gave a sort of rebel without a cause, a cause. My mission: To horrify the jws & drive them nuts. My crimes against jdubbery are too numerous to mention here now, but sufficie it to say I tried every drug known to mankind at the time (no Ecstacy or Special K), dyed my hair wild shades of eggplant (this was big stuff at the time), got in HUGE trouble at school, & did not go down! I refused to cave! I saw some teenage jws lead a double life. I had one good jw friend & we used to drink cheap wine & dream of the day we could get away. She's an inactive, head tripped jw today. I only tracked her down about 2 years ago via the net, & she believes. I refused to enter a kh again after age 15.5.
I saw others sit next to some geek one too many times & find themselves engaged to a kid they hardly even knew. The jws were afraid they'd have S-E-X, so they married 'em off young. Undereducated, unprepared for real life, but safe.
What a bad trip! But most of those teenage marriages ended in divorce & scandalous partner swaps, dfings, & just disaster. Living well IS the best revenge.
