Disillusioned JW

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Posts by Disillusioned JW

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  25

  Resistace to going back to meetings

  by truthseeker in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  lot going on.

  i had a covid divorce last year over zoom.

  not pretty but i got a good deal.. anyway,.

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  Disillusioned JW

  If they do include ones who attended physically, will ones who attended virtually also be included in the count?
  
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  42

  Were JWs Right That There Would Be A Time When Governments Would Go After All Religion?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  they have predicted this for years.

  religions of the world would become attacked by the governments.

  the only difference is when they go after jehovah’s witnesses, then jehovah god will step in and destroy the governments..

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  Disillusioned JW

  cofty I agree with you in the idea that is very bad that the Chinese government is sending millions of Uighur Muslims to concentration camps. Not all Muslims are bad, just as not all Christians are bad.
  
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  85

  My Letter to Brooklyn about the Parousia that got me disfellowshipped

  by cofty in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  this is the letter i wrote back in '96 about the parousia.

  following the '95 watchtower that disconnected the "generation" from 1914 i began to look carefully at end-time prophecy and soon discovered what i knew were basic errors in what i had been taught.. i was a loyal jw at the time and was still serving as an elder.

  i used only watchtower publications in my research.

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  Disillusioned JW

  cofty a moment ago I read the first part of your very long post, the one which is the first post on this topic thread. It is excellent and scholarly and most of that which I read of it is exactly what I concluded in 1995 after I read the same WT articles you mentioned and then carefully read Matthew chapters 24 and 25 with each verse of them in the context of the others in the same chapters! I combined it with what the WT said in various books of theirs regarding the technical meaning of parousia. It was the conclusion I reached in 1995 which resulted in me thinking I need to start thinking independently of the WT in interpreting the Bible. That is because I discovered I would have to come the correct understanding regarding the parousia of Christ before the WT partly corrected their ideas about the parousia and Christ coming in glory. About 6 years later I stopped attending meetings (other than the Memorial for several years) in the Kingdom Hall.

  blondie returned to posting on this site, thankfully. You can too. cofty please return. I await your coming to, return to, and presence on this site. We need minds like yours posting onto site.
  
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  51

  8 Year Old Can Decide If They Are Transgendered

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  so says joe biden.. anybody agree with this?

  ?.

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  Disillusioned JW

  cofty I very strongly relate to the post you made on page 3 of this topic thread and largely for the reasons you stated in that post, I also stopped posting for a period of time on this site. But I returned in order to say what I think needs to be said on this site. I invite you to also return to posting on this site.
  
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  8

  Steven T. Byington / Bible in Living English

  by cathyk in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  there's an article posted by william dalton at the andover townsman on steven t. byington, translator of the bible in living english.

  there are some interesting tidbits about the man which i didn't know, including the fact that he was an anarchist!.

  you might want to head over to the comboxes, because there's only me (with a neutral post) and a couple of rah-rah jw posts.

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  Disillusioned JW

  I have also noticed some interesting translations/renderings in the Byington Bible, enough that I decided to keep that Bible, but I hardly ever use that Bible.
  
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  21

  Why did Jehovah's Witnesses release the Byington and New Jerusalem Bibles in the early 70s , and forget about them in the 80s?

  by Balaamsass in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  andover townsman, andover, ma.

  july 26, 2012. dalton column: lawsuit concerns one of town's most interesting yet forgotten.

  bill dalton.

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  Disillusioned JW

  ScenicViewer, notice in the Cost List that Bibles listed as "Other Bibles" are grouped separately from those published by the WT.
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  21

  Why did Jehovah's Witnesses release the Byington and New Jerusalem Bibles in the early 70s , and forget about them in the 80s?

  by Balaamsass in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  andover townsman, andover, ma.

  july 26, 2012. dalton column: lawsuit concerns one of town's most interesting yet forgotten.

  bill dalton.

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  Disillusioned JW

  ScenicViewer I don't think the WT ever published/printed the Jerusalem Bible, instead I think they sold/distributed it. The Cost List you show only indicates they offered it for sales, not that they also printed/published it. I agree with dropoffyourkeylee in that matter.

  Folks, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Watch_Tower_Society_publications says that the Byington Bible was revised in 1989. Has anyone seen that edition? What changes were made in the 1989 edition?

  dropoffyourkeylee, regarding the WT selling Catholic Bibles keep in mind that many times the WT quoted from Catholic Bibles (probably mostly to convert Catholics). They also quoted from The Complete Bible: An American Translation and though it is a Protestant (and possibly Anglican-Episcopalian) Bible that edition of the Bible translated primarily by Smith and Goodspeed includes the Apocrypha (translated by Goodspeed).
  
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  15

  Pandemic as part of Bible prophecy?

  by truthseeker in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i was thinking that since russell started the movement in 1879 which became jehovah's witnesses in 1931 never has there been a period in time when all their activities just - stopped.

  especially the preaching work.. do you think they will find some obscure verse in daniel that talks about this period of time and try to make a greater fulfillment?

  like the 70 weeks of years or the 42 months?

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  Disillusioned JW

  Correction: Where I said "... since most of non-Christianity does require its members to preach to others" I meant to say "... since most of non-JW Christianity does not require its members to preach to others".
  
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  15

  Pandemic as part of Bible prophecy?

  by truthseeker in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i was thinking that since russell started the movement in 1879 which became jehovah's witnesses in 1931 never has there been a period in time when all their activities just - stopped.

  especially the preaching work.. do you think they will find some obscure verse in daniel that talks about this period of time and try to make a greater fulfillment?

  like the 70 weeks of years or the 42 months?

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  Disillusioned JW

  BluesBrother I notice you said the following regarding the JWs. "They have dropped the prophetic patterns of the Fred Frank era and take the Bible more as it says ...". If the WT/JW's are doing that (and it appears to me that the WT literature is now doing that), I think that is a good thing. It means they have stopped promoting much of their wild ideas, ideas which go far past what the scriptures say and mean, and it thus means their teachings are more in harmony with the Bible. It also means they becoming more mainstream as a result.

  If they are more mainstream, then their religion may last longer (good from perhaps the WT's perspective, but not from the perspective of those of us who want the religion to soon cease to exist). If they ditch the erroneous date of 607 BCE for the destruction of Jerusalem, and if they ditch the what they teach regarding 1914, 1918, and 1919 in regards to purported supernatural events, then they will be even more mainstream and much less sectarian, more in harmony with the Bible and reality, and thus receive much less criticism. Perhaps they will end up doing such.
  

  M. James Penton (a professor History and Religious Studies, who is also an ex-elder and an ex-JW) in his book called APOCALYPSE DELAYED: The Story of Jehovah's Witnesses" says something which I think is relevant to the above. On page 7 of the hardcover edition which was reprinted in 1986 he says the following.

  "In an important way, though, Jehovah's Witnesses are unique; they have preached millenarianism longer and more consistently than any major sectarian movement in the modern world. Millenarianism has been a phenomenon common to many movements over the centuries, but in its purely religious form at least, it generally had to be played down, spiritualized, or abandoned within a relatively short time. ... Thus, the ordinary pattern has been for millenarian movements to surrender, ignore, or modify significantly their millenarian teachings - as has happened with the Seventh-Day Adventists, Latter-Day Saints, and many fundamentalists - or to become rather isolated within society - something which has taken place with the Christadelphians.. Surprisingly, this has not happened to Jehovah's Witnesses who, in spite of many prophetic failures and vicissitudes for more than a century, have gone on preaching the nearness of the millennium and have grown to become a movement with nearly 2.7 million active members and several millions more adherents throughout the world."

  In pages 8 - 9 of the book Penton says the following. "In many ways the Witnesses have become ossified. ... More and more they have become hostile to new intellectual developments, the intellectual world, and to independent-minded intellectuals in their own ranks. And more significantly, their leadership has become a self-perpetuating caste which refuses to open itself to new and constructive criticism of almost any sort. ... Furthermore, an aging leadership seemed incapable of developing anything like a satisfactory response to what had not happened in 1975. ...while their essentially Adventist millenarianism has long been the basis of their growth and success, it is also their greatest weakness. Since, for over a hundred years, the end of this world has been delayed for them - something which they never expected would happen - they have not been able to adjust satisfactorily to world events or to a world which, in their view, goes 'groaning on.' "

  There are number of ways the WT is solving some of the weaknesses mentioned by Penton and thus becoming more mainstream and thus more sustainable ideologically. In evidence of that consider the following.
  

  Their books (the ones ones used for conducting Bible studies with non-JWS) made in the past 10 years or so, have greatly reduced the emphasis on 1914, 1918, and 1919. They also have stopped sharply directly criticizing the United Nations organization, and they urge JWs to adhere to the Covid-19 safety rules of the secular governments of the world. This shows they are reducing their conflict with government, at least in those countries which allow freedom of religion and which allow people to not join a military.
  

  The WT has given more freedom for JWs to more types of blood fractions, and it allows JWs to have their blood salvaged and circulated through a machine during surgery. That makes a prohibition on blood transfusions much less problematic.
  

  They now rarely disfellowship or label as disassociated JWs who have become 'faders' from the religion. That policy makes it much easier for those who stopped believing in the JW religion to essentially cease being JWs and at the same time still associate with their JW family members and to still get along with them.
  

  They have sharply reduced the amount of field service time which JWs are required to do to remain considered as active JWs.That makes it easier for people to be JWs and is much more like mainstream Christianity, since most of non-Christianity does require its members to preach to others.
  

  They have stopped saying the creative days of Genesis were 7,000 years long, and now say they could have been considerably longer. They have shifted their arguments from the old style type of creationism (involving a young biospehere of less than 49,000 years) to Intelligent Design type of arguments of biblical creationism (the form of biblical creationism which is the most in harmony with modern science), thereby being somewhat less in conflict with paleontology and evolution.

  Their 2013 revision of the NWT is much more like the Bibles of mainstream Christianity (such as the NIV and the NRSV) and thus will likely appeal more to non-JWs.

  If they switch their name from "Jehovah's Witnesses" to "Witnesses of Jehovah and Jesus" they will become even more mainstream (and have a more Bible based name) and thus be even more successful in attracting non-JW Christians to the religion. But they would have to go even further. They have to teach that all faithful Christians around the time of Armageddon will go to heaven and be there at least during the battle of Armageddon, if not also during the 1,000 years. They can teach that the faithful Christians will be back on Earth after the 1,000 years, in harmony Revelation chapter 21.
  
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  70

  2034 - A Future History of Jehovah's Witnesses

  by slimboyfat in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i don't know what i am talking about... read this post at your peril.

  back in the 1960s there was, seemingly, a brief period of relaxation in authoritarianism among jehovah's witnesses.

  those who have read raymond franz's 'crisis of conscience' will have heard the story about dan sydlik's remark about the need to 'open some windows to let some air in here'.

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  Disillusioned JW

  Correction: 4024 BCE was an error, I should have said 4026 BCE instead. I keep thinking that the WT says Adam was created in 4024 BCE (and the WT probably used to teach that) but starting in the 1980s (or maybe earlier) the WT began teaching 4026 BCE instead.

  Correction: I said Usher came up with the date of 4000 BC, but instead I should have said Ussher came up with the date 4004 BC.