Where can I find JWs and potential JWs who would like to read the old printed literature of the WT, and how can I share that literature with them without being officially removed from the religion and thus shunned by my JW family?
Disillusioned JW
JoinedPosts by Disillusioned JW
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Shocking Letter Reveals Jehovah's Witnesses True Beliefs! - YouTube 'xjw curious'
by Mace.Bean inyoutube's 'xjw curious,' pete corbeil, reads proselytizing letter written by a pimo jw who simply shares current watchtower teachings like no other jw.
use google drive link below to print your own copies of this letter.
(114) shocking letter reveals jehovah's witnesses true beliefs!
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28
Shocking Letter Reveals Jehovah's Witnesses True Beliefs! - YouTube 'xjw curious'
by Mace.Bean inyoutube's 'xjw curious,' pete corbeil, reads proselytizing letter written by a pimo jw who simply shares current watchtower teachings like no other jw.
use google drive link below to print your own copies of this letter.
(114) shocking letter reveals jehovah's witnesses true beliefs!
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Disillusioned JW
ThomasMore, by "they are redacting former writing as fast as they can" what exactly do you mean? Do you mean they are changing the wording of online copies (or blacking out portions of the text of them) on their website and revising in-print editions of their literature? Or do you mean they are tracking down copies of old out of print WT publications and destroying them? Regarding changing their literature are they acting like the evil government in the novel called Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four .] That book was required reading in the grade school or high school I attended.
An ex-JW close friend of mine has told me that the WT is making numerous changes to the wording of their literature, without mentioning in the literature that the publications are revised. Is that what you mean? Since much of their literature is now primarily accessed online rather than reading print editions, that is something they can easily do for their online content. Furthermore, much of modern human society, especially young people, do most of their reading online and in digital downloads rather than reading books printed on paper. That further makes it easier for the WT to secretly rewrite their literature, far easier than the fictional evil government in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four could.
My mother's house contains old WT literature (some of which my mother inherited from her mother and step-father) going back at least to the 1930s. I know that because I have seen them and browsed through them, including numerous books by Rutherford. Likewise my mother has books of her own from the 1940s onward which I also have seen. I have avoided telling any JW elder that such books are in my devout mother's home.
Years ago I sold off most my pre-1970 WT books (including the Russell books and most of the Rutherford books I had; I had bought them at a local thrift store and online), since I didn't think I could change the mind of any devout JW by inviting them to read them. Should I try to buy replacement copies of those books?
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WT's Impact on Children
by Sea Breeze inwhat is your opinion of the wt's impact on children?.
here, children get to connect the dots and see what will happen to you if you are disobedient.
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Disillusioned JW
Thanks LongHairGal for sharing with sympathy for me and for sharing your experiences.
Foolednomore, please tell me some of the things which the professional told you about the WT being the source of your depression. My devout JW mother for many years was a psychiatric nurse at a large hospital.
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WT's Impact on Children
by Sea Breeze inwhat is your opinion of the wt's impact on children?.
here, children get to connect the dots and see what will happen to you if you are disobedient.
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Disillusioned JW
Regarding 1975 I do believe that the WT made at least one false claim, namely that it marked 6,000 years of human existence. That is because I now know that anthropology (including archaeology) definitely show that humans - even our specific species of humans - have existed for more than 100,000 years! Furthermore, they show that even that the ancient city of Jericho dates back more than 10,000 years ago! Likewise, hypothetically speaking, if the biblical creative days of Genesis really took place each of them must have been millions of years longer than 7,000 years each.
Regarding Jericho, a city inhabited today and now under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, see https://www.travelujah.com/touring/ancient-ity-of-jericho-marks-10-000-years and https://www.britannica.com/place/Jericho-West-Bank . The Britannica article says the following.
"By about 8000 bce the inhabitants had grown into an organized community capable of building a massive stone wall around the settlement, strengthened at one point at least by a massive stone tower." Think about it folks; a literal watchtower - perhaps the very first one - existed by about 10,000 years ago. For the WT religion isn't that ironic?!
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WT's Impact on Children
by Sea Breeze inwhat is your opinion of the wt's impact on children?.
here, children get to connect the dots and see what will happen to you if you are disobedient.
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Disillusioned JW
Note: In the last paragraph of my prior post I ran out to time to revise it to say the following. "A number of other times I experienced harassment (including racial insults) and threats of violence with 'worldly' people, but nothing like that with JWs or Kingdom Hall attending children of JWs (except for some harassment from one preteen child of JWs). When in a group of JWs I always felt very safe (including at district conventions) but not always when in a group of non-JWs."
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WT's Impact on Children
by Sea Breeze inwhat is your opinion of the wt's impact on children?.
here, children get to connect the dots and see what will happen to you if you are disobedient.
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Disillusioned JW
LongHairGal, while I was a grade school child I would sometimes play outside on my block with kids from my side of the block and the ones on the opposite side of my street. Many times they would harass me (only one of them was raised by JW parents) and sometimes even try to start a fight with me, and I never knew why. I tried to get along with them. To the best I could determine it was either due to racism (I am a multiracial brown skinned person and they were all white) or because I tried to always be very good (to the best of my ability) and tried to avoid getting into fights and tried to avoid doing other things which the JW religion says is bad (such as playing with toy guns or celebrating pagan holidays or using 'foul' language).
My bedroom French windows had a latch on them to hold the windows shut but no actual lock. On many days I would have the windows open to let in cool breezes. There was a tall bush below the windows. One of the kids, a very bratty 'worldly' kid who caused troubles for me climbed up on the bush and reached out to come into the open windows! I closed the windows and he went away. Another time, but when the windows were closed, the troublesome kid not only climbed up the bush, but he also opened the windows and reached into (or nearly into) my bedroom while I was in my room! I thus pushed him away and closed the windows and then I never saw come up to my second story window again. But, one day either my Mickey Mouse watch (from my bedroom) or my sister's Minny Mouse watch was missing from the house (I forget which, maybe both happened) and I presume he stole it (or them).
One day on the grade school play ground 'worldly' kids took terms kicking my butt and when I would chase after one of them, one of them would kick me from behind. In high school a kid kept on jumping onto my back in gym. I would bend over and he would slide off my back and then get back on and the process would repeat. Why in the world did he act that way? Admittedly for a time even a Hispanic boy raised by JW parents caused me some problems, but thankfully in high school he didn't cause me any problems. In high school he was an A student.
A number of times I when I would open my high school locker (which had a built-in combination lock) I would find that some things (pencils?) were stolen from it and that some unwanted things had been put into it. I wondered how that could happen and who did it. Small things can be slid through slits on the door and the bottom and top of the door can possibly be bent open while the door it locked. Maybe the kid knew how to 'crack' the lock. I later bought a combination padlock and put it on the lock and started keeping my things in a hard to reach place of the lock (near the level of the locks) and that solved the problems. It wasn't until college that I no longer had any problems with 'worldly' people in school.
In one banking office job I had, about 10 years after I graduated from college/university, one non-JW young person (probably a non-Christian) started verbally harassing me (but carefully done in a way which probably couldn't get him in trouble, and he made himself a friend of the boss) multiple times a day after he learned I was a JW (I mentioned to him and the other two co-workers sitting close to me that I don't celebrate holidays and birthdays) - holidays and birthdays were celebrated in the workplace and thus my non-observance of such was noticeable. I think the guy was a non-Christian (and probably an atheist) because when I first met him he told me that he got a Christian woman to quit work and that I was her replacement (I and he were working through a temporary agency).
A number of other times I had problems with 'worldly' people, but hardly any problems with JWs or Kingdom Hall attending children of JWs. When in a group of JWs I always felt safe (including at district conventions) but not always when in a group of non-JWs.
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WT's Impact on Children
by Sea Breeze inwhat is your opinion of the wt's impact on children?.
here, children get to connect the dots and see what will happen to you if you are disobedient.
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Disillusioned JW
It is extremely hard for me to believe that any parent (except possibly for a extremely tiny percentage of parents) would take the entire contents of their minor child's bedroom outside as punishment. The idea is ludicrous to me that a JW parent, or any other one, would do so. Not only would the punishment be extreme, but it would be a lot of work for the parents - even if only twice (though if only twice it would be feasible). Imagine them taking dressers and bed frames outside (note that Sea Breeze twice said "everything" was taken out of his bedroom).
Sea Breeze since you say you stopped believing the WT when you "turned around 14 or 15" does that mean you never got baptized as a JW? I forget if in an older post you ever said you got baptized as a JW, though I remember that you said you were raised as a JW. I got baptized (several years after 1975) shortly before age 16.
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WT's Impact on Children
by Sea Breeze inwhat is your opinion of the wt's impact on children?.
here, children get to connect the dots and see what will happen to you if you are disobedient.
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Disillusioned JW
Correction: In my prior post when I said "... we did inhale ..." I meant to say "... we did not inhale ...".
Additional Comments: Other negative influences by the WT on me as a child (a young teen at the time) were the frequent teachings about the Great Tribulation, the Battle of Armageddon, and the New Order. That is because such teachings pressured me to get baptized soon, and as a very sad result I did get baptized. If only I had had the courage to go to the library to read books about evolution (ones presenting the scientific evidence for such) and to read atheistic books (to see if they made good arguments, including in criticisms of the Bible) I would have been saved from the WT and never got baptized. I had been thinking that maybe evolution was true, that maybe the Bible was mostly unreliable, and that maybe Jehovah God didn't even exist, and thus I had thought of seeking such books. But because of the WT's warnings, including the WT's statements that college professors teach lies against creationism/creation and the Bible, I was too scared to do such research at that time.
Even while in college/university I avoided taking courses which would teach evolution (though I was very curious about that subject) and radiometric dating (such as in geology classes), philosophy courses which might teach arguments against the existence of God, and a Bible as literature course which might criticize the Bible. Avoidance of those courses was also largely influenced by someone in my congregation saying that when JW young people go to college many of them end up loosing their religious beliefs (and by implication from a JW point of view, thus end up loosing their future prospect of living in the New Order). I heard that mentioned within a year of so before I entered college. If I had hadn't heard such I might would have taken the above courses. It was a huge mistake for me to avoid taking such courses.
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WT's Impact on Children
by Sea Breeze inwhat is your opinion of the wt's impact on children?.
here, children get to connect the dots and see what will happen to you if you are disobedient.
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Disillusioned JW
By pressuring people (including children raised by JWs) to study numerous WT literature and at JW meetings to give answers to questions of WT in way which was in agreement with the WT literature, that hindered critical thinking (when I was a child and as an adult JW) in regards to religious topics. That routine also probably hindered my critical thinking in other areas. I also believe it hindered the critical thinking of others who were children under the WT/JW influence.
In contrast, the WT influence on me when I was a child was very favorable in helping to instill strong morals in me and to also avoid doing the foolish things of many non-JW children (such as smoking or putting one's life unnecessarily in danger in other ways). My step-grandfather stopped smoking cigarettes before the WT forbade smoking, because of what he reading about the WT's view of smoking (and that one could not become and elder if one smoked). That likely very much benefited his health and the health of the rest of my JW family. It benefited the rest of us because we did inhale second-hand smoke from either of us during my lifetime (my step-grandfather probably stopped smoking before I was born since I have no memory of experiencing any of my JW family ever smoking, nor of smelling tobacco smoke in either of our homes). Also, the WT influence on me probably favorably influenced my reading skills.
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WT's Impact on Children
by Sea Breeze inwhat is your opinion of the wt's impact on children?.
here, children get to connect the dots and see what will happen to you if you are disobedient.
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Disillusioned JW
BluesBrother I notice that you said the following. "Kids love violence… it does not seem real. We had the cartoon characters doing “ Bam, Splat, Your Gone” and it was funny." I never loved violence and I never approved of it being done for unjust reasons. I don't recall ever seeing any humor in the violence in those kinds of cartoons. For a time I watched the types of cartoons you mentioned, but I never loved and never liked the violence portrayed in them. I knew the cartoons were not real and thus I was not troubled much by the content, but when I imagined hypothetically what it would mean if the violence was real then I thought such would be horrible.
In 1975 I was a preteen (enrolled in the Theocratic Ministry School) and I knew from my reading of the WT literature that the WT never said that Armageddon, the Great Tribulation, or the start of the 1,000 year portion of Christ's reign would definitely begin that year (though they did strongly suggest such was a strong likelihood). As a result, after 1975 ended I didn't consider the WT's claims about 1975 as being false prophecies or false predictions, but rather unfulfilled hopes. I got baptized as a JW several years later.
I believe that the WT's negative impact upon as a child were their false teachings about evolution, their teaching that there were no genuine contradictions in the Bible, their teachings that JWs shouldn't disagree with the WT's teachings (and not read atheistic and/or apostate literature), attend and participate in Kingdom Hall meetings and pray multiple times a day, and related matters.