Posts by dgp

52

JW's and home schooling?

by semelcred in

i don't wish to offend any that are teaching their kids at home, but today i was again confronted by a situation where a jw family were home schooling.

the kids had little structure to their routine and without putting the mum down, she was no teacher in an academic sense.. the subject is close to my heart because my parents who are witnesses, took my younger brothers out of school and home tutored them.

the were subjected to below standard education and limited in social skills, particularly as my parents are crap at these skills themselves.. i have grown to hate home schooling except in the situation of medical or logistical situations.. what are your comments good or bad and do you think the option to home school is abused by the witness community?.

dgp

Didn't take it personally, bekskbs. I surmise JW children aren't home schooled for financial reasons?

52

JW's and home schooling?

by semelcred in

i don't wish to offend any that are teaching their kids at home, but today i was again confronted by a situation where a jw family were home schooling.

the kids had little structure to their routine and without putting the mum down, she was no teacher in an academic sense.. the subject is close to my heart because my parents who are witnesses, took my younger brothers out of school and home tutored them.

the were subjected to below standard education and limited in social skills, particularly as my parents are crap at these skills themselves.. i have grown to hate home schooling except in the situation of medical or logistical situations.. what are your comments good or bad and do you think the option to home school is abused by the witness community?.

dgp

You're right, beksbks. There should be nothing wrong in supplementing or supporting the education.

I do hope, however, that you noticed that my post does say that I believe home-schooling in the WT is done mostly to prevent children from learning what happens outside and evaluating what happens inside. yes, that is such a real handicap.

8

Divorced women in the WTS

by dgp in

i am not a witness.

if i have understood correctly, in the wts, a single woman is at a disadvantage.

the wts is male-dominated and a woman can only go up through her father or husband.

dgp

I am not a witness. If I have understood correctly, in the WTS, a single woman is at a disadvantage. The WTS is male-dominated and a woman can only go up through her father or husband. Singleness is common, and women have a hard time marrying. I have also read many posts about women who were abused and told to stay married anyways. I also know that divorce is a difficult thing to get, granted only in cases of infidelity (and sometimes, not even then). So, as a non-witness, the doubt came to me as to whether a woman in the WTS would conceivably choose to stay single after a divorce. Suppose the sister in question married young, left an abusive relationship, but looks good and is in her forties. Children are grown up and married. Can anyone speculate why she would choose to stay single?

I will appreciate all opinions. Thank you.

31

Bible student with 8 kids turns down marriage proposal?

by QuestioningEverything in

jw
friends

a woman who is studying/attending the kh where my mom goes has 8 kids.

the oldest is 15y and the baby is only 7 weeks old.

after studying for some time, she decided it would be morally right for her and the kids father to get married.

dgp

Marked for reflection.

52

JW's and home schooling?

by semelcred in

i don't wish to offend any that are teaching their kids at home, but today i was again confronted by a situation where a jw family were home schooling.

the kids had little structure to their routine and without putting the mum down, she was no teacher in an academic sense.. the subject is close to my heart because my parents who are witnesses, took my younger brothers out of school and home tutored them.

the were subjected to below standard education and limited in social skills, particularly as my parents are crap at these skills themselves.. i have grown to hate home schooling except in the situation of medical or logistical situations.. what are your comments good or bad and do you think the option to home school is abused by the witness community?.

dgp

Reading Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion", I found a new perspective on this home schooling. Dawkins mentions the case of some Amish who were "recognized to have the right" (my quotes, not Dawkins') to home-school their children on the grounds that school and education were a threat to Amish way of life, and, therefore, something like cultural annhilation. I understand the case took place in Wisconsin and the court ruled, by a 6-1 split decision, that parents had that "right". Dawkins says that there is no such right. Children should be allowed to decide whether they want to continue living in their religion or not, or whether they want to stick to some "cultural" specificity of theirs or not. Which reminds me of the sadness that Jacques Cousteau felt about the Aleutian indians who had dropped oars and kayaks for outboard engines and fiberglass boats. Cousteau claimed that the indians were losing their traditions, which was right, but the Indians themselves were doing a better living and had freely adopted the new stuff. Of course, it was Cousteau's point of view that appeared on TV. What the Indians themselves wanted didn't seem to matter. And, Cousteau had this funny idea that people remaining petrified in the past is a good thing. The very opposite thing to what a scientist like him should preach.

More to our point, all children should have the right to decide whether they want to be homeschooled or not. Whether that goes against a certain church or belief, or way of life, should not carry that much weight before the children's decisions.

I believe the great point here is that homeschooling is not done on the basis of the quality of the education that is given. I'm open to the idea that a parent might just provide better education that what children and teen-agers get at today's schools. But, that is not the only issue here. The most basic issue is that steps are being taken to prevent a child from having a different point of view about life and religion. In my opinion, there's no value in keeping your child in your religion if that decision was not made by him or herself, on the grounds that he or she was actually convinced, instead of misled or not given an option. How sad that religions (not just the JW's, which does not free them of guilt, anyways) don't give people a choice.

38

Are JWs attracting more and more off-center people?

by undercover in

jw
friends

this thread is prompted by the thread about a jw woman who disprupted a funeral.

i don't know the details as i can't view youtube from work, but it did get me to thinking.... over the last couple of decades, at least, i've noticed that more and more 'fringe personalities', for a lack of a better term, have infiltrated the ranks of the everyday jws.

true, jws are themselves a fringe element to normal society, but even within their own communities, there used to be a sense of normalcy, or at least seemed to be.. has the cultic message of the wt society started attracting people with different thought processes over this time period?

dgp

I don't know much about who are becoming new JW's, because I'm not one myself. I do know that someone was attracting me into the WTS, and I consider myself a normal guy. I also met some people who either became or were close to become JW's, and they also seemed normal. And I met some people who left the organization and they seemed normal, too.

I do believe that the point here is that the organization is so concerned about bringing new converts in that the publishers will not spend their time converting, say, someone who is hard-working, honest and normal but is not that willing to accept a magazine, for example, but they will indeed spend time trying to convert someone who is responsive to their ideas but is a little crazy. And, since the organization gives that much importance to WORKS, then it would gladly accept someone who, say, has a very questionable past, under the assumption that once he does what a good witness is expected to do his inner person has changed too. I understand that becoming a witness does force people to change their personality and behavior, but I wonder if this would go as far as, say, changing an abusive person into a less abusive one. From the posts on this site, that does not seem to be the case.

Steven Hassan says that cults tend to recruit the people who are smart and would become an asset to the organization. I'm not sure if this is the case with most converts. They might be an asset if you look at them as "another member", but I wonder if they really bring something new and innovative to the organization, other than their hands and willingness to knock on doors.

A similar point was made by an evangelical I saw on TV. He claimed that many evangelicals had been rescued from drugs, bad lives and the like, and so many of them had a less than pure background, which was something they had to recognize. The evangelical's purpose, of course, was to say that they all had been changed, and that no one should feel above others because one day they had been below others, too.

I wonder if JW's are really concerned about who they bring in, in terms of their original morality or their real change. Yesterday three ladies came to knock on my door, all middle aged women who had converted from another religion. They felt they had become more spiritual. That's OK, they are not nuts, but, suppose someone brings in a former criminal in. Would you want your daughter to marry him, because he's now a brother?

I guess JW's would be more selective about who they bring in if they were not that obsessed with numbers. A mistake leads to yet another, and another...

3

JW's and non-JW's

by dgp in

sorry, i forgot to add a title to my post.

so i'm repeating the post.. in another thread (http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/social/family/189023/1/interfaith-marraiges-and-children), balsam wrote this:.

...challenging her concepts, especially challenging the words like "unbeliever", or "worldly person", you need to point out to your wife those are words used to try and put a division between jw's and other christians or people of other faiths.... i know that jehovah's witnesses are told not to befriend (much less marry) people of different religious faiths, or no religious faiths at all.

dgp

Sorry, I forgot to add a title to my post. So I'm repeating the post.

In another thread (http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/social/family/189023/1/Interfaith-marraiges-and-children), Balsam wrote this:

...challenging her concepts, especially challenging the words like "Unbeliever", or "Worldly Person", you need to point out to your wife those are words used to try and put a division between JW's and other Christians or people of other faiths...

I know that Jehovah's witnesses are told not to befriend (much less marry) people of different religious faiths, or no religious faiths at all. But the people in the WTS can but realize that not everyone outside is bad, and not everyone inside is good. I wonder what it feels like to be unable to relate to good people, people you might like and work with all the time, and on the contrary have to hold that a bad person who also happens to be a witness is "better association".

In my mind, anything whose final effect is dividing people and making them unable to love their neighbors is plainly wrong. I would appreciate your comments on this.

Thank you.

untitled

by dgp in

in another thread (http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/social/family/189023/1/interfaith-marraiges-and-children), balsam wrote this:.

...challenging her concepts, especially challenging the words like "unbeliever", or "worldly person", you need to point out to your wife those are words used to try and put a division between jw's and other christians or people of other faiths.... i know that jehovah's witnesses are told not to befriend (much less marry) people of different religious faiths, or no religious faiths at all.

but the people in the wts can but realize that not everyone outside is bad, and not everyone inside is good.

dgp

In another thread (http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/social/family/189023/1/Interfaith-marraiges-and-children), Balsam wrote this:

...challenging her concepts, especially challenging the words like "Unbeliever", or "Worldly Person", you need to point out to your wife those are words used to try and put a division between JW's and other Christians or people of other faiths...

I know that Jehovah's witnesses are told not to befriend (much less marry) people of different religious faiths, or no religious faiths at all. But the people in the WTS can but realize that not everyone outside is bad, and not everyone inside is good. I wonder what it feels like to be unable to relate to good people, people you might like and work with all the time, and on the contrary have to hold that a bad person who also happens to be a witness is "better association".

In my mind, anything whose final effect is dividing people and making them unable to love their neighbors is plainly wrong. I would appreciate your comments on this.

Thank you.

52

JW's and home schooling?

by semelcred in

i don't wish to offend any that are teaching their kids at home, but today i was again confronted by a situation where a jw family were home schooling.

the kids had little structure to their routine and without putting the mum down, she was no teacher in an academic sense.. the subject is close to my heart because my parents who are witnesses, took my younger brothers out of school and home tutored them.

the were subjected to below standard education and limited in social skills, particularly as my parents are crap at these skills themselves.. i have grown to hate home schooling except in the situation of medical or logistical situations.. what are your comments good or bad and do you think the option to home school is abused by the witness community?.

dgp

From the perspective of a non-JW, the problem is that kids are home-schooled to keep them away from the rest of the world, and sometimes the quality of their education suffers. With my worldly eyes, and apologizing to anyone who deserves an apology, that is the same as doing serious harm to your children for the sake of the dictates of an organization.

31

Interfaith marraiges and children

by garyneal in

i just wanted to share this story with everyone:.

last weekend on saturday, my wife found out that field service was not being cancelled due to snow.

all week prior to saturday, my wife kept saying that she was going to swim classes with my daughter and i and actually swim with my daughter that morning.

dgp

Gary, fellow unbeliever, there is little I can add to what other people said. I think you have handled this admirably. I also think you have a far better grasp of your situation than you had when you first came here. Yet, you have used that in a loving way. I commend you on that.