Posts by Mary

I watched it. While there were some obvious differences, there were also quite a few similarities with the cult we escaped from. The isolation, the exclusivity, the shunning of family who are not members and the fact that you were not allowed to question any of the leaders whacko doctrines, sounded all too familiar.....

15

Is this an "all-time" Low?

by Je.suis.oisif in

i just wanted to vent, nothing more.

my aunt died in edinburgh last week.

her obituary facilitates adding candles & personal messages.

Mary

Actually, this is not unheard of. Some Witnesses will do ANYTHING to get their hours in, no matter how low they have to sink. Here's a case that happened last year in Florida that the media picked up on:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A local father who wishes to remain anonymous sent Action News Jax a copy of a letter sent to his family's church.

The letter read in part: "Sorry about your loss. I read about it from the obituary."

Jehovah’s Witness literature was attached to the letter.

“In a time when a family is grieving they need to be surrounded by family and friends. That's not a time for a person to proselytize their views,” the father said.

He tells me it's the second time his family received a letter like this. He said something similar came to his home in January shortly after he lost his daughter.

"We found a tract from the Jehovah's Witnesses, which I found horribly inappropriate,” he said.

The most recent letter was signed by an Eva Robinson.

Action News Jax reporter Katie McKee tracked down Robinson and spoke with her on Thursday.

McKee: “What is the overall purpose of them getting this pamphlet if they belong to a Presbyterian church?"

Robinson: "That doesn't matter. We are not trying to change anyone's religion. We are just simply encouraging."

Robinson was apologetic when told a family was angered and offended by the letters.

"I’m sorry. I meant no harm,” Robinson said.

Robinson said she frequently sends these letters to families listed in obituaries. She said this is first time she has heard of someone having an issue with it.

"I think it just reflects upon her leadership, which is unfortunately interpreting scriptures in a very shallow way,” the local father said.

137

Mouthy has Passed Away

by Simon in

jw
friends

update on mouthy (grace gough)this is graces granddaughter.

i wanted to send an update that today my beautiful grandmother passed away - surrounded by friends and family.

- may 22 1927 - sept 2nd 2016. mouthys_granddaughter.

Mary

Yes, I just received a phone call from Mouthy's daughter telling me that Grace had passed. I had spoke to her a few months ago and I could tell she was going downhill. Her daughter said that they'll be an announcement in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and the Montreal newspaper, so I'm not sure of the date of the funeral yet.

Mouthy was the first ex-Witness I met in person and I loved her from the start. She had a wonderful sense of humour and would do anything to help others. She had had a difficult life from the start but always had a smile on her lovely face.

Rest in Peace dear Grace. I'll miss you.

49

Are the GB very intelligent men with higher than average IQ? Or are they stupid men who were put in their position by sheer “LUCK”

by John Aquila in

are the governing body of the wt wickedly smart with extremely high iq or are they leaders of the wt because they were at the right place at the right time.

(in other words, pure luck )-think lottery.

ive seen them talk in jwtv and you can never convince anyone in the whole world that these guys are in the same category as someone smart or cunning like jim simons who founded renaissance technologies or bill gates.

Mary

I think they somehow managed to 'Pull a Homer'

13

Woman sues JWs - Mom's inheritance, 300 000$ signed over to JWs 1 week before her death!

by StephaneLaliberte in

this article is written in french: .

http://gatineau.rougefm.ca/info-gatineau-ottawa/2015/08/08/elle-donne-son-heritage-aux-temoins-de-jehovah-sa-fille-depose-le-dossier-en-cour-superieure .

the mother, who passed away in the spring of 2015, signed a new will just one week before her death, while she was dying, in which she made the jws beneficiary of her 300 000 $ dollars inheritance.

Mary

This is exactly what happened to my uncle (my mom's brother-in-law). His step-mother (who had no children of her own) left everything that my uncle's dad had to the Organization despite the fact that my uncle had looked after her and looked after her very well for all the years after his own father died.

It's hard to say whether she did this simply because she was a evil nasty bitch (which she definitely was) or because she thought it would score brownie-points with Jehovah.

29

Is there a Child Molester on the Governing Body?

by TTATTelder in

great report by abc on the abuses in jw-dot-org land.... i hope it opens a "floodgate" of future news reports and exposes.

if you ask yourself, "why hasn't the watchtower leadership changed their policy on the 2 witness rule?

if one or more persons on the gb has victims out there that can't come forward because of the 2 witness rule, then that would explain the permanent road block to policy change that is obviously in place.

Mary

"...If you ask yourself, "Why hasn't the watchtower leadership changed their policy on the 2 witness rule?", here is the simplest explanation in my opinion: There are molesters in the leadership of the organization, namely the GB..."

In all honesty, I've never read or heard anything to suggest such a thing. I think a far more likely explanation as to why they don't want to change their Neanderthal policy is because they've always had a very 1950s mentality towards child abuse: don't ask and don't tell, plus they've always been drunk on their own power and no one--especially ex-Witnesses and the media (which of course is being run by Satan) is going to dictate how they run their ~~business~~ religion.

I don't believe that they purposely want children to be molested, but when they had to choose between the welfare of the children and the Organization's reputation, they chose the latter which was of course, a huge mistake and certainly not the moral thing to do.

The quandary they now find themselves is this: If they change the policy due to (worldly) public pressure, then that would certainly give the impression that 'Christ's Brothers' were in the wrong and that is something they will never admit to, no matter what the evidence shows.

It would also put them on the same level as the Catholic Church---that 'false religion' that the WTS has pointed the finger at for decades for doing the exact same thing: protecting pedophiles, and again, that is something they will never concede to. At least the Catholic Church has publically apologized and is trying to make amends. The WTS has simply dug their heals in deeper and are now saying that all these court cases against them are nothing more than "apostate lies".

These guys live in an ivory tower and don't seem to understand that the decades of sweeping scandals under the carpet is over for them. With the advent of the internet, "there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed." If they were smart, they'd do a complete overhaul of this policy, do a public apology and compensate the victims. Their behaviour so far means that I wouldn't want to hang from the end of a rope waiting for this to happen.

14

Disfelowshipping / Expelling

by freein2004 in

the insight book volume 1 page 788 uses matthew 5:22 and acts 10:28 as biblical support for dfing and shunning.. thoughts?

hopefully someone upload the insight book page here.

i don't have the means.. i should have said that basically the top paragraph in the insight book is supporting shunning because the israelites shunned the man of the nations and tax collectors?

Mary

Thanks for nice comments! I'm not on here too much anymore (first joined 13 years ago!). I had my project on Randy Watters website at one point, but I know he re-did his site and I'm not sure if it's still up there or not. Barbara Anderson also had a link for it on her website. Whether or not she still does, I don't know. I'll see if I can find out and let you know. (although some parts of it might be outdated now--like the 'generation' doctrine. I think it's been changed at least twice since I did the project in 2008).

16

New donation arrangement in action locally

by respectful_observer in

recently they announced at my hall that a large donation had been made to the local congregation-- nearly $100,000.

they then proposed a resolution that we continue our new(ish) practice of only keeping enough money on hand locally for monthly expenses, and send the entire amount of this large donation to the watchtower society.

aside from the fact that our congregation has already sent well over a half-million dollars to the wt in the last 12 months, i don't understand the motive of the person who made the donation.

Mary

Doesn't surprise me really. Big Brother wants as much cha-ching as they can possibly get their grubby greedy hands on because someone's got to pay for all these multi-million dollar lawsuits that keep getting levied against the Borg. Who better to pay than the local congregations!

While I don't know if it's written in stone, I remember about 10 or 12 years ago at one of the (last) circuit ASSemblies I went to, they came up with "a new resolution". The gist of it was that they would pledge to send X amount of dollars to Crooklyn even if there wasn't enough left over to pay the bills for having the assembly. Everyone would just have to pony up some more $$$.

It sounds like this is the consensus at the congregation level too. Despite the fact that your KH obviously needs major repair work done, the elders are given some not-so-subtle hints that Jehovah will bless them more if they send all that money to headquarters. So unless whoever gave that money specifically stipulated that it was to be used at the congregation level, in all likelihood, that's exactly what's going to happen.