hey splendour,

fwiw, i agree that we're all lucky to be born here and now instead of in soviet russia.

but, are you really allowed to make that claim?

under your view, that we're all god's children, how can anyone's origin be a lucky or unlucky accident?

weren't the JWs who were deported made by god and put there by god?

I'm not making a claim.

Why must everyone be making a claim? So you can take exception to it?

Some things stated have nothing to do with claims. They are simply observations.

Looks like you are.

Yes I am aware of the JWs in Soviet Russia and what they went through.

(Sorry I have not posted in about a month, been extremely busy and this fell by the wayside.)

I guess we are all lucky we were born in the time we were instead of say, the Spanish Inquisition, or any period more than 100 years ago when you could die of a simple infection.

I'm sorry, splendour, for stepping on your toes. I didn't realize that you already put this maroon in his place.

Edit: I hug people in my church every sunday who have testified to horrors and tragedies that you cannot imagine. One couple, Indian, lost a cousin and nephew to Mohomeddan butchery before they fled Iran.

Why are the atheists so maudlin, so prone to shrill hueristics and over-dramatization?

Maybe a thread should be started.

What's with the name calling?

Nine Budweisers.

Dont be a stupid atheist. The best way to show others that name calling is wrong is to call people names.

http://www.openbible.info/topics/being_drunk



repent!

Apparently it's impossibly histrionic to mention anything bad that happened to you if anyone elsewhere has ever experienced something worse. Move along folks, nothing to see here, just the usual theist apologists.

Maroons and other off-reds ITT.

Doggg strikes me as one of those special guys who would be a complete and utter prick without jesus... l. better to keep people like that caged so I'm all for it.

You are saying he would improve were he not a Christian?

Good thread Coach. I thought about doing this, but I've been out so long I didn't think I'd remember enough details to make it interesting. I just found this thread, so I’m going to jump in on a few points.

How long ago was this? As I recall, their stance on higher education waxes and wanes, but they usually bounce between strongly discouraging it and reluctantly allowing it. Was he stating the Society’s official position that going to college was a disfellowshipping offense? It sounds like he was going ahead of Jehovah’s Celestial Chariot, which could get him reprimanded and/or disfellowshipped.

I don’t want to derail Coach’s thread, but I have (sorta). One of my best friends and his wife were in a car accident. He was unhurt, but she had massive injuries.

Congregations have ‘Hospital Liaison Committees’ standing by in case of traumatic accidents. They don’t assist JWs with admissions paperwork, don’t deal with the insurance company, and offer little-to-no consolation to the family. Their only purpose is to ensure that JWs are not given blood. They have packets of documents all prepared for the hospital, asserting the patient’s right to refuse treatment and threatening to sue if the hospital gives them blood, all so a traumatized spouse doesn’t have to worry about such details.

My friend confided to me that he was tempted to allow blood for his wife, but his father was an elder, and the Liaison committee had already been there, and the default stance was that it was not even an option. I think the doctors induced a coma (to try to prevent further swelling?) and told him that he could make the medical decision for her, but he couldn't pull the trigger.

Don’t be too hard on him. He was born and raised a JW. He had never heard anything his entire life except that everything that came from The Society was the Truth, straight from God’s mouth. And when God tells you not to take blood because of a couple verses in the Bible forbidding the eating of food that contains blood, you do what God says.

So, was she okay?

No, but she didn't die as a direct result of refusing blood. She made it through the surgery but the next day there was major swelling around the spinal column. The doctors said a blood transfusion could possibly prevent worse swelling and that the paralysis could be temporary. Without blood, they thought it would cause permanent damage.

She refused the blood and ended up paralyzed from the chin down. She couldn't eat, talk, or breath on her own. She was in and out of the hospital because of pneumonia, along with ongoing problems with her kidneys and liver. She needed 24-hour nursing care, had to have a suction tube stuck down her trach tube into her lungs every few hours to remove mucus, and was fed through a tube in her stomach.

After a few years of that she had a DNR order put in her medical records. She died near her 4-yr wedding anniversary. I guess we'll never know, but if she had accepted blood she might have made a full recovery after the accident.

The ironic thing is that it's usually not "blood" per se, that is needed in the case of massive blood loss (though massive blood loss wasn't her problem); it's blood volume expanders. This happened almost 20 years ago, when JWs would not allow separated blood components to be transfused, either. They pretty much allowed saline solution or nothing. Nowadays almost every single part of blood is allowed, alone or in concert with other parts. Basically you can remove some small portion of the blood (e.g., the albumin) and say it's no longer blood and get the transfusion. But back then they were much more strict.

I wonder how many pissed off JW parents are out there today who let their children die because they allowed the Society to tell them exactly what parts of blood they were and were not allowed to give their children, only to see a couple decades later that the very blood components they withheld from their children are now allowed.

Sorry, Coach did a very good job of not making this a "Rail against JW teachings" thread.

I suppose "better late than never" would apply, but I wouldn't hold it against someone if they were harboring a grudge (or felt betrayed, etc).

Ah, yes, “there were some” who were “overzealous” in interpreting what was written in the magazines. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that. My mother and grandparents have vivid memories of the time leading up to 1975. While the Society didn’t directly publish that 1975 was going to be the end, everybody living during that period understood the message. My grandmother wasn't alive in 1914 or the '20s, but she remembered later failed end-of-world predictions in the 1940s, and she remembered the fallout of the constant date shuffling of the 1920s and 30s (I think she was born in the 1930s—sorry, JWs are terrible with birthdays--to this day I have no idea when either of my parents' birthdays are). If you google the subject, you can see scanned copies of their literature, including statements in their JW-only newsletter from 1974 saying things like, ‘Many faithful brothers and sisters have sold their homes and all their possessions, to unburden themselves for the preaching work. What better way to spend the last few months of this system…?’

JWs believe that their door-to-door preaching is an important part of fulfilling Bible prophecies, and that Armageddon won’t come until they’ve given everyone on earth a chance to accept The Truth. In 1990 or ‘91 there was a JW article that said something like, ‘this worldwide preaching work, which will be completed before the end of this century…’ It caused quite a stir among me and my young friends. Older people didn’t get too worked up about it, but they’d lived through 1975 so in hindsight that was understandable.

I started making my exit shortly afterward, but I mentioned it to my lapsing JW brother a few years later. He pulled out the bound volume (a reprint of the 24 magazines for a given year, bound in hardcover so I can haz an impressive Watchtower library) and they had changed the wording from ‘before the end of this century’ to ‘before much longer’ (meaningless, because they’ve been saying ‘before much longer’ since the late 1800s). They also periodically release DVDs with a bunch of their literature on them. The wording had been changed in the electronic version, also.

Jehovah be praised!

BTW, JWs don't ever read anything into a statement from the leaders that isn't spoon-fed to them. There are a few very minor subjects that are called "conscience issues," but in every other area, once the leadership establishes doctrine, all JWs are to follow it to the letter.

When JWs talk about their interpretation of a scripture, or their take on an issue, they invariably talk about (what they remember of) The Society's take on it. Individual contemplation does not exist within the JW rank and file.

A JW bible study is a study of a book written by the Watchtower Society, with numbered paragraphs and questions at the bottom. The 'conductor' asks the question, and the 'study' gives the answer from the corresponding paragraph. During congregation studies, JWs are discouraged from quoting outside sources--even other Bible verses not mentioned in the paragraph and older JW literature (because you might not be interpreting it correctly, so just trust the Society to supply the correct information and interpretation for you.)

To anybody familiar with the group, it's laughable to think that in 1975 there were tens of thousands of JWs who spontaneously and independently came up with the same drastic interpretations of what they were reading. That kind of personal study and independent thinking is not part of the culture of JWs or other cults.

JWs are taught not strive after material things, or status in this worldly system that's about to end. The only cache witnesses have is their reputation for being "spiritual."

For some reason (I have theories), there are many times more JW women than men. I think I remember reading that the ratio was like 6:1 in the US.

If you're a young JW woman and not drop-dead gorgeous, it's hard to find a JW man interested in marrying you. If you want marriage prospects in the religion, you need to be seen as spiritually strong. Women cannot hold any type of position in the congregation, so committing to a higher level of hours preaching is about the only way to get this reputation.

If you're walking down the street and you see a fugly guy walking with a hot girl, the first thing you probably think is, "He must be rich." Among JWs it's, "He must be an elder (or above)."

As for guys, it's a stepping stone to responsibilities (prestige and a degree of power) in the congregation. If you're a young guy who wants to be a Ministerial Servant (like a junior elder, or deacon(?)), you greatly increase your chances if you sign up to auxiliary pioneer for a few months before the traveling overseer's visit, when recommendations for appointment are made. Same if you're a MS who wants to be an elder. If you sign up to Regular Pioneer (x hours for the entire year) you're pretty much a lock for appointment.

A publisher is someone who spends at least one hour per month preaching. The national average in the US is usually around 10 hrs/mo, so that is set as an unofficial goal, and if you fall short of the goal too often you can expect a shepherding visit.

Auxiliary Pioneers commit to 50 hours in a month (though for some reason it's only 30 in March and April). In my day it was 60 hours per month.

Regular Pioneers commit to 840 hours for the whole year, which works out to roughly 70 hrs/mo. I did it when the requirement was 1000 hours for the year. As I understand it, the requirements have gone down a few times.

Many older JWs do it because they really believe they're doing what God wants them to, and many have been regular pioneers for decades. But I'd guess that 75% or more of the young people who do it have an agenda; either to catch a husband or to gain responsibilities in the congregation and be able to choose from the finest sisters.

This might sound jaded, but IMO, it's even worse. I left some stuff out that would probably sound like cynical propaganda.

I want to read the cynical propaganda

+1, this is a fascinating read.

It might just be that I hung out with a particularly jaded group of friends. They had kind of figured out the system, that there weren’t enough brothers to go around. There were as many promiscuous girls as in any other group, but JWs have more desperate girls, I think, and they were often taken advantage of.

Understand, also, that most young JWs are socially repressed, and very sexually repressed. Masturbation and having sexual fantasies are no-nos. I once went to a wedding where they couple kissed after being pronounced Brother and Sister Whatever, and the elder doing the ceremony said, “You have just witnessed this couple’s first kiss.” I’m pretty sure they were being honest about it. It was the most chaste courtship in history.

Among JWs, it’s not proper to just date casually. If you’re dating a sister, it is supposed to be ‘with a view to marriage’. So if a guy asks a girl out (in a proper group setting, naturally) more than a couple times, it is understood that he is interested in a serious relationship. I knew a number of guys who strung girls along for a long time because of this unspoken understanding that he wouldn’t be doing it if he weren’t serious.

This usually meant no sex, but if you gamed the system you could get plenty of grinding, dry-humping, and mutual masturbation out of the deal. They had two rules: 1) Don’t stick it in, and; 2) If she says it’s starting to bother her conscience, you have to go to the elders first.

According to the elders, the biggest indicator of repentance among horny young JWs is whether you confess or if you get caught. So if a young sister starts getting bitter because she’s feeling used, she’s liable to go to the elders and say she feels bad about what you two have been doing. The young brother has to head this off at the pass, and go to the elders before she can, and claim that it’s his conscience that is bothered. (This triggers lots of late-night phone calls to elders who you think will be sympathetic to you, or are friends of your father, etc...)

If the elders believe (guided by God’s Holy Spirit) that you are repentant, you’ll get off with a public reproof, where they announce that so-and-so had been publically reproved. They don’t give the reason, but the JW rumor mill is a powerful thing. (There’s an old JW joke: What are three ways you can get a message from one place to another? Telephone, telegraph, or tell a sister. JWs are unknowingly pretty mysogynistic.)

If they don’t believe that you’re repentant, you get DFd and you’re an outcast for the next 12-24 months, minimum. (We often joked that the back room where these meetings took place was called the crying room, because so many tears were shed there, trying to convince the elders that you really were sorry for what you did. I used to be an MS, being groomed to be an elder, and I was once warned by an elder that the sisters will go back there crying their big crocodile tears, but you can’t fall for it.)

So if you’re a young woman in a group where females already heavily outweigh males, being branded with a scarlet letter and being taken out of the mix for two years is a lifetime sentence. Even when you get reinstated, the elders will clearly tell young men to stay away from you for at least 6-12 months so you can get spiritually strong again. This is in a community where if you’re still single at 25 you’ll likely never get married.

So plenty of girls got talked into doing things they believed were wrong. I know a guy who got reproved three times for getting frisky with the sisters, but he could tell when things went sour and confessed before they did. He ended up marrying a beautiful girl who should have been way out of his league.

Anyway, I don’t know how widespread that kind of stuff was, but this was among a group of guys who were generally considered to be pretty spiritual. I’d imaging among the “worldly-acting” set of JW men the same stuff went on, but they were sealing the deal with the girls.

This doesn’t really have anything to do with the levels of preaching, except that it was the alternative to try to catch a husband… you could either become a Regular Pioneer and trudge around in the hot sun for 90 hours every month getting doors slammed in your face, or you could give the guys what they want. The problem is that the loose girls often got passed around and nobody ever had any intention of marrying them… they could just sow their wild oats for a few years before settling down with a nice submissive Pioneer sister.

Fascinating stuff DeuceKicker, thanks for sharing.

Seems women always get screwed in a patriarchal system