He is a JW (as he’s said in other threads), and is posting to discredit anyone who disparages the religion.
First he mentions that we collectively think that JW-ism is a cult, which is a claim with a lot of truth, though not 100% true.
Then he defines cult with a set of criteria that distinguish JW-ism from mainstream Christianity but are not bad or threatening in any way. The unspoken assumption is that his definition is valid.
Then he can demonstrate that JW-ism meets these criteria, but makes it seem as if those of us who don’t like the religion are just prejudiced against things that are different.
Personally, I think the problem with the religion is not its doctrine, but the institutional psychological abuse that permeates the group, including segregation from non-JWs, mistrust of education, and the practice of shunning. Most of the doctrine is unobjectionable, and none of it is any weirder than mainstream Christianity.
I see, thanks for clearing that up! His double-speak and implied persecution when this has been a pretty civil thread seemed oddly defensive but that piece of the puzzle clears things up quite a bit.
I’m looking forward to Mike’s response to it.
I used to talk with the JW door knockers. I never saw the same ones twice. Always a different couple.
One day they were trying to prove a point, and brought out the bible to convince me. I said that is all well and good, but I am not a Christian. They left and I never saw another door knocker again.
Fibromyalgia and lupus are not mental issues, although they can certainly lead to depression. YMMV, of course, but most of the JWs I have personally known have been black, and they have a higher rate of lupus than the general population.
They also seem to have extremely high rates of domestic violence and divorce, probably IMHO tied in to early marriages and women not being educated.
There is a Scriptural basis for the issue you have raised in this paragraph: “Bad associations spoil useful habits.” (1 Corinthians 15:33.)
As far as education is concerned, this has not been an issue with me personally…with my track record I need all the helpful education I can get, and I earned paralegal certification from my two-year college’s legal program.
This came after someone sharing work with me, for the German carpenter I was working with earlier made an apparently taunting remark (“What are you going to be doing ten years from now? Are you still going to be pulling nails out of boards for Kurt?”)
I had been doing yard work and such, and I have never been too proud to get my hands dirty. But I figure that if I have the scholastic ability–as some of my grades and transcripts (and results of the California GATB) would indicate–I would properly exploit this rather than just being a gardener or a carpenter’s helper. If I need more education for that, I’ll go for it. But I digress.
And I have posted already concerning the issue of disfellowshiping, and how I disagree so strongly with the Dopers who had already posted their disapproval of the practice.
Yes, but most people don’t interpret that to mean “cut off all association with anyone not in your cult” (and I say that as someone who is a member of a religion that is also often accused of being a cult, or worse).
Well, I’m glad that has worked out for you, but these days “paralegal certification” is a pretty low educational mile marker.
OK, fine, we’ll agree to disagree. I just find the notion of shunning your relatives distasteful to the point of nausea.
Of course, my religion also absolutely forbids proselytizing and finds it extremely offensive, so that’s two strikes against your faith from my point of view.
Despite all that, I will be polite to you should I ever encounter you in real life. Unlike you, I will not try to persuade anyone to abandon their sincerely held faith.
The dude (Dougie Monty) just bumped a thread that was off the page that makes his religion look bad, which makes little sense. His anti-“cult” usage rant came out of nowhere. I gave my reasons in post #3, right from the start, as to why I use the term. I can’t really respond to someone that comes in randomly out of nowhere espousing nonsense in the context of my usage of the term cult.
No, you wouldn’t be black listed for that. More than likely they’ve been by and your paths just haven’t crossed again. There were times we’d go to houses over and over again and never find anyone. It’s likely just coincidental.
I mentioned fibro and lupus together with mental illnesses not because they are such, but because they seem to run together from the observations I had made. Anecdotally, it often seemed like the depression or whatever preceded the diagnosis of such illnesses.
Yes, there are a LOT of divorces, and your opinions as to why seem appropriate and I would agree. With men being the head of the house, many times that power was abused, or an excuse for abuse. There are lots of sad experiences about that.
If you believe your quoted scripture, then why are you here? Why are you associating with not only “worldly people”, but on my thread when I’m clearly an “apostate” by your religion’s terminology? After all, you know that “a little leaven ferments the whole lump”, and yet here you are associating with what your religion would see as just that. For what association does light have with darkness, or truth with untruth? By your very participation herein you’re proving the ineffectiveness of taking a general scripture and trying to make rules out of it. Your organization goes beyond scripture, dictating to it’s members who and what “bad association” is, rather than letting ones determine that for themselves. Clearly you’re here of your own accord. It’s actually often the sign of a weak JW that they would venture into conversations like this. Maybe there’s hope for you. I was here defending the organization, and now look at me.
And disfellowshipping is psychological warfare, hands down. It is a disgusting practice that causes lifelong harm to many.
That is correct. Most of my life I have had a very poor social history. I use my own discretion about contact with others. You may have noticed that my contact on the SDMB relating to Jehovah’s witnesses is considerably less than it used to be. This is, for the most part, because of the temperament I am treated to, which is scarcely better than what I experienced when I was growing up–and I am quite disappointed. I had expected that people posting on this Board would be more objective when the purpose is dealing with ignorance; I had not expected to face arrogance and vulgarity, which have been doled out profusely.
You have also said, “And disfellowshipping is psychological warfare, hands down. It is a disgusting practice that causes lifelong harm to many.”
I see no point in discussing this issue further; I gave a Scriptural basis for it. That is as far as I see fit to pursue the matter.
The problem is that your Scripture doesn’t support disfellowship. You needed other sources to interpret it that way. To someone who thinks disfellowship is wrong, it sounds wholly unobjectionable. Becoming friends with bad people can indeed lead to compromising one’s morals. It is therefore something we have to watch out for.
Thing is, Jesus himself ate with tax collectors and sinners. He even ate with Judas, a once devoted follower who turned on him. He did not eschew their companionship. Any interpretation of Scripture that would make Jesus into a sinner is inherently wrong, since Scripture also says he led a sinless life.
And I’m sure this isn’t anything you’ve not heard before. My point is not to witness, but to point out why your attempt to witness is pointless. Even with someone like me who believes in Scripture, argument by single scripture is not remotely convincing.
Let alone talking to an agnostic like the OP who isn’t even sure that Scripture has value at all.
Scripture says he lived a sinless life—except for that time he freaked out and flipped the tables in the temple. Somebody could have gotten hurt.
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The ignorance here is yours, not ours - you are disturbed because we don’t agree with you and we don’t come over to your camp. “Objectively” your religion meets at least some definitions of “cult” and shunning people can, indeed, cause terrible psychological harm.
Well, you’ll have to forgive me for not knowing what you’ve said in the past, just as I can forgive you for clearly not having read this thread that you chose to come and resurrect. However, let’s have some fun while we’re at it. I am agnostic now and no longer believe in the Bible or Jehovah, per se, but let’s look at the scriptures and disfellowshipping.
First, let’s establish that the word “disfellowship” is not used anywhere in the Bible. Jehovah’s Witnesses love to use the fact that the word “trinity” doesn’t exist in the Bible to immediately discredit such a teaching. So what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. It is a term that cannot be found.
As mentioned by another poster, Christ, who is supposed to be our “exemplar”, never shunned anyone, nor did he teach such. Even Jehovah God allowed Satan to remain in heaven after his direct opposition to Jehovah. Where was his shunning? So we can establish that neither Jesus nor his father Jehovah seemed to be the shunning sort.
Okay, but what about 1 Corinthians 5:9-13? It says:
9 In my letter I wrote you to stop keeping company* with sexually immoral people,* 10 not meaning entirely with the sexually immoral people* of this world+ or the greedy people or extortioners or idolaters. Otherwise, you would actually have to get out of the world.+ 11 But now I am writing you to stop keeping company*+ with anyone called a brother who is sexually immoral* or a greedy person+ or an idolater or a reviler* or a drunkard+ or an extortioner,+ not even eating with such a man. 12 For what do I have to do with judging those outside? Do you not judge those inside, 13 while God judges those outside?+ “Remove the wicked person from among yourselves.”+
Let’s examine these words. First of all, what is a fornicator or extortioner or idolater? Is it a person that ONCE committed such a sin? Why is it that in the organization a person that at some point in their lives follows a course that flies in the face of your organizations rules is forever labeled as such? My brother lived with a girl and they were unmarried. He was therefore disfellowshipped. Ten years later he’s a happily married guy living a good life, but he just doesn’t want to be one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Why is he shunned for the rest of his natural life? He is not “called a brother”, nor is he living an “immoral” life? You see, it isn’t about those things, it is about the for us or against us mentality that Jehovah’s Witnesses have, and the silencing of any that don’t wish to follow them. It is about psychologically torturing people with the loss of their family to try and push them to come back, and Dougie you and I know that coming back for family is the wrong reason. A person is supposed to come back out of repentance, or love for Jehovah, not for family, yet they use that to exploit people. In the end, once a person is on the “outside”, what right scripturally do you have to judge that person, as the scriptures indicate?
In the end though, this is merely picking and choosing a verse to suit a desire to push a controlling doctrine of disfellowshipping on their followers. What happened to 1 Corinthians 13:4-8? Where in the description of love there do you see disfellowshipping, an arrangement that is described over and over as a “loving arrangement”? Where is that reflected in those scriptures?
That’s an issue with picking and choosing verses, or maybe it’s an issue with the Bible in its entirety, that there are conflicting scriptures and teachings throughout, which there seem to be and which is just one reason that I can no longer give it much weight.
Let’s also look at the teaching of “reinstatement” as on of Jehovah’s Witnesses that they use. If a disfellowshipped person wishes to come back to the congregation they must first prove their repentance by attending all meetings and whatever the elders prescribe to them as a show of their change of heart. They must arrive at meetings when they start, and leave when they end, being shunned and not making others uncomfortable by their presence, sitting in the back. They must wait a year or so, doing all of this penance, before being allowed back. Even then they will be watched like a hawk, and whatever they did will be documented and in their personal file forever.
How does the preceding work with scriptures like Luke chapter 15 in the example of the prodigal son? He was immediately welcomed back, a show of true love, unlike the controlling and manipulative organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
How does keeping a literal file of people’s transgressions jive with Psalm 103:12 where in God’s eyes our transgressions are as far off as the sunrise is from the sunset? What about forgiving and forgetting, something that is often encouraged in the Watchtower study articles? Your organization does neither.
If a person has a crisis of faith in the organization the elders will meet with them. The one question that they ask is “do you believe that this is God’s spirit directed organization and channel on earth for dispensing truth”, and if you cannot answer affirmatively, they will often move to disfellowship you as an “apostate”. You see, none of this is about morality, but rather control, absolute control and power over others. Doubt cannot be tolerated. It can ruin your life. You can lose everyone you’ve ever known due to mere doubt. Rather, it can be ripped away from you and has.
Let’s also acknowledge that although Jehovah’s Witnesses boast that they do not baptize infants like Christendom, they do baptize children on the regular. Unlike Christendom, they see such baptism as an absolute contract with their organization that will be controlled under the penalty of expulsion and shunning. So yeah, pat yourself on the back for not holding babies to a decision that they didn’t make because they had no reasoning faculties or control as babies, but doing the same to a small child is no better. Go look at a 8-15 year old kid, ages at which sooooooo many JW’s are baptized, and ask yourself if they should be held accountable forever for decisions made at that age while they’re playing with toys and cuddling stuffed animals and being told how to dress and what to do by their parents. Jesus wasn’t baptized until he was 30 and he was perfect according to scripture. Jehovah’s Witnesses are, once again, going far beyond scripture.
Did you know that Jehovah’s Witnesses disfellowshipped people for joining the army until, of course, authorities looked down upon it? You see, political authorities don’t like religions punishing people for following what at times is the law regarding serving their country. So what did Jehovah’s Witnesses do? They invented disassociation for such things. By saying that you’ve chosen to disassociate by such actions the skirt the real issues and invented a way to disfellowship you by default. Did you know that at one point people like my wife and I that disassociated were NOT shunned? Yes, that’s true. However, then there was a man named Ray Franz that made it all the way up the ranks to the governing body and saw that it was a farce. When he tried to just walk away on his own they trumped up charges against him, said that he therefore disassociated himself, and then made a rule change that those that disassociate must be shunned. Of course they did, as they had to silence him. Thankfully, he went on to write a book, Crisis of Conscience, that has helped so many leave the abusive organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses, including myself. It backed up so many things that I saw for myself and let me know that I wasn’t crazy.
So, there is no iron clad scriptural support for the practice. It is the picking and choosing of verses, something that Jehovah’s Witnesses make fun of other religions for doing, to support a controlling doctrine so as to keep the numbers in the ranks high. It leads some to suicide. How can you say that a person that commits suicide wasn’t repentant, or sorry for what they did? Yet the elders clearly determined that they weren’t and cast them to the land of the shunned. I will forever have a hole in my heart where my family once existed, and I missed the last year of my dad’s life, all because I no longer wanted to be identified as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses because I could no longer support their controlling ways. My wife will forever have dreams of her family and cry over the loss of her sisters because that’s apparently an expression of “God’s love” for her. I’ll say it yet again. Disfellowshipping, and applying the same rules to the disassociated, is a power move aimed at controlling dissenters through psychological warfare, and it is disgusting.
The arrogance being shown in this discussion has come almost entirely from you, Dougie. What you feel has been disrespect and condescension is considered disagreement in most circles. But b/c you feel (w/ not one shred of evidence) that you hold the real truth, you see any rejection of it as an affront.
You’re simply wrong, by your organization’s hypocritical standards and by those of civil society. It’s not that we’re all libertines or leftists or socialists - that would be too easily shown; you’re just on the wrong side of what it means to be a caring and kind person b/c your cult puts you there.
This shows just how much you know. There are people I have known over the course of my life since I finished high school in 1967–not one of them with religious ties to me. (The German carpenter, closer than any other person with whom I did have religious ties, moved out of the area about 30 years ago and died not long after.) Of the people I have been acquainted with since then, the only one who has criticized me for any reason is the Jewish lady with whom I used to keep company (I have not seen her in about four years) and she is one whom some of you have properly criticized for her own temperament and behavior. I believe I am justified in ignoring your ignorant judgment, on the basis of the personal contacts I have had, many of whom I communicate with regularly on Facebook.
But you are entitled to your opinion.
I don’t know why you’re talking about people and their religious ties to you, I didn’t mention it. What I know of you is just the face you’ve shown here, where you picked a fight to defend your cult from a person who left it after years of deliberation.
It put a smile on my face to read you prefacing your ignoring me w/ explaining how right you are to do it, as well.
“I am right in ignoring your opinion, and now I will ignore it.”
Great that no one has criticized you in 4 years and the last critic was Jewish. Did she criticize you b/c she’s Jewish or were you justified in ignoring her criticism b/c she’s Jewish? Either way, it’s her Jewishness that’s most important to note in weighing her having criticized you, right?
