I think you’ve built a strawman. Just because people don’t like Jehovah’s Witnesses doesn’t mean they have less outrage for genocide in Africa, sham faith healers, homeopathic woo, or whatever else you mentioned. In fact, that claim seems ridiculous and makes me think you’re not interested in an actual debate. You mentioning “no gunshots required” is similarly disingenuous since I don’t think a single person in the Pit legitimately thought JW deserved to be shot at, at least last time I read the thread.
Why are some people (certainly not all) more vocal about Jehovah’s Witnesses than those other things? Because it effects them directly. People that commute by car to work complain about traffic more often than any of those things you mentioned, but that doesn’t mean they think bad traffic is worse than genocide.
Finally, Scientology is another religion that gets as much or more scorn than JW and probably for at least one similar reasons. It basically amounts to what Dr. Drake posted. I know a former JW that was ostracized by her family for leaving the faith, and she regularly visited a web forum for other “recovering” JW. She had some pretty bad stories to tell about her personal experiences, and said others on the forum had similar stories. Scientologists treat former members even worse, which is one reason they are scorned even more than JW by most people.
Dammit, you’re ANOTHER person who didn’t even look at the syllabus before posting here. The Illuminatus! Trilogy is right there on the reading list, and the first book begins, “It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton.”
I bet you haven’t seen The Princess Bride, either. How people can be such cultural ignoramuses and still function is beyond me.
Here. They probably leave out random pages on Google Books, but that shouldn’t make it less intelligible. There’s some sex, if that bothers you, but you can skip it because it is poorly written and does not further the plot, because there really isn’t one. Then you can go to Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky. And I should read The Game of Thrones, but I don’t like George RR Martin.
I disagree with that sentiment. **simster **came across to me as having a very specific agenda of calling me out on some specific claim that an organization made years ago, which has very little to do with me personally.
Then you have a reading comprehension problem - and you are the one that made the claim in the thread you 'walked away from".
eta “an organization” - wtf? the Jehovah’s Witnesses are the subject - and you know it - you are a member, are you not? how is it that they are suddenly “an organization” ?
Perhaps because I didn’t link to a cite. It’s just not the type of thing I knew how to cite really. It’s a general attitude, with occasional specific incidents that are isolated components of what I view to be a whole.
The cite would end up being a frickin’ research paper…
Oh well, if you’re not going to attempt to rectify my reading comprehension problem by maybe, re-linking to your question that I failed to answer, how can I answer it? I apparently don’t comprehend.
The Watchtower and Bible Tract Society of Pennsylvania is / was an organization that years ago made statements and offered scriptural insights that it’s members took to mean specific dates of impending armageddon. Never was a specific date published, not were any directives given to members to abandon their earthly lives in expectation of a date. That’s Harold Camping’s territory (was that his name?)
Fer cripes sakes, even entire country gov’ts have changed course on things when they were wrong. Why would JW’s get vilified for doing the same? Call it moving the goalposts, or whatever. I call it re-aligning your kick when you realize the goalposts you were aiming at were just a mirage caused by your own misperception of events.
So again, I’ll say - we’re straying pretty far from the intent of my OP. I’d like to not get too far from it, because we’ll never get back.
I don’t hate anyone. It’s not good for the digestion.
Neither do I fear them or feel defensive from their proselytizing. They are acting on what they believe is the right thing for them to do and it has no effect on me.
Should they show up at my door I tell them the same thing I tell all people who try to sell me something I neither want nor need. I smile. “Nope. Not interested. All is well here. Good luck to you and please don’t come back.”
Only takes me a couple of seconds and costs me nothing. They are people, after all.
When I was very young I married and moved to the other side of the country. My husband was a sailor, and the JWs in the small town where we lived visited all the new servicemen and their families and brought small gifts, usually food. They were very nice to us and like many young military wives I was lonely and looking for friends. My husband and I decided to study with a group and go to a few meetings. After a few weeks I started feeling pressured, and it got much worse when I revealed that I was pregnant. I was turned off by the medical nonsense (in my opinion it is nonsense) and as a born-and-raised United Methodist I felt they were a little too extreme in their beliefs and traditions so I backed off.
That would have been the end of it and I wouldn’t have such a bad feeling about them except they hounded me by phone and knocking on my door several times a day, then contacting my husband and trying to get him to convince me to change my mind. That’s when he started backing off, but there were several JWs in our neighborhood and they wouldn’t leave him alone.
I don’t know if this is common or if we were just victim to a particularly obnoxious group, but one of the men started telling my husband that I was a bad influence and that he needed to get away from me. Now granted, I had cussed one woman out after she’d called me about a dozen times in one day, but you don’t get between a man and his wife. They didn’t stop harassing us until I broke up with my husband and moved back across country. They didn’t leave HIM alone until he was transferred.
This is why I have a problem with the organization, and maybe it’s just that one group, like I said, but they still make me nervous when they come to my door after 20+ years. I don’t really mind people coming to my door…once… but if you say no thank you but still talk nice to them they will come back and leave their literature if I don’t answer the door. How many times do I have to tell them I’m not interested?
Also, I don’t like that they’d put a person at risk when it comes to rejecting blood transfusions. One of the pamphlets had a story praising a woman for “standing her ground” and refusing blood after hemorrhaging in childbirth. It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and she was in the hospital for months all because she was taught that getting a blood transfusion was partaking of blood. She didn’t want to be in trouble with her god, so she put her life at risk and easily could have left her children without a mother. I don’t care for that sort of extremism, no matter what religion it is.
One day, the nice pair of JWs came to my door, and we got to talking. It was very polite, friendly, upbeat, and informative. I said I wan an atheist, they asked why, and we kept it polite. No pressure, no names, no problem.
They came back the next day with a tract entitled “What Atheists Really Believe.”
I was very disappointed, and had to spend some time explaining the Straw Man fallacy to them. They didn’t know the difference between witnessing and bearing false witness.
The individuals were very nice. The organization, its dogma, and its form of debate are wanting in reason and sense.
your fein of ‘ignorance’ is astounding - you can’t remember the post from the other thread that led to this one, you know, the one you quoted but wasn’t responding to?
Did you read the link I posted? Probably not, being afraid of “apostate material” nd all…
Lastly - and then I am done with you and this thread - trying to distance yourself from the Watchtower is an interesting tactic - they publish your materials - they publish the stuff you peddle from door to door - they are the very place you get all of your 'insight into the scriptures" - they have published dates, they have encouraged folks not to futher educational or career goals and to put eveything into the preaching work - that article lays alot of that out.
If they were wrong before - and they’ve been claiming to be “Gods oRganization on earth - delivering his message straight from his mouth” - why would they be right now? How many lies does it take to prove they are not “gods chosen”?
This is why people find your little cult so worthy of disdain.
Besides the refusal to allow modern medicine (Science!) to take care of your minors, it’s the wholesale insincerity you’ve been coached to emote. Such as this:
You pretend to be amused in many of your posts, not because you actually are so gregarious and agreeable, but because you have been coached to respond to with with bonhomie. As evidenced by this OP, the bonhomie is false, fake; a put-on. You attempt to ingratiate yourself because the elders have coached you to put on the appearance of humility and acquiescence, but you’re anything but. You’re attitude is superior, abrasive. Unpleasant, and inauthentic. I haven’t requested you peddle your wares, and I certainly don’t want to endure your dry, tight smile as you privately will my soul extinguished for not jumping onto the bandwagon you worship.
Well, that, and the persecution complex which you cultivate and some of us, myself included, are quick to feed. But I always feel dirty after I shut the door on a Witness, because I know your type gets some odd gratification from any rejection of your program. So I suppose I feel as though I’m helping you masturbate, in a fashion, and that’s disconcerting, then I think of the minors who have suffered and died due to your sect’s insistence that blood is HOLY and I remember all those who wander the planet lonely, awkward, and ill-prepared when they dare leave your sect. And yes, I kind of hate your kind. Not you, specifically, though you have displayed every attribute I’ve ascribed to all JayDubs. It’s hideous, your willingness to allow minors to suffer and die, your willingness to shun and isolate your own kind. How can you expect any variety of Heaven, when you treat your own brethren thusly? It’s despicable.
I dislike proselytizers of all stripes. If Methodists were knocking on my door at 11:00 AM on Saturday mornings to push poorly written literature on me, I’d dislike them as well. But since they don’t do this, they don’t register on my radar.
Perhaps if JW’s were known for good works–like founding colleges and hospitals, effective anti-poverty ministries, social justice, etc–instead of calculating the end of the world down to the second, maybe JUST MAYBE people would have something good to say about them. And maybe they do good works and it’s a false perception that they don’t. But the truth of the matter is that if your only exposure to a religion is through proselytization, you’re not going to really be impressed with that group.
At least the Nation of Islam sells bean pies. I think they’re crazy as all get-out and don’t think The Final Call is good enough to be used as toliet paper, but I sure love me some of those bean pies. The JW’s need to come up with something like that to win the hearts and minds.
Missed the edit window. Second only to the disgusting practice of disfellowship is the pride your people take in anti-intellectualism. I’m gobsmacked that any of you with an IQ above 70 can’t see through the veil of deliberate discouragement of higher learning. The more you know; the more you’ll reject. So you subscribe to a club which promotes ignorance over knowledge, and expect the rest of the modern world to jump on your bandwagon.
Do you know what that means for you club? The entire organization is lacking in experience, reason, knowledge, and adaptability. You aren’t the strongest of the herd, yet you behave as though you know something the rest of us don’t. But we can read the same booklets and editions you read, so we’re actually quite well-versed in your rhetoric. And for me, at least, well, I’m sorry and ashamed for you. You, especially, because you do seem to be well-spoken and well-written, despite your self-imposed limits on learning. Why in the world would you restrict your normal to above average brain to such an insular commune? Please, join the rest of us and advance. You’re capable. And whatever you do, stop converting others. Surely you’ll find other socially awkward or isolated members of your community while knocking about and you’ll convert them to your small world.
Please stop. Let them grow and learn. They’ll never get in, anyways. The 144,000 quota was met years prior. Let the innocents thrive and burden them not with the artificial fears you’ve enrolled in.
Syllabus, no. I have seen the princess bride though. Not nearly enough times I admit freely. The first few pages of that book look … how you say … enticingly silly.
Well then. I think there’s a term for this, but I can’t quite nail it down. Something about attributing things to others which are based on preconceptions?
So, because you have disdain for JW’s as a group, somehow I am now being disingenuous, or putting on false emotion? I’m not allowed to see how much Dr. Drake’s experience hurt him, and offer consolation? Well shit in my hand and call it a hotdog. That just doesn’t seem right. I do not pretend to be amused in my posts, I’m genuinely amused. I’m the least Witness-y JW you’d ever meet, and many in my own congregation actively choose to limit their association with me for fear of being “spiritually damaged” by my abrasive tone and “worldly” wit. See, I was raised rather opposite of a JW, and old habits die hard.
I can totally see why having your mindset would lend itself to hating (or really really not liking) JW’s.
Meh. Just because some old white dudes in a fancy building in Brooklyn discourage college for fear of the anti-biblical exposure the young’ins get doesn’t mean I ascribe to that belief. Nor is that the case with all JW’s.
It’s discouraged simply because many aren’t “strong enough” in the faith to endure college without being wholly disabused of the beliefs they enter with. I know a couple Witnesses who went to college, with little ill effect. Made it through, got a degree, and still consider themselves witnesses. I also know of plenty who went, and got involved in typical college stuff, minor drug use, promiscuity, frat-boy idiocy. These individuals eventually decided that they preferred the spiritual life they had left behind, and now had to live with the consequences of the decisions they had made in their teenage angst. Some of those consequences are obvious - STD’s, accidental pregnancies, dependencies on drugs, or even just a bothered conscience.
It is the inability of the average person to avoid the strong temptations of an unscriptural lifestyle that motivates the discouragement to attending college - nothing more. College has a lot of benefits, but for many, all it does it put them on the hamster wheel of modern life and they abandon what their parents believe is their spiritual heritage. Know that scripture that says you can’t serve two masters? Riches or God, not both; not honestly anyway.
Re: disfellowshipping - it works. If you want to return to the path Jehovah lays out, then you do so. If not, then your continued associated with his people would serve only to diminish the value of the efforts others made to stay on that path. It’s “these are the rules, if you don’t follow them, get off the playing field”. The bible places loyalty to God above loyalty to family.
Like it or not, your representative’s behavior reflects on your organization as a whole, your own attitudes and behavior included. You aren’t unique. Well, none of us are, but you certainly aren’t some shining, progressive paragon of enlightenment by virtue of your membership to the Straight Dope Message Board. It simply means you’re talkative and willing to interactive with worldly types, or bored and lonely, or perhaps on some level you realize you are too smart to drink the Kool-aid. Doesn’t matter which, really, it doesn’t. So long as you are online on any site that isn’t JW approved you are learning. And that’s good. Brave, even.
But please don’t flatter yourself by thinking that your superior intellect will help you win converts on such a platform. The tolerance for bullshit here seems quite lower than that which you may find on lonely Saturday mornings in financially depressed neighborhoods around the world. You think we don’t know you aren’t tapping into the widow/retiree/shut-in market? We know this. We know your population base. We also know the stats on the longevity, the viability, the fertility of your likely membership base. Shut-ins, widows, loners, the disabled… you prey on those people who desperately need a community. And that, my dear JW, is the only service you provide the World that isn’t a nuisance and a blight on a tax-paying society. Thanks, I suppose, for taking in the chronically lonely.
But be honest with them about their chances towards Heaven. Please let them know the seats are all filled, and warn them that any dissent or questions will lead them to be shunned. Don’t mislead those weak-willed lonely folk to pad your numbers. It’s profoundly unkind.
