Anna

No, you love this, that's why you're always trolling on here 

@Srecko Sostar asked how it was that I got through the material with him in the first place, and this is the key. During a study with someone I don't think it's my place to tell him where I might think differently, or why certain material may be questionable. But I don't have to go against my own conscience by saying things I don't believe. I can emphasize the points of agreement and defend, to a large extent, the basic concepts of the 1914 doctrine. And I end up in pretty much the same place: that we are in the last days, that Jesus is reigning, that Jesus is invisibly present, and that we are undergoing critical times hard to deal with. But when I go through Daniel 4, I present the 7 times as one of those ideas that might even point to our own time period.  (I believe it does point to our time period in the sense that it shows Jehovah still has everything under control, no matter how chaotic the effects of world governments are.)
I will typically add a bit of scriptural balance by pointing out what Jesus said about knowing the day and hour, and what Jesus said about the times and seasons being in the Father's jurisdiction, and Paul saying that we don't need to have anything more written to us about the times and seasons, or even the parousia itself, for the reasons he gave. But it is natural for us to want to see whatever we think is possible to see, and we live in times when it is important to keep our hope alive during an age of fear and distress upon all nations. This is especially true of times that can see conflicts escalate into world wars. When half a nation will take sides against the other half, or half a world will take sides against the other half.
What I think is obviously quite different than what appears in the WT, and I can't blame his own conscience. I am surprised that it came up years later, but fortunate enough that I am not "turned in" for my own conscientious beliefs. (I can believe that something made him doubt the chronology himself to trigger his dredging it up and then choosing to dig in his heels.) But it is sad to lose good friend.

What would they apostasize from?
Not only to the many verses dealing with apostasy reveal the nature of apostates. They also reveal the nature of the Christian congregation.

Interesting observations. On the other hand it makes sense that there would be a greater enthusiasm for criticism among any group which claimed to have the truth. In fact I thought it quite idiotic as an atheist that anyone promoting their particular brand of faith didn't consider their brand of faith to be "the truth".
Now you'd be hard pressed to find a Catholic apostate, or a Lutheran apostate....
I remember on the matter of exploring religions a statement by the unitarians in leo rosten's "religions of america" - "You might be a Unitarian and not even know it!"
My thoughts are, then apparently being Unitarian is meaningless.

Yes. This is another “booby prize” at first glance that turns out to be top prize at second..It is an indication that JWs have the truth: We have by far the best apostates.
No NT writer does not deal with the subject of apostasy. Two chapters of the Bible are devoted to it entirely. Unless the world has been won over by Christ (we all know the answer to that one) then the reality then should be the reality today. And nobody has more vociferous “apostates” than ours. We should be proud of them, for through them is our validation.

Xero: I enjoyed this. It brought back memories. Your experience is my experience, not the specifics, but the general outline.
This is a specific that is the same. To this day, that book is my favorite, dated though it must be by now..
I had two college chums, and I gave the book to both of them. I thought one would love it and one would hate it. I was right!
I was also wrong. The one I thought would like it hated it. The one I thought would hate it liked it.

hehehe :)))))))

These days it is easy to confuse memory with a good search engine.

You do NOT sleep with a smile of Jesus in your face. If you did, your manner of communication, respect, and kindness would align with his.
At the drop of a pin, you pick fights and take offense. Jesus didn’t do this. Picking on poor @Araunaof the fading eyes—shame, shame!

What did Jesus do when he was “disrespected?”
How insistent was Jesus on proving himself right?
Even were I to take this as an insult, which appears the way you intend it, how many times did Jesus say to Peter (after 3 times denying him) “The one that should be ashamed is you, ex-disciple!”
I mean really, CC. If you want people to believe that you are a Witness, you should act like one.

Grrrrr, that is so sad, and I would say unnecessary. But of course we are not masters of an other's conscience, so no one can judge him for that (I am not saying you are ) and say it was totally unnecessary. But, the ironic thing is, how was his conscience formed? Was it through the Bible, or was it through the interpretation and understanding of some men who have erred in the past over a number of things? It's obviously the latter, and that's the sad frustrating, and unnecessary part.  I know, I know....I'm preaching to the choir...

Grrrrr, that is so sad, and I would say unnecessary. But of course we are not masters of an other's conscience, so no one can judge him for that (I am not saying you are ) and say it was totally unnecessary. But, the ironic thing is, how was his conscience formed? Was it through the Bible, or was it through the interpretation and understanding of some men who have erred in the past over a number of things? It's obviously the latter, and that's the sad frustrating, and unnecessary part.  I know, I know....I'm preaching to the choir...

Yeah. But it is optional method for some people. :))

I request that all upvotes that might otherwise go to CC, who disdains them, be bestowed upon me instead. I need all I can get to counter the deluge of downvotes from 4Jah.
Never could there be a worse waste of already strained eyes.
Better people than you have tried to figure this out. I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. I’m not sure what happened either. Last I checked he was upvoting you routinely.
 

Grrrrr, that is so sad, and I would say unnecessary. But of course we are not masters of an other's conscience, so no one can judge him for that (I am not saying you are ) and say it was totally unnecessary. But, the ironic thing is, how was his conscience formed? Was it through the Bible, or was it through the interpretation and understanding of some men who have erred in the past over a number of things? It's obviously the latter, and that's the sad frustrating, and unnecessary part.  I know, I know....I'm preaching to the choir...

I also believe that true anointed persons make up a portion of the WTS. And I see no evidence that there would be any true anointed persons found among Mormons. I'm not trying to be a judge of who is and isn't a "true anointed" but I'm just giving an opinion based on evidence I've seen.
But this view of yours is a fairly unique view among ex-JWs (and the JW acquaintance of mine who is now an ex-elder). It's one of those things that probably made/makes no sense to "John Butler" and "4Jah2me" even though those accounts have often sided with your critiques, but have also been very vocal about not believing that "true anointed" are to be found among JWs.
When you say the anointed "Israel" resides in the WT, you also admitting that the truly anointed persons reside in the WT, but that they must also "get out of her." This means that the true anointed ("Israel") must pass through the WTS and then realize that they are in the wrong place and must get out of her. This also appears to associate the WTS directly with Babylon the Great.
But I admit that I still can't follow the logic:
How did the truly anointed "Israel" (God's people) get into the WTS in the first place? What attracted them? If they were attracted for good reasons, or necessary reasons, but must now come out, then the WTS acts as some kind of trap. There must be something special about the WTS that produces or attracts these anointed to stay in the first place. But if they continue to stay and don't come out, then whatever attracted them was a trap! If Satan is allowed to test them within the WTS then was it Satan who made this trap? Or do you think that the WTS is a good place for all anointed to pass through, assuming they also see that it is not a good place to stay, because they must get out of her? How long is the right amount of time to stay? What happens if whatever was supposed to to attract them to the WTS works, and gets them into the WTS, but they die just before realizing that they were also supposed to "get out of her."
If one looks at the Hebrew Scriptures as a pattern, then God's people (Jews/"Israel") were forced into exile in Babylon as a punishment. Many stayed in Babylon and survived as "Babylonians" for a few years. Some even thrived as Babylonian/Persian citizens for centuries, and the worldly comforts and economy of Babylon held them "captive" from restoring pure worship in Jerusalem with their fellow Jews.
This is why I don't think of Babylon the Great as a specific religion or group of false religions, but as a world of materialism and false ideologies of all kinds: the "world and its desire." This can definitely include all false religion (the general JW doctrine) but now that "location" is not the issue for pure worship, the idea of Babylon, Rome and Jerusalem must be spiritual concepts in Revelation:
(John 4:21-24) . . .Jesus said to her: “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, because salvation begins with the Jews. 23 Nevertheless, the hour is coming, and it is now, when the true worshippers will worship the Father with spirit and truth, for indeed, the Father is looking for ones like these to worship him. 24 God is a Spirit, and those worshipping him must worship with spirit and truth.”
Spiritually speaking, then, Sodom and Egypt, and Rome and Babylon have meanings in Revelation that are associated with their earlier "OT" counterparts. True Christians, whether heaven-bound or not, anointed or not, must get out of Babylon because she represents the "center" of a world of false religious beliefs, false ideologies, political associations, the commercial centers and ideologies. Like you, I believe this is happening now, because true Christians have conquered the world spiritually. As Jesus said, "I see Satan already fallen like lightning from heaven."
(John 16:33) . . .. In the world you will have tribulation, but take courage! I have conquered the world.”
(1 John 2:14-17) . . .because you are strong and the word of God remains in you and you have conquered the wicked one. 15 Do not love either the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him; 16 because everything in the world—the desire of the flesh and the desire of the eyes and the showy display of one’s means of life—does not originate with the Father, but originates with the world. 17 Furthermore, the world is passing away and so is its desire, but the one who does the will of God remains forever.
(1 John 5:4) 4 because everyone who has been born from God conquers the world. And this is the conquest that has conquered the world, our faith.
(Romans 8:37-39) 37 To the contrary, in all these things we are coming off completely victorious ["more than conquerors" KJV] through him that loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor governments nor things now here nor things to come nor powers 39 nor height nor depth nor any other creation will be able to separate us from God’s love that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I don't see anything in the context of Revelation's depiction of Babylon the  Great that would limit it to a specific religion. I see it as something much bigger. I see it as the way in which Christians should know that the last world empire (e.g., "Rome") has already fallen for them, spiritually.

I feel the same. I am completely convinced there is a creator and that he has revealed things he wants us to know in the Bible.  I believe that some of the things that we cannot seem to reconcile at the moment (pertaining to creation and scientific evidence, such as carbon dating, the supposed age of man and civilization, predators....etc.) will be revealed, and we will have that face palm moment as in "duh, of course"! 
Ummm.....say no more. I have been wrapping my head around it for some time now, with the help of JWI. I still owe him a reply, actually, it will be more questions....
 
Thank you for sharing your experiences, very interesting and encouraging! 👍🤗
 

That takes a humility not found among all of us. Learning from our students rather than thinking only of ourselves as the teacher can be very beneficial.
My wife and I have years of pioneering behind us, although we are less active now. We both learned a lot from studying with a couple where the wife was mentally ill ("possession" issues), and they became Witnesses with no further issues that I have heard about. My wife and I studied with another mentally ill woman who had been in a jail (NYC Creedmoor), and whose fleshly brother (also an addict) joined one time creating a scene that brought about an assault situation for the police. There was no success here in converting the person, but it created a deep friendship and evidently a life-long change in the woman who has overcome addiction, and is still loved deeply by us. She actually sees herself as a Witness, although the elders here would not allow baptism.
I studied for years with persons inside medium and high-security prisons. Altogether, it's like a course in psychology.
I studied with one family where the husband was a policeman, the wife took a year of studying and long late-night hours with me on the phone to help her overcome her smoking addiction. They were baptized together. Their two children were too young at the time, but one has been baptized since. This is a sad situation for me, because we love the family and have been close, but he is an elder now and realizes that I didn't believe in the 1914 chronology because of things he remembered in the way I studied it with him. He confirmed this by asking me directly, and has now asked that we have no more contact.
Very early in my pioneering (pre-Bethel) I loved studying the Evolution book and the "Is the Bible Really the Word of God?" book with university students. It was easy to pick up a dozen Bible Studies, and this made the pioneering hour quota go by so easily. (Strangely, one of these studies left Missouri after getting baptized and joined the congregation I was assigned to in NY at Bethel.)  My mother is pioneering as we speak and calls in to the meeting for service every day before letters or phone calls, and she currently has only one regular Bible Study. She stays on the line with one of the other sisters so they can talk together while writing letters, but getting in the quota is so slow-going for her.
That can be read with a bit of ambiguity. If you care to, I am always happy to discuss.
I either join or create a discussion on the topic about once a year on the forum, because I have now spent enough time on the topic to be convinced in my own mind. It's not something I feel is specifically important in the long run, but it's part of an ongoing and ever-resurfacing problem of trying to motivate activity (works) by emphasizing that we have special knowledge of the times and seasons. Going back to review how we (as an organization) received this 1914 tradition was an important lesson in humility for me. But sharing that lesson will just be seen by most as the exact opposite of humility and some will vehemently oppose discussing it reasonably.
I've reached the same idea, and I know that other JWs have also concluded the same. One or two others have implied as much on this forum.

One thing I've had hammered into me over the past decades of pioneering, studying w/mentally ill people, people who were out of jail, homeless people, professors of anthropology, teachers of farsi at the local mosque, chinese buddhists from hong kong (using me to practice english), professors of astrophysics, ranchers, ex-football champs, a hip hop artist and so-called normal people is that I'm not more worthy of survival than any of these.
In fact many are arguably better people personality wise. People who really care about other people.
That's been my lesson. I believe the truth of the bible in outline taught by JW's w/exception w/regard to rather specific ideas surrounding certain events in the last 100 years.
My experience coming in was that these were some of the most open-minded people I'd dealt with. I watched them w/my gf for about six months just observing these meetings and going to get togethers (she was studying - I was an unhappy atheist). I felt that out of respect for her interest it was worth my time to watch them for a time to see what I thought of them.
At some point, I thought "I want all my friends to be JW's, but I don't want to be one." I could see weird people in the congregation and normal people - as an outsider. Weird people always give me the creeps, but most of the people I talked with didn't do that, like every other religion.
My change in attitude came from the first apologetics I'd ever seen "Is the Bible Really the Word of God", the old book on Evolution (a little blue one)...then I started hitting Christian stores and found a bunch. I hadn't started to study yet, but went w/my gf to one day of this district convention when they released the book "Life How Did It Get Here - By Evolution or Creation". I read it that night. What's funny is that I had almost all the referenced books because I was taking a lot of evolutionary classes at the university - I was in the midst of E. O Wilson's - Sociobiology and had finished Dawkins book the Selfish Gene. I was amazed. I went and got every book I could find on this, one of my favorites being the book "Darwin Was WRONG - A Study in Probabilities".  After eating up all I could on this, I was a thoroughgoing theist.
So I brightened so no doubt. God exists!.... Next step...has he communicated w/us....
So I doubled up on apologetics relative to the manuscript and historical evidence for the Bible. I used Gleason Archer's "A Survey of Old Testament Introduction" and "Is The Bible Really the Word of God" ...anyway a lot more in this regard....I bought the cassettes for the bible and listened to them while I was running.  (I'd started to study now, because I felt the guy who was studying w/me was OK, but he was kindof not that logical, so I got passed on to another couple of elders and we'd go through the material.
It'd go like "How does that make you feel about Jehovah" (a sample question), and I'd go "I can see from x that if y were true it would be reasonable to feel z, but I'm not quite there yet."
It took a while. I had more questions on biology and so they brought in this sister who'd been a masters biology major and I got to grill her w/questions.
Me - "What about the dinosaurs?"
Her - "Soil building takes time. Dinosaurs were great processors of plant material....."
It went like that.
I wasn't and still haven't been thoroughly convinced on some of these matters. (but is it important, when there IS a creator?)
Then there was the whole 1914 thing. That was something needing analysis. The question then and now was not whether the Jews were in captivity 70 years, that was not disputed....At least not to believers, but chasing this chronology is a collossal pit....Not that I don't recommend chasing it, just that no one was ever convinced of anything via chronology. (Except if you were a Jew in Babylon and you got word it was getting close)
 
Anyway...I've wandered. My final point is that I don't believe the bar for survival to be only JW's. I'm thinking it's the majority. Now does this mean some event may be allowed to impact the earth and the only way people survive is through divine intervention? I think so. Then the rest who perished in my view would likely get resurrected - face it - it's only the blasphemy against God's spirit which according to the Insight book is hard to know if anyone has done this or not....so I'm sure Jehovah is more merciful than any of us could imagine.
So then you follow your conscience - it's yours to follow or not, to wound or not. If you know how to do what's right and don't that's on you. If someone's doing something wrong and that's out of your control - well "Desiderata"...
 
 
 
 

You were able to get right to the point in the way you worded the question. I tried the same question once with "Witness" because I also know someone else who has all kinds of problems with various doctrines and practices of the WTS, but who also expends so much energy on those problems. He is so negative that I have come very close to asking him why he hangs in there. He believes, of course, there is something special about the Witnesses, and believes that Jehovah is still using them. He expects "something very significant" to happen soon, centered around the WTS.
This appears to be similar to the thinking of "Witness" in that she believes that true anointed persons will be attracted to the WTS, where they will be tested because Jehovah has allowed a distortion to occur within the WTS organization. So she has this idea that it is, to some extent, an organization used by Jehovah, but only up to the point of attracting truly anointed persons to go through a test. But this implies that Jehovah tests in a way that entices persons into a trap, which I think is impossible, according to James:
(James 1:12, 13) . . .on becoming approved he will receive the crown of life, which Jehovah promised to those who continue loving Him. 13 When under trial, let no one say: “I am being tried by God.” For with evil things God cannot be tried, nor does he himself try anyone.
The other (ex-elder) I know has hinted at an idea in his case that perhaps Jehovah might use him personally as a means to correct things. And he writes to the WTS regularly. I think putting oneself personally into such an equation is the most problematic part. I haven't heard anything directly from "Witness" that implies she thinks she has a personal responsibility in this regard or if she thinks it might be true of a "prophetess" named "Pearl" whom she often quotes.
I guess it would be hypocritical to condemn on this idea alone, since all of us feel a personal responsibility to copy the example of Ezekiel as a "watchman." In that example, the person who feels they need to share a scriptural warning should feel a personal responsibility to share it.
There is a person on a site who calls himself the "Watchman" (or is it e-Watchman), and I think this is their own argument about Watchtower criticisms. In any case, they all must think there is something very special about the WTS so that their energy goes against it instead of being equally shared among the problems of Mormons, Catholics, Scientologists, etc. 
There was another "Ezekiel Watchman" who regularly wrote to Fred Rusk at Bethel in the 1970's. Fred Rusk was the primary Watchtower magazine editor during those years, and although he laughed at most of the "Ezekiel Watchman" rants, he took them seriously enough to read through them before tossing them. He even shared one of the 10-page papers with me once. (We worked near each other, and he gave half of my wedding talk.)
I don't have the impression that anyone at WTS HQ reads this site. But, who knows?

I don't believe in a "we" when it comes to taking responsibility for "my" moral decisions. There is no end to the deflections which I or anyone else might latch on to committed by others, but is this getting you anywhere?
I'll tell you, you don't have to be an expert to find out what's wrong or supposedly wrong with anything. Anyone w/half a brain just googles and gets all the garbage he might ever want to sift through. So unless you're trying to monetize this line of complaining, I don't see the point. It's not like anyone has the scoop.

Whenever I get a pang of conscience, I think; it's ok, Tom's on here! 😂🥳🤪💃

Your posts make me feel sad. I don't know why you keep on the attack. It isn't helping you or anyone else I can see.
I remember a brother once talking about someone, I forget who who was never a firebrand in service, commenting, cleaning the hall or anything else of this sort become as he described it "A pioneer apostate".
I wondered why people who didn't believe JW's had anything to offer would expend so much energy attacking them. I mean if what JW's have is vomit, then why go back and spend time examining the vomit?

I just draw the line when they say "go up you bald head!" - That's one thing I'll not put up with. Neither me, nor my trained dancing bear.
 

Uh oh. Whenever I get a pang of conscience, I think; it’s ok, Anna’s on here.
Maybe both of use can say, “It’s ok, Cesar’s here.”