Pariah Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 Today it came out in the One Verse at a Time thread that Sub_Zero actually believes Noah's Ark factually happened. He even sent me to a website ... to prove how Noah was able to get pairs of every animal on the ark. Deep down I knew there were literalists out there. But this is the first time I've examined a website where literalists expended enormous amounts of energy to "prove" something as unbelieveable as 2 of every kind of animal fitting on the ark. I have to ask ... did you all REALLY believe this stuff, or did you just not question it? If you were teaching, in the ministry etc... didn't kids ever ask you? How did you answer? I don't really remember much about this, but I did accept the Bible stories at a certain level. You know when you look at diagrams of the insides of the human body, you don't really connect those pictures with the actual inside of your body (or at least I don't, maybe its just me)? Well, it was the same kind of thing for me with Bible stories, I accepted them as history because an authority said so, but for some reason I didn't really think of them as having actually happened. This was when I was first being taught these stories. Later I started questionin them (especially Jesus's sacrifice), but in my religious community (school, church, and home) questioning Bible stories was seen as a sign of immaturity, so I quickly learned not to voice any doubts outloud. If you have any questions about teenagers and Christianity feel free to ask me, since I know a lot of literalist Christian teenagers from all different sects from my school, which is a private Christian high school. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Open_Minded Posted February 27, 2006 Author Share Posted February 27, 2006 OK ... new question.... Today I spent the whole day at a local expo. Our group had a booth there and I did a presentation on meditation. Many people stopped by our booth to talk. And many of those people shared with me why they left the church of their childhood. Anyway, one woman told me she had been raised in Jehovah's Witnesses. She said she left when they kicked her out. She didn't give me all the details and I didn't ask. But - she did mention an "enforcer". What's an enforcer. From the context of our conversation - it seemed as if the person she was referring to was charged with the job of monitoring church members moral behavior. Is this for real. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godlessgrrl Posted March 3, 2006 Share Posted March 3, 2006 Welll... I don't know what an "enforcer" is in the JW's. But I do remember that a number of years ago my sister had a friend who was a Mormon gal. When the two of them were in their first years of college, the friend, N---, started getting more involved in her church again, and there was a gal who hung out with N--- who was essentially a church spook. She did, in fact, keep tabs on N---'s behavior. It was kind of creepy, actually. We couldn't go out anywhere with N--- without the spook coming along, and even though the spook was polite and nice enough in her own way, there was just enough of this feeling that there was some weird... I dunno, tentacle thing going on, and I don't quite mean in the hentai sense. N---'d be out doing whatever with us, and we'd invite her to go have a beer, or stay out late, or arrange a date for her with a mutual friend, and the spook would always pipe in and tell N---, "No, you really don't want to do that." And I can always remember the crestfallen look on N---'s face too - that was the saddest part of it. Here was this gal who was fun-loving, outgoing, independent-minded, and all this, who was for some unknown reason letting herself live on a leash. Anyway. Yeah. Maybe a JW "enforcer" is a little like that. I don't know though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Open_Minded Posted March 3, 2006 Author Share Posted March 3, 2006 Welll... I don't know what an "enforcer" is in the JW's. But I do remember that a number of years ago my sister had a friend who was a Mormon gal. When the two of them were in their first years of college, the friend, N---, started getting more involved in her church again, and there was a gal who hung out with N--- who was essentially a church spook. She did, in fact, keep tabs on N---'s behavior. It was kind of creepy, actually. We couldn't go out anywhere with N--- without the spook coming along, and even though the spook was polite and nice enough in her own way, there was just enough of this feeling that there was some weird... I dunno, tentacle thing going on, and I don't quite mean in the hentai sense. N---'d be out doing whatever with us, and we'd invite her to go have a beer, or stay out late, or arrange a date for her with a mutual friend, and the spook would always pipe in and tell N---, "No, you really don't want to do that." And I can always remember the crestfallen look on N---'s face too - that was the saddest part of it. Here was this gal who was fun-loving, outgoing, independent-minded, and all this, who was for some unknown reason letting herself live on a leash. Anyway. Yeah. Maybe a JW "enforcer" is a little like that. I don't know though. Gwen.. I'm sorry to hear that. Was N... able to escape this whole mindset? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godlessgrrl Posted March 7, 2006 Share Posted March 7, 2006 Gwen.. I'm sorry to hear that. Was N... able to escape this whole mindset? I have no idea. The family ended up losing touch with her after awhile. I kind of hope she got out of the Morg cube. She was independent and headstrong enough that it's definitely a possibility. I just don't know, though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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