Really, all that work to get you to join the club and you wouldn't believe the list of things you can be kicked out for! It pretty much boils down to "whatever you're doing immediately before you piss somebody off." Religions are wonderful for creating bizarre and numerous rules everyone will eventually break, aren't they?
Adultery (sexual intercourse with a person other than your marriage mate), includes;
- abandoning wife and eloping with another woman
- planned adultery to break Scriptural marriage ties
- remarriage without Scriptural permission
- polygamy
- dating a person not legally divorced
Dating a person not yet legally divorced is most certainly not adultery. Also, is abandoning one's husband and eloping with another man acceptable?
Associating with disfellowshipped people including;
- friends - ks91-E p.103, w81 9/15 pp.25-6, w55 10/1 p.607
- family - ks91-E p.103
Was your mother kicked out? Your son, your twin sister, your dying uncle? Too bad, you can't ever see them again!
- Blood and blood transfusions
- Drug use
- Drunkenness
- Dishonest business practices
- Employment violating Christian principles
- working for any religious organization
- working in a gambling institution
- selling tobacco -
- contract work at a military establishment
So, can you sell alcohol? Also, working for any religious organization? Doesn't someone work at the Watchtower?
Fornication it-
- bestiality
- incestuous marriage
- artificial insemination
- sexual abuse of children
One of these things is not like the other.
Greediness, this in used to include;
- gambling ks91-E p.95
- extortion ks91-E p.95, w89 1/15 22, it-1 p.789
- greed in relation to bride-price: w98 9/15 p.25
Wait, what? Bride-price? O_o
- Obscene speech
- Parents condoning immorality
- Political involvement, including voting or holding a political card in Malawi Therefore Jesus, knowing they were about to come and seize him to make him king, withdrew again into the mountain all alone.
- Porneia. "It includes oral and anal sex or mutual masturbation between persons not married to each other, homosexuality, lesbianism, fornication, adultery, incest, and bestiality."
- Uncleanness
- sexually 'perverse' practices within marriage, such as oral and anal sex
- heavy petting and breast fondling
- touching of sexual parts
Fuck! I'm out! I'm guessing "parents condoning immorality" means not beating your gay child half to death. Porneia is a new one on me. Isn't lesbianism included in homosexuality? I also enjoy any list that puts masturbation on the same level as incest and bestiality. Ooo, and voting. That's of the Devil.
Also, how do they breed? Maybe that's why they have to recruit so heavily- if you can't touch sexual parts, you can't impregnate/be impregnated, and artificial insemination is out . . . so, no baby JWs. Brilliant!
Hey, maybe I could just tell the JW Grannies that keep visiting me that I "like fucking female donkeys while smoking cigarettes and playing blackjack in a voting booth." That should keep them away!
Back when I was in Grad school, my roommate and I shared an apartment. The first year we were there, we forgot to take down the Halloween decoration... for about three years.
ReplyDeleteI mention this because it did a wonderful job of keeping the random proselytizers away. Seriously. I'd watch them knock on the other doors, and yet somehow they never quite made it to ours.
Dunno if that would work everywhere, but it worked in west Texas...
As a former JW, the stories I could tell. (but never write on a public forum.)
ReplyDeleteThey practice a modified version of arrange marriage, where dating is never one-on-one. All potential mates are evaluated for suitability in group situation, and nothing remotely sexual can happen 'til marriage.
John, it sounds like barely anything sexual can happen after marriage too. No anal or oral, I am definitely never joining that religion, like I had ever thought about it.
ReplyDeleteum, how would they know, anyway?
ReplyDeleteJWs will bring up the "proper sexual conduct within marriage" every now and then to remind the rank and file what is acceptable to Jehovah, but for the most part it is not a big deal.
ReplyDeleteUnless it becomes known to the rest of the congregation.
Then it becomes a public scandal.
PF, it is not that they would know, but it is that you would get brow beaten for it. Also, if you raise a child in this environment, if they ever partake in consensual oral or anal sex they will be guilt ridden by it. It is just a physical and mental handicap I do not wish to have or inflict on others.
ReplyDelete"Uncleanness: heavy petting"
ReplyDeleteWhat? It's like the 4kids version of "Groping."
Much of these rules are stricter than what the Puritans practiced. Puritans were also much more intellectual than the JWs.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I have to agree with John in that my impression is that for most JWs a lot of this is simply ignored.
funny story.
ReplyDeletewhen we were in Alabama, we had a PLAGUE of JW missionaries.
because they knew we were pagan.
every freaking saturday at 6am, they'd ring our bell. and it was usually ME who'd answer, because... well, frankly because none of us wore anything to bed, and i was the only one WILLING to answer [my step-mother did once, but she was so upset i did it from then on]
FINALLY they happened to come on a day when my dad was in town [he spent MONTHS TDY that last year he was in the AF]
so, large naked adult man opens the door. they did *try* - but my dad is actually VERY atheist, and can barely handle knowing the rest of us HAVE a religion, and we never, ever bug him with it.
20 minutes later, they were running scared, because my dad had convinced them that they were "mere figments" of his imagination :) ah, solipsim...