Waching daily Oct 6 2018

This is Fifth and you're watching the ExJW Fifth YouTube channel. On today's episode, I'll

be speaking with Ben. Ben is a former Jehovah's Witness, also a former elder

and pioneer. He even worked with the writing desk in the Australian branch of

Jehovah's Witnesses and several of his articles were actually published in the

Watchtower and Awake magazines. So Ben, first of all I just really want to welcome you to

the channel and thank you so much for taking time out to speak with me.

thanks Fifth it's a pleasure to be on your channel. I'm looking forward to having a good

chat with you. -Likewise, thank you very

much. Let me ask you a little bit about your background with Jehovah's Witnesses.

What was your introduction to the

religion? -Sure, so my parents were

introduced to it when I was about 8 years old; my father was a window dresser

setting up shop displays, so of course most pioneers being window cleaners he

came across the witnesses all the time and eventually invited one back to the

house and started studying. My mother was reluctant at first and she gave the

witnesses a really hard time, but eventually she started studying as well

and I think they got baptized around 1978 so from that point on I

grew up in that culture. My father was never a serious sort of witness I think

for him it was more that he liked the people. He was very social and gregarious;

I don't think he ever really took it that seriously. I know when he studied

with me, he never took my study very personally, so I had to kind of

study for myself. So, in my teenage years I was very studious. I'd read a lot but

like - yeah, my dad was pretty casual about it all. He used to even fall asleep in the

study that he had with me but I was a very serious young person. I made a

friend with another older brother in the congregation and we used to even study

our books together, get right into all those old meaty things with all the

types in the antitypes and all the heavy prophecy stuff so

that was the kind of person I was. And so at 14, I decided to get baptized and even

from that young age I had instilled into me

the goal of pioneering. I had a few older brothers that sort of mentored me and

really sort of instilled those goals into me, so I was a very serious-minded young

person; never got into any trouble and baptized very young. Then about eighteen

I met my future wife. She moved into our congregation from a northern coastal

congregation here in Australia and 19 I was married. So yeah that's

how it all started. - I see, and now I would

imagine because you already have mentioned that you were very

goal-oriented even from a very early age, I would imagine you were reaching out

for even more privileges at that time, is that correct?

oh absolutely, so of course I was hoping to be appointed as a

ministerial servant and the brothers indicated to me that they were looking

looking at me in that way. Unfortunately, my courtship to my

future wife sort of threw a spanner in the works there, they viewed my wife

as kind of a - I don't know - a boy chaser or a cradle snatcher or something. She kind of

moved into our congregation and straightaway she's sort of after one of

their spiritual boys as it were, and I just remember our courtship, you know... it

should have been kind of the happiest time in your life but the elders at times

made it really miserable for us because we couldn't do anything right. If we were

seen holding hands we were straightaway taken out to the back room and counseled.

Everything we did we were counseled for, they just interfered with

everything. Eventually, it got so bad that the circuit overseer even got involved.

To his credit, he actually pulled the elders aside and said, "hey brothers, look, if the

parents are approving just stay out of it. Mind

your own business. So I thank them for that, but I just remember what

a miserable time it was just not being able to have a natural courtship just

because everything you did was so micro managed and everything was observed and

criticized and counseled. Anyway, we got married eventually

and then the brothers came to me and said, "look, you know, we would like to make

a ministerial servant but seeing as you're just married, we would like to give you

some time to settle into marriage." Which I thought was a good practical thing. So

I accepted that, but then they made me a ministerial servant so I would have been

about twenty, twenty-one, early twenties I can't remember exactly, and then that

sort of opened up some strange things for me and I guess through my story I'm

gonna be mentioning a lot of things that probably should have made me think about

the organization on a deeper level, should have made me question things but

I just sort of suppressed it all and I ignored a lot of things. So I found

being a ministerial servant in that congregation where I grew up very tough

because there our presiding overseer - as they were called in those times

He was one of those really old school elders that sort of felt the congregation

was his congregation, like he owned it. He was the chief and we were the

Indians, and so there was again this very very strict control of everything - how

everything was done, there was no freedom of opinion or how you might

carry out certain tasks but, you know, I coped with that and I thought he was a

bit of a Hitler in a sense and eventually when the opportunity came up

to move, I took that opportunity and got out of that congregation. Also because

I thought it was good to to move away from where you've grown up where

everyone views you as just a sort of young kid - to establish your own identity

I thought was important too. I progressed well, I was being given

public talks as a ministerial servant so I think I'd made good progress there,

but the opportunity came up to move to, another Kingdom Hall where there was a

Kingdom Hall flat available. So they were looking for a pioneer to move into that

flat and we jumped at that opportunity

as a newly married couple. - I see. Okay, so

once you moved into that flat and obviously changed congregations;

being able to be perceived perhaps in a different light than you had been

previously in your home congregation, what happened? How was your time

there at that congregation? - okay, so

part of the reason for leaving was, as I said, to get away from the this

very controlling elder and unfortunately what happened was it was a bit of the

out of the frying pan into the fire scenario. So when we moved into the new

congregation, it was all lovely. We were welcomed so warmly. The presiding

overseer there said, you know, how much he appreciated having us there but that

only lasted for a very short time and then his true colors came to the

fore and I realized that he was an even worse man than the man I had left. I have

to put this in context and say that, you know, I've worked with many many

wonderful elders over the years, so I don't want to portray a wrong picture.

Many of these elders I've worked with have been very loving, very

genuine men, but over time there have been some real bad ones, some bad

eggs in that mix and this one was probably one of the worst. So just to

give you sort of an idea of how he ran the congregation it was really like

with an iron fist. Everything was controlled to the minutest detail

and again we used to get in trouble for the slightest things. So it might be...

we had a anniversary party for someone in the congregation and he'd come up and

grill me and say, "you can't have anniversary parties! The society doesn't

agree with them." and I'm like, "well, where does it say that?"

and then he'd write letters and just make stuff up and say the society says

this and that. So any of his personal opinions he'd used the society and say

that's what was behind his opinion. There was another instance where

my wife wanted to do something fun for the kids in the congregation. So

she thought, "Let's do a drama with the kids! We'll use one of the

recorded dramas, we'll hire a community hall, we'll get the brothers to make up

costumes and it'll be a real fun school activity in the holidays for all the

kids. As soon as this elder heard about it he again straight away around to the

hall flat to grill us and say, "you can't do that! You know the society doesn't

approve of these kind of things! You dare not be doing it in the kingdom hall." and,

you know, we reassured him that no no, we weren't going to do it in the hall but

everything was just - it was just so hard to get anything done or anything nice

and joyful, there was such an oppressive atmosphere in that in that Kingdom Hall,

and then of course being a person who wanted to create a sense of community

and a sense of joy in the brothers and sisters there, I was always trying to do

things and always getting myself into trouble with this elder, and there were

other things too. Like I remember a time where a sister had this emotionally

abusive husband and at one point it got so bad that he basically kicked her out

of the house, threw all the clothes and stuff on the lawn and locked her out of the

house and she was good friends with my wife. So she called my wife and we went

and got her and we invited her to stay with us for the night just until she got

herself sorted out, and again as soon as this elder found out, he was around to

our place grilling us, telling us how inappropriate it was because we were

interfering in their marriage and, you know, all we were doing was just this

humanitarian thing. This sister was out on the street and we just gave her

somewhere to sleep for the night and we were sort of punished for it, but it sort

of all came to a head at one point where there was a couple of other ministerial

servants in the congregation that were also feeling that, you know, this just

wasn't right the way he was doing things and oppressing everyone. And one in

particular was an ex elder who'd moved in and was a servant and so he had a lot

of experience and he also could see that this was just not right. So three or

four of us I think it was, we decided we needed to do something, we

thought, you know, God's Spirit wasn't working this congregation and we didn't

feel like we could talk to him because he would just go nuts at us. We

didn't feel like we could talk to any of the other elders because they all just

seemed to be under his control as well. They just seemed to be his "yes men" as it were. So we

decided the only thing we could do is go to the circuit overseer. So there was a

circuit assembly coming up and we all went to the circuit overseer and we

explained what was going on in the congregation, explained how we felt about

it. The circuit overseer sort of thanked us for that and opened up an

investigation and I remember how crazy that whole assembly was. The whole

weekend was just interview after interview. So what they did was the

circuit overseer got the district overseer involved who was serving that

assembly and the two of them got each of us in turn on our own separately and

just grilled us for hours on end about the situation, and after that they interviewed us

all, and then they sort of went back and interviewed us all again based on the

other information they obtained. So initially we thought, well this

is a positive, you know, the society is listening to us and we're going to do

something about it, but of course what happened was that it all just went back

to him and I'm sure that the circuit overseer, you know, gave him feedback and

some counsel. I don't know what was said to him.

Nothing was actually done about it in any practical way. So the fallout from

it was that I guess maybe because I was sort of one of the chief instigators of

it, he really directed his animosity towards me even

further. So at the time, as I said, I was doing public talks, I had my own book

study group, I was almost doing everything an elder

would be doing and all that was taken off me because I'd gone behind his back

and acted disloyally. So basically he dissolved the group I was in and he put me

in his book study group where he could keep an eye on me and keep me

under control and this is the bizarre thing Fifth, I was not removed as a

ministerial servant. So I was still an appointed man but I was treated like a

disfellowship person for all intents and purposes. So he wouldn't let me take the field

service group, I was barely allowed to answer. When I did answer he just sort of snarled

at my comments and looked at me disdainfully. I wasn't allowed to do anything.

So I had no privileges anymore, even though I was still a ministerial servant. It was

like I was put in the naughty corner as it were for speaking up against him and

I think - I can't remember exactly how long this lasted but I think I was in

his group for a year or two and the whole time I just had to sort of put up

with it and think, well, you know, just wait on Jehovah this will get sorted out.

It just went from bad to worse really. Eventually a special pioneer elder was

sent to the congregation and then it finally was sorted out. What ended up

happening was that virtually the whole elder body was removed as elders. A

couple of other new brothers moved in along with this special pioneer brother

and so at the time - again that appeased

my doubts and my concerns. I thought, yeah this is - even though it took so long - this

is evidence that Jehovah eventually fixes things up, that he's really in

control. So a mental conditioning remained for still a long time even

though that experience was just horrendous. There was no evidence of

God's Spirit working in that congregation at all, but I thought now it

had been fixed, and then not long after that I was appointed as an elder

myself, and at around the age of I think about 27 28 I was at that time. So

what happened then was interesting because for a while I served with

that special pioneer brother who was a very good brother. We're still actually

very good friends. He moved on from the congregation after a short while and

then a new presiding overseer had to be appointed. You know, the interesting thing

is that there were two very experienced elders there, but they

didn't get on both had very strong personalities and I think if

either of them had been appointed the presiding overseer, there would have been

a lot of tension and drama because of the other one disagreeing all the time and

not supporting the leadership of the other brother.

so as crazy as it seems, I, as the youngest elder on the body, was appointed

as the presiding overseer. Not because of any skills or experience

On my part, but literally because I was sort of a compromise candidate. I was the

one who could maybe keep the peace between these other strong-minded brothers, so

I was kind of really thrown in the deep end in a sense, being appointed presiding

overseer at a very young age. -I see, so

obviously that would have been a lot of responsibility; even being an elder

at 27 and all of the duties you would have had at that point in addition

to being married and all of that, that was a lot on your shoulders. What

was that experience like for you? How did things

proceed from that point forward? -it was

good for quite a while. As I said, those brothers were good

brothers, as I said there's been a few bad elders I've worked with, but that

team of elders were genuinely good men to work with, but being an elder

is stressful - like just the amount of work, the amount of emotional energy...

because I was also living at the kingdom hall flat because I was pioneering as

well. It was like I was on call 24/7, so eventually that did wear me down and I

almost had - what you might call a nervous breakdown in a sense, and I eventually

moved out of that Kingdom Hall flat and to another congregation, but I guess the

big thing that stands out to me from that time in my life was just being

thrown into this whirlpool of committee cases after committee cases all the

time. It was funny, when I was first appointed as an elder and I got

the keys to the filing cabinet as it were, where we kept all our records,

I was a bit shocked as a young elder to see...with judicial cases, they

are always filed in particular yellow envelopes that were all sealed, and so

the first time I went into this filing cabinet, there must have been - I don't know - 30

or 40 of these yellow folders and they were thick with notes; just all the judicial

cases over the decades in that congregation. I just thought, wow!

There's just so much stuff here and that didn't stop during my time as an elder

there. I served on - I don't know how many but it just seems like every few months

there was another judicial case and that's probably one of my big

regrets now looking back, that some of the ways we handled those cases. I

mean at the time we were following policy and procedure, at the time I

thought I was doing the right thing but looking back now I can see that some of

the decisions I made really affected families, tore families apart in a

sense because of the shunning that followed. I've tried to now go back and find those

people and apologize as much as I can for the part I played in some of

those things. There was one particular case that really still weighs heavily on me

because I've never been able to find the man and he was a good friend of

ours at the time. We used to be around at their place for dinner every week we had

a young family with young kids, we had gotten on really well with them, and

anyway, he was disfellowshipped for the most minor of things, you know? and the

only reason he was disfellowshipped because it happened a couple of times

and we were following procedure and the book says, you know, if it's more than one

occasion then you have to question their repentance, but of course we had no idea

whether he was repentant or not, you can't judge that in a person. We were

just following procedures. So he was disfellowshipped and that was the end of

that friendship of course for me and I don't know what happened with his

family but I presume that he hasn't seen his kids for a many many years, I certainly broke up

that family and to this day it makes me very sad that I had a part in it.

So there were many cases, there was also a case of child abuse. So again

I was only in my early 30s I think when I got that one, so again very

inexperienced. I didn't know how to handle that it was a very difficult case.

Luckily it wasn't a severe case it was more

sort of the early stages of inappropriate touching it wasn't

the full-on child rape or anything like that, but still looking back now, I can

see how ill-equipped we were to handle it. We did what we were supposed to

do which was to ring the branch office and they gave us some guidelines, we

followed those procedures. The man stopped attending meetings so we

didn't really pursue him in the sense of taking judicial action or anything, we

just sort of let the matter rest, but the thing I deeply regret is that we

didn't really give the victim the support that she would have needed. We didn't

encourage her to go and get counseling all we really did was, you know, for a few

meetings just check on her to say "are you okay? Are you doing alright?"

Read some scriptures to her, and that's all we did. There was no long term help and

years later that all came to a head because she actually decided to do

something about it herself. So she started legal proceedings. So, I got a

call last year when I'd already left the organization from one of the elders, the elder who wa

actually the chairman of that committee, and it was interesting, now I could see

from the other side of the coin just how things proceeded from his point of view

so he rang me up, and he told me, look, you know, the police are going to call me

about this case. We have to make some statements, we may have to go into court

and testify, but what really struck me was that this elder - his chief concern

was that we got our stories matching, got our stories straight. So that's

the reason he was willing to give me a heads-up. He basically told me

what he had told the police and he wanted to make sure that I was going to

tell the police the same thing, and his chief concern was that we looked good to

to law enforcement, that it looked like we handled everything correctly

and what he was suggesting, as far as you know, the statement that would be given -

was it true? -No. I didn't agree with it

I don't think - I mean we handled things correctly in that we followed

procedure, but I didn't agree that we handled things correctly from the point

of view that I now have in hindsight. -Sure

I don't think we could have done anything different at that time because we were

only doing what we knew how to do, but looking back on it I could see that

we didn't handle things properly and I wasn't prepared to say that we did. So

when I went to the police I gave them quite a different statement and I told

them how I felt from my current perspective, but that went to trial

and then the man was dealt with, and he he was found guilty, and so that all

turned out well, but yes, it just really opened my eyes up to the fact that

the other elders on that case were more concerned about how the

organization looked versus what we did

for the victim. - how long was

that period of time, from when you were made aware of the allegation or the

reporting of the inappropriate touching to when the police ultimately got a hold

of it and pursued that case legally? that's a good question, and that's why

in hindsight it really concerned me, because this case happened in around

2003, 2004, I can't remember the exact year. So it would have been well over ten

years ago before it actually came to court. So - now in that time, there's no

telling what that man could have gone on and done, and again our concern was he

wasn't part of the congregation anymore. So we felt, okay, the young ones in

our congregation weren't in danger but we weren't at all concerned about what

he might be doing to kids outside the congregation.

Now, I don't know, I never even thought of that at the time, it didn't come into my consciousness.

of course now it does. Now I just see, well, you know, we should have gone and

reported that to the police because they might have been able to do something

much earlier which may have prevented him abusing other children. So I don't

know if there were any other cases that certainly didn't come out in the trial

and hopefully that was a one-off case, but as we know with pedophiles

it is a sickness that usually doesn't

stop at one case, does it? -Of course not -Yeah, so

that really disturbs me, that in following those procedures we did - and

never putting that to law enforcement at the time, what could have

happened in those intervening years. -so

you had that case and you said several other difficult judicial cases at that

time but that didn't throw you too far off balance, right? You continued plugging

along continue serving as an elder and eventually even attain higher privileges

is that correct? absolutely yes, so any sort of doubts

I had or whatever of just again just sort of shoved under the rug, just carried

on serving loyally, again, being a very serious-minded elder, so eventually I was

giving talks on the circuit and district convention level, also around

that time I had the privilege of joining the writing team and doing research for the

society, so one of the elders who was in my congregation where I grew

up who sort of mentored me when I was younger, he was he was kinda the

coordinator of that writing team that we had was where I live we have the

national library here, and so the the writing desk in Bethel would often

use us to do a lot of research here because we had access to the materials

and the library here and all the journals that we needed, so this

brother who took me under his wing, as it were, he encouraged me to start doing

some research with him. so eventually I was

sort of invited to become a part of what they called the writing team and we

used to work along with the writing desk at the Bethel here in Australia. so

I'm happy to tell you a little bit about that, I think it's an area that people

probably are not really aware of how it

all works. -Right

I think people are interested to know how these articles get written. so what would

happen is sometimes we would get an outline from the society and we'd get

asked to research and write that article but more often than not our main

purpose was to actually come up with ideas for the society. so we would talk

amongst ourselves talk to circuit overseers, have our ear to the ground as

to what, you know, things happening in the congregation and see what concerns the

brothers had, and we would come up with an idea for an article. so then what

would happen is we'd write - we would put together like a one-page brief or

one-page outline just outlining the main points of the the article and what

the, sort of, thrust of it would be, and that would get it sent to the Australian

branch who would then send in on to the Brooklyn Bethel, and then we'd wait for

their approval. so they'd send a document back saying it might say, "no, we don't

want that article at the moment", but more often than not they'd like the idea and

they'd say, "yes, we give you approval for this article to be written", and they

would give us direction as to what the article - where

the article would be used and how big it would be, so they might say, "well this would be

a two-page article in the Awake! magazine or this might be an eight page cover

series in the watchtower, so they would direct how they wanted that article, and

often they would have other brothers in other writing teams around the world

also at the same time working on a similar subject,

and then they would often combine the two articles or the different amounts of

research into one article, so that's kind of how to how it worked.

then, once we got the approval for the article, then we'd get stuck into

research. so we sort of had an idea of what we wanted to say and the points we would

want to make, we'd go and research and find, sort of, material evidence to

support the things we were trying to say, support the arguments we were

trying to make, and this is where I learned looking back now from my

perspective just how poor the society's academic credibility is in a

sense. so at the time I thought - at the time I was very impressed by the

thoroughness of how we did things, so even just for a couple of pages in a

magazine we would send in a very thick binder of all the photocopied articles

that we'd researched and that we were quoting from and it all looks very

thorough and academic but looking back now I can see it wasn't, because what we were

actually guilty of doing was just basically using confirmation bias at the

time. so instead of - to give an example - instead of, um, let's say we were looking

at a particular issue and writing about a particular issue, instead of researching

and finding out, okay, what are all the experts saying about this issue,

for or against, what are both sides of the story,

we had our particular angle that we wanted to present and we were just looking

to basically quote mark, and we were looking for a quote that would support

our position and pretty much just ignoring everything else that didn't

support our position, so that's basically what I did as a researcher, I was

basically "quote mining", I was looking for something that I could use to support my

argument. I wasn't looking for - where does the evidence lead,

you know, what do the bulk of experts say is the case in this

particular scenario? -I see, I have a

question about that. so, as you were doing this research and you were kind of just

picking out things that went along with whatever it was that you were trying to

say, which of course would have been in harmony with what the organization kind

of already taught, did that ever bug you, you know, did it

ever bother you to realize that maybe the context is really this and

maybe the rest of this article besides that quote I took is carrying another

message? - no it didn't because at the time

I didn't understand, I didn't have the critical thinking skills at the time to

understand what I was doing, at the time I'd never heard of confirmation bias.

I didn't know about these cognitive fallacies that we suffer from, so at the

time I saw nothing wrong with what we were doing, it seemed totally normal

to me, and that was the training I got at the time, it was very minimal. I should

have been taught how to access context, how to understand what the author was

saying, and looking back at the notes I got, the very brief sort of

training I got, we were instructed to make sure that we were quoting

in context, that we weren't misrepresenting the author, but again

that was like something on paper that we really didn't apply that well in

practicality. -I see so, would it be

possible for you to just give a specific example of a time where you were just

looking for things to support the point

that you were trying to make? -Sure. I'll

give you an example. It was to do with a very sensitive subject,

it was homosexuality, so this was in the early nineties. At the time, there was

this idea floating around that homosexuality was a genetic thing, that

people were sort of born that way, so they couldn't help being homosexual, so

we were writing an article to sort of investigate those kind of things, and of

course the the thrust of the article would be that, you know,

it doesn't matter if you had genetic tendencies, you could still fight those

things. You know, it would be like if you were genetically disposed to be violent or to

be an alcoholic. You could control those things, so it didn't matter if you

had tendencies. But this idea that it was a genetic thing, I guess was maybe a

Little bit, could be potentially damaging to the Society's position, so we were

trying to suppress that idea as much as possible. So anyway, in the research I was

tasked to find out what was the scientific evidence behind this, was

there a genetic factor? So I looked up a lot of a science journals, a lot of

studies that were being done at the time, and the evidence was not clear. The

evidence was that there's definitely some kind of factor there, that people do grow

up from a very young age having this sexual identity where they're

attracted to the same sex, so that was definitely clear. But what I did, was, when

I was looking at the studies, I found out that most of the studies were actually

funded by organizations that supported gay rights, so I took that as meaning:

okay, these studies are not valid so I basically put the case

forward that none of this science can be trusted because the funding comes from

someone who's biased and so that was basically the thrust of the article, that

we just ignored all the evidence because the science couldn't be trusted because

Of where the funding came from, and to a point that's a valid argument in the

sense, yes, there may be some biases in the research and that needs to be taken

into account, but we just ignored all of the actual data, all the actual

evidence that was uncovered because of this perceived bias that we couldn't

actually prove was there. It was just that, the wrong

people were doing the funding, so I think that's a good example of how we

would find information that supported our argument and even if

we found evidence that didn't support it we would try and write that evidence off

in some ways as not valid because it didn't fit our viewpoint of the

world. -That's very ironic because clearly

the way that you guys were going about doing your research and, you know, finding

things to support your argument would've Been very biased, but it's very

difficult to make that correlation when you just assume that everything on this

side is correct and there's no - this can't be called into question, but

somebody's up to something on this side, and they're trying to pull the

wool over our eyes. -Well, when you think

you have the truth, then you don't think you're being biased, or you don't think

Your bias matters because it's the truth so whatever bias there is, is the right bias.

The other thing I would point out, is that, that I thought was interesting,

was, we were directed to write to a certain audience, so the articles were

written from the point of view of a sort of mid grade high school, sort of a

fourteen, fifteen-year-old level of reading, so that's what it was

sort of targeted towards, so it seems like very thorough and academic, but it was

kind of dumbed down a little bit towards a sort of more teenage kind of

audience, and we felt that was sort of More representative of the whole target

audience, from young ones to older ones that we were trying to approach. And it's

interesting looking back now at the material the society is producing, I

don't know how much has changed since then. I don't know if the direction is

different because I'm out of the loop there now, but I would say that dumbing down

process has just gone to an extreme now, when I look at the material that's

being produced, you know, when I was, well, when I compared with the articles that I

was writing, which were, I guess they weren't long form of

journalism as you might see in a proper academic journal, but when you did a

cover series at least you were sort of getting into some meatier aspects of the

subject. We had two or three articles over, maybe, 8 or 10 pages where you could

really develop a theme and get into more detail. And you compare that

though to the older magazines from the 50s and 60s; it was was much shallower,

much less in-depth in those times, but now it's gotten even worse. I mean,

they've cut the size of the magazines to literally half, and there's no depth to

these articles anymore, and in fact what I noticed is that most of the actual

content now is these charts, pictures, cartoons, illustrations; it is all just

graphic in nature the actual amount of text I think would probably be reduced

to a quarter of what we would have actually written in terms of text for

those old articles. -Right, so you're

able to see that now with your current perspective, right? You see to what extent

they're dumbing down the information, And many times that is a

criticism of the articles is that, you know, they speak to the audience as

if they're children and now it sounds like that was very purposeful in nature.

Yeah, the other thing too, is that I remember, the Society never liked to publish

articles on subjects that they're uncomfortable with or that could be in

any way controversial. So, I remember there was a couple of

outlines I submitted, which didn't get approved. One was an outline on

alternative medicine, so I wanted to, it's something that always bothered me

and it's one of the things that helped me wake up later on, was just

how many of the brothers and sisters were always pushing these really strange

pseudo-scientific alternative remedies for things, whether it was

homeopathy or chiropractic Remedies or I don't even know what

half of them were sometimes, but there was one brother in our congregation

that used to have a special machine that ionized water in a special way and

made it into magic water, if you like, and it could cure everything, so there was

always these remedies and all the brothers would jump under these things,

these bandwagons, and it really disturbed me because even though I didn't

have critical thinking skills at the time, I was always passionate about

science. I did very well at school with with mathematics and science. I could

see that a lot of this stuff was pseudo scientific nonsense, and it disturbed me

how brothers can really fall for all this stuff, so I wanted to write an

article just looking at the dangers of alternative remedies, and it

wasn't going to be an article attacking it per se, just taking an approach of, you

know, just weigh up the evidence carefully, just look into a bit more

thoroughly, don't just be gullible and accept these things, and I think at the time it

was just too controversial, the brothers just didn't want to go anywhere near it,

and I think because probably 90% of brothers in Bethel were on some kind

of alternative remedy at that time, including the brothers that probably had to approve

that outline, so It was never going to get through, and a couple of years ago

we actually finally, after all these years, had I think one or two paragraphs

in a Watchtower study article warning about the dangers of

not looking at the evidence. It was literally one paragraph in the Watchtower

and I thought finally, yes they've addressed this issue but, you know, it

could have been a whole magazine article. There was so much to say about that.

There was another one I wanted to write about propaganda, because again, even

though I didn't have the necessary schooling, I.....

I forgot to mention, so when I was - As a young person when I finished

high school, Of course, I started pioneering straight out of high school, I

got a very good tertiary entrance score, I could have gone to a university

and done practically anything I wanted to, but of course I sacrificed all that

For pioneering and I was even interviewed at an assembly at the time. I

was put on the platform and put out as a good example, look at this young brother

he's had very good academic achievements, but he's sacrificing a career

and a university degree to go and pioneer. Again, now looking back from my new

perspective, it shames to think that I was used for propaganda in that

way and I might have influenced other young people to sacrifice an education

to pioneer as well following my example. But anyway going back to this sort of...

I was scientifically minded, but I didn't have the critical thinking

skills because I never went to university or college, as I believe you

call it in America, so... but I was interested in how we think and how we were

manipulated to think, so I wanted to do an article on propaganda, but of course

that article never got approved either

-Big surprise -because I think the

people in charge there realized that a lot of the points that were going to be

brought out would highlight just how much the society actually uses

techniques of propaganda to further their cause. So it was a little bit too

close to home I think, and again recently I noticed we did have an article on

propaganda and it was kind of hypocritical and just really revealed

the Society's own way of doing things, but again they misquoted things in

that article or left important bits of the tools of propaganda out because I

think they could see that people might add up two and two together and see

that they were actually using those tools themselves. So this is what part of

what helped me wake up later was to just see how cleverly manipulative the

writing department is in misquoting, misrepresenting facts,

misrepresenting evidence and very carefully weaving a narrative that suits

their agenda, which is part of what propaganda and indoctrination is of

course all about. At the time, I couldn't see it, now it seems so obvious to

me. -but it sounds like, although you

weren't able to see it completely, it did plant some seeds; it sounds like

throughout your life you've had moments that would have caused you to

think twice, but it's interesting that being on the

writing team of the Australian branch is wwhat assisted you in ultimately

making your exit. Would it be possible for you to basically explain that

process how is it that you finally came to that to that conclusion that

this was not the truth

essentially? -Sure, okay, so this is quite

complicated. I wish there was kind of one thing I could point to and say, you know,

this is what really helped me wake up or this is the doubts that I had, but I

guess it was really a whole - it was a number of things that all coalesced

together to sort of make that push. So it's interesting, actually, just before

this happened, I even had a part on a convention about doubts. So my outline

discussed that even elders sometimes have doubts about

things, and I was instructed to even interview a couple of elders and

pioneers as to what doubts they might have had in the past and how they dealt

with those doubts. So even then - this is before I woke up - I was learning to

suppress my doubts. I even had a part on how to do

that at the assembly. So we're acknowledging that we

have doubts but we learn to suppress them and ignore them and just

shove them under the rug, as it were. So I guess what happened was, as I said there

was a number of things, so the whole

alternative Medicine thing was one thing. I'm a voracious reader and I started reading

some books on logical fallacies, critical thinking, again because I've always been

interested in that - been interested in how the brain works, how our thinking

processes work, and what I started to see was that when I learned about logical

fallacies like confirmation bias, selection bias,

ad hoc arguments, arguments from authority…I could see how they all

applied to alternative medicine. I could see why people were gullible in

accepting a lot of those things and all the logical fallacies involved in how

those things were sold and presented, and I started to see the connection

with what I believed as well, and I started to think back to what I did in

the writing Department and I could see that -

how much confirmation bias and special pleading and other problems were

very much a part of my work, and I guess the reason I was starting to think a bit

more deeply about it was at the same time I started to notice these really

strange dogmatic statements being made in the study articles without any

biblical support. So the brothers would say, you know, this is what this means and

there would just be no Scripture attached to that statement, and that sort of got

me thinking, why they they doing that? and then of course at that time we had the

the new generation understanding, the overlapping generations. So I think that

was a statement in that article that said something like: Jesus

evidently meant there were two groups of people and this is how they explained it,

and again there was no scriptural basis for that. In times past

I remember whenever they'd come out with a new light or a new point, they'd

spend the whole watchtower establishing and leading up to that point. So it'd be

proving with scriptural references and context and everything. They put a lot of

time into establishing this new idea. Some of these recent magazines,

they're just like: here's our new explanation and just.. like… well you've just

got to accept it. Just, evidently, that's what Jesus meant. There was no

need anymore to provide context or scriptural evidence for anything. So that

started to disturb me. Around the same time, we had that article on the types

and antitypes. I don't know if you remember that. - oh yes

Basically they said: well look brothers, we just went totally

overboard with this over the years. We're not going to say that anything's a type

an antitype anymore except when the Scriptures actually say it is. Now, in one

way, that was disturbing because as I mentioned, as a young person growing up,

that's how the truth had always fascinating me; all these intricate

connections, these types and antitypes from these prophecies were something

that I always was fascinated by, and that, to me, was like the deeper things of the

truth. That was what made our understanding of the Bible so

much deeper than Christendom's understanding, and now the brothers were

saying: well, we're just throwing all that out now, like everything that made

us unique and different, we're just throwing that on a scrap heap, and so

that's where I sort of thought well, I can't buy this idea anymore that this is sort

of some progressive new light all the time, and what particularly disturbed me

about it was they didn't expand on the implications of what that

would mean. So for instance, they gave a couple of

sort of minor examples, but then when you think about it, just about every doctrine

he had was based on a type-antitype, and one doctrine in particular is, of course,

the prophecy in Daniel about the Great Tree and Nebuchadnezzar's rulership,

and again, that was a type and antitype for God's kingdom and that's how we get

to the whole 1914 thing with the chronology and everything. So for me, I

sort of thought through the implications of getting rid of the types and antitypes.

So I thought, well, that means that we can't use that tree - Nebuchadnezzar's

tree - to prove the chronology that leads to 1914 anymore because that's a

type-antitype and the Bible doesn't say that we should view it in that way, but of

course, the brothers just avoided that subject entirely and didn't mention that,

even though they said that we're not going to rely on types and antitypes

anymore. So then I started thinking about - that got me thinking about the whole

1914, they would keep having to reinvent the explanation of what a generation

means and it occurred to me that we're just - we're just playing word games. We just

keep reinventing what Jesus meant when he said this when it should be

obvious what he meant. He is the greatest man who ever lived. He's

the greatest communicator. He's the great teacher. We had books called "the great

teacher", and yet, we couldn't just take him at face value. He couldn't

communicate, as a great teacher, what he actually meant we keep having to

reinvent it. So I guess that's where I first gave myself permission to think,

now I need to go back and look at everything I believe and really test it

properly. I really need to make sure that I'm not falling victim to some

fallacy, to some confirmation bias. I need to go back to square one and reprove to

myself

all these doctrines. -Were you still

working with the writing team at this

time? - no, no that stopped quite a… so that

stopped a number of years ago when I moved congregations. So we didn't really discuss that,

but after.. I think I lived in that Kingdom Hall flat for 14 years and, as I

said, it just ground me down. I was suffering emotionally, financially and in

many other ways. I just sort of had a nervous breakdown. So I moved to a new

hall, I resigned as a presiding overseer, I just went back to having sort of minimal

privileges that I could cope with, I still served as an elder, but I gave up

pioneering. I just sort of needed to lighten up all the things I

was working on. So around that time I'd also stopped working for

the writing team. I just couldn't cope with it anymore, I couldn't find the

motivation to do that work anymore,

so I'd given that up. - I see,

so at this time, although you weren't on the writing team, you were still serving

as an elder when you were making all of these discoveries.

Absolutely, so it was also around that time that the Australian Royal Commission

came out, that's why I said I can't pinpoint any one thing that woke me up

because it really was a whole range of things that all came together. So I

remember watching the testimony of Geoffrey Jackson

and I was just - I was just dumbfounded, you know? I was expecting to see

some amazing defense of the truth, and even when I was, as I said, I went

back to all the things I believed and I tried to reprove it to myself,

not in the sense of trying to prove it false, but in the sense of, "I

need to shore up my faith here, I need to reconvince myself of what I believe".

I went in wanting to prove that it was true and did my best to prove that it

was true, but having the critical thinking skills to be aware of if I was

just conning myself. So, the same thing when I approached the

Royal Commission, I was really expecting to see some evidence now that… because at

this time, this is the first time we'd seen the governing body

members. We never used to even know who they were and I used to be proud of that

fact, that we don't even know who these people are they don't… they're not the

limelight, and of course when they started JW broadcasting, they did come

out in the limelight, as it were, and we got to know them. Initially

that was good, they seemed like really nice and genuine and it was nice to see them

joke around and have fun and they seemed like really down-to-earth people, but the

more we started to see them, well the my that I'd start to see them, the more the reverse

started to happen. So with Geoffrey Jackson testimony, I was… I was… I was just

appalled at how he - the lack of defense for what he believed in came out

loud and clear and how he dodged and evaded all the questions, and I felt that

even in a couple of places he outright lied. I went to one of my colleagues,

one of my fellow elders and say, you know, what do you think? Do you think he lied

in those particular instances? and this elder said, no, I disagree he was

just being cagey because what he said might be a lie in this

country but it might be valid in another country, and the policies are different

around the world. So he was having to hedge what he said to make it sort of

internationally appropriate. This is the sort of mental gymnastics that some

elders were saying that, you know, he wasn't really lying he was just being

cautious. He was just withholding information, he was using

theocratic warfare, as it were, and they justified it to me by saying, well, you

know, apostates were feeding the Royal Commission all these things, they were

out to get us. So it was appropriate that he wasn't upfront and honest with the

Commission, and I was thinking, that's not right, you know? That

we're told to be obedient to the superior authorities. This was the

superior authorities holding us to account on something, and they had a

right to know this information. This wasn't like in Nazi Germany

where we could lie and withhold information about our brothers because

they didn't have a right to know. No, this was a Royal Commission. This was

a respectable and proper thing for the government to be doing and we should

have cooperated, and Geoffrey Jackson actually said, yes we want to cooperate,

but that's not what he did in his testimony. I couldn't believe how many

times he said "that's not my department,

I have no knowledge of that." -right - this is

a governing body member! Every bit of policy goes through him or one of the

governing body committees, there's nothing… everything that I wrote in the

writing department eventually went through his purview, he or one of the

other governing body members had to approve every word of what we

wrote before it got published. So I knew that, I knew that he would know every bit

of policy, and besides being a governing body member, he was also an

elder. So it wasn't good enough to say well, you know, I don't know how the

elders would handle this particular scenario because he was

an elder first before he was a governing body member. So he knows how elders do

things, what procedures to follow, and I just couldn't believe how much he

evaded the questions and just ran around in circles. So that was a real

disappointment to me, and then when I watched the testimony of other branch

committee members, I saw them also evade and lie and misrepresent certain things.

So that sort of all then tied in with the other issues I was thinking

about. So basically, what I did with all my doubts and the research

I was doing, I I did the right - well, I think I did the

right thing, again, I was still very loyal to the organization at this time. So no,

I hadn't read any apostate things, I had only - you know, when I looked up about - I

started doing some research on 1914 and 607 and I wanted to, as I said, go back to

the drawing board and look at the evidence for 607 and the archaeology.

Again, in a naive way, thinking well, maybe the whole generation thing is not

working out because we've got the starting date wrong. Maybe 1914 - there is

something wrong with that, and so I needed to just check the chronology and

I used worldly secular sources. I didn't look at apostate things, I just looked at

secular sources to try and work out what the evidence for all of that was, and of course you know

what I would have found out, that there was no evidence for anything,

it just really came crumbling down. So again I went to a fellow

elder whom I trusted and one who was quite academically inclined, a very intelligent

man, and I discussed some of these issues with him, and he was initially quite

helpful, but what disturbed me was I wrote - he doesn't know this but he

actually, I guess, pushed me further down the track of the questioning because I

wrote him a long email at one point and I outlined in this email

all the assumptions that we need to make to get to the chronology of 1914.

There's a number of steps that's involved obviously, it's very complicated and

most the brothers would find it very hard to explain it all, and going

back and looking at I realized that there were lots of leaks, lots of

assumptions we had to make along the way to get to that point, and so I outlined

all those to him I think there was seven or eight of them in the email, and I said to

him, brother, like… help me understand this. Are these just

assumptions or is this solid evidence? Are these just a bunch of non sequiturs

that don't follow or am I missing something? And so he wrote back and

I think two of the points - he referred me to a Watchtower article which I'd

already read and decided really didn't answer the question,

but what again shocked me was all the other points he just said, yes, they're

assumptions, but so what? That was his words, "so what?" So that just

really blew my mind, I thought, okay so here's a bunch of confirmation bias, a

bunch of assumption, there's no evidence for any of these steps, and here's this

intelligent elder saying, "well, so what? Who cares?" like - and that's really

then, I guess, what pushed me into researching things further. So what

happened after that was, as you can imagine, the more I'm learning, the more

disturbed on becoming, the more I'm really realizing that this is a house of

cards. It felt like I'd sort of pulled on this thread with the 1914 chronology, and

everything was just coming apart underneath me because it was all so tied

in and related. So basically I went to my fellow elders and I said, "brothers,"

again I was very upfront I was still at this time trying to save my

faith in a sense, and I said, "brothers, you know, look - I've got doubts about this,

this, this, this, this doesn't add up," I was saying to them. So another thing that

occurred to me at the same time to do with the child abuse issue was that I

sort of came to the conclusion that, you know,

where's God's Spirit in all of this? What I put two and two together with was that…

I think… so in Australia, what came out from our own statistics

in the Royal Commission that there were a thousand cases of child abuse or

allegations of child abuse, and I can't remember the exact breakdown, but I think

it was like somewhere between ten and twenty percent of those were appointed

men - ministerial servant or elders, and then I realized, again, this

sickness is not something that just - you don't get to 40 years old and

suddenly become a pedophile, like this is a sickness that starts very young. Again,

as an elder, I dealt with another case of abuse where it was like a

teenage boy abusing an even younger girl. So I knew that this sickness

happened from a very young age. So it occurred to me that there were a

number of elders in the organization that were appointed by Holy Spirit that

must have already been pedophiles at the

time they were appointed. -Good point

and that just like hit me like a bolt of lightning. I thought, well how could that

possibly happen? Because now, as elders, we go over the qualifications and we

pray to God to help us identify what we can't see. We can't read the heart of

this man. We don't know what's lurking in the background. All we can go on is what we

see by appearances' sake, and so the whole point of praying over the brother

and talking it over with the circuit overseer and sending the recommendations

to the society - the whole point of that whole procedure is supposedly to allow

the Holy Spirit to make that appointment. The Holy Spirit is supposed to - I don't

know - put something in the mind of some brother along the way to say, "hang on,

I've got a bad feeling about this. We need to look into this more."

There should be some warning. Something the holy spirit should have given us not to

appoint this brother, and that never happens. Dozens and dozens of

these men - abusers - got away with things because of their position as elders and

position of trust they were given, and it occurred to me - how could the Holy Spirit

allow that? How could Jehovah, whose power protects his sheep, allow predators to

get into positions of authority like that? So from that point on, I really

started doubting that there was any spirit involved,

and I started reassessing everything in my life, because again, over the years

I'd sort of seen Jehovah's hand in my life, as it were, but I realized that I

was just - it was another form of confirmation bias. I was interpreting

events in my life as if Jehovah had somehow done something for me, when in

the fact it was due to my own efforts. I realized when something good happens

it's because I worked towards it, or when something bad happens it was because of

failures on my part, but I'd interpreted certain events in my life as answers to

prayers or God doing something for me, and looking back now I could see again

it was just my interpretation, my biases coming into play. It wasn't reality.

So anyway, getting back to the point, I went to the body of elders and I said,

"brothers, I'm having problems with all these issues," and the

first meeting was really nice and, again, these are brothers - I have to say this

team of elders I worked with - they were good men and I still hold them in quite

high regard on the whole, but they were good, they were willing to

listen, they were patient, they were kind with me for that first meeting. They even

acknowledged that they too had some similar doubts, that they often

struggled with similar things, but the upshot of the meeting was, well, they

didn't have any answers to start with.

-Of course not -They couldn't defend the questions that I'd

raised. So because they didn't have any good answers, they just said, "look, just…" I

think the expression they used was "you've just got to park it. Park all this doubt." So,

in other words, "shove them under the rug, just kind of ignore them, suppress them,

and just keep doing what you're doing. Trust in Jehovah. Wait on Jehovah,"

and all these platitudes that we get, "and just kind of suppress all your

doubts," is what I was told, and looking back too, though,

they were even willing to, I guess, again, misrepresent or lie about things. I

remember one - I was talking to him about the whole new light thing and how that

didn't make sense, and how can we talk about old truth or new truth? or

whatever, and one of the brothers who, again, very old experienced brother who

served at Bethel, he said, "oh, we don't use those expressions. We don't

talk about new truth or old truths." and I started doubting myself, I thought, am I

going crazy? I'm sure we use those expressions, but again, I trusted this

brother. He was older and more experienced than me and the brother said, "oh, we don't

say that something is present truth. We talk about our current

understanding of things," and I thought, no, no, that's not how we talk, but he

but he flustered me, I thought I was going crazy, and then the very next

day, the broadcast came out and a sister was interviewed and she talked about

receiving present truth and how much he delights in presents truth, and I thought,

there you go! and this brother just totally denied that we use those

terms and think about things in that way. So anyway, I left that meeting and

continued with my doubts and research and then a couple of weeks later we had

the circuit overseers visit and I discussed a few things with him out

working with him in the territory and we had our elders and I said - at

the elder's meeting - "brothers, there's just one more thing I'd like to bring up if

you'll allow me," and the thing I brought up - while I was talking about it - one of

the elders was sort of Googling it on his iPad and he found commentary on

it on an apostate website, and so straightaway he sort of said, "well,

where did you get this from? Why are you asking about this? Did you get it

from an apostate website?" and at the time, I said to him - truthfully, because it was

the truth - that, no, this is just something that's come up in my research and

that make sense and something that I happened to know about, and - but from

that moment on, it was almost like I could physically see the shudders come down,

near like if there literal shudders in their brain and in their eyes. I could

virtually see that, and the whole mood and everything changed to - I was now no

longer a welcomed colleague. I was now almost like a dangerous enemy and

initially we discussed - I said to the brothers, "look, I can't in

good conscience teach some of these things and I disagree with them, and

initially they said, "well we just won't give you any talks on those subjects,"

but as the discussion progressed, we sort of came to an impasse

and we - I think, mutually realized that this wasn't going to work because

I wasn't a team player anymore, I wasn't a company man, if you like, any more.

I wasn't willing to just do what the society told me, to teach what

they told me to teach. So we mutually agreed that it would be best if I

resigned. So I resigned as an elder that night and I went to

the meetings for a few more weeks after that and then I just stopped going to

meetings. I couldn't stand sitting in anymore

and listening to all this nonsense I was hearing, all this

unfactual, incorrect information, this misleading information, I couldn't

stomach it anymore. So yes, I had to make that cut completely, you know,

cold turkey and just leave. -I see

There was also one other thing that happened in that meeting that really - I

guess - confirmed that my decision to leave was the right one and it kind of pushed me

over the edge, because even up to that last moment I was still

undecided as to whether I should resign or not, but what happened was we were

looking at a young man as a potential ministerial servant and the

way the process works in an elders' meeting is we go through all the

scriptural qualifications and we discuss the person and then we look at his

report card and discuss what he does in the congregation, how he meets up to the

standards we're expecting. So anyway, this brother was well-spoken of by all the

elders. We had already agreed that we all supported his appointment as a servant

but the circuit overseer was looking at his report card and he said, "brothers,

he's not getting enough hours. His average is quite low," and we tried to

give the circuit overseer the extenuating circumstances. We said, "look,

his wife is going through all this stuff, they're trying to have a child,

they're going through a lot of drama and emotional trauma with that. We

pointed out how much he does for the brothers in the congregation. If

someone needs moving, he's always the first to help someone move. He's doing

the accounts. He's doing the sound. He's so busy helping the brothers in the

congregation. We feel, regardless of his low hours, that he's a spiritual man.

His hearts in the right place. He's putting himself out to serve the

brothers like a young Timothy," and this is what shocked me:

the circuit overseer said, "well, what really counts is the hours. If he's doing

all these other things, then maybe you should get him, talk to him and get him

to do less of those things so he's got more time for the ministry."

I could not believe it. I could not believe we were judging a man based on

numbers on a card; a man who does practical things for

the brothers, you know? Helps the older sisters with their shopping, helps

brothers move, shows so much practical love in the congregation, and we were

telling him to stop doing all those practical loving things so

that he could get more numbers on his

report card. -Amazing -and that for me just

settled the whole thing. I thought, what - what am I doing here?

Why am i part of an organization that judges people, not on the good they do, but

on numbers on a card? and I thought this is wrong, and that just really cemented

my decision then, in that moment, to step down.

I see. So you said you continued going to the meetings for a couple of weeks and

at some point you stopped. Could you just explain what the process was once you

stopped going to the meetings? - Sure. So at

that point now, I decided - there was a scripture that I read in Proverbs which

says something along the lines of "he who's first to make their case seems

right but then you should cross examine that and hear the other side of the

story." So that's when I finally gave myself permission to actually read what

would be considered apostate material in a sense. So in the eighties when I was

a teenager, I'd vaguely heard about this member of the governing body,

brother Franz, that was disfellowshipped and it caused a bit of

drama at the time and I didn't know anything about it. So I looked up his

book, I found this book called "Crisis of Conscience", and I thought, well, I'm going

to apply proverbs here, there's nothing wrong with doing that. You know, God tells us to

question things, to test things, he had recorded in Proverbs that you should

cross examine the first person and I realized that all my life I'd

listened to one source of information, the Society was the first person to ever

teach me anything about everything. I thought, well, I need to hear the other

side of the story, I need to cross examine this story, and so reading "Crisis of

Conscience" was when - I guess is what brought it all together and the scales

just came off my eyes. That's the moment I awoke. I remember

closing the last page of that book and realizing that my whole life had just

changed in that moment, but that's when I literally lost

lost my hope, lost my faith, lost any sense of who I was, my identity - I just

realized it was all built on the fantasy, it was all built on a lie because he

confirmed everything that I was feeling that there was no Holy Spirit directing

this organization. He gave the proof and I didn't just accept it, Fifth.

I didn't just sort of suddenly go off and start believing apostate lies, as

the society likes to portray it as, as you know if you've read the book,

he has documented everything. There's photocopies of all the letters he's

referring to, the correspondence - everything is documented, but that wasn't

enough for me. In the book, he also mentioned other various people who were

caught up in that big sort of purge, if you like, at Bethel, and some of those

people are still alive. So I made the effort - again, this was my training as -

when I was working in the writing Department, you learn to check

sources, you go back to primary sources. So I did that.

I looked up these people. I Skyped with them on the other side of the world and

I interviewed them and I said, "Can you corroborate what I've read in this

book? You were there at the time. Let's hear your side of it", and I interviewed two or

three of these people and they all corroborated the story. So again, I went to

the source of people who were there and saw it with their own eyes, and that

was terribly devastating for me I have to say at the time. I've always

suffered from depression and anxiety disorders and I've sort of gone up and

down with that over the years, but that just hit me like a ton of bricks. I just

literally bawled for days, you can ask my wife. I was just an emotional wreck I had

a nervous break down, I'm pretty sure. My wife was so concerned she

made me make an appointment with a psychiatrist. I'd never been to

psychiatrist before. I went to a few counseling sessions and that helped me a little bit

but she wanted to make sure that whatever I was going through wasn't to do

with any mental illness and I was quite happy to agree with

her that could be a factor to what I was going through, and I wanted to

make sure that my change in belief wasn't because I was going crazy, because

you know that the society gaslights you in that sense, they do make you feel

like there's something wrong with you, you're the one going crazy if you don't

believe it anymore. So I went to a psychiatrist and he basically gave me a

clean bill of health. He said, "there's nothing wrong with you. You're just going

through a stage where your thinking process has changed and you need to

follow it, you need to continue that, but there's nothing wrong with the

way I was thinking. I wasn't being illogical,

I wasn't being emotional. It wasn't a symptom of mental illness. It was just me

actually just thinking for myself for the first time in my life, and sort of

deprogramming myself. So that was good to sort of just affirm as well for

my own sanity, but that was a very difficult time, and of course it creates

a lot of friction in a marriage, you know. My wife is the one thing I don't

regret about growing up in this organization. She's been my rock,

my support, and even though we disagree on many things now, she has stood by me

and defended me in all this, and I just can't thank her enough for her loyalty

towards me even though she's still very loyal to society as well, and it's been

very hard for her now to go to meetings on her own. She thought she'd married an

elder, she thought that her life was going to be a certain way,

and that pains me every day too, that I have to make her life difficult in

that sense, but I can't do anything else. I can't live a lie. I have to be true to

myself and who I am, and it's sad that it creates that conflict and division when

there's two opposing philosophies like that. With the depression - as I mentioned, I'd

always suffered from depression but this this was quite a bit more severe than

what I experienced in the past. In the past I'd never had any suicidal

thoughts or anything like that. It was just this sort of vague kind of depression

where you're just unmotivated and feeling miserable, but this really did hit me

hard in the sense I started having suicidal thoughts. I'd literally have

some days where I felt so bad I just - I just literally played out my mind a

scenario where I would drive my car into a tree or just do something insane

like that, and of course I didn't, I just wanted to mention that because you can

really plummet to some serious depths of despair when your whole

worldview is upended like that. When you have to face your mortality

for the first time and realize that you're not going to live forever, that

was just wishful thinking, and it changes your perspective on life, and the

depression got so bad, but luckily with the help of counseling and my wife

and other factors, I was able to get past that, which is good.

That's great to hear and I appreciate you mentioning that because

it's so common and we're starting to hear a lot of terrible

stories. So it's good that we're able to be open about that and

take steps to try to deal with it and just understand that many times that's a

part of finding out that everything you believed in and promoted your whole life is

not what it's what you believed it to be. So let me ask you about how

you're dealing with all of that now, I understand you had those thoughts and

feelings that you just mentioned previously. How are you able to deal with

it at this point? Sure, I think I've gotten past

the worst of things, I mean you have good days and bad days, but I think

generally I'm on the up-and-up now. I'm learning to cope with my mortality and

I've learned to appreciate life in a way that I never appreciated it before. I think

previously you're always thinking, well,

whatever is happening now in life doesn't matter because you're in like a

holding room, you know? You're waiting for the new system to come and

you're going to be able to enjoy lots of things there. So now I see life in a different

way. I see every moment as so much more precious than I ever did before because

this is the only life I've got in that sense and I have to make the most

of it. So now I'm just trying to change my thinking patterns and

trying to get out of that, sort of, depression that you initially go through

and focusing on the more positive things of life, and what I want to

achieve in this life, because I still am the same person, you know? As an elder - the

reason I was an elder is because I wanted to help people I wanted to make a

difference in people's lives and I still want to do that. I still want to make a

difference in this world and help people make the world a better place. I can't do

that anymore in a religious sense as an elder, so now I'm looking for ways in

which I can help the community and support my fellow man in more secular

ways -Right, and that's great. That's a very good

outlook to have, just try to find practical ways to help people which we

were somewhat discouraged from doing in the past. Ben, I really

appreciate you sharing all of that with me obviously you had so many years of

experience at high levels within the organization and I appreciate you

opening up and sharing that with all of us. I will ask you the same thing that I

ask all of my guests: for those who are looking at these types of videos, perhaps

for the first time or just starting to have doubts and have built up the

courage to watch videos of former Jehovah's Witnesses, what would you say

to those people who have not yet decided what they're going to do? Well I'd say

don't be afraid to explore the doubts that you have or the questions you have.

Whatever you do, don't suppress them. I think that's emotionally damaging. It's

not good. It's not a healthy thing for you to do. I think doubts are your

mind's way of saying, "there's something that doesn't add up here", and you should

listen to that, not just suppress it, but you should explore and address it and

come to some conclusion about it. So don't be afraid to look at both sides of

an issue. Don't be afraid, because the society likes to scare us into thinking that

outside information is somehow evil or satanic or whatever. I remember

my last elders meeting, I brought up something about just some kind of

secular fact I think I got it from Wikipedia, and the brother said, "well you

don't know who wrote that Wikipedia article. Maybe Satan influenced

them to write it," and so this is kind of demonization of any information that

doesn't come from the Society. So of course, that is ridiculous.

Information in itself is not good or evil, it's just information. It's what

what you with it. So I'd really encourage people to explore, question

everything, research everything thoroughly, research both sides of any

issue, and don't be afraid to come to your own conclusions. I would also really

encourage people to learn critical thinking skills because I can see that's

what kept me trapped in the organization for years because I didn't have the

skills to evaluate the information I was given. I was fed all this so-called

knowledge but I didn't have the necessary skills to be able to deal with

it properly and come to the right conclusion. So I really encourage people

to thoroughly research their questions and concerns and doubts and

don't be afraid of where that leads you

to. -That's great advice. I definitely

appreciate you sharing that point of view. So my next question has to do with

those who have come to that conclusion that this is not the truth, this is not

what they believed it to be at one point? and obviously we both know it could be a

very scary, very emotional time in our lives, you may even have some of those dark

thoughts, and I've had them as well. What would you

recommend or what would your advice be rather to individuals who find

themselves in that situation. - okay, you

need a support network. One of the good things about being a Jehovah's

Witness, even if what you believe might be wrong or the doctrines might be

wrong, you have a sense of community, a support network, and if you

leave, then all of the sudden you don't. You're on your own. It can a be very

lonely thing. It's hard to cope with on your own. One of the reasons I decided to

do this interview with you is because I wanted to add my story to many others

that are out there for people to realize that they're not alone, but I would

encourage people to find - well, to reach out to other people in the same

situation. It's good to read stuff on the internet, watch videos, but you still need

that one-on-one personal connection with people. So what I've done is I've reached

out to a number of people that have left and other ex elders who are in a

similar scenario to me and I've established some friendships with them.

I've established a new circle of friends and that has been so helpful to have

that support network. When I'm having a bad day, I can just ring them and vent,

and because we understand each other, we can really help each other out.

So I really encourage people to replace the support that they had with

a new one. You still need that human connection.

I'd encourage people to get counseling or psychological help if they

need to because changing your worldview brings up all kinds of emotions and

anxiety. So it's really good to be able to talk all those things through

with someone who's sort of independent and not critical of you

and just work through all those issues, and you can come out the other side as a

very healthy human being with a new way of looking at things. At the end of the

day, never stop questioning anything in life.

Just maintain your curiosity. The minute we stop questioning is the minute we

stop learning and growing as a person. So I just really want to encourage people

to keep learning, keep educating yourself, don't put questions aside, keep

gaining more knowledge and just open up a whole new universe of things that

you never experienced before when you're

under that indoctrination. -So with that

Ben, I would really like to thank you again for taking the time out, speaking

with us about your story. I know it's not an easy thing to do but it's very much

appreciated. So thank you very much. Thanks Fifth, it's been a real pleasure to

be with you and to get my story out there and I hope someone out

there - I hope it helps least one person to realize they're not alone and if I

could just mention, as I said, I think it's important to connect with people so

if anyone wants to reach out to me I'm happy to talk to them and help them. I'll

leave my contact details with you and I'd welcome anyone getting in touch

with me if they want to talk about more of the issues that we've discussed.

Sounds great. Thank you very much again. Thank you very much for having

me on

For more infomation >> Interview With Former Watchtower Writer & Researcher (subtítulos en español) - Duration: 1:33:10.

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Clarify Yourself - Clarify The World - How to Know Yourself - Duration: 15:43.

a lot of times in life are so caught up with the world around us and

my friends and family

we're trying to fix all of their problems and fix everything around us and try to be the hero really and

Save the world

But we don't take any time to reflect on who we are

What we want in life and what really makes us happy

we just get so lost and consumed with everything around us that we

Go through life really lost and we don't know

What makes us happy we don't know

what to do next and

you know as you get older you start thinking yourself and what am I doing with my life or am I going and

Do I have the right friends enough? Should I talk to this person or not is?

My friendship with them

Knows is it any good it continued like this

You start asking yourself some of the questions and you

know a lot of questions are

Ones that are good to ask, you know, but I think that sometimes we spend so much time

Trying to understand people around us a bit

We lose touch with ourselves. We lose touch of no the things that made us happy in life and as we get older

We think of the person that we used to be we think of the things that used to make us happy, you know

Growing up as a kid

Would always made me happy it was no drawing

being creative creating things and

As I got older I

Tried to pursue other things

things caught up with me in life and

there were times to where I

just got so involved in other people's problems and trying to fix everyone around me then I

Pretty much lost touch with who I am

What I want in life and you know as you get older you get involved with

working a lot

you get involved with some so many other things that happen, you know, you know, some of you have kids and a family and

you just

spent so much time on everybody else and

Sometimes people expect you to help them or to

You know do things that

you've always done for them and they rely on you they rely on your help and

then

Without your help. They don't know who they are

And I think that you know, if you're a helpful person or hearing the person that is always getting help from others

either way

Those people have trouble understanding

Themselves and

Knowing in life what they want and knowing what makes them happy

And

If you're just always going around helping other people

eventually, what's gonna happen is you're

Just not going to understand yourself you're not going to know the things that

Make you happy in life, and eventually you're going to get to a point to where you

spend all this time on other people and then you get lost and

Who you are and then?

you're no longer able to help other people anymore because

You've lost her own identity and

Sometimes when we do get older we think back to who we are

when we were younger and who we used to be

you know the good times whatever happened to me, you know, and I

Think that's what happens a lot of times. We just get so caught up in the whole world around us that

You know, we're trying to clarify lols. It makes sense of everything

When we should just try to make sense of ourselves and try to understand who we are

And I think that in the process of doing that

After to understand yourself, you know the things that make you happy the things that give you purpose in life

no when you wake up in the morning, what is it that

Drives you to get out of bed. What is it that drives you to go through your day and to

Continue doing things that you wouldn't want to do

and

You'll reach a point to where there's something in pursuing as a goal or something that you want in life and

If if you don't clarify and understand yourself

You lose that goal you lose the hope to

Continue pursuing it

and know that that's all involved with goals and dreams and things you want to do in life and

If you lose touch of who you are

while pursuing that goal or that dream

then

You're just never going to make it there you'll never be able to reach your full potential and

What you want to try to do with just to be the best version of who you are

Don't try to be like everybody else. Don't try to just do whatever anybody else is doing

just because it's popular or just because maybe they're popular and think sometimes people get caught up in this idea of

popularity and trying to be a certain type of person in

Trying to do the things that everybody else is doing just because it's working for them

You have to find out what works for you in life. You have to find what makes you happy and

if you don't take the time to

Figure out what it is that makes you happy these things in life lit. Will it matter to you?

Then you're just going to be spending time. You know, it's lost

Its running through life not taking the time to enjoy the moment not taking the time to

Reflect on what you're doing and

That'll leave you to where you're living your life

Just thinking of the future

only thinking of

the things that you

Want to be in life the things you're going to be and we we talk about these things that we're gonna do and the things

that we're gonna be

but we never put them into action and

Years go by and then you think what ever happened to me?

no, Who am I now and

That's when people you have their

what they would call like a midlife crisis and

they don't know what to do with their life next and they just uh, they get lost and

then they make

really bad decisions in life and though they

it has completely changed for for the wrong reasons for and

You know as I said before you always try to help other people you can try to do everything we can to help

the world around you but

If you can't help yourself if you can't clarify who you are

What you are and what you want in life

then

life is gonna pass you by and you're gonna just be

Standing there when you're much older

Not knowing who you are

And I see a lot of people pursuing things. They think that makes them happy, you know, and

Sure there are decisions in life that are

Logical ones things that you should do, you know

and but they also see people to

pursue something that they think is going to make them happy and that's something that makes everyone else happy and

then they pursue it and they keep trying to

trying to be that person and

In the process of doing that and they're spending all this time trying to be that type of person

They're not happy, you know that they look back ten years ago 20 years ago and they think back

This isn't the life that I want you

You know for me, I never won the life of only working. I didn't want to just work in the whole life and

Then that's it. You know, I wanted to want to do things on my thanks and give me purpose and I

didn't want

The jobs that I worked to define who I am I didn't want

everything around me to define who I am and I

wanted to find my

own life

by my own decisions and by

My own clarity of understanding myself. I didn't want I

Just never wanted the same life. Everybody else wanted and trying to be no slowing or not

Just to please other people because maybe they don't understand who you are. Maybe they don't accept you to are

and

Just because you're not like everyone else and just because people don't understand you

What they don't accept you doesn't mean you should try to change who you are just to police them

Because in the end it doesn't really matter

All that much what everyone else thinks about you?

It doesn't really matter whether or not they think that you are

Interesting to talk to you is they think that you're cool or whatever it is because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter

What goal you're following what dream you have because

If you don't believe in yourself and you don't believe that

You can do it and you don't believe that whatever it is you're pursuing is something that is

Important to you to where you're not just doing it to please other people

You're not doing it to try to be like other people to try to be cool and to fit in

You know just try to do things that make you happy

Stop looking at the world around you and trying to fit in with things and trying to be

something that other people are just because they don't that to you or just because they think that you know

What you're doing is impossible or that your goals and dreams?

Cannot be achieved

Just because they haven't achieved them and there's always going to be people in life and try to put you down and tell you that

what you're doing can't be achieved and

It might be from jealousy

Or maybe they were pursuing a goal like that and they couldn't do it. So they try to bring you down and

Make you feel like he can't be possible because they don't want to see people achieve

Things that they couldn't achieve in life

So they try to bring all those people down

But just try to understand yourself

Try to learn what it is that makes you happy what gives you passion

To even get out of bed in the morning until you're going through every single day over and over and over

if you're waking up every day, and you're still questioning yourself of

Why am I doing this? Why?

Do I even get up every morning to do this if it doesn't make you happy and it's not improving you as a person

Then it's time for the change

And sometimes we be terrified of that change

But sometimes that's what we need is a really big change in life really to push us to stop

repeating this cycle of telling ourselves that we're gonna change and do something in the future and

Then it gets there and said another five years passed by then. Nothing ever happens

So just be yourself

Learn to understand yourself learn to understand what makes you happy in life

And stop worrying so much about what?

The world around you things

Because if you don't take time to clarify and understand yourself

It doesn't matter what you do then because in the end

The world is always going to keep going life is going to just keep going time is gonna keep going

and

the thing that you have to remember is

As you get older you're going through life as that

It was life passes you by

If you don't take time to learn who you are

You're gonna look back in your life

Way in the future 20 30 40 50 years from now and you'll think to yourself

Why didn't I just take that chance? Why didn't I just try to do the things in life that made me happy?

Rather than trying to do

what I thought

Would make me happy based on the decisions of everyone else

So just

Go out in the world

Do the things that

Give you a purpose in life. Whatever your passion is. That doesn't matter if your passion is um

No a different hobby other than art, it could be sports

It could be any type of athletic things you could be into computers or maybe

The health field it doesn't matter what it is. As long as you try to just be yourself and

Just take the time to understand who you are

Because sometimes in life we

Oh, we don't always have someone there to talk to you

We don't always have someone there to help us and there's going to be times in life where that happens

And when that happens and you don't understand yourself, you have no one to talk to you

That's when you really have a problem

It's sometimes in life. The only person that we have to talk to you the only person who might listen

and the only person that will believe in you when the times are the most difficult and when you are just

At the point to where things are very difficult. You don't think you can go any farther

Sometimes the only person is there is you

You've got to learn to accept who you are

understand yourself clarify yourself

Just keep doing the things that give you a passion to keep going every single day

And remember never give up

For more infomation >> Clarify Yourself - Clarify The World - How to Know Yourself - Duration: 15:43.

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[PRÉVIA] LELIN - Realtrashtrap. PRODUÇÃO FODA DO @slanderprod - Duration: 2:28.

For more infomation >> [PRÉVIA] LELIN - Realtrashtrap. PRODUÇÃO FODA DO @slanderprod - Duration: 2:28.

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Mystery Show "sometimes I could be anyone" Live - Duration: 1:24:23.

For more infomation >> Mystery Show "sometimes I could be anyone" Live - Duration: 1:24:23.

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Die Flasche! die das Böse besiegt! ~ 10 Fakten die nicht jeder kennt - Duration: 9:27.

Heyho my little plants,

welcome to a new fact video,

sry that it has been delayed again but I was sick and

well I am still sick

but we will not let that stop us.

Well then let's start!

Who of you actually uses a smartwatch?

Personally, I unfortunately have no idea but to get a fitness smartwatch.

Because I want to lose weight and do a better Sora Cosplay

Did you know that similar ideas like smartwatches existed a few years ago?

well, not so mature, but still revolutionary!

So once in the early years of 1989,

there was an Nelsonic LCD Game Watch (Textbox: The release year of the game boy)

which was ahead of its time! it was a normal watch with a mini Zelda Game!

This even has a little story and although

our hero enters a cave at first unarmed to collect all Triforce parts.

He travels through 4 dungeons, each with 4 rooms.

in which he is attacked by numerous opponents

such as iron ball or bats.

He also finds a Bummerang to defend himself. (textbox And a sword and bombs)

At the end of each dungeon, he has to face Aquamentus (Boss from Zelda 1).

And if he succeeds, he will put the Triforce together

and the game will be reset to level 1.

There is even an easy and a hard Mode!

perfect for every dark souls fan

Unfortunately,

as so often was the watch easy not good for the market and was a financial failure

despite the strong license but it was a cool idea!

fact 2

The grandiose The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time

is it like in the other games possible to collect some bottles

or buying

and these bottles have many useful functions you can transport things on these

or you can transport other things on these

the options are endless

But did you known that these even can destroy the evil himself

yes it is evil in the grass (German spongebob referenz)

oh wait wrong series

Yes you heard right you can in the final battle on the tower,

the flashes of light that you throw Ganondorf

thrown back with an empty bottle can fight back!

this works even better than with the Master sword because the bottle has for some reasons

has a bigger range then the mastersword

Well you have to do the damage with the sword but it give me one idea

praise the Holy Bottle! Woop Woop

Shut up Navi!

Do you know that some games of the official zelda series are a typ of

of cheating game

yes you heard alright! For exsample Link's Awakening

This is the first game of the series,   in which the title-giving princess does not occur!

Well, story-technically is this logic ,

the game does not take place in Hyrule but on the island Cocolint but still shocking: P

(link:yes i got a shield mama pls be proud of me!)

The newest offshoot of the legend of Zelda series

the great the legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild

for the Nintendo Switch and WiiU, was first programmed as 2D Game

much like the first offshoot in the series!

The 8-bit version was used to test new game mechanics

for exsample Miyamoto jump up hours to animated the perfect jump animation

One must also say it has definitely paid off!

I mean the game is really great!

Unfortunately, the 2D version has not been released yet!

And Nintendo if you ever see this

PL Publish this! I want to buy it !D:

you can publish this even on the Gameboy Advance SP if you want i Like this too :D

As you know for sure I have a huge love for the zelda series

I love the music the games and even the decoration.

But did you also know that Nintendo employees like

to use Zelda objects as decoration?

or why else can you , in the DS Game Animal Crossing Wild World

buy the Master Sword or the Triforce

Or in Wii Litter Let's Go to the City find the Majoras Mask!

And there are so many more for this you got now a shorty overview of some exsamples

Artis 10 Secounds of Fun!

Normally no name fairy fly along the way

Ganondorf

The ultimate villain

Ruler of the Gerudos !

and nemesis of Link

Bearer of the Triforce Fragment of Power!

This rogue always puts a smile on my face,

especially if I destroy him!

But did you know that this rogue knows no other hobbies

than annihilating Hyrule and destroying LInk and Zelda?

yes

He really dont know anything else

Therefore, there is a place that is always left in peace by the evil!

The Fishing Pond

It even goes so far as the Ganondorf does not even know what a angel is!

or why else does he look at Twilight Princess in Bossfight

when you pull this angel at the irritated?

Well there is now the theory that it is because he comes from the desert

but then at least he should know fly fishing. But I have another theory!

I suppose that's because of his origin source ,

the deathbringer,

this knows no other hobbies as breakout try and hate on Hylia

entire rage of a lost fight

and dont know what is a butterfly net!

also get in the net you boi!(fulltimegames referenz, German Youtube Content Creator)

Run it is Navi!

Why you dont Run???

The songs of the Zelda series have many secrets and secrets

and open even so much in the games

Particularly helpful is the lullaby of Zelda from Ocerina of time

which opens up many paths and secrets

and it is a beautiful song

But did you know that this song is even a secret itself?

It is in the title song of Skyward Sword, representing the ballade of the goddess

If you play it backwards then

you hear Zelda's lullaby

i have link you here some exsample because i dont want to steal content :)

Nintendo had many cool consoles,

even though the Gamecube was not the strongest selling console

it also had many good games and innovations to offer.

for exsample a practiable carrying handle (textbox) with friendly greetings to MythosofGaming(my dear favourite german Funfact Youtuber)

but a other innovation of him was

you could connect your Gameboy to the Gamecube

and get maps or hints in some games display on it

This isn't count for the WiiU remake

that's pretty cool but did you know that this even has a secret?

Put in the tower of the gods, the subject Tingles Ceiver

reveal a secret story about Tingle,

This is also named as "The Legend of the Fairy".

The story is spread out on 5 sheets and tells of how Tingle appeared to a fairy,

Before he met the hero of the time and helped him out with cards from Termina,

To that is said on another island on the big sea:

They are celebrating their 35th birthday with a green suit and red underpants.

They do it hoping to be like the legendary fairy named Tingle! "

I'm still lucky 10 years ago!

but link

i guess it is to late for him

waaa navi is everywhere D:

Majoras Mask is one of the most ingenious games I have ever played

The masks are very cool designed and varied

but did you know that they are an allusion to the Star Fox series?

Yes, The Fox Mask,

The Bremen Mask, The Rabbit Ears, Don Gero's Mask,

and the great and beautifulste of all mask

the Mask Of Majora's Mask Perfumes

Pigma Dengar

So at the end I want to navigate you again to the golden laugh!

Yeah okay so it's about links well-known companions from Ocarina of Time Navi!

She is there from the very first second and relies on the victory over Ganon.

how many of you already known, was originally

planned that the playership Navis continuous tips and

comments or remember your quest that hey listen hey listen hey listen

accept it as helpful and great record, and

that you should perceive Navi as a loyal friend as Epona.

YEAH, but the playership and myself

has hated her ! She was really annoying

but you knew it was originally planned that was

The fairy should have romantic feelings for Link

even jealous even on Zelda should be Navi.

This Miyamoto said during an interview during the development of the classic so well

that details hats never managed with navi in ​​the finished game,

but one could suppose that it was changed to Ruto.

If it could do it and you could choose who would be your choice?

pls vote per infocard ! I would be interested

i guess i would choice marlon (She and Tiny Link would be a sweeter couple then Link x Zelda )

Welcome on my endcart, i hope you liked this fact,

well you have facts that i did not name but you think it's absolutely secret?

if yes let you like a comment there! : D

So here you come to the last facts video

and here to the good Charki and Korti the two have helped me this time with the footage extremely

Korti is a German Streamer and Youtuber who work with Nerf gears and Nintendo Games and Charkiboi is a Austrialien Streamer/Youtuber, who play on different Games/randomizer and work on Short Youtube Clips and Streams

Thank you guys <3 it help me a lot!

and at least good night sleep well and here was wolo(a Referenz to a german Youtuber and Letsplayer WoloU)

For more infomation >> Die Flasche! die das Böse besiegt! ~ 10 Fakten die nicht jeder kennt - Duration: 9:27.

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SMG4: War Of The Fat Italians 2018 REACTION - Duration: 26:59.

SMG4: War Of The Fat Italians 2018 REACTION

For more infomation >> SMG4: War Of The Fat Italians 2018 REACTION - Duration: 26:59.

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Characters Who Will Die Avengers 4 / BR Varieties - Duration: 1:47.

BR Varieties

Characters That Will Die In Avengers 4

😲😱😱😞

Has Confirmed Movie But Could Die

These Are Those That Will Possibly Die

they arrive at their end after Avengers 4, so it is very probable that Cap, Iron Man, Thor, War Machine, Black Widow, Vision and Falcon end up dead or are forced to retire, although, on the part of Black Widow, we will have it back in a film of origin.

BHE Runners

For more infomation >> Characters Who Will Die Avengers 4 / BR Varieties - Duration: 1:47.

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what the fluff challenge | Xiaoling toys - Duration: 6:20.

what the fluff challenge | Xiaoling toys

For more infomation >> what the fluff challenge | Xiaoling toys - Duration: 6:20.

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|MMD| Lucid dreams - Duration: 0:22.

You left me falling and landing inside my grave

I know that you want me dead..

I take prescriptions to make me feel a-okay, I know it's all in my... head

For more infomation >> |MMD| Lucid dreams - Duration: 0:22.

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Power of Community | Saturday Slowdown - Duration: 6:56.

hey it's patti scharf CPA and co-founder of catching clouds the leader in

e-commerce accounting and I want to welcome you back to our Saturday

slowdown where I like to remind everybody to work on their business and

not just in their business

all right so I just got back from an accounting salon in New Orleans

basically it was a group of people who were invited there to share knowledge

with each other we had people who work just with QuickBooks and zero or zero or

sage or none of the above and didn't have an accounting practice at all some

people were just starting their business some people have been doing it for a

long time and we just kind of shared our stories and talked about where we came

from what our journey was where we wanted to go and we just shared

knowledge with each other about all the things that are going on in the world

blockchain sales tax just development of practices and things like that so I came

away and I was like super inspired a lot of these people I had never met before

and I just knew of them because I followed them on social media or I'd met

them but we'd only spoken a few times or things like that so it was really great

I felt really honored to be invited to be part of that process and I think

everybody who was there they really saw a vision of something better on the

horizon for the accounting industry and for small businesses in general so I

came away from there and I was I was really inspired and I was thinking about

how powerful community is when you can get a bunch of like-minded people into a

group to just brainstorm and things like that and I was gonna talk about like the

power of community and how powerful that is and how you need to find some people

who who think like you do to be part of your tribe and and help you along your

journey and I think that's true but I think that you have to be very careful

about the community that you pick because sometimes you pick a group of

people and they're very supportive and they're very comfortable but they're not

actually challenging you and they're not they're not helping you to advance

yourself propel yourself into something more for yourself so so I think about

this quote that I've heard I to Jack Welch or Confucius or like

anybody in between and it's if you're the smartest person in the room it's

time to change rooms and I think that a lot of people they they find their

community and it makes them feel warm and fuzzy but it's not helping them move

their business forward and I think you have to be really careful about who

you're surrounding yourself with and I think you have to be careful about not

challenging your own ideas like I know some people there there are only

QuickBooks and they don't want to hear from anybody else who uses any other

software and same thing you know Xero or whatever like people get into their

little niches and they forget that they can learn something from other people

even if they're not part of that little group so I think this event in New

Orleans was great because people didn't look at each other like oh you're use

you use Xero like I got nothing to learn from you and you use sage and I don't

you sage so I don't care that's not what it was about at all we saw each other as

human beings and we saw each other as struggling through the journey of

entrepreneurship which I think anybody who owns a small business whether you're

an accountant or whether you're an e-commerce seller or any anybody else I

mean anybody who has a small business I think understands that there are

challenges that are not unique just to one little element of their business

it's it's something that can be shared with everybody so I think it's really

important for people to find the right room that they need to be in to find the

people to surround them to not only give them support but to help challenge their

ideas help spark some creativity like I know that when I was there I saw how

other people were doing some things with zapier or something like that and I was

I came away like oh I know exactly I wha I have some great ideas for what I'm

gonna do next you know and you know had I not gone I might have just kept going

down my normal path and not taking a step back to look and see what I'm doing

or not doing that I really should be thinking about and trying and

experimenting on to make my business so I guess what I want to say is if

you're not already part of a community or honestly even if you are just take a

step back reevaluate the community you're in do you still actually belong

there are you getting anything out of it or is it just kind of comfortable for

you and even if you're part of that community maybe join another one and and

think about what your challenges are think about where you might be able to

find a new group of people who can help elevate you and take you to the next

level if you care about e-commerce we actually have a Facebook group you can

see a couple links down below we've got one for accountants and one for

e-commerce sellers and we'd be more than happy to have you there if you if you do

join I highly recommend that you get active and involved because just like

anything in life you get out what you put in so so feel free to join there if

you're an e-commerce seller you may want to take a look at attending the

conference prosper show if you haven't heard that they have that in Vegas every

year in March I believe and it's just thousands of people who are on the

journey just like you you might want to join take a look at ecommerce fuel and

start chatting with people there and if your accountants they're like a

gazillion different Facebook groups just do a search and I'm sure you will you

will find some and when you find the right community hopefully they will help

keep you on your toes and keep you creative and flexible and making your

business better and better so I hope you like this video if you did please like

comment and share if you haven't already please subscribe and I'll catch you

later

For more infomation >> Power of Community | Saturday Slowdown - Duration: 6:56.

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ASMR Moisturize Lotion (Lotion Sounds, Tapping) GigiASMR - Duration: 10:30.

ASMR Moisturize Lotion

For more infomation >> ASMR Moisturize Lotion (Lotion Sounds, Tapping) GigiASMR - Duration: 10:30.

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Mistério ou milagre? Jovens viram homem desaparecer, deixando uma carta para elas - Duration: 4:14.

For more infomation >> Mistério ou milagre? Jovens viram homem desaparecer, deixando uma carta para elas - Duration: 4:14.

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COUNTER-STRIKE RAP 💀 - Jairous (Videoclip Oficial) #Especial54k - Duration: 2:03.

For more infomation >> COUNTER-STRIKE RAP 💀 - Jairous (Videoclip Oficial) #Especial54k - Duration: 2:03.

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Dumb Things In The Last Jedi Everyone Just Ignored - Duration: 4:25.

The Last Jedi broke a lot of new ground for the Star Wars franchise.

It gave Luke Skywalker his first speaking role in the saga since 1983 and, perhaps most

importantly, brought fans closer to watching Chewbacca eat a comic relief alien than they

ever dreamed possible.

And while The Last Jedi really was a great movie, there are still a few points that we

couldn't quite wrap our heads around.

Sore losers

From the very start, George Lucas has credited Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand

Faces as his inspiration for the Star Wars mythos.

Campbell's book outlines the basic story structure of most heroic journeys in Western culture,

and told us why we always end up rooting for the protagonists.

In one word: tenacity.

But if that's what we like in our good guys, why do we keep rooting for the Jedi?

Luke tried to become a Jedi — and succeeded.

He also tried to blow up the Death Star — and he did that, too.

Then he tried to teach a new generation of Jedi, and it went so badly he flipped the

table and rage quit polite society.

What's likable about a hero who only keeps trying when he's always winning?

We've seen this before, of course, when Yoda couldn't beat the Emperor on the first go

and subsequently sulked off to live in a swamp for a few decades.

"Do or do not, there is no try" might make for a great inspirational poster, but in practice,

it's pretty fatalist and kind of whiny.

At least Yoda learned something in the end.

Forcing it

The Force: if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

Nobody'd ever be able to find the droids they were looking for, the Mos Eisley cantina would

have padded walls for all the telekinetic bar fights, and Skee-Ball would become infinitely

easier.

Sadly, it's not the case that everyone can use it, and even the most sensitive Force

user needs intense training to harness their slick menagerie of space wizard powers.

You've gotta have a teacher if you're gonna use the Force.

Rey needed Luke.

Luke needed Yoda and Obi-Wan.

Leia needed, well, apparently Leia just needed a good kick into gear.

We get it.

We love Carrie Fisher, too.

She was amazing.

But it seems weird that all it took was a little jeopardy to suddenly become a vacuum-traversing

flesh-based escape pod.

"That's not how the Force work."

A hollow victory

Of the complaints fans had about The Last Jedi, one reigned supreme: Canto Bight.

But there was one aspect of this portion of the film that stands out as especially jarring

if you give it a few seconds' consideration.

Rose and Finn, looking for a way out of the city, climb onto a horse-like creature called

a fathier and make good their escape.

Rose is positively delighted that she and Finn managed to set the beasts loose and help

them to freedom.

But how did they do it?

By taking them 30 seconds outside town.

Unfortunately, the film makes a point of explaining that these animals are owned and abused by

the ultra-rich.

Freeing them would be like riding Seabiscuit into the parking lot of the race track, declaring

him free forever and then climbing into your sedan and driving away.

If you think there isn't going to be a search party herding those camel cats back home inside

of fifteen minutes, you're living in a science fantasy world.

Masters of disguise

Everybody loves a good disguise sequence, and Star Wars is no exception.

Luke and Han did it.

Lando and Leia did it.

Even Jyn and Cassian gave it a go.

But there are some times when it just doesn't work.

Towards the end of The Last Jedi, Rose, Finn, BB-8, and DJ infiltrate Snoke's Star Destroyer,

the Supremacy.

Their first move is to disguise themselves by donning the uniforms of the First Order's

military officers.

So far so good, right?

Well, considering these would be the first racially diverse First Order officers we've

seen so far in the saga — and considering Finn is still on the organization's Most

Wanted list — choosing disguises without masks or helmets might not have been a fantastic

idea.

It's just a shame there weren't any outfits nearby which are, say, notorious for covering

the faces of the wearer.

"Boring conversation anyway."

For more infomation >> Dumb Things In The Last Jedi Everyone Just Ignored - Duration: 4:25.

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KUZENİM FURKAN YİĞİT'LE ZULA 1V1 ATIYOR !!! - Duration: 15:27.

For more infomation >> KUZENİM FURKAN YİĞİT'LE ZULA 1V1 ATIYOR !!! - Duration: 15:27.

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High school football Saturday: Week 6 highlights - Duration: 2:41.

For more infomation >> High school football Saturday: Week 6 highlights - Duration: 2:41.

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Y'all, We're Not Trying To Have A Threesome | Smoothie Saturday - Duration: 9:40.

Hello people behind screens, I'm Jac and we're back and this is

Paris. You know Paris. Welcome to smoothie Sundays

Alright, so today we're talking about gross men who try and have threeways with us

cause for some reason they

think they are obligated

Is that the right word? obligated? entitled

you're looking for the word entitled

Or that we're obligated, nevermind, so anyways, so we both have a gross man in our life

who have tried to three-way with us. Paris?

what do you want us to say?

Just talk about your gross man

That was great. We love smooth queen

I don't know what to say

I'm not good at telling stories

Their gross man is their ex-boyfriend. He was telling me that his sister was at the Pride Parade we were at and I said,

'love that' and

he was

'She's gay' and I said 'I'm gay' and he said 'no'

what do you mean 'no'? Okay. No

That's great. Just, just say no then it becomes true.

And then I kept saying 'what do you mean no?"

And he just kept saying no

so then

Jac sent him a video.

oh right, I took your phone

[unintelligible talk]

Um, yeah

They're gay. And then I, like, I put my face on them

Yeah, and he was like, 'I like girls - can I join?'

ew. Oh wait, oh, ew

penises are disgusting

I would like to strap on where it's just like

Doesn't have the shape of a penis

You know, why does it have to have the head and the

ew and the I don't want to look. I don't wanna, i'd don't wanna look

down and see myself with a pink silicone penis

who wants that?

So my gross man is um, a man. An old man. I

met him because he played at the prom last year so he knows that I'm very young. He's very old

He was very really adamant on like, he's very very

forwards and

So I posted pictures of us with pride

And

Messages me and he's like, oh y'all are cute together

and I was like, thanks. And he goes

Can I join in sometime?

So I'm just like, ha ha you're funny you and says

"just speaking my mind." You are old. You are an old man

D I N A S O U R a dinosaur.

you didn't even finish spelling dinosaur.

No D I N A S O U R a dinosaur.

ohh

Yeah

Babe

Anyway

Is that what happens in your mind? Is that would you think about?

You should know this about me by now, I am weird. I'm a weird person

It could be worse

it could be cringy weird like

I'm weird. I'm a weirdo. I don't fit in, Do you ever see me without-

is there a beanie back here? I think I have a beanie back here

let me just

Owwwww, my forehead

Let me put my cold smoothie against it

Can you check under your ass?

OW!

I was in the middle of this class and this girl threw a whole thing of nail polish at my head

why?

I don't know

and she's just like 'i'm so sorry'

i'm like, it's okay

i just got like- it hurt because it was nail polish

I mean, yeah,

and I was like, it's fine

oh, wait

You ever see me without this stupid hat on? that's weird

I'm edgy, follow my photography Instagram with picture they took on my camera

that my parents got me. It's very expensive, but I act like i'm poor

Did I go in too deep? Was that too real for a sec?

no offence babe

No offence on what? Being poor?

No, on the edgy teen stuff

So gross men try and have sex with us

It's becoming a problem

We're in very happy fulfilled relationship and we don't need a penis

We are not people who need penis. We are not people who want penis

wait do you want penis?

no

okay, I just don't wanna offend you cause you want penis sometimes

all the time? I don't know

anywho

Penis is not fun. We don't like penis. I don't like penis. They like penis

But right now, they don't need penis cuz they have me. I'm penis

spirtually

You know who I feel would like, also try and like,

try and have a threesome with us?

who?

Meghan

Let's be real, she would fucking try it

She would honestly try it

She would come up and be like

"So how y'all doing?" and try and like slowly steer

[indistinct mumbling]

She's this girl that had a crush on both of us last year. I didn't know she liked them

Did you know Megan liked me last year?

Yeah, at one point cus she was like

"Me and Jak made out"

we didn't make out!

Meghan told everyone we made out, we did not make out

my face, her face, never happened. Never happened

Ever. Ever!

She keeps telling people that- face

This, this is like the closest our face has ever been

Meghan and I never made out. Okay? Setting the record straight!

me and meghan, never happened.

I swear it didn't. I have no fucking idea she was going around telling people shit.

I promise I never put my face-

hello, so my friend overheated and

It like shut off. Oh, you caught me, I film on my phone because I'm a broke bitch. I'm not monetized

you guys wanna send me a camera?

Oh, babe

that guy who used to be my sugar daddy. He also tried to have like a threesome

but um, he asked how old you are and he called me a cradle-robber

when you're like a year and a half younger than me, and he-h'se literally

47

and he-and he like-

What?

He's hitting on me at 47 and he is calling me a cradle-robber

He wanted to like, pay us to like, have a three-way with him.

and it was like, listen dude. Listen

Listen, no

Not gonna happen. So that-that's-that's something I forgot to tell you about

well

You should like and subscribe and follow Paris

Ew I looked bad.

No you're beautiful! Fuck you. You're gorgeous.

I look like ketchup and mustard.

Well, I love ketchup and mustard

aww

i know, I'm so romantic

This is the closest we've gotten to spiderman kissing

successfully

Spiderman kissing is hard. Don't try it at home

Alright, I was, I was here to tell you to like and subscribe and comment and follow

them on instagram

you just said that! I did?

I can't think straight when i'm with you

You're also not straight.

Okay. Okay, you're so funny-You're so

Funny-tumblr is gonna love you. Oh my god.

somebody call LGBT tumblr. you made- you made a

not thinking straight good joke. Oh my god someone tell tumblr!

You're so- you're wearing a choker. They're gonna love you. Call the authorities!

oh I turned my blinker on, bye

For more infomation >> Y'all, We're Not Trying To Have A Threesome | Smoothie Saturday - Duration: 9:40.

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SINGING AND CLEANING| Dwarf Vlogs[CC] - Duration: 5:42.

[intro music]

Hey guys! My name is Cheyenne.

And welcome to my channel!

So today's Dwarf Vlogs is also going to be pretty uneventful, but

I am filming a couple videos today. One of them is already filmed, but then I had to charge the battery

So I got that charging over there.

But because this weekend is going to be very busy, I will be

vlogging, but I won't be able to post the vlogs, so instead,

I am filming a couple of dwarfism-related videos

to schedule to post

while I am really really busy

I wanted to show you a little something funny.

Here's my bear here

And this is the bear I use to make sure my video is in focus.

Because it is literally the same height as me!

This is my focus bear. *laughs*

It is LITERALLY the same height as me!

And I can just - there is a funny story that goes with this bear that I can tell

after dwarf vlogs, because

It is funny.

As always, let's see where the day takes us. It's mostly just a

cleaning and filming day.

Fun times(!)

*Mom and I laugh*

CHEYENNE: Try again...

*laughs*

MOM: Why are you sqeezing it?...It's a trigger.

*laughs*

This is how I focus my camera.

[people chatting in the background and Mom playfully yells at Bella to get to the car]

[car sounds and people chatting]

[starts singing "Sober" by Demi Lovato]

[stops singing]

Today is coming to a close.

And I filmed a video to go out since this weekend IS going to be very busy.

And I won't have time to post.

It's not a vlog-y video, but I do think it's something that fits well with

Dwarfism Awareness Month and Dwarf Vlogs and all that.

So I'm gonna call it a night

And I'll see you guys tomorrow!

Love you guys!