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Written by Barbara Anderson
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Friday, 25 September 2009 09:59 |
 Joe and I just returned from Chicago where I was a guest speaker at the BRCI conference on September 19, 2009. The attached material, "Opening Pandora's Box" is the talk I gave. It is about our European month-long tour from last June-July. “Pandora’s Box” is a simple Greek myth which explained how bad things came to be. In one version, when Pandora opened what appeared to her to be a valuable box, she let out all the evils including hope. Is hope evil? Well, the Greeks considered hope evil, even dangerous, and its bedfellow was thought to be delusion.
In our jargon today, opening Pandora’s Box means to unwittingly unleash chaos on yourself and those around you. It was with these thoughts that I commenced one of the lectures that I gave three times in Europe this past summer.
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Written by Barbara Anderson
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Monday, 01 June 2009 09:20 |
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 I was baptized as a Witness in October 1954 at age 14. I severed connections with non-Witness friends and relatives, except for my father who never joined the religion, and had a great social life with people in the congregation and with young men from Brooklyn headquarters who often visited our home in Long Island. I was having the time of my young life.
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Written by Barbara Anderson
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Monday, 11 May 2009 04:46 |
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Ever wonder why the Watchtower (one word) is sometimes the Watch Tower (two words)? Does it matter? What are the legal ramifications? What does the Watchtower have in common with the Peoples Pulpit Association of New York? The answers to these questions and more are thoughtfully presented from a historical perspective.
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Written by Barbara Anderson
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Friday, 13 February 2009 20:03 |
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On January 14, 1912, my dad was born to Polish Catholic immigrant parents in Flushing, New York. His negative experiences during the time he was a practicing Catholic no doubt unfairly influenced us to view the Church the same way as he did, disapprovingly; yet, we never thought of leaving the Catholic religion.
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Written by Barbara Anderson
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Monday, 12 January 2009 13:03 |
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Jehovah's Witnesses are discouraged from doing extensive personal research into their modern-day history. Such action can cause a truth-seeking Witness to be labeled "apostate" and be shunned by family and friends.
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Written by Barbara Anderson
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Friday, 29 May 2009 17:44 |
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My experiences at Bethel are in line with what Ray Franz explained in his book Crisis of Conscience that it was the “other sheep” who, over the years, did the bulk of the writing for Watch Tower literature. Of course, when Ray was in the Writing Department there were men who professed to be of the “anointed" who were doing writing. He was one of them along with Karl Klein, Lloyd Barry and Fred Franz. I don’t know if Dunlap or Reinhart Lingstat, both who collaborated on the Aid book, were of the anointed.
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Written by Barbara Anderson
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Monday, 20 April 2009 14:52 |
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Frances Pollini was the middle-aged woman of Italian descent who conducted a home Bible study with me and my mother in the fall of 1953. Connie Grazzuti introduced the Watch Tower religion to Frances Pollini, an ardent Catholic who changed her religion to become an ardent Jehovah’s Witness. A year before Frances met us, she moved from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, NY, where Connie also lived, to East Meadow, Long Island, NY.
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Written by Barbara Anderson
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Thursday, 29 January 2009 16:12 |
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In 1998, I completely severed my association with Jehovah's Witnesses. However, it wasn't until 2004 that I heard the details from my mother, two years before her death at age 91, of how the Watch Tower organization’s teachings significantly altered her Polish Catholic father's life-course causing him to end up an excommunicated Catholic in Poland although he never became a Watch Tower follower.
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