Read ex-Bethelite & ex-JW story on his Blog

http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf

includes his being raised as a Witness as well as life at Bethel during the tempestuous seventies

sorry!  correction:

www.JohnBechtelBlog.com

Great read!  Thanks for sharing it.

Farkel

Indeed.

Thanks!

Sylvia

Wow!  Very good.

I've been debating a few evangelicals on whether their religion is an accident of their birthplace - Jonathan Dough here and AGuest here

Bechtel says it best:

 For most inhabitants of this planet, the core beliefs that guide their lives are a function of geography, the random location of their birth, rather than some rational choice among alternatives.  People born in a Christian nation tend to espouse Christianity,  Chinese practice Buddhism, Japanese practice Shintoism, etc. 

The point of this book is that these belief systems  are vestigial, totally inadequate to life in the Information Age, and all too often actually inimical to our well-being.  They get in the way, they hinder us from relating to reality consciously, productively, and achieving our greatest potential.  All of our progress in the last few hundred years has been a result of discarding traditions and attempting to discover natural laws and forces and then adapting them to our uses;  to discovering reality and then choosing how to harness it. 

For example, in ancient times civilization was often centered around rivers whose annual flooding provided fertile soil for agriculture.  During the annual flood stage, portions of the population who did not flee in time often perished.  So the river became the source of both life and death.  Early man’s response to this was to personify the river, ascribing some form of consciousness to it or gods who ostensibly controlled it.  Modern man’s response is to build dams, irrigation canals, or dikes to control and direct the flow of the river. 

Our technological success at harnessing the forces of nature  has been exponential, but we have attempted to drag along our vestigial traditions and behaviors and continue to use them as our guide to coping with reality on a personal level.  This is particularly true when the pace of growth in technological or scientific knowledge far outstrips our ability to adapt and we become frightened.  When we are scared our emotional response is to quickly revert to our ancient traditions and beliefs, including our oldest comfort zone of mysticism. 

Even when these ancient beliefs contradict what we have established as scientific fact, we take refuge in them and they comfort us in their ancientness, and our desire to feel safe in something that has survived the ages, something that also requires no support or mental effort.  Doing so is a time-honored means of escaping reality when we find it too overwhelming.

Nullius in verba - the motto of The Royal Society in London since 1663 - on the word of no one. The exponential decline of world religion at the hand of scientific progress has only just begun.

Well done John - great writing and you can read the rest of this entry here

I found this topic and link very interesting.  funny not much interest in this life story here

If he was such a hot shot, how can he write that "The Governing Body was enlarged from seven members to eleven, and finally to eighteen.  Ray Franz, who was clearly the Che Guevara of the theological revolution, was ousted, as was Ed Dunlap. " - considering Dunlap never was a GB member?

I quite enjoyed reading what I did of John Betchel's blog.

TOH

I don't think the writer is saying that Dunlap was a member of the governing body but is saying that Ed Dunlap was one of the rebels - just as he himself was - if we read it in the context of the first three sentences and not just in the context of the fourth sentence. (btw I quite like locking horns with you at 7.40 in the morning - )

Thanks so much for posting this Gayle. I just finished reading all eight chapters in one long sitting and I enjoyed them immensely.